Have you guys been watching this season of Curb Your Enthusiasm? It’s not bad. The scenes in which Larry is just sitting around goofing it up with Jeff and/or Richard Lewis and whatever other goons are around from his group of Exhausted Jews have been pretty funny and have this genuine sense of jovial comraderie. Larry is often smiling in those scenes and as is likely to be laughing at someone else’s joke as he is to be whining or complaining or whatever it is that he usually does. All in all it is much better than last season, which was unbearable. That show has always been very YELLY, but last season had really jumped the shark and then turned around and blamed the shark for being there in the first place, in terms of yelling. So much yelling, which is to be expected, but over nothing. “LARRY HOW THE FUCK ARE YOU GOING TO GO TO THE BATHROOM IN THE MIDDLE OF A DINNER PARTY?!” “What? I had to go to the bathroom!” “OH FUCK YOU, LARRY!” That is my snapshot summary of the last season of Curb Your Enthusiasm. That show has always been pretty hate-it-or-love-it because it’s so dependent on your reaction to Larry David both as a character and as a performer. It’s the kind of show that’s not really worth arguing about because even people who love that show UNDERSTAND COMPLETELY anyone who feels differently. “I hate that show because he’s obnoxious and awful and egotistical and selfish and everyone is always yelling all the time.” Well, right. CORRECT. I bring this all up because there was something about Ben Stiller’s character that reminded me of a younger Larry David. Except, imagine his character if he never told any jokes, he never apologized for any of his mistakes not even with one of those half-hearted Larry David non-apologies, he didn’t at least create Seinfeld so you don’t have to give him any credit for that, and when you thought about it it turned out he was an unambivalently terrible human being. Greenberg!

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As we get older, we inevitably begin to reflect on what choices we’ve made in life that have brought us to that particular point. Things rarely turn out the way that we think or hope, and some of the heavy, inevitable truths of aging and the vagaries of middle-to-old age cannot be imagined or understood until they are experienced. One morning you look in the mirror and it’s your father (or your mother) staring back at you. And yet, no decision or path taken can be disentangled from any other decision or path. As we learned from the philosophical treatise Sliding Doors, you are the inextricable accumulation of an infinite number of choices leading towards one compound outcome. Or, if physicist Brian Greene is to be believed, then our existence is just one of an infinite number of mirror existences in the multi-verse, each opportunity or possibility or hair color (Sliding Doors!) being somehow expressed simultaneously in the far reaches of the universe.

Of course, some of us aren’t worried about it, because some of us pay a 15-year-old boy in the neighborhood $5-a-week to keep us up-to-date on what the kids are into these days, and that is why we’ve got two tickets to see the Justine Bieber this weekend. She’s toteee neato! Good luck regaining the meaningful path of your lives, GRANDPAS!

Makes me sick to my stomach (which is full of foie gras and root beer floats and money).

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