This week people were talking about the “male loneliness epidemic” again. As far as I can see, this is because one of the sillier centrist pundits retweeted an honestly not-at-all mean Emily Witt article from months ago, accusing her of being cruel—there are honestly many writers who deserve that accusation more than Witt does—and then we were off to the races. It’s all rather silly. Nevertheless, it made me think about something really moving that happened to me a while ago.
During one of the pandemic summers—it must have been 2021—Ashley traveled a little more than usual, and I was a little sick at heart, and maybe in the head. I had developed this strange habit of asking myself And then? about everything. I would wake up and think Today I will write some, and then I’ll go to the gym, and then afterward I’ll tinker with my syllabus, and then I’ll read and watch a little TV. And then I would think: And then?
I needed variation in my routine, you say. Perhaps! But historically, I rather enjoy pointless repetition. I’m happiest when I can enjoy what I’m doing, and half-hypnotized by the consistency with which I do it. One of my happier recent summers was when I was finishing Midwest Futures and just wrote for longer and longer days, until the very last day, when I got going at eight, wrote till around 9:30pm, went running, and, on arriving home, having forgotten to eat all day, consumed an entire box of cereal. The one time I went to Europe (twenty-four years ago), I ended up going to Salisbury Cathedral, over and over again, on the days nothing was scheduled. I’d ask myself Why do you keep going to Salisbury Cathedral, you freak. You’re in England. Go be haunted in a landscape! See someone’s grave! Hook up with an authentic punk girl who’s from the actual punk region of Punk! Nope, just Salisbury Cathedral over and over again, with that medieval clock. I liked being there.
So, that summer of 2021, I tried to fix my And then? problem by varying my routine a bit. Today I’ll go to the record store, I’d say, and immediately, there it was: And then? The thought crouched at the end of every street. I need a hobby… So you’ll get a hobby. And then? I’ll try learning the piano again. Sure, OK. And then?
What was in that question, that it had so much power to torment me? I think my And then? had a certain amount of For what? mixed up with it. I had lost the ability to do things just to do them. I needed them all to add up to something, some larger and lasting project that would Matter. You can already see why that doesn’t work: Moth and rust and the like.
Along with whatever else I have going on, I like to have some bit of inconvenient and unpleasant do-gooding on my schedule. The unpleasantness and inconvenience reassure me that I am not giving in to moral sloth and complacency. This sounds a bit like works-righteousness, which Christian theology assures me is to be avoided. I know very well that I can’t work my way into heaven, though, and God loves me in spite of my neurosis, and if I wait to do anything good until I have completely purged myself of any tendency toward works-righteousness, I will never do anything at all. Checkmate, Calvinists.
Anyway, that summer, the inconvenient and unpleasant do-gooding that I was up to was text-banking various former Bernie voters (or people who had given up their contact information under that flag) and asking them to ask their senators to support the PRO Act. This was a legislative package that was supposed to improve the conditions under which labor organizers organize. It ultimately died, as everyone expected it to do, although I believe Biden and the Democrats passed some of its provisions through other means. Anyway, you can imagine what this was like. I was annoying strangers, which I don’t like to do, to rally support for a good legislative measure, which I didn’t expect would pass (since it was good), using a means that I actually would like to see prohibited by all sides (but till that day, we’ve gotta use whatever we can), with a mailing list created under a now-doomed hope named Bernie Sanders. I didn’t want to be doing it, and I didn’t seem to get too many positive results. The virtue content was off the friggin’ charts!!!
One day, a stranger responded to my lightly edited boilerplate text as follows:
I don’t know. Is Senator Ligma supporting it?
Now, I am a reasonably well-informed person, and I did not recognize the name of this putative senator—a name that doesn’t really have the mouth-feel of a human last name, anyway. (You can just imagine Nixon on the White House tapes saying something like “Ligma? Is that Slavic? Goddamn Slavs. I like ‘em. They’re a crooked people. You know where you stand.”) I also felt that the question was oddly specific. You can’t really imagine an American voter who knows the names of Senators but doesn’t already have a position on something like the PRO Act, such that they must wait to support it until Senator Ligma, that rock of the progressive cause, has come out in its favor.
So I googled “Ligma” and learned that, of course, it was a variation on the great American BOFA joke trope. Consider the following sort of exchange:
Person A: I wonder why my mom isn’t answering my texts.
Person B: She’s probably busy with BOFA.
Person A: What the hell is BOFA?
Person B [while gesturing appropriately]: BOFA DEEZ NUTS!!!
In the case of “ligma,” one varies the formula slightly, as who should say:
Person A: I’m so sorry to hear about your girlfriend.
Person B [anxiously]: Wait, what? What did you hear?
Person A: I thought you knew. I’m so sorry you had to find out this way.
Person B [panicking]: Please tell me what’s going on.
Person A: You really haven’t heard? She’s going to …. Ligma.
Person B: What the hell is Ligma?
Person A: LIGMA BALLS!!!
So, thinking myself very clever, I responded to my anonymous questioner as follows:
I’m not sure about Sen. Ligma, but Rep. BOFA is a cosponsor. (But seriously, the PRO Act could radically improve labor organizing in this country. You can read more at [link] and [link]. Thanks for the laugh and have a great night!)
This is as human as text-banking gets.
A day or two after this exchange, I went to my friend D’s house to have dinner. D is one of Ashley’s dearest pals and our families are close. We call her children our godchildren, though there is no such formal relationship—I don’t know whether they were christened Catholically, and if they were it was in another state, years before any of us met any of them. D was worried, with reason, that I would go nuts from spending so much time alone, in a world that had only partly opened back up from the pandemic, and so she told me I had to come over, and I had the sense to accept the invitation.
At dinner, D and the kids and her ex-husband M, who was there in his capacity as his children’s father and also my pal, and I got to talking about prank phone calls. D and M and I are all children of the 1980s, and we spoke familiarly of such classics as “Is your refrigerator running,” “Do you have Prince Albert in a can” (this one always confused me as my family never did eat a lot of fish), and the crude but effective “How big’s your dick” (to which the only possible response was “Come measure it yourself. Bring a yardstick”). D’s children did not grow up in a world where people answer their phone, and they found this all fascinating. They reacted to it as I, in my childhood, reacted to my father’s stories of listening to old-time adventure serials on the radio: just as I never thought “Well, now you can actually watch the Lone Ranger do stuff, if that’s your thing,” they never thought that the text-heavy smartphone world allows far greater opportunities for pranking than the world of landlines ever did. They just saw a lost thing and loved it because it was lost.
Inspired by this conversation, I went on to relate what I was already thinking of as “my Ligma story.” D and M were amused, but their younger daughter was transported. She had not yet heard the good news about either BOFA or Ligma, and she couldn’t believe something so wonderful existed. Immediately—as in, right there at the dinner table—she proceeded to call five of her best friends to ask them if they’d heard about BOFA. There still exists on my phone a video of the last of these calls, which proceeds as follows:
Godchild [in a whisper, to phone, which is on the table, ringing]: please answer. c’mon c’mon.
Godchild’s friend [sounding as though he just woke up]: H’lo?
Godchild [frantically composing self]: Hey, [friend’s name here], I have a question for you.
Godchild’s friend: Shoot.
Godchild [covering mouth]: Did you hear about BOFA?
Godchild’s friend: What?
Godchild [fanning self and looking at ceiling]: Did you hear about BOFA?
Friend: ... I’m not stupid.
[Everyone in the video breaks into hysterical laughter]
Godchild: Oh, please just say it! Please say it, [friend’s name here]!
Godchild’s friend [audibly sighing]: What’s BOFA.
Godchild: BOFA DEEZ NUTS!!!!
In the years since, my godchild has taken to calling or texting me at random intervals. Once, on picking up the phone, I was asked somewhat urgently whether I had ever heard of a writer, who I took to be Greek, whose name is perhaps spelled like “Iladis,” and whose name, I quickly learned, is pronounced “I LAY DEEZ NUTS ACROSS YO FACE.” My godchild’s work in this area often shows considerable effort and ingenuity, as in the following text exchange:
Godchild: Hi Phil! I was wondering what a Palindrome was?
Self: It’s a sentence or word that’s the same forward and back
Godchild: So like Hamood
Self: No, ‘hamood’ backward isn’t ‘hamood,’ it’s ‘doomah’
Godchild: DOOMAH NUTS FIT IN YO MOUTH
Godchild: Ha gotem
Self: Dammit
And thus I rediscovered the joy of doing things for their own sake. I taught a child how to BOFA the world, how to add to any social situation a secret door opening onto hilarity. This has been its own reward. Indeed, no activity has so enriched my life, has helped me to slow down and appreciate the wonder of things, except perhaps studying Sugondese.