I was a lousy student in Lyle Bradley’s 10th grade biology class and he was wildly generous to give me a B-minus, given my ineptitude at frog dissection and tree identification, and since then I’ve descended into superstition and mythology and faith in vitamin E, and chicken soup and in the story of Adam and Eve in the garden, the woman created from a spare rib because the man was lonely, but had God chosen, He could’ve made the man capable of creating egg and sperm and combining the two, perhaps by sticking his finger into his ear, and we’d have a world of a billion guys and there’d be no fashion industry, no beauty products and what little opera there would be would not be very grand.

Had I worked hard in Lyle’s class, I might’ve gone on to get a degree in science from a third-rate college and started a mediocre career and who needs that? Nobody. Instead, I looked for a line of work that didn’t exist anymore and became the host of a live radio variety show, of which there were maybe four in the country, and of those four hosts I was pretty good. And this is my advice to the young: don’t be a poet or video producer or proctologist or politician – you’ll find thousands of people ahead of you in line. Chose something very rare – write a Canadian romance novel, make butterfly milk, design an app to tap maple sap, produce a podcast of pure silence. Be distinctive from the get-go. Become a Mob boss. The Mob is dead, so revive it. Some things worked better when the Mob was in charge. Be the guy in charge.