EppsNet

Every once in a while, my wife is flipping channels and on comes one of these celebrity interviews . . .

“Actor Jude Law, who stars alongside Nicole Kidman in the film Cold Mountain, says he has emerged stronger and happier from his bruising break-up with Sadie Frost . . .”

Really!? Who the hell cares?! I’ve got my own problems! Are people really sitting around asking themselves, “Gee, I wonder how Mr. Whoever-he-is is holding up after the divorce?”

What a pompous ass!

Listening to celebrities speak makes me very, very angry, for reasons that I have a hard time articulating. They’re invariably vacuous, of course, but that alone doesn’t seem to merit getting so enraged about them . . .

And then — this weekend I was reading Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow. The narrator is a famous author who had a play on Broadway for eight months, although he knows it wasn’t very good.

“I had the attention of the public for nearly a year,” he says, “and I taught it nothing.”

THAT’S IT! Hey, Mr. I’m-Still-Standing: Tell us something! Teach us something! Make us believe that great things might be true!

You’ve got the attention of the public, and you don’t have a single goddamn thing to say . . .