Current Events

Me, a One-Hit Wonder

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The photo above shows it, the moment in which my life did not change. I may desire the sensation of a life-altering fame, but I know that one semi-viral tweet only serves to remind one that that sensation has not yet been felt in this life. Is it possible to desire something that one has not experienced? Is “desire” the correct word here?

Anyway, a tweet of mine tossed off last night with insouciance of a man who knows nothing about insouciance was liked 750 times (so far) and re-tweeted more than 130 times, and viewed/read/chuckled at (I hope) more than 200,000 times in under twenty-four hours. This is worth a post here if only because my average Twitter engagement is usually 200,000 times smaller than that.

Some of you may be acquainted with the feeling. Some of you may have watched one of your tweets fly out of the nest and somehow attract attention from hundreds of thousands of other Twitter-nests. This is my first time. In thirteen years on Twitter, ten with the current account, this is the first hit tweet. And nothing has changed for me: I am as annoyed or not annoyed by the world and most of its denizens as if 200,000 pairs of Twitter-eyes had not alighted on my one-liner.
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Michael Lang and Small-Town Fame

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

So far in my employment history I have had four salaried jobs. Three were the best-paying ones, and at least one of these is the reason my current income, monthly SSD, is as not-horrifyingly tiny as it could be.

My first high-salaried job was in 1997-’98 with a publisher based in Woodstock, NY. Now, for someone like me, a high salary at the time meant more than $30,000 a year. (Sad to say, this amount would still be a high salary for me.) Thus, when I received my first paycheck at this publisher, I “felt wealthy” for perhaps the first and only time in my life.

I lived nowhere near Woodstock, though, so it seemed to me that I needed to open a bank account near where I thought most of my weekday life would be spent. Off I marched at lunchtime to a local bank with a paycheck that felt like it made my wallet bulge. At this point in my life, I think my one previous experience with a new bank account was in elementary school, and in that “bank,” quarters were the largest denomination accepted for deposits.

I explained my plight to a teller and I was directed to a seat, which was another novelty: I’d never sat in bank before. Please understand, in 1997 I was 29, so my naïveté was bizarre and somewhat hard-won.

I was one customer behind someone else who needed to open a bank account that day, so we were seated very close to one another at the desk of the accounts manager who could help us. That someone else was Michael Lang.
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A Year Concludes

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

When HBO’s John Oliver “blew up” 2020 for viewers of his comedy commentary show Last Week Tonight last year, I actually grew teary-eyed, which is perhaps not the reaction he and his staff might have wanted from the average viewer, but it is understandable, I think: 2020 was difficult for each one of us in ways unique to each one of us.

That endless year had featured several deaths of family, friends, acquaintances, and my father’s death of COVID in the first wave of the pandemic, as well as the first of many responses to the pandemic: lockdowns, local businesses shuttered, friends and family on video calls, recovery meetings on video, funerals on video, the first tentative steps out of lockdown (a cosmetologist friend came here to cut my hair a few times), experimentation with mask styles, and the wait for a conclusion that we would all know was a conclusion and/or new start whenever we might see it. Oh! and there was an national election campaign followed by a constitutional nightmare.

The year before this one also saw the start of a creative collaboration that continues to this day (new video up this evening!), which is probably only just beginning even after almost two years.

So when Mr. Oliver blew up 2020, I grew teary-eyed. Now, anyone who knows me knows that I get choked-up quite easily, and the signs of an imminent cry are obvious: my voice cracks, sniffles start, my eyes darken. And then nothing happens. The emotional explosion never comes, unlike the John Oliver’s farewell to 2020 (Last Week Tonight had run the same joke before, but 2020’s goodbye was a bit bigger):
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