Reasons to Live

6. Les parapluies de Cherbourg, but only once every six years or more, when yet again, from some infirmity of memory, you’ve managed to dismiss it as minor and sentimental, so you can find out all over again just how wrong you were, as on your knees you grieve your newly shattered heart

8. tuning forks

10. Walking to the drugstore with a numbered slip in my wallet knowing there’s an envelope of prints awaiting me. A pleasure largely extinct.

11. Chris Marker. Is out there, somewhere. With a camera. And miraculously, funding.

15. a voz de Astrud Gilberto

17.

18. Bruce Lee t-shirts

23. when something in your waking day jogs loose a piece of dream from the night before

24. My Little Airport, “Edward, had you ever thought that the end of the world would come on 20.9.01?”

27. Pedal steel.

31. socialized medicine

35. The Venture Bros., “Twenty Years to Midnight”

39. the Peanuts “Hey Ya” mashup

41. Neglected authors who turn out to be incredible

53. the invention and presence of mechanisms so sensitive they can, despite a flimsy appearance and a reputation for failure, separate stacked paper sheet from sheet with a dexterity approaching that of the human finger—not aided, wetted, or sheathed in a nubbled rubber tip, but with only the texture of its unique print’s ridges for friction and detection—for what will become of these appendages, delicate as the legs of insects, these machines of a function specialized, like entire sectors of a civilization, almost unto obsolescence, when children with smudged faces clamber over chunks of fallen buildings to escape the feral clans, and the sun is dim through lingering smoke; will they be as mysterious as the white armatures, attached to smashed benches, with their numbered weights on pulleys, amidst a wreckage of mirrors—of a use inconceivable to the urchin generation combing the ruins for a can of peas unopened, a stale pastry on a spotted doily fringe, only to find, in the curved face of an urn, chrome-sided and ornate of spigot, in which a bitter drink has long since cooled, the distortion of their own desperation, streaked faces and matted hair, chapped lips and blood dried at the temple—what, oh what, will become of them then?

54. Shadows of My Forgotten Ancestors, Sergei Paradjanov

63. freshly squeezed orange juice

75. Someday being as urbane as James Mason.

79. Snipping the tags from newly bought clothes.

88. Orange peel in preserves, whether marmalade, jelly, or jam.

98. Eddie Izzard, when he sticks his tongue out.

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