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  Praise for I’ll Seize the Day Tomorrow and Jonathan Goldstein

  “Jonathan Goldstein is one of today’s most original and intelligent comic voices. He has done for radio what Larry David has done for television. And in his new book he proves, once again, that his wry, self-deprecating observations work just as well on the page.”

  —David Bezmozgis, author of Natasha and Other Stories and The Free World

  “Jonathan Goldstein has created something uniquely funny, smart, and touching. I love this book.”

  —Neil Pasricha, author of the New York Times bestseller The Book of Awesome

  “Surrounded by [Goldstein’s] cast of family and friends, this chronicle of his 39th year is a portrait of a life that is striving towards hope and beauty—even wisdom—against the relentless pull of the gravity that is one’s own character, and the entropy that is age ... I smiled or laughed at every page.”

  —Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?

  “One of the funniest books I’ve read in a long time. Jonathan is like a mix of Louis C.K., Jean-Paul Sartre, and Sholem Aleichem. I guess what I’m trying to say is that he’s hilarious, philosophical, and Jewish. I want to be Jonathan Goldstein when I turn 40. (Note: I’m 44, but you know what I mean).”

  —A.J. Jacobs, author of the New York Times bestseller The Year of Living Biblically

  “Jonathan Goldstein’s existential misery makes for good reading. As long as he keeps writing such funny and original pieces about it, I hope he continues to suffer.”

  —Shalom Auslander, author of Foreskin’s Lament

  “I’ll Seize the Day Tomorrow is packed with Goldstein’s trademark combo of sharp-edged wit and tender wisdom. It’s his funniest book yet!”

  —Miriam Toews, author of A Complicated Kindness

  “With his brilliant deadpan and his all-seeing eye, the hilarious Jonathan Goldstein traffics in what he calls ‘moderate hopefulness.’ It fills me with wild optimism.”

  —Henry Alford, author of Would It Kill You To Stop Doing That?

  “Jonathan Goldstein is one of the funniest and most original writers I can think of. Anything by him is better than anything by just about anyone else.”

  —David Sedaris, author of the New York Times bestsellers Me Talk Pretty One Day and When You Are Engulfed in Flames

  “Jonathan Goldstein is like no one else. He’s constantly surprising, simultaneously poetic and hilarious; an honestto-goodness artist.”

  —David Rakoff, bestselling author of Don’t Get Too Comfortable

  PENGUIN

  I’LL SEIZE THE DAY TOMORROW

  JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN’s writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, GQ, and Nerve. He is a columnist for the National Post and a frequent contributor to PRI’s This American Life. He’s the author of the short story collection Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bible! and the novel Lenny Bruce Is Dead. His CBC Radio show, WireTap, is now in its ninth season.

  ALSO BY JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN

  Lenny Bruce Is Dead

  Ladies and Gentlemen,The Bible!

  PENGUIN

  an imprint of Penguin Canada

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700,Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell,Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,

  New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published 2012

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

  Copyright © Jonathan Goldstein, 2012

  “Unfolding” by Carl Dennis first published in The New Yorker. Used with permission.

  Portions of this work were previously broadcast or published in slightly different form on or in the following sources: CBC Radio’s WireTap, This American Life, National Post,

  En Route magazine, and The New York Times Magazine.

  All rights reserved.Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Manufactured in Canada.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Goldstein, Jonathan, 1969– I’ll seize the day tomorrow / Jonathan Goldstein.

  ISBN 978-0-14-317388-5

  1. Goldstein, Jonathan, 1969– —Humor. I. Title.

  PS8563.O82846I55 2012 C817’.6 C2012-905314-7

  Visit the Penguin Canada website at www.penguin.ca

  Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see www.penguin.ca/corporatesales or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 2477.

  For my family and friends, past and present.

  And what the heck, I’m feeling good:

  for those, too, who may not even like me,

  because they might some day.

  Who knows. Life is weird.

  Contents

  Foreword by Gregor Ehrlich

  Youth

  The Things Left Undone

  Popeye Loves His Olives

  Why a Duck?

  Survival of the Fittest

  Seizing the Day

  Atonement

  What if Henry Heimlich Were Choking?

  “I am. I am. I am.”

  Friends Who Do No Kill You Make You Stronger

  Guys’ Night Out

  bed

  The Great Gazoo

  Loss of Memory

  The Tears You Cry in Dreams

  Two Yarmulkes

  Knights of the Roundtable

  Unpredictable

  Space and Mass

  Real Tears, Finally

  New Year’s

  Judgment

  A Mission

  A Thousand Monkeys and Darwin

  Beginnings, Middles, and Ends

  Padding the Dream

  Baby Steps

  A Covenant

  Two for One

  Soulmates

  Honeymoon for One

  The Power of the Written Word

  Irreversible

  It Can’t Be That Bad

  The Weight of Worry

  The Writer’s Life

  Picasso Goldstein

  A Still Shark Is Still a Shark

  A Place to Hang One’s Cape

  Medium Is the Message

  As Elusive as a Peach Slice

  Timing

  Stuff

  Inbetweenness

  Perfect Imperfection

  Beating God to the Punch

  To the Bottom!

  On Being the Fastest Runner:The Hare Retorts

  Sing the Tune Without the Words

  Down the Aisle

  The Levy Equation

  The Great Rabbi

  City Folk

  A Final Toast

  Musical Chairs

  Social Studies

  Another Lap Around

&
nbsp; Face to Face

  Late Bloomers

  Afterword by Gregor Ehrlich

  Acknowledgments

  Foreword

  by Gregor Ehrlich, agent to the star

  One wintry morning many years ago, my butler opened the door of my maison de campagne and discovered a basket of reeds with a baby inside. There was a note pinned to the swaddling cloth explaining that the baby’s name was Jonathan Goldstein, who, due to an unspecified condition, had been born well on the other side of his prime. Here was a middle-aged-man baby. And one who had not lived well at that. He was doughy, rotund, and bald—and not baby bald, but Ed Asner bald. In fact, the only thing baby-like about this creature were his genitals. Which were small.

  I gave him the finest education money could buy. Elocution. Archery. Japanese stick fighting. And finally the day came to send young Goldstein out into the world—a hero’s quest for my little hero! He was to fetch my dry cleaning. I’d lost the slip, but hoped he could get my pants anyway.

  Unable to explain the situation to the proprietor, he threw a veritable conniption, carrying on in the shop about everything and nothing. But as Lady Luck would have it, a talent scout for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation happened to be in that very dry cleaning establishment and heard in Goldstein’s high-pitched hysterical mewling something universal. Here was a voice—a cross between Joe Franklin trying to sing through his nose and the panicky shrieks of Larry King awakening during a hernia operation—that would one day touch the lives of hundreds.

  And so his radio show, WireTap, was born. Although I’ve not heard it, I’m told Goldstein uses his governmentally funded half-hour to perform monologues about everything from his corns to his cankles, occasionally mixing it up with a modern-day fable obtuse enough to put knots in a rabbinical scholar’s beard.

  For the next eight years I would try unsuccessfully to pry Goldstein off that stupid show. But cling he does, like a barnacle on the underbelly of a ship, a ship he calls “Show Business”—a glorious place where Ed McMahon spits bingo numbers and Frank Sinatra slaps his valet across the nose for rumpling his cabana wear.

  From his radio show sprang his column in the National Post, where each week his writing sits proudly alongside word scrambles, terrible international tragedies, and Marmaduke. And those columns led to this very book.

  “Pack it with sex,” I advised. “Detailed anatomical descriptions of naked ladies sunbathing and such. Those without internet, i.e., the book-buying public at large, need nudity, too.”

  “It’s my belief that fans of my work would rather read my pensées on everyday life,” said Goldstein.

  I’d like to apologize.

  As a man with a Netflix account and an active social life, I’ve not had time to read this book, so I can’t vouch for its worth. I’m told it represents a year in the life of Goldstein as he approaches his fortieth birthday and confronts his mortality. I can vouch for this foreword, though, which you are now enjoying immensely, because I have written it. I intend to also write the afterword, so that should be enough to keep you soldiering on to the end.

  Perhaps it’s best to think of this book as a sandwich. A sandwich made of delicious, crusty, fresh-baked bread. Smeared on this bread is something that tastes like, well, let’s just keep this civil and say, I’ll see you at the end.*

  *Hummus.

  Youth

  (39th birthday)

  MONDAY.

  Before stepping out, I accidentally put my shoes on the wrong feet. It’s something I haven’t done since I was a kid. The sensation of my left shoe on my right foot makes me feel about six years old. It’s like playing with ants, like sitting in a sunbeam on the carpet.Though we pretend otherwise, we’re all our ages at once. I decide to start putting my shoes on the wrong feet whenever I need to remind myself of that. To this end, I will also take up skipping, though only late at night when no one is around. This, too, will make me feel young. But also insane.

  THURSDAY.

  It’s close to midnight and tomorrow’s my thirty-ninth birthday.

  I wish you could leap from thirty-eight straight to forty. More dignity to it than hanging on to the last dregs of your thirties.

  Forty was the age at which I thought I’d have a house full of oak shelves spilling over with hardcover books. Cabinets loaded with china. Carpets brought home from exotic trips abroad.

  “Where’d these come from?” they’d ask.

  “Abroad,” I’d say.

  The age at which I’d have a piano substantial enough to cripple the back of each member of the moving team that finally gets it into the upstairs parlour.

  “Do you play?” they’d ask.

  “I always wished I could,” I always wished I could say.

  Forty was supposed to be the age at which I’d have a gigantic flat-screen TV, one that sinks into the wall like a corrugated iron anchor. A wife. Kids. Peace, too. The kind that rises like mist from a settled life, the life of a man who’s figured out the cologne that suits him and the channels he wants programmed into his car radio.

  With all that in order, I’d be ready to do one of those Russian leg-kicking dances straight towards the grave with a smile on my face.

  But here I am with no wife, no kids, no car, and no house. Not even a houseboat. And the clever names I could have given one!

  With so little to show for it, is it possible to even call myself a grownup? I need to get my house in order. Man up and settle down. And the way I see it, I have one year left to do it.

  This weekend will involve dinner with my parents and phone messages from my friends’ kids singing “Happy Birthday.” I’m sure it’s just me, but every year the tone of their singing seems to get more mocking.

  FRIDAY.

  Step one: shave.

  While doing so, I stop at the moustache and stare at myself in the mirror. Moustachioedness. I look like a completely different style of person, like the kind of guy who’d sing Motown songs in the public showers at the Y— someone who’d shirtlessly open his front door to the gas man, possibly calling him “chief.”

  When I finish I’m left feeling as if, after a long night out, my face has finally taken off its pants. But when Gregor stops by, he tells me I look older.

  “I’m on public radio,” I say. “It doesn’t matter how I look. And for that matter, it’s also why I don’t need an agent.”

  “You already have that old-person smell,” he says. “Hospital cafeteria. Hamburger steak in particular.”

  “I’m feeling a little sensitive about my age at the moment,” I say, “so maybe lay off.”

  “By my math, you’re thirty-nine going on dead,” he says in his version of laying off. “You’re aging out of your audience by the second. Do you think Millennials will tune in to hear about your latest visit to the doctor? And so I propose The Goldstein Pavilion, a section in Canada’s Wonderland with rides based on your show. Stuff like the Monologue Monorail.”

  “Which would be?”

  “A slow, meandering ride with no end in sight.”

  According to Film World, the secret to Fatty Arbuckle’s success—what set him apart from other morbidly obese vaudevillians who could balance on telephone wires— was that he was possessed of an ability to laugh at himself. This is another in a long and growing list of reasons why I am nothing like Fatty Arbuckle. Nonetheless, as Gregor jokes, I try to laugh and my face takes on the expression of someone trying to lap up a saucer of pennies.

  The way that people can learn so much personal information from looking at a face strikes me as unfair. Even a beard is not enough to cover up the truth of who you are.

  The Things Left Undone

  (52 weeks till 40th birthday)

  SUNDAY.

  My father is now on the internet and we’ve started emailing each other. The way it works is he sends me an email and then calls several seconds later to make sure I’ve received it, just in case.

  For my father, a man who shows up at the airport five to
six hours before departure—a man who fills his gas tank about every ten minutes—“just in case” are the three most important words in the English language. If we were the kind of family to have a crest, those words would be emblazoned in Latin across a figure of a man wearing a medicine ball–sized fanny pack.

  I read his emails back to him over the phone.

  “HI, JONNY,” I read, “REPLY AS SOON AS YOU CAN AS I WANT TO SEE IF MY EMAIL IS WORKING.”

  “Unbelievable,” he says. “I just sent it to you a second ago!”

  I’ve also started sending him links to sites I think he might enjoy. Among them, The Onion.

  “I read this op-ed piece,” he says, “about a man who leaves behind instructions for what to do with his sandwich in case he dies before finishing it.Very poignant.”

  I try to explain that it’s a joke, that The Onion is a satirical newspaper, not a real one, but my father won’t buy it.

  “It’s poignant,” he repeats. “It addresses one’s sense of mortality and the legacy we wish to leave behind. The sandwich is a metaphor for the things left undone.”

  “What’s the article called?” I ask.

  “If I Die, Please Finish This Sandwich.”

  We argue for a while, but then I decide to drop the subject. His way of reading the paper might be better anyway. I can see the Onion headline: “Area Man Mistakes Humorous Weekly for Legitimate News Source.”

  MONDAY.

  In my latest bid to multitask, I’ve begun screening silent films while listening to the radio. And so I watch Buster Keaton hop from train-car roof to train-car roof as a German scientist on the CBC explains how the Earth might one day be engulfed by the sun. The combined effect has me toggling between joy and existential terror. Not so different from how I feel most of the time, anyway.

  The film is The General and it takes place during the American Civil War. In it, Keaton is trying to outrace the Unionists back to his base to alert the Confederate troops of a surprise attack.

  As I watch, it strikes me how many movie plots would have been ruined if cell phones existed. I mean, all Keaton would’ve had to do was call ahead and let them know the army was coming and the whole film would have been over in five minutes. Deliverance? The war with the hillbillies would have been averted by a call to 911. The Wizard of Oz? They call up the wizard, and he’s not home. The end.