For your evening's (inexplicable) entertainment. . .

The hate crime no one talks about

Oh yes. Oh, yes, Captain Kirk, and his noble soliloquy in perhaps my fave original Star Trek episode, Miri. The one with all the kids on that planet, you know, all by themselves cuz the adults all died, and they get all gross when they hit puberty and Yeoman Rand's leg looks like a major cigarette burn. I watched it at 13, tape recording it as I usually did on our old reel-to-reel Webcor with the fan-shaped microphone. Kirk wasn't ridiculous then, he wasn't a joke, he wasn't a buffoon and to date, he had done no Loblaws commercials. Kirk was just Kirk.

But his immortal line, "no blah blah blah!" has taken on a special significance in my mind over many decades of observation.

Do you know what I'm talking about? Happens so often I want to yip with irritation. In fact it happened yesterday:  we're in Denny's eating our veggie omelettes with hash browns, when I hear a familiar drone coming from behind Bill's seat.

Umbumummm-bumbumbummm-bumdabumdabumdabuuuuuuuum.

I -

UMMM da bummada bummda. Mm-mmoom-dah! Da bomada bomadadamda bom.

A - 

Bum BUM DA dum dum, demda dum! Dem -

So you get the idea by now. It was one of those totally one-sided conversations you constantly overhear (without meaning to: this is hardly eavesdropping, as I would have loved to shut out all this blathering) in restaurants or theatres or other public places. 

One person is blathering on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and - sorry, my hand just fell off - but as this blathablathablathablathablathablatha goes on, all of it self-referential, all of it self-serving, all of it self-entitled, all of it related to the blatherer's intense suffering at not being treated like a crown prince/ss, I can sense the listener/receiver's blood volume being slowly, slowly, and surely sucked down and siphoned out.

When they leave the restaurant, the blatherer will be hugely inflated with self-righteous helium and all ready for the next deadly gas attack, but the victim (for that is what it is) will be but a pale shadow of his/her former self. She will be so anemic, you'll be able to see through her. She'll have to go home and lie down for a month or more, maybe get a transfusion.

But the thing is, they'll still go out again next week for lunch. The same thing will happen all over again. He or she will tell the same pompous, pointless stories, the same tales of persecution. No one even notices how soul-destroying the experience is. The entitled one will be bursting with hemoglobin by now, ready to explode like some honey-forced queen bee or ruptured giant termite. The victim will now weigh 37 pounds. Doesn't matter how many pancakes she puts away.

I heard it yesterday and I heard it at the mall food fair the day before with a similar booming, thrumming, droning male voice, this time with some sort of European accent. Bom-bomda-BOMmmdaa-bommmm-daBOMmada-bonga, etc. etc.

This is not a conversation. This is a monologue. The monologuist has no idea that it isn't a conversation and in fact thinks he's a very good conversationalist, very smart and sharp. His blathering about camping equipment or the plumbing in his house or his car troubles or the asshole at work who got the promotion he should've got (or his bitch of a wife, always a favorite) strikes him as scintillating discourse sparking a lively debate, an exchange of witticisms rivalling the Algonquin Round Table in sheer witti-blah-tudinous-ness.

He doesn't know, because his brain is made out of shoe leather and his psyche is about as penetrable as a block of obsidian. I would like to start carrying a baseball bat around with me to play whack-a-mole with these characters, but there are just too many of them, and besides, then *I* would be considered obnoxious and antisocial, hitting these poor innocent guys who weren't doing nothin'. 

This is abuse. The endless, boring, repetitive blathering with only the occasional squeak out of the audience/receiver/victim/codependent masochist.  This person NEEDS this sort of ego-stroking, this constant reinforcement of his (or her: one of the worst I've encountered is a her, droning on for 45 minutes about her Grade 11 science teacher and what he wore to class) innate sense that his every word is interesting and useful and even enlightening, when in reality it's a torrent of horseshit more horrific than the result of opening Mr. Ed's stable door.

There is nothing to be done. Stay away, that's all I can say to you, try to stay away and not call them friends. A friend does not stick a drinking straw in your jugular vein and begin to vigorously suck. Blatha-blatha-blathata-blah.

I don't know if this codicil belongs here, but I might as well tack it on. It's the self-proclaimed expert who charges into a room full of chemo patients and bellows, "TAKE MILK THISTLE AND YOU WILL BE CURED!" The person so sure of (his or her) convictions that they force them on others as absolute, unassailable gospel truth.

One doctor I know is a doozie. Educated, an "expert" on many things, in fact famous.

"Illness means you've repressed your emotions."

"No, you mean: I believe illness means you've repressed your emotions."

"There's no debate about this, it's simply true."

"So everybody else, everyone who believes something different from you, is completely erroneous and full of shit?"

"I didn't say that! Don't be so defensive. It's just an opinion."

"Then why didn't you say so?"

"Because it's an opinion that happens to be true."

"Jesus, don't you hear yourself? That's total arrogance!"

"Obviously you have issues with authority figures."

"No, just with YOU, asshole!"

(That last line was fantasized, but isn't it great?)

I once attended some sort of workshop (it had something to do with my sick and dying church trying to manage a last-minute, futile resurrection) where the facilitator said, "Tell me the difference between these two statements: Divorce is terrible."

(Slight tremor in the room, caused by minute vibrations from the divorced people trying not to spit at her.)

"MY divorce was terrible. Which statement is easier to accept?"

Wa-a-a-a-al.

But people don't do it that way! They stride in and say, "Everything happens for a reason/God never gives us more than we can handle/It's all in God's plan." This person has never suffered a major hardship, and in fact has led a charmed existence.  God's will has been, at least up to now, a piece of cake. (Secretly she/he thinks it's because she prays a lot and "surrenders", so God favors her.) But never do they say, "I've come to believe that - " or even, "It's my conviction that - ". No, they just take one of those thingamabobs they used to tamp down powder in a cannon, and casually shove it down your throat.

"I was about to die in a car crash, but my angel saved me."

"God must have intervened."

"It was meant to be" (but NEVER with reference to anything negative. Only positive things are "meant to be". No sense of entitlement here.)

"It was God's plan that little Timmy survive being run over by an express train 47 times."

Oh yes? What about this couple over here, dying of grief because God DIDN'T save their son? What about the man whose wife actually did die in a crash? Didn't she believe enough, didn't God love her enough, didn't she have the right mojo or put enough on the collection plate?

It's really just more BLAHBLAHBLAH, of a particularly toxic variety. It's toxic because it is so un-thought-out, so carelessly said. So smug. So entitled ("see, God loves me enough to pull me out of flaming wreckage. What's wrong with you?")

I wonder sometimes if even half of what people say is really considered, or if it just pours out of them like so much raw sewage. They snag on to jingles, axioms, homilies, catch-phrases, churn them around unexamined, and spit them in your face. They never preface these statements, just jam them up your nose as "fact".  It's easier than thinking, easier than feeling empathy or compassion or any of those dangerous things that require a little stretching of the soul.

The blatherers of the world are verbal thugs. When you see one, whether it's in Denny's or the hardware store or your local church or synogogue, whacking the palm of his hand with a lead pipe and wearing a smug self-involved smile, there's only one thing you can do.

Ru-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-n!

"You had me at hello"

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Back to Hoagy's Alley The making of Top Cat

Can I retire from life?

This has been brewing for a while, and whether or not anyone wants to “view” it is quite beside the point.

My husband recently retired from a 40-year career as an environmental engineer. This only happened a few weeks ago, and since then it’s like the air slowly being let out of a balloon – not so much into depression as exhausted relief from a stress that has dogged him for years.

Now he’s tinkering, the thing he likes best in the world, fixing things in the garage, contemplating home renovations large and small, taking over all the cooking (to my endless delight – I am SO tired of fixing meals, and he’s a much better cook than me anyway).

And I am looking at myself and wondering. A friend recently quoted an older woman she knows. “They retire. We don’t.” It made me think. It certainly would apply to the old style of marriage where wife waited on husband hand-and-foot. Not being the handmaiden type, I prefer a self-serve husband who heats up his own  beans because I hate the things (and scrape the bean-scum out of that pot while you’re at it).

But still. They retire. We don’t. Or I don’t. Retire from what? From this miasma of desire, this scrambling to try to get a foothold on something that will probably escape me forever?

Like a lot of people, I wanted to be a published author. It too me oh, so long to get there. And I did. Supposedly.

But “published author” is a relative term. It's sort of like saying “I have an income from writing”: which I do, and which I have had since 1984. But if you mention the size of the income (and you’d be surprised how many people ask), all you get is snickers or looks of amazement that you’d put that much effort into something that earns you less than the average paper boy.

I want to quit the whole thing: I want to quit wanting. I want to quit having my work up there, or out there, where brickbats can be thrown at it. I recently was really worked over for something I wrote, and it was not very pleasant. She had a right to feel the way she did, because what I said was wrong and I will always regret it. I did not think it through at all.   I think my attempt at an apology was only poked full of more holes, so I could not win.

This happens, a lot. Not just to me, though I've been reamed out many a time, often for no crime except being visible and expressing an opinion. I've seen commentary that is simply appalling all over the internet, including on YouTube videos of disabled children and babies with terminal deformities. People can be absolute shits, and they’re almost encouraged to be. Ridicule rules the day. It’s easy, because nobody really knows who you are.

The internet and blogs and social networking have changed everything: it’s often said, but never adequately understood. Everything is lived out in public.  As the old Moxy Fruvous song says, “Everyone’s a novelist, and everyone can sing/But no one talks when the TV’s on.” This  all implies a certain amount of exposure. We’re all nude in front of the cameras, folks, in a way that’s making George Orwell turn over in his grave.

So I was laid bare, peeled, not realizing what the full ramifications would be. The worst name I was called during that whole tirade was “amateur”. What does that mean? Is it tied to a certain amount of money? What amount? Is there a minimum? Could it be ANY amount? Or do you really have to earn anything at all?

I want to quit this. Writing is what I do, and it’s hard for me not to do it. Blogging for the most part has been fun, sometimes exhilarating, with very mixed results in the viewing department. I have had thousands, and zeros, and everything in between.

But that’s just the trouble. Views are like “friends” on Facebook. I know people with thousands of “friends”. How is this possible? How would you have time to “meet” all those people and still hold a job, or even attend to your basic bodily functions?

How deep are these friendships, or do they just bump along the surface in a world that sometimes seems like it is ALL surface?

I tend to illustrate my posts, and some like this, and some hate it and think it is stupid. The title of my blog was recently ridiculed:  never mind that the person didn’t get it, that the intentional sentimental irony of it flew right over their head. Misinterpretation rules in the land of bloghood, does it not?

I want to quit. Quit this. Quit it, resign, retire, leave. Walk. I don’t know if I can walk from writing and I don’t know if I can quit blogging, or caring, but I want to. I don’t want to send any more “queries” by mail. I don’t want to get any more stamped self-addressed envelopes in the mail, miserable little things with (usually) form rejections in them, or, once in a while, personal rejections, which are supposed to be better because they're not forms.

It’s great, in fact we think it’s a potential bestseller, but sorry, we can’t publish it because it doesn’t suit our list. 

I’ve let this get to me, haven't I? Yes. I’ve let critics get under my skin. Shame on me.  If I answer critics, I am peevish and hypersensitive and can’t accept a constructive comment. If I don’t, I don’t care or am too snotty to reply. If I apologize for writing something that is out of line, the apology is never enough because I somehow have to reverse time like Superman turning the world backwards in that movie and unwrite what I wrote. Anything less is cause for more jabs in my most tender places.

My so-called career, the thing I feel so ambivalent about and now would like to drop like a whole bag of hammers, is like a balloon just brushing the tips of my fingers. When I try to grab for it, it pops up beyond my reach. Stop trying then, they say. Just let it fall. Then I probably won’t want it anyway.

From worrying about whether I will ever see my work in print again, I QUIT.

From wondering if writing this will make one tinker’s goddamn of a difference to anyone, I QUIT.

From trying to entertain or please, something I had to do to survive as a child, I quit. No more court jester stuff, it’s killing me.

From trying to figure out whether certain other (mostly scarily anonymous) people are human or reptilian, I most definitely quit.

The internet is a no-man’s-land, a bizarre wonderland/wasteland that nobody has figured out yet. It has its exhilarating aspects, connecting with strangers (who could be anybody, by the way, even psychotic killers), getting “support” from other people who are addicted to sniffing Drano or whatever, and glopping up moploads of information from Wikipedia that may or may not have any truth in it at all. Then there are the darker aspects.

People are adopting babies through Facebook, and selling them on eBay. Men look at internet porn at work: even cops (it happened here not long ago, and they got into a spot of trouble). Suddenly it seems like eroticism has become as ugly as a rhinoceros, torn loose and galloping free. Four-year-old girls are being dressed up like prostitutes and encouraged to act like them.  Sometimes I want to bring back corsets, restraint, Sigmund Freud telling us that if libido is ever let loose, society will crumble in a matter of months.

But I digress. My work is now out there where “some” people can “sometimes” see it, and in fact I probably have had more views in a year of blogging than I had readers in 15 years of writing newspaper columns. I am still beavering away, and just getting so tired. Just wanting to throw away something that feels like an arm. You can’t throw your arm away, can you?

I resign from the monster I have created for myself, tugged and pulled by the nasty little bugger we call the internet. I just want to write because I want to write, because I feel like it. It can be as dumb as dirt. I can call it Barbie’s Sparkle-Plenty Pink Plastic Dream House and laugh if people take it literally and call ME stupid.

Wanting to be understood, wanting someone or anyone to "get" you, is the province of adolescence, is it not? But what happens when it never happens, when at the advanced age of (blbblblb) you realize you're never going to be "got" so you might as well get over it?

From wanting too much, from wanting anything at all, I quit, I resign, I fold, I surrender, I submit! Submission is a wonderful thing, is it not? I do it all the time. Just ask my editor.

"You had me at hello"

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

As I went out one morning

(Author's note. I'll be damned if I remember writing this, but it has to be mine because I can't find it anywhere else. As I Walked Out One Evening by W. H. Auden is perhaps my favorite poem, so maybe it got the juices flowing. In any case, I must have borrowed some imagery here and there. Auden I'm not, but we must wade in.)

As I went out one morning

Walking the primal road

My shoulders were bent over

With an invisible load.

And down by the creek where the salmon

Sing all day in the spring

I heard a man with holes in his clothes

Say, “Love has no ending.”

I wondered at his heresy

He wasn’t supposed to speak

Of things he did not understand

And shouldn’t even seek.

“I love you, Lord, I love you,”

the ragged man proclaimed,

although his face was badly scarred

and his body bent and maimed.

The man was clearly crazy

For as he spoke his rhyme,

The salmon danced in the shallow stream

In fish-determined time.

I didn’t try to love him

But I loved him just the same

For he broke the diver’s quivering bow

And called his God by name.

“Oh tell me, man, oh tell me,”

I cried in my anguished state,

“What is the secret of the world?

Where is the end of hate?”

And all at once his face had changed

To an evil, ugly mask

His body had become the hate

About which I had asked.

“How stamp this mask into the mud,

How keep despair at bay?”

“You can’t,” he told me, grinning,

“But my God can point the way.”

“How dare you speak of God, you wretch,

When God’s abandoned you?

How dare you use the Holy Name?

He doesn’t want you to!

Your life’s just spent surviving

With the sidewalk as your bed

And taking poisons in your veins

And scrambling to be fed.”

The man just stood in leaves and mulch

While the salmon sang and spawned:

“Just see the other side of me

And tell me I am wrong.”

Another face appeared just then

A face all beaming bright

Its eyes were streaming like the sun

With pure mysterious light

“You blinded fool, you stand before

A drop of mist made rain

An eye that Paradise looks through

That holds both joy and pain.”

“I cannot understand you, for

You play such games with me!

How can you masquerade as God

And tell me how to see?”

“No one knows how Life began,

From Nothing came our birth.

A stir of seething molecules

Sparked all the life on earth.”

“Don’t tell me, wretch, you are the one

Who made this world come true!

Imposter, get out of my road,

I cannot look at you.”

“Just so,” the man said, streaming light,

“For no one knows the why.

But you will be forever changed

By looking through my eye.”

"You had me at hello"

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Perfect rainbow circle over Niagara Falls

No matter how hopeless: Terry Gilliam's mad quest

Terry Gilliam's infamously delayed Don Quixote is finally happening on Amazon, says Terry Gilliam
By Jacob Kastrenakes
on June 11, 2015 12:16 pm

Terry Gilliam really wants to make an adaptation of Don Quixote. He's been trying to get it made since the late ’90s — Variety reports that he's made seven attempts in total — but this latest attempt may finally get it done. At least, a series of reports and quotes from Gilliam suggest as much. And the most surprising part: it may happen thanks to Amazon.

IS IT REALLY ACTUALLY FINALLY TRULY HAPPENING?

Gilliam told Indiewire this week that Amazon is partially funding his adaptation, titled The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, and that it plans to stream the film following a short run in theaters. Assuming production doesn't go awry again — it can't happen again, right? — this would be a smart grab by Amazon. It might not attract wide attention, but it'll certainly get Amazon credit from cinephiles, which isn't a bad way to kick off its original film program.

There hasn't been an official announcement from Amazon (perhaps it would rather wait, given the film's history), but the story seems to be adding up. Gilliam said back in Augustthat his Don Quixote had funding, and Deadline later reported quite vaguely that he had a deal with Amazon. Now Gilliam is stitching the stories together. There's even been casting news, which at the very least shows that there's real movement here. The film is, once again, supposed to shoot next year. Entertainment Weekly reports that it received confirmation of the news from Amazon.

Perhaps it shouldn't be so surprising that it took a new media company looking to make a name for itself to make this risky, fan-favorite project start heading toward reality again. It's essentially the same strategy Netflix took when it restarted Arrested Development or, to a lesser extent, that Hulu is trying to take with The Mindy Project. It may not appeal to an enormous audience, but it makes people pay attention.

GILLIAM'S QUIXOTE HAS HAD AN UNFORTUNATE HISTORY

And Gilliam fans have certainly been paying attention to the long and strange journey that The Man Who Killed Don Quixote has taken on its way to the screen. In the late ’90s, Gilliam began work on the project and eventually started filming, in 2000, with Johnny Depp in the lead role. A series of issues, including flash floods that destroyed sets, quickly caused production to shut down. Since then, Gilliam has tried unsuccessfully to get the movie going again with different actors. Now, even the script is different.

"I keep incorporating my own life into it and shifting it," Gilliam told The Wrap in August. "The basic underlying premise of the version Johnny was involved in was that he actually was going to be transported back to the 17th century, and now it all takes place now, it’s contemporary. It’s more about how movies can damage people." Basically, it sounds like the story is going meta and incorporating history of the failed Don Quixote into the newDon Quixote. Hopefully we'll all be watching it on Amazon next year.

SOURCE INDIEWIRE

If you'd like to hear Richard Kiley's majestic performance of The Impossible Dream, start the video at 7:00. This was one of those things that doesn't happen any more: a 10-minute chunk of live theatre presented on The Ed Sullivan Show, uncut and uninterrupted. Kiley's performance here far surpasses the many studio versions, since his voice is actually not at its best (no doubt they'd already done a matinee performance that day) but slightly rough around the edges. Like any great singer, he decided to use it rather than fight it, giving him a heartbreaking catch in his voice in a few places, as if he is about to weep. The makeup seems overdone mainly because they're probably still in makeup from the matinee performance, and the facial expressions are exaggerated but would look fine from the audience. This is theatre, people.

And to Terry: FOLLOW THAT STAR!

Narcissists on parade: come on and suck my blood!

Though it did not make me happy and sometimes made me feel downright guilty, I had to cut out a lot of dead wood this year that was becoming oppressive. Denial suffocates me, and of course, deniers deny the denial and turn it around and make it YOUR fault.

There is a lot on the internet now about narcissism, which used to be called, “Oh, isn’t he good-looking!” The perpetrator would slide by on his good looks like a used car saleman rolling back the odometer. Everyone would ooh and ahh and clasp their hands in approval, then wonder where all their money went, or even where their spouse went.  But all this still goes on, vastly amped up by the internet.

Yesterday on the news, I saw yet another story about an attractive, accomplished, well-off woman falling “head over heels” with someone she “met” on a dating site. She had never actually MET him, of course, but that didn’t matter. He sent her photos on Instagram, didn't he? Actually meeting someone in the flesh isn’t a priority these days, because everyone carefully constructs their own image, which seems to be enough to convince people. By some magic of fiscal seduction he wangled away a quarter of a million dollars she had salted away to look after herself and her ageing mother. He sucked it away and disappeared and went on to the next attractive, accomplished, well-off victim.

My psychiatrist (yes, I see one! Zip-a-dee-doo-dah!) once talked for an hour about narcissism, and my eyes were hanging out of their sockets like those trick eyeballs on springs. It was a perfect description of my older sister, for one thing, who always left you with the unpleasant feeling that you had somehow shortchanged her or let her down, while garnering enormous admiration for herself (she thought) by inflating herself like a grotesque balloon. I am still sorting out, or trying to, how toxic that was for me and how much damage it did. 

But back to the main story. There was a movie called Catfish - I just looked it up and reeled at the fact that it came out FIFTEEN years ago! - all about the phenomenon of the phony, narcissistic lure which has grown like a malignancy, affecting women in ways that make me scratch my head. Are people THAT desperate for companionship that they fall “head over heels” for someone who doesn’t really exist except as some sort of heartless parasite? Evidently. Personality disorders thrive in the strange world of the internet, because you can always manage and foster the impression you are giving, hold the mask up, and if that one gets you in trouble, hold ANOTHER mask up to dupe yet another lonely person.

I constantly wonder how this can be. Once Caitlin and I played a hilarious game based on a news story we had seen. A heartless, manipulative man somehow found out about an elderly woman who had not seen her son in a very long time. He phoned her up and said, "Hi, Mom! It's Johnny!" Mom was over the moon, even though she said at one point, "But you sound so different." She ended up wiring him thousands of dollars before someone intervened. Caitlin and I took turns over the phone being the elderly woman and the son, our scams getting more and more outlandish until we were literally rolling on the floor laughing. By the way, at the time, Caitlin was TEN YEARS OLD.

But there’s another side to all this, the narcissist who seems humble or even downtrodden. This is an exquisite form of parasitic behaviour with many evil twists and turns. It's the person who used to exist and has been so eroded by the unfairness of life that just being in the same room with her is completely exhausting and depressing. I call this the “how could you?” model, the one who acts so downtrodden that you dare not say anything to criticize her.  This is usually someone who has buried her ambitions like a corpse, then spends the rest of her life fuming, fuming, fuming over people she hates (but is usually poisonously polite to) who are morally corrupt and doing everything wrong.

Of course she has a gigantic hole at the core, as every narcissist does, which needs constant filling and refilling from others to keep her from feeling dead. Which means that part of the friendship contract (which is never spelled out and which never changes) is that you must constantly build her up to shore up that rotten or non-existent self-esteem. Her traumatic background seals the deal: how could you not be sympathetic to her after the kind of childhood she suffered? (I have come to be wary of any statement or thought that contains the words "how could you?"). 

She is a misunderstood, "good" person, of course, no one appreciates her, and your job is to keep pouring it in and pouring it in like booze into an alcoholic, while it all steadily pours out the bottom. Whatever narcissists have that keeps them manipulating like that, it's never genuine self-esteem, or they wouldn't need to suck so hard.  As Bob Dylan once sardonically wrote, no doubt describing the malignant trappings of fame, "Show me someone who's not a parasite/And I'll go out and say a prayer for him."

The things everyone is doing wrong are the same things SHE does, of course, and far worse, but rather than take responsibility, she turns it around and fumes and fumes. And fumes. And fumes. It never bursts into honest flames but smolders like a shit fire underground. The smoke goes up your nostrils and kills you with its reeking toxicity, but you dare not complain or you are being a traitor and inexplicably disloyal. What has SHE ever done? Nothing! But that’s just the trouble. Too many people shove away their real dreams and ambitions, letting them rot while they insist they never wanted them in the first place, and complain about everyone else's worthless success. The downtrodden have the most hyperinflated egos of anyone I know.

It’s getting harder and harder to find someone who WILL burst into honest flames and be straight with me. I don’t expect them to be any more perfect at it than I am. But please, PLEASE do not try to con me, swindle me with a cry for pity, apologize in a way that feels about as authentic as the proverbial $3 bill, and ask me to pour gallons of my own precious energy down a bottomless hole that you will never acknowledge because you are too busy soliciting even more sympathy and complaining about everyone else. No thanks, that’s over now. Am I lonely? Who cares. It’s a cleaner loneliness, because in spite of having to pay a price I never anticipated, I am no longer buried up to the chin in shit.