It's getting time...

… to sum up the year gone by.  It's been a momentous year.  (Courtesy of David Brewster.)

Momentous for me personally because I retired.  Momentous politically, nationally and internationally because Donald Trump was elected president of the United States.  (Arrgh!)

I had a bad feeling about that one, and still do.  Check out my post of October 6th while I was working for Hillary Clinton, who had a 99% chance of winning, and I couldn't stop having a nagging deja vu feeling.  (A picture of diversity that America, a nation of immigrants, rejected on November 8th.)

On the home front, I learned last summer that my youngest son got married a year earlier.  Welcome to the family, Laura.  (Laura is the one on the left.)

You Can't Always Get What You Want

I find myself lately telling a lot of people I'm 57 now. As if that's an excuse for no longer having a plan in place to be able to run a sub-21 minute 5K, or a sub-46 minute 10K.

It's true that my mantra of running five times a week is harder now than it was when I was in my 40s. I find myself taking analgesics for more than their blood-thinning qualities. (I started taking aspirin to address my elevated blood pressure.)

I think back to the olden times. Last year I listed the 10 best albums (don't know what an album is?) ever on my profile page. The best of the best is Let It Bleed by the Rolling Stones.

My musical taste stopped in about 1971, my sophomore year at CU-Boulder just before I dropped out of school to work as a committed 20-year old for the McGovern campaign. You probably don't know who George McGovern is.

These days, we're trying to get past the "mess" that the Decider/Bird Hunter/Rummy/Condi and Yoo-the-quaint left us with. Back in the 70s, we were stuck with getting past the mess that LBJ left us with, which gave us those crooks Nixon and Agnew. Nixon killed McGovern in 1972, which turned me into a cynic, a trait that received its vindication in 2004. (It was the Pogo comic strip which said, We have met the enemy, and they are us.)

Anyway, the Stones came out in 1969 with an album (CD), Let It Bleed, that Rolling Stone magazine described at the time as a fin-de-siecle masterpiece. At the end of the 60s, the convergence of the antiwar (Vietnam) movement and the civil rights movement promoted profound changes in American society and produced extraordinary results.

I would call Let It Bleed an era-changing masterpiece. I still listen to it all the time. It's my rock-solid mantra that you can't always get what you want, but you get what you need. That's how life goes. And the LP (CD) contains one of my favorite songs of all time, Gimme Shelter. War is just a shot away. So what do we have left from here before the next really big war happens? 20 years? 40? Did I tell you I'm a cynic?

Yeah, we all need someone we can dream on.