I would like to say, in the nicest and humblest terms possible, that I am probably the best thing that’s ever happened to you.

I’m sorry, let me clarify: I’m not “probably” the best thing that’s ever happened to you. I am the best thing. And I say that with compleat and utter hummility. With no spelling errers.

Think about it. Who’s been better to you than me? Your wife? To hell with her! And to hell with your kids. You should swap them for Greenland! They are a compleat joque. Their not even in skool. And they where masks, which is unnecessarry.  

I want to be clear that I say all of this in the nicest and most respectful way possible because, let's face it, I'm incredibly humble.

Young people are always asking me if I ever saw the Beatles, or the Doors, or the Glenn Miller orchestra. And whether calculators had been invented by the time I was in grade school. What about toilet paper?

Soon I’m rubbing my temples, irritated as hell. I inform them that I was born in “the sixties,” which means Glenn Miller had been dead some 20 years and Jim Morrison was already three-quarters of the way through his short life, which would be over before I was 8. Not to mention that toilet paper had been clogging up toilets for centuries prior to that.

And believe me, no one saw The Beatles.

A more apt question is “Did you ever see Rush?” In fact, I didn’t. And no, I don’t have a good excuse. Among my earliest LP record purchases, probably via the ubiquitously advertised “Columbia House 11 LPs for a Penny” deal, was the Rush album 2112, which I quickly wore out, playing songs from it like Passage to Bangkok over and over while I pretended to keep up with the drumming of Neal Peart.

Suddenly it was 2020 and Neal Peart was no longer with us, as they say, and my chance to see these rockers and all their odd Canadianisms had vanished like moose into the woods of Ontario.

So heap your derision on me, for this was indeed among the great failures of my rock life.

I don’t lie very often, but I’m thinking I should start. Lying is getting to be a more and more accepted communication device, and I feel like I’m missing out on the enjoyment of it all.

I’m not saying I’ve never lied. As a bona-fide Catholic boy I went to confession as required, and I always confessed that I lied, so I must have. On the other hand, that was an easy way to get in and out of the confessional box in short order. And what else was I going to say? “Bless me father, for I have sinned. And I coveted my neighbor’s wife”? I didn’t covet any of my neighbors’ wives, and had I said that it would have been a bald-faced lie, requiring yet another confession.  

However, I did tell little white lies here and there, like the time my Dad asked me if I had brushed my teeth before going to bed, and I said “yes,” at which point he pulled out my toothbrush from his luggage, where it had been since we left that morning from our beach vacation.

Kids in grade school told much bigger lies than anything I could muster, and I wonder if they are now succeeding in life better than I am, thanks to lying. One classmate claimed that he looked in the mirror in the boy’s room and his face was covered in scars and huge stitches, the result of some tricks played by Satan (or else he had recently seen Poltergeist). Another time this same boy claimed that he’d ingested mercury. How we young kids came into possession of a bottle of this liquid lead (did someone bring it in? Was it the school’s supply?) is unclear, but I remember its unbelievable heft compared to a similar volume of water. We spilled it onto the floor and watched it bead up, and someone told the nuns that a boy had licked the mercury. Our mothers were constantly warning us against licking mercury (“You’ll lose your penis if you lick mercury!”).

OK, that was a lie. My parents never told me I’d lose my penis.  

Anyway, the nuns were ready to haul his lying ass off to the hospital so he could have the mercury eliminated, so he suddenly had to shift gears and admit to his unlikely yarn.

Nevertheless, lying to my fans and supporters is always an option.

I don’t tweet very often, but that’s going to change. Soon I’m going to tweet the bejesus out of you and everyone else, and when I do it’s going to be tremendously interesting and also good for America. My friends are going to love it, even as I humiliate them. I’ve already got a few tweets cued up.

• Hilarious that “Scrambly” Bob is keeps tweeting out the false claim that I like scrambled eggs. I’m not the scrambled one, he is! Do you see the way his handlers refuse to allow him to talk about scrambled eggs? Probably afraid that he’s going to scramble his way through the conversation. Really sick.
• I mention that I’m golfing and now old More Salt Than Pepper Steve starts blabbing about his golf game. “Shot an 82.” What, nine holes on a par 3 course? Play one of my courses and see if you can break 100, Old Salty. (And then have a meal at one of my fine restaurants.)
• “Veggie” Tim goes on the record as saying that I eat too much meat. Even though my meat eating is partially fueling the cattle industry’s economic recovery. IT’S BEEFY ECONOMIC PATRIOTISM TIM! Meanwhile Tim doesn’t eat his allotted portion of meat, causing a drop in demand and a drop in prices. And there are stories out there – some good people claim they have first-hand knowledge – that he’s hunting exotic animals with a chef hiding in the shadows to butcher and serve the delicacies he shoots up. Vile!
• Dirty Howard’s going nuts! He calls me dirty because I dig holes in my yard, while he spends his days up at the cabins riding jet skis, and by night he sits in the shadows and stares into the fire. Like baiting hooks with LEECHES and hauling in crappies is “clean”! Get a life, you dirty loser!
• Failures like Mark keep promoting TOTAL HOAX BS STORIES claiming that I disparage military veterans. We all know that he’s disgruntled because he wanted a job and I wouldn’t endorse him. TOTAL SUCKER!

I think this will be really good for our relationship.