First, Oprah. Now, bed bugs. Stop the madness!

I see Oprah is calling it quits soon, and then where does our nation go for leadership? There’s only so much Judge Judy can do alone.

“My pits are moist,” the little guy tells me the other day.

“Whose aren’t?” I tell him.

By the way, the little guy and his teammates did seminal work in their first soccer contest of the season, thanks for asking. Afterward, we gathered for snacks and a postgame chat. Everyone seemed to enjoy that part. By “enjoy,” I mean everybody put up with it even if they had better things to do. So much of life is like that.

My favorite part of a postgame chat is when I open the floor to questions from the players, who are 7. Let me note that they are fast becoming mini-men. But when you hug them, they still burp.

“OK, any questions or comments?” I ask.

“Before the game, you should always have a healthy breakfast,” one of them says.

“Excellent point,” I say.

“And you can have something sweet, just not too much,” chimes in a teammate, who then burps.

Strangely, no one brings up Oprah’s departure, which has been weighing heavily on all of us for months now. You can’t just ignore such things and hope they’ll go away.

Or what about the problems the country is suddenly having with bed bugs? I lie awake at night just waiting for something to bite me. So far nothing. As a rule, nothing good ever happens to me in a bed.

Like you, when all else fails, I lose myself in literature. The other day, I was reading “It’s Not Easy Being a Bunny,” a novel recommended by the little guy, who has some 400,000 children’s books in his bedroom alone. Then there are 800,000 more just lying all over everywhere. Honestly, you could build an ark.

“What do you want to read?” I ask.

“Hmmm, this one,” he says, handing me a book with big bunny on the cover.

“Oh, Tolstoy,” I say.

Turns out it isn’t Tolstoy at all but, rather, this Marilyn Sadler, sort of the poor man’s Tolstoy. In “It’s Not Easy Being a Bunny,” she’s created a protagonist who is struggling with the standard existential questions you see so much of in great literature: What does life mean? Where do I park? Will there be an open bar? That sort of stuff.

To add to the bunny’s sense of middle-aged ennui, his mother makes him eat cooked carrots EVERY DAY! He also has too many brothers and sisters. “It’s Not Easy Being a Bunny” is bereft of plot but long on character development and big, goofy illustrations of beavers.

In the end, after tiny pockets of personal discovery, P.J. the bunny decides he does not want to be a pig or a moose or a possum or even a skunk. What he really wants to be — after all that — is a bunny.

So he hurries home, where the other bunnies welcome him with open bunny arms, which are stubby and not all that inviting. If I remember correctly, Fitzgerald and Roth dealt with a lot of these same themes, particularly the complexities of family in a post-industrial society.

“What would you like to be?” I ask the little guy when we are done.

“A penguin,” he says, and I can see right away that the book made a big impression.

If you belong to a book club, or even if you don’t, I heartily recommend “It’s Not Easy Being a Bunny.” “I Wish That I Had Duck Feet” is another can’t-fail selection, a mystical reflection on the advantages of webbed toes in a weary and occasionally dejected world.

Did I mention Oprah was leaving?

To help cope, we’ll all be jetting off to the Middle West soon to comfort the little girl, who they tell me is back in college, where she is studying what blends best with rum, what goes well with vodka, that sort of thing.

“Like she couldn’t pick that up at home?” I ask my wife Posh.

“You were always too busy,” she says.

Yep, back we’re going to the heartland, which we’ve come to think of as our own private Caribbean island. The natives are so friendly, and almost no one bothers us there. If you’re looking for someplace to completely disappear, I’d recommend northern Indiana.

From what I hear, bed bugs haven’t become a major issue there yet, and the food is poetry on a plate — a hamburger-based cuisine heavy on all parts of the cow.

Excited? Who wouldn’t be? I think my pits might be moist.

chris.erskine@latimes.com