peteg's blog - noise - 2013 02 01 LastTimeInALife

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My friend Nell sent me her novel that completes her creative writing degree at Newcastle. I read it as fast as I could, over about three days. She made much of David Byrne's lyrics for his song Once in a Lifetime, which got me thinking that, even at this point in my life, I've done many things multiple times that others do once or not at all; and I don't mean that as some kind of boast, an expression of privilege, but more of klutziness, indulgence and necessity. (At least some of these things embody the ethos of a dog returning to its own vomit, a kind of self-applied backward-looking Pottery barn rule.)

At his recent inauguration, Obama muttered "I want to look out one more time because I'll never see this again," and this is indeed a time for me to be doing some things for the last time in this life. I don't know of anything that expresses how empowering this sentiment can be 1as awesomely as Byrne's song captures the road to the middle class.