There are, in the course of a river of jokes, ways to misdirect your audience so that what they think is the punch line was actually a line to the hors d’oeuvres. Or a line to the bathroom.

At my age, I have played roles that featured in bad office Christmas parties (walking in on the guy who just vomited all over the hotel lobby bathroom floor) and business training videos (hosting an international meeting on my cell phone, making sure we were all respectful of cultural nuances in conversation, while I was sitting a few feet from the family waiting for me to join them for a sumptuous Christmas dinner).

What I have discovered is that…well, what have I discovered?

First, there was little reward besides a comfortably stuffy office environment, great healthcare coverage and worldwide travel expense accounts for working in an office job. I only had to pretend to be a serious grown up for a number of years to reap my reward.

But then I got bored with the ways of the Jedi boss adult.

Ultimately, I found the whole acting job just that — a big act.

The people I met in upper management were focused on goals I did not desire, such as bigger house/car/vacation/empire/recognition/influence. Some were moving along their paths of perceived destiny in the world playground, simply finding more interesting things to talk about, looking forward rather than repeating their past mistakes and triumphs.

If all of us are acting, then I am going to act the part of the laughing hermit who wasn’t good enough to die young and goes on talking to himself here to verify his theory that all else is illusion until my babbling becomes completely incoherent and I die at an old age of natural causes, everything being natural, of course.