Middle Age Cloudy
A short playlist:
"Watching the Wheels" John Lennon, from Double Fantasy, 1980
"Waiting on a Friend" The Rolling Stones, Tattoo You, 1981
"Talk of the Town" The Pretenders, The Singles, 1987 (recorded & originally released in 1980)
"Back on the Chain Gang" The Pretenders, Learning to Crawl, 1984 (originally released as a single in 1982)
"Slit Skirts" Pete Townshend, All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes, 1982
“Youth music” is a tricky term to define. As years and decades pass and generations take turns grabbing the pop-cultural zeitgeist by the throat and thrashing it about to make it do their bidding, our ideas about who should be doing what at any particular age have, hopefully, evolved. This is, or would be, a good thing, I think. If your grandmother loves K-pop, and your thirteen-year-old niece has just discovered Leonard Cohen, we are all the better for it.
That said, it is a plain fact that during the first fifteen or so years (at least) of rock music’s existence the entire world was operating under the assumption that the music was mainly for teenagers and children, that it was the stuff of fad, novelty, disposability. Its use value was in expressing or assuaging the emotional excitability associated with adolescence.
How the artists who generated this music were going to approach the onset of middle age was an open question that hung in the air almost from the beginning, with the nagging salience of the question borne out by all the archival footage of John Lennon, Mick Jagger, et al pontificating about the seemingly inevitable waning of their own popularity and the turning of the tide in their career fortunes that would no doubt result. “You’ll look funny when you’re fifty,” James Fox’s character says to Mick Jagger in 1970’s Performance, and it was generally assumed that yes, he would.
For these musicians middle-age would come very early, and who could blame them if they approached their mid-to-late thirties as though these years represented a perilous crossroads, a minefield of troublesome potentiality? Societal pressures force us all into that minefield at some point, where we end up worrying not only about thinning hair and aching joints but something deeper in the psyche and soul. Call it a loss of spiritual vigor - the old passions waning, stamina fading, the ebb and flow of our lust for living no longer taking any kind of predictable form, or worse yet, becoming recognizably, all-too-predictably tame.
Artists of that thorny age group began to wrestle with these ideas across the landscape of pop radio in the years 1981-2, and it is startling to realize how the music they came up with - ruminative, wry, unblinkingly honest - might provide lessons that could be applied to any age at any point on the spectrum of life’s chronology.
I was only ten years old when John Lennon’s “Watching the Wheels” made its brief run up the Billboard charts in 1981. But that “only” is too dismissive. We often discount the childhood years as a time of carefree, low-stakes innocence, but look, the reality is that ten-year-olds are people too, with their own set of confusing passions and problems. In my case that included not only the usual fourth-grade tests and unknowable social mores, but also a family life moving slowly and inexorably towards wholesale change. To hear Lennon all over the radio singing about how he “just had to let it go” was more than simply relatable, it was a relief, straight up.
John Lennon’s song about stepping out of the limelight was part of the batch of tunes that he brought to the sessions for Double Fantasy, his late 1980 comeback album with his wife Yoko Ono. The party line held that Lennon wrote his contributions in one quick burst after a sailing misadventure during summer 1980, though given the song’s subject matter it might’ve come at any point during the previous five years, addressing as it does Lennon’s conscious withdrawal from the treadmill of performing, recording and being an all-around outsize rock and roll personality in favor of living a quiet home life with his wife and child.
Wistful, mid-tempo, with a stately piano pattern that hints back to classics like “Imagine” and “Isolation”, the song is a paean to voluntary introversion, with Lennon admitting that he’s no longer willing to participate in the dog and pony shows his career had forced on him during his spotlit heyday. But it goes deeper than the specifics of fame and the mechanics of career. “Watching the Wheels” also works on an everyday/everyman level, as a simple reminder that taking a breather, a break to relax and let the world go about its business without you can be a welcome and necessary proposition. If nothing else it can help recharge, and all Lennon’s attention to cleaning up and starting over throughout the rest of Double Fantasy bears out that line of thinking.
The willingness to watch from the sidelines comes naturally to some, less naturally to others, and if you are a person who often finds yourself staring out a window at nothing in particular for long periods of time without even realizing it you might know what I’m talking about. Lennon spoke often of his proficiency in the art of doing nothing, and in a sense “Watching the Wheels” qualifies as another in a long line of Lennon songs extolling the virtues of being a space cadet. Consider his history of songs about sleeping, dreaming, daydreaming, talking about the weather, generally goofing off. It’s the plain-spoken directness and contemplative mood that sets “Watching the Wheels” apart, though, such that it becomes almost a song of spiritual purpose.
Society’s attitude towards introversion, like its attitude toward aging, has taken great strides in recent years but there’s still no doubt that it can often be misinterpreted as weakness, with willful disengagement seen as an unhealthy step towards isolation or outright morbidity. This is especially true in America, where we like our fellow citizens to actively take part in absolutely everything, preferably making as much noise about it as possible.
With all of this in mind, for the better portion of my adolescence I considered “Watching the Wheels” my favorite song. I was only mildly introverted, but the song made me feel better about having what even then felt like an affliction that would need to be managed. I remember walking around the track at school talking to my first girlfriend about it, explaining that I was much more of a watcher than a doer, and feeling as though I was risking a good deal of vulnerability in that admission. Not to mention feeling a bit resentful about feeling so touchy about it. Thanks for the neurosis, overall socio-cultural environment of the late twentieth century.
“Watching the Wheels” provides a welcome example for anyone, not just famous people, that one really doesn’t need to do all of the things that society so loudly or so subtly and insinuatingly demands that we do. I think ultimately the idea that I took to heart was the notion that people may think you're crazy for sitting out their various and voluminous reindeer games, but that’s a small price to pay for maintaining mental equilibrium. Let them think you’re crazy.
“Watching the Wheels” peaked at number ten on the Billboard charts during the week of May 30, 1981, becoming the third Double Fantasy single to ascend to the top ten in the wake of Lennon’s murder the previous December. The very next week it was passed up on the charts by John’s old friend George Harrison. “All Those Years Ago” was George’s ode to his departed bandmate, and he was helped out by the two remaining Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. George and John had not been on great terms at the time of Lennon’s death, though it seems unlikely that their friendship wouldn’t have been mended if fate had provided the opportunity. Or so one hopes. In any case, the way the grieving Beatles came together in a comradeship that only they could understand was heartening, a sign that friendships can evolve and endure against any number of odds.
Friendship would seem at first glance to be the subject of the Rolling Stones single “Waiting on a Friend”, or so the promo video would have us believe. Certainly few rock and roll friendships have been as chronicled, celebrated, dissected for clues, as that of the two Stones frontmen, who are seen in the short film meeting up warmly on a New York City tenement stoop. The familiar ease with which they interact is truly affecting; Mick Jagger and Keith Richards have known each other since they were kids, and they shared alongside each other not only the usual growing pains that most of us endure but also the convulsive, corrosive effects of bright-lit international renown and dark-hued infamy. When we see them in the video laughing, dancing, doing the things that brought and kept them together in the first place, the effect is almost impossibly charming. The period of discord that would ensue between the two over the course of the years just after this video was filmed would seem to be very far away. Friendship is a fragile thing.
“Waiting on a Friend”, however, is about something more than the video lets on, and it’s right there in the lyric: “Making love and breaking hearts / it is a game for youth.” Like “Watching the Wheels” it’s a song about slowing down, taking yourself out of the game, maybe the rock-star equivalent of telling your friends that you can’t join them at the bar tonight because you just feel like watching a little television and turning in early.
The shimmering guitar chords that open the song establish the melancholic mood, and the piano sustains it. Jagger picks up on that feeling and runs with it in his lyrics and delivery, singing about romantic loss and taking comfort in friendship with an unusually humble directness, his trademark leer/sneer now exposed as a facade, a mask that no longer holds much power, in the same way a child gets tired of toys. It's a song about friendship as a bedrock to cling to when the lure of another potential romance feels intimidating or tiresome rather than enticing. Or when life’s old vices/habits no longer do the trick. The drifty, tranquil mood is appropriate because there’s naturally a little bit of mourning that goes on as part of that process.
Whether Mick Jagger, or any of the Stones for that matter, ever truly experienced these feelings, outside of maybe the fleeting moments during which the song was written and recorded, is a moot point. Given what we know of his history, it’s fair to question the idea of Jagger finding too many moments of restraint in his pursuit of sex and romance. But sincerity has never been a prominent tool in Jagger’s bag of performative tricks. For the duration of the song, he makes you feel it, makes you believe it. And he’s helped immeasurably by the billowing, beautiful ache of Sonny Rollins’ saxophone, a performance nudged along by Jagger, who danced along to the track while Rollins played, both men interpreting and giving shape to the song’s floating, almost zen-like mood.
“Waiting on a Friend” was all over the radio during the weeks that my parents were in the middle of divorcing. As such, those gorgeous first few chords and the fading saxophone denouement always carry a depth of feeling and connection beyond the melancholy that’s surely there on the surface. I loved the song. It helped. It was a shrug of the shoulders in the face of change. It sounds like acceptance.
Jagger’s vocal is plaintive, displaying a vulnerability unusual in the Stones’ catalog, but it’s also almost defiant; an assertion that the way a person experiences and perceives life’s changes is bound to evolve, and that evolution is necessary. Passions and desires, dreams and disappointments - these things continue to some degree or another as the years pile up, but how much they weigh us down is up to us. It’s entirely possible to look at these changes with bemusement instead of dismay.
We spend so much of life in flux, figuratively or physically. How to deal with all that changeability is an ongoing dilemma. Often enough the change happens subtly, so that one day we turn around and realize that what was once a close friendship seems to have faded into the rearview, and our lived reality no longer resembles the ideal we’d imagined.
It’s those ideals that mess with us. In the Pretenders’ “Talk of the Town”, a UK single in 1980, Chrissie Hynde confronts the sense of dissonance that arises when we realize a person close to us has moved on from the frame we’d like to set them in. It’s a deceptively low-key song, not quite rocking, not quite a ballad, a hint of mid-sixties jangle giving a sense of movement, turbulence. Hynde is considering a person who’s come and gone in her life, someone she’s missing; while lying in bed looking out at the sky she can’t help but compare this person to clouds. It’s a song of quiet regret, suffused with a feeling of opportunity missed, time slipping away. “Maybe tomorrow, maybe someday,” Hynde sings, the melody swooping gorgeously downwards, fading into faint smoke.
Hynde is at a remove for the better part of the song, singing with a cool, even-keeled distance. Like “Waiting on a Friend” the overriding feeling is one of acceptance. People move on. Stations change. Life goes forward. Then comes the chorus and the calm is broken open, if only briefly. “You’ve changed!” Hynde blurts, her voice suddenly breaking into disbelief, anguish. She settles back into composed cool soon enough, but the listener doesn’t really recover, the flash of raw emotion lingers on.
I remember long weeks spent trying to get over a breakup during one autumn of my late teen years. “Talk of the Town '' was a salve during those elongated hours as I would find myself sitting in front of the stereo admiring the way the dust had settled in front of the illuminated radio light, the sky outside permanent dusk. The song worked like therapy, like an experienced older person offering perspective. We need songs like this to tell us how to act when the object of our attention changes their place in the world.
I had become a Pretenders fan in early 1984, when “Middle of the Road” was ubiquitous on MTV. Hynde used that song to express her own changing place in the world, growling “I’m not the cat I used to be / I’ve got a kid, I’m thirty-three.” Thirty-three might seem pretty young, but in rock and roll years it’s seriously pushing the envelope. At least that was the perception in 1984. Hynde had a right to feel that perception keenly; by the time she sang that song two of her former Pretenders bandmates had died, each of them failing to make it anywhere close to age 33.
In light of those losses it’s hard to hear the late 1982 hit “Back on the Chain Gang” as anything other than a wake, or a farewell. Guitars chime and jangle, the rhythm section tumbles together in buoyant lockstep. “Back on the Chain Gang'' is surely one of the only top ten songs to carry such a lively tempo and light touch yet also strike such an elegiac tone. (The Smiths, with future part-time Pretender Johnny Marr at the musical fore, would ride this approach to fame and fortune in the UK only a couple years later.) The song’s mood is autumnal, verging on wintry, with the sense of a once-vibrant emotional landscape going slowly barren. The singer is looking for warmth amid the chill, sifting through photos, remembering distant memories. She finds a picture of a person, maybe the same person from “Talk of the Town”, and it triggers something in her, a remembrance of happier times.
Exactly what went on during those happier times is left unclear, as is the nature of the relationship. My own interpretation has always seemed to me to be a little forced, or wilful, possibly or probably not what Hynde intended, but I cling to it anyway. It has to do with the idea that for those people who feel ill-at-ease in the everyday world, whether it’s school, work or some other mundane social construct, finding a partner in crime - someone else whose square edges won’t allow them to fit into the traditional round hole, and with whom merely being in the same room can feel like an escape, a transgression against mundanity - the resultant relief can feel like a godsend. I always imagine Chrissie Hynde is singing about someone who served that function in her life, a kindred contrarian with whom she was able to plan and connive against the narrow worldview of the majority and shout gleefully into the void.
She had confessed in “Talk of the Town” that “It’s hard to play by the rules / I never could / and still never do”. In “Back on the Chain Gang” it seems to me she is not only mourning the loss of a person with whom she shared those characteristics, that bond that comes with bucking any and every established system, but also admitting, or fearing, that the whole idea of either living by or bucking the rules might be a mirage of the mind, another ideal ripe for shattering. Worst of all, it may be that at some point, to some degree, we all have to settle for something much less than our ideal for living, and submit to some power beyond us.
The song, it seems to me, wrestles with the daily struggle that comes with that inability to settle. Part of the burden is lifted when you find a person, or group of people, who share in that struggle. Youth is the primary time for finding your tribe. When people start to fall away from the tribe, when individuals whose presence you’d come to rely on, even unknowingly, are taken away, the effect is jarring. Sometimes the individual who falls away is you, and the effect is doubly jarring.
There was a point in my mid-thirties when I had to leave the workplaces I’d been used to, places full of color and noise and wild laughter, and move into a comparatively somber office job - uncomfortable clothes, fluorescent white light, personalities tamped down to a vague, listless congeniality. The culture shock was so dispiriting that I felt a little like Henry Hill at the end of Goodfellas, frustrated with his newly bland witness protection suburban existence, stumbling out for the morning paper in his bathrobe like an ordinary schmuck.*
*That term “ordinary schmuck’, it should be noted, is an entirely subjective, ultimately meaningless one, born of insecurity, or rising from a well of ugly human impulses like ravenous vanity and greed, the kind of thing that came naturally to the cretinous Henry Hill as portrayed in Goodfellas. For the rest of us the difference between ordinary or otherwise is always relative, and as changeable as the weather. And for all my aversion to early mornings and pointless memos, I excelled at that damn office job and came to enjoy many aspects of my experience there, not least the people I met and friends I made. As such, all these ideas about the wild rebellion of youth vs. the boring tedium of adulthood should be taken with several grains of salt.
This is the feeling I think “Back on the Chain Gang” is getting at; the feeling that we can enjoy the escape - the rebellion, the romance, the ridiculous joy of dancing about the margins - as long as it lasts, but sooner or later we fall back into some routine, some assigned role that faceless, impenetrable society places on us. Not a very rock and roll idea. One that a lot of rock and roll artists and fans actively fear. The treadmill, the routine, the ordinary, not so much watching the wheels as being a slave to wherever they take you and drop you off.
We can accept it or we can rage against it, and the deeply redemptive part of the song is that it so powerfully insists on the latter.
Similarly to “Talk of the Town,” Chrissie Hynde approaches most of “Back on the Chain Gang” calmly, her voice aching but measured, a little detached. The frustration of it all is implicit right up until the bridge, where the bitterness finally spills over. She sets her sights on those ever-present, unknowable “powers that be” the ones that take us from our imagined realities and force us into barren, unrecognizable places, and then she takes aim and imagines firing, lost friends on her mind as she wraps her finger around the trigger: “They’ll fall to ruin one day / for making us part.” That last word stretched out into multiple syllables, trailing away, exhaust from a ragged engine. Hynde never even really raises her voice, and that’s part of her brilliance as a vocalist, she might sound as if she’s tossing the words over her shoulder, but not too far beneath the surface there’s an undeniable seething at work, a fathomless rage. It’s that sense of fight that gives the song its power.
Sometimes we don’t recognize the fight is necessary, sometimes the fight is just beyond us. Often enough we simply come to terms with whatever our situation might be. Even Pete Townshend confessed via The Who in 1981’s “Daily Records” that he relished the day-in day-out routine of writing and recording songs, and no longer needed much else, as the old “cold sex and booze” that used to spice up his days no longer held much appeal and certainly did not impress his children. Ever self-aware, he also lamented his own newly-inadequate fashion sense.
One year later he based a whole song on that particular strand of paranoia, this time concentrating on the unease and hesitance that tends to set in as we watch our youth receding into the distance, fading like scenes from some fondly-remembered movie, one in which we brazenly wore the clothes we thought would make people want to have sex with us.
“Slit Skirts” begins with Townshend stating his age, 34, not quite what we think of as middle-age, but only a year older than Chrissie Hynde in “Middle of the Road”. (Townshend was 37 when the song was released.) He sings of his friends, lost in their own neuroses, their own everyday mazes. Somber piano, elegant arrangement, the musicianship supple and supportive. Brooding melody, full of longing, edging towards disillusionment. Townshend is in ruminative, rueful mode, looking back on loves lost and senses rearranged, lightly cursing the way it all happened via some metaphors that might reach a little too far, some wordplay that might be a little ill-advised; quite what “men not fit for marriage” taking “refuge in the oil” means in the context of a song about lost youth is a thing that I can probably figure out, but the mild strain of doing so is a little distracting. And while we’re at it, could any other song use the words “Recriminations fester” and still be listenable?* But then the clouds lift for the chorus, not quite an eruption but definitely a raising of the temperature, with Townshend bitterly lamenting that his friend Jeannie no longer feels comfortable wearing the slit skirts of the title, then complaining that au courant ripped shirts don’t match well with his receding hairline. So far, so mildly amusing, but when he arrives at the crux of it all - “Can’t pretend that growing older never hurts.” - it hits hard.
*Critic Robert Christgau made vicious fun of Townshend’s pretensions in his D+ review of the album that houses “Slit Skirts”, castigating the complex arrangements and self-conscious poetics. (That latter is admittedly over-ambitious, to say the least, check the album’s unfortunate title; All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes.) It all adds up to “intricate meaninglessness” he says. But that’s just, like, his opinion, man. Maybe one has to adjust/adapt to Townshend’s approach or maybe one comes to it naturally or maybe you just like the way the damn music sounds. Reactions are complicated and I check all three of those boxes. And “Slit Skirts” is a damn exquisite track.
Rambling on about one’s lost youth is dangerous territory, things can get mushy and overbearing real fast. Townshend navigates the territory not totally nimbly, but with a charming combination of directness and humor. “Let me tell you some more about myself,” he sings, mocking his own excessive candor. But it's his impulse to overshare that makes the song so affecting. It’s easy to relate to a person who admits he has to get to a certain level of drunkenness before attempting a new dance step.
The song wavers like someone who’s had a couple drinks. The melody floats about restlessly, taking its time, speeding up. Words rush forward, phrases rise and fall. That meandering, slightly confused approach works in the song's favor, at least as far as communicating the feeling - it appropriately mirrors the way we realize that time has cruelly worn away our natural vigor and vitality. That process is a slow burn, caught in glimpses, here and there. Maybe we don’t even notice it, we’re too busy digesting the complexities of day-to-day, wandering in our own mazes. Then suddenly one day we realize that we’re going to look and feel foolish in the flashy, finely-fitted clothes we used to swan around in so calculatedly, yet somehow effortlessly. Townshend places the realization explicitly in erotic terms, he spends the whole second verse mourning the loss of his own sexual potency. Likewise, the slit skirts that Jeannie used to wear represent a flirtatious provocation, a dare she now isn’t willing to risk taking.
Poignance is in the eye of the beholder, but there’s no doubting how easy it is to miss that sense of daring when you realize it’s gone, and anyone who falls prey to being a little bewildered and/or moved by it probably shouldn’t be judged too harshly.
“Slit Skirts” was not a hit song, it wasn’t even released as a single, but in 1982 the video got regular rotation on MTV and on HBO’s Video Jukebox, where it kept sympathetic company with “Back on the Chain Gang” and “Waiting on a Friend”. A couple different versions of this video exist, audiowise - I saw it in its raw, live-in-the-studio form, an excerpt from a longer film used to promote the album. I was eleven years old, and this performance was quietly impactful. Townshend is in a room full of musicians, but he seems very alone at the piano, shadows and faint blue light falling about him dramatically. The story he tells in the song seemed to my adolescent ears to be a very adult one, an inclination that was correct. An eleven-year-old is capable of picking up the gist of what a 37-year-old is saying even if the specifics are a little beyond comprehension, and even if the meaning is a little coded in strained metaphors. More than anything, he seemed to be putting across a plea to enjoy all the romantic escapading and wanderlusting as it’s happening.
It might stop happening.
Or maybe that’s only a false perception, a dread instilled by a fear that comes naturally in a society obsessed with youth and youthful beauty.
In any event, all of the fretting over old clothes and dwindling libido is merely cosmetic compared to the more complicated impulse Townshend hits on at the end of the chorus. He poses a question, in summary this: Is there truly any reason that we can’t to at least some degree maintain some measure of the romantic rush that used to sweep over us unbidden? “Romance, romance / Why can’t we drink it up / true heart romance?” Townshend sings, perplexed, borderline furious at the way we lose touch with our own raw-nerved longing and lustfulness, and demanding that we find a way to regain access to it.
Once, a few years ago, a friend and I spent an evening together discussing our memories of a time several decades ago, when we had both moved in the same crowd of teenage dreamers. We wondered at how adulthood so insidiously dulls the edges of the wild desires and urge to expressiveness that comes so naturally to people in relative youth. We paused for a bit on the idea of enchantment, and just for emphasis sake let’s capitalize that - Enchantment. It’s an elusive, fluid notion, for sure, but most of us have felt it at some point in some small way; that widescreen sense of possibility that stretches about us during adolescence and into early adulthood. The romantic yearning, the electric shudder of dancing and planning and innocent philosophizing - it is all so very intoxicating. To think that it might be irretrievable is a gut-punch beyond.
My friend and I that night were wandering a fairground, lit up with brightly-colored lights, and as we walked, summer night sky close enough to touch, we of course came to the realization that even as we evoked that sense of Enchantment as a thing that was long gone and missing from our lives, we were also somehow feeling it keenly, albeit in some new form. Different, but distinctly recognizable.
Obviously, duh, we can still feel it. It can’t be forced, it just might need to be nudged along a little.
Even in that realization, one can’t be blamed for feeling some small sense of loss. It’s what we do with that sense of loss that defines our ability to grow and adjust into advanced years, and how gracefully we do it.
Gracelessness is an option. When Pete Townshend inducted the Rolling Stones into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989, he offered them this advice: “Don’t grow old gracefully, it wouldn’t suit you.”
Making a mess of it all might be fun. Tying it all up neatly in a sleek, attractive box, maybe in the form of a song, a long love letter, a confessional poem, might also be a fulfilling option. Pete Townshend chooses a little of all these approaches on the fade of “Slit Skirts”, railing at the dimming of our collective light, the unfortunate fact of irretrievable innocence. The way this impeccably-arranged and immaculately performed song keeps fraying at the edges, with Townshend’s mildly cryptic lyrics and near-hysterical self-involvement skimming over the surface, is part of, maybe all of, its charm. A listener doesn’t have to fall for that charm, but it might be wise to at least consider the potential lesson within. Townshend even points this out right there before the first chorus: “From all this you’d imagine / that there must be something learned”.
So what should be learned? I dunno for sure, but here’s a guess.
If musicians and their fans are prone to being space cadets - lost in whatever imagined reality suits them whether it's motorcycles and mini-skirts or simply that elusive avenue towards self-expression that allows a person to wear whatever makeup or garishly colored shirts they like - then the fight to keep being the person we want to be is a daily one, and some days the battle goes better than others.
A person doesn’t have to be a musician, artist or fan to relate. All of us regular mortals, meaning all of us, surely have our moments of serious doubt regarding our place in the world. For some of us it registers sharply, for others it's a blip on the radar. Either extreme and those in between can use whatever assistance gets picked up along the way, because the road is treacherous.
Life results in bruises and loss. We stumble and lose steam, and then we (preferably) laugh about it or (less preferably) whine about it. Or, accordingly, we wax poetic about it, hopefully with a little sly humor.
In all of these songs there is some form of acceptance. Crucially, there is also not a single hint of defeatism. A wry smile in the face of our diminished appetites is only appropriate, and so is an insistence that whatever appetite is left still needs to be fed.
Maybe a bemused acceptance of inevitable change and the old raging against the dying of the light don’t have to be mutually exclusive endeavors.
Ignoring it, letting it lie, is perhaps the only option best not put on the table at all.
