Hallo, Freunde!
The Carnegie Hall pre-sale for my November 4th show went amazingly well. Glad you got your tickets if you did. They are on sale to the general public now and there are tickets available but I would get them now if you want to come.
I’m reading what I think is an important book about America that you all should know about if you don’t. It's rare that I get so worked up about a book is so compelling and written in such a way that I can't put it down or shut up about it. I was like that about ‘Fast Food Nation.’ That book blew my mind on a lot of levels and impacted the way I saw the world. It was good journalism.
The book I am reading now is ‘Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic.’ It’s written by Sam Quinones who is a journalistic storyteller of the highest degree. It basically does what ‘Fast Good Nation’ did for fast food to Black Tar Heroin and oxycodone. Black Tar was, oddly, a franchise business model as were the ‘Pill Mill’ Pain Management clinics. It is a stunning journalistic journey that follows the history and narrative trajectories that lead to this entirely new style of cultivating drug addiction and the business around it and how it happened. I just love this book. I don’t want it to end. I mean, I want the problem to end, but the book is so engaging. I’ll try to reach out to Sam and see if I can talk to him for a bit.
I was called upon to engage my manhood in a way that isn’t really used that often but it went well. My girlfriend was having some neighbor issues. They’d been going on a while. I had been hearing about them for months. The couple next door wasn’t cleaning up after their dogs and the smell of shit was wafting into my girlfriend’s house and the dude was being belligerent about cleaning it up, for months. There was also a parking issue. The guy decided that the public street in front of his house was his property and if he couldn’t park there he would just park in front of my girlfriends driveway occasionally. Again, he was belligerent about it and a bit of a dick to her. I told her I would talk to him. I saw that as just a man-to-man talk about growing the fuck up and being a responsible adult dog owner and accepting that sometimes it’s hard to find a parking spot where you want. Simple stuff. She didn’t want me to make a scene.
So, the other day she calls me in the middle of a squabble with the guy who was half-parked in her driveway and being belligerent about it. I’m not a fighter. I don’t hit people. I have a certain amount of bluster and bravado and cocky swagger but I’m not about kicking people’s asses. I jumped in my car and went over there having never seen this dude before. I saw them in front of Sarah’s house. I stopped my car in the middle of the street, jumped out, slammed the door and stepped to both of them and said, ‘What’s the problem? Do we need to call the cops to work this shit out?’
The dude, who had shorts and no shirt on and a little hipstery side part to his hair and an incomplete beard just started stammering and apologizing like I was holding a bat. It was a little pathetic but I let him. He told Sarah and me he was doing everything he was supposed to yada yada and I actually thought he was going to start crying. I told him things were cool and found him a parking spot up the street. Apparently he was yelling about us after the ‘altercation’ that we were ‘unenlightened’ people who resolve problems by ‘fighting’ and we were ‘animals.’ Wow, I guess me pulling up in my Hybrid Camry with my Stooges T-shirt on really threw the guy. I mean, I am a real Neanderthal dummy. How could I be mistaken for anything else?
I am excited to say the force of nature that is Werner Herzog is on my show today. Astounding man, great talk. I also talk to Godfrey for a bit about his new Showtime special ‘Regular Black.’ On Thursday the hilarious Kristen Wiig will hang out with me in the garage. She is one of the funniest.
Enjoy!
Boomer lives!
Love,
Maron