So I said to my wife: “I am going to take this money and buy an electric guitar.” And she said—I believe I married her in anticipation of this moment—”Fine.”

I have never been so happy. My amplifier has a knob called overdrive, which, if you turn it all the way up to 10, makes it so that all you have to do is touch a string to make a noise that would destroy a greenhouse. My wife and son and dog spend more time back in the bedroom these days. Out in the living room, I put the Paul Butterfield Blues Band on the stereo, and when they do “Got My Mojo Workin’,” I play the guitar solo at the same time Mike Bloomfield does. I am not as accurate as he is in terms of hitting the desired notes, but you can hear me better because I have “overdrive.”

I bet I know what you’re thinking: You’re thinking my electric guitar is a Midlife Crisis Object that I bought in the Midlife Crisis Store filled with middle-aged guys who wear jogging shoes and claim they love Bruce Springsteen but really think he’s merely adequate. And you may be right. I don’t care if you are. To me, my guitar is a wonderful thing. It’s a Gibson, with the

classic old electric-guitar shape. It looks like a modernistic oar, which you could use, in a pinch, to row against the current in the River of Life, or at least stay even with it for a while.

Ye Olde Humor Columne

We need to do something about this national tendency to try to make new things look like they are old.

First off, we should enact an “e” tax. Government agents would roam the country looking for stores whose names contained any word that ended in an unnecessary “e,” such as “shoppe” or “olde,” and the owners of these stores would be taxed at a flat rate of $50,000 per year per “e.” We should also consider an additional $50,000 “ye” tax, so that the owner of a store called “Ye Olde Shoppe” would have to fork over $150,000 a year. In extreme cases, such as “Ye Olde Barne Shoppe,” the owner would simply be taken outside and shot.