I wouldn’t consider myself a hard-core Frank Sinatra fan, only buying a couple of his albums back when that was what one did in order to listen to music at home. But there are some of his songs that enriched my young adult existence. I bonded with them and I can’t imagine anyone singing them better.
It almost goes without saying that my favorite of his albums would be a collection of songs of longing. Music well-suited to someone with a melancholic disposition. A soundtrack for suffering with themes like Oh I’m so lonely or I’ve just been dumped again or Where is my perfect person? … you know the drill.
And that album would be “Only the Lonely.” One excellent hymn to sorrow after another, served up with Frank’s perfectly matched vocals and backed up by Nelson Riddle’s orchestral arrangements.
The record came out in 1958 and is still timely. Turns out heartbreak is always in fashion, and comfort is always a need.
Ay ay ay … just thinking about it I can hear a certain twenty-ish angst-filled man pacing in a basement apartment somewhere in my memory. Memories of nights with this record on a turntable, on repeat play.
Maybe I am a fan after all … Type 2.b, perhaps.
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From The New Yorker archives
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The dermatologist uses his sternest voice:You know, you should have come to see me about this lump on your arm a long time ago. This time it was a treatable problem, but not every skin lesion can be safely ignored. Some of them can kill you.
The elderly patient chuckles: Doctor, when you are my age everything is trying to kill you. The cars of impatient drivers leap at you at crosswalks. Every new infectious disease that comes to town has your name at the top of its list. All of your organs are hovering on that thin line between just being able to do their job and failing. Your heart and your brain are filled with plaqued-up and narrowed blood vessels that could plug up at any minute and that will be the end of your story.
All of us run a gauntlet between dangerous things all of our lives, but when you get very old, you slow down.You slow down, but those dangerous things do not lose one bit of their vitality. They are just as swift as ever, which means that the odds of one of them catching you go up rather steeply.
So I know that I should have come in earlier and I am grateful that what I have is something you can treat. But it was never the only threat out there I had to worry about. Only one of many.
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From The New Yorker archives
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David Brooks is a thoughtful man, which makes him quite an outlier in today’s raucous social and political scene. He’s also an aging white male, which positively marks him as someone to be ignored, because that makes him a member of a group that is being held responsible for everything that is bad in the world.
But let’s keep our minds open, shall we, and allow for the possibility that this old dude might say something worth thinking about.
More of us have to embrace an idea, a way of thinking that is fundamental to being a citizen in a democracy. That idea is known as value pluralism. It’s most associated with the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin and is based on the premise that the world doesn’t fit neatly together. We all want to pursue a variety of goods, but unfortunately, these goods can be in tension with one another. For example, we may want to use government to make society more equal, but if we do, we’ll have to expand state power so much that it will impinge on some people’s freedom, which is a good we also believe in. … these kinds of tensions are common in our political lives: loyalty to a particular community versus universal solidarity with all humankind; respect for authority versus individual autonomy; social progress versus social stability
Brooks, David: The Cure For What Ails Our Democracy
So why would I even bother to read his Op/Ed and recommend it to you? Well, there are several reasons, actually.
- He’s way smarter than I am
- He loves this hot mess of a country
- He refuses to make each social or policy question a matter of black vs. white, but finds the world to be everywhere shaded, and no one has all the truth on their side
- When on a televised panel he is invariably polite and respectful to everyone else, even the dolts
- He never yells at other panelists, and lets them finish their thoughts before offering his own
It’s difficult to see how we could get to the place he describes, but I agree with him that it is essential if we are to begin to get out of this poisonous stew we’re in.
I really hate to admit that, because it will mean that I have to lighten up on my strong tendency to use sarcasm and my assumption that I have always been and will always be right about everything … but, hey, if it means that the noise quiets down … might be worth it.
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Just finished a massive housekeeping chore. I was running out of storage space on WordPress with hundreds of posts going back six years or so. Those tunes and photos and videos took up a bit of room. The next step would have been to move up to what was essentially a commercial-sized cloud parking area.
Time had caught up with me because I didn’t follow my own prescribed path. When I originally thought about writing this thing, my idea was to keep it short and sweet, and delete old posts periodically. Even in my most narcissistic moments I realized that there was nothing I was going to say that was worth preserving for very long. Truth is, I traffic in ephemera. Each blog entry is a pebble dropped into a pond which causes a small ripple that spreads out and eventually disappears.
So over the past several days I took down about 500 old posts and everything that went with them as I repeatedly pressed the delete key. Needed to be done.
I feel ten pounds lighter.
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Little Home In The Valley 