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I miss everybody. I miss my corpulent friends who are travelling the world and feeding street urchins indisciminately. I miss the rocker chicks partying into the sweaty halo in the sky atop a ferris wheel. I miss the strongmen who have already fled to head up heroin smuggling rings in Albania. I miss my friend who is sweating and suffocating under a mountain of dead-tree documents in some anonymous office block. I miss the steamrollers in the streets with their drivers distracted by the blaring seduction of MIX 99.9 FM, followed by a parade of snack trucks. I miss the grandfather tree of my front lawn. I miss the discoveries of new narrative styles. I miss the wiskey from the shot glasses of burnt-out air traffic controllers. I miss my years of courtship with self-important angst (which involved dog-eared books, slipping hygiene, cramped basements, sketches on high school desks, the first holy drunkennesses, tanked-up clatter of modern music, seven contradictory philosophies under one political umbrella, upside-down flags, etc.). I miss the diplomats' daughters in their slighly outlandish clothes. I miss lung-conscious thespians' images distorted and discoloured through the convex filter of a beer pitcher. I miss long pointless bike rides, where water towers were significant and church congregations were meaningful assemblages of shades. I miss the rage on the streets, the repetitive, invocative djembe circles protesting the naked and endless War. I miss godly instructors. I miss being able to delude myself efficiently. I miss running down playground slide alleys and making long monologues out of them. I miss being thankful to the giants of the past.

But that is just one side of the fork. On the other is everything I have taken with me and retained. So let there be no songs of mourning.

Consider: "good artists borrow, great artists steal.”