Remember This Face

Sam Kinison's first appearance on Letterman was perhaps his best performance ever: a perfect balance of his patented "madman son-of-a-preacher prophet" in-your-face comedy and 80's LA rock'n'roll excess. Four minutes in, he's absolutely on fire. "Is this the man who was prophesized to come out of the sea and roll the cities?...ar...argh??!!! No." Unbelievable stuff.

His take on men pushing a stroller through the mall with the look of someone "who envies the dead" is less a put-down than a warning. Wasn't that what George Romero was getting at in "Dawn of the Dead"? What happened to Spicoli after the "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" slowed down?

I take the kid with me all the time to the mall. I go, I do my business and get out, usually after we've stopped for a tipple. A necessary evil. What I don't do is let domesticity define who I am or who I am not. If you want to fetishize your lawn because you think you owe it to the neighbors or you owe it to the American Dream or your father or whatever, well, you very well could end up envying the dead. Mindfulness is most potent close to the ground.