Some folks create hours-long playlists for a long trip. Me, I dig out George Carlin on audiobook and laugh the entire way to my destination.

It’s hard for me to believe it’s been three years since George Carlin’s death. The brilliant, irreverent, mischievous and unabashed comic died June 2008.

That’s because every time I listen, watch or read his routines these days, it is as though he’s satirizing current events. The jokes remain fresh, though Carlin’s catalog spans several decades. The barbs thrown at all sorts of systems — whether Carlin is mocking the political system, education system or whatnot — remain relevant. It could be any Congressman or priest that Carlin is talking about, he mentioned no specific names… why limit yourself, he must have thought.

Though his jokes could seamlessly exist without being rooted in specifics, New Jersey has its specific memories of George Carlin.

Carlin was no stranger to the Jersey Shore. The Strand in Lakewood continues to list Carlin as among the star performances to have graced their stage. He garnered standing ovations at the State Theater in New Brunswick and the Count Basie in Red Bank.

I have my specific memories, too. He was a classic on stage in Atlantic City in 2006, when I saw him perform at Caesar’s Casino five years ago this week. He opened with some shock value, asking the audience why a certain slang word for a female genitalia phenomenon wasn’t used more often, before quickly eschewing politics, consumerism, public education, mass media and the trickiness of the English language.

It was a performance of familiar topics but also of some bits that would end up in his last HBO special, “It’s Bad For Ya” which aired March 2008.

There’s enough Carlin for me to listen to in a trip that could get me at least to Ohio, if not further, should I decide to dig out all his albums for the longest of car trips. But even after his death, the Carlin catalog continues to grow. Last Words was released posthumously in 2009. The George Carlin Letters: The Permanent Courtship of Sally Wade, was published in March. The collection is by Carlin's widow, of previously-unpublished writings and artwork by Carlin, set alongside Sally Wade’s story of the last decade of Carlin’s life.

I had tickets to a Carlin show that never happened. My favorite comic died before he made it back to Atlantic City later that June, when I had tickets to see him. It was one of many dates left on the final tour of the five-time Grammy-award winning comic.

Still it is hard not to think: What Would George Carlin Do, given news about the debt ceiling or trying to make sense of Twitter. No doubt, he’d weave them into a combination of observational humor and social commentary that made him so well-loved by fellow cynics, nihilists or cranky folk. The folks who root for the end to come and will have popcorn at the ready for the entertainment of destruction —another theme so prevalent in his works.

Though the end may have come for Carlin, he lives on in more than an echo. Whether it’s in the new release by Sally Wade, or a series of performances this month by daughter Kelly Carlin in Montreal called A Carlin Home Companion, George Carlin is still very much alive and well today ... although he is dead.

Or put another way — Carlin once joked, when asked what his tombstone would read: “Gee … he was here a minute ago.”