How bout some original material, eh? I've had the strongest compulsion to bring a tape recorder with me and secretly record a conversation between Matt and I. I wouldn't do it because he wouldn't want me to, therefore is unethical, but I'd like to. I don't think I have any video or any thing like that recorded of him. Photographs are ok, but they only seem to represent vaguely a memory with time, and they tend to dissassociate from your present life. You end up not being able to resolve the present with this past that is on a piece of paper.

But a tape recording is something...you could get to know a person on tape. The cadence of their voice, the pitch, the words. A tape recording would be something else. It's a strange kind of meloncholy when someone is dying. There is so much time, so much to say, and yet none of it seems to get said and the time just goes ahead and passes. In time it will kill all of us, I suppose. When someone is dying you are aware of a huge, unstoppable and almost incomprehendable reality that does little to resolve itself with the everyday hum-drum of real life. Yet the dying keeps happening and someday you will know that you had these days, these strange days when the dying was happening, but had not happened.

Quickly you start to dissassociate yourself with this dying, quickly you come up with very clever coping mechanisms. If you have been through a 'dying' before, you learn. You shut out the bad thoughts with distractions, substances, and mental tricks. They work, but they're prone to breaking down. Sometimes you are amazingly collected and together, and sometimes you are a bloody wreck that must stay in your room to avoid embarassment, and sob as you call your parents.

What can be said? I wonder what it is like in places where the currency of life is devalued. It must be exactly the same for each person that dies. Each person leaves a void in the niche that they carved out in the world, only there are too many voids. Too much misery.