I wouldn't call it any inability, any sense of being not up to the manly task of withstanding in the steamroom, far from it, as I wrote some ten years ago, it is far more likely the dawning realization that there is more to life than plastic flowers and bad coffee, and the attendent realization that all of those years in the hamster-wheel didn't actually lead anywhere.

As I explained in that article, I'd come to that realization a long time ago. It's hard for me to say exactly when. Could have been when I watched my father toe the line for decades for the patriarchal and patronizing corporation who duly dumped him as soon as he ceased to be convenient to them, or maybe when I read how the inventor of the cubicle publicaly apologized for the Dilbert dystopia he'd helped to architect.

Or maybe it was the day I'd cut through all the disinformation and found out precisely why Ned Ludd and his followers gave their lives trying to save us from precisely the world they said would follow and which did.

There comes a time, so my theory goes, when people reach that certain age where toys don't matter nearly as much as a smile, when 'the finer things in life' aren't satin sheets and wine and imported exotica but real things like sunshine and birdsongs on the wind, clean air and a safe place for the children to play. They start remembering old Cat Stevens songs, Crosby Stills and Nash and two cats in the yard.

Not surprisingly, that's the reason I most often hear from others who, like myself, scrambled and scrimped and chose to live way up here, after having seen far and wide the world away.

I thought the link read OPIUM STRATEGIES FOR CREATIVITY AND LONGEVITY.

As soon as I hear the term Satin Sheets I think of, well something , and I can't stay focused long enough to provide a cereberally(sp?) responcible and ethically viable responce.
Give me time my friend,,,, give me time