Sitting here in the Boston Logan Airport, literally in the shadow of a 6-foot-tall "sculpture" of a Dunkin Donuts "coffee." I don't put scare quotes on DD's saccharine-sprinkled, malarial-swamp version of the sacred skittish water because I'm snobbish about coffee- in fact Harrison recently revealed unto me the dark magic of Folger's Black Silk Coffee, which retails for about $4 a pound. Its spot in front of the International Departures ticketing counters is really fitting, as it's hard to imagine a better 6 foot symbolic spur to encourage people to get far far away from this country. Unless, the Daughters of the American Revolution paid this guy to hand out greasy Apocalyptic pentacostal pamphlets while topless.
Anyway, I received a really special birthday present in the form of a dispelled long-held belief regarding brains. Stemming from a psychology class I had back in high school, I had always thought that by the age of 25 the brain had substantially reduced the overall number of neurons (peaking in adolescence) in order to optimize efficiency at the expense of interconnectivity and plasticity. Apparently that is false, which is good news because I still can't speak a foreign language or play a musical instrument- though I'm working on both (I swear!).
Lastly, I just now thought up the idea of the Whiskey Vital (play on Uisge-beatha ['water of life' in gaelic]- meaning a bottle of scotch distilled in the year I was born from which I will take a hundred-part (7.5mL) each year a progressively more delicious and dire reminder of:
"Whether at Naishapur or Babylon,
Whether the Cup with sweet or bitter run,
The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop,
The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one. "
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