We can dance if we want to

10 05 2011

If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be a part of your revolution.

We want bread and roses, too!

Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.

Okay, so that last slogan may not have been associated with radical or revolutionary politics, but it should have. And while Free your mind and your ass will follow! could be read as a somber observation of the necessity of intellectual development in one’s liberation, set it to a beat with a thumpin’ bass and you get the right spirit.

Anyway, this is prompted by a New Yorker blog post by Sasha Frere-Jones on music and culture critic Ellen Willis. I’d heard of her—read encomiums to her upon her death—but hadn’t been much moved to read more about or by her.

I should read more of her.

Frere-Jones offers this excerpt of some emails by Willis’s friend Karen Durbin:

Ellen was that wondrous creature, an intellectual who deeply valued sensuality, which is why she wrote with such insight about rock and roll but also with such love. She respected the sensual; in a fundamentally puritanical culture, she honored it. She saw how it could be a path to transcendence and liberation, especially for women, who, when we came out into the world in the early to midsixties, were relentlessly sexualized and just as relentlessly shamed. Rock and roll broke that chain: it was the place where we could be sexual and ecstatic about it. Our lives were saved by that fine, fine music, and that’s a fact. [emph. added]

I’ve been lamenting the left’s  failures to offer any alternatives to our current deracinated culture—capitalism is flattening us into consumptive nothingness—without doing much beyond, well, lamenting.

But here’s a clue for us: remember the pleasure of liberation, remember that pleasure can itself liberate.

Here’s Richard Goldstein on Willis (also quoted by Frere-Jones):

Ellen was, more than anything, a liberationist. She taught me that gay liberation was an “epiphenomenon” of feminism, and that’s something I still believe. Finally, she believed that for any leftist agenda to succeed it has to be based on pleasure, on realizing desire. This is a lesson the left has largely forgotten; indeed, the right has appropriated it, though they use social sadism the way we used orgiastic ecstasy. Ellen would surely agree that we won’t see a revival of revolutionary sentiment until we learn to make it fun. In that respect, Ellen, Emma Goldman, and Abbie Hoffman are part of a lost tradition—radicals of desire. [emph. added]

I’m much better and winnowing down than opening up, much better with distance and critique and despair blah blah, and, for the most part, I’m okay with the distance and the critique and the despair and the blah blah.

But it’s not enough, not for me personally and certainly not for any truly radical politics. If we are to have a human politics, then we have to begin with us, as humans—in our mess and despair and failures and blah blah and in our pleasure and amusement and joy and ecstasy.

Okay, so I”m a little uncomfortable with the ecstasy, but I can certainly get behind humor and dancing and ever more laughter. And while I’m also uncomfortable with my own desires, I have to admit that I have not been improved by my suppression of them.

So let’s bring it back, the mess and the desire and everything else—not as a problem, but as a given.

~~~~~~

Books by Willis:

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So tell me something someone and help me get it right

1 05 2011

I don’t know what I’m doing. I may have mentioned this once or twenty times before.

Freelancing is feast or famine. I get inquiries, but when I tell people that I’d expect to be paid for a two-hour consultation on how to improve their writing, well, poof!—there goes any further contact.

I write in the ad that rates are negotiable, but, really, do people think negotiable means “free”? Just to be clear: negotiable does not mean free.

Or I’d get requests to write college papers; I’ve since put in a line stating that I do not write college papers.

No, the corporate gigs are the way to go, but that particular boat only pulls into the harbor on occasion. All aboard when that happens, but otherwise, dry dock.

So, yes, back to looking for FT work. But doing what? And who’d hire me? And can I still teach and work for The Man?

This is an issue because I had to decide whether to accept a teaching gig for the fall even though that might interfere with that ol’ 40-hour workweek. But then I said fuck it, who know if I’ll even have that 40-hour workweek, and besides, I like teaching and I like my department. So yeah, fuck it.

This attitude may explain my current life circumstances.

I honestly don’t know what the answers are to the questions I don’t know which to ask. I don’t think there’s any, one, way to do/perform/be in/live this whole life thing, but I gotta tell you, I think I”m doing it wrong.

If I wanted to be optimistic, I guess I could say that at least I’m still holding on, but, y’know, I’ve never been accused of being optimistic.

Yep, things are as backasswards or assupwards as they appear.

Excellent.

Photo: Seriously Cute


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Let’s run naked through these city streets (part I)

17 04 2011

Restless, I am restless. Again.

I thought I’d be over this by now. I know New York’s my city—where the hell else am I going to live?—so you’d think that knowledge would be enough to calm me.

It does not. Knowing there is no place else does not calm me.

Oh, I could certainly live elsewhere. Had I any knowledge of German beyond gesundheit and Gott im himmel and I’d give Berlin a whirl, and I wouldn’t mind a stay in Budapest or Prague. Or Paris, despite the cliche of, well, Paris.

But could I live, forever, in one of these places? Make them home? If I can’t make it here, I can’t make it anywhere.

Why is this? Is this the consequence of lookin’ to leave since I was thirteen? Bide time in SmallTown, live in Madison—love Madison, but know I have to leave, because to stay is to, I don’t know, to give up, somehow—live in Minneapolis, knowing I’d have to move to wherever I’d be lucky enough to land an assistant professorship, etc. Even when I moved to Boston, allegedly for my last move, I had a sense it wouldn’t take. It didn’t.

New York, however, New York took. It took awhile, but, man, this is it.

And I don’t know what to do with that.

It feels like a last stand, no more escape hatches or retreats across the desert, no more waiting for life to begin.

What am I still waiting for?

My life is more than halfway over and I’m afraid to let it be. I’m in the city I’ve dreamed of in that first escape plan, and I still feel like I’m on the run.

So I’m staying put and waiting and on the run, all at once. No wonder I’m restless.


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The heaviness, the heaviness

17 04 2011

Family farms are amazing places.

You notice the barns, first (there’s always more than one barn), and, in Wisconsin, they tend toward the standard red. There’s usually a big barn, thirty or forty feet high, and then a smaller one, maybe around 20, 25 feet, and maybe another outbuilding, used for the farm equipment; there’s often a chicken coop thereabouts. If there’s not a silo, then there are a number of large cylindrical containers, and it’s not unusual to find a gas pump on the property.

The family farms I knew were dairy farms, and the milk-barn, where the cows went into their stalls twice daily for milking, tended to be low-ceilinged in the stalls area, although where the hay was kept there was, actually, a loft.

The farm house looked big from the outside, but it was usually quite cozy inside. The first floor would have the kitchen, a den, then maybe a formal living or dining room; the parents and kids’ bedrooms—and on these farms, there were usually a lot of kids—were on the second and third floors. Depending upon how large the family was, the younger kids would share rooms, and the older ones might have their own, or, they were all shared, divvied up by sex and age; maybe there were two full bathrooms.

Any trees on the property were near the house, or maybe there’d be a small stand to mark the edge of the property or on some spot where crops wouldn’t grow. Two-lane highways might cut through a property or serve as the dividing line between families; shoulders were gravel and often pitched steeply toward a ditch. If you came upon a tractor driving on the shoulder, you still had to swing wide around him, as the tractor usually trailed some equipment that spread across both lane and shoulder. It was rarely a problem; there’s not much traffic out on those country roads.

And there’s the smell. It’s almost always smelly on a farm, but it’s a clean smell, of manure and hay and dirt and animal, the kind you get used to and reminds you, simply, of country.

I’m thinking of one farm, in particular, as I write this, but it was the thought of another which prompted this post.

Jon Katz at Bedlam Farm posted on a 4-H visit to his mini-farm, for the kids to watch his farrier take care of his donkeys. Katz notes (correctly, I think) that urban and suburban parents today are over-protective of their kids, but that In farm areas, most families can’t afford to do that and don’t believe in it. In this and many other posts, he celebrates the hard and necessary independence of those farm kids.

Such hardy independence, however, has its risks.

As I read Katz’s post, all I could think of was RW. R. was in my brother’s class (two years ahead of me), and oh, was he a honey. He was popular with the guys, very popular with the girls, close to his younger sister J, who I later knew through theatre and track.

Word was she had to be sedated at his funeral.

R. was hit in the chest with a piece of farm equipment, and, being out in the country, was far from any hospital; by the time the ambulance got there—word was it got lost on its way to the farm—it was too late.

I think he was sixteen.

R. likely wasn’t doing anything on the day he died that he hadn’t done before, and, at sixteen, was certainly old enough to be doing anything that needed doing on that farm. He was one of those kids that Katz and I would both admire.

But as much as Katz wants to thrust the sweat and peeling paint and oh yes, the smell, into his viewers’ understandings of the family farm, as often as he cautions that there’s no such thing as a “no-kill” farm, as much as he wants us to see the hardness and the beauty of these places, the admonitions themselves often serve to turn that hard beauty into its own kind of light.

There is light there; he’s not wrong to see it. But not everything hard is beautiful and not everything beautiful is light, and sometimes what matters most of all falls beneath a heavy sight.


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It was twenty years ago today

10 04 2011

I was standing in the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, chatting with my sister-in-law and nephew, when I was thrown back in time.

There was K.

K. is the sister to B., who led the choir in which my nephew sang, and for which he and twenty or so of his classmates and a few parents flew to New York to sing. I mentioned something to my sister-in-law about B., who I hadn’t seen for over twenty years, when I last saw his sister.

“There she is,” s-i-l, said.

Where?

“There, in the black sweater, standing next to him.”

Holy shit.

It took a moment to recognize her, but, yep, there she be. I walked over to her group and stood there for a moment, waiting for someone to finish talking. K. looked over at me, kinda squinted, then her face and eyes and mouth and arms flew wide open.

Oh my god!

She lives in Jersey, with her wise-ass husband and their three sweet kids and four cats (“never look at kittens when you’re in a bar drinking”), runs a school for the performing arts, and occasionally performs around town.

(I’ve mentioned K. once before: She was Maria in our high school’s production of The Sound of Music, and she’s one of the reasons that I hang on to that memory.)

Oh, and that JG Wentworth opera commercial? She sings all the female parts for that.  I think that’s the right one; maybe it’s all of the commercials—I don’t remember, what with being a wee dazed and all.

I never thought I’d see her again.

I don’t know that I will. I mean, I gave her my number and e-mail and we talked about meeting up in the city and her giving me a tour of her school but, honestly, who knows.

It would be lovely, I think, to see her again.

And if not, it was lovely simply to see her again.


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That’s not my name

26 03 2011

Ima gonna start another blog. I think.

Yes, I already have two others—one for teaching and one for freelancing—but I’d like to set one up for my writing, one which is tied to my name. Although I’m still waffling on what to do with my writing, it probably wouldn’t kill me to have some kind of publicity page; print or electronic, writers gotta hustle.

I could use this blog, but I like the semi-anonymity of this joint. It’s not as if I’ve gone to great lengths to protect my identity*—I’ve eased waaaay up on that—but I don’t necessarily want this blog to be the first thing that pops up if someone runs a search on my name. I don’t think my students are all that interested in me and I doubt that any of my family members run searches on me, but I prefer the discretion afforded by pseudonymity, nonetheless.

So, the issue is: What to call the new blog? My given name is already taken, and first-initial-last-name has been reserved (I don’t think by me). I use a shortened version of my name for one of my e-mail addresses, so that’s a possibility.

Or I could go with something completely different. Oh, my name would be somewhere on the blog, but maybe I’d call it something completely different. One of my good poems is titled “Catching witches”; I considered that as a name.

I don’t know. The url can’t be too complicated, and should probably be SEO-friendly. And, what the hell, the title of the blog can be anything: I could register under shortened-version and call it something else.

Huh. I probably shouldn’t be thinking of this after 1:30 in the morning, and certainly not while I’m still hip-deep in this freelancing project. But, well, some shit’s happening with CUNY (namely, budget cuts) so I gotta get movin’ on other plans. I don’t really expect to make money slinging my own words, but, you know, if the stories are already cooked, why not serve ’em? I write to be read, after all.

Still: it’s after 1:30 in the morning.

I welcome your suggestions, whatever the time you read this.

*And chances are I would link the two blogs. Again, just that bit of distance between me and this moniker is all I want.


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Thousands are sailing

17 03 2011

I am many things (yeah, yeah!), among them, Irish.

And German and probably Swedish and French and possibly Polish and likely a smattering of other northern and western European tribes.

Nationality wasn’t much on my radar growing up, probably because the area in which I grew up was so dominated by Germans and, to a (much) lesser extent, Irish; the one group which stood out were the Dutch, who in their enclaves were (in)famously insular. I don’t know what it was like not to be a part of the ethnic majority—although, not being Catholic, my Irish bona fides were sometimes called into question. (But my grandfather was! I’d protest. Shees.)

Anyway, St. Patrick’s day wasn’t a big deal there. Sure, we wore green and when we old enough we used the day as an excuse to down a few, but, really, any celebration was a kind of sentimental feint toward history.

I’ve since lived in three Irish-saturated cities: Montreal, Bostonish (okay, Somerville), and New York. St. Paddy’s is done up in these joints.

Since I’m rather “eh” on parades and my heavy-drinking days are well in the past, the most I may do is wear green when I teach tonight, and really, probably not even that. Some of my ancestors may have  come from Eire, but any sense of Irishness I may have is constructed, not inborn; I’m an American, full stop.

And that’s fine: One of the delights of being an American is the ability to construct and deconstruct and reconstruct identities. If I want to follow a family line back to County Cork and bring that connection to the 20th or 21st century, then let’s raise a pint and drink to the Auld Sod.

I did in fact go through an Irish-intense period some years ago, laying claim to the 19th century immigrants (Hoy and Ducey and the lot) who left before or maybe were just born before (my recollections of my mom’s genealogical research are fuzzy) before the great calamity, the Famine. And I still get sniffy about the British in Ireland and am quick to note that food was exported from Ireland while people were dying in the streets and the fields.

Still, leave it to the Pogues to strip me of the romance:

We celebrate the land that made us refugees.

I don’t know if that line is original to the Pogues or they swiped it, but it’s a right proper astringent to the mythification of Irish history—although, given the hold of myth and mist on the Irish-American imagination, probably not enough.

Not even for me: Even my heart jumps at that kick of the drums.


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Now give me money, that’s what I want

6 03 2011

Dr. Donald Levin feels bad.

The psychiatrist is no longer able to treat patients with talk therapy, is no longer able to meet with them for those regular 50-minute-hour sessions, no longer able to sit and take in the vagaries of human existence. Instead, he must limit himself to 15-minute increments, enough time to write a scrip for meds but not, alas, much time to get to know them, or even remember their names.

As he told a reporter from the New York Times,

“I miss the mystery and intrigue of psychotherapy,” he said. “Now I feel like a good Volkswagen mechanic.”

“I’m good at it,” Dr. Levin went on, “but there’s not a lot to master in medications. It’s like ‘2001: A Space Odyssey,’ where you had Hal the supercomputer juxtaposed with the ape with the bone. I feel like I’m the ape with the bone now.”

I had some sympathy for Dr. Levin. Insurers are stingy in reimbursing all types of medical care, and can be especially stingy in mental health care. Levin has to pay the bills, which means adjusting to a reimbursement system which pays him more and more reliably for those 15-minute increments than it does for the 5/6 hour.

But then I read this:

He could have accepted less money and could have provided time to patients even when insurers did not pay, but, he said, “I want to retire with the lifestyle that my wife and I have been living for the last 40 years.”

“Nobody wants to go backwards, moneywise, in their career,” he said. “Would you?”

My sympathy shriveled.

There is still a nugget of fell0w-feeling: The man has lost a way of life which was both congenial and supported him, and loss is loss.

The shrivel comes in, however, insofar as he made a choice: Psychotherapy or money, and he chose money.

A very practical choice, and not one to be gainsaid. After all, as the article pointed out, a psychiatrist can make $150 for three 15-minute med visits versus $90 for 50 minutes of talk therapy. Levin (with help from his wife, a former psychotherapist), now works 11-hour days and sees around 40 patients per day. They charge for missed appointments, faxed refills, and penalize for missed co-pays.

It’s quite a business they have set up, and the patients who spoke to the reporter seemed satisfied with their relationship to Dr. Levin.

But here’s where the shrivel comes in: Levin chose this business. Not a “free” choice, true, but most vocational choices are not. He could have chosen to continue to practice psychotherapy and forgo the money; he could have chosen to mix psychotherapy with the scrip mill, sacrificing some money but keeping some of the “intrigue” of the therapeutic relationship; or he could turn his office into a full-time scrip mill, in order to maximize financial returns—which is, of course, what he did.

He may lament the consequences of this choice, but, as he noted himself, he wanted the money. More than anything else, he wanted the money.

I don’t begrudge him that. Really. There is nothing dishonorable in what he’s doing, and, as noted, he appears to be helping his clients.

But I also don’t know why I should in any way care about Dr. Levin’s lament that “I had to train myself not to get too interested in their problems”—because doing so would mean he’d spend too much non-reimbursable time with them.

He might genuinely feel bad about his loss, but if so, he’s crying all the way to the bank.


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They just use your mind and never give you credit

25 02 2011

I was once a ghost and am again.

It’s better this time around; more renumerative, too.

Before: I was a spectre in my own life, fading, unsure I was even there. It was different from despair, which was all too heavy, too real. To be a ghost was to float, untethered—sur-real.

That ghostiness was itself tethered to the despair; how could it not be, when despair so corrodes being that one is more absent than present?

But I’m not that kind of ghost today. No, the 21st century version is a job, a verb: “I ghost.”

Which is to say, of course: I ghost-write.

I don’t know that I ever thought I’d ghost, but when you put up an post in Craigslist advertising your willingness to write for someone else, well, you shouldn’t be surprised that you would be hired truly to write for (which is to say: as) someone else.

I am happy to be getting paid.

But I’m also quite happy to ghost, especially on a subject  (business) about which I care little. If I were asked to write on politics or bioethics or reproductive issues, it would be tough—perhaps not even possible—for me to pass my words off to someone else.

But business? Don’t care. Someone else has created an outline which I simply fill in. It requires work and effort and some creativity, but because it is so far away from my central concerns, I am able to treat it simply as work. I take it seriously because it’s easier for me to do a good job than if I were to scoff at the topic; I take it seriously because it’s important for me to do a good job.

If I’m going to do the work, why not do it well?

Besides, the gent for whom I’m working is nice and enthusiastic about the work and he pays me on time.  He  pushes a positive and ethical approach to the work he does, and is concerned that his recommendations have some basis in research and evidence. And while I can’t say too much about his type of business (non-disclosure agreement), I can say there is very little chance that his success is predicated on the harm of others.

Would I ghost for someone who profited from such harm?

I’d like to say No, but, honestly, if I were broke? Amazing what one can justify when one is in need.

That’s not currently an issue, and, inshallah, won’t be anytime soon. No, what I have had to justify is the ghosting itself.

How can you do that, a friend asked, friend-ily. Well, I said, it’s not about me, not my ideas, not my concern. It’s not creative—it’s technical, and simply involves a set of skills which I’ve deployed in other wage-situations. Writing may be drawn from something deep within me, but not always; as much as writing may not only express but also be a form a being, it is sometimes simply a skill, something I can do, and do well.

The writing I do here is a form of self-expression, as is my novel- and essay-writing. But ghosting? A job.

Not as exciting as haunting someone, but hey, at least it pays.


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Stigmata

21 02 2011

I watched Stigmata again.

It’s a dumb movie, but I find it irresistible. I used to watch it whenever it showed up on t.v., and now that it’s streaming on Netflix, I watch it every few or six months or so.

Okay, so there’s Gabriel Byrne, who is always watchable, with those dark eyes and. . . well, I’ve gone on about Mr. Byrne before, so there’s no need to repeat myself.

Anyway, irresistible: It opens with an old man writing in a notebook, then cuts to Andrew Kiernan (GB) walking through the town of Bel Quinto, Brazil, on the way to a church with a statue weeping blood. The church itself is holding a funeral for the old man we saw in the opening scene: Father Alameida. A kid swipes Alameida’s rosary from the coffin, then sells it the street to an American tourist, who then sends it to her daughter, Frankie.

Frankie (Patricia Arquette) is 23, lives in Pittsburgh, cuts hair, and parties. After receiving the rosary, however, she begins receiving the stigmata: puncture wounds through her wrists, then lashes across her back. A local priest witnesses the lashings and contacts the Vatican. Andrew Kiernan—Father Andrew Kiernan—is sent by his Cardinal (Jonathan Pryce in full evil mode) to investigate, even though Fr. Andrew would prefer to go back to Brazil. No dice; Pittsburgh.

He meets Frankie, finds out she’s an atheist, says whatever it is she has, it can’t be the stigmata, sorry, see ya. Frankie is like, yeah, whatever, screw you, goes out to her clubbing, and ends up collapsing on the dance floor as she bleeds from a crown of thorns. She runs out of the club, pursued by her best friend (Nia Long), nears her apartment, sees Fr Andrew (come to make nice), then takes off. Her friend and Andrew find her scratching something on the hood of a car, then bring her to the church of the priest who first notified Rome.

And on and on. More stigmata, more scratchings and speeches (in Aramaic, natch), more machinations by the cardinal, brief discourses on the non-canonical gospels, and. . . well, watch it yourself to see how it all turns out. Like a said, not a great movie, not by a long shot. Good priest, bad church, gnosticism, gnostic sayings, candles, dripping water, doves, wind—you know, the works. I should be laughing as I watch it.

I don’t.

I don’t believe it. Oh, I mean, I don’t have any problem believing that the Church has gone to extraordinary lengths to protect its power nor that it would suppress any documents which threatened its standing. But I’m not a religious person, and am not particularly inclined to believe in the power of faith.

Actually, it’s better to state that I lack faith. I actually do find it easier to believe in a god of some sort than I do to have faith in that god; I like to joke that on the days I believe, I tend to think of god in nominalist terms: the great and powerful Other who doesn’t have much to do with us. No personal Jesus, no angels, no love. Just god, who does whatever he or she or it sees fit.

When, then, the draw of this movie (besides Gabriel Byrne, I mean)? It’s the gnosticism, the hidden knowledge, the secret sayings of Jesus:

The kingdom of God is inside you and all around you. . . .

Split a piece of wood, and I am there. . . .

These are both from and variations on a theme found in the gnostic Gospel of Thomas (although, it should be said, that not all scholars agree that all non-canonical texts ought to be categorized as gnostic gospels—but that’s another issue). This was among the gospels found in an earthen pot in Nag Hammadi in the mid-1950s; some of the scrolls were burned, but others made their way to market, where they were scooped up and translated.

Elaine Pagels, probably the most well-known of the scholars of these gospels, has written two books on them: The Gnostic Gospels and The Gospel of Thomas. The Nag Hammadi Library, as edited by James Robinson, contains translations of all those surviving Nag Hammadi scrolls: 12 codices, a fragment of a thirteenth, and 52 separate tracts. The Catholic Church and most Christian institutions tend to discount the importance of these texts; as a result, they have not had much of an impact in the institutional church, bible study, or seminaries.

So. The two sayings, as mentioned, are from the Gospel of Thomas (sections 3 and 77, if you want to look them up). More famous, perhaps, is the saying (as translated by Pagels) from sec. 70:

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

I would like to dismiss this, but do not. Perhaps I could call this a koan and thus regain my a-gnostic philosophical cred, but, as koan-like as many of the sayings in the G of T are, I don’t think this one is particularly paradoxical.

I think it’s quite clear, and, to me, quite powerful. And I am chagrined that I do find it powerful.

But there it is. I came across this in my endless avoidance of my dissertation, and while losing a battle to despair. This made sense to me then and it makes sense to me now: if I am to live, live, and if I am to die, die.

It doesn’t mean just that to me anymore, but that was and remains the essence of this saying: there is life, and there is not.

This saying didn’t save me, any more than a Beth Orton song or my therapist saved me, but it was with me when I saved myself, and I’ve kept it with me ever since.

Does it matter that the saying begins Jesus said? Perhaps, perhaps not (here’s where my agnosticism comes in handy). Perhaps the kingdom of God was within me that night ten years—oh, man, it was ten years ago this month—that I sighed and said, Okay, I’ll live; perhaps it was just me. I think it was just me, but if not, then. . . okay.

I’m fine with the not-knowing. I prefer the not-knowing—that is kind of the definition of agnosticism, after all—which leaves open the possibility that there is something beyond knowledge, as well as the sense that it’s all right if there is not.

I feel a little silly for admitting this possibility, the possibility of, I guess, faith. Belief, to me, is not necessarily problematic, but faith? I wrinkle my nose; it makes no sense.

This movie, Stigmata, doesn’t really make sense, either. But it doesn’t make sense in a way I understand. I don’t understand why, that night ten years ago, the leaf blew this way rather than that; I see no miracle.

But I am here. Sense or not, I am here. If I am to live, live.

And so I live.


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