Celebrating yet another birthday

We were talking about an artist we know, a photographer, P., a very nice person who makes black-and-white pictures of trees, when you said of her, "she's more interested in having than in making."

I thought you'd made a key point, making the distinction between someone who has to make something and someone who makes something only after she or he has the means to do so, whose primary motivation is not the making of a thing but in acquiring things and then making something to which a value--material or spiritual--may be attached after its making. I thought about this distinction from the Friday night when you'd first spoken it to the Sunday morning when I'd passed another milestone in my own life, thinking about such things and coming to no real conclusions yet feeling obligated to keep thinking until I did.

I've finally come to a time in my life when even the young are getting old. I find myself less and less interested in things--by things, I mean people and places in the news, trends, fashion, experts, important thinking, analysis, wisdom, slaughter in Gambia and in east-Texas, the Magna Carta and the 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. I can now read The New York Times in record time, especially "The Arts" section which once held out such great treasures. I've even created my own political parties, broadening the electorate so that more folks, as Obama used to call us, feel included--(1) Those Awake (2) Those Not Awake (3) Those Who Can't Wait to Wake Up in the Morning (4) Those Who Can--and join two parties at once: I'm Awake but I can Wait to Wake Up in the Morning, a post-modern socialist who believes in the right-to-bear-arms in 18c America but not in 2019. 

Furthermore, I unlight all the cigarettes and cigars I've ever smoked and, by doing so, am primed to exhale a force-field of recently enlightened electro-magentic light that will reverse all the harm done to the environment by the clear-cutting of the Amazon Basin and the global reliance on fossil-fuels. Today, no yesterday or was it the day before that, that I became a day and then a year older? It's difficult to say, it's more a feeling than anything else.