The Silence

Sorry for the silence, but I've been off the web and into the real world too much. Awful last week, with my brother Paul's legs almost being amputated between a train and a platform on New Jersey Transit. He is still in the hospital where they did a great job on him. But it will be a long, residential recovery just as he was getting his life together after some tough times.
Otherwise my sometime-girlfriend and always soul-mate Rachel had her mother die so quickly it was unreal. Her mother was diagnosed with a fatal disease, on top of the one she had before, on a Saturday. By Friday she was gone, at age 63.
When my own mother died back in 1990 I remember thinking that there was going to be some kind of climactic scene where I would say goodbye to her just before she died. It happened too fast for that for me, and unfortunately for Rachel as well, nothing like it happened. It's what Hollywood has conditioned us to expect, but it rarely happens that way.
So I've been playing games with Fugazi videos instead. By the way, if you are feeling melancholy about fate, try to rent Ingmar Bergman's The Silence . Literally, there are about five lines of dialogue in it, but the title is in reference to the silence of God in the world and its affairs and random cruelty. There is a constant wind-in-the-plains whishing-whistling sound, but no words from above to comfort the characters. A real laff-fest, but more on the mark about the human (and divine) condition than 10 Hollywood feel-gooders.