SKYDIVERS: If you are at all like me, and if you are at all like me then you regard thirty-minute home pizza delivery as one of the fundamental characteristics distinguishing truly civilized societies from those inchoate masses of culturally benighted heathen hearts who place their trust in reeking tube, iron shard, and those English muffins topped with mozzarella and tomato sauce, which are most definitely not almost as good as the real thing, trust me on this one, then it necessarily follows that you must also regard the now almost constant loss of various and sundry body parts by skydivers as they plunge towards the Earth as an especially irksome phenomenon and one with disturbing implications for the long term electoral viability of the Republican Party.

Now, I am all for debating the long term electoral viability of the Republican Party with anyone who wanders down the pike, provided that they themselves are pikeless and I have Smith & Wesson’s latest and best bit of hardware in my pocket, just as I am in favor of debating anyone about anything, up to and including sex, religion, race, and whether or not jars of mayonnaise should give the contents’ calorie from fat percentage on the label—I think the label should just say Yes at that point; if the oily white goop you’re putting on your chicken sandwich to make it even halfway palatable after that dried out chicken’s been sitting in the back of your refrigerator since last weekend doesn’t get 100% of its calories from fat, then the oily white goop you’re putting on your chicken sandwich isn’t real mayonnaise—at least, that’s my opinion; I am not, however, in favor of debating anything with anyone so long as there is a prosthetic leg, complete with Reebok running shoe, protruding from my windshield. In this situation, I don’t care one way or another about the long-term electoral viability of the Republican Party; I want to know who’s going to pay to fix the damage to my car. And don’t tell me to call my insurance company; I refuse to let those thieving skunks jack my rates through the roof just because some dope started coming apart at the seams some 5,ooo feet up.

You might not think that dealing with the ongoing plague of disintegrating parachutists might not be the most important problem of our modern age, but it is one that will grow in size and intensity as the baby boom generation ages. This generational cohort, stuck as it is in a perpetual adolescence, will refuse to grow gracefully as previous generations did and will spend an inordinate amount of time doing things any normal person would think beyond the physical capacity of someone of an advanced age. But the baby boomers, for whom life means never really having to grow up, will try to deny the biological effects of passing time and as a result of this denial the skies over this our Great Republic will soon fill with dentures, limbs, pacemakers, walkers, bifocals, AARP membership cards, and the occasional veteran of the Summer of Love, all of them raining down upon an unsuspecting populace like so much unwanted space debris. Things will definitely get uglier hereabouts before they get any better, folks.

In any case, and yes, I am about to digress from the point here; I thought you’d want to know that before I actually did it so you wouldn’t be wondering just how this other subject came up without any prior notice—there was a time in this country, and I know that a lot of the young people here will find this hard to believe, when it was possible for an ordinary citizen without any sort of prolonged psychological training whatsoever to walk down any street in a fairly good-sized American town and be able, with a fair degree of accuracy, tell which of their fellow pedestrians was a complete raving lunatic. Your average citizen required no special skills for this task; loonies, being a polite lot in general, made detection much easier with their constant habit of carrying on conversations with people not immediately observable to the naked eye.

Modern loonies still carry on conversations with themselves, of course; no one willingly gets rid of a good gig; but detecting loonies from the broad mass of people is now so much harder to do that many people simply give up and hope that the man sitting near the emergency exit muttering to himself is on the phone to his broker and not someone who thinks that aliens from the planet Mongo are out to steal his brain waves with fly paper and Gorgonzola cheese. Modern communications technology has brought us to this; phones are now so small that they fit in your ear and I am sure that some clever scientist somewhere is working on a model that the phone company can insert directly into your brain, the better to bill you for thinking about calling someone outside your family circle.

Such technological compactness may be a good thing, for all I know, but I think I can speak for many people when I say that I find people I do not know suddenly starting conversations about their private matters as I am trying to read my newspaper disconcerting in the extreme. No, I do not want to hear about your cousin’s wedding and no, I don’t care what the bride was wearing or whether the maid of honor had had to much to drink when she brought up that bit about her sleeping with the groom the night before and wasn’t it wonderful that the lawyer was a friend of the family and would only charge half his normal fee for handling the divorce (if I were a betting man, I’d say that the answers to both questions is yes, but what do I know? I could only hear one side of the conversation). Clearly, someone must devise a system whereby those of us who are merely wandering by can tell whether or not people are on the phone or just speaking to the top tenor in the choir invisible. Perhaps if people on the phone could hold up a sign and let the rest of us know one way or the other, this would be a nice gesture, I think. Life is hard enough here on the ground as it is, what with crazies raining down on us all the time these days.

BIRTHDAY: So everyone here and there is reminding me that it's my birthday and saying congratulations and the rest of it, and there's even some that are telling me that your fifties are probably the best time of your life: you're not a kid anymore and when you have something to say people just assume that you have the life experience to back up what you're saying. So I know that turning fifty shouldn't bother me; it just does, though. Being fifty is like being on the top of a steep hill in a gold 1958 Cadillac convertible: you see the great view, you can see where you've been and where you're going, you can feel the wind in your hair (or what's left of it), you can feel sunshine warm upon your face. The trouble here is that the Cadillac is starting to inch down from the top of the hill, slowly picking up speed as it goes, and on this particular 1958 model Cadillac, there's no seatbelts and the brakes are shot. Somehow or other, this does not bode well for the future.

NEW EXCUSES: No, I don't really have any excuses for the hiatus here. I could say that it's because of the weather or because of writer's block or because of the upcoming birthday, but it's not: I'm just being lazy. Sorry about that. I will try to get something new up here in a couple of days; I have something about half-written, but finishing the thing depends on a bunch of things, not least of which is me getting off my lazy ass and actually finishing it.

FINE DINING: We live today in an age of ever-increasing market specialization, with niche markets pullulating like so many phony tax shelters on a millionaire’s quarterly return (not to get off the subject here, but can anyone tell me why Bill Gates, a man with a personal income larger than the gross national product of any seven Third World countries you could name off the top of your head, a man who makes more in the time it takes for him to go to the bathroom than I will make in my entire life, needs $600 from the United States government in order to stimulate the economy?). Where once consumers had to take what goods and services corporate America offered them or do without, in today’s Internet driven market more and more customers can indulge whatever taste or interest they may have, content in the knowledge that someone somewhere will have what they want to buy, no matter how strange that purchase may seem. Nowhere is that more true than in the market for sex toys, and if you are interested in this sort of thing then you should stop reading right now, because this is the last mention of sex toys in this particular bit of business.

No, I am speaking today of the publishing industry, where the smaller, boutique publishers, the specialist presses that may only handle a few books every year, are challenging the industry’s giants for a share of the market. One need only go into bookstores and public libraries from one end of this our Great Republic to another to see the effect of these digital age Gutenbergs. Shelves strain today under the weight of new books, an odd phenomenon, given that vast numbers of the citizenry are now too illiterate to understand the pictures, much less the words, in what the trade nowadays refers to as graphic novels, which in another time and place were simply known as comic books. Cookbooks abound today as never before, with books on French and Italian cuisine growing more and more narrow in their focus. Where once Julia Child could produce a cookbook that contained all anyone would ever care to know about French cooking, today’s culinary scribes feel a constant pressure to come up with something new, something more cutting edge, something no one else has, the demand driving them to concentrate on smaller and smaller areas, to the more regional and village cuisines, going deeper and deeper into the countryside for their subject matter, until these harmless drudges of New Grub Street are describing in exquisite detail for the gastronomically deprived wretches of the New World just how the coq au vin of Madame Defarge differs in style, taste, and texture from the coq au vin of Madame Dubois, the grouchy old bat who lives two doors down from Madame Defarge in a Alpes de Haute-Provence village so remote the villagers spend a fair amount of time wondering what numeral the current Louis is up to. The discerning critic will note, however, even after a cursory examination of newly published cookbooks, that nowhere in this ever-expanding pile of culinary prose will he or she find a cookbook describing the best way to prepare and serve a missionary for the socially conscious savage who wants to impress their family and friends.

This dearth of cannibal cookbooks seems a more than a little ethnocentric to me, if not culturally arrogant to an extreme degree, privileging Western gastronomic concepts over those of other cultures. How else will the environmentally concerned cannibal learn that Roman Catholic missionaries should be thoroughly washed and dried before eaten, as they may contain artificial preservatives known to cause cancer in laboratory rats? Or that the intelligent host should never serve Methodists, Episcopalians, or Mormons as the antipasto, reserving these denominations for the main course? Most up to date cannibals already know better than to consume Presbyterians or Dutch Reformed missionaries raw, as Calvin’s doctrine of predestination tends to give the flesh a slightly bitter aftertaste that the cook can remove by first marinating the missionary in beer (Heineken works the best; Bud Lite the worst—even the most ignorant and benighted of savages know enough to regard the vast majority of American beers as little more than slightly insipid imitations of the real thing) for several hours before cooking, but where is the anthrophagous Jacques Pepin who will tell today’s hip, with it upwardly mobile fine young cannibal that they can whip Pentecostals, Fundamentalists, and Southern Baptists into a fine frothy lemon meringue just by mentioning how much most cannibals support sex education in the schools? Alas, here is a niche market if ever there was one and apparently one that no publisher in the Western world wants to touch with a six foot Pole (Come on, admit it, you didn’t think I had the guts to use any pun that awful, did you?)

All is not lost, though. Self-publishing has been around for a long while; Proust self-published the first volume of A la recherché du temps perdu, for example, and Whitman brought out the first edition of Leaves of Grass himself; but over time many people, perhaps influenced by the publishing industry itself, which stood to gain financially by such an attitude, came to look down on the practice, calling those publishers that still did it the vanity presses. This, today, is an antiquated attitude; modern digital self-publishing has made the process much more available for the common person who may not have access to the centers of bookmaking power in New York, Boston, or Churchill Downs. Today’s publishing software makes it possible for any budding Rachael Ray to tell the struggling young working mother the best way to juggle the often conflicting demands of demands of work, family, and how to get and prepare the best cut of Congregationalist they can afford quickly and easily. And it will not be long before she does, I think. The possibilities created in our digital age are endless and endlessly fascinating. Bon appetit, everybody!