HOLLYWOOD -- It still feels inconceivable that George Carlin is no longer with us.
And it's not just because many comics tend to live until ripe old ages -- both George Burns and Bob Hope reached 100, Milton Berle was 93 -- it's that Carlin, who died at a Santa Monica hospital on Sunday at age 71, just always seemed so reliably in the moment.
While Carlin's heart finally failed him after a lifetime of scares (he suffered the first of several heart attacks back in the mid-'70s), his mind was something else again.
Right until the end he retained the inquisitive, creative energy of a man less than half his age.
Ever the spry wordsmith and keen social observer, he was constantly auditioning fresh material when others of his generation were content to trot out their greatest hits.
Those who lumped him together with the shock comics whose one-note acts were comprised of those Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television were missing a salient point.
Swapping a suit and tie for a T-shirt and jeans back in the late 1960s, Carlin and his counter-cultural musings may have occasionally made waves, but even with his liberal use of those seven words, his act seldom would have been accused of vulgarity or tastelessness.
Instead, his comedy demonstrated a tremendous respect for language and its power -- and with a surgeon-like precision he succeeded in extracting the exact word from his mental thesaurus that would generate maximum comedic impact.
Even as the tributes continue to pour in, the entertainment community is struggling to accept the fact that Carlin is gone.
As dozens of famous names, from Robin Williams and Whoopi Goldberg to Jerry Seinfeld and Ben Stiller to filmmakers Judd Apatow and Kevin Smith, credit Carlin as a singular influence, young comedians have been congregating at clubs across town to pay their respects.
If you drove past The Laugh Factory on Sunset Blvd. yesterday, you'd see "GEORGE CARLIN REST IN PEACE. MAKE GOD LAUGH" on the marquee, while flowers covered his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
From a personal vantage point, he's the main reason most stand-up comics I've known and worked with felt compelled to stand in front of strange audiences and disperse some "Brain Droppings" (the title of his 1997 best-selling book) of their own.
While I was attending the CineVegas film festival last week, Carlin was performing at a casino just down the Strip and I was trying to figure out a way to duck out of some of those screenings and catch one of his sets.
I wish I had.
At least he continues to be a daily fixture in my household, as the genial narrator of many of my three-year-old's favourite Thomas the Tank Engine DVDs, in which the only dirty words you'll hear are "Cinders and ashes!" and "Bust my buffers!"
Among his thousands of trademark observations, Carlin once quipped, "I'm not afraid of heights, I'm just afraid of falling from them."
There was no need for fear -- George Carlin remained at the top of his game for the duration.
