Plan of the day

The guy writes some very affecting songs, but apparently that particular aptitude doesn't automatically credential one as a good human being. 

Stay to yourself and let others be. It's better that way. Live quietly. 

Don't tease what's smoldering into flame. Flame consumes. That's just the nature of fire. You can't be mad about it. Sure it illuminates, heats, but only briefly. Its true purpose is consumption. To leave everything ash, burned black. 

Look out the window. Breathe. Don't get attached. Let go and fall away. Practice for death. The only moment - after birth - that really matters, or so I've read.

"You got a lot of heart," the man in the movie says to me. "Maybe too much." 

Or maybe you don't have enough. Who's that talking now?

Hey, maybe today you ought to throw what's left of that weeks old rotisserie chicken into the woods for the wild things. What do you think? 

Muster up.

They're going to close Maury's. The signboard in there is the same one, I believe, they had when my father took me there as a boy of four or five or six. 

He was tall and handsome and slim. He could sing and he was funny. But I don't remember ever hearing him sing. Those are things others told me about him. He called me tiger and carried me on his shoulders at least once because I saw a photograph depicting that scene. 

Grinders. I remember the white paper they were rolled in and the smell of cold cuts and raw onions. 

Fifty years ago. A pizza we made together also photographed. Cottage cheese sprinkled heavily with black pepper. Black Label beer bottles. You grew thinner, distant, yellow. Meaner, but I like to think that was not intentional and just once. You were the first man to hit me in the face, by the way. 

Funny, the things that stay.