Mirrors And Images. Or Sex And Love.

How Strange It Is. We Have These Deep Terrible Lingering Fears About Ourselves And The People We Love. Yet We Walk Around, Talk To People, Eat And Drink. We Manage To Function. The Feelings Are Deep And Real. Shouldn't They Paralyze Us? How Is It We Can Survive Them, At Least For A Little While? We Drive A Car, We Teach A Class. How Is It No One Sees How Deeply Afraid We Were, Last Night, This Morning? Is It Something We All Hide From Each Other, By Mutual Consent? Or Do We Share The Same Secret Without Knowing It? Wear The Same Disguise?

Why Shouldn't The Death Of A Person You Love Bring You Into Lurid Ruin? You Don't Know How To Love The One You Love Until They Disappear Abruptly. Then You Understand How Thinly Distanced From Their Suffering, How Sparing Of Self You Often Were, Only Rarely Unguarded Of Heart, Working Your Networks Of Give-and-take.

The True Life Is Not Reducible To Words Spoken Or Written, Not By Anyone, Ever. The True Life Takes Place When We're Alone, Thinking, Feeling, Lost In Memory, Dreamingly Self-aware, The Submicroscopic Moments.

The Genius Of Rock Music Is That It Matched The Cultural Hysteria Around It.

Every Advance In Knowledge And Technique Is Matched By A New Kind Of Death, A New Strain. Death Adapts, Like A Viral Agent.