Hello from JFK, my third trip to airports in 24 hours, maybe this time the plane will not return to the gate to refuel/be cancelled/be delayed to the point that I will miss my connection, which is not an option.

I have been thinking a lot in the past few days (months/forever) about how to be of use. I am very fortunate to be surrounded by many friends whose work means a lot to many people. That it does is no accident! Not when you churn out content that informs and entertains people and, when they are frightened or confused, reassures them. I have written more than once that after 9/11, I had an image of the poets blinking out from the warrens they work in; we needed them now, to explain what was going on. I mention in the video The Fifth Column guys and what they mean to people. As an example, see today’s Mailbucket, letters from listeners in North Carolina and Spain and South Africa and the UK, reaching out to exchange heartache and offer thanks and to jackass and to just keep talking. What a service.

I mention too Matt Taibbi’s Racket News as being useful. Whether you are agree or disagree (I am somewhere in the middle) with what he is reporting, re: the allegations Tulsi Gabbard has leveled at Obama et al, people want what it, in that it rips open a part of our brains where questions have been worming for a decade. Letting in the sunshine is of use.

I am sorry to report that my video is no sunshiny, but perhaps it is of use. Or perhaps I am asking you to be of use to me.

When I was writing To the Bridge, I listened to the soundtrack of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford many hundreds of times. The song “Rather Lovely Thing,” especially, felt and still feels like an encapsulation of the death of a child. It was as though the song was a line from this world to the next I had to hold on to it; I had to, I could not let it go.

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