I've been working from home, trying to get a little business venture off the ground while doing some freelancing.  And the thing that's very important about working from home, as anyone who works from home can tell you, is that you've got to get out of the house periodically.

The weather's been cooperating, that's for sure.  The last couple of days have been fairytale perfect.  I mean, this is what the weather's like in paradise: seventy-five and sunny.  In fact, while the rest of the nation's been getting it wild, fires and floods and hurricanes—Ol' Humberto decided to go on ahead and mess with Texas, didn't he?—we've had it pretty mild. 

I date the great weather back to June when that gay marriage vote was defeated here in Massachusetts.  I think God might be one of those "career bachelors" people used to whisper about, after all.

Anyway, I frittered and wasted and whiled away the morning (I've decided to have weekly, not daily benchmarks for my work-from-home projects), but finally had to tear myself away from my laptop, and get out of the house.

I took my book du jour, Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, and walked down Elm Street to see what was shaking in Davis Square.

And shaking is the operative word here.  The square is positively quivering in anticipation of at least two new restaurants (one with a patio) and a new state-of-the-art health club going in.  But it's been quivering for a while now.  It might actually be DTs.

I decided to have a coffee—I'm drinking many more of them since I started working from home in earnest and Star Market started giving LaVazza away.  It's probably not a good thing, as I'm very sensitive to any little change in my delicate chemical equilibrium.  I get pretty twacked on caffeine.  It ain't pretty.  I have to be careful.

I went to Starbucks, got my fix, found a table outside in the sun, and opened my book.  I had been curious what it was about the book that had drawn the Coen Bros. to make a movie of it.  I knew it had to have some serious black humor in it.

I saw humor in parts of The Road, too, though, where my friend J., who had lent it to me, could not find a scrap. But that's likely because the subject matter was so heavy, you wouldn't expect it, and sometimes people only see what they expect to see if they're not looking too hard. 

I remember once, when I was a freshman in college, a group of us was playing a game out on the veranda of the main building in the quad. Doug Eck would call out some word, and whomever’s turn it was had to mime it. "Pathos" was one—and I remember Doug saying the way they were acting it out it looked more like "bathos" to him, and everyone laughed, even though none of us knew what it meant. I laughed, too, but I didn’t know the difference. (You can probably see I still don’t.)

Miming was not really my thing, but Doug liked this kind of game. And I liked Doug. It wasn’t a major crush, but he was big, kind of clumsy, with thick, very curly hair and very, very blue eyes, and he was very, very, very clever.

Anyway, he had to mime, like, something to do with having gone a week in the desert, and what it would be like coming upon a glass of water. Whatever the word for that would be.

He mimed first seeing the glass, with a look of wonder, as if he had been wishing and praying and here was the answer, and then he set about caressing the thing, touching it to his face, licking the beads of condensation off the outside, and then lustily drinking it down, the whole glass in one gulp.

I didn’t mind the last bit, but all the foreplay leading up to it I didn’t think was right. Someone really dying for a glass of water wouldn’t bother with all that.

My point is, we have some received notions about things like what it would be like to survive in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. But what's so special about a novelist like McCarthy is that his examination of that scenario is so truly, humanly rendered, that he exposes the rift between those cartoon notions and the likelier truth of the persistence of human emotion.

Anyway, what  humor there was in The Road was in its humanity. The old man they encounter on the road, and his take on life, which didn't seem to have changed much from pre- to post-apocalypse. That scene, the seeming unlikeliness of the utter likelihood of such a character, and his being rendered so simply and truly, is what sets McCarthy apart, and that's why The Road is literature.

The brand of humor is the same in No Country For Old Men.  It's never labored.  It grows naturally from McCarthy's keen eye for the way people are.  That people don't know, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that that's the way people are is why we have writers like McCarthy to remind us. 

Existence doesn't cease being absurd in times of extreme adversity.  There are limits, of course.  When people are utterly stripped of hope and humanity, it's not possible to find humor, and those who can are either psychologically or spiritually sick.

Where there is hope, there you will find humanity, and what makes McCarthy's oeuvre compelling is his ability to trip right along the border between the faintest flicker of hope and the abyss. 

But there is real and relevant evil in McCarthy's world, too.  And this strikes me as true, as well.  There's a scene early on in No Country For Old Men that sums up McCarthy's worldview pretty handily...

The character who will serve as the embodiment of evil (or soullessness, as one of McCarthy's narrators puts it) has stopped into a desert Mom-n-Pop, and is tormenting the old man behind the counter.  Finally, he tells him he's going to flip a coin and he wants the old man to call it.

For what?

Just Call it.

Well I need to know what it is we're calling here.

How would that change anything?... You need to call it.  I can't call it for you.  It wouldn't be fair.  it wouldnt even be right.  Just call it.

I didnt put nothin up.

Yes you did.  You've been putting it up your whole life.  You just didn't know it.  You know what the date is on this coin?

No.

Nineteen fifty-five.  It's been traveling twenty-two years to get here.  And now it's here.  And I'm here.  And I've got my hand over it.  And it's either heads or tails.  And you have to say.  Call it.

After some persuasion, the old man finally obeys.

Heads then.

Chigurh uncovered the coin.  He turned his arm slightly for the man to see.  Well done, he said.

He picked the coin from his wrist and handed it across.

What do I want with that?

Take it.  It's your lucky coin.

I dont need it.

Yes you do.  Take it.

The man took the coin.  I got to close now, he said.

Dont put it in your pocket.

Sir?

Dont put it in your pocket.

Where do you want me to put it?

Dont put it in your pocket.  You wont know which one it is.

All right.

Anything can be an instrument, Chigurh said.  Small things.  Things you wouldnt even notice.  They pass from hand to hand.  People dont pay attention.  And then one day there's an accounting.  And after that nothing is the same.  Well, you say.  It's just a coin.  For instance.  Nothing special there.  What could that be an instrument of?  You see the problem.  To separate the act from the thing.  As if the parts of some moment in history might be interchangeable with the parts of some other moment.  How could that be?  Well, it's just a coin.  Yes.  That's true.  Is it?

That scene, I think the Coen Bros are about the only ones who could render it truly.

I was talking to a friend of mine, B., at dinner the other night. He had asked me about my dad. And I'd told him about the last days, when he was seeing things and talking stuff and nonsense. I'd wheeled him out to the breakfast nook with the big bay window overlooking our secret garden. And he started describing what he saw out there, and I couldn't see any of what he was seeing. Then he said, and I will never forget it, because he wasn't prone to saying things like it:

"The midget is with the entourage."

I was like, yeah?

And he was like, "yeah."

OK, I said.  If you say so.

"I say so."

OK.

So I was telling B.: someday, I'll understand that. I'll be sitting in a casino in Vegas playing blackjack with a midget, hiding out from some Mafia kingpin, and pop's voice'll come into my head: "the midget is with the entourage."

And I'll be like, um, can you excuse me a moment—I have to use the little boy's room. And I'll make my escape.

It may not go down exactly like that, but I have this feeling it'll come in handy.

He didn't leave me anything else in his will, so I'm hoping.

So, this afternoon I was reading that passage in No Country For Old Men when an old man—or late middle age, let's say—parked his bike and went into Starbucks.  He was one of these sixty years young types, very bubbly and vivacious.  And he comes out onto the walk, takes a seat and starts yakking on his cell phone.

I tried not to listen to what he was saying, but you know how loud people talk into the cell phones.  And when he said, "and what about the stench?" I had to just put my book down and give him my full attention.

Apparently the person on the other side didn't know what a stench was.

"The smell!  The stink!  The foul odor!  The bouquet of urine, fecal matter, decaying animal carcasses and... oh, it's gone?  Great!"

From there it became apparent that he was in some sort of social work, because he set about discussing a client, whose first name is Kyle (I know his caseworker's first and last name and where he works as well). 

Kyle's not taking his meds.

If you are reading this, Kyle:  TAKE YOUR MEDS!

And that reminds me, it's time for me to take mine—I mean, of course, to swallow the bitter pill of getting back to work so that I can meet my weekly benchmark by midnight Sunday.

(But seriously, Kyle.  Take your meds.  Because I don't want to hear you've had another episode on my next trip to Starbucks.)