SERIOUS GRAVITY (A SANITY PRIMER)

My mantra used to be... Pour the glass half empty... Hide under a rock... Curl up in a ball, counting backwards from 100... Let your limbs go slack... Sleep in until dusk... Walk toward the donut shop - never arriving... Stop at green lights... Pull over then and tell the officer a story... Failing to make eye contact... Stay in your room at night reading old Life magazines... Play solo tetherball to lose... Avoid avoid avoid the mindless crowds.... Go days without smiling - make your face like stone... Let each golden opportunity go by untouched... Let someone else steal the spotlight - this one is not for you... Hold at arms length the material snares... Avoid alcohol, tobacco, LSD, heroin, sedatives, amphetamines, aspirin, cold remedies, cough syrup... Shun the most basic of human encounters,  handshakes, hugs, cuddles, hand-holds, trysts,  flings, affairs, peccadilloes, relationships in general... Concoct a drug of your own making in the brain - this in itself will strap you to the

We don't choose the age we live in...rather, the age chooses us...enveloping, dominating, shaping our destinies - the sheer immensity of it all, the overwhelming scope, the global reach, the unavoidable impact - like the air we breathe - like a horrifying weather event - no choice for most but to endure these "storms" of history - living through wars, pandemics, upheavals, famines, revolutions, economic downturns, malaise,  lost decades, years of austerity, autocracies, dictatorships, purges, reprisals,  repression,  pogroms, displacements, mass migrations, expulsions, coups, abdications, guerrilla wars, killings, genocides - these "dark clouds" that take up so much of history for so many...(think: Czarism, Bolshevism, Great War,  Fascism, Great Depression, Franco-ism,  Stalinism, Hitlerism, World War, Cold War, Peronism, Maoism....) and oppressive, unwanted, annoying tyrants, autocrats, generalissimos, monarchs, premiers, prime ministers, presidents, people'

  Growing up in the golden state, during that era of extended prosperity through the decades of the 60s and 70s - there, in our west coast bubble of relaxed, sunny contentment, I thought, for a time, at a very young age, that I had found real happiness on earth. Ca lifornia was growing by leaps and bounds then without feeling overcrowded; there was some traffic, to be sure, smoggy days through July and August, and yet a wealth of open spaces, new homes sprouting up everywhere,  the streetcars of Santa Monica having disappeared, replaced by freeways darting in all directions; even so, long stately old boulevards still stretched all the way from Pomona to Los Angeles; there were vineyards lining the backroads to Ontario airport and vast tracks of land still available in Orange county...Where we lived was a central location as my father liked to say... to the west the Pacific Ocean, to the east Palm Springs or the high desert, to the north, mountains, Big Bear and Lake Arrowhead, heading