Ex-Blondie singer Deborah Harry, who played a solo show here in Orange County last night, is 62 years old . . .

Will you come to see me Jack
     When I’m old and very shaky?
Yes I will for you’re my dad
     And you’ve lost your last old lady
     Though you traveled very far
To the highlands and the badlands
     And ripped off the family car
Still, old dad, I won’t forsake you.

Will you come to see me Jack?
     Though I’m really not alone.
Still I’d like to see my boy
     For we’re lonesome for our own.
     Yes I will for you’re my dad
Though you dumped me and my brothers
     And you sizzled down the road
Loving other fellows’ mothers.

Will you come to see me Jack?
     Though I look like time boiled over.
Growing old is not a lark.
     Yes I will for you’re my dad
     Though we never saw a nickel
As we struggled up life’s ladder
     I will call you and together
We will cuddle up and see
     What the weather’s like in Key West
On the old-age home TV.

— Grace Paley, “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute”

I adjure you by the gods, cease to admire material things, cease to make yourselves slaves, first of things, and next, for their sake, of men who can acquire them or take them away.

— EPICTETUS, Discourses, Book III, Ch. 20

When we moved recently, having to pick up everything we own and transport it from Point A to Point B confirmed something I’d long suspected, which is that we’ve accumulated way too much junk and clutter in our lives.

And if I were to walk away from here with nothing but the clothes I’m wearing, how much of it would I really miss?

Answer: Not much.

I’ve come to think of marriage less as a way to spend your life with someone you love, and more as a way to have someone to blame for your life turning out the way it did . . .

From wnbc.com: Even More Famous Women: How They’ve Aged

It’s a photo slideshow. My comment after viewing it:

LUCY (kneeling and looking at the ground): Look at those stupid bugs … They don’t have the slightest idea as to what is going on in this world.

CHARLIE BROWN: What is going on in this world?

LUCY: I don’t have the slightest idea.

The most pernicious aspect of procrastination is that it can become a habit. We don’t just put off our lives today; we put them off till our deathbed.

Never forget: This very moment, we can change our lives. There never was a moment, and never will be, when we are without the power to alter our destiny.

— Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

From xkcd:

I came up with a new game-show idea recently. It’s called The Old Game. You got three old guys with loaded guns onstage. They look back at their lives, see who they were, what they accomplished, how close they came to realizing their dreams. The winner is the one who doesn’t blow his brains out. He gets a refrigerator.

— Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

You didn’t come into this life just to sit around on a dugout bench, did ya? Now get your ass out there and do the best you can.

— Morris Buttermaker

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

— George Santayana

“Is that a fact?” she said. “Well–I’ve got news for Mr. Santayana: we’re doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That’s what it is to be alive. It’s pretty dense kids who haven’t figured that out by the time they’re ten.”

“Santayana was a famous philosopher at Harvard,” said Slazinger, a Harvard man.

And Mrs. Berman said, “Most kids can’t afford to go to Harvard to be misinformed.”

— Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard

What is the point of this story?
What information pertains?
The thought that life could be better
Is woven indelibly
Into our hearts
And our brains.

— Paul Simon, “Train in the Distance”

I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily . . . and threw them out the window in disgust.

— Henry David Thoreau, Walden

That book made a powerful impression on me. After reading it, I decided that I, like Thoreau, would travel light along the road of life, and stop dragging so much useless junk around with me.

Unfortunately, that was almost 20 years ago and I still haven’t been able to carry it off.

Not yet, anyway.

But I still think the concept is valid . . .

I was at the corporate office of a well-known company here in Irvine yesterday when I saw the name “Tim Jones” on one of the offices.

“Hmmm,” I thought, “I used to work with a Tim Jones [not his real name] about 20 years ago. I wonder if it’s the same guy?”

The door was closed, but I was able to peep through the glass as I walked by and saw what looked to be Tim Jones’ grandfather.

It’s amazing how Tim Jones has fallen apart over the last 20 years while I myself have not aged a single day . . .

How I thought it worked was, if you were great, like Martin Luther King Jr., you had a dream. Since I wasn’t great, I figured I had no dream and the best I could do was follow someone else’s. Now I believe it works like this: It’s having the dream that makes you great. It’s the dream that produces the greatness.

— Barbara Waugh

Things I’m thankful for this year:

1. Nothing lasts forever.

But in Old Rimrock, New Jersey, in 1995, when the Ivan Ilyches come trooping back to lunch at the clubhouse after their morning round of golf and start to crow, “It doesn’t get any better than this,” they may be a lot closer to the truth than Leo Tolstoy ever was.

 

The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that — well, lucky you.

 

He had learned the worst lesson life can teach — that it makes no sense. And when that happens the happiness is never spontaneous again. It is artificial and, even then, bought at the price of an obstinate estrangement from oneself and one’s history.

 

This is how successful people live. They’re good citizens. They feel lucky. They feel grateful. God is smiling down on them. There are problems, they adjust. And then everything changes and it becomes impossible. Nothing is smiling down on anybody. And who can adjust then?

 

Here is someone not set up for life’s working out poorly, let alone for the impossible. But who is set up for the impossible that is going to happen? Who is set up for tragedy and the incomprehensibility of suffering? Nobody. The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy — that is every man’s tragedy.

 

The students in her class at Montessori school were asked ten questions about their “philosophy,” one a week. The first week the teacher asked, “Why are we here?” Instead of writing as the other kids did — here to do good, here to make the world a better place, etc. — Merry answered with her own question: “Why are apes here?” But the teacher found this an inadequate response and told her to go home and think about the question more seriously — “Expand on this,” the teacher said. So Merry went home and did as she was told and the next day handed in an additional sentence: “Why are kangaroos here?” It was at this point that Merry was first informed by a teacher that she had a “stubborn streak.”

 

The final question assigned to the class was “What is life?” Merry’s answer was something her father and mother chuckled over together that night. According to Merry, while the other students labored busily away with their phony deep thoughts, she — after an hour of thinking at her desk — wrote a single, unplatitudinous declarative sentence: “Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive.” “You know,” said the Swede, “it’s smarter then it sounds. She’s a kid — how has she figured out that life is short? She is somethin’, our precocious daughter. This girl is going to Harvard.” But once again the teacher didn’t agree, and she wrote beside Merry’s answer, “Is that all?” Yes, the Swede thought now, that is all. Thank God, that is all; even that is unendurable.

 

“You talk about what I’m dealing with as though anybody could deal with it. But nobody could deal with it. Nobody! Nobody has the weapons for this. You think I’m inept? You think I’m inadequate? If I’m inadequate, where are you going to get people who are adequate . . . if I’m . . . do you understand what I’m saying? What am I supposed to be? What are other people if I am inadequate?”

[S]tories hold power because they convey the illusion that life has purpose and direction. Where God is absent from the lives of all but the most blessed, the writer, of all people, replaces that ordering principle. Stories make sense when so much around us is senseless, and perhaps what makes them most comforting is that, while life goes on and pain goes on, stories do us the favor of ending.

— John Hodgman

Let’s begin this typical courtship process, shall we?