Sadness Crept in like Fog

"There is an old saying that if you're worried about your weight, your clothes or getting old, then you have nothing to worry about." From Miss Dreamsville and the Collier County Women's Literary Society.

Sadness engulfs me like fog. I know the fragility of life, pursuits, plans. I know nothing lasts forever. There are fires -- ask Jeff,  pain -- ask Jerry, death -- ask The Daley Family.  I know into every life sadness must come. Sadness travels around the world and visits rich and poor, young and old, male and female.

"Life is not easy to live and learn, sometimes it is very painful, but pain makes a person think, thought makes a person wise and wisdom makes life endurable." Is this true? I think it might help.

There are huge stories I don't always understand that makes me sad; fires in Brazil, 150 car pile-ups in Texas, hurricanes in Louisiana, some from stupidity, some from intent, some from nature. My head is full of the the way a world works and wars. Greed, guns, child soldiers, business as usual.

I wanted to know what "insurgent" meant --precisely. Why are some folks patriots and some not. WOW is there a lot of information on; insurgents, transnational insurgency, counter-insurgents, belligerents, terrorist, guerrillas, revolution, rebellions, wars, brigandry, lawful and unlawful combatants, subversion, coups, piracy, raids, ambushes, security gaps, and the clash of civilizations, and no precise definition. Lots of theories though. The Art of War through the ages Biblical to Mali.

It is too much for me so to lighten my load I turned to Woody Allen:

There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?
I do the movies just for myself like an institutionalized person who basket-weaves. Busy fingers are happy fingers.
The two biggest myths about me are that I'm an intellectual, because I wear these glasses, and that I'm an artist because my films lose money.
To you, I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition

 'Everyone knows the same truth.' Our lives consist of how we choose to distort it. One person will distort it with a kind of wishful thinking like religion, someone else will distort it by thinking political solutions are going to do something, someone else will think a life of sensuality is going to do it, someone else will think art transcends. Art for me has always been the Catholicism of the intellectuals.

Most of life is tragic. You're born, you don't know why. You're here, you don't know why. You go, you die. Your family dies. Your friends die. People suffer. People live in constant terror. The world is full of poverty and corruption and war and Nazis and tsunamis. The net result, the final count is, you lose - you don't beat the house.

Your perception of time changes as you get older, because you see how brief everything is. You see how meaningless ... I don't want to depress you, but it's a meaningless little flicker.

I think what I'm saying is that I'm really impotent against the overwhelming bleakness of the universe and that the only thing I can do is my little gift and do it the best I can, and that is about the best I can do, which is cold comfort.

Life is full of misery, loneliness and suffering - and it's all over much too soon.

You see those ancient ruins and you're hyper-aware of the fact that thousands of yeas ago, there was a civilization that was mighty, the most dominant civilization in the world, and how glorious it must have been. And now it's a couple of bricks here and a couple of bricks there, and someone's sitting on the bricks eating their sandwich.

I try to encourage my children musically and guide them cinematically, but my opinion ... I represent the Old World, the Europe from which they took boats to escape.

What you're left with, in the end, are very grisly, unpleasant facts. The universe is flying apart at breakneck speed as we're sitting here.

Maybe I shouldn't have turned to Woody Allen.

Scottish saying: "There's g'aye few like us...and they're all dead."