Saturday Notes | Planet Waves for Nov. 5 People seem to be going through a grieving process, getting used to the fact that Bush has been selected again. There is a sense of disbelief and disconnect among the Americans I am meeting here, and people from France and many other countries. They are wondering what has happened in the United States and how people could do this to themselves and the world. It's really like the U.S. has broken off and become this insane island floating in the cosmos, and that is how it feels for here -- though all of us here have a piece of our souls there, and our friends and families who we love. Many are freaked about the possibilities of their little brothers and sisters getting drafted and sucked into this war. There are many ways that people are feeling their lives are threatened by what has happened. And many have the feeling that nobody gives a damn. A few weeks ago, I descended into the Paris catacombs with two friends, James and Heather, by buddies from Utah (I met them here) who crashed on my couch for a few weeks through the election time. The catacombs are a vast underground network of tunnels and caves that contain the bones of five to six million Parisians. You can go down there and look around. I got in free, with my press card; once again, it comes in handy. My old therapist Joe lived in Paris in the Sixties and I told him I went down and he said, yes, when I went down, they gave you a candle and told you not to walk far from other people. I realize now that there were not electric lights at the time, and probably no gates to keep you on the main path so you don't get lost in this network that spreads under much of the city. Today there are lights and gates. As the weeks have passed, I am slowly feeling the experience of confronting this place move through my mind and various psychic levels of my body. My whole psychological relationship to Paris changed in one afternoon, but like taking a homeopathic remedy, it's only slowly dawning me how deep that change is. I wrote an article about it as the last in my series in Chronogram magazine on the election, called If the Dead Could Vote. Here is the link. Thanks for tuning in. http://www.chronogram.com/issue/2004/11/backbone/planetwaves/