stupid human tricks

It’s Sunday evening and on the third day after David Letterman announced to his audience that he’d had affairs with women on his staff, not one of my Facebook-using friends has mentioned the would-be scandal. And I say “would-be” because unlike the people he has included in his jokes and monologues over the years, he approached the revelation differently. He admitted he’d had sex.

And that is where the departure began in his approach to what sounds like a stress-filled month where the former boyfriend of one of the staffers with whom he’d had an affair tried to blackmail him for (cue Dr. Evil) two million dollars in exchange for the man not writing a book or movie about the liaisons.

Letterman, on Thursday night’s show, took matters into his own hands before the rest of the media and critics could even begin speculating. He avoided the awkward wife-by-his-side denials that have plagued politicians over the last several years.

He did not claim that he did not have sex with that woman. He didn’t proclaim to have a wide stance or a sudden urge to hike the Appalachian Trail. He did not run away to sex-addiction therapy. He didn’t deny and then admit. He self-effacingly told the audience that, difficult as it was to believe, he’d had sex and that when the truth came out it would be embarrassing for the women. I bet.

I’ll admit, in the late night television battles (from which I weaned myself when the digital revolution happened this summer) I was always a Letterman person. Yes, he can be annoying. But his Midwestern style of delivery won me over. I’m even old enough to remember when he had a daytime show. So I'm speaking here as someone who kind of likes the guy as a TV personality. Still.

Cheating on a partner when you’re in a committed relationship, whether married or not, is detestable. (I know, some people have open relationships & that’s another story.) Lying about it when questioned directly takes it to a level where I lose much of my remaining respect for a person. Their road to redemption in my eyes will be mighty long. But this guy did something detestable, then he told the truth about it. My brain doesn’t quite know where to file this. But that doesn’t really matter.

What matters is what his wife thinks, what his bosses think and what the women involved think. As for me, now that the Ken Burns National Parks documentary is over, I’m going to unhook the digital converter box and go back to watching You Tube.

it goes away... or, what's it worth to you?

I was trying to figure out what facebook is for besides killing time while I put off writing or some household chore. Then last Monday I saw lots of activity and unexplained comments made to my friend Nancy, with whom I recently reconnected. We attended college together at UW-Milwaukee. In the early 1990s I worked for Harry W Schwartz Bookshops in Milwaukee. Nancy still works there.

But on Monday the employees learned that after 82 years, at the end of March the independent, family-run shop will close. Though it's been years since I worked there, I still feel a fondness for the shop and an appreciation for what it represents in the community of readers and writers. A gathering place with author events hosted by people who love books. Great books.

Just a week before when I was adding a bookshelf to this site, I noticed that it offered a link for people to buy the book from an online bookstore. That's when I posted the note telling you about my favorite local bookstore here in Anchorage. (That would be Title Wave.) Little did I know that my friend's employer was about to close its doors, partly because of the competition from online sales; partly from the current financial problems that face so many Americans.

I know it's easy to shop online and that's why so many people do it. Besides, there are some things that just can't be purchased in Anchorage (like my favorite granola). But if you can get something locally, even if it's to have something ordered by a local shop, it supports local jobs. And those people are our neighbors and their friends and family. And if too many people stop buying locally, shops like the best book store in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, go away. And I wonder if that can happen here to my favorite bookstore or to the bike shop where I work.

After all, these are more than just places where people buy things. They are shops where people meet to talk about the things they have in common, to share their passion, whether it is for words or bicycles... or both. These are the places that feed our desires to interact, to be validated, to have contact with like-minded people. These are the places many of us go to experience community.