On his 68th birthday, Kevin Kelly offers 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice from Kevin Kelly. My two favorites:
“You are what you do. Not what you say, not what you believe, not how you vote, but what you spend your time on.”
“When crisis and disaster strike, don’t waste them. No problems, no progress.”
This is in my future. I’ve got an electric clipper on the way but I might have a go at this first. How hard can it be?
This might be the best subject line ever. There was some kind of Kim Jung Un meme going around on Google+ back in the day and I created the image above to send to my friend in Bisbee, AZ. He recently resurrected it and it went viral (in Bisbee) under the subject line: “Un Dead?”
“New York’s Chrysler Building, one of the city’s most iconic skyscrapers, was built in a remarkably short time–foundation work began in November 1928, and the building officially opened in May 1930. Even more remarkably, the steelwork went up in just six months in the summer of 1929 at an average rate of four floors a week.
Fox Movietone’s sound cameras visited the construction site several times in 1929 and 1930, staging a number of shots to maximize viewers’ sense of the spectacular heights.”
“According to scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, there is only one word in existence that’s the same in every language, and that word is ‘huh’. By recording segments of informal language from across five continents, the scientists have revealed that the world ‘huh’ is the same in 31 different languages, making it the most universally understood term in the world.”
“The researchers have suggested that the reason ‘huh’ is the only word to have spontaneously adopted the same meaning in almost every language is because there is no other word that is capable of filling its place. According to the study, ‘huh’ is the only word capable of stating that there is a problem, signaling that it has to do with a lack of knowledge and asking for a response without being aware of what that response may be.”
We are the sum of what we stuff in rented storage units. I’m considering renting one and leaving it empty.
I started keeping track of consecutive days on the (meditation) cushion on December 4, 2014. As of today, May 31, 2019, I’ve missed just two of the last 1,638 days. Today is the 1,000th consecutive day on the cushion. The only day that really counts, of course, is today. But I’ve found that logging my meditation practice helps me be consistent, something I do every day. And I can’t think of anything else I’ve done every day for 1,000 days.
I look forward to my daily meditation. I average 45 minutes a day but time really seems to stand still. One of my favorite things about the practice.
I don’t wear cologne but have an idea for a line of “manly scents.”
When people ask my age, I’ll tell them “65 Plus.” After 65, nobody cares how old you are. Media rating services like Arbitron and Nielson have nice, easy-to-remember categories…that stop at 65. So no more birthdays. I’m 65+. It’s really the last age that matters. (Medicare, Social Security, etc)
I’ve reached the age where contemporaries start dying. God’s mortar shells landing ever closer. John D. MacDonald described it best in Pale Gray for Guilt.
“Picture a very swift torrent, a river rushing down between rocky walls. There is a long, shallow bar of sand and gravel that runs right down the middle of the river. It is under water. You are born and you have to stand on that narrow, submerged bar, where everyone stands. The ones born before you, the ones older than you, are upriver from you. The younger one stand braced on the bar downriver. And the whole long bar is slowly moving down that river of time, washing away at the upstream end and building up downstream.
It’s hard to be part of the 65+ demo and not have a sense of your own mortality. I like Scott Adams’ take.
“…we’re a simulated (programmed) world left behind by advanced humanoids that shed their bodies billions of years ago. Our simulated world is the closest they could come to immortality. They were romantics, much like ourselves, and couldn’t stand the thought of being separated from their loved ones for eternity. So in our programmed little world, when we feel a special connection to another, it’s because we knew that person when we were real, and the program allows us to feel it again as if new. Thus, when you meet your soul mate, it is a reunion of sorts. And it will happen over and over, in each subsequent life the program provides for you.”
But Paul Simon said it best for my money.
“The land where Salisbury is now located was first owned by Prior Bibo, a veteran of the War of 1812, in the late 1820s. A tract of 320 acres was granted to Bibo by the U.S. government as a bonus for his military service. Following two intermediate owners, the land was sold for $400 to Judge Lucius Salisbury in 1856. He had surveyors lay out the town plat in 1857, and the town was founded on April 1, 1867. The city has had a post office since 1863, when Judge Salisbury opened it in his home. He also ran the stagecoach stop from his business, known as “Shop-A-While.” (Wikipedia)