It is a relatively cool and sunny morning here; I was home briefly on the weekend and am back downtown again, then will come back down for my usual few days and then go home...but my real home, I have come to realize, is London. When he talks about our kitchen, it's there; our room, our bathroom...it's there. This lends, as you might imagine, an air of unreality to where I live, but for now I must treat it as real and in fact work even harder to be able to leave...my consolation being, when I do, I will take little to nothing with me...unburdening myself, it's a good feeling, even in advance...

...though the music bug (amongst real bugs) has bitten me...I just won the 13th Floor Elevators' first album on eBay and my only excuse is that I love them and in a strange (or maybe not so) way, I am going back to music that was new when I was born, from the same year, to appreciate it and see if I can't learn something from it...I like to think the legacy of 1967 is something that has some durability in it, like one of those long-lived desert plants that looks dull but bursts into flower after a rare drenching thunderstorm...certainly the death of Syd Barrett caused more impassioned commentary at I Love Music than I would have expected (though it did digress into a bunfight over whether he was 'successful' as an artist)...Pink Floyd and Love and 13th Floor Elevators and Scott Walker and Laura Nyro offer a richness, an intensity, that is adult and yet not deadly serious or monochrome; all of them insist on seeing the world as it is, of really taking the world on in its fullness...the beautiful and the ugly, life and death...

...which of course brings me to today: the fifth anniversary. I have little to say except that 5 is, as I recall, the number of movement and change; metaphorically it is like a fresh start...and while I think of the dead, I think more of those who are left to mourn; to hear one of them say that 5 years is like an hour, like no time has passed, is awful. Clearly for him (he lost a son that day), he is going to need a long time...but I am scared that people will become stuck. I know what that is like; I also know what a relief it is to become unstuck, to see the situation, everything, in a new way. The dead are always there, with us; once this is really understood, then their physical death is easier to deal with, no matter its cause. I may sound like a 60s flower child here, but I really believe that a person is much more than his or her physical body...but death is death and it is hard. Think of those who mourn and how much work they have to do; think and pray for them, as well...