Happy Birthday David

Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face; and souls are never, or very rarely seen, that in growing old do not smell sour and musty. Man moves all together, both toward his perfection and decay. In observing the wisdom of Socrates, and many circumstances of his condemnation, I should dare to believe, that he in some sort himself purposely, by collusion, contributed to it, seeing that, at the age of seventy years, he might fear to suffer the lofty motions of his mind to be cramped, and his wonted luster obscured. What strange metamorphoses do I see age every day make in many of my acquaintance! 'Tis a potent malady, and that naturally and imperceptibly steals into us; a vast provision of study and great precaution are required to evade the imperfections it loads us with, or at least, to weaken their progress. I find that, notwithstanding all my entrenchments, it gets foot by foot upon me; I make the best resistance I can, but I do not know to what at last it will reduce me. But fall out what will, I am content the world may know, when I am fallen, from what I fell.

~~Michel de Montaigne

What the fck do we know now that we didn’t already know back in the fifteen-hundreds?

& still the sum total of all human knowledge & wisdom doesn’t seem to permeate the din.

Not because you’ve endured another year in this weary ol’ world, David Baerwald, but because

you had the audacity to have been born in the first place:   Again, Happy Birthday to you. 

[Shel just-now handed me a glass of Chambourcin, tapped her glass against mine, said, "Cheers...Here's to Dave...Happy Birthday."]