I lived in the apartment above that entrance.

I read an article today by someone imagining what salutary advice he would give to himself if he could send it back twenty years in time. He is forty now and supposed he had the chance for a few moments to address his twenty year old self. He also listed two people in the computer industry who have written books using this same whimsical theme, what they would have done differently if they had this same, retrospective twenty year advantage in plotting their lives. I read this on the site ‘Medium’.

This brought a smile to my face because I imagined for a moment what I would have told my twenty year old self at the age of forty, what simple message delivered through a glitch or portal of time. It brought a smile because in my case (though I’m well past forty) the advice would have been simple, succinct and perhaps the most curious and enigmatic of any advice ever formulated on this planet.

Here it is:

‘Never ever date a woman whose first name starts with the letters "Lind".

This is because, in my late twenties I went through three painful relationships (all very pleasant at first) with three young woman whose first names were, curiously enough and in order, Lindy, Linda and the last and worst, lasting over two years and near disaster and destruction to both of our personal lives, Lindsey.

I wish I had been more superstitious along these lines back then as I might have learned from the first two not to have fallen for the third. But I wasn’t and the irony of my fate didn’t strike me till years later.

I wasn’t oblivious to such thoughts back then and have the proof. I kept voluminous, introspective journals at that age and in one of my late night entries was this succinct note “Don’t find your next girlfriend at the Starry Plough”.

This was written after I had met two of those three, sitting almost exactly in the same bar stool at the ‘Starry Plough’ a famous Irish pub in Berkeley California which I lived above for half a year and was the only bar I felt completely at home in. I must admit though that by far the most passionate love of my life, Dale, was serendipitously met on that very same bar stool when I was twenty nine.

If you want to read the adventures of all these affairs in detail open the bottom link. It transcribes those scenes from my journals with an almost painful honesty, because I was a well read and a practising philosopher at the time with a burning mission to dissect my life and heart, as the notebooks candidly display, and I’m so old now I have one great luxury, I don’t care what anyone thinks of me, society or individuals, or do to me. The rich life I have lived, as the famous song by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong states, ‘they can’t take that away from me’ and another from a songwriter I knew when he was composing this song in my living room. He wrote ‘I am beyond the pale of worry or of pain’.

Here’s the link, enjoy:

This is the middle of my autobiography entirely posted on this site.

https://www.publish0x.com/robert-oreilly/lindy-xpzenmn