"You have to stand out in the rain to get struck by lightening..."

For those of you not yet initiated into the ways of “The Rooster” and his kin… may I suggest reading Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris. As is everything Sedaris writes, it is simultaneously sad and funny. I’ve been a huge fan since I first heard him reading from his “Santaland Diaries” on NPR’s This American Life. There is just something special about hearing him read his own words aloud in that unique voice of his. In fact, I’ll be in the audience listening to him next Wednesday at Royce Hall as part of my “kabuki-acid-jazz” series at UCLA. Sadly, I fear I’ve run out of books for him to sign. Last time, I was forced to have him sign the playbill from The Book of Liz which he wrote with his sister Amy… my new obsession. Amy has become David Letterman’s new and improved Teri Garr - the go-to-gal of fill-in guests. Whether taking about her sewing circle, the Crafty Beavers, or a nearby lesbian bar, Lickety Splits… she is a guaranteed to make you laugh. That Ricky is a lucky man.

In Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris put a name to my affliction… keraunothnetophobia, the irrational and constant fear of being hit by falling man-made satellites. Now I probably don’t fit all the criteria as laid out in the DSM IV, but I think about it… perhaps a little too often. I think it first started when I read Deadeye Dick, by Kurt Vonnegut. The thought of a child carelessly shooting a bullet into the air, only to have it hurtle back to earth and land on some poor hausfrau’s head, truly disturbed me. The cover is still burned into my brain… an open door, a running vacuum and the dead woman’s legs with toes pointed upward. (I still remember what I thought the first time I read Vonnegut… “Wow, someone wrote this just for me. I am not alone”)

This all brings me to an article I recently read in WIRED [14.02] entitled “I Spy”. The piece quotes Desmond King-Hele on the subject of planet Earth after a nuclear holocaust as saying “satellites would remain circling a devastated planet, relics of the advanced technology that led to our downfall.” It is a haunting image. Imagine some future generation or alien civilization discovering these orbiting time-capsules like some sci-fi Stonehenge. I can’t escape the thought of Charleton Heston falling to his knees at the base of a half-buried Statue of Liberty in agony over the realization that The Planet of the Apes is in fact planet Earth. “Oh God!”

Or maybe a dying satellite will just fall from the heavens and hit poor Chuck squarely on his head.