I can only imagine how easy it would have been to do stand-up thirty or forty years ago.

--back when free speech was the biggest concern you had to worry about. Back in the time of the greats, who did fine work, but who did not have to dedicate fully twenty-five percent of their clock cycles to keeping an eye out for pure criminals wanting to do them in.

My memoir ultimately will wind up in the remainder bin, worthless. This is because my life history over the past seven years sounds just so outlandish that it has to be a fabrication. The graph of the value of a memoir goes up, left to right, the value increasing in direct proportion to the wonder of the story. But there is a drop-off point where the value becomes inversely proportional to any further interestingness. At that point, the story is regarded as incredible and is presumed to be a fabrication. The monetary value of the memoir then drops to zero. It is simply not believable.

Even today, I make no effort whatsoever to interact with people. Interaction is a sharing exercise. It is how primates bond with each other. You share your stories and thus do you bond. How do you bond with someone who, upon receiving the considered offering of your stories, says, "Oh, that didn't happen"?

I suppose during the bonding phase of any couple there is some late-night conversation on the couch in the darkness, maybe with an old record playing low on the stereo, each of you drinking a glass of wine. You're turned toward each other and you're whispering your secrets to one another, confiding things you save for the one you judge to handle them with care.

"Oh ha ha. That didn't happen. Kook! You're just a pack of lies."

You can see that my membership at Match.com notwithstanding, I do not have high expectations of the whole dating thing. But I have promised my witch doctor* that I will at least go through the motions.

Anyway. My law enforcement audience members say, "How the hell did he know his house was bugged? How did he know about that guy on the train? How did he know he's a ledger entry on the Secret Service's books?"

It is because, even in my short time doing live stage work, I learned to develop a keen sense of everything going on in my theater. Even without letting on that I was aware of these things, I would immediately know that the guy over by the restroom had had too much to drink, or that the guy and his girlfriend at the table to the left are having a bit of a silent spat which threatens to become vocal, and that I need to pick up the pace and get this show over five minutes early because the street sweeping machines come by at ten and will have blocked the exits to the parking lot.

And out of the corner of my eye I can see that guy in the back, at the end of the row, glancing left and right and jumping up a row. And he sits there for a while, glances left and right again, and then jumps up one more row. And I can see a knife in his hand. I can watch this guy for an entire half hour.

I am aware of every last thing in my theater. And when you realize that I have seven times the experience doing a virtual show in a virtual theater than live stage work, you can see that I might develop a keen sense of everything in my virtual environment.

So even though the danger of doing stand-up is far greater today than it was forty years ago, my audience will be pleased to know that they are safe here. Threatening to make pastries for the president** was the smartest thing I ever did, because it forced the system to roll their cop cars, to recognize me and my stellar personal history and my good faith, and the system then found itself obligated to post armed guards at the doors who now eyeball every last potential troublemaker.

I'm on Easy Street, and so are my audience members. We're legit now!

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* My witch doctor has assured me that he is not in my theater. I certainly hope that he does not integrate what he hears in my show into his understanding of me as a person, a performer who claims a professional detachment from his own material. This is not a Facebook page. If you have doubts about that, just ask the Justice Department how useful it is to diagnose stage personas. I went from paranoid schizophrenic to schizoid to schizotypal to needing a date, all in under a year. Wow, I sure got better fast. I'm a modern medical miracle, a psychiatric success story.

I've only been stating for years now that what you read here are transcriptions of spoken word pieces that I would have delivered in a physical theater. Don't you think I might want to have a little fun now and again? Hmm?  And buy your ticket.

** I cannot legally tell you what I said. It's a new law or something, heretofore unknown in American jurisprudence --like so much around here.