George Carlin's Views on Aging
Do you realize that the only time in our lives when we like to get old is when we're kids? If you're less than 10 years old, you're so excited about aging that you think in fractions.

"How old are you?" "I'm four and a half!" You're never thirty-six and a half. You're four and a half, going on five! That's the key

You get into your teens, now they can't hold you back. You jump to the next number, or even a few ahead.

"How old are you?" "I'm gonna be 16!" You could be 13, but hey, you're gonna be 16! And then the greatest day of your life . . you become 21. Even the words sound like a ceremony. YOU BECOME 21. YESSSS!!!

But then you turn 30. Oooohh, what happened there? Makes you sound like bad milk! He TURNED; we had to throw him out. There's no fun now, you're just a sour-dumpling. What's wrong? What's changed?

You BECOME 21, you TURN 30, then you're PUSHING 40. Whoa! Put on the brakes, it's all slipping away. Before you know it, you REACH 50 and your dreams are gone.

But wait!!! You MAKE it to 60. You didn't think you would!

So you BECOME 21, TURN 30, PUSH 40, REACH 50 and MAKE it to 60 .

You've built up so much speed that you HIT 70! After that it's a day-by-day thing; you HIT Wednesday!

You get into your 80's and every day is a complete cycle; you HIT lunch; you TURN 4:30; you REACH bedtime. And it doesn't end there. Into the 90s, you start going backwards; "I Was JUST 92"

Then a strange thing happens. If you make it over 100, you become a little kid again. "I'm 100 and a half!"

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Subject: Growing up in Massapequa An article written by an ex-long Islander. You might enjoy it.

Tawkin' 'Bout My Generation: The Long Island Star Factory Carol Sottili Washington Post Staff Writer August 15, 2001; Page C2

It's just too easy to make fun of Long (emphasis on the hard G) Island . Joey Buttafuoco, big hair, the mob, the garbage barge, Levittown , corrupt local politicians, "Survivor's" Dr. Sean -- it's all there. Along with a host of the famous and infamous, I grew up in the Massapequas, a place on the island's South Shore roughly divided, by train tracks no less, between blue-collar and white-collar. We liked to call it Matzohpizza because of its rich ethnic mix (there were plenty of Irish, too).

The caricatures of Long Island are my heritage. I know from fugedaboudit. I was part of the blue-collar crowd. My dad, Tony Gulotta, was a printer at Newsday. My friends had fathers who were cops and firemen and mailmen. A couple of moms, including mine, had part-time jobs, but only during the hours their children were at school. I didn't meet a kid whose dad wore a tie to work until the ninth grade.

At Alfred G. Berner High School , now a junior high, they sent children who lived on the water to school with us. There I met kids whose dads were newscasters and corporate lawyers and senior vice presidents. I also met lots of famous people, although they weren't famous then. Xander ( pronounced Zan-duh) Baldwin , now better known as Alec, sat next to my brother in science class -- in my yearbook, he's a skinny, goofy-looking freshman class president. He and his brothers lived on the right side of the tracks, but they didn't come from real money. The Baldwin kids were famous in Massapequa long before any films were made because their late dad -- Mr. Baldwin to us -- was a football coach and social studies teacher at Massapequa High for almost 30 years.

Alec and his brothers aren't the only famous sons and daughters of Massapequa . Jerry Seinfeld double-dated with my friend Marion and her date. She recalls him starting sentences with "When I'm a professional comedian." And it was always "when," never "if." Brian Setzer, the Stray Cats rocker turned big-band leader, lived down the block from another friend -- neighbors complained about the noise. Kiss was the bar band at our favorite hangout, the Daisy, in Amityville, the next town over, but we knew Gene Simmons as Gene Klein and Paul Stanley as Stanley Eisen. We shot pool and drank 35-cent beers while they played.

Mob boss Carlo Gambino lived on the water, on the right side of the tracks. Bodyguards hung out on his front stoop. A rite of passage in high school was to drive fast past Gambino's goons, yelling obscenities out the car window. Cheap thrills, Long Island-style.

Ron Kovic, the Vietnam War veteran and peace activist who wrote "Born on the Fourth of July," was raised up the block from my buddy Gail. Anti-Hillary book author and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan and I went to the same junior high, although she was ahead of me.

My friends and I have a theory about why she dislikes the senator from New York : It's not just the politics, it's because Hillary Clinton looks and acts like the snooty moneyed girls who were often quite cool to the girls who lived north of the tracks. Like me, Noonan has retained friends from her youth in Massapequa . "I spent the Fourth of July . . at Tobay [Beach], with my best friend from junior high and her husband and family and my son," Noonan recently told me. "It was fabulous. We toured as we always do, like the stations of the cross, the houses we lived in." Noonan moved from Massapequa in her sophomore year, but she returns for high school reunions. "So many of us are still friends, which is thrilling and touching." I know exactly how she feels.

Like most of these now-famous people, my family didn't have a lot of money. Neither did anyone else in my neighborhood. But at Berner High in the early 1970s, working-class and privileged-class not only mingled, they became friends. I got lots of rides on expensive motorcycles and 35-foot sailboats. I was invited to summer houses on Fire Island . I didn't know it then, but those forays would open my eyes to another Long Island.

As teenagers, we hitchhiked to the beach just about every summer day, first to Jones Beach Field 4, the closest to the main roads. And then, when cars and boats entered the picture, to Tobay Beach and Gilgo Beach and Fire Island . We dug our toes in the shallow waters of the Great South Bay in search of clams, slurping them down with cold beers. We learned to body-surf without breaking our necks.

We discovered the beauty of the North Shore . We spent rainy days atTeddy Roosevelt's house, Sagamore Hill, with its hundreds of animal heads and its sweeping lawn reaching to wide-open vistas of the Long Island Sound, seeing the F. Scott Fitzgerald world we read about in English class. We rambled through quaint, New Englandy villages like Cold Spring Harbor , with its incredibly xpensive gift shops and French restaurants. We absorbed the ecology at the Planting ields, a 400-acre Gatsby-like estate turned into a state historic park.

We went farther afield on Long Island . We took long motorcycle rides to the North Fork, then all Long Island ducks and potatoes and now a string of wineries and upscale bed-and-breakfasts. We drove to the tip of the island at Montauk and climbed the 200-year-old lighthouse for views of Block Island . We went to clubs in the Hamptons .

I left Massapequa Park at age 20 and moved to a beach on the other coast. For many years, I didn't like coming back. I made fun of the accents and the rudeness and the crowds. I turned my back on fugedaboudit.

But now I go back whenever I can -- especially in summer. I am comforted when, leaving church on a sunny Sunday morning, I watch an old man put his arm around his friend's shoulders, overhearing him say, "Waddayagonnado?" I laugh when I take too long ordering and the guy behind the deli counter tells me he doesn't have all day. I go with my mom to the village's "Breakfast in the Park" on July Fourth weekend and see the kids of the kids I went to school with. I sit on my brother's boat at Tobay Beach drinking a cold Budweiser, watching the kids catch crabs off the pier, and feel totally content. I eat Italian cookies from Di Monda's and french fries from All American, and I know I'll lose the weight when I leave because they don't have food like this in the Olive Garden world I inhabit.

The island has faults. It's crowded, the drivers are crazy, the people aren't outwardly friendly, and smokers are everywhere. But my kids won't grow up grabbing a slice of pie at Sal's, understanding Yiddish words without being Jewish, watching the waves come in under a full moon, walking into town to pick up hot semolina bread.

I sometimes wonder why so many famous people are linked to the Massapequas. Did ethnic guilt obligate them to make good? Did the proximity to the seemingly unattainable world of Manhattan spur them on? Were they saving themselves from drowning in the miles of tract homes? Or, like me, did interacting with those privileged kids open their eyes to a world of possibilities? Who knows. Cuz, hey, waddayagonnado? Pass me a cannoli and fugedaboudit.

Only Long Islanders remember... I know you'll appreciate this.

THE REST OF YOU...YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE MISSING......

LONG ISLAND You live in the shadow of the greatest city in the world, but you almost never go there. When you're away from Long Island , you love it and when you're there, you don't. You think if you're not from Long Island or NYC, you're not really from New York . You know the exact point at which Queens turns into Nassau simply on intuition. You don't go to Manhattan , you go to "The City." You never realize you have an accent till you leave. Everything north of the Bronx is "upstate." New Jersey sucks.

At some point in your life you've gone clamming. Either your parents or your grandparents lived in the city. You'd pay $11.50 for a movie. You don't live in Long Island . You live ON Long Island. You know where the Commack Motor Inn is. Your distant future might involve the state of Florida . You can correctly pronounce places like Ronkonkonma, Happauge, Wantagh , Mineola, Islandia, Massapequa . You know the location of 6 malls and a dozen McDonalds and 36 7-11's. You never, ever want to "change at Jamaica ..." You've tried to find the Amityville Horror house.

No, you don't want mustard on that burger!! You can't understand why a diner would ever close. You've had a seagull crap on your car. You have or someone you know has fallen asleep on the LIRR and ended up in one of these three places; Babylon , Port Washington or Hicksville . You went to an elementary school that promoted dodge ball as the number 1 game among children 7-13. You know White Castle is terrible for you and the food sucks but you periodically "Get the Crave."

You want the Yankees to stay in the Bronx , but would probably go to more games if they moved. You think that somehow, the Jets and Giants still play in New York . You've missed that "Drunk Train," the 2:42 out of Penn and had the dreaded wait until 5:30. You or someone you know has owned an animal that came from North Shore Animal League. Quick! Who's your county Executive ? Don't know do you? You've never taken an MTA bus. The Long Island Expressway isn't really as bad as everybody thinks. You don't associate Fire Island with gay men. You know which parts of the Godfather were filmed on Long Island .

You've paid a $10 cover charge to get into a bar, but got nothing for it. You miss wiffle ball and running through sprinklers. You think Islip MacArthur airport is cute and you enjoy watching it grow up. Billy Joel said it best, "either you date a rich girl from the North Shore , or a cool girl from the South Shore ." You don't really see the big deal about the Hamptons , unless you got smashed at the Bordy Barn. When people ask "where are you from?" you answer Long Guy Land and automatically assume everyone in the world knows that answer means New York . You've always liked Billy Joel and you own several of his "records."

The Belt Parkway sucks! You've been stuck in a traffic jam for more than 2 hours (without moving). Your parents took you to All American, Nathans or Carvel (on the way home from the beach). Regular gas -- $2.69 and you still pay it!!! You hate paying tolls. You don't have to go far to see your family. You remember Grumman. You've gotten drunk on the bleachers of some high school. You know the color of the water at Jones Beach is not BLUE! You were upset when all the Roy Rogers turned into Wendy's and Arby's closed for good. You can spout off all the LIRR stops between Penn Station and Ronkonkoma . Paying $35 for a haircut doesn't sound so crazy.

You think the people from Brooklyn are "da wunz dat tawk wit a accent." You went sledding in the sumps. You've partied on a golf course in the middle of the night. You knew of Massapequa before the Amy Fisher-Joey Buttafuoco nightmare. You think going to Queens was a hike. The first time >you heard the term "Long Island Iced Tea" you were somewhere else and you laughed. When you live somewhere else and are astounded to see that people actually stop at yellow lights. When you just sort of presume that wherever you live, you'll be able to find good delis, good pizza, and good bagels. You can name at least three bands that came from Long Island . When you walk in the city and you see two men holding hands...it becomes normal to you. No word ends in an ER, just an AH.

Just wanted to add that my father fell asleep on the LIRR quite a few times and woke up at the wrong station....