new year's day 2010

Hi everyone. Andree here.

It's become increasingly difficult for me to do this blog, you've no doubt figured. But today is - I use present tense on purpose - Erik's birthday.

E isn't here where we can handily see him, but he IS present. When we think of him and laugh, or see something excellently cool and weird he would love, or any time at all we think "Oh man, Erik would dig that" -- Erik is digging that.

The other day, weirdest thing, I was by myself on the internet again looking up some arcane thingy or other as I do, and somebody whapped me on the left shoulder in a most familiar way: I am talking to you, heyheyhey, over here.

Just think, where he is now, wherever that is, he understands all kinds of things he always wanted to wrap his head around. As human beings, we have our limitations as we scoot about on the terrestrial plane. To lose those, we lose our limited understanding and the limited machine that housed it. And of course we don't know from different down here, so we are scared; we don't have the tools to read loss as freedom. Not yet. Imagine how much E might like to tell us if we were able to process the information.

I'm not saying "don't be sad." Damn, I'd be the last person to tell you that -- I'm saying, it's like saying bon voyage and being sad you couldn't go on the trip, and then understanding you could so.

If you hadn't known sorrow, you couldn't recognize joy. Expect joy in 2010, my friends. Think of it as practice for jamming with E again.