I've just had my seventy-fifth birthday, a couple of days ago; which makes me

old. I figure--given the current okay state of my health, and the excellent condition of my heart (in the opinion of cardiologists), and the fact that I quit smoking thirty-two years ago (when, if I'd continued smoking, I'd have had a fifty per cent likelihood of contracting lung cancer)--that I have, maybe, ten years left to live; although, frankly, I'm tired already and wouldn't mind dying sooner. Just sayin'.  But, curiously, things (by which I mean Kismet or Destiny) conspire to protract my existence in this sub-lunary sphere: I'm about to be granted an insane amount of money in an insurance settlement (for breaking my leg last year), the garnering, husbanding and careful expenditure of which should see me through the next decade.  Funny how these things work out.

So, looking back (and ahead), it's odd, and funny, how many of the things that I might have striven for--the legalization of marijuana in Europe and in the Pacific States, and the world-wide (in 1st-world countries) decriminalization and normalization of homosexuality--have just sort of happened, in a manner that I approve of but had scarcely anything (in fact, nothing) to do with. And, in the Décennie d'Or that for no good reason (certainly, due to no virtue or effort of my own) stretches before me, I propose to (finish learning to) play all the pieces in both books of the Wohltemperierte Klavier and all the keyboard suites and partitas (Bach's of course), and to compose a couple of Masses in the style of Thomas Tallis; though whether these will be Christian or Buddhist (or American Transcendentalist) Masses is uncertain in my mind.