Marianne Faithfull: once, she was of the Immortals.

She had to be—all that time she spent with Keith Richards.

Like Richards, Faithfull had the constitution of a mule. Nothing could fell her. Sure, sometimes there were the comas. But she always pulled out. So, too, when she would break her jaw, or her heart would stop, or her lover would leap out a 14th-story window, and become a stain. She always came through.

Even the years on the streets, sleeping in dumpsters, which permanently spiked her vocal cords, inserted razor blades into them; she just took that, into one of the most powerful white-woman curse-songs, in all of Christendom: "Why D'ya Do It?"

Mick Jagger's penis, it shriveled into nothingness, upon the release of that song. No one has seen it, not even a hint of it, since.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mvAMEaWgTQ]

Faithfull eventually becalmed herself in rhythmic, prolonged visits, to the home of Van Morrison. Where Morrison invited her to: just: stay. Long, as she so needed.

Morrison, yes, it is true, he has been known to occasionally—like, once or so an evening—imbibe a shot, or nineteen, of Tullamore Dew. But that is like, maybe, an aspirin. To someone of the appetites of Faithfull.

There occurred, in these stayings, compadreing. Because Morrison, too, and at the same time, had gazed, like Faithfull, into, mystic eyes.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-Qn9CVnpmc]

And there, then, Morrison, he shared with Faithfull, in those long remote rural Irish nights, what he had found after.

The common one. In a coat so old. With light in the head. In a town called paradise. Where she could be free.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AACGQ0a7J0w]

And then, no longer, did Faithfull, always, absolutely, have to dwell, in Times Square.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vDE_q0sli4]

Today, Marianne Faithfull's world, it is a one where she is 69 years of age, where she "struggled onto the stage at The Roundhouse with the aid of a walking stick, before realising she had forgotten the glasses she needed to read from the music stand in front of her."

The bohemian star was on stage for an hour and 40 minutes but clearly struggled to stand for longer than a few minutes and found herself having to rely on her walking stick or sit down in an armchair that was provided for her.

She opened up about her health struggles telling her fans: "it's been very, very hard with all these terrible injuries and Le Faithfull actually ending up disabled."

She added: "I've had three years of this shit."

At one point she visibly struggled to get out of the chair, quipping: "oh fuck. It's hard work, and for not much money. Up with the cripple."

The singer, who has also been treated for hepatitis C, was forced to cancel a string of US tours after breaking a bone in her back and suffers from emphysema.

It was also reported that in May 2014 she suffered a broken hip while on holiday on the Greek island of Rhodes. Following surgery it was said that she developed an infection where the prosthetic was placed.

[S]he declared: "I'm getting very tired now. I really am. I'm not so young anymore."

Discussing her daily routine with The Guardian earlier in the week, Miss Faithfull said: "I do my inhalations for my emphysema, and then I go back to bed until 8.30.

"I've just been through three years when I've had the most terrible accidents, including a bone infection. I am just coming to terms with being disabled."

It just doesn't seem fair. That someone who, in her life, on many given nights, survived more heroin than would kill the entire population of Crete, is now befelled by such piddly shit as a broken hip, a bone infection, emphysema.

But: there it is. This world.

Where, programmed into every being, at birth, is that being's death.

A dirty little secret is that every being on this planet is, as a replicant. As set forth in the true-life documentary-film Blade Runner. We all come with a pre-programmed end-date. We just don't know what it is.

Evolution, on this planet, does not trust individual beings, to get it right. So it pre-programs every individual biological unit, to age and die. And meanwhile replicate. The idea being, that maybe the next-generation replicated individual biological unit, might get it, righter.

So. Whaddaya think? Has this, "evolutionary," plan, worked?

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Umc9ezAyJv0]

Leon, he is the quintessential Hairball voter. Without a doubt. And so is Mr. Holden, whom Leon kills. There is nothing surer. Than that. In this world.

I am passing through an aging-and-death passage because whenever the kitten commands I sit on the floor and play with him for an hour, my legs creak when I seek to rise, and because this house has become a sort of vortex around which death in recent weeks seems to revolve.

First, the aging. The eternal Eeyore, George Orwell, inscribed in one of his diaries:

Things not foreseen in youth as part of middle age.

Perpetual tired weak feeling in legs, aching knees. Stiffness amounting to pain in small of back & down loins. Discomfort in gums. Chest more or less always constricted. Feeling in the morning of being almost unable to stand up. Sensation of cold whenever the sun is not shining. Wind on the stomach (making it difficult to think). Eyes always watering.

Do I want to think about this sort of shit? Much less write it down? No. I do not. And so, I don't.

But it is not so easy to ignore, when the survivor, he becomes no longer the survivor, and dies of septic shock, in the hospital. After the cop shot him in the neck. Two blocks from here. And when they find, round the same time, also two-three blocks from here, a six-weeks decomposing remnant of a habitual drunk, who laid down, she, one cold night, in the woods, and just, from exposure . . . died. And then I go, to take to the camera-guy, his shop a block-and-a-half from here, my digital camera, to find out why it don't work no more, to find out he don't work no more, because he died. In the night. In his sleep. Then, to complete the four cardinal directions, there's my wood guy, who this fall couldn't deliver my firewood, because liver/pancreatic cancer, into him it galloped this summer, and, by fall, gleefully, laughing, it had taken away, all of his life.

It's kind of a cloud. Like the one that hangs over Pigpen. In the true-life documentary comic-strip Peanuts.

These days, when I wake up, I first spend the usual hour orienting myself as to what space-time I am in. Then, once that is accomplished, and I understand that I am "here," in the "usual," I say: well: okay: yeah: okay: I guess: thanks.

Warren Zevon was a proud young buck who had pretty much all and every and then he didn't go the doctor for twenty years and then he did and three months later he died of lung cancer. His parting words: "enjoy every sandwich."

Sounds right to me.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0FaVI9ae24]

"So why is this now called 'Til Tuesday,' hecate?" No one has asked.

It is because I was trying to be all original and creative, in finding some coupling to "Open," in as "Open ______," and realized finally, that, in this, as in most everything I attempt, I was dying like a pitiful dog.

Since this thing goes up on a Tuesday, I next tried to find something musical, relating to a Tuesday. Because I, always, anywhere, in my life, go, always, first, to music.

I then flashed through this, that, and the other, until I arrived, at last, at this song, by the band, Til Tuesday:

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDZQ70uHbIo]

But I couldn't announce it right away. That that is what I was doing. Because I am a coward.

Not like my friend John. Who reminds me of, here, Shahryar. A musician who is fearless. Who will like what he likes, regardless of whether it is supposed to be "cool." John, he was always cutting across, whatever was supposed to be the Right music. To like, and not like. I remember the summer of 1984, John publicly pronouncing, absolutely, that Don Henley's "The Boys Of Summer," it was, without doubt, the finest AM-radio white-person pop tune of the summer. And he was right.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6z_NfTe6SI]

And he said the same of "Coming Up Close." From Til Tuesday. In the fall of 1996. That it was absolutely pop-music right. And none of us should be ashamed, for liking it.

He was dying, then, John. Though he wouldn't let us, for quite a while, know that. The stomach cancer, it had come, and it was eating him alive.

Of all the billions of words, ever written, or spoken, about Elvis Presley, none captured, for me, why Presley was, how he was, what he was, better than the words John spoke, one night, when he and I were walking back, from the liquor store, and he paused, to look at me, in the faint streetlight glinting off his glasses, as he tamped, softly, his sandals, onto the planet, and he said:

he moved with the twitch of the earth

So did John.

So may we all.

Selah.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMEExDZEgoo]

Some of the humans, they think that the aging/death thing will be solved when machines can get plugged into the humans, or the humans can get plugged into machines.

Alas.

Not so.

There will still be Problems. Still, no one, really, will be Happy. Or Hopeful.

For instance: your machine-body, it could get hacked by a Bad person. If you don't pay your debts, your machine-body, it could be sold for scrap. If you have any machine-body parts made by Microsoft, they will constantly freeze up, and you will have to reboot. There will be peer pressure, to upgrade to the newest, spiffiest, machine-body. In the machine-bodies, everyone will be a walking lightning rod, in constant danger of shorting out. Also, rust. To wit: the Tin Man. He went out one day, to chop wood. And a rain-storm came. And that was it, for him. Till the girl from Kansas, she came with her dog. Even then, he still had no heart. Because machine-people—in them, there is no heart. And heart. That is all. That, here, there is.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8m0RrkKroA4]