Joan Rivers was funny

At one time, she was but another struggling entertainer trying to make it in a crazy business that a tiny number of people do successfully. This picture is of her at age 35, in her first film role. The movie was "The Swimmer." It was based on a short story by John Cheever and starred Burt Lancaster. Rivers was only in it for a minute or so.

Some of her jokes:

After lovemaking do you: A) go to sleep? B) light a cigarette? or C) return to the front of the bus?

If I found her floating in my pool, I'd punish my dog.

I have no sex appeal; if my husband didn't toss and turn, we'd never have had the kid.

You know you're getting old when work is a lot less fun and fun is a lot more work.

A child can be taught not to do certain things, such as touch a hot stove, pull lamps off of tables, and wake Mommy before noon.

I once dated a guy so dumb he could not count to 21 unless he was naked.

Never be afraid to laugh at yourself. After all, you could be missing out on the joke of the century.

Thanks for the acid

Young C.:
Thank you for the four tabs of acid you left in my mailbox before you returned to home after Thanksgiving. I was a little concerned that it had been there all day, me at work, this being the kind of mailbox you see more in Normal Rockwell illustrations and the message you wrote on the handmade paper you'd Scotch taped the tabs recommending dosage and state of mind being easily readable to the postal carrier when he filled the box with catalogs and bills.

These tabs are surprisingly tiny.

Really, it was the most positive thing that mailbox has held in the two years I've lived in the house after my parents died.
I took it today, even though it's been weeks and the walk up the driveway is now paved with ice and treacherous for me, despite being technically a few years shy of senior citizenhood.
My manners are remiss. Before boring you with what a middle-aged man's first acid trip was like, I have to tell you how much I enjoyed seeing you when you spent some time at the house, though I know I’ll come off as condescending however much respect I have for you.
We'd barely met before then and most of your life, relative to mine, has been in childhood. Condescending already? No: Your intelligence, insight and capabilities are those of a mature adult, but in terms of raw time they don't erase what to me is the fairly recent past. At 26, you’re young.
I remember instructions on the caring of your parakeet you wrote to my parents before your parents and the three kids vacationed someplace. You roll your eyes now at the memory of your precocious prepubescent writings, but the wit was there, as was the love of words, and the boldness. My parents read it to me, impressed, and I held back on my feelings (as I did with so much else, which will burn me forever, of course, as it should). I do remember thinking that just maybe you’d be different, out of Main Line mold and that perhaps you’d lead others in some way or ignite an interesting trend.

What do I think now? I can only be honest: Too early to tell. But that’s in your favor. Yes, it’s at my age that some get crotchety about things moving too fast, and that what really endures is what’s built over time and other cliches, but after a few dozen spins around the sun you do start to take a long view. There are short cuts. Music, for example. In interviews with mature musicians most speak candidly of how much of the profundity of their lyrics was happenstance. A word that fit, another that rhymed. Too much visual art passes for something when it’s not, but you’re a better judge of that than I. The next time you’re at the museum I’d like to show you two paintings I love. Both are unromantic images of a man and a woman. Being visual images, words fail me, so I’ll leave it at that and it’s on you to remind me on your next trip east. Writing’s harder to fake and get away with, but some do, for awhile.
I don’t mean to discount music and art made by the young. The young John Lennon, Paul Simon and Laura Nyro said as much as the seasoned Randy Newman or Loudin Wainwright, and Alice Munro and John Cheever in their sixties are good to read at any age.
I like what you said about what you’re up to these days. It seems you learned volumes from the bad relationship in Texas and moved on undamaged. Keep throwing yourself into others, with as much heart as you have and without fear. Once, a few years before you were born (my condensation again!), someone I knew would be “it” gave me hope, and for an unforgettable walk down a hallway at a corporate center in mid-1980s Japan to a telephone, there was only air between my rubber soles and the charcoal industrial carpet below, I swear. Nothing has come close since. An obituary in last week’s Inquirer quoted a local husband in his late 80s saying of his late wife that his heart fluttered whenever she entered the room throughout their marriage of over half a century. May you be one of those who remains fresh.
Back, now, to the acid. It’s good. I’d feared it. You know -- jumping out of windows, going tete-a-tete with locomotives. But no. It’s fine. Not the different animal I’d thought it might be, closer to the bhang lasi I’d had in India and with even less time distortion. A gentle high. You were right, what you had is good. I listened to comedy and music and laughed and swooned.
It’s horrible, but the greatest fear of such drugs at my age is that they remind you of lost promise, of roads not taken, people not told to fuck off, interests not pursued. True, you and others will say it’s never too late, that so-and-so started doing this or that at an advanced age and became happy with the output, if not renown for it. I’m not one of those special people with that energy however. For me, nine-thirty at night means a book and a warm bed, alarm set, tomorrow’s responsibilities in mind. Hell, the reason it’s taken until now to take half a tab was scheduling.

All right, Young C., nearing a thousand words, which is about six hundred more than needed or that you may have interest in. Oh, the acid brought out the latent stand up comedian in me and I wrote them down on paper so, before it completely wears off:

• I was walking to the mailbox today and I thought, “Brrr!” Then I thought, How can “Brrr!” be a thought?
• How do you feel right now on a scale of one to ten with “one” being a one and “ten” being a ten?

And what good’s an acid trip without a profundity of love, like this one I wrote of my most recent instance of rejection:
The photons of this winter’s sun would seem less cruel if reflected from your face, blah, blah, blah.
I actually wrote the “blah, blah, blah.” Go figure. 
Love,
B.

Updike is Dead

A pack of Marlboro cigarettes.

The Complete and Total Loser read John Cheever which gave him no room for John Updike so the Complete and Total Loser didn't read him. And now he's dead of lung cancer.
Smoking will do that to you. Hard to believe a guy that smart would smoke himself to death.
The Loser learned to smoke at 13 from a summer friend named Richard.
“Take a small drag,” Richard said. "When you get used to that, take bigger ones.” One night, girls present, the Loser took bigger drags than he was ready for, blowing out impressive clouds. Later, as he and Richard headed for the small sailboat Richard's family owned to sleep, he vomited.
Many stop forever at that point. By summer's end, the Loser was addicted. He found he could buy cigarettes from most stores and that vending machines were unsupervised. Only once in his teens was the Loser refused a pack of cigarettes. You had to be 16. He'd get 50 cents daily to take the bus home from school and then hitchhike, saving the money for cigarettes.

John Updike, smoking.

 The Loser's mother smoked. There’s nothing a teenage smoker likes more than a smoking parent. It covers the smell and provides a source of free cigarettes. If you knew how to roll a joint, you could get butts from a parent's ashtrays and use the leftover tobacco to roll your own. She smoked L&M’s, an awful brand. The package used to have graphics like Marlboro’s, but not as bold. In the 70s they went for a hip look—a photo of a couple, smoking of course, surrounded by trees in full autumn color.
Marlboro was the preferred brand. They came in crushproof boxes, which meant you could put the pack in your blue jeans pocket and still have unbroken cigarettes after a day of bicycling and running around.
The Loser's older brother took up smoking at boarding school. “You’re not a real smoker,” he said, “unless having a cigarette’s the first thing you do in the morning and the last thing you do at night.” Smoking in bed was hugely pleasurable. There are times even now, decades after quitting, that the Loser wakes up from a dream in which he was smoking and searches the sheets for a burning ember.
He quit in high school, an all-boys school where he was unpopular. Not going to parties meant few opportunities to impress girls. Even though his tobacco use was withering on its own, it still required a conscious effort to quit.
He went to college in rural Ohio, miles from any city. The isolation was good. The only TVs were in lounges, there were no VCRs, the campus had one computer in the physics department.
The winter of 1977-78, his freshman year, broke records with its snowfall and cold. Even though the campus was small and neatly contained, lying along a level spine-like path less than a mile long, classes were canceled during the worst of the storms that season. From women's dorm rooms came popcorn, cookie dough, hot chocolate, decks of cards and board games.
One reason people start smoking is for a feeling of social togetherness. That winter, as the Loser played backgammon and hearts, he began to borrow cigarettes from friends, first as a joke, with mocking cool. He was soon hooked again and bought packs for those he’d borrowed from. Eventually he skipped that step and bought his own. Winstons.
The late 70s were a smoker’s paradise. You could smoke almost anywhere; dining halls, hospital waiting rooms, libraries, airplanes. Cigarettes cost about 75 cents a pack. In big cities, young people on street corners promoted new brands by giving packs to passersby. You could smoke anywhere. Only once in four years of college did anyone ask the Loser not to smoke while they ate. There were fold-to-assemble ashtrays made of coated paper, a dull aluminum, at library desks and study carrels throughout the campus. Even parties at the jock frats were thick with smoke.
The Loser majored in art. Much of art involves waiting. For gesso to dry, for film to develop, for plates to etch, for ideas to form. A cigarette, held and smoked the right way, was an indispensable part of being an art major.
The Loser didn't quit till he was out of college for three years. At age 25 he knew that, being a loser, he would never be able to quit at age 40 and that he would be the type to get lung cancer or heart disease by 50 if he didn't. It took several attempts but the final one took and now he lives smoke free. When he thinks of how he could simply walk into a store and buy a pack at any time, the idea surprises him a little. He sees smokers standing outside in the cold, the heat, the rain and pities them.