Night of the Druids

John Kerry walked into a bar.

"Why the long face?" asked the bartender.

You may think this one of the oddest pumpkins you've ever seen displayed on Halloween. I like him. I voted for him. His nick is johnkerry san, which is pronounced "John Kaylie San." He once was almost the President of the U.S.



This morning, with lights low (thus the fuzzy image), my newly minted 9-year-old waved to me from her place in the Halloween Band.

Children told jokes, like this one:

Q: "What does a skeleton say when he's about to start eating a meal?"

A: "Bon appetit!"

***

There was a request for jokes from adults, as long as they were not R-rated, and damn it to hell if I couldn't think of single fucking one. Here's the one that popped into my mind (courtesy of Garrison Keillor.)

The chicken and the egg were lying back on the bed, spent, smoking cigarettes.

The egg said, "Well, I guess that answers that question!"

Keillor was a columnist for us at Salon.com. For some reason, he insisted that we all call him "Mister Blue," which was his pseudonym. My buddy David Talbot's genius included getting people like Mister Blue onto our site. Every time I visit a bookstore, I see another Salonista in print.

Recently, I ran into the brilliant Gary Kamiya, who has one of the most startlingly original writing voices I have ever encountered in real life, walking with his lovely wife, Kate Moses, whom I first met at California magazine ~17 years ago, and their daughter, Celeste. Kate was (and is) an extremely serious student of literature, and several years ago, she published an excellent book about Sylvia Plath, which you can eaasily locate by searching Google or Amazon.

I first met David Talbot's lovely wife, Camille Peri, a very long time ago indeed. My memory grows hazy but I am guessing some 26 years ago when I was teaching a writing course for U-C, extension. There were two true writers in that class of 30 or so adults, and Camille was one of them.

She and David got married not long before Connie and I got married. I don't think I'm talking out of school by saying the minister who married them counseled them before hand that their marriage stood only a low chance of surviving.

Happily, he was wrong.

The minister that married Connie and me expressed concern that I already had three children from my first marriage, and that matters were not well enough resolved for them to attend our wedding. In retrospect, that minister (a woman) was right. Our marriage was doomed from the start, though neither of us realized it then.

Such is life. Tragedies abound. Love is a difficult situation in which to find yourself. Someone is almost guaranteed to get hurt. Don't read me wrong. I am a big fan of love, despite my history of relationships that ultimately failed.

As much as I hate cliches, there's one I can support:

"Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all."