I’ve spent a lot of time this week thinking about absence. What the world looks like when a moment, person, or place has exited. It’s not that there’s nothing or no one there anymore, more that there are traces, vapors, something to mark the spot. The Los Angeles fires for one. This piece is a beautiful and full-on snapshot of a woman living it. (Also the Oldster has a comprehensive how-to help here.) Where once there was a certain kind of vibrancy, there is now a negative space where something once was.

A friend from my music dayz, Jackie Farry, died on January 12th from the multiple myeloma she’d had and lived with for 20 years. As this piece in The Hollywood Reporter shows, she was an unsinkable spark of awesome whether hanging out with all the great unwashed at the time (& I do mean great, from Joey Ramone to Evan Dando with a lot of metal, grunge, alternative folx along the way). Post the C diagnosis, she started a line of Fuck Cancer hats (available here) that I would send to my friends dealing with that fukn invader. If you can sneak onto her FB page, you’ll see all the snaps of bands and her smiling face.

Jackie was Frances Bean Cobain’s nanny in the earliest days (search Jackie Farry + Frances Bean Cobain + 1993 and a great photo of her at the MTV Awards peeking around Courtney with a bottle at the ready will pop up). But here’s the thing, she was always and forever a mensch whether talking to someone about to step onto a stage in front of thousands or the person bringing us food at a diner. I know, I know, people often say that about a person who has passed but I can’t describe how sunshine&natural she was. And it stood out because sunshine was not the go-to flavor during the always-rainy season of our grunge discontent. The point almost always seemed to be pushing on the emotional bruise while staring at our Docs. That’s not to say we didn’t get goofy and laugh. We did. I can’t remember so much about what, but with Jackie there could be lightness around often-scowling rock face. She’d stroll in with a nickname: Sweet Hank for the intense punk rock, Black Flag frontman Henry Rollins. And I think he rather liked that. What I’m saying is that by not taking herself or the scene around her too seriously, she unhooked us from the hand-wringing and shoe-gazing tendencies that the music often leaned into. She was a delight in her ability to bring a kind of, C’mon, we’re not curing cancer here attitude.

But I wish we had been curing cancer.

I’ve also spent a lot of time this past week looking back and back and back in my photos (which includes seeing a lot of my dad as well, a different kind of remembering). There’s nothing like a trip into those bygone music days to remind me of the where’s and when’s of situations that to me often felt life or death (in a career kind of way, which was of course connected to my WHOLE life). Funny also that I barely remember a lot of the rooms and places where the pictures were taken but when I see Jackie, I can hear her wry delivery around whatever situation we were in, and it’s no lie to say she brightened so many corners that often got very very dark. Delight.

So as to absences, leaving, and all of that: as of Monday, I’m signing off of Facebook and Instagram for good. The removal of the fact-check layer, the MZuckerberg weak-tea explanation, I just can’t be OK with sticking around his platforms. In a world where I’m struggling to pinpoint how I can make any movement toward a safe place in this upcoming administration and world at large, it’s baby steps. And this is my first. So for those of you who link to my blog through one of those platforms, I hope you’ll still join me by going directly to the blog space and hitting the little subscribe button in the lower right corner (it’s free). I’d hate to look out and not see your faces there! Thanks!

(Extra material found while looking for Jackie and Frances Bean photos. This photoshoot of Kurt and Courtney for SPIN took me back since I remember getting the outtakes and framing some for my office and now I have no idea where they are. sigh. And although I know there’s not a lot of clickage of external links here, do please check out Lance’s page and also Jackie’s obit in The Hollywood Reporter.)