In most European countries with a Christian heritage, November 1st is a rather unusual public holiday: people remember their friends and relatives who passed away, in general by visiting the graves of the deceased – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Saints_Day. Like our French and German neighbors, Belgians buy a huge amount of flowers on Nov 1st, turning graveyards in white and yellow flower fields.
Unfortunately, I also lost someone who was very close to me some years ago, but I prefer not to visit the grave as it tends to open wounds that have not yet healed.
[image: a graveyard in Europe on Nov 1st]
November 2006 will start the way I expected it to end: wet, cold (10°c/50°F) and rainy. Unlike The Weathergirls’ song, it will not be “raining men”, although I did have my fair share of enjoyable encounters during the more summer-like month of October. But basically the start of November resembles the general “drama feeling” embedded in that infamous song from Guns and Roses, ‘November Rain’. You know, “The summer’s over, the dark winter is upon us” kind of feeling.
Rest assured: you won’t easily find more high-impact drama in a regular rock-video. Just in case you never had the opportunity to view the accompanying music video: imagine a wedding that turns into a dramatic funeral, swept away by torrential rain. The visual slow motion drama in the last 4 minutes of “November Rain” has become a classic: the guests scramble for cover, with one of them symbolically trashing the huge wedding cake. When the deluge has finished, the wedding turns into a bizarre funeral:
There’s also a never explained mystery embedded in this rock-video: why (and how) does the bride suddenly die? A possible explanation can be found in the short-story -”Without You” by Del James- this video is supposedly based on, but I found it all rather unconvincing.
Anyway, for millions of Europeans (myself included) November 1st is an unpleasant confrontation with a very simple fact: we’re mortal, all of us.
From “November Rain” by Guns and Roses:
‘Cause nothing lasts forever
And we both know hearts can change
It’s hard to hold a candle
In the cold November rain’
According to http://www.rsf.org/ (Reporters without Borders), the USA dropped to a shocking 53rd place on the 2006 Worldwide Press Freedom Ranking. To put that into perspective: that’s the same rating as the African nation of Botswana, not exactly known for its ‘free press”.
I just installed Firefox 2.0 Final, the latest version of the award winning Mozilla browser. The Dutch version was a compact 5 MB, in sharp contrast with Microsoft’s latest IE7 bloatware effort. Unlike MSFTs IE7 browser (issued 5 years after its current dated version 6), Firefox won’t force you to go through all kinds of annoying and heavily criticized Microsoft “genuine advantage” checks, neither will it crawl deep into your operation system or cause annoying coding problems due to the (slight) overhaul of IE7 Trident rendering engine when viewing pages designed for IE6. But most striking: it’s kind of pathetic to see the worlds largest software company copying most features that were already in Firefox since version 1, by offering a ‘new’ browser that is visibly slower than IE6.
For most of us (“most” as in the gay part of the population, living in tolerant, European countries) coming out to our family, friends and the rest of the world has not always been an easy ride. Let’s face it, out families basically all expect us to be ’straight’, marry and have children. When nature decides otherwise, it does take some getting used to. Image the courage it took for a female, lesbian Moroccan girl to face her Muslim family (living in Belgium) when she decided to tell them she was gay. Taking it one step further: her sister made a “gay coming out movie”, showing her family, friends and the entire lesbian/gay coming out story to the whole country. It’s not a joke, it’s real. Youtube video (in Dutch):
This blog is not affiliated with or endorsed by the city of Antwerp, Belgium.