What we really mourn for is the future, the loss of a future. The present cannot contain loss. We can change the past; the past is only an agreement.

When things turn out so far from what you expected... but before he left he taught us about wear. WEAR: The marks that past and future make on life, on objects, places, people. He wrote: "It is beyond entropy. It is like entropy�s little sister that sneaks about and puts the real subtle lines in your teeth. She's not the one who smashes them out, or pops out your eye. She is like the first sanding, or the quick once over. With her I feel we still have a choice. She is attached to our will. we CAN grab her by the arm, or do her work for her. And she does live within our choice, or better she is called by our choices. She hears them sometimes long before we hear them ourselves. and this is where the value of attention, and watchfulness, and caring really has come back home for me. cause she is very quick, and very fair, and ALWAYS does her chores on time."

He took out his little "wear exhibits." The old red dog collar, chewed into a new existence: a silver buckle attached to a shredded piece of red cloth. He held it like a worm in one hand and illuminated it with his lighter, cackling in his old Irish fisherman personality, �Ahhhh... �Tis a fine gem!� The round jewel he handed us with a glint of wonder in his eye. He let us turn it over in our fingers. The weight was wrong; it was too light. What is it? Where did it come from? He breathed a scheming chuckle and smiled with the secret. It was a piece of foil that somehow formed a ball in his pocket; it became a jewel. Things that become other things. WEAR. I found one for him, it's in the kitchen. The front of a metal glasses frame, crushed into a new shape on the pavement.

You cannot escape anything without it leaving a trace on you, a faint color change, a memory. Life scraping subtly against you. We'll need something to remind us of all the sweetness that has passed through us. Stop counting on that camera that hangs round your neck; you'll never remember what you choose to forget. But you can't stop the wear. Here's what nietzsche thinks about wear:

"Something that has somehow come into being, is again and again interpreted according to new views, monopolized in a new way, transformed and rearranged for a new used by a power superior to it [wear]... an arranging by means of which the previous 'meaning' and 'purpose' must of necessity become obscured or entirely extinguished... But all purposes are only signs that a will to power has become lord over something less powerful and has stamped its own functional meaning onto it; and in this manner the entire history of a 'thing' can be a continuous sign-chain of ever new interpretations and arrangements, whose causes need not be connected even among themselves... the form is fluid but the 'meaning' is even more so... even the partial loss of utility, atrophying and degenerating, the forfeiture of meaning and purposiveness belongs to the conditions of true progressus..."

Tonight Donna and I went to L.'s apartment for dinner. He made us pasta with vegetables and we drank wine. He has a new apartment downtown with smooth floors and 3 futons and a disco ball. He has good wear; we've known that for a while. Once he said, "I want to have a party where everything starts with 'C': champagne, cocaine, and caviar! Wouldn't that be nice?" Of course it would be nice! Everything he thinks of is nice!

As I awaken to the dream that I am a different person now, every second. Continuity is deceiving. I never stop taking pictures, but the reason changes so much. The ways I hear a song over the years, the times when a song reappears in my life. A postcard and the various places I put it, on walls I'll never see again. it must have been sweat but i drank it like wine...