Today’s Goodbye moment: went to the Collaborative, the airport-lounge for building tenants.

I will be exiled from here a week from Friday, and I don’t care. The whole “having a second home in a proud downtown tower” emotion has evaporated. I went downtown to pay a last visit to Lobby Pizza (not the name, it’s this place) and say farewell to the owner if he’s around. He wasn’t. We go back a ways. I'll always be grateful that he never closed during COVID - in fact, it was the sight of someone walking out of the building in March 2020 with the familiar white to-go pizza sleeve that I realized there was still life downtown, however diminished.It was like being the last man on earth and coming across a smouldering cigarette butt. All the chairs were up, because you couldn't sit and eat a piece of pizza without spreading the fatal plague, and they'd let everyone go but two guys, and only made six pizzas for lunch, but it was something.

Went up to the office to get my gym bag. Was quick. Didn't want to engage. Went through the kitchen, and everyone was a 20-something talking about web stuff and I don't know any of them.

At the gym one of my co-workers - good guy, Fargo stock - said he'd heard I took the buyout, and wondered why. I said I didn't like what I was doing and I didn't like the place anymore and I didn't forgive them for what they did. He nodded: well, yes, that about covers it.

After the gym I ran into Leslie, the charwoman, and she said "you going to the gym to work off that pizza lunch, huh," because apparently she'd seen me eat. I told her I was leaving soon, and she had maybe three more opportunities to make fun of my walking speed or say she liked my shirt. She also does our office, and let me tell you something: all the staff at the gym shoots the breeze with her. I've never seen anyone at the office give her a syllable.

Then I went home and did some audio work for Astrid's upcoming podcast, and took an early nap. Dreamed a series of events so transparently related to my current situation I'm surprised no one in the dream said "that's a metaphor, you know" when they took my shopping cart away.

Yesterday in the Clippings section I mentioned a humorist of the day who hadn't made the shelf. It reminded me of the comments of Bleatnik Buzzy Krumhunger. I am grateful for the kind words:

Humour columnists are hit or miss. OGH is like the comfortable pair of slippers, possibly because of the Bleat and definitely due to his easygoing voice via This…The Ricochet Podcast and The Diner. Dave Barry I can only tolerate when he rolls out the Year In Review bits.. . . not everyone loved PJ but I have all his books and still find it amusing that my parents watched him on 60 Minutes doing the Point/Counter Point thing. If they only knew the horrific stuff he wrote for Lampoon…

I loved PJ. It was one of my highlights to make his aquaintance when we did some panels, and when he came to Minneapolis and did a speech, and I went over to see him he was the very picture of courtly conviviality and bonhomie. He found me later at the event and said let's go smoke cigars and we rode down the elevator with a former Minnesota Senator about whom I'd written a piece in the 80s, repurposing his plywood commercial tagline for thermonuclear war (don't ask) and he'd written me a nice letter back, and this was thrilling for a young fellow starting out in the trade. Then PJ and I sat outside the Hilton hotel on a summer night and talked and laughed. Capital fellow. Dead. Still funny. On the shelf.

Buzzy also said mentioned . . .

Benchley, Perelman, Baker and Thurber?

Which is interesting because I wrote something last week for this week that mentions all those guys. We have the same idea of . . . the shelf.

When I decided to take the buyout I felt instantly liberated - not just from the surly bonds of the Current Situation at work, but from almost everything that had been tying me up and dragging me down. All of a sudden I felt a long-overdue realization that all the big work was done. I didn’t have to try anymore or do anymore or strive anymore. At this point I’m either on the shelf, or I’m not.

For that matter I’m not sure there’s a shelf at all.

Ok, explanation.

In my mind, my set of assumptions about American culture and literary history, there is a shelf of humorists. There’s a top tier of Immortals, who in some cases are there just because the previous generation put them there, because the previous generation had put them there. The Generally Assumed Names. In many cases they’re not read anymore, but they’re referenced. It works like this:

1. Everyone loves Benchley!

2. Your Dad remembers Benchley was a name he saw in the magazine or newspaper from time to time

3. A later cohort of people know that Benchley was popular and maybe paged through a collection they found in a used bookstore, looking for a funny line

4. “Benchley” is a name associated with New Yorker / Algonquin / Dorothy Parker, and that’s about it, and that’s about .03% of the population.

But he is on the shelf, next to Thurber. No one, however, reads Benchley anymore. Thurber is on the cusp of oblivion, because no one references his work or style, but you can still make some people nod if you drop his name. Is Russell Baker on the shelf? I remember when we all had to read him, and enjoyed his wry style - “wry,” in most instances, being a synonym for “never laugh-out-loud funny.”

I'd never do that in a million years. That's how he ended the column: quoting other people.

I fit in this schema somewhere. I don’t know the precise location. I’d say “well, that’s for history to judge,” but I don’t think history does much sorting anymore. Aside from a few fine contemporary practictioners, the category of “American short-form humorists” seems on the wane. No one wants to be S. J. Perelman when they grow up, like I did. They want to talk for 45 minutes on YouTube.

Perhaps that's where it ends up: thinking one is barely relevant in a field that’s barely relevant itself. And that’s fine. The work is out there in the archives, and as long as there’s a Library of Congress it will be slumbering in the dark waiting for someone to call up a page, and another, and another, and maybe not more than that because the style has dated and the concerns are passe.

Perhaps I should have come to all these conclusions last year when the paper, you know, killed my column. I had slight hopes of finding my way back; it happened before. But things are different. The medium is different, in the sense that it’s . . . como si dice, morto. At least the paper version. The online version of our paper has become utterly unappealing to me. (They have a new humorist, and you know she’s funny because her twitter handle says she is funny, one of those things that makes you cross your arms and say I’ll be the judge of that.)

Of course, I'm not stopping writing these little feuilletons. Monday and Friday. As long as some of you are paying me on the Substack, I'll continue to do it. When not enough are paying me I will take that hint, too.