Rather than going out to eat yesterday, I cooked a really good lunch and then we watched a movie - Sunset Boulevard from 1950. What a tragic portrayal of those given to spells of melancholy, living in the past, longing for the glory that was yesterday's, unable to age gracefully. "There's nothing tragic about being fifty. Not unless you're trying to be twenty-five," Joe Gillis tells Norma Desmond.

One of her lines about silent movies reminded me of one of blogging's appeals - There once was a time in this business when I had the eyes of the whole world! But that wasn't good enough for them, oh no! They had to have the ears of the whole world too. So they opened their big mouths and out came talk. Talk! TALK!

And this one - We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!

And she also said - You are... writing words, words, more words! Well, you'll make a rope of words and strangle this business! But there'll be a microphone there to catch the last gurgles, and Technicolor to photograph the red, swollen tongues!

Makes me wonder about myself, just how gracefully am I aging? How much of yesteryear would I reclaim if I could? Would I be happier with silent pictures, no dialogue, black and white rather than Technicolor? There are days when the answer to that is yes. If I weren't taking Zoloft, those days would be more frequent than they are.

"All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up."