So let’s all Simonize our watches and keep a sharp ear out for this joke. I’m very serious about this. Trained personnel are standing by now at the joke Tracking Center. So report those sightings! Together, we have a chance here to obtain scientific findings of great significance, and possibly a large federal grant. Remember: This chain has never been broken.

The way I picture it, adulthood is a big, sleek jungle snake, swimming just around the bend in the River of Life. It swallows you subtly, an inch at a time, so you barely notice the signs: You start reading the labels on things before you eat them, rather than to pass the time while you eat them; you find yourself listening to talk radio because the hit songs they play on the rock stations (can this really be you, thinking this?) all begin to sound the same. Before you know it, you have monogrammed towels in your bathroom, and all your furniture is nice. And suddenly you realize it’s too late, that you’d rather sit around on your furniture and talk about the warning signs of colon cancer with other grown-ups than, for example, find out what happens when you set one of those plastic milk jugs on fire. And if your kid sets a milk jug on fire, you yell at him, “Somebody could get hurt,” and really mean it, from inside the snake.

I mention all this to explain how I came to buy, at age 38, an electric guitar. I had one once before, from 1965 through 1969 when I was in college. It was a Fender jazzmaster, and I played lead guitar in a band called The Federal Duck, which is the kind of name that was popular in the sixties as a result of controlled substances being in widespread use. Back then, there were no restrictions, in terms of talent, on who could make an album, so we made one, and it sounds like a group of people who have been given powerful but unfamiliar instruments as a therapy for a degenerative nerve disease.

We mainly played songs like “Gloria,” which was great for sixties bands, because it had only three chords; it had a solo that was so simple it could be learned in minutes, even by a nonmusical person or an advanced fish; and it had great lyrics.

My band career ended late in my senior year when John Cooper and I threw my amplifier out the dormitory window. We did not act in haste. First we checked to make sure the amplifier would fit through the frame, using the belt from my bathrobe to measure, then we picked up the amplifier and backed up to my bedroom door. Then we rushed forward shouting “The WHO! The WHO!” and we launched my amplifier perfectly, as though we had been doing it all our lives, clean through the window and down onto the sidewalk, where a small but appreciative crowd had gathered. I would like to be able to say that this was a symbolic act, an effort on my part to break cleanly away from one stage in my life and move on to another, but the truth is, Cooper and I really just wanted to find out what it would sound like. It sounded OK.

Unlike The Who, I couldn’t afford a new amplifier, and playing an unamplified electric guitar is like strumming on a picnic table, so I sold my jazzmaster and got a cheap acoustic guitar, which I diddled around on for 16

years. It was fine for “Kum By Yah,” but ill-suited for “My Baby Does the Hanky Panky.” So there’s been this void n my life, which I’ve tried to fill by having a career, but I see now I was kidding myself.

So recently, Ms. magazine sent me a check for $800 for an article I wrote about sex. This seemed like such a bizarre way to get hold of $800 that I figured I should do something special with it, so I thought about it, and what came to mind is—this is the scary part of the story, coming up now—a new sofa. Our primary living-room sofa looks like a buffalo that has been dead for some time, and I thought: “Maybe we should get a nicer sofa.” Which is when I felt the snake of adulthood slithering around my leg.

So I said to my wife: “I am going to take this money and buy an electric guitar.” And she said—I believe I married her in anticipation of this moment—”Fine.”

I have never been so happy. My amplifier has a knob called overdrive, which, if you turn it all the way up to 10, makes it so that all you have to do is touch a string to make a noise that would destroy a greenhouse. My wife and son and dog spend more time back in the bedroom these days. Out in the living room, I put the Paul Butterfield Blues Band on the stereo, and when they do “Got My Mojo Workin’,” I play the guitar solo at the same time Mike Bloomfield does. I am not as accurate as he is in terms of hitting the desired notes, but you can hear me better because I have “overdrive.”

I bet I know what you’re thinking: You’re thinking my electric guitar is a Midlife Crisis Object that I bought in the Midlife Crisis Store filled with middle-aged guys who wear jogging shoes and claim they love Bruce Springsteen but really think he’s merely adequate. And you may be right. I don’t care if you are. To me, my guitar is a wonderful thing. It’s a Gibson, with the

classic old electric-guitar shape. It looks like a modernistic oar, which you could use, in a pinch, to row against the current in the River of Life, or at least stay even with it for a while.

We need to do something about this national tendency to try to make new things look like they are old.

First off, we should enact an “e” tax. Government agents would roam the country looking for stores whose names contained any word that ended in an unnecessary “e,” such as “shoppe” or “olde,” and the owners of these stores would be taxed at a flat rate of $50,000 per year per “e.” We should also consider an additional $50,000 “ye” tax, so that the owner of a store called “Ye Olde Shoppe” would have to fork over $150,000 a year. In extreme cases, such as “Ye Olde Barne Shoppe,” the owner would simply be taken outside and shot.

We also need some kind of law about the number of inappropriate objects you can hang on walls in restaurants. I am especially concerned here about the restaurants that have sprung up in shopping complexes everywhere to provide young urban professionals with a place to go for margaritas and potato skins. You know the restaurants I mean: they always have names like Flanagan’s, Hanrahan’s, O’Toole’s, or O’Reilley’s, as if the owner were a genial red-faced Irish bartender, when in fact it is probably 14 absentee proctologists in need of tax shelter.

You have probably noticed that inevitably the walls in these places are covered with objects we do not ordinarily attach to walls, such as barber poles, traffic lights, washboards, street signs, and farm implements. This decor scheme is presumably intended to create an atmosphere of relaxed old-fashioned funkiness, but in fact it creates an atmosphere of great weirdness. It is as if a young urban professional with telekinetic powers, the kind Sissy Spacek exhibited in the movie Caine, got really tanked up on margaritas one night and decided to embed an entire flea market in the wall.

I think it’s too much. I think we need to pass a law stating that the only objects that may be hung on restaurant walls are those that God intended to be hung on restaurant walls, such as pictures, mirrors, and the heads of deceased animals. Any restaurant caught violating this law would have to get rid of its phony Irish-bartender name and adopt a name that clearly reflected its actual ownership. (“Say, let’s go get some potato skins at Fourteen Absentee Proctologists in Need of Tax Shelter.”)

And I suppose it goes without saying that anybody caught manufacturing “collectible” plates, mugs, or figurines of any kind should be shipped directly to Devil’s Island.