Freedom is a beautiful thing when you’re young, allowing kids who know they should be focused on the perils of global warming to instead be fascinated by the troubles of Britney Spears, but for an old guy it means a loss of direction as the people whose approval you worked for die off and you’re left with no direction. My teachers have left the planet, my uncles who looked at me and shook their heads, my dad, and my editors who would look at this paragraph and say, “Nobody wants to know what you think about global warming. You’re a humorist. Be funny. Throw it out.”

So I now have an app on my laptop that sounds a shrill alarm when I write about global warming, race, gender, politics or people whose last names begin with T, such as Thoreau, Thackeray, Trillin, Justin Timberlake or Tammy Tequila, and instead I shall write about my long court struggle to get free of the conservatorship imposed by my wife after I bought a dozen books, some of which we already had at home.

“You have a library card, so why not use it instead of filling the shelves with expensive books, most of which you never bother to read.”

She could detect non-readership by putting confetti in the first page that’d fall out if the book was opened. I wasn’t aware of that.