Wit and Warmth

Given a choice, I would go back to the days of record stores, the Saturday Evening Post and houses with real shutters.

I’m bored with coffee. I’m bored with everything, especially February, a month devoted to ruts, routine and tax prep.

I don’t have many write-offs or expenses: one house, one car, one son, a Dick Butkus jersey. Does a Dick Butkus jersey qualify as a dependent? On my taxes it does.

My other “dependent” is our pet wolf, with snowflakes for eyelashes and a music box for a heart. White Fang is like a creature Shel Silverstein would design, think “Naaa, that’ll never work” and crumple up the sketch.

On Sunday, White Fang almost drowned Smartacus in Valentine’s slurps – “French slobber,” I call it – the same sound of wooden pallets falling out the back of a truck. So there are behavioral issues on both sides.

And my daughter Rapunzel made penne pasta with vodka sauce for her boyfriend.

Seems a waste of vodka. Why not a martini? Who raised you? Oh, that’s right, your mom, who never had the proper respect for super-chilled Russian hooch.

Anyway, it’s all the usual family drama and insanity around here. Proof again that a suburb is no place for a meaty, difficult man like me. I’m really better suited to mending barbed wire on Wyoming ranch, or rescuing calves stranded in some canyon. I discuss all this with White Fang. By all indications, she completely understands.

Listen, it’s no secret I’m not well in the head. I think we’ve established that over time, and given you plenty of proof – my obsession for the prairie poetry of John Prine, or for Gordon Lightfoot, who’s as Canadian as an icy blast of wind. Or the malarkey of everyday life here in LA. Jeeesh, I love that stuff.

I mean, I’m not exactly a hot mess. More of a cold mess. Like everyone else in this year-long panny, my grip has slipped a little, if I even had one to begin with.

So, I find myself confiding too much in the Arctic wolf? Big deal.

One day she will answer, as if in a New Yorker cartoon: “Will you shut up already?” Ironically, that’s the effect I’ve always had on females. Too much chatter. Too few of the thoughtful gestures that women prefer over mere words.

I am a man of mere words, some more mere than others.

That’s why I’m trying to be sweeter to White Fang. So she won’t leave. As it turns out, I have abandonment issues, in addition to an aversion to major change.

Instead of wit and warmth, movies are now superhero burlesque shows…about as fun as a violent sneeze.

In fact, the other day I confirmed with my favorite checker at the supermarket that change is bad. Very bad indeed.

Not sure how it came up. Maybe:

Her: “So what’s new?”

Me: Nothing. Fortunately.”

Then we commiserated, even laughed a bit, about how change is pretty overrated.

Take all the polls you want, listen to what the pundits say, but the very best way to gauge the national mood is to talk to your supermarket checker.

Anyway, I have discerned that there are two Great American Myths – 1) Los Angeles 2) the notion that change is good.

Two things. Neither true.

That’s not to say there is no Los Angeles, only that the mythical version of it, the mental image outsiders have, doesn’t really exist. LA is the nearly unknowable city, that’s part of its kooky charm. A dark, noirish mecca beneath a full-on sun.

Change is the other Great American Myth — specifically the notion that change is glorious and refreshing, which it is not. If given the chance, I would go back to my mother’s womb.

But seriously.  I would gladly return to the simpler days of public phone booths and pre-cable TV. The world is always in need of many comforts, but it never needed more TV channels, nor more phone calls.

Don’t get me wrong. I like variety. I like new experiences (on my terms, of course). I like sampling new restaurants and making new friends.

The other day, the happiest hiking club in all the land, the Happy Hour Hiking Club, took a lap around the Rose Bowl, and I made some terrific new pals. One of them was this Roswell character.

Roswell is a true raconteur, and I don’t really need another nut job in my life. Already have too many – Irv, Jeff, Bittner, Verge — the loudest guys at a party, the sort of goofs other goofs huddle around.

Now I also have this latest clown Roswell, who tells his funny stories in dialect. I suck at dialect, though if I’ve been drinking the right tea, I can do a pretty decent Sean Connery. Go figure.

Still, despite my enthusiasm for new experiences, I don’t like fundamental change in the way things work, or in the mundane responsibilities of everyday life.

Given a choice, I would go back to the days of record stores, the Saturday Evening Post and houses with real shutters.

And simple four-burner stoves with pilot lights, not the electronic ignitions that tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick ….

I would go back to childhoods that didn’t require tutors – to the days when teachers actually taught well enough to satisfy frantic and frightened parents. How novel.

Back then, if a kid was a little wound up, you gave him a glass of milk.

The developments that pass for progress don’t really qualify as progress. They are economic efficiencies mostly, driven by the need to squeeze more money out of every little corner of American life.

Hence, there are forever lines at airport counters. There is no one at the other end of your customer service call.

A great man (Pat Sajak) once said, “Nothing is more exhausting than anger. Nothing is more relaxing than love.”

And I fully agree with that. Except for the love part.

For the record, I find modern love to be exhausting too.

See, sex was sexier 30 years ago. Not so overt. A little sly. If you overstepped, women kneed you in the groin – twice — as they always should.

Thirty years ago, relationships were not so fraught. You couldn’t order up a date on your phone, as you do a pizza.

Funny was funnier back then too. There were actually stand-up comedians, who roamed the nation like cowboys. They also worked the colleges circuits, where free speech reigned. Students could have a beer keg in their room, no one cared. If you overdrank, you flunked out. It was academic Darwinism, far superior to the totalitarianism of today’s campuses.

Of course, music was better – don’t we always prefer the music of our youth? Movies were better too, though.

Hollywood stars were beguiling, mysterious and a little arrogant. They’d been places. They showed up on motorcycles. They didn’t come off conveyor belts from some suburb, straight from the orthodontist, as if their mothers dropped them off.

The other night, Smartacus and I watched  “Juno,” a gem of a movie, not that old (2007), but old enough to feature delicious dialogue, unlike pretty much anything we’ve heard in the past 10 years.

Delicious dialogue, as ancient as a milk truck.

By gawd, I’d hate to be a movie critic these days, and have to pretend that any of this stuff is halfway entertaining.

Instead of wit and warmth, movies are now superhero burlesque shows…about as fun as a violent sneeze. Sometimes you can feel your brains oozing out your ears. The other movies are dim, art-house character studies of human dysfunction.

Hey, if you want human dysfunction, look at me. Lately, I can’t even get Hulu to work. If I manage to Drop Box all my tax forms, it’ll be like Aquinas’ proof of God’s existence.

Ugh. I so love February.

Meanwhile, I noticed during our hike that the trails are stirring. Out of the ground, fingers of crocus and random beds of clover. We’ve hardly had rain, and still they come, marching toward March…relentless little rascals responding to the promise of the sun.

I admire relentless rascals. I admire how White Fang follows me around, even into the bathroom to watch me shower. I love how Mardi Gras comes every year – relentlessly — as it did this week. And how Ash Wednesday follows (today, in fact – a day of atonement in an era of infrequent sin).

You can fix the world all you want, and still these grand traditions show up.

Like the spring flowers. Like my first grandchild in May.

Soft and wonderful, into a world full of thistles.

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Thank you to all who participated in Saturday’s Valentine’s hike. Hadn’t realized how much I missed the sound of live laughter. Coming next: the annual convention  of the Gin & Tonic Society of Los Angeles. Stay tuned for details. Meantime, stock up on gin glasses, or a handsome hat, at ChrisErskineLA.com