People know they know, about as much as they know what love is, which is to say almost never. There is nothing more opaque to ourselves, as our own emotional workings. Thankfully sitcoms and comedy films are all the better for this fact, even if we are doomed to suffer from it.
Also, it might be better if all men were pre-incarcerated prior to marriage. At least everyone would already know the score.
Merrill? I have known you a long time - and I have known how smart and funny and aware and inventive and stylish and articulate you are ever since you were in art school but brother. This piece just blows me away.
Good for him, and good for you. My youngest just had her tenth anniversary of sobriety. My oldest has really been through the mill, but she just hasn’t gotten with it. My baby brother died a few years ago at 58 after a very long stretch of alcoholism. I used to be suspicious of these cultish organizations, but there’s a lot of wisdom, as you say, in this one. The Serenity Prayer is as good a guide to living as any. My crutch is laughter. So, thanks.
You are too kind. Congratulations to you on being one of America's leading humorists, with a fuller palette than, say, Dorothy Parker or Robert Benchley. Would *they* have completely detourned an episode of QUICK DRAW McGRAW? :) (Not sure about Perelman.)
Ah. Well, it links with the Seminole village in that people behave as though they are visiting a roadside zoo. Some semi-distant relatives came down to visit from New England, and we took them to, probably, the Parrot Jungle (actually pretty cool), and they wanted, for some reason, to see the "Indian Village," which was, of course, just some people's home. The older male member, purchasing tickets, asked: "What is there to see?" and the woman just laughed at him. I was probably 12 or 13 and crimson with mortification. I remember old fashioned sewing machines and colorful striped garments, houses on stilts, children and animals, and that's about it. Many years later I took my own kids to meet their grandmother in Massachusetts, and the upper middle aged uncle talked about how they enjoyed going to Provincetown "to look at the hippies." Maybe they saw John Waters. Anyway, when my wife to be and I were dating in 1983, we took our first road trip to Taos. She wanted to see every square inch of the place, a fair warning for our honeymoon in France and Belgium a year or so later, and we wound up at Taos Pueblo, another neighborhood of native people that welcomed tourists as a source of income. It was relatively early in my art museum career, and I was examining the Stations of the Cross that wound around the walls of the church sanctuary when I heard a woman's voice saying: "Oh, look! They're gonna have a wedding!" in much the same tone as someone might use while getting small children to look at a cage full of chimps just before they begin masturbating (the chimps, that is). It was as though I had been transported back to the Glades years before. I could feel the blood draining from my face as I tingled all over and was suddenly desperate to leave the pueblo at once. I had seen plenty of odd and mortifying scenes by that point in my life, but this was the first time in memory that I had had this reaction. Susan had a similar reaction when we were visiting friends in Tulsa later on and I took her to see Oral Roberts University. She had to get out of there immediately. To her credit, she voluntarily took me back there a decade or so later to see Frank Sinatra perform on what may have been his last real tour. ORU, at the time, had the largest performing venue in the city, or so I assumed. Later on, they built a really nice big one downtown, just a couple blocks from the scene of the 1921 race massacre, which was not widely known about until, among other things, Donald Trump chose to hold one of his rallies in the same venue where we had seen Paul McCartney a couple years before. It was the centennial of that horrible event (I refer to the massacre), and it wasn't long before everyone on Earth knew about it, especially after HBO featured it prominently in the WATCHMEN sequel and LOVECRAFT COUNTRY. I don't run around clutching my pearls on trips as a rule, but sometimes things trigger me, like the group of Texans in Notre Dame de Paris going off about a religious ceremony taking place while a bunch of tourists gawked from the ambulatory, much as they probably had in the 1200's. Well, that's a lot of verbiage. I hope it's the bit to which you were referring. ;)
I thought I responded last night, but Substack is putting me through some paces. Bottom line: I had the same experience with the Seminole Indian Village, and, 20+ years later, at the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico. Actual panic attack at the latter. White tourists can be a living horror movie.
I have enjoyed your work for years, but this series is the best. Interesting about parents. Mine made *me* move, as well...from Norman Rockwell rural New England to Homestead, Florida. It's down by the Keys. My dad worked at the university's subtropical experiment station. No snow, its only redeeming feature for them. According to Atlas Obscura, the station is still there; they hired farmers from Cambodia to help out with Southeast Asian agricultural techniques; two different groups quit and refused to spend another summer in Homestead. I'm not making this up. I spent six years there enjoying puberty in the late Fifties/early Sixties with a bunch of troglodytes. It was a fascinating time to be alive, but not there. Especially during the Cuban Missile Crisis down the road from the Air Force Base. I suspect that your Florida time might have been nicer, but neither of us would survive there now. And I'm writing this from Amarillo, Texas, where it is *dry.* (My children are unappreciative as well. Go figure.) I look forward to more of your wonderful observations. Your mind is a gift to the human condition.
I grew up on Robert Benchley and James Thurber (and the Kingston Trio), so I didn't hit these rocks until later on, and it was different for me, being a man, of sorts. My art school days were in the late Seventies on the G.I. Bill. in Oklahoma no less, though I had spent my adolescence in Florida. So basically I was working out of my high school thing when I was pushing thirty. That said, I have never read anybody who could discuss this stuff as hilariously and touchingly as you do. Even Joni Mitchell, about whom the late David Crosby said: "She's about as modest as Attila the Hun." I slightly knew, or, more accurately, observed Crosby in his folk singer days in Miami. He knew whereof he spoke. I bought WE SAW SCENERY as a Christmas present for my wife, but I'm going to steal it back and read it myself before she gives it away, as she is wont to do with books (to me, the most amazing thing about her). You are a world class humorist!
What can I say but WoW! Loved it. From the first paragragh to the last.
It feels like I should send you a check for out of state tuition. Personally I carry a slip of paper
in my wallet with old Douglas Severaid pieces on it.
Tuning in for Joni on the Grammies then spinning some old vinyl of hers after
Your recollections of the influence that our mutual friend Joni had on us … perfect and priceless and partly still true. Thank you!
Really well done!🫡
I will never eat my wife's candy without her express written consent again.
Merrill Markoe I don't know enough superlatives. Great profound hilarious I'm out.
Also: I've never seen a story of a man who contacts/falls for/marries a death row woman. Anybody?
"as insignificant as eating a chocolate Easter bunny"
Clearly that reporter has never been married. 😂 😂 😂
People know they know, about as much as they know what love is, which is to say almost never. There is nothing more opaque to ourselves, as our own emotional workings. Thankfully sitcoms and comedy films are all the better for this fact, even if we are doomed to suffer from it.
Also, it might be better if all men were pre-incarcerated prior to marriage. At least everyone would already know the score.
Merrill? I have known you a long time - and I have known how smart and funny and aware and inventive and stylish and articulate you are ever since you were in art school but brother. This piece just blows me away.
Good for him, and good for you. My youngest just had her tenth anniversary of sobriety. My oldest has really been through the mill, but she just hasn’t gotten with it. My baby brother died a few years ago at 58 after a very long stretch of alcoholism. I used to be suspicious of these cultish organizations, but there’s a lot of wisdom, as you say, in this one. The Serenity Prayer is as good a guide to living as any. My crutch is laughter. So, thanks.
You are too kind. Congratulations to you on being one of America's leading humorists, with a fuller palette than, say, Dorothy Parker or Robert Benchley. Would *they* have completely detourned an episode of QUICK DRAW McGRAW? :) (Not sure about Perelman.)
Ah. Well, it links with the Seminole village in that people behave as though they are visiting a roadside zoo. Some semi-distant relatives came down to visit from New England, and we took them to, probably, the Parrot Jungle (actually pretty cool), and they wanted, for some reason, to see the "Indian Village," which was, of course, just some people's home. The older male member, purchasing tickets, asked: "What is there to see?" and the woman just laughed at him. I was probably 12 or 13 and crimson with mortification. I remember old fashioned sewing machines and colorful striped garments, houses on stilts, children and animals, and that's about it. Many years later I took my own kids to meet their grandmother in Massachusetts, and the upper middle aged uncle talked about how they enjoyed going to Provincetown "to look at the hippies." Maybe they saw John Waters. Anyway, when my wife to be and I were dating in 1983, we took our first road trip to Taos. She wanted to see every square inch of the place, a fair warning for our honeymoon in France and Belgium a year or so later, and we wound up at Taos Pueblo, another neighborhood of native people that welcomed tourists as a source of income. It was relatively early in my art museum career, and I was examining the Stations of the Cross that wound around the walls of the church sanctuary when I heard a woman's voice saying: "Oh, look! They're gonna have a wedding!" in much the same tone as someone might use while getting small children to look at a cage full of chimps just before they begin masturbating (the chimps, that is). It was as though I had been transported back to the Glades years before. I could feel the blood draining from my face as I tingled all over and was suddenly desperate to leave the pueblo at once. I had seen plenty of odd and mortifying scenes by that point in my life, but this was the first time in memory that I had had this reaction. Susan had a similar reaction when we were visiting friends in Tulsa later on and I took her to see Oral Roberts University. She had to get out of there immediately. To her credit, she voluntarily took me back there a decade or so later to see Frank Sinatra perform on what may have been his last real tour. ORU, at the time, had the largest performing venue in the city, or so I assumed. Later on, they built a really nice big one downtown, just a couple blocks from the scene of the 1921 race massacre, which was not widely known about until, among other things, Donald Trump chose to hold one of his rallies in the same venue where we had seen Paul McCartney a couple years before. It was the centennial of that horrible event (I refer to the massacre), and it wasn't long before everyone on Earth knew about it, especially after HBO featured it prominently in the WATCHMEN sequel and LOVECRAFT COUNTRY. I don't run around clutching my pearls on trips as a rule, but sometimes things trigger me, like the group of Texans in Notre Dame de Paris going off about a religious ceremony taking place while a bunch of tourists gawked from the ambulatory, much as they probably had in the 1200's. Well, that's a lot of verbiage. I hope it's the bit to which you were referring. ;)
I thought I responded last night, but Substack is putting me through some paces. Bottom line: I had the same experience with the Seminole Indian Village, and, 20+ years later, at the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico. Actual panic attack at the latter. White tourists can be a living horror movie.
I have enjoyed your work for years, but this series is the best. Interesting about parents. Mine made *me* move, as well...from Norman Rockwell rural New England to Homestead, Florida. It's down by the Keys. My dad worked at the university's subtropical experiment station. No snow, its only redeeming feature for them. According to Atlas Obscura, the station is still there; they hired farmers from Cambodia to help out with Southeast Asian agricultural techniques; two different groups quit and refused to spend another summer in Homestead. I'm not making this up. I spent six years there enjoying puberty in the late Fifties/early Sixties with a bunch of troglodytes. It was a fascinating time to be alive, but not there. Especially during the Cuban Missile Crisis down the road from the Air Force Base. I suspect that your Florida time might have been nicer, but neither of us would survive there now. And I'm writing this from Amarillo, Texas, where it is *dry.* (My children are unappreciative as well. Go figure.) I look forward to more of your wonderful observations. Your mind is a gift to the human condition.
I grew up on Robert Benchley and James Thurber (and the Kingston Trio), so I didn't hit these rocks until later on, and it was different for me, being a man, of sorts. My art school days were in the late Seventies on the G.I. Bill. in Oklahoma no less, though I had spent my adolescence in Florida. So basically I was working out of my high school thing when I was pushing thirty. That said, I have never read anybody who could discuss this stuff as hilariously and touchingly as you do. Even Joni Mitchell, about whom the late David Crosby said: "She's about as modest as Attila the Hun." I slightly knew, or, more accurately, observed Crosby in his folk singer days in Miami. He knew whereof he spoke. I bought WE SAW SCENERY as a Christmas present for my wife, but I'm going to steal it back and read it myself before she gives it away, as she is wont to do with books (to me, the most amazing thing about her). You are a world class humorist!
Why is it that the good ones are either married, or gay, or serial killers?
Knockout good. And oh, how I do relate. All of it, this and Part One, too.