Q: How much money do you need to start a photography business?

A: These days, not that much. You don't have to pay for film or processing or prints. If you have the right phone, you don't even need to pay for a camera. If you have the right clients, you don't even need lights or talent. Just so we're on the same page, the right clients are recent high school graduates rushing into marriage. Get enough of them and you can start shopping at the nice mall.

All you need to start a photography business is the will to start and a couple of dollars in your pocket. Starting a philosophy business, now that's a different story.

The philosophy business has been in a bit of a downturn for about the last 80, 90 years with no end in sight. The big philosophy firms aren't hiring like they used to, most of the top philosophers have gone independent, and every year there's a whole crop of new philosophers coming out of America's liberal arts schools all ready to capture the essence of life in one simple metaphor.

Used to be a man could toss on his toga, bang out a few aphorisms or paradoxes, pocket some money and go hot the gruel house. I don't have to tell you how much it has changed. The modern public lacks a thirst for knowledge. They no longer question the great existential dilemmas of our time. What is the purpose of life? How does a man live his life? Do we make choices or are they thrust upon us by great unseen forces that live deep in the bowels of the internal combustion engine? Are there demons in my cereal?

People today don't care about these questions. Don't want the answers. You could stand in their living room all day shouting the answers to the great mysteries of life and writing theorems on the walls and, where you would once get praise and cherished looks of enlightenment and patronage and sexual favors,  now all you get is laughed at and asked to leave and shouted at and told to leave and screamed at and begged to leave and surrounded and pepper sprayed and brought to the station and questioned and told to take off your toga and admitted to the mental hospital and kept for evaluation and given pills and told to take them and told to obey and asked to remain calm and to keep back and to listen because this is your last warning and pepper sprayed again. And at the end of it all they hand you a bill.  A bill. They used to hand you offerings, burnt meat and the hearts of enemies. Now try getting the heart of an enemy after a good rhetoric. Even ask for one and they'll look at you like you're a crazy person.

It's like the whole world has gone mad.

Q: How do you get the smell of smoke out of your clothes?

A: That smell never comes out. You're better off throwing them away. I'll get a trash bag.

I'm really sorry I started that bonfire in your car. I really wasn't thinking. Well, I was thinking, but about making s'mores, not about setting your car on fire and ruining your clothes. Man, that was weird. I didn't even have any marshmallows. Or chocolate. Or Graham Crackers. Or sticks.

Don't worry. I have something you can wear. It's not like you're going to have to walk around my place naked.

Unless you want to.

Joking. I was joking. Totally joking. Unless you want to.

Joking. Seriously. I'll go get some clothes.

Really sorry about that fire. Good thing we happened to be right by house when your car caught on fire. That sure was lucky. But you said you always wanted to come over and hang out, or at least I imagined you saying it. It sounds like something you'd say.

There really aren't any cabs around here.

Anyway, it worked out that you're here, and we're alone, and I happen to have a box of wine chilling in the fridge, and I just got Irreversible from Netflix. You like foreign films, right?

Anyway, I think this sudden irrational car fire might just be one of those stories we tell our grandchildren. Not our grandchildren, of course. Not like you and I are going to make love and fall in love and have children and they'll have children and someday we'll watch those children and they'll ask how we met and we'll look into each other's eyes and kind of laugh, and smile, and smile with our eyes, you know, and we'll turn to them and kind of argue over who should tell the story and I'll say, "Well, I really wanted s'mores ..." I didn't mean anything like that. I meant we'd tell our own grandchildren, separately, if they ever ask us about setting a car on fire. That's what I meant. I was just joking about that other thing, about making love and spending the rest of our lives together.

Unless you want to.

Joking. Totally joking. These tears are part of the joke. I have a dry sense of humor.

Q: How many people in the US die from bear attacks a year?

A: Not enough. Not nearly enough. Last year there were 4. The year before, 3. That's it. More people die trying to catch foul balls at baseball games than are killed by bears each year.*

And that's the problem. With so few deaths each year, people fail to take bear attacks seriously. Bears are celebrated in this culture. Worshipped. You can't walk three blocks without seeing a T-Shirt with a cartoon bear, or a sports team named after a bear, or comic book featuring a crime solving bear in a suit who spends his weekends doing pro-bono work in family court.

Bears should not be worshipped or celebrated or even caricatured. They should be shot. Or stabbed. Or hit with a car. Whatever it takes.

So that you know I am not crazy, let me share a personal story. I used to have a son. I no longer have a son. He was killed by a bear. Bear attacks account for 100% of the deaths in my family.**

And yet no one seems to understand the terror of bear attack. They weren't there. They didn't see my little boy dripping honey, stuck in that wood cage, suspended in the forest, his eyes full of fear as he heard the bear approach. They didn't the bear ripping him apart with its teeth and claws, cracking his skull like some kind of giant, honey-glazed Cadbury egg. They couldn't hear his screams, his cries begging me for help, begging me to drop the camera and save him. No one saw it. And they still refuse to watch, despite all the time and money I have spent editing and scoring the video. I haven't even sold a single DVD.

What will it take for this nation to learn?


*Statistic possibly false.
** Not counting deaths by erotic asphyxiation. 

Q: What does CRNP after nurses name mean?

A: In most cases, it means Certified Registered Nurse Practitioner, a lot of fancy words that mean a nurse has been trained and tested and knows enough about medicine to not kill someone when inserting an IV. That's in most cases. My case is different.

Those letters after my name don't mean anything. There's no acronym to decode, no riddle to solve. They're just a name. My name.

My name is Nurse Lisa CRNP.

My father swore off vowels after a disastrous appearance on The Wheel of Fortune. You've probably seen it. He really wanted that ceramic dog. He never really got over it.  The dog, that is. And his disastrous loss on the show. Nearly every day after school I would wonder home to find my father staring at an empty spot on the carpet, petting an imaginary ceramic dog, muttering, "I'd like to solve the puzzle, Pat. I'd like to solve the puzzle, Pat."

It wasn't the best childhood.

When I was 8, my father swore off vowels and changed our name from Curniape to Crnp. When I was 12 he turned against uncapitalized letters, after a incident at work involving the New York Times crossword puzzle. My mother wouldn't let him touch my first or middle name. "Who'd want to marry someone named NRS LS CRNP?" she said, "Who'd want to take that in? She's got enough problems already, Dan, what with the homeliness and the odor and the vacant stare. Give her a chance."

I didn't overhear that conversation, by the way. She said all that in my presence. Frequently. She worked it into toasts. And birthday cards. And conversations with strangers. Saving my name was the defining moment of her life.

It meant a lot to her that I was called a nurse, even if I didn't become one. More consumed with title than accomplishment, my mother. She named my older brother Doctor and my younger one Noted Ladiesman. They work in meat.

She would have loved for me to actually become a nurse. But it wasn't meant to be. I don't test well. And I can't remember anything. And sick people are the worst. All the moaning and crying and soiling the sheets. Who wants to deal with that?

I'm only in this hospital because of the weather. Can't stand the rain. I'm only in your father's room because someone a doctor said, "Nurse, come with me." Once I realized he wanted an actual, trained nurse I had already been helping him for twenty minutes and was too embarrassed to say anything.  In his defense he was probably confused by my outfit. And my name tag. But I look great in white. And the name tag saves me from the crippling awkwardness of introductions.

Look at me, talking your ear off.

You'll have to excuse me. Your father had a lot more blood in him than I expected and I need to figure out how to get it back in before the doctor comes back. He seemed like kind of a neat freak.

Q: How were the nuclear reactors removed from the USS Nautilus during her restoration to museum status?

A: Here's the thing, and I hope you can keep this quiet. I don't want one word of this spreading to the other tour groups. Some of them can be pretty jumpy. But you folks look like the type who can keep a secret. Besides, tomorrow's my last day. It's not like they can do anything to me. Anyway, here's the thing:

We never removed the nuclear reactors. We painted them over with scenes of sea life. Apparently, that was enough. As long as no one said anything, we could call this thing a museum, place some stanchions out front and start charging admission.  Just so you don't think we were heartless, we paid attention to our guests, making sure that their flesh didn't start burning or their eyes didn't begin to glow luminescent in the dark passages. We take our jobs seriously here. Our business depends on repeat customers.

Can you imagine the conversations? "How was your visit to the USS Nautilius Museum?" "Well, my hair tuned green, my skin broke out in volcano sized boils and the baby melted." "So nothing from the gift shop?" Who would want to come back? No one. That's why we keep a careful eye on every guest who wanders near the reactor and why we monitor the integrity of the ship every six months to make sure no radioactive material has leaked out.

We would monitor it more frequently, but most of the inspectors wind up rather deformed. Most of them, anyway. The rest wind up rather dead. Hard position to fill, as you can imagine.

That concludes our tour.  On your way out, please visit our gift shop. I recommend one of our glow-in-the-the-dark dolls. Just make sure you keep them away from food and children.