I was preparing to leave when I spotted an album with a wonderful title: "More Songs About Buildings and Food." You will probably already know who it was by--I didn't. The Talking Heads. As I stopped to admire it, I was gripped by melancholy, similar perhaps to the feeling a certain kind of man gets while sitting with his wife on a train platform as a beautiful girl--different in all aspects from his wife--walks by. There goes my other life. Is it too late to get into the Talking Heads? Do I have the time? What kind of person would I be if I knew this album at all, or well?

--Zadie Smith, My Epiphany About Joni Mitchell

BEHOLD, THE NEW JERUSALEM!

But make no mistake: Change is a motherfucker when you run from it. And right now, the conservative movement in America is fleeing from dramatic change that is certain and immutable. A man of color is president for the second time, and this happened despite a struggling economic climate and a national spirit of general discontent. He has been returned to office over the specific objections of the mass of white men. He has instead been re-elected by women, by people of color, by homosexuals, by people of varying religions or no religion whatsoever. Behold the New Jerusalem. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a white man, of course. There’s nothing wrong with being anything. That’s the point.

--David Simon, Inevitabilities and Barack Obama

“I am, and ever will be, a white socks, pocket protector, nerdy engineer,” he said in February 2000 in a rare public appearance. “And I take a substantial amount of pride in the accomplishments of my profession.” 

--Neil Armstrong Obituary

A LIST OF THINGS MY FAMILY SAYS SCARED ME AS A CHILD

1. E.T.
2. The Bert and Ernie segment in which mummies come back to life but only Ernie can tell
3. Fireworks
4. Trains
5. Balloons
6. Chuck-E-Cheese
7. An audiotape of "Humpty-Dumpty"

THEY'RE JUST GOING TO BE GOOD

DAVIES: ...Do you have a sense of yourself over the next 20 years? I mean, you've certainly got an active career now.

EPHRON: You absolutely don't know. The next 20 years, we're talking about 85. This is just a crapshoot. This is a lottery. Who knows? So I feel - I don't think about the next 20 years. I think about today. So today, I have already been to a bakery. This is the thing that I'm obsessed with, is carbohydrates.

I feel that I'm now living in an age where there's the best bread we have ever had in the history of the world. There has never been more bread that is good out there. So it seems to me a shame not to eat some of it, even if - and this is one of the terrible dilemmas of old age. You know, do you save all your money as if you're going to live till you're 90, or do you spend it all because you might die tomorrow?

Do you diet like a fanatic in the hopes that it's going to buy you a couple of extra years, or is it going to have nothing to do - are you going to be hit by a bus, and your last thought will be: I should have had that donut?

And it's very confusing to know what to do, but I'm coming down on the donut side.

DAVIES: Yeah.

EPHRON: So I feel that, you know, that's one of the things - I'm not so into 20 years. I'm kind of into: Is this meal I'm having something I really want to have? And if someone says to me let's go somewhere and it's not good, I say let's not. Let's not, because I have a finite number of meals ahead of me, and they are all going to be good.

DAVIES: You're going to make them count.

EPHRON: They're just going to be good. That's the truth.

--Dave Davies interviews Nora Ephron

SUM SUM SUMMA TIME

I've been doing the same for almost a full week now.

Vacations with my parents, though wonderful, give me too much time to think (see: Alaska 2008, Florida 2012).

Nine more weeks of school then--?

DAVEY SIMON GETS IT

"It's so fucked up," he says. "You know what I'm saying? Does everybody else see how fucked up it is? Does anyone else see that? Do normal people see something like this and get pissed off?"

--David Simon, Homicide

See also.