As I get older, once upon a time becomes further and further away from the dock of me each and every day until I am no moor.
It's like all my most precious payload of held-close-to-the-heart-memories are being slowly pushed out to sea on an grand, ceremonial boat and lit afire, Viking/Game of Thrones funeral style and it's the job of the mist to make the world as I knew it, officially disappear.
No one escapes this fiery end. Not even the Gods. Look how many died this year alone. David Bowie. Garry Shandling. Patty Duke. Alan Rickman. Harper Lee. Glenn Frey. Bob Elliot. Gato Barbieri. Merle Haggard. And that is just a partial list.
I'm working on a new series at the moment that I co-created which is about the behind the scenes, hilarious madness of the Johnny Carson show, set in 1972 Burbank and it seems, while taking an informal poll, that virtually no one under the age of 30 has any idea who he was. Well we are about to remedy that. But still.
Oh, how the Mighty Carson Art Players have fallen.
Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Jack Benny, celestial luminaries all, are now largely forgotten show biz relics, resigned to live in a Friar's Club heaven that only those older than 40 can feel.
Time they say marches on, but in many ways it's more like stomping, Riverdance style. It's like forgetting is the specialty of the house and you and what you cared most about are no longer even on the menu.
Now being a disciple of Frank Sinatra, who is barely hanging onto the memory cliff by his rat pack fingertips (along with Sammy, Dean and Joey Who of Las Vegas, Nevada) I am following his fairy tales will come true advice to be young at heart and on most days it works.
And yet modern day distractions are working overtime to knock me off my game. Just like you, I ogle my iphone 7 plus, which is the size of Peter Dinklage, like it's day one of my newborn baby. I savor and slurp up the shimmering, vibrant 4K palette of my flat screen TV like it's a multi-color, gourmet meal and I add all kinds of side dishes to my sound system like DACs and amps that showers me with a purity of sound that would make Stravinsky crap his pants.
But just like on Christmas morning, by the end of the day, the whacked out bliss of new toy playing is quickly replaced by the simple fascination of the boxes that they came with.
Printed on each and every box should be the words: "apply imagination here." You might as well throw away the toys.
The thing is we parents don't just buy one or two outstanding toys for our kids on the baby Jesus's big 0-1 birthday. We inundate them until our living rooms resemble Charles Foster Kane's storage bin.
We have begun to treat ourselves the exact same and the entertainment business is just thrilled to bits to be our over indulgent parents. We don't just get three or four channels like in the good old days. We get 5,000. And yet this country can't even decide between two presidential candidates.
We are just not faced with simple choices anymore. The average deli menu looks like an unspooled torah. It takes longer to order off them than it write it.
We are surely more sophisticated in many ways, but we have evolved at the expense of our souls.
It's lovely that independent book stores are making a significant come back. They did it by piggybacking on the shoulders of social networking and not on local good will alone. Maybe that is the lesson here. We need to marry the old with the new instead of treating yesterday like it was a Kim Jong Un nuke.
There is a deep hunger, I think, to coddle, all that we have loved, but the problem is the world of technology keeps trying to yank it out of our hands.
The whole concept of living in the moment is criminal to me.
As a writer, I am a guy who over-packs for any writing journey as I travel up and down the perilous and often frightening waters of my own personal inner Amazon River whose unpredictable and serpentine currents are my now publicly displayed, hitherto most private fantasies and dreams, alongside my trusty friend, guide and all-purpose muse: my fireworks lit imagination, whose dulcet voice has whispered to me, like a chanting prayer, from somewhere in the ether of the infinite beyond
Ghosts are my raucous, bleacher bum cheerleaders. Long silenced voices continue to serenade me like wandering troubadours to the point where my heart swells and combusts from an excessive romance every hour or so. An infinite supply of stowed away smiles and acts of kindness received from along the way parents, teachers, friends and lovers are always just within my reach, ready to be withdrawn from the ATM of my own personal vault of life experience.
That is my hear and now.
I think, my friends, the message here is that we need to summon more and bombard less.
We desperately need to float in the sublime holiness of silence because just below the surface is where all the buried treasure of our lives live, that are waiting for us to gently wake them up, like tender babies, to hold and adore while they remind us of all the magic that can be held in our arms at any given moment.