It’s not an easy subject to talk about, at least to talk about seriously, so sometimes we joke about it. We joke about how hard it is to get through the night without having to get up and go pee.

It’s called nocturia. Like pretty much every other bodily function, nocturia becomes more problematic as we age, particularly when we are past 60. While women have the problem, too, particularly older women, nocturia is much more common in older men.

It affects more than 50 percent of adults after age 50. It’s considered normal for a 60-year-old man to get up once, a 70-year-old man to get up twice and an 80-year-old man to get up three times a night. . . .

Pre-Cannes, I rendezvoused with my good friend, Todd McCarthy, in Normandy at the home of our mutual amie, Florence Dauman, for about a week of talk and table. We had been debating about whether to go west to the WW II beaches, or north to lunch in Deauville/Trouville.

In the end, Flo stayed back—going to Omaha Beach for her would be like a San Antonian going to see the Alamo, and Todd and I drove up to Trouville for a long lunch at Les Vapeurs, a historic bistro across from the grand casino that still serves up a good lunch despite the heavy whiff of tourist trap about it.

As we were nearing the end of our meal, a tall young man and woman sat down across from us. It was nearly four, the restaurant was mostly deserted. The young man was straight up and down as an arrow, short hair, clear blue eyes and wearing an odd T-shirt that said Watergate. . . .

House calls

Hiding a transistor radio under the pillow

Being able to wear heels

Flipping baseball

cards . . . .

And more things we don’t miss:

The Vietnam War

Floppy disks

TV dinners . . . .

      Because libraries and school curricula are currently under assault regarding the appropriateness of diverse representations and gender expression, it seems like a good time to look at the homophobia and Culture Wars of the ’90s, a time when conservative forces organized, successfully, to destabilize arts funding

      I was curator of performing arts at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis from 1988 through 1996. Our mission was to be “a catalyst for the creative expression of artists and the active engagement of audiences.”

      We presented 100 performances each season in theaters ranging from 100 to 4,800 seats. Given the mission, I at times produced identity-based performance work, some of which became entangled in the culture wars of the ’90s. . . .

After a 45-minute wait, we learn our United flight from LAX to Newark has been cancelled because of a mechanical problem.

      Okay. Now what do we do?

      A line immediately starts forming at the gate of the cancelled flight: We are about a dozen people back, and that line ain’t moving. An announcement instructs us that we can get help finding new flights from a human on the United app. My wife tries. No human, just a recording playing over and over again.

      I walk up to the front of the line, to find out how long this is going to take. The lonely United employee there responds: “one hour.” I can handle that.

      But then she makes clear that she meant it would take an hour just to find alternative flights for the first couple on that line . . .

They gave me a certificate and a t-shirt, and some parting words of advice. After 36 early-morning sessions, spread out over three months, I finally had graduated from cardiac rehab.

Each of the 36 mornings, beginning two months after my near-fatal heart attack, I got weighed, had my blood pressure and pulse taken, attached color-coded electrodes to my body, and then spent 50 minutes or so on the treadmill or a stationary bike.

It was reassuring, so soon after almost dying, to have physiologists and cardiologists and other staff watching over me, checking the data from the electrodes, noting my target heart rate, asking me how hard I was working, making sure that I was pushing myself but not pushing myself too hard.

I knew that the foremost risk factor for having a heart attack is having had a heart attack. The cardiac rehab staff was there to make sure that didn’t happen, at least not on their watch. . . .

(This is an excerpt from Ted Gioia’s consistently provocative Substack: The Honest Broker.)

More than 100 years ago, sociologist Emile Durkheim studied the problem of anomie. That’s not a word you hear very often nowadays. But we need to bring it back.

Anomie is a sense that life has no purpose or meaning. The people who suffer from it are listless, disconnected, and prone to mental illnesses of various sorts. Durkheim believed, for example, that suicide was frequently caused by anomie.

But the most shocking part of Durkheim’s analysis was his view that anomie increased when social norms were lessened. You might think that people rejoice when rules and regulations get eliminated. But Durkheim believed the exact opposite. . .

No, no, no—I don’t mean the 1970s. I mean the seventh decade of one’s life.

For anyone under that age, your gagging reflux might kick in when you think of older people having sex. I get it. When I see an older couple kissing and making out in a movie, I get a little queasy. My usual response is “Oh my gosh—do we look like that? Ugh, what a turn-off.”

So, don’t worry; I promise to keep this essay quietly tucked under a PG rating and I will not attach any videos.

But take a look at the photo above, one of my husband and me just a few months ago, getting all giddy for one another. We are indeed a sexy couple. We can’t keep our hands off each other. . . .

No, we’re not talking about the 34 recent felony convictions of that real estate guy from Queens.

We’re talking about two other guys from the boroughs in our 70s—us—who just, finally, have convinced Facebook that the website you are currently reading is not spewing spam all over the internet.

Here’s the backstory. . . .

On the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, four months, 24 days and 11 hours after nearly dying from a heart attack, I finished a 5K race.

It was my daughter’s idea, part birthday gift, part incentive, part recovery celebration.

She thought I could do it; I wasn’t so sure, even though the cardiologist had said my heart had healed.

5Ks, I thought, is a lot of Ks. I had neither run nor even walked that far since the heart attack….

Thinking About ArtificiaI Intelligence

Requires Thinking About Human Intelligence.

And Humans Have Demonstrated

The Limitations Of Their Intelligence

By Messing Things Up Pretty Badly.

Click for video.

Tough newspaper city columnists, like Breslin, Royko and Hamill

Newspapers

Sleeping through the night

A human being answering the phone

Snuggling up in the front seat

Feeling comfortable driving at night

Leafing through Life Magazine

The new Beatles album

I winced as the friendly, strong junk guys maneuvered my husband’s old desk down the brick front steps and tossed it into the truck bed, where it splintered. Even though that desk was never my favorite, I felt a quick pang of regret as it landed with a crunch.

The competent guy in charge had told us that they would recycle what they could. I realized then that our definitions of recycling might vary, but overall I was glad to get these eight or nine pieces of well-used furniture out of our house.

There went the particle board bookcases I bought more than 45 years ago for my first apartment—cheap, because that was all I could afford on my teacher’s salary. Onto the pile went my mother‘s antique vanity dressing table, which had one broken leg for years that we never got around to fixing.

You get the idea. None of the items in the junk pile was worth saving and no one wanted any of them. Even so, I could almost hear a few pieces groan and sigh as they were abandoned.

We are downsizing from a two-story house to a one-level ranch. . . .

Donald Trump supporters are turning their flags upside down this week to protest his conviction, CNN reports. I’m not impressed. My head has felt like it has been turned upside down for many months now.

In fact, at times it’s felt ready to explode as I try to understand how more than 40 percent of U.S. voters reportedly support, and in many cases revere, a man who is a non-stop liar, a bully, a narcissist, a wanna-be dictator, a racist and, now, a convicted felon. It pains me to even think about it; I can’t fathom why.

I do know this: if Joe Biden loses the presidency in 2024 it won’t be because of his age. It won’t be because he’s a mediocre speaker. . . .

Ever since I turned 70, which was four years ago, I have been attending a lot of “Celebrations of Life.” They always include many of my living friends and one dead one.

We gather and share memories of the person we are celebrating. Sometimes we cry, but most of the time we wish we knew the person better—had spent more time with them, visited them when they were sick, reached out and created friend time while they were alive.

I always feel very guilty at these events because I realize I could have done better while they were alive to let them know how much I would miss them when they left. . . .

On Sunday, at age 82,

It had gotten old

As all things do

So, on Monday

I turned the page

And moved into a different age

Now, tra-la-la, tra-la-lee,

I’m setting sail

At 83 . . . .

(click for complete poem)

We spend a lot of time lately and rightly worrying about the challenges and horrors of our day: climate change, war, pandemics, the rise of fascism worldwide, etc. It is certainly difficult to see progress through the miasma of such modern horrors, but it is there.

As a generation we have witnessed considerable progress—progress sometimes at a cost, progress sometimes woefully inadequate, progress usually inequitably distributed, progress not without some backsliding—but progress nonetheless.

Our generation, born between World War II and Woodstock, has lived through a period of major, perhaps unprecedented, growth in the economy and of similarly substantial improvements in medicine and life expectancy, in living standards and physical comforts, in transportation and, of course, in technology.

We experienced considerable improvements, as well, in civil rights and in sexual and cultural freedom. We even witnessed, globally in particular, a major, though still woefully incomplete, reduction in extreme poverty. . . .

Because of back beat, our generation lived through one of the most consequential evolutions in popular music, a change that profoundly affected and reflected our view of the world.

What Is Back Beat?

Quick definition: “back beat” is a musical term that establishes a particular structure for a song.

Think about the structure of measures in songs: Four beats to a measure: 1-2-3-4.

In the music of our parents’ generations and before, the emphasis in a song would be on notes 1 and 3. 1-2-3-4.

      Technology is wonderful. It helps keep us alive. It also helps keep the idea of us alive after we’re dead.  

      My voice mailbox now includes four messages from people who are no longer living. Some of them, in fact, have been dead for some time. I haven’t erased the messages although they fill up space in the mailbox and there is no practical purpose for them to still be there.

      But I still don’t want to get rid of them, erase them from my machine, delete them from my life, and I know I am not alone in doing this. Or not doing this. . . .

I am not known for the power of my memory, but I can tell you that the first time I saw the Rolling Stones (Mick and Keith plus Brian, Bill and Charlie—the original five lads) was 55 and a half years ago. It was easy to remember: Thanksgiving Day, my junior year of college, Madison Square Garden.

Keith was still on the upward slope of his career as an addict then. Mick, to the best of my recollection, was considerably less concerned in 1969 with our feelings as an audience, less likely to inquire, at frequent intervals, as he did last night “are you having a good time”?

The Stones when I saw them that year, had released, within the previous five months, three singles: “Jumping Jack Flash,” “Street Fighting Man” and “Sympathy for the Devil.” …