Foul Shots

I've puzzled over it since last year's playoffs and I still don't
understand how superstar basketball players can miss so many of their
foul shots. We're talking about guys able and positioned to compile
humongous career stats--twenty thousand women, a hundred million
dollars--those are Hall of Fame numbers by any measure. So what's the
problem? Are they ashamed to be seen cashing in their free throws? They
can give them to me. I'm seriously middle-aged, five-foot-seven,
myopic, arthritic and usually nauseous. Not every part of my body is
still getting a proper supply of blood. The closest I've come to
resembling an athlete has been in the manner of my deterioration; as
with Mickey Mantle it was my knees that went first. But shit. I made
six of ten just yesterday and it wasn't even my home driveway!
***
Since my memory loss is strictly of the short-term variety I have no
problem remembering the last time I got laid.
***
Can we cut the crap for just a minute? Managed care isn't about
reducing medical costs, it's about making money for the people who run
and invest in HMOs.
***
Is it me or is it Congress? I mean, doesn't it miss the point just a
little to allow a "successful" lawsuit against an HMO to result in
higher premiums for its members instead of a devaluation of the HMOs
stock and a lower annual bonus for its CEO?
***
I've never been represented by anyone in the House of
Representatives.
***
The fitting response to "gatekeeping" doctors who refuse to order
certain procedures or make specialist referrals because it means losing
a percentage of their HMO take is, of course, to break their
collarbones. But short of that, I think physicians found capable of
compromising patient care for financial gain should thereafter be
addressed not as "Doctor," but as "Mister," the appropriate title for
the businessman they've opted to be. It may not seem like much in the
way of vengeance, but I've noticed that doctor's get unhinged in a
major way when you call them "Mister." (No, I'm not going to bother
reconstructing any sentences to accommodate women doctors. Women are
supposed to be more compassionate than men. If they pull that "I don't
think the hole in your heart is big enough yet to warrant a
cardiologist" shit, they don't rate even GENDER recognition--call them
"Mister," too!
***
When you're put on hold in America you might very well be subjected to
a lackluster Naval Academy Choir cover of "Bitch Better Have My Money."
But when I called a company in Italy recently I got to hear the entire
first act of "La Boheme."
***
I would love to live in a world that's scripted by Aaron Sorkin.
***
Actors who are nominated for but fail to win an Academy Award are, a year or so later, better off emotionally than those who do.

They still don't know that winning such an award won't save them.
•••
I've been pondering the "offers" to insure my accounts against default
that I receive from credit card issuers. I agree that, stifling any
chance for me to save money by charging interest rates that would
embarrass my local loan shark, these companies have good reason to be
concerned about my ability to repay them should I lose my job. But, you
know, the peace of mind problem here is all theirs. I myself miss no
sleep over the prospect that I may one day be forced to stiff people
for whom capitalism is too heady a system--who get much too overheated
and giddy when they use it--and who should never have been allowed to
participate in a free-enterprise economy. So I'm afraid that, in
response, the best I can do is tender a counteroffer. I'll consent to
the insurance if they pop for the premiums.
***
When individuals or groups demand that I respect them, they are
evincing an uncertainty about their respectability--and a need for my
reassurance--that only makes me contemptuous of them.
***
How slovenly we've become in our pursuit of money is no way better
demonstrated than by the loose subscription cards that cascade from our
magazines. I appreciate the fact that a lot of magazines are in trouble
and I know that good subscription numbers sell advertising, but for me
these cards have resulted in only a pronounced aversion to newsstands.
And I can't be alone. The choice of having a torso that's permanently
bent at an angle perpendicular to your asshole, or leaving a trail of
"blow-ins" from your subway stop to your apartment door--tipping off
the entire neighborhood that you've squirreled a copy of "Miraculous
Mammaries" inside he annual face towel issue of "Macrame Times"--has to
be hurting magazine sales at least as much as the dwindling literacy
rate. (It should go without saying that those were arbitrary titles
that happened to come to mind.)
***
Re: The final installment of Ken Burns's "Jazz." Isn't Branford
Marsalis the entertainer who used to lead "The Tonight Show" band? What
exactly qualified this man to pass judgment on the work of an authentic
artist like Cecil Taylor?
***
In most of our stores these days, trying to negotiate a simple purchase
with personnel who, by all appearances, were clients of the City
University of New York placement service, is to subject yourself to a
degree of stress the proverbial Turkish prison warden would be loathe
to inflict. But it's stores where the salespeople are trained to pounce
and hover, and where the security guards greet you at the door like
they haven't seen you since you did hard time together, that irritate
me the most. Betraying both desperation and a guiltiness about
something, they automatically lose any prospect of getting my
business.
***
The real mission of proselytizing religious groups isn't to share a
revelation, it's to validate beliefs they're not sure of by securing
the agreement of others.
***
Since I think that, for the most part, the people in charge of
educating New York City's children would be more suitably employed as
highway dividers, I certainly don't want to appear to be coming to
their defense. But it should be pointed out that in its front page
story about that faculty-written junior high school graduation program
with all the spelling errors, the "Daily News" incorrectly identified
"programme" as a misspelling of "program." In fact, "programme" is a
legitimate, if chiefly British, variant. Apparently the folks who wrote
and edited the "News" piece are themselves products of New York's
school system.
***
Where can you relax or drop your guard these days? I'm thinking of how
stressful and enervating the dumbing down thing has made all but the
most basic of verbal exchanges; of the automatic defensive posture
rampant greed forces you to take when you enter into the most
elementary of financial transactions, and of the increasing incidence
of random violence. And I haven't begun to talk about what you have to
deal with after you've left your family in the morning.
***
Since I get all of the violence and profanity I need at home I only go
to the movies for sex.
***
People tend to be confused about this. I'm not pro-choice, I'm
pro-ABORTION. Okay? There are currently six-billion humans on this
planet, most of whom are stupid and unattractive and all of whom show
up at precisely the moment I'm in a supermarket aisle and reaching for
something on a lower shelf.
***
You want to know what's wrong, why I'm so jittery all the time? I'll
tell you. It's the egregious flaws in nature's design of the female
body. I mean a freshman at Pratt, for Christ's sake, would have known
better than to locate the portal to the world in such close proximity
to the anus. On the order of something my plumber might try to get away
with, this demoralizing arrangement has made the moment of one's birth
tantamount to exiting a subway station in downtown Jersey City. Yes,
there may have been some practical justification for joining the female
genitalia and the birth canal--although I find it interesting that even
the manufacturers of Coke machine, and in a time of budget constraints,
have managed to maintain a respectful distance between the coin slot
and the delivery bin. But at the very least, these organs should have
been positioned where the former would be quickly accessible, where the
necessity to get undressed would have been eliminated. (The spot I'd
have chosen is the side of the neck, just above the clavicle.)

(2020)

Fully aware of the grievous toll Covid-19 has already taken, and belonging to the demographic deemed most vulnerable to contracting a lethal case of it, I’m hardly inclined to make light of the disease. But owning the belief that in ways self-evident and convoluted, to mitigate the terror of death is a provenance of virtually all human behavior, I can’t help but be amused by certain of the reactions to the virus and what they reveal about the games we play with our minds in order to alleviate existential dread.

I’m speaking of the extreme, indeed overwrought, adherence by many of us to protocols we’ve been told will shield us from infection, and which can range from, say, never leaving the house to painstakingly sanitizing one’s mail.

Being obsessively immersed in such protective measures enables us to feel that we’ve narrowed the infinite causes of death to a single and, crucially, avoidable one.

For a not insignificant percentage of the population, Covid-19 comes as something of a gift.