OPEN
GK: It's good to be in San Diego, a city so beautiful that people don't mind rush hour, you'd want to take your time anyway, going over the Coronado Bay Bridge or the 5 downtown or the beautiful 163 through Balboa Park with the beautiful bridges over it and so nobody honks in anger in San Diego, they only honk to make sure you are sharing the experience. San Diego is famous for a lot of things, the Navy, the beaches, the climate, the mayor, but what's different here is that it's the capital of yoga and meditation. In grade schools they teach mindfulness, the Buddhist discipline of serenity, no desires, no anger, no greed, simply an awareness of yourself and all around you. So if you do a show here, if you just stop for a few minutes, people don't mind. It's enough for them to just be here with the others.
It's good to be here though I don't deserve it, there are others in Minnesota who deserve it more. Junior high teachers. Nurses in hospitals. People who work in drive-ins and have to slide the window open every 20 seconds to take the money and give change.
I still feel sheepish about Christmas. This was a year when I decided to downplay Christmas and give gifts like novelty key chains and other people went all out and gave me vintage wine and first editions and and sweaters handwoven in the Himalayas, not to mention gold, frankincense and myrrh...
GK: ... and I sat with a mountain of presents and I had given them a certificate saying a goat has been donated in your name to a village in Africa. And a handmade certificate saying Good For One Hug, which I'd obviously just made, with colored pencils, in the kitchen.
Every year at Christmas I eat a lot of nutmeg, mainly on ginger cookies --- back in the Seventies I had friends who were sure that nutmeg was a legal drug. They'd take a pinch and inhale it and wait for it to kick in.They all gave up on it. I wonder if it isn't a matter of getting the right batch. I eat a ginger cookie and I think, maybe this is the one that will change my life.
I'M singing in the snow, just singing in the snow,
What a glorious feeling, it's twenty below,
There's three feet of snow, So lovely and white,
And the weatherman says, We'll get more tonight.
Some folks may head south,
Cause they're down in the mouth
Come on with the snow
That's what winter's about
I wish we could be
Snowbound, you and me
I'd be singin, still singin in the snow.