Have a seat.  Make yourself comfortable.  Here, have a pillow.  Would you like a glass of urine? 

Ask me what time it is and I'll tell you how the watch is made. 

I grow older.  Grains of sand are falling in the hourglass of my life, and the bottom is fuller than the top.  I know how much sand has spilled out, but I don't know how much is left above me.  Time is like a river that rushes along, carrying everyone in it toward the great sea of oblivion, in which we all must drown.

Time is like a wall that grows and encircles us, until finally cutting us off entirely from everyone we love.

For everything, there is a season.  A time to be born and a time to die, a time to drink a flute of champagne on the balcony of a hotel overlooking the Carribean, where the trees dance in the island breezes.  And you can see, standing on the bridge of a passing cruise ship, maidens with pearls in their hair.  And a time to reach deep down into my vest pocket to retrieve from it the Ingram watch that has, since my father's death, run backwards.  A time to swallow oyster shells and tinkerbells.  And a time to have a seizure, because everything else has failed.  And a time to close my eyes and watch on the back of my eyelids, as though projected from the rear of my head, an unedited NC-17 rated film of my life, beginning with the severing of my own umbilical cord and ending with the turning off of my life support.  In technicolor.  My head as though a great amphitheatre with ten thousand seats, each one occupied by a brain cell. 

And I'm sitting there, watching this film, becoming increasingly agitated as my life is spilled out onto the screen.  And I think, What a waste and a failure.  And I get up, wearily, and leave the theater.

     --Joe Frank
       At the Dark End of the Bar

Happy New Year!