“Not caring about things since 1971, so that you don’t have to.”
7. Football – Be bigger. Run full speed into other high-schoolers, fall down. College for a year. Go pro. Get paid insane stacks before you’re twenty-three. Have creepy old men interview you in a towel, scribble down your answers. Buy a McMansion, marry a stripper, start a charity you don’t even know the name of. Knees ache. Get cut, get re-signed. Act badly at party, retire. Card shows.
6. Employees washing their hands before returning to work – Way overrated.
5. Your prescription pill memoir – Granted, slightly more interesting than your booze memoir.
4. The new Jack White – Sorta like the old Jack White: curdled vocals over half a Son House riff, and then some new distortion effect. Bitch about being ripped off by the Black Keys, which is like bitching about being ripped off by Phil Spector’s wig.
Don’t even think of asking for my autograph or Meg is gonna lay on top of you until the seventh inning stretch.
3. Netflix on Apple TV – Eighty percent of the movies in your queue aren’t available for streaming. Aside from House of Cards not arriving as four separate discs and begrudgingly watching random episodes of your wife’s doctor show, what was the point again?
2. ISIS being called ISIL or Islamic State or EIIL or Daesh – Pick a name already and stick with it, I’m still getting Bosnia and Herzegovina straight. Lynne Cheney suggests an acronym for “drone meat”.
1. What Jenny McCarthy has to say about anything, but particularly authoritatively debunked anti-vaccinationist propaganda – A peroxide Typhoid Mary whose line of ignorant pap has brought Whooping Cough back to a elementary school near you. Also, never read anything in Lancet.
Those glasses aren’t for reading the teleprompter, they’re for Extra Smart.
speaking of staying alive longer, as your title does, this week i read and viewed roz chast’s book “can’t we talk about something more pleasant?”
as the book points out, and as i have observed with some relatives, there’s such a thing as long life, and such a thing as too-long life
roger landry’s book “live long, die short” is applicable here – i’ve read it earlier this year – it’s good
less well known than the buddha’s five contemplations (you can’t avoid old age, sickness or death, you’ll change and be separated from all you love, you reap what you sow) but covering the same ground, albeit from a blatantly theistic perspective, is
OLD AGE Rumi
Why does a date-palm lose its leaves in autumn?
Why does every beautiful face grow in old age
Wrinkled like the back of a Libyan lizard?
Why does a full head of hair get bald?
Why is it that the lion’s strength weakens to nothing?
The wrestler who could hold anyone down
Is led out with two people supporting him,
Their shoulders under his arms?
God answers,
“They put on borrowed robes
And pretended they were theirs.
I take the beautiful clothes back,
So that you will learn the robe
Of appearance is only a loan.”
Your lamp was lit from another lamp.
All God wants is your gratitude for that.