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The African-American jazz pianist Fats Waller had a sentence he used to shout when his playing was absolutely brilliant and hilarious. This was it: “Somebody shoot me while I’m happy!”
That there are such devices as firearms, as easy to operate as cigarette lighters and as cheap as toasters, capable at anybody’s whim of killing Father or Fats or Abraham Lincoln or John Lennon or Martin Luther King, Jr., or a woman pushing a baby carriage, should be proof enough for anybody that, to quote the old science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, “being alive is a crock of shit.”
“I made sandwiches of German soldiers between an erupting Earth and an exploding sky, and in a blizzard of razor blades.”
She was as unpopular as ever because she was as boring as ever, so she invented automobiles and computers and barbed wire and flamethrowers and land mines and machine guns and so on. That’s how pissed off she was.
They say the first thing to go when you’re old is your legs or your eyesight. It isn’t true. The first thing to go is parallel parking.
Acculturated persons are those who find that they are no longer treated as the sort of people they thought they were, because the outside world has changed. An economic misfortune or a new technology, or being conquered by another country or political faction, can do that to people quicker than you can say “Jack Robinson.”
John Dillinger, a farm boy, escaped from jail once brandishing a wooden pistol he had whittled from a broken washtub slat. He blackened it with shoe polish! He was so entertaining. While on the run, robbing banks and vanishing into the boondocks, Dillinger wrote Henry Ford a fan letter. He thanked the old anti-Semite for making such fast and agile getaway cars! It was possible to get away from the police back then if you were a better driver with a better car. Talk about fair play! Talk about what we say we want for everyone in America: a level playing field! And Dillinger robbed only the rich
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“If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have nerve enough to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts.”
“That the rerun lasted ten years, short a mere four days, some are saying now, is proof that there is a God, and that He is on the Decimal System. He has ten fingers and ten toes, just as we do, they say, and uses them when He does arithmetic.
“If there is a God, He sure hates people. That’s all I can say.”
It wasn’t set on another planet. It was set in the office of a psychiatrist in St. Paul, Minnesota. The name of the shrink was the name of the story, too, which was “Dr. Schadenfreude.” This doctor had his patients lie on a couch and talk, all right, but they could ramble on only about dumb or crazy things that had happened to total strangers in supermarket tabloids or on TV talk shows. If a patient accidentally said “I” or “me” or “my” or “myself” or “mine,” Dr. Schadenfreude went ape. He leapt out of his overstuffed leather chair. He stamped his feet. He flapped his arms. He put his livid
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In that story, Trout calls his war, and my war, also, “Western Civilization’s second unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide.” He did that in conversations, too, one time adding in my presence, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, please try again.”
I AM HONORARY President of the American Humanist Association, whose headquarters in Amherst, New York, I have never seen. I succeeded the late author and biochemist Dr. Isaac Asimov in that functionless capacity.
My great war buddy Bernard V. O’Hare, now dead, lost his faith as a Roman Catholic during World War Two. I didn’t like that. I thought that was too much to lose. I had never had faith like that, because I had been raised by interesting and moral people who, like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, were nonetheless skeptics about what preachers said was going on. But I knew Bernie had lost something important and honorable. Again, I did not like that, did not like it because I liked him so much.
“He almost certainly killed people as well as a radio,” he said, “thus sparing them years of disappointments and tedium in civilian life. He made it possible for them, to quote the English poet A. E. Housman, to ‘die in their glory and never be old.’”
“I could have written a best-seller, if I’d had the patience to create three-dimensional characters. The Bible may be the Greatest Story Ever Told, but the most popular story you can ever tell is about a good-looking couple having a really swell time copulating outside wedlock, and having to quit for one reason or another while doing it is still a novelty.”
I SAY IN lectures in 1996 that fifty percent or more of American marriages go bust because most of us no longer have extended families. When you marry somebody now, all you get is one person. I say that when couples fight, it isn’t about money or sex or power. What they’re really saying is, “You’re not enough people!” Sigmund Freud said he didn’t know what women wanted. I know what women want. They want a whole lot of people to talk to.
I do not propose to discuss my love life. I will say that I still can’t get over how women are shaped, and that I will go to my grave wanting to pet their butts and boobs. I will say, too, that lovemaking, if sincere, is one of the best ideas Satan put in the apple she gave to the serpent to give to Eve. The best idea in that apple, though, is making jazz.
“Beware of gods bearing gifts.”
I myself say atomic energy has made people unhappier than they were before, and that having to live in a two-hemisphere planet has made our aborigines a lot less happy, without making the wheel-and-alphabet people who “discovered” them any fonder of being alive than they were before. Then again, I am a monopolar depressive descended from monopolar depressives. That’s how come I write so good.
A person walking in either hemisphere was commonly off balance, leaning in the direction he or she was going, and with most of his or her weight unevenly distributed between his or her feet.
“Science never cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too awful.”
All male writers, incidentally, no matter how broke or otherwise objectionable, have pretty wives. Somebody should look into this.
“Of native talent itself I say in speeches: ‘If you go to a big city, and a university is a big city, you are bound to run into Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Stay home, stay home.’ ” To put it another way: No matter what a young person thinks he or she is really hot stuff at doing, he or she is sooner or later going to run into somebody in the same field who will cut him or her a new asshole, so to speak.
Question: What is the white stuff in bird poop? Answer: That is bird poop, too.
“That seemed somehow important, that the picture was nice and straight,” he said, “and evenly spaced from the others. At least I could make that little part of the chaotic Universe exactly as it should be. I was grateful for the opportunity to do that.”
Let me note that Kilgore Trout and I have never used semicolons. They don’t do anything, don’t suggest anything. They are transvestite hermaphrodites.
I had to add, though, that I knew a single word that proved our democratic government was capable of committing obscene, gleefully rabid and racist, yahooistic murders of unarmed men, women, and children, murders wholly devoid of military common sense. I said the word. It was a foreign word. That word was Nagasaki.
Many people fail because their brains, their three-and-a-half-pound blood-soaked sponges, their dogs’ breakfasts, don’t work well enough. The cause of a failure can be as simple as that. Some people, try as they may, can’t cut the mustard! That’s that!
I have a male cousin my age who was doing miserably back in Shortridge High School He was a hulking interior lineman, and very sweet. He brought home an awful report card. His father asked him, “What is the meaning of this?” My cousin responded as follows: “Don’t you know, Father? I’m dumb, I’m dumb.”
Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different!
