People Need A Moral Code, To Help

That Kind Of Friendship Doesn't Just Materialize At The End Of The Rainbow One Morning In A Soft-focus Hollywood Haze. For It To Last This Long, And At Such Close Quarters, Some Serious Work Had Gone Into It. Ask Any Ice-skater Or Ballet Dancer Or Show Jumper, Anyone Who Lives By Beautiful Moving Things: Nothing Takes As Much Work As Effortlessness.

Now Death Is Uncool, Old-fashioned. To My Mind The Defining Characteristic Of Our Era Is Spin, Everything Tailored To Vanishing Point By Market Research, Brands And Bands Manufactured To Precise Specifications; We Are So Used To Things Transmuting Into Whatever We Would Like Them To Be That It Comes As A Profound Outrage To Encounter Death, Stubbornly Unspinnable, Only And Immutably Itself.

Over Time, The Ghosts Of Things That Happened Start To Turn Distant; Once They've Cut You A Couple Of Million Times, Their Edges Blunt On Your Scar Tissue, They Wear Thin. The Ones That Slice Like Razors Forever Are The Ghosts Of Things That Never Got The Chance To Happen.

I Listen To The Things People Want Out Of Love These Days And They Blow My Mind. I Go To The Pub With The Boys From The Squad And Listen While They Explain, With Minute Precision, Exactly What Shape A Woman Should Be, What Bits She Should Shave How, What Acts She Should Perform On Which Date And What She Should Always Or Never Do Or Say Or Want; I Eavesdrop On Women In Cafes While They Reel Off Lists Of Which Jobs A Man Is Allowed, Which Cars, Which Labels, Which Flowers And Restaurants And Gemstones Get The Stamp Of Approval, And I Want To Shout, Are You People Out Of Your Tiny Minds?

I Can't Explain The Alchemy That Transmuted One Evening Into The Equivalent Of Years Held Lightly In Common. The Only Way I Can Put It Is That We Recognized, Too Surely Even For Surprise, That We Shared The Same Currency.