One of my favorite songs is Slit Skirts, by Pete Townshend. It begins with
I was just 34 years old and I was still wandering in a haze
I was wondering why everyone I met seemed like they were lost in a mazeI don’t know why I thought I should have some kind of divine right to the blues
It’s sympathy not tears people need when they’re the front page sad news.
I turned 35 today, so I can now look back on that song fondly, in my decrepitude.
Cartoonist and painter William Stout offers some advice for living well. (Thanks, Tom!)
Also, here’s a passage from the book I’m reading, Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities:
[I]t is understandable that men who were young in the 1920’s were captivated by the vision of the freeway Radiant City, with the specious promise that it would be appropriate to an automobile age. At least it was then a new idea; to men of the generation of New York’s Robert Moses, for example, it was radical and exciting in the days when their minds were growing and their ideas forming. Some men tend to cling to old intellectual excitements, just as some belles, when they are old ladies, still cling to the fashions and coiffures of their exciting youth. But it is harder to understand why this form of arrested mental development should be passed on intact to succeeding generations of planners and designers. It is disturbing to think that men who are young today, men who are being trained now for their careers, should accept on the grounds that they must be “modern” in their thinking, conceptions about cities and traffic which are not only unworkable, but also to which nothing new of any significance has been added since their fathers were children.
At which point Springsteen’s New York City Serenade starts playing, and I feel like I’m going to have a wonderful birthday.