Opinion

Congestion pricing comes to Manhattan in June, a system of tolls to reduce daytime traffic on streets that have become sluggish so they’ll start moving again and not turn into parking lots, which is a noble idea, just as no-smoking laws were back in the day: you don’t have a right to be a public nuisance.

In my neighborhood there are a lot of rock outcrops and in those rock outcrops there is a variety of flowering plants and grasses growing at the moment.

Last week the rain finally cleared enough to till the garden space.

Whenever I open an egg carton, I think of the chicken at work in the factory, creating this elliptical work of art onto a conveyor belt, to be stolen away, and then the hormones in the chicken feed kick in and the process of creation repeats itself, sort of like me and limericks: I write a good one and it stimulates the next limerick and pretty soon I have a hundred of them, which I could collect in a book but won’t because very few people appreciate limericks — women do not, because so many cruel limericks have been written about women, and when men read a limerick they think, “I could’ve done better than that,” being the compulsive competitors they are, and meanwhile here I am with this work of art in my hand.Minneapolis is great.

I went out West to Idaho and Washington to do my show in Boise (soft s) and Spokane, and was surprised by how vibrant, bustling, handsome both cities are, and walked out onstage and sang Van Morrison’s “These are the days of the endless summer, these are the days, the time is now” and they seemed to like it okay, so I hummed a note and they sang “America the Beautiful” with me and then we did “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” for the Republicans in the crowd and they sang it full-out, four parts, and then, for contrast, “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt” and we were on our way.It’s an age of dread, the news perpetually discouraging, TV and media merchandising ugliness, and either you join the Greek chorus of gloom or you go with the American choir of cheerful resolve, and I choose cheerfulness.

The weather - it still plagues us.

It’s been a few years since I tried my hand at gardening, so when a friend offered a shared space on her land for a co-garden this summer, I was very excited to get busy on it.