This is a column about my children. It’s supposed to be funny, although I’m not making any guarantees. (I suppose I could offer to refund you your money if you don’t find it amusing; however, if you actually paid for this free copy of Flag Live, then I am sure that you are much too busy running the Treasury Department right now to worry about trifling little things like refunds.) Anyway, I feel that it is necessary make the nature of this column clear because it seems that–for many of you out there–I am not so much a humor columnist as an ombudsman.
This is apparent from the number of times that I have been approached recently by people telling me, “You know what your next column should be about? Gas prices.” Or the lack of movie theaters in town. Or the fact that the corner market no longer sells their favorite brand of cigarette. If the person making the suggestion seems even slightly sane, I’ll usually point out to them that high gas prices are neither funny, nor do they involve my children. (Unless, of course, they have some kind of an inside scoop on how my kids are involved in a super secret oil cartel involving President Bush, the Saudi royal family, and Legos. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out that my daughter, Clementine, is somehow involved in all that. Maybe it’s just a preteen thing, but lately she always looks like she’s up to something).
Of course, on the other hand, if they do not seem sane, I’ll just smile and say something like, “Sure, sure–thanks for the tip.” And then I’ll run.
Who knows–maybe it’s not so much that people see me as an ombudsman; maybe they just think that since I’m just sitting around typing all day anyway, I might as well do something useful, like bang out a letter to the editor for them–and sign my own name, of course. (They wouldn’t want to sign their own name–people would think they were nuts!).
I’ve often wondered whether other Flag Live columnists have this same problem: does Jim Hightower get people coming up to him on the street saying things like, “You know what your next column should be about? The fact that Kelly Poe Wilson’s son, Clyde, absolutely refuses to wear socks, even in the wintertime.”
Even if he doesn’t, I’ll bet he still gets plenty of other suggestions. As Balzac once said, “It is as easy to dream a book as it is hard to write one;” and the assumption that it is the idea (and not the actual hair-pulling, head-clutching, fingernail-scraping, physical process of writing) that is the hardest part of the writing process seems to be fairly universal amongst non-writers.
Even my own father recently suggested to me that we should “collaborate” on a screenplay (“I’ll provide the ideas; you just do the writing”), a suggestion remarkably similar to saying that we should “collaborate” on dinner: “I’ll pick the dish, and you cook it.”
Of course, some writers–such as Dave Barry–seem to make audience participation a regular staple of their columns. (“Let’s look in the old mail bag and see what people have sent us this week.”) Then again, it seems like most of the suggestions and tidbits that Dave Barry gets sent actually are funny, which certainly doesn’t hurt. Of course, maybe that’s just because he’s done a better job than me at demonstrating that his column is supposed to be funny. In fact, I’m pretty sure that he’s never received the response that I once got when I tried to explain to someone that I couldn’t write a column about their missing cat because, tragically, it just wasn’t very funny, and my column is supposed to be funny.
“Oh, is it?” they replied. “I hadn’t noticed.”