So distribution should undo excess, And each man have enough.
— Shakespeare, King Lear
Your correspondent, in case you did not realize, is a man of some accomplishment. In 1963, at the Bryn Mawr Olympics of local elementary schools, I placed second in the high jump. I was but eight years old, and yet: staggering triumph. I might still have the ribbon somewhere. It was green.
That was childhood. In 2022, through sheer will and perseverance, even as I pen these words, I am on a regime of no fewer than nine prescription drugs. You think I’m being obnoxious? Nope. If you can do it, it ain’t bragging.
And until very recently, I owned six sofas. Boom. Deal with it.
The list, by the way, goes on and on. I could tell you about that time back in the 80s. I bent under the hood of a disabled Jeep and flipped open the butterfly valve above the carburetor, allowing a nervous young couple to be safely on their way. I says to them, “Folks,” I says, “you need to get some air in there for the combustion. Pure gasoline in them cylinders won’t really explode.” Then, like the Lone Ranger, I tipped my hat and galloped away.
Here’s the thing. It’s nice to be quietly heroic, but a little recognition isn’t bad, either. I’m not speaking of my global cult of followers who hang onto my every word as if it were the last water drop in the Sahara or a random TikTok. No, I’m talking about my own loved ones — especially my three adult daughters. I won’t tell you their actual names, because these days you just can’t be too careful, so I’ll just call them Regan, Goneril and Cordelia.
They, for the most part, are oddly indifferent or dismissive or sometimes even hostile to my work. I can’t say why, because they won’t tell me. A father wants his kids to not only admire him, but to admire the shit out of him, to lay at his feet, propped up on their elbows, eyes wide, drinking in every original and unexpected pronouncement as if it were the last drop of water in the Sahara. “Oh, Father,” they might say, “if only I could be like you!”
Yeah, well, I’ve written seven books and they haven’t read a one of them. It’s a puzzlement. I have actor friends who report that their daughter, out of sheer paralyzing self-consciousness, will not watch their plays or movies. It might be that sort of thing. Another possibility is they think I’m a blowhard.
Perhaps, knowing me as you do, you credit me with accepting their aversion with a shrug and sense of wry bemusement. You would be incorrect. On the contrary, knowing how important it is for their emotional growth and personal legacies, I have shipped them or emailed them or personally gifted them books, articles, tapes and podcast links, conveying one explicit message and one implicit one. The explicit message is, “I love you, and I want to share with you this part of me, if not to treasure at least to hold within you for that inevitable time when I cannot be with you in the flesh.” You know, such as a traffic jam on the New Jersey Turnpike.
The unspoken message is: “Goneril, finish your liver and onions, because nobody is leaving this table until you do.”
Believe it or not, that strategy has been unavailing. So, to help them understand theirs is a minority sentiment, over the years I have occasionally emailed them kudos, encomiums, endorsements and the most fulsome compliments from anonymous habitués of the Bobosphere, signaling to my beloved girls that it is perfectly OK to worship me, for there is safety in numbers. Oddly, that hasn’t seemed to do the trick, either. I suspect they have been put off by the subject line, so characteristically pointed and candid: “How Great I Am.” Reports have filtered back to me that these helpful missives have made them raugh (retch + laugh). I am mystified.
You may wonder why, all of a sudden, I choose to unburden myself on this subject and expose myself as a caricature of narcissism and pathos. Well, it happens that the very same process that saw me one month ago divest of half my sofa fleet also has me rummaging through carton after carton of clippings that represented more or less the entirety of my journalism career. I’ve been carting them from dwelling to dwelling for years, boxed and unexamined. This time around, I decided to cull the archive.
Alas, it was more than just a culling. I haven’t saved them for the Smithsonian, or some imagined biographer. Until now, I’ve saved them for family posterity. It dawns on me though, why am I breaking my back to schlep heavy boxes of my life’s work if they are destined to be discarded without examination by my heirs. It is not the first time I encountered the question.
Once, in the late 80s, I wrote about an international legal scholar named Albert Blaustein who had two major claims to fame: 1) His helping draft the constitutions for a half dozen nascent democracies around the globe and 2) His unparalleled collection of complimentary hotel soaps amassed since 1945. I spoke with the now late Professor Blaustein on the occasion of his farewell to 1,000 bars of Palmolive, Neutragena and Cashmere Bouquet from the world over. His children wanted no part of it, and he was shattered.
It’s possible that you’re wondering why I’m pondering this sad mystery of filial impiety. Didn’t I already say? I’ve been downsizing. The process has included some curation, as I decide whether to dispose of my archive wholesale, or retail. Lo and behold, I discovered something interesting, something I hadn’t thought of for even an instant in 25 years. It was a column, one of thousands in a long career, in this case about a TV commercial.
To be precise, it was about a commercial for the late, unlamented MCI Communications, which for whatever reason decided in its waning days to offer a paean to the internet. That ostensibly made sense; MCI was at the time a very big ISP. What didn’t make sense was the willing suspension of disbelief.
People here communicate mind to mind. Not black to white. There are no genders. Not man to woman. There is no age. Not young to old. There are no infirmities. Not short to tall. Or handsome to homely. Just thought to thought. Idea to idea. Uninfluenced by the rest of us. There are only minds. Only minds. What is this place? This place? Utopia? No. No. The Internet. The Internet. The Internet.
It was in some ways just a longer iteration of the sentiment in Peter Steiner’s iconic New Yorker cartoon four years prior: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Except this was a lot more naive, and vainglorious, and so utterly the opposite of the truth. Or, as I put it in my January 20, 1997 column, “a bunch of hooey.” Because these people looked at what a great app email is, and somehow missed the lethal other side of the sword. To which puffery I objected:
Who says there is some sort of pristine egalitarianism to the Internet, free of prejudices and other human foibles? … The same qualities of distance and anonymity that make each interlocutor faceless also make the medium remote and impersonal, ripe for deceit, exploitation, neurotic escapism and, of course, mindless blathering.
This staggering display of prescience was long before Gamergate and Cambridge Analytica and “Jews Will Not Replace Us.” It was years before anti-vaccine insanity, cyber bullying and QAnon. But there I was, Bobstradamus, flipping the butterfly valve to get society safely on the road. Sadly, the world — never mind my own personal offspring — did not heed my surpassing vision. And to happen upon the text now, after decades, makes me wonder for whom I have so long toiled. As I lug the boxes of clippings to the recycler, I can’t escape the image of crates and crates of hotel soaps, tipped into a dumpster, to be buried for all time. It is distressing.
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks! You sulfurous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts, Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder, Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world! Crack nature’s molds, all germens spill at once That make ingrateful man!
I won’t be Lear, who had some problems with equanimity. And I respect my kids’ choice to separate their father from his mere labors. And at no point before unearthing this old column had I felt so much as a twinge of resentment at a world not necessarily hanging on my every word. But just let me observe — and please do not raugh — the green ribbon was very nice.
If you have anything to say on this subject, though, kindly leave me out of it. Just drop a note to goneril81@gmail.com. Suggested subject line: “Eat your dinner.”
Well, Bob, this long time listener, now reader, very much does hang on your every columnic offering -- assuming "columnic" is an actual word -- and your latest is in equal measures satisfying and entertaining. This issue of what to leave to posterity is a thorny one, but although I'd love to read your early work, you've probably made the right choice with the dumpster. "All we are," as 20th century pop philosophers "Kansas" sang, "is dust in the wind," and it's hard to argue with that. We come, we go, then all too soon are gone and forgotten, as have been millions before us and millions that will come after us in this stormy, troubled veil of tears, and perhaps that's all for the best. Still, be sure to leave a few choice nuggets for your troika of daughters to pour over once you've ascended to the Great Beyond. Once they finally grok the full measure of your incandescent brilliance as we outsiders do, they'll wish they'd come around while you were still upright and breathing -- and having your offspring yearn for more of your work, now lost to that dumpster, might be the sweetest legacy of all.
Bob, I just saw the "listen" button on the email version of your post and got really excited that I was going to hear a little morsel of your sardonic delivery. I rushed to open the post in the app and my hopes were dashed as a I heard a synthetic female voice start to read the piece. I appreciate your health issues that prevent you from editing a whole podcast each week but could you think about reading your posts out loud and posting the audio? There are a lot of people who would be made very happy by the option to continue to hear your delivery. I'm now going to start channeling my inner Bob Garfield so that I can do my best to "hear" your words with the appropriate delivery.