The Old Fools by Philip Larkin What do they think has happened, the old fools, To make them like this? Do they somehow suppose It’s more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools, And you keep on pissing yourself, and can’t remember Who called this morning? Or that, if they only chose, They could […]
Archive for the ‘Future’ category
Thank you, and good night
It was September 10, 2001 and this guy Bill who I found aloof and brittle but who served as a makeshift friend during a pretty lousy year asked if I wanted to go see Laurie Anderson the next evening. As you may have heard, some shit went down the next morning, and we both decided […]
Notes from Downtown
Not too long after those marches we went to in DC that so effectively stopped the war in Iraq, a friend of mine said one of those sentences that got pasted on my brain like a bumper sticker*. “Chanting in unison,” he said, “makes me ambivalent about, oh, just about everything.” I had felt this […]
Comparative Freedom
I have often wondered where I got my inability to understand the unspoken expectations of authority. For a while I figured there was some kind of cognitive gap right in the part of the brain that might do that; it feels almost like a mechanical failure. Of course it’s almost certainly the fault of radical […]
Old
My parents are only in their early 70s…not so old, right? Two weeks of vacation with parent 1 and then parent 2 brought me face to face with the brutal reality of our immortality. Actually, I don’t think it’s the immortality that worries me. It’s the aging. Mother has always been a challenge. Apparently, as […]
Having a baby changes everything
“Not having kids is making aging confusing.” This was a friend’s status update. It jolted me to read it. In fact, I’m not sure how he intended it, but it took me back immediately to this documentary I watched in grad school, Daddy & Papa, about gay couples adopting kids. Now, I’ve never wanted kids. […]
I believe that children are our future. This is not a good thing.
I had to watch in 1-minute intervals and I missed a lot of it because the part of my brain that processes language would periodically blow a fuse out of some self-preservation instinct and I would stop understanding the words. If you can watch the whole thing at a stretch without dying of vicarious embarrassment, […]
What is it you want?
After the ball was over, after the break of morn, after the dancers’ leaving, after the stars were gone…it was about forty eight hours before I read my first piece of Internet verbiage about how the goal of marriage is an assimilationist one and how saddened the writer was to have her queerness coöpted. And […]
Yea or Nay?
1. Fingertoe shoes: Orthopedically sensational invention that cool people wear? Or fashion disaster? 2. X-Men: Moving allegory for discrimination in our nation’s history? Or goofy comic-book franchise? 3. Anthony Weiner: Resign? Or stay? 4. Lance Armstrong: Doper? Or unfairly maligned champion? 5. Edible gift for Father’s Day? Or… a tie?:
