youth

It__ amazing how when we were young we wanted to know what it felt like to be older and when we are older we want the feeling of being younger again.

What are heavy? sea-sand and sorrow.What are brief? today and tomorrow.What are frail? spring blossoms and youth.What are deep? the ocean and truth.

By the time Albie is my age I will be long gone, or, best-case scenario, barricaded into my living module with enough rations to see out my days. But outside, I imagine vast, unregulated factories where workers count themselves lucky to toil through eighteen-hour days for less than a living wage before pulling on their gas masks to fight their way through the unemployed masses who are bartering with the mutated chickens and old tin-cans that they use for currency, those lucky workers returning to tiny, crowded shacks in a vast megalopolis where a tree is never seen, the air is thick with police drones, where car-bomb explosions, typhoons and freak hailstorms are so commonplace as to be barely remarked upon. Meanwhile, in the literally gilded towers above the carcinogenic smog, the privileged 1 per cent of businessmen, celebrities and entrepeneurs look down through bullet-proof windows, accept coktails in strange glasses from the robot waiters hovering nearby and laugh their tinkling laughs and somewhere, down there in that hellish, stewing mess of violence, poverty and desperation, is my son, Albie Petersen, a wandering minstrel with his guitar and his keen interest in photography, still refusing to wear a decent coat.

Youth believes itself immortal. There is a cure for such an attitude, but unfortunately it is a cure from which one never recovers.

Shandy looked ahead. Blackbeard, apparently willing to get the explanation later, had picked up his oars and was rowing again. 'May I presume to suggest,' yelled Shandy giddily to Davies, 'that we preoceed the hell out of here with all due haste.' Davies pushed a stray lock of hair back from his forehead and sat down on the rower's thwart. 'My dear fellow consider it done.

Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn't enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I've never been able to kill myself.

To tell the truth is very difficult, and young people are rarely capable of it.

With favoring winds, o'er sunlit seas,We sailed for the Hesperides,The land where golden apples grow;But that, ah! that was long ago.How far, since then, the ocean streamsHave swept us from that land of dreams,That land of fiction and of truth,The lost Atlantis of our youth!Whither, ah, whither? Are not theseThe tempest-haunted Orcades,Where sea-gulls scream, and breakers roar,And wreck and sea-weed line the shore?Ultima Thule! Utmost Isle!Here in thy harbors for a whileWe lower our sails; a while we restFrom the unending, endless quest.

One is never too late to become young at heart.

Take a shower. Wash away every trace of yesterday. Of smells. Of weary skin. Get dressed. Make coffee, windows open, the sun shining through. Hold the cup with two hands and notice that you feel the feeling of warmth.__ You still feel warmth.__ow sit down and get to work. Keep your mind sharp, head on, eyes on the page and if small thoughts of worries fight their ways into your consciousness: threw them off like fires in the night and keep your eyes on the track. Nothing but the task in front of you._Get off your chair in the middle of the day. Put on your shoes and take a long walk on open streets around people. Notice how they__e all walking, in a hurry, or slowly. Smiling, laughing, or eyes straight forward, hurried to get to wherever they__e going. And notice how you__e just one of them. Not more, not less. Find comfort in the way you__e just one in the crowd. Your worries: no more, no less.Go back home. Take the long way just to not pass the liquor store. Don__ buy the cigarettes. Go straight home. Take off your shoes. Wash your hands. Your face. Notice the silence. Notice your heart. It__ still beating. Still fighting. Now get back to work.__ork with your mind sharp and eyes focused and if any thoughts of worries or hate or sadness creep their ways around, shake them off like a runner in the night for you own your mind, and you need to tame it. Focus. Keep it sharp on track, nothing but the task in front of you.Work until your eyes are tired and head is heavy, and keep working even after that. Then take a shower, wash off the day. Drink a glass of water. Make the room dark. Lie down and close your eyes.__otice the silence. Notice your heart. Still beating. Still fighting. You made it, after all. You made it, another day. And you can make it one more.___ou__e doing just fine.__ou__e doing fine.I__ doing just fine.

I took him to the river and said __et__ watch something drown,_ So he took a stoneand I took my necklaceand we threw it all together,the way I always think I will get better in July. Things will change and sounds won__ acheand I gave my heart to uncertainty so many times, and so I took him to the river,threw the necklace in the river to slowly watch it drown, or burn, or fade awaylike I__e done so many times.

we have faith to sit in a chair, and continue to believe in its foundation that holds us up. If we have faith in God, the foundation will hold us both up, so its our decision to take the seat and trust him.

It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life.

. . . Like ashes of gold in a cinnamon-flame,My youthful desires have been burnt with the years_ And tonight in the chilling sunset-windA cicada, singing, weighs on my heart.

I was stressed and scared and I had to hurry to be someone, become something, do something. I was running and talking and cursed myself when I wasted my time on things that wouldn__ get me anywhere. It was work and it was money and I was never where I was, always somewhere else in my head far, far away.

Policymakers cannot take the situation lightly, for at its worst, it speaks to __ntergenerational inequity_ _ a breaking of the social contract between two generations.

She could afford anything, she could give anything, but she could not share a moment of her life with anybody. Shewas a beautiful and a glamorous diamond with an astronomical price tag, but to a crude reality _ she was still a stone, a living stone. Nothing else but a stone in an aesthetic sense.

For the fact was drugs were not necessary to most of us, because the music, youth, sweaty bodies were enough. And if it was too hot, too humid to sleep the next day, and we awoke bathed in sweat, it did not matter: We remained in a state of animated suspension the whole hot day. We lived for music, we lived for Beauty, and we were poor. But we didn__ care where we were living, or what we had to do during the day to make it possible; eventually, if you waited long enough, you were finally standing before the mirror in that cheap room, looking at your face one last time, like an actor going onstage, before rushing out to walk in the door of that discotheque and see someone like Malone.