everybody's sayin' that
hell's the hippest way to go
well i don't think so
gonna take a look around it though

In describing the arc of her songwriting, Joni Mitchell not so long ago said:

My first four albums covered the usual youth problems—looking for love in all the wrong places—while the next five are basically about being in your 30s. Things start losing their profundity; in middle-late age, you enter a tragedian period, realizing that the human animal isn't changing for the better.

I don't know: maybe there's something wrong with me. Because though I guess I too am moving through middle-late age, I think better of people, places, and things, than I did when I was younger.

When I was younger, I thought that, though the world seemed to be controlled by Hairballs, it—the world, that is—would all become right, in my lifetime. And I, meanwhile, had a tendency, to become distraught, at every signal, that it might not.

Now, I just don't get distraught, any more. Because, I know, that that won't happen—all becoming all right, in my lifetime. But I also know, now, better, what life was like, for those who came before, as compared to what it is like, for those, who are here now. Because I have been afforded, the luxury, of traveling widely, in space and time, through history.

And I see movement. I see an arc. I see that it is long, so very long, but I see that nonetheless it indeed bends that way, towards all becoming all right. Someday.

Not, in my lifetime, of course.