Agree with you sir. I think Fred is rooting for you too!

Fred may have left us physically but he, in my eyes, earned peace in a better place and lives well in the presence of The Most High. Fred’s cogent posts on this site enhanced my thinking.

I shall miss him.

Salaam Fred!

I first became aware of him some years ago on a site called “FuckFrance.com” where he actually fit in pretty well while never descending into ranting hate-filled hysteria. He hasn’t been posting as much lately here (or maybe he found a new place to talk to), but I always slowed down the scroll to read his thoughts carefully when he did post.

It was always comforting to me that someone of Fred’s caliber agreed with me on pretty much everything. He would have been a good warrior in whatever we end up doing as a result of Obama’s depredations, so God must have other more important plans for him now.

To you, Fred. Fuck France!

A Leonard Cohen story. I once dated a Montrealer. There is a modest sized Jewish community in Montreal. At the time I flew into Montreal and dated this woman the Jewish community of a certain taste tended to hang out at a handful of bars. Leonard Cohen, being a descendant of Aaron, also hung out at one or more of these bars on occasion.

One night my woman friend was leaving one of said bars. Leonard Cohen walked by. Groping for a pickup line to use on my friend Cohen came up with “Have we ever slept together?”

She answered “I don’t remember.”

Leonard Cohen is also a descendant of slaves.

Is that all?
Not to worry, no one has to read that stuff.

Yes, I’m quite sure he would. And he’s probably rooting you on.

Our best tribute to him is to keep on doing what we’ve been doing. That’s what attracted him here in the first place.

Note that O will be leaving an America fully embroiled in a full-time bet-the-farm high-stakes for-the-future full-volume all-parties-on-deck debate over pending legislation on climate-change, health-care, unemployment, housing, the Dollar and the economy –and thus unlikely to be paying much attention to the technicalities of whatever Russian spider web has been long and artfully prepared for us to get (at best) our all-important peacekeeping nuclear defense messed up in.

Why do i have that disneyland thrill-ride sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach?

Jamie -

Glad you mentioned this. We got into a discussion last week at work (started with Michael Jackson, moved to topic of Mark Sanford) about whether anyone really radically changes (as in the 180), or whether what appears to be radical change is just something heretofore latent coming to the surface.

When you talk about people becoming “stuck” at a certain age, have you found “stuckness” to be universal, or just the great majority with exceptions of change at either end of the bell curve (people who have previously led genuinely good lives going shockingly bad, and vice versa)?

Semi-related is an article from a recent Atlantic Monthly called “What Makes Us Happy?” by Joshua Wolf Shenk. (Sorry, just worked 14-hour day and too lazy to embed the link. But the article is easily found on the mag’s website.)

The article takes an in-depth look at a seven-decade longitudinal study of Harvard men (including JFK before all that) and how they changed, or didn’t, over the course of their lives. I think the main lesson I drew from the piece was that real life is messy, and that rather makes art, when your subject is people, at any rate, difficult. A lot of these guys in the study didn’t have just one “character arc” (as you would give a character in fiction or drama), but several. How the heck is an artist supposed to capture that? Compared to the longitudinal study or the seven-decade real live life, even an epic like “War and Peace” comes across as a snapshot, it seems.

BTW, my oldest sister once declared to me (and proudly) that she vividly remembers coming to the firm conclusion, at age 6, that there was no God. She has not changed her mind since. I was kind of the opposite. For as far back as I can remember, I have always believed, though I did go through a questioning/investigative phase in my 20s that necessitated a leap into the apologetics pond. And then there’s CS Lewis, who writes about being “dragged, kicking and screaming,” to belief at age 29.