The best things

This is all strictly my opinion, of course, based on a limited, markedly US/Christian experience, though some of these things are or were pretty popular – it is not just me.

In alphabetical order (those with links have posts of their own):

• The best age: 19 – but that might be a male thing: the testosterone rush (or whatever it is) makes you feel like you will live for ever (the genetic programming necessary for battle charges?). All your ideals are still shiny and new. You can be free of your parents. Life has not yet ground you down.
• The best book: The Bible. The book I have read more than any other. A book you can read and reread your whole life long and still get something out of it.
• The best city: New York. For all of its ills, nowhere else do I feel so alive. It is a world city which contains worlds within worlds. And has the most beautiful women.
• The best computer screen-saver: Flying Toasters (1990s). Pictured above.
• The best drink: tea. What is more reassuring than a cup of tea?
• The best experience: being a parent. Easily life’s greatest joy (and sorrow).
• The best film: “The Wizard of Oz” (1939). What my parents saw on their first date, so this one might be overdetermined. It is the film that helped bring me into being.
• The best food: rice and beans. What I pretty much lived on when I was single. I never got sick of it – and it has all the proteins you need.
• The best game: Monopoly. It has strategy, reversal of fortune, revenge – what more could you ask for?
• The best holiday: Christmas, especially as a child. Unlike my birthday, it features a nationwide build-up in the weeks before – the Holiday Season – which adds to the effect.
• The best invention in my lifetime: the Internet. Arguably the best invention since sex.
• The best institution: marriage. Not all peaches and cream, of course, but still hard to beat if you marry a right-enough person.
• The best joke: “Does the pope shit in the woods?” This still makes me laugh!
• The best magazine: The Economist. I can tell because when I subscribe to only one magazine this is the one I subscribe to.
• The best song: “Love Ballad” (1976) by L.T.D. Back in the 1970s I liked the George Benson cover way more, but like many things on this list it grew on me over time.
• The best television show: “Twilight Zone” (1959-64) – and I have not even seen all the episodes yet! Of those I have seen, my favourite is “Eye of the Beholder” (November 11th 1960).
• The best thing: life – what makes all the rest possible.
• The best thrill: sex. Even when you do not do it right.
• The best year to live in: 2019, but that is mainly because we do not yet know how it will turn out. All the other years are like shows you have already seen.

– Abagond, 2019.

See also:

• Seven books I would take to a desert island

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