I Guess It Comes Down To What Kind Of World You Want To Live In.

I fucking love this city but sometimes I just want to get the fuck out. Right now is definitely one of those times. The entire city is grieving, crying, lashing out, apportioning blame, trying desperately to find a way to cope with being very suddenly, very noticeably different. None of us know what to do, and in our inability to articulate these feelings we fall back on our politics, our prejudices, our ineffective language. Our lines of communication turn into arguments and in our anger we focus again on our differences, ignoring - or perhaps avoiding mentioning - the one thing we have in common: that right now, we're all scared. Not just of randoms in the street, but of death, of dying, of losing those who we love. Of loving someone who is no longer there.

It's Friday and you're probably making plans for the weekend. You may even have come to this blog looking for ideas. But this weekend I don't have any ideas about how you spend your time. All I want to do this weekend is curl up in bed with a whole loaf of raisin toast and a pile of books taller than me. The only idea I do have is that this weekend, no matter how mawkish or awkward or uncomfortable you feel about doing it, you should explicitly appreciate the good things you implicitly feel about the people around you. I don't care how you do it. Just make sure they know. It won't change anything about what has happened, it won't make it safer to walk the streets at night, it won't stave off dying. But it might make that fear seem a little smaller. It might help us all cope with a little more reason, a little more compassion and a little more care. It might give us all the little bit of extra strength we need to work to reduce the chances of anything like this ever happening to anyone, in our city or in any city, ever again.