“It is foolishness to assume that times past were better than the present.”
A post full of melancholy to match the gray and rain.
(1) Lyrics from The Lumineers:
The glow of Hollywood signs
They sold you a bridge
They fed you the lines (they fed you to lions)
You always confused your servants for friends
But you couldn’t see how it ends
It’s all or nothing to you
(1a) Piano snippet for a rainy day
(1b) “The spiritually unmoored become dominated by the latest ideas, “tossed by waves and swept along by every wind of teaching arising from human trickery (Eph 4:14), but “those who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received a spirit of adoption, through which we cry, ‘Abba, Father!'” (Rom 8:15-16)†.
(2) Sad ending for Aqueduct on Long Island: NYC’s Last Horse Racing Track is Closing Forever (YouTube)
(3) A quote from the movie Shadowlands:
I have no answers anymore, only the life I have lived.
Twice in that life…
I’ve been given the choice:
As a boy…
and as a man.
The boy chose safety.
The man chooses suffering.
The pain now is part of the happiness then.
That’s the deal.
The soundtrack from George Fenton is beautiful.
(4) Quote from Shampoo Planet by Douglas Coupland:
“Later, as you get to be my age, you will see your friends begin to die, to lose their memories, to see their skins turn wrinkled and sick. You will see the effects of dark secrets making themselves known — via their minds and bodies and via the stories your friends — yes, Harmony, Gaia, Mei-lin, Davidson, and the rest — will begin telling you at three-thirty in the morning as you put iodine on their bruises, arrange for tetanus shots, dial 911, and listen to them cry. The only payback for all of this — for the conversion of their once-young hearts into tar — will be that you will love your friends more, even though they have made you see the universe as an emptier and scarier place— and they will love you more, too. Zero balance (a getcracking term from the KittyWhip® manual).”
†Magnificat June 2005 Vol. 27, No. 4