I won't give you that smug feeling of having aged better than me by showing you the upper portion of this cropped photo; suffice it to say that neither the description 'I'm so cute' nor the size still fit.
It's going to be another very hot day and a very dismal day on the stock market, with BHP down more than 2%, or more than a dollar, in early trading ( in contrast, RIO is up by almost 2%, or $2.70, on the news that it will no longer pursue a merger with those Swiss gnomes Glencore). I'll never be a trader but only a collector of fully-franked dividends, so I might as well avert my eyes from the sea of red and look out to the river of blue while I sit on the sunlit verandah and listen to the radio.
Or perhaps I could just read Charles Bukowski's book "Ham on Rye":
[Chapter 44] "I could see the road ahead of me. I was poor and I was going to stay poor. But I didn't particularly want money. I didn't know what I wanted. Yes, I did. I wanted someplace to hide out, someplace where one didn't have to do anything. The thought of being something didn't only appall me, it sickened me. The thought of being a lawyer or a councilman or an engineer, anything like that, seemed impossible to me. To get married, to have children, to get trapped in the family structure. To go someplace to work every day and to return. It was impossible. To do things, simple things, to be part of family picnics, Christmas, the 4th of July, Labor, Mother's Day . . . was a man born just to endure those things and then die? I would rather be a dishwasher, return alone to a tiny room and drink myself to sleep."
Or I could just close my eyes and listen to the audiobook.
P.S. A friend was caught driving without a seatbelt and was fined $420. I told him, "Why not paint one across your t-shirt just in case you forget again?", and felt pretty good about having had the idea. Then I googled to see if someone had beaten me to it — and there it was: click here.
"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." Ecclesiastes 1:9















