[Image: “The Sign Guys Were Feeling Larky,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) This is just the latest in a series of photos I’ve posted on Instagram tagged #jesstorypix, each photo accompanied by a caption telling a sort of microfiction about what the photo might (in my imagination) show. This one’s caption reads: “Once every year, the fellas down in the municipal sign shop followed a tradition: they made up one sign which made no sense, and placed it on a random sign pole somewhere in town. By consensus, their favorite was the one in the middle of the bridge over North Creek. It’d been there since 1987 and still confused the bejeezus out of people who’d never noticed it before.”]
Our anonymous friend over at whiskey river seems to have aging on their mind:
Aging is peculiar, I don’t think you should be lied to about it. You have a moment of relevancy — when the books, clothes, bars, technology – when everything is speaking directly to you, expressing you exactly. You move toward the edge of the circle and then you’re abruptly outside the circle. Now what to do with that? Do you stay, peering backward? Or do you walk away?
(Stephanie Danler [source])
…which post predated the following by just a few days:
“There will come a time,” I said, “when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this”—I gestured encompassingly—“will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was a time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be a time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.”
(John Green [source])
I guess someone, somewhere in what we (sometimes laughably) call The Civilized World, someone must not be thinking at all about aging… Monologuist, erstwhile radio host, practically professional nostalgist Garrison Keillor turns 80 later this year, and the gods know he’s been all but obsessing about the experience recently. E.g.:
I was having a hard time falling asleep the other night because I’d thought of something that I was afraid of forgetting if I fell asleep, which was keeping me awake, not that it was the sort of timeless thing you see printed on coffee cups sold in bookstores, like “Hope is the thing with feathers” or the one Thoreau said about confidently pursuing your dreams, which now I forget the rest of…
In retirement, as I say, my nocturnal life has blossomed into extensive dreams, pastoral epics in which I am a great sailor, an artist, a standup comic, a race car driver, a ballet dancer — dreams of competence and authority — and the other night (I am now getting back to what I started to say in the first paragraph) I dreamed that I had written a perfect limerick and in my dream I was afraid that if I fell asleep I’d forget it, but in my dream I was arguing with myself and thinking, “You’re awake” and the conflict, knowing that my sleep self was wrong, that I was sleeping, woke me up, and I sat down and wrote the limerick, about the famous podcaster Phoebe Judge, host of “Criminal,” which everyone except me (I?) has heard, but I refuse to hear podcasts because earbuds look funny on me, and the challenge was to not use the rhyme “heebie-jeebie.”
A girl who loves radio, Phoebe,
Has AM and FM and CB,
And plays them proudly,
Constantly, loudly,
At 370 dB,
And when she was caught
She fired a shot
At the cops with her personal BB,
And when she turned deaf
She shouted the F-
Word that’s not found in Mister White, E.B.It is a perfect limerick, not that this is the solution to our national dilemmas, but the limerick is one enterprise in which perfection is possible, and that is why I keep returning to it. I look back at my life and I see a series of sinking ships and gunshot wounds in my feet, but “A girl who loves radio, Phoebe” is right up there with the five or six perfect ones I’ve written. This column is not perfect. It strikes me as somewhat disorganized and scattered, but, as I say so often, it is what it is. Someday I’ll write about that.
(Garrison Keillor [source])
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