But Enough About You (essays)

But Enough About You (essays) by Christopher Buckley, Simon and Schuster paperback 2015

STOP THE PRESSES!  AN UPDATE FROM CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY SPEAKING IN 2014!!! - ABOUT THE TRUMP PHENOMENON IN "Trump, the Inaugural" (originally published in its entirety in the Wall St. Journal):

           So what do you think of your new first lady?  I picked Moronia - what's your name, honey?  Melania, right.  Great name.  I just picked Melania here from a very wide selection of possibilities - not just because the sex is incredible but because this nation wants and deserves a trophy first lady...

and 

 Foreign-policy-wise?  ... I'm a businessman.  Other countries want to do business with us, I'm all for it.  Trade, great.  I have no problems  with people trading with us.  But it's going to be fair trade, by which I mean we come out on top.  They have a problem with that, they can sell their TVs and cheese and whatever to someone else.  Maybe North Korea...        

I am convinced, having just trudged my way through a nearly 500-page spy thriller - overly long, although dead-on timely -  that short stories and essays, especially humorous ones such as Christopher Buckley's contribution to my positivityness  regime, are the way to go.  These pieces are just too brilliant, too funny, too catchy, to forget.

i.e.  :

     from "Freighter Days"                                                          

    Call me Whatever.  At eighteen I went to sea, not in Top-Siders, but in steel-toed boots, as a deck boy aboard a Norwegian tramp freighter.  My pay was $20.00 a week...

    The final leg - Colombo to New York, around the Cape of Good Hope - was thirty-three days, longer than expected owing to a Force 12 gale in the South Atlantic.  In such seas, the ship's autopilot cannot function; the steering has to be done manually.  I took my turns at the helm in a state of barely controlled panic at the thought that thirty-one lives depended on my ability to steer a shuddering, heaving 520-foot ship through mountainous seas.  When the next man relieved me, my hands shook so that I couldn't light a cigarette.  Even some of the older men, who'd seen everything in their time, were impressed by this storm.  Arvid winked at me.  "Maybe ve sink, eh?"

Ha ha ha I LOVE THIS GUY!!!

His recollections of childhood thanksgivings in Sharon Connecticut, where he reconnected with over 50 cousins, and where he watched the grown-ups sip WWI-era aged wine, puckering and wincing at the muddy dregs, are too much fun to be savored only once.  In his reflection on the writer Kurt Vonnegut -  Schlachthaus funf -  - he delivers a sharp blow with the fact that Vonnegut developed his deadly humor from his own finally fatal life:  Vonnegut's mother, when he was 29, committed suicide on Mother's Day. 

And you gotta read Buckley's chapter entitled, briefly:

                                                                  NASA Astronaut Screening, Revised and Updated

                                                                        Which of the following do you most resemble?

                                                                                        A.  John Glenn

                                                                                        B.  Scott Glenn

                                                                                        C.  Glen Campbell

                                                                                        D. Glenn Close

I'm going to take this book to the hospital - I know it will help speed my recovery if it does not displace some stitches.