Monday, January 08, 2024

Another Trump Rant

 

This quote came up on my Facebook feed today and set me on a rant:

 

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate. ~Noam Chomsky

 

So, I thought, what would I see if I step away from the minutiae? By minutiae I’m referring to some friggin big things, like women’s healthcare, LGBTQ+ issues, Jan6, the upcoming election, all of it, all of the things being pointed and counterpointed in the news every day.  Referencing the above quote, are all of these things examples of ways the spectrum of acceptable opinion has been strictly limited?

 

I’ve been embroiled in my nation’s politics since the 2020 election.  So much is at stake.  So many moving parts.  But are there?  What would I see if I could beam myself up to a satellite station and look down on all of this from a distance?  Is there a pattern to this chaos? 

 

I see that we have a mission to save democracy in the United States of America.  It hit me that democracy will not be saved by a super hero in tights and a cape.  Democracy will be saved by we the people working together to bring light and shine it all of those dark corners.  Our theme song should be This Little Light of Mine. 

 

I get the sense that all of these weighty, important issues at hand are distracting us from the real issue.  All of these matters, every single one, stems from Donald Trump.  Throw in his puppetry over the Republican Party in Congress, and it is evident that he has taken over control of us all.  He’s stirred so many pots, and we’re all in those pots, spinning.

 

If we’re, all of us, the collective hero, we’re really only up against one man.  All of those angry voices out there, they’re all really him shouting, disrespecting, demeaning.  Trump made that normal.  He made it acceptable.  He made millions of Americans extensions of his bullhorn.  So, what needs to happen is for that bullhorn to be taken away.  If he were to be silenced, lots of people would snap out of it, until only a few diehard fanatics would be occasionally seen. 

 

The only way to silence him is to treat him like any other criminal.  Could you imagine being arrested for armed robbery, but being released by the court because you don’t have time to go to jail.  You’re up for a promotion.  Treat him like the criminal that he is, and throw him in the pokey…without bail.  That’s what he deserves, and that’s what we deserve.  Treat him like any other prisoner.  Fuck his secret service detail.  He lost his status as a free American when he was charged.

 

Putting him in prison would castrate their strategy of delay.  How fast would they go from tortoise to hare if he couldn’t campaign from prison?  Then we’d have a trial.  And he will be found guilty.  And he will go to prison for the rest of his whiney little life. 

 

And his goon squad…all of those who’ve been manipulated and hypnotized by his seething hate…we will see, won’t we, what they’re made of.  I think that Jan6 was a wake up call for his base.  Until that day, they never dreamed that there could be consequences for anything that they did in Trump’s name.  Somewhere in their deluded minds, they know that Trump calling the convicted insurrectionists hostages changes nothing.  The institution of our court system looms over them.  Trump can say anything he wants, and they can cheer for it all, but now they will hit a wall if summoned to go to battle for him ever again. 

 

So, instead, his cultists shrink into their lairs and seek out Trump’s targets to threaten, demean, terrorize on his behalf.  And as they sneer with pride when they send this hatefulness to another human being, they must certainly know on some level that they’ve descended into complete cowardice. 

 

Take away his bullhorn.  Throw him in the clink.  Put him in a cell by himself so that he can’t hurt anyone.  We’re wasting time.  The courts need to stop coddling this grifting, self-aggrandizing, hateful, manipulative man.  Every day he stays out of jail, he’s winning.  They say that there is no such thing as bad publicity.  All of the news is about him.  There isn’t a shred of anything going on where we don’t have his stupid input.  Whether part of his base or not, left, right, any label you want, the news is about him.  He’s in control, and it needs to stop.

 

 


Saturday, January 06, 2024

The Saboteur

 

In computer parlance, it’s called an infinite loop.  An infinite loop goes like this:

 

If blah is true

Do blabbity blah

Sleep 20

Done  

 

As long as the blah remains true, the program will repeat the blabbity blah command every 20 seconds…forever, until you hit CTRL+C to manually exit. 

 

I have an infinite loop in my head, and it holds me in a paralytic twilight as it plays and plays and plays.  My biggest challenge is to find a way to hit CTRL+C.  The loop resides in a deep groove inside my head, so finding the exit keys is difficult. 

 

I retired this year, so the loop presents an array of conditions related to that adjustment:

 

  • Will I be able to live on so little money?
  • Will I be able to keep my home?
  • Will I have to avoid all social activity to save money?
  • Will anyone want to buy my jewelry?
  • Will my jewelry business ever supplement my income?
  • Will my 401k run out?
  • Will I become too isolated?
  • Will I become sick?
  • Will I die soon?
  • Blabbity blah blah blah…

 

Retirement is a challenge in all kinds of ways I never anticipated.  Fear of the future has encased my life in a putrid fog of self-doubt.  Sometimes, the fog lifts, and a radiant blue sky buoys  me up just enough to see outside of the groove. 

 

Extra light draws me and I am able to step out, or as John Muir would say, step in.  Only outside of the loop can I access my creative self.  I jump on it.  I write.  I design and execute many pieces of jewelry.  I read a ton of books.  I attend to life’s business, clear away wreckage.  Eventually, I’ll get too close to the edge and fall back into the groove, where the loop waits.

 

The loop is a trickster, not intending good or bad, simply performing it’s imperative.  It never stops, even when I am outside of the groove.  I’ve never been able to find the CTRL+C.  So, until I do, my job is to get out of earshot.  Slip out the back, Jack.  Make a new plan, Stan…

 

Such is the rhythm of my life.  The rhythm holds a stark reality.  I cannot immerse myself in any creative endeavor if any part of me is thinking about how I will make money from it.  Thinking along those lines is the surest way to make the creativity fairy bid me a fond fuck you.  What I want her to do, wish I could train her to do, is scream, “Stay away from that groove, you fool!”  And call me back into her bosom.

Sunday, December 24, 2023

Arthurian Legends - My Readings and Meanderings

 

Today I finished reading Steven King’s Finder’s Keepers.  One of the things I underlined in my Kindle was when Pete says that Rothstein’s work changed his heart.  I immediately thought of the book that had the biggest impact on me when I was a young reader, The Once and Future King, by T H White.  The book didn’t change my heart, rather, it articulated truths about my core being that opened my heart and showed it to me.

 

The book made me laugh until I was in pain.  And it made me cry for days.  I could say so many things. 

 

The Once and Future King, a World War II anti-war novel, is a compilation of five books.

 

The Sword and the Stone

The Ill Made Knight

The Queen of Air and Darkness

Candle in the Wind

The Book of Merlyn

 

The books were originally published in the late 1940s.  The Book of Merlyn wasn’t published until the late 1970s.  When The Book of Merlyn came out, I couldn’t believe it!  There was MORE! 

 

I’ve always thought that, if I were to be given one wish, I would wish that I could flip a switch that would allow me to read a book, see a movie, hear a piece of music for the first time again.  I’ve read many books more than once, but I can never read them again for the first time.  That’s what I want.  I want to read a book for the first time the second time I read it…and the third.  Maybe that’s not such a good thing.  If I could do that, I might only read one book, thus denying myself the pleasure of so many wonderful storytellers. 

 

I digressed.  I squealed in the bookstore the day The Book of Merlyn came out.  But, after reading it, I had a sense that something was wrong.  The Book of Merlyn tells the story of Merlyn changing Arthur into animals so that he can learn the different ways creatures of the earth govern their societies.  But some of the stories in the Book of Merlyn had already been told at the beginning, in The Sword and the Stone. 

 

I discovered that parts of the work had been edited out because they were considered too controversial.  So, when the greater work, The Once and Future King, was published in a single volume, The Book of Merlyn was removed.  Some of the endearing animal stories from The Book of Merlyn were placed in The Sword and The Stone.  And parts of the Sword and the Stone were removed, altogether. 

 

I pieced this together in a T H White meandering.  In the 1980s, when I was a poor college student, I walked past a collector’s bookstore on my way to the bus.  Of course, I went in.  Often.  One day, I found a first edition of The Sword and the Stone.  It still had the flawless original jacket.  I think I got tears in my eyes and paid something like $12.00 for it.  I know we’re supposed to put such treasures in glass-encased bookshelves, to be admired but not touched beyond a mild dusting.  But the book vibrated in my hands, begging to be read.  The book is dogeared now, but it’s still my treasure.  Cringe if you must.

 

That’s where I discovered Madame Mimm!  And the snake story appears in the original version, that same snake who has such an important role in the final chapters.  So, once again, I had discovered MORE! 

 

Since then, I have found separate publications of each of the collected works, mostly in libraries.  Each one is worth a separate read.  Each was edited for compilation in The Once and Future King.

 

White creates characters who spin their own stories, some so comical that I smile just thinking of them, some hapless but never passive, and some profoundly dark.  He throws in little delightful bits, like Arthur speaking with a boy named Tom of Warwick.  I didn’t pick up on it when I read The Once and Future King the first time.  But I caught it in the musical version of Camelot, at the end, Richard Harris as Arthur, speaking to Tom of Warwick, sending him home to tell the tale of Camelot.  Where once it never rained ‘til after sundown…sorry.  Sir Thomas Malory was from Warwickshire. 

 

The stories of Arthur came from all over, but the first writer that I know of to compile the stories of Arthur was Sir Thomas Malory in the 1200s.  Malory wrote parts of Le Morte d’Arthur from prison.  It was while I was reading Malory that a friend said to me, “If you like that, you have to read The Once and Future King.”  I thoroughly enjoyed Malory.  But I read a prose version of it by Keith Baines.  Very readable.  I love the battle scenes.  They’re hysterically funny.  A knight can be gashed from groin to sternum, steaming guts spilling to the ground, and he’ll pick them up, stuff them back into his belly, wrap himself up and return to battle. 

 

Malory also included Tristram stories, which are a hoot.  That guy was a total man-whore, who used the excuse, sorry, honey, I thought she was you.  My favorite Tristram story is the one when he rescues one of the Elaines, I can’t remember which one, and Tristram wouldn’t know either.  Elaine is being publicly boiled in a cauldron of oil for some transgression.  Tristram pulls her naked, pink body from the boiling cauldron, saving her life and causing her to fall madly in love with him.  When I say madly, I mean it.  The lady turns out to be quite coocoo in later stories.  But, after the oil incident, she was reportedly pink for days. 

 

Most college students have been assigned the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  I’ve found so many stories like that in second hand bookstores, and they’re like little pieces of candy. 

 

Next that I know of is Tennison’s epic poem, Mort d’Arthur.  Tennison’s work best told the story of The Lady of Shalot, which has been rendered beautifully in music and painting.  I have a poster of the Waterhouse painting in my dining area. 

 

White came along in the 1940s.  Steinbeck wrote a compilation of some of the Arthurian stories.  Mark Twain wrote humorous story of a time traveler, who goes back to Arthur’s time, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

 

I can’t think of any other prominent works about Arthur.  These are just the things I’ve read.  I suppose I could go back to before Malory.  The further back I go, the closer I will get to writings made when the nitty gritty of the stories can be laid bare.   

 

The stories depict a time in England when Roman Christians were in the process of stamping out paganism and replacing it with Christianity.  The world is populated by witches, who are evil, whose ways must be vilified and annihilated.  The greatest quest of the round table is to find the holy grail.  Knights gain strength from their purity, each sin diminishes them.  Only Galahad, who is without sin, is able to see the grail.  If I go back to before Malory, will I find writings made when people believed these things?  When pagan England was under siege of Roman ideology? When rituals focusing on the lyrical processes of Nature were going underground, to be replaced by a system whose god had martyred his own son.  In place of herbal remedies and midwives, stone edifices were erected to house stories with a focus on white men, their deeds, their battles, their destruction. To find stories written during those times would be a prize. 

Friday, November 24, 2023

Retirement

 

 

Retirement.  How old was I when I started to think about it?  How many years into my career?  Early on, I had great imaginings about what it would be like.  “I’ll travel the world!” I thought, unraveling a mental montage. Standing in front of St. Mark’s in Venice.  Strolling a dusty open market in India.  Playing on the beaches of Cambodia.  Revisiting The Tate, MOMA, Palazzo Borgese.  Walking the Camino de Santiago…at least part of it. 

 

I’d get in shape, take myself out into the woods for local hikes at least once a week.  I’d walk.  Join a gym with a pool.  Oh, I’d be so busy taking care of myself.  Each day a new adventure. 

 

But the moon has two sides.  The dark side of the moon returned echoes from an endless cavern.  Will I have enough?  Will I be able to keep my house?  Will I be healthy?  Will I be alone?  Will I die within a year or so like my dad?  I’ve always thought that the health problem that took him was a symptom of a man who was just so tired of it all.  Would I be like that when I retire?  Tired of it all?   

 

Those were good questions.  But there are others I’ve identified now that I’m about 9 months into retirement.  For example, I had not anticipated what an emotional roller coaster it would be. 

 

  • The corner turned away from having a generous paycheck and benefit package to relying on Social Security and Medicare.
  • About a year before I retired, I started learning to make jewelry.  Beaded.  Silver.  Copper.  I began taking classes in silver smithing and transformed my carriage house into an art studio. 
  • I opened an official business for my jewelry.
  • Worried about what to do with my 401k. 

 

With the 401k, I went from:

Never touch it unless it’s an emergency.  New water heater.  New car.  A medical expense.  Emergency dental treatment.  Leave it for that purpose alone.  Don’t touch it unless you have to. 

 

To:

If I pay myself X a month, the 401k funds will last for X years.  That will give me just enough breathing room to cover my expenses, if I’m careful.  And, surely, my business will begin to kick in a little.

 

It’s taken nine months, but I’m finally quasi-comfortable with the financial side of things.  I’m going to be okay.  I have adequately provided for myself.  I just can’t live like I was when I was bringing in a couple of paychecks every month, each having been more than my one monthly Social Security allotment. 

 

Dealing with Social Security and Medicare intimidates me.  They are both, at once, extremely efficient and inefficient at the same time.  When they do something wrong, it takes hours of maneuvering around the  bureaucracy to speak to someone who can address the problem.  Their rules seem random and incomprehensible. 

 

The details are boring and typical big bureaucracy balderdash.  But I realize now that I haven’t dealt with this kind of bureaucracy since I was in college.  Maybe that’s another thing college taught me.  How to go with the flow of a nasty, rule-ridden, system.   

 

My memories of the University bureaucracy are of a place where each person behind a desk only holds his one piece of the puzzle.  No one within the bureaucracy can see the whole machine.  So, rather than turning its gears, the student is the one spinning, spinning, gone.  It takes fortitude, courage and a little bit of being the one who goes where angels fear to tread.

 

Thank god that isn’t the whole of it.  Making jewelry has become a passion.  I do bead work inside the house and silver and copper work out in the shop… or the Nan Cave, as I like to think of it. 

 

Yes.  I am alone.  But I’ve settled into my aloneness to a place where I am never lonely.  I enjoy my solitude.  I frequently go into a creative zone, where I have so many things to turn to.  Writing.  Just sitting and reading a book.  Working on a challenging bead project.  Going out to the shop and losing myself in the tools and materials I’ve put together.  Sometimes I come out of the zone to realize that it’s after 9PM, darkness dropped on top of me, and I’m famished.  I enjoy long, hot bubble baths and time with my kitties.  I love cooking myself interesting meals.  I’m never bored and am surprised to find that I am usually quite happy. 

 

A few months ago, I started selling stuff on eBay.  I buy stuff from garage sales and thrift stores.  Then resell it.  I’m still getting the hang of it.  I buy figurines, vases, trinket dishes.  I look for things that make me wonder why someone left this object behind.  I’ve found some wonderful stuff.  I haven’t made much money yet.  I’ve sold a few items, and it always surprises me to see what sells.  But I have a lot to learn about how the world of online retail can serve me.  In the meantime, it’s great fun.  I’ve become a prowler of thrift stores.  I have a pile of stuff acquired but not yet sold, and I refuse to believe that I may be becoming a hoarder.  I will NOT become a hoarder.  NOT.  So, I enjoy some of these things for a while.  Then I let them go. 

 

So, I have a couple of activities that fulfill two purposes.  These activities are designed to be fun and to bring in a little bit of money.  And, between these two activities, jewelry making and eBay haunting, I am quite busy.

 

My social life has gotten a little busier, too.  I’m such a recluse.  I resist anything that gets me around people.  But I recognize that I must get out of here a few times a week to be around other people.  I go to one of my two favorite restaurants, places where everyone knows me, where I don’t need to see the menu.  Even when there is little conversation, I feel comforted being in these familiar public places. 

 

I’ve also done a couple of craft fairs.  Those have been really fun and get me out and around lots of people.  Craft fairs are so good for me. 

 

Immediately after I retired, I went to that familiar panicky survival mode.  How does one not work?  In the past, I’ve had a lot of lean times when I was between jobs.  Finding a new job was a horror show of putting myself out there, investigating what came back.  Singing back to middle-managers my enthusiasm for being part of a team, solving problems, elevating the structure, when inside feeling like garbage, feeling hopeless, being so full of fear that nothing would come along until it was too late.  When I retired, that’s where I went and stayed for about 2 months.

 

Then it slowly dawned on me that this was not the same situation I’d been in many times before.  No. Retirement was something entirely different, and the plunge into survival mode fear and despair was not warranted here.  If I wasn’t careful, I might start having thoughts about being tired of it all.  I backed myself out of that groove and started off in a new direction.  And I’m so glad I did, because this road is beautiful and full of surprises. 

 

Tuesday, September 19, 2023

This Party is for You

 

I attended a seminar last weekend in my small town of Monroe, Washington, which had the purpose of finding ways to make our community more inclusive.  It’s mighty white here in Monroe…but not really.  We have a large Hispanic population and a small black population, a smattering of Muslims, a growing group from India and an occasional Asian.  But our community events do not include people who aren’t white.  It’s not intentional.  But all of the events are planned by white people.  So, music in the park centers around bands that appeal to old white men.  No one’s going to suggest that we have a dance in the park that plays nothing but songs from James Baldwin’s Spotify list. 

 

Now, I know that there is racism in this town.  Politically, we’re divided, like everywhere else.  Like everywhere else, the hate faction that has sprung from right-wing politics goes about carrying a bullhorn.  I know that racism exists, that my brothers and sisters who are not white face dangers and challenges that I can only try to imagine.  I know that I go about my life from a place of privilege, without even seeing how privilege manifests itself in my life.  I am not blissful in my ignorance, though.  I want to know, to understand what’s actually happening.

 

So, this seminar focused on how to build a more inclusive community.  Then, one of the facilitators said something that hit me between the eyes.  She said that the two black women in our community who normally would have co-facilitated this event were not there because they are too afraid to come to the YMCA building.  This seminar, by definition, should have been safe.  The YMCA should be a safe place.  Yet they were too afraid to come and be with us.

 

I commented on this.  I said that I wanted a better understanding of what these women were dealing with.  Why would they feel unsafe in a room full of women (and one man) who had gathered with the express purpose of fostering inclusion.  The white facilitator told me that she would be happy to take me aside, maybe for coffee, and explain it to me.  But, she said that by even talking with them, I would further victimize them.  By talking to them, I would become a perpetrator of their oppression. 

 

I don’t know what to do with that.  If my community is that toxic, and I’m not saying it isn’t, what the hell good would it do to have an Hispanic band at a community gathering?  If attending a meeting with the purpose of discussing inclusion is not safe, if entering the YMCA, which publishes its core values as caring, respect, honesty, responsibility, and inclusiveness, is not safe, then why would anyone think that encouraging more ethnic vendors to set up in our farmer’s market is a solution?

 

I’ve heard many time that it is not any black person’s job to explain it to me.  Indeed, the facilitator pointed out to me my ignorance in this regard, that by even speaking to these women who felt too traumatized to attend this meeting, I would further their battering. 

 

I don’t know…maybe I am incredibly ignorant, but I think that, before throwing a party for people who don’t trust me, it might be a good idea for us to sit together and get to know one another better.  It might be a good idea to ask our non-white neighbors what they would like.  It’s like we’re changing the menu to appeal to people who would never come to our restaurant, for people whose refined palates we haven’t bothered to become familiar.  It’s all well intentioned.  But, as white people, is it our place to decide what would make them feel more included?  If getting to know them better is considered abuse, then I’m at a loss.  That’s where I get stuck.

 

So, I turn to the teachers who have spoken out.  Again, I turn to books, movies and art.  But I don’t understand how I can help effect change if I have to cross the street to avoid sharing the sidewalk with someone who finds me a threat because of my color.  I came across this clip of James Baldwin this morning.


https://fb.watch/n9Aa1KhlZK/

 

Thursday, August 31, 2023

Russia Russia Russia

 

During her talk on Tuesday, Heather Cox-Richardson posed the question: why are these people going through such gyrations to support an ex-president?  I also wonder this…it can’t be just because they don’t want to lose Trump’s base.  That base just isn’t big enough, IMO, to warrant the amount of energy they are putting into keeping themselves tethered to poor Mr. Trump.  Is it?  I mean, really.  What if they all just said screw it…screw him?  What if they all openly proclaimed that Trump is not their horse anymore?  What if they all stopped tearing down and began working to build us up?  What’s stopping them?

 

Heather said that she feels like she's missing something.  Well, me too.  At the risk of sounding like a left-wing conspiracy theorist or just a batty old woman, I keep turning to Russia. 

 

I am convinced that Russian interference put Trump in the White House in 2016.  I just can’t believe that so many Americans were manipulated into voting for him to give him such a sweeping victory.  To believe that his win was legitimate would mean that I would have to realize that this is NOT my country, that the majority of the people here are some combination of stupid, hateful and violent.    

 

Then in 2019, Mitch McConnell was nicknamed Moscow Mitch when he blocked two House-approved measures to protect elections, despite warnings that Russia intended to meddle in the 2020 race.  This was also about the time when the clown car of MAGA goons started really pumping up the volume. 

 

The actions of Congress members in this group are so anti-American and so autocratic-leaning I can’t come to any other conclusion than to believe that Russia has infiltrated at least 2 branches of our federal government.

 

When Trump was just entering the stage, Putin must have been ecstatic.  What a perfect stooge to further his efforts to topple us.  All Putin had to do to control the guy was to flatter him.  So, Russia lost control of the Executive Branch in 2020, but, with the help of our Congress and a few Supreme Court Justices, it could continue to hammer away at us until we break. 

 

Well, we’re not going to break.  Pundits keep talking as though Trump could actually win in 2024.  I cannot allow myself to believe that.  We simply cannot allow it.

 

Friday, August 25, 2023

What I'd Like to Think

 

He looks at the camera with contempt and arrogance.  Pundits are saying he spent hours rehearsing for that photo for his mug shot.  He wanted to get the image just right.  The image needed to be perfect to be transformed into an effective tool for fund raising.  So, they’re saying that the picture was calculated, formed with practiced nuance.  He’d only get one shot.  Had to get it right.

 

Contempt and arrogance.  Rehearsed.  I can see his base using that image to elevate him, to demonstrate proof that he is a super hero.  But I see something different.  I don’t think it was rehearsed.  I’m not saying that he didn’t rehearse how he wanted to look in his mug shot.  I completely believe that he did this.  But this photo was not what was rehearsed.  In this photo, I see a man without a mask.  This is what is underneath the jaunty, self-aggrandizing, smug banter that we usually see.  Here is the menace behind the mask.  His contempt for all is palpable. 

 

Meadows and Giuliani also have the same expression on their faces.  White male privilege.  Rage that anyone could dare to treat them with anything but delicate deference because of who they are.  Contempt.  Arrogance. 

 

Here’s what I like to think.  I like to think that the Fulton County processing procedures really were performed for these puffed up sleaze bags the same as for everyone else.  No nonsense.  They were given orders, and it was made clear that, if they did not immediately comply, harsher measures would be used.  Imagine being treated that way when you see yourself as being so important that you are above such treatment.  When I imagine these men, having been among the most powerful people in the world, now standing under florescent lights, being told what to do by a civil servant, being stripped of their freedom in the same procedure rooms where countless criminals of all kinds had been processed in the same manner, it takes my breath away.  Those mug shots were not rehearsed.  By the time they came before the camera, their rage had burned away their carefully maintained masks.  Their privilege had been cast aside by these lowly civil servants, and what had been carefully stoked and hidden on the inside flared out, allowing us all to see that they are nothing more than malignant scabs, clinging to the still living tissue of our democracy.  These men still attempt to spread their malignancy and devour that living tissue until they transform it into something dead and lifeless.

 

And that’s a cause for hope because our democracy still lives.  These roiling spit balls are not going to win.  They may be seething with contempt and arrogance as they glare at the camera, but they are arrested.  Their freedom has been taken away, and they are now under the control of the State of Georgia.  Wow.  What a satisfying feeling.