Day, that is.  It’s another fall day here in Los Angeles that’s so pretty it makes your eyes water and cheeks shake like a 9G wind tunnel.

Every time I see or read about some astonishing level of training astronauts had to go through — like wind tunnels — I always think, “Well, if I could just skip that, I think I could do the other stuff.  It seems mostly to be a lot of flicking toggle switches and pushing whatever square plastic button flashes red.  Then you get to drive the golf cart around the moon.”

This, of course, is stupid beyond belief, and reminds me of the Uncle Lou we all have who watches a boxing match between two terrifying heavyweights and says, “Why, for that kind of money, I’d fight him.”  To which we all have to bite our tongues to avoid saying, “Yes, but in case you haven’t noticed, no one’s lining up to buy tickets to see a sixty-seven-year-old carpet salesman from Queens get hit it the face once and cry.”

I know this piece ostensibly started yesterday about heating and air conditioning, and I have every intention of getting there but a) As a rule, I have no idea where my writing will go in the first place, and b) I have to leave in fifty minutes to go to work, and I don’t know where the single-cylinder African Queen steam engine in my head will be when the time limit is up.

The point is, I’m going to try to write at least two or three times a week, no matter what the weather or where I am.  (I almost said blog there, but it still feels foreign in my mouth.  Another thirty years under my belt and I should be fine with it.  As I’ve said many times as I’ve been promoting the book:  Considering I started writing this thing with a quill, and wound up with a web, that’s pretty good progress.)

Okay, so, as I said, anything lower than ten or over a hundred degrees, I’ll turn something on, but otherwise I hate heating and air conditioning.

Our house gets pretty cold at night in winter for this area, but I always tell my wife and kids, “Aw, this isn’t cold.  What do you say we all put on sweaters?”  I’m not cheap, by the way, I just don’t need climatic intervention as much as sane people apparently do.  (They don’t put on sweaters, by the way, they put on the heat.  My wife has stopped saying, “You’re an idiot.  It’s an ice box in here,” and just turns it on.)

In summer, which can get seriously hot for carbon-based life forms, my wife sometimes turns the air on when she goes out for something, and I’ll come home and turn it off.  When she returns with the kids, she’ll send them upstairs, walk into the office where I’m writing with the windows open (and the air as still as the walls), remove the drink from my hand and take a sip, and say, “Hey, Faulkner.  Turn that air conditioner off one more time after I’ve turned it on, and I’m going to wait for the kids to go to sleep, and stab you.  Write about that.”  

My dad used to stay with us a few times a year after my mom passed on, and our guest room (one of the kids’ rooms now) would get very cold in winter.

Now, he was a pretty tough guy, like all fathers from that era.  He made Victor McLaglen look like Laurence Harvey.

He was in the hospital once for a colon operation, from which he recovered completely, and I was in the room with him when the surgeon came in the next day and said, “Well, Mr. Miller, everything looks just fine.  You waited a little long, though, and, I must say, that blockage was very large, really the largest I’ve seen.  It must have been very painful.”

And my dad said, “Uh, no.”

And after a beat — no kidding — the surgeon laughed out loud and said, “That’s a good one, sir, but, seriously, it must’ve hurt a lot.”

And my dad said, “No.  No, it didn’t.”

And the surgeon laughed again (but much less) and said, “Sir, that was a massive blockage.  The last six months had to have been very, very painful.”

And my dad said, “I’m telling you, no.”

The surgeon looked over at me, and I just shook my head, and he left.  (You don’t hear people murmur and mumble to themselves like that very much anymore.)

So my father was a pretty tough guy.  But after spending one night in that room without any heat, he said to me the next day, “Okay, this is nuts, you gotta get a heater.  Today.  I’ll go down there with you.”

You don’t think he, and my mother, and my wife, and my kids could all be right, and that I’m wrong, do you?

LARRY MILLER  11/30