Jeanne has a beautiful memorial to John Lennon up, with a link to another by Jeralyn.

Unless you're a Person of a Certain Age, all this probably seems a bit excessive, like the episode of the Brady Bunch where Jan swoons over Davy Jones.

I'm not sure how to explain it - there really isn't anyone now who has the same impact. There was this brilliant man, and he wrote songs that grabbed at your heart, and he was All Fucked Up, but he wasn't proud of it, it just was.

Then at some point he decided not to be All Fucked Up, and then he was that too.

For those of us with less-than-optimal antecedent situations, that was an astonishing thing.

Because this guy wasn't a model for anyone's life - went out of his way to tell people he wasn't. Wrote songs about it - and when what he was doing didn't work, he went and found something else, and when that didn't work he tried something else, and when that worked, he just did it.

It was a little gap in the conformity-rebellion-conformity sequence that rolls through popular culture like a gilded hamster wheel every few years. Don't know what to be? Make something up. Doesn't work? Make something else up. Pick and choose, put pieces together, find your foothold on the shifting sands and stand there.

If you have someone to stand with, even better, but they can't make the sand stay still for you.

If you've spent your life wrapped around with things you don't belong to and people you don't belong with, it's a very liberating thing to hear that you don't have to live in or outside the borders of someone else's idea of the world.

You are, we would have said in those long-ago days before earnestness became irony and we came to pride ourselves on our shiny carapaces, your own thing, and as long as you are, the people around you take their places at the periphery of your world, not to define it, but to share it if they can and if you can.

Timothy Leary rewrote the Tibetan Book of the Dead. John Lennon set it to music. I don't think it's any great shakes to figure out whose soul got larger.

I hope - no, I believe - he's somewhere in the middle of just a small part of what he passed on to the rest of us.

Which, as you remember, he once said is all you need.