Three Score and Ten

My father passed away on April 23, 2025. It’s still hard to write those words.

In the days since, I’ve been going through his notebooks, spiral-bound pages filled with stories, poems, notes, and fragments of thought he never got around to publishing. Some are raw. Some are sharp and complete.

All of them feel alive.

As I continue building this archive, I’ve realized that I don’t just want to collect his writing, I want to be in conversation with it. To share the ideas he left behind, and reflect on the ways they shaped me and still speak to this moment.

This passage, written in 2008, left me curious:

“The precious allotted time of three score and ten is anathema, wrong headed and just plain bad karma for the Madison Avenue Boys (and Girls.)

If you want to get your kicks, they are going to be squeezed, grated and scraped from the disparate bottom of a natural honey coated, nut sprinkled, shelf stored jar of pap with about as much…”

That’s where it ends. But it lingers. So today, I want to unpack it, not just for what it meant then, but for what it still means now.

What He Meant

“Three score and ten” is a poetic way of saying 70 years, drawn from Psalm 90:10 in the Bible. The verse reads:

"The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

It’s long been a symbolic reference to the human lifespan. But here, my father calls it “anathema”, not to religion or science, but to the engines of modern consumer culture.

To the ad men and image makers, “the Madison Avenue Boys (and Girls)”, the idea of aging, limits, or mortality is bad for business. They sell dreams of endless youth, vitality, and pleasure, and the quiet truth of life’s brevity doesn’t fit the pitch.

He’s not just critiquing advertising, he’s suggesting that consumerism has become a competing belief system. One that denies death. One that sells distraction in place of meaning. In doing so, it corrupts how we engage with both science and religion.

Where Science and Religion Get Bent

It was interesting to me how his short note exposes a shared vulnerability between science and religion, themes that he wrote about often. Both can be twisted to serve the market.

Religion offers us a story about life, death, and purpose. Science offers us tools to understand the passage of time and even stretch it. But when hijacked by advertising, both become props. Time becomes something to fight. Spirituality becomes a lifestyle brand. Mortality becomes a glitch to be patched with supplements, upgrades, and creams.

Instead of grounding us, both science and religion are often used to sell us back to ourselves, improved, optimized, extended. I believe that my father saw that distortion clearly.

Manufactured Joy

Then there’s that second paragraph:

“If you want to get your kicks, they are going to be squeezed, grated and scraped…”

He’s not describing joy so much as the effort of trying to feel something in a hollow culture. The metaphor of a “natural honey coated, nut sprinkled, shelf stored jar of pap” sounds like something you’d find in the health food aisle, marketed as wholesome, nourishing, simple.

But it’s just pap. Over processed, overpromised, and empty.

You have to scrape the bottom of that experience to find your kicks. And even then, there might not be much there. It’s a perfect image for how modern pleasure often feels:

artificial, exhausting, performative.

Why It Still Hits Today

Sixteen years later, everything he pointed to still lingers. Maybe it’s gotten worse.

We have more data, more devices, more tools to chase youth and dodge the weight of time. But we also have more anxiety, more burnout, more people wondering why nothing quite satisfies.

This passage isn’t just a critique, it’s a diagnosis. A note from someone who saw clearly that, you can’t sell your way out of being human.

Why I’m Sharing This

Losing him has made me want to share more of him, not just who he was, but how he thought. This passage, like so many others, reminds me that my father was paying attention. And that he wrote to challenge easy answers.

He didn’t finish the sentence. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe he was waiting to see how the rest of us would.

There’s more to come.

Euri 🖤

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