Well, my friend and I have been close since middle school, and over the years we’ve accumulated a lot of humorous stories about one another. In our friend group I’m kind of joked about as emotionally and physically clumsy–like a well-meaning alien–and he is treated as this stalwart but foolhardy gun-nut, and we’ve got a backlog of anecdotes pertaining to those traits.
So, when he suggested loading his wife’s SUV up with guns and driving into the hills to fire them at dirt mounds, I was thrilled at the prospect of doing something cool with my friend. But I was also aware that from the outside it looked like Laurel and Hardy meets Heckler and Koch.

And I was counseled to be very safe, and I was extremely earnest and direct about taking precautions, and he clearly wanted to both put me at ease and establish that this was kind of “his thing” and he could be trusted to do it safely.

So, when the whole adventure went sideways, I knew it was going to be one of those stories we like to tell, especially given the offbeat quality of our home town. (It isn’t in the story, but I’ve got a photo from the gun range of this kid in a flannel shirt and a Roman Centurion’s helmet taking aim at a target). And when I related it to a friend over a drink one night, she found it very funny and recommended I write it up as a humorous essay (and very kindly edited the first draft – thanks Liz!). And, that’s how we find ourselves here.

You know, I’m not really sure. It seems in some ways we’ve already made efforts to reengineer daily life as a kind of compromise between things we enjoyed beforehand and the new necessities of keeping people safe, and I don’t really expect that to fully go away even after COVID-19 itself is a more managed part of our existence. I’m not really imagining things I want to do post-pandemic. I’m just thinking about what I want to do next with things the way they are now.

Around my father’s last (posthumous) birthday I read Losing Mum and Pup, by Christopher Buckley, about the death of his father William F. Buckley Jr., and Christopher’s mother Patricia Taylor Buckley, which was very enjoyable. He managed to talk about some of the sardonically funny aspects of that kind of loss that I wasn’t able to touch on in full in what I wrote about my own father, and I saw some flashes of the idiosyncrasies of my own family.

I also read SPQR by Mary Beard, about the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Roman Empire, which I found just utterly captivating and very humorous. And I’m following it up now with Are We Rome, by Cullen Murphy, which is also very good.

Many. At this point, they may have my other pleasures outnumbered, even surrounded.

For starters I truly, and without irony, love Smash Mouth. I had the high enjoyment of seeing them in concert with another friend of mine. He told me he sums up our friendship by describing us going to see a showing of Double Indemnity and then running to the local fair to see the concert. Thoroughly grand–and anyone who would reprove me for thinking so has an IOU where their sense of fun should be.

Coffee. I keep tea stocked, but really only in case my outrageous coffee consumption gets to be too much and I need to pace myself by getting caffeine some other way.

Wine. I find it a more enjoyable thing to drink when relaxing at the end of an evening.

Oh, no, I think that covers things for now.