When I'm good and famous

I've been reading all about Bob Dylan  being unreachable; the Nobel Prize Committee wants to get a hold of him to give him his medal and a bunch of money, but Dylan won't return their calls. Same thing with Bill Murray; he's notorious for not having an agent or manager or secretary and for never returning phone calls and not giving a hoot in hell about publicity.

What is it with these people? Are they crazy?

Crazy like a fox. Or like J.D. Salinger.

These people have gone beyond the hype of fame, to discover the Land of Fame Zen -- where privacy, if not modesty, reigns, and the media goblins have been expelled forever.

And that's how famous I want to be.

I'll go back and live in Thailand, where I spent two years as a missionary and five years as an English teacher. Pick up where I left off with my girlfriend Joom. Live on a durian plantation in a teak wood shack.  No cell phone. No internet. No indoor plumbing. Just unreliable mail delivery. Any darn reporter who wants an exclusive will have to tramp through thorny jungle trails, barely wide enough for a python, to reach my compound. And the chances will be very good that I won't be there, because I don't care enough about journalists or publicity to follow the rules of normal hospitality. They can talk to Joom, who barely speaks English.

And if I decide to fly over to Hawaii to see my good bud Barack in his retirement, for some golf or body surfing, you can bet dollars to donuts I won't alert the media. Especially the social media. No Twitter or Facebook for me, kemosabe.

I'll have a beard-growing contest with Letterman, and the press won't know a dang thing about it until it's over -- and the only information they'll get about it is from Letterman, the blabbermouth.

I'll be so elusive and aloof that all the biographies written about me will have to use the word "Unauthorized" in the title.

I guess I'll have to get a penthouse in Manhattan as well, right next to Woody Allen's. We'll feud about his dog messing around in my garbage. But the public will never know about it, since Woody knows how to keep his mouth shut, and I'll be too busy with my New York bankers to care. And I'll do nothing to scotch the rumors about a possible Broadway production.

At some point the sneaky paparazzi will snap a photo of Tom Cruise giving me a Scientology book while I give him a Book of Mormon. This is the only photo of me extant for the next twenty years.

I won't be in Washington to receive my Mark Twain prize; I'll send Joom's daughter-in-law from her first marriage, who speaks passable English, to pick it up.

Let me tell you, it's a great feeling having complete validation of my talents without being bothered by any fans or questioned by the media. I get to have my kale and eat it, too.

Now the only question is just how exactly am I going to get that famous; it usually requires work and patience and genius. And I don't go in for that kind of strenuous stuff anymore. Bad for my blood pressure.

Maybe I'll just live obscurely without bothering to become famous at all. And then I'll become famous for that.