I imagine that someday at America's boarding gates and airport terminals

after the wheelchair passengers are boarded and those who need extra time and then active military,

there will be other categories of merit to be given precedence, maybe persons traumatized by flight,

or persons in need of affirmation,

persons trapped in bad relationships,

and why not add unappreciated poets,

and third grade teachers to the list and then you let the fat cats board for

first class and and then the pons and peasants.

I am a fat cat to tell the truth and I'm sheepish about it so I walk eyes averted down the empty elitist lane between long lines of the underprivileged and

I come to the TSA agent and I am eyeballed and I pass through the scanner and off to the

gate and if this were Christian airwaves, the agent would ask, have you loved your neighbor?

As yourself, have you extended a hand to the fallen? Do you love the Lord with your whole heart?

And of course the answer is no, no, no.

And so I would be seated in 27B between a talkative Scientologist and a woman with a small infant and I would

be denied a screwdriver and not allowed Wi-Fi and my seat would not recline and I'd be given

that crying infant to hold, but I fly delta, so no questions are asked.

I am a privileged white male, I acquired a vocation in the eighth grade when my teacher, Mr. Anderson, showed

me a story by A.J. Leibling in the New Yorker magazine and I decided I wanted to write

like A.J. Leibling. I attended college when tuition was $360 for the entire school year, and now

Medicare has paid a bundle to replace my metro valve and if it hadn't been done I'd be dead

and not gallivanting around the country doing shows as an octogenarian stand-up as I did last week in California.

My audiences skew older than Taylor Swift's also they're smaller but in California

...