Essays

I’m thinking of making a career change, taking on something that’s intellectually challenging like miniature golf or hot-dog-eating contests. I don’t know what it is, but I feel as if life is passing me by, as if I have less time remaining than I did when I was 20, which makes no sense. Maybe it’s the mid-life crisis I never had, coming on me later than it does with most men. That would make sense, because I held on to infancy until I was 25. I wouldn’t have given it up even then except that people made fun of me when mama took me around town in my stroller. And I was going through an expensive number of teething rings, chewing the hell out of half a dozen a day. I didn’t experience adolescence until I was thirty-eight, when I was the only person my age with an acne problem and a collection of Marky Mark records.

If it’s not a belated mid-life crisis, I don’t know why I bought all these fast red sportscars, snappy plaid golf caps, heavy gold-chain necklaces, and a 100-gallon tank of Plexoderm. I suppose it could be environmental despair that I never got to experience the imminent ice age that a consensus of scientists were predicting in the 1960s. Or maybe my problem is what the French call “ennui” and we who have chosen not to be French call listlessness or boredom. It has certainly been the case that recently I’ve been dashing around all day and night, finding hundreds of things to be bored about, until I’ve lost ten pounds.

Someone told me that, not having children, I need two or three younger individuals in my life to make me feel needed. So I acquired a brown bear, an orangutan, and a chimpanzee. I gave each of them a fast red sportscar and sent them to college, but it didn’t work out. They wrecked the cars, and the college sent them home in a cage with an intemperate letter. However, the brown bear was hired by the governor of California as his “wildland czar” to manage forests and prevent disastrous fires.

I suppose the best thing I can do is not worry about what I can’t control—such as advancing age, the orangutan, and the chimpanzee—and just get on with writing another novel, which thus far has given my life more meaning than pickleball. Maybe I’ll write a novel about pickleball and the human condition, with a monster and a serial killer to give it some tension.

Meanwhile, on May 20 of this very year, my novel Going Home in the Dark will be available. You could preorder it now, though tomorrow would also be okay. I am sure that you will find it very entertaining, because I found it very entertaining and I know what you want. Some of what you want frightens me, but I left the worst of that icky stuff out of Going Home in the Dark and kept only the fun non-icky stuff.