London on No One's Lips

My ex-gal Kitt phoned early with news of the bus/tube bombings in London. Fuck... Andy Bolus (Evil Moisture) formerly lived only a few blocks from the King's Cross tube station. We'd taken that train together on several cider-addled occasions. Jared Loche (nee Hendrickson), my erstwhile Peach of Immortality partner (and Chemlab/Pigface personage) resides there also (as do other friends). He and his wife have a new baby... Hope they're okay. Christ, that bus was really blown to shreds. Poor bastards. (I include the terror twats, for they deserve our pity more than anyone. Imprecation, however, is a no-brainer.)

Kitt and I met for lunch at a cafe off Union Square West. No one was talking about the attacks. Sex, shopping, roommates, apartment hunting, errands... Everything imaginable but. AWK thinks it symptomatic of a collective exhaustion. Phony war, phony presidency, phony alerts, phony enemies. Of course. And then this, yet another series of martydoms. A linear and ultimately reciprocal transmission of grief, fear, and anger.

Walking back from lunch I crossed near ABC's Time Square jumbotron. Faces of injured tube passengers filed past the camera. The words "AL QAEDA" scrolled slowly, right to left, at the base of their newscrawl. No one so much as blinked a eye.

TS