“A doctor to whom I occasionally talk suggest that I have made an inadequate adjustment to aging. Wrong, I want to say. In fact I have made no adjustment whatsoever to aging. In fact I had lived my entire life to date without seriously believing that I would age.” Joan Didion (Blue Nights)
“We have enough youth. How about a fountain of smart?” (Unknown)
Tempus Fugit…time flies…how much we are caught up in seeking youth, fitness, mental harmony, peace of mind, forgiveness. All well in good, but as we try to transform ourselves and get caught up in those processes, time flies ever faster. Life can pass us by as we work too hard, stress too hard, attempt to transform ourselves too hard. From the fountain of truth: forget the youth…live everyday as if it’s your last, because you will surely come to realize that years have flown by as you tinkered or toiled away at some nebulous otherly you.
SwittersB & Exploring 
if you are of a certain age and worked in manly-man jobs you spent time around some very hard people. they had survived the depression, fought in wars and each other. they didn’t snivel. they weren’t particularly “sensitive” but by and large they were good people.
a friend of my dad’s took me under his wing early on. he was a first-rate drunk (alcoholics were @#%&^s in a program), meaner than billy hell and a better workman than ninety percent of his peers. he said I wasn’t much more than a longhairedhippyfaggotfreak (yes, that’s one word) and there wasn’t much he could do for me but he’d do what he could.
so for two years he bailed me from my misadventures and I drove him when he couldn’t. one afternoon I foolishly asked if it wouldn’t be better to stop drinking. his response was “SCROOM!’. he was what he was and he wasn’t going to change. he was in his sixties then. doing more than I could ( I was probably nineteen or so).
shortly after that the crew was passing a jug around after miserable summer day (I got to drink a soda because most of these guys liked or were afraid of my dad). bud was holding court and decided to expand on his original comment..” i’m having a good time. i’m not hurting anyone..so scroom if they can’t take a joke. hell, scroom anyway”.
he was a tougher than a boiled owl, lived into his eighties and until a doctor and his daughter convinced him to give up Falstaff for breakfast and hand rolled prince albert for lunch was one of the happiest and finest men I’ve ever known.
so maybe scroom instead of perpetual self improvement is the way to go.
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“Scroom” indeed…I think you are right. As long as family and innocents don’t get savaged along the way then I ever more thing to each their own way. Old mentors like that are hard to find today for young guys/and gals.
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