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Speaker 1: Most aphorisms are self evident, such as a bird in

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the hand is worth two in the bush, and the

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one about glasshouses and throwing stones and the mice playing

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when the cat is away, and as you sow, so

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shall you harvest, And as I get older, the ones

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about living in the moment and seizing the day and

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not crying over spilt milk feel very profound. I remember

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a day fifty years ago when I had lunch with

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my hero es j Proman in Minneapolis, when he was

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to give a reading and I was to enter him.

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I was stunned by admiration for Esche Peerlman's writing, such

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as the paragraph I guess I'm just an old mad

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scientist at bottom, give me an underground laboratory, half a

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dozen atom smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous

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veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, And I

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care not who writes the nation's laws. I admired elegant

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wackiness like that, Having grown up among devout Christians, who,

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even in dinner table conversation, tried to sound elect the

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King James translation, they wouldn't have written a paragraph like

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his about the mad scientist, if you'd gotten them drunk,

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set them on a bundle of dynamite, and set the

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timer to ten minutes. I knew Pearlman's work from the

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New Yorker magazine and also from the Marx Brothers movies,

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great lines like don't wake him up, he's got insomnia,

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He's trying to sleep it off. Perlman didn't know me

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from Adam or an Adam smasher. I looked at him,

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and I tried to compose a great compliment, but nothing

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was good enough. And then a man told Perlman that

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I had been published in the New Yorker, and Perlman

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leaned across the table and he started complaining about the

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magazine and its miserly payments, its confounded editing, its clueless

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fact checkers who ripped into comic fiction as if it

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were a doctoral thesis. And it was the ultimate honor

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to be treated as a fellow working writer by the

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great es Jay Prowman. I had been prepared to kiss

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his ring, and he talked to me as a colleague

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in his line of work, the honor of equality. His

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illustrious past did not matter. The future was unknown. But

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there we were two writers having a cob salad and

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a chicken sandwich about to go meet an audience. Living

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in the present, I guess I'm just an old humorist

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at heart. Give me a wedding chapel, A groom who

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forgot his suspenders and is trying to hold his pants up.

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A beautiful girl with last minute trepidations. The man puts

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the ring on her finger as his pants drop. There

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is an expel ulsham of gas, and I care not

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who wins the National Book Award. I live in the present.

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If I were to think about the future, I'd be

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alarmed about the demise of journalism and the self degradation

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that many U S editors are eager to accept, and

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the use of cryptocurrency to enrich the chief executive by

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tech tycoons kicking back twenty percent of their federal contracts.

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But instead, I spend the day in my laboratory experimenting

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to design artificial intelligence software to let me chat with

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long deceased relatives, such as my great great grandfather William

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Evans Keeler, who says, I don't know if this is heaven,

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it looks like Nebraska, and immortality is not my cup

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of tea, but I'm getting used to him. No calendars,

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no clocks. The good news is that death dissolves your marriage.

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So I'm free of Sarah at last, and I've taken

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up with an angelic slip of a girl named Celeste

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who flutters about in water wings and silkndies. And instead

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of beans and bacon, we have rigatoni with zucchini, connollini, solami, bolognesi, prosciutto, radichio, parmegiano, pepperoni,

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prima vera, chorico, prestado, guacamole, guancia, le calabresi, pistachio, pesto,

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and san giaves. Never had Italian food in Minnesota back

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in eighteen eighty. He's quite the guy, opinionated but very witty.

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I told him to look up Pearlman, and now the

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two of them play commassed together. I'm living in the present, which,

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thanks to artificial intelligence, includes the past. I guess I'm

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just elon Musk at heart. Give me an office in

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the White House. Let the old guy revise the Constitution

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with the wave of sharpie. All he likes. I will

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give the Nazi salute when and where I please, and

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when the earth burns up. I'll be sitting on Mars

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eating a milky way, and I care not that I'm

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the only human being in the universe.