Last night I was at the Y, running on one of those treadmills with a TV attached to it, which isn't normally my thing but was the closest one on which I could get in an impulsive and fairly illogical seven-minute run before the Y closed and threw me out onto the street like so many indigent Village People. Even less my thing was the realization that by choosing a machine that uses the same principle as the rabbit at the greyhound track to spur couch potatoes to physical exertion, and by then changing the TV to the 60 Minutes profile of Bobby Jindal, it was as if I were unsuccessfully chasing the person on whom the GOP, so the captions told me, is pinning all its hopes and dreams. The alternative, that I was breathlessly pursuing Morley Safer, was not much better, although it is a little-known fact that one of his hobbies is painting depressing pictures of motel rooms, which I find to be endearing proof that Morley Safer, under his cheap sportcoat and soothing yet gravely voice, has the soul of an angsty college kid who feels he is misunderstood. Regardless, since it was the end of the hour, both of these objects in my not-very-good metaphor for unattainable desire were supplanted by an even weirder one: Andy Rooney.
Dear Andy: what sort of meta-risks would I run by offering an ironic commentary on you, O Most Ironic Commentator? What kind of hypocritical new heights would I scale by curmudgeonishly pointing out your foibles, O Most Curmudgeonly Foible Pointer-Outer? Could I ever come close to the acrobatic exasperation and surprising earnestness with which you recite your frustrations with this world in which we live in, hunched over your desk, your hands, powerless to tear down the insipid culture around you, deciding to instead remain clasped and your eyebrows continuing their march, like Sherman to the sea, south into your eyes--representing the only truly interesting development, week in and week out, of your otherwise unchanging act at the end of every show? And could I, in good conscience, mock the man who may not possess the cynical artistry of an H.L. Mencken but nonetheless has more intelligence and heart than your average "Hey you kids get off my lawn" misanthrope, combining the two somewhere in the middle to become the embodiment of what we may most accurately refer to as "a prickly pear"?
I can't. I was going to go for the cheap shot by explaining what it was like to read Andy's grousings in closed caption there on the treadmill rather than hear them delivered in his trademark deadpan, peppered with abrupt pauses to signal an end to the Quixotic attempt to understand aspects of our society that simply cannot be understood, and interspersed with footage and ambient noise to back up his point and, more importantly, to save us from the discomfort of a neverending shot of Andy, staring at us from behind his desk as if we've been called into the principal's office and our punishment is a rambling catalogue of everything that's wrong with kids like us. I was going to talk about how, even with my intermittent-at-best viewing of 60 Minutes in my wastrel young adulthood and, even then, seeing Andy Rooney tempered with the above embellishments, I had already noticed a marked decline in the quality, humor and even logic of his meditations from the levels he showed every Sunday night when I was growing up, and how this was finally confirmed by reading rather than hearing his words as they fled me at approximately 5.8 miles an hour.
Then I pulled up the text of his segment and everything I had thought as I was running last night was still there--but it mostly just made me feel sorry for Andy who, hilarious eyebrows-as-symbol-of-his-unchecked-grouchiness-about-everything notwithstanding, has the melancholy air of someone left behind by the Pied Piper of the Reagan years. However, if he ever decides to quit the world of disgruntled journalism, I think Andy could really have a future in poetry. So that's what I offer you instead. Enjoy!
When I write the name of a month in a script,
I'm always surprised
How some months are spelled. August is easy
But February is strange.
"Febuary" is spelled "FebRuary" and not "FebUary"
The way we all pronounce it.
II.
Today is March 1st, of course. Most of us
Like March but I think either May or June
Would win any vote we took to pick our
Favorite month.
January and February are
Too cold and
July and August are
Too hot.
Some people would probably pick September But I don't like endings
And I think of September as an ending.
III.
The thing you have to remember is,
Most people don't wear clothes
To keep warm.
For instance, "warm" is not the issue
When women get dressed.
I wear the same suit
All year long.
(This final one is not by Andy but by the lone commenter to his segment posted online. I didn't alter the capitalization):
Ode to 60 Minutes
the Bible I choose to live by
is 60 Minutes,
and 60 Minutes keeps me feeling
alive.
thank You
