Thoughts On A Monday

It was like being in a long vertical room with metal sidings empty of anything save wooden chairs. With me speaking loudly my voice ricocheting around and about and back to me. I heard the sound of my own voice as if it came shouting at me. It rang through my brain. I was teaching on a Monday morning and the class was especially quiet and docile. I've grown used to lively vibrant classrooms with  a lot of interaction and those accented voices from around the world sharing the space with me. But today they were quiet they were listless they were seemingly outside of their bodies and in another space entirely. I could hear my thoughts ringing about seeking solace in forgotten corners. I put them in groups where they were obliged to talk and felt the waves of their voices soothe me.

Later in the day I buzzed happily on coffee sharing quips and stories and observations with colleagues. I spoke too much now too fast too silly and giggled at my own jokes. I was quickly on to me and drew inward and read student papers and silently stroked my ego with thoughts of how cool I could become at a moment's notice. I thought I'd like to be in a community of people like Hemingway and F Scott and even TS Eliot and certainly ee cummings and 1930s European foreign correspondents covering the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Nazi Germany and jazz scenes and James Joyce and oh those romanticized times when typewriters clickety clacked. When smoking was okay and whiskey hangovers were a sign of manhood just like catching marlin and slapping cads. I thought of that community of writers and journalists and people who mattered but were unselfconscious about it. They did not have twitter nor Facebook followers. They had class. When class meant something.

I felt how my body responds to a cold and missing trips to the gym and eating sweets and sitting a lot. I walked on the beach and talked to seagulls and they consistently failed to respond -- as if my words didn't matter to them! I thought of our cat and my daughters and my beautiful wife as I looked at the Golden Gate Bridge and the sky so bright blue after the morning rain and the clouds so brilliantly white and massive and gorgeous. The sand was ubiquitous. I threw a rock into the bay because I am still in so many ways 10 years old. I squinted. I stared. I scratched. I shook my head in disbelief at all the little tiny moments life offers that we miss because we are so busy being someone. Not ourselves always. But a someone. Who others would have us be. We are so many Zeligs. But I realized that life is fair enough for most of us when you consider the alternatives. We get by and abide. Thus spoke zarathustra.

Trying to Live Up to My Remembrances of the Past, The Sixties Redux

I gave a talk on the 1960s a few days ago. It was called: The 1960s, The Music, The Protests and Me. I felt good about it. I felt energized. I felt that I lived in a magical time in a magical place and seen amazing things happen. I'd seen hippies, the National Guard, tear gas canisters, the world through LSD. I'd heard anti-war chants. Beatles records on vinyl that I bought new for $3. I felt excited and hopeful and like all things were possible. I felt there was a chance to change everything. I grew to be disappointed that only some things were changed. I grew to appreciate that which did change. I grew angry and cynical and morose. I grew out of that to wax nostalgic and to re-visit Joplin and Hendrix and Neil Young and The Who.

I saw Watergate and said: that figures. I saw Vietnam end and said: it's about time. I saw Reagan elected president and said: oh no. I saw disco come and go and said: dance, dance dance the night away. I saw an end to my own over indulging and said: thank you.  I saw my children born and said: this is fantastic. I saw the U.S. invade Iraq and said: here we go again. I saw a middle school classroom for 18 years and said many many things. Now I see how things have been and understand some and not others. I am glad to be able to remember what I do and wish that I could have been a better passenger for the first decades of my trip through life. I learned to accept what I cannot change and not have regrets not have resentments and to try to be honest at all times in all things. I learned there are worse things than run on sentences.

I gave a talk on the 60s a few days ago. The Beatles were singing, people tripping, soldiers dying (when, oh when, don't they?) and a helicopter flew over my head pouring tear gas on us. I was in high school, cut class and headed for the demonstrations on the Cal campus. On the way through campus large men in bright blue uniforms in full riot gear hid behind shrubbery, they were as obvious as the sand in a desert. We chanted, we yelled, we exercised the U.S. Constitution. Gave that mother a good work out. Then a helicopter appeared with the white clouds flowing out of unto us. An indelible moment in a young man's life. Lo these many years later the sound of a helicopter has a special meaning to me and not a pleasant one.

We ran.

I escaped the clutches of arresting officers and made my way back to school, the day's lesson learned on a college campus.

I spoke of this the other day. I spoke of Woodstock, Altamont, the Domino Theory, Nixon, Johnson and the Haight Ashbury. I write of it now. I write of belief. So powerful to have a belief system and values. A code we live by and up to and with and never ever -- if we can -- ignore. If we fulfill our duties to ourselves we are doing all around us a favor. The Sixties formed me and gave me backdrop and a sense of what is important --- crazy crazy ideas like peace and love. And brotherhood and sisterhood and true equality and not tolerance but respect and holding your truths to be self evident and not in need of facelifts. We who we are have us to become and to value and to hold dear and be and we be as we are this. This. Ourselves.

We are who we were.

I was young and smart and idealistic. I have a past to live up to.

Busy, Busy, Busy and School Appearances

I've spent years pondering the strong desire many Americans have to be busy. Not only do people aspire to being busy, they boast about how busy they are. It's as if relaxation, recreation and contemplation were signs of weakness. Odd when you think about it. We work for more hours and harder than many previous generations. Instead of creating leisure we create more work more activities more ways to fill the calendar.  But I think I get it now. To be busy distracts us. Keeps us from looking ourselves and our mortality in the eye. To have free time is to be able to contemplate the abyss that awaits. It begs us  to go about the awful task of self evaluation, to consider who we are, what we have wrought and what is to come.  We fill those vast expanses of thought with work and what's left with television and chores. Child rearing is an especially good out, particularly in today's society where children are constantly waited on, taken to soccer practice, violin lessons, play dates (imagine!) while parents occupy themselves with ancillary activities like PTA meetings. Two working parents trying to earn enough to pay for all the needs of their children while saving for their college funds have no time nor any inclination for musings on the universe.  Children don't demand so much of their parents' time, the parent's demand it of themselves and their children. When do kids have a a minute for an unscripted thought? They are rarely alone and never without something to do. If there's not a coordinated activity in place there is the TV and the computer. Young minds are taught from an early age to fill open moments, all of them with "something to do." Hopefully something productive. Idle minds are the devil's workshop, people must suppose. In truth, a people given time to think will frequently start to ask the question: why? This can lead to trouble for authorities, institutions and conventional wisdom. Further, considering the why can lead one to uncomfortable truths. Better to keep busy.

Today a North Dakota high school freshman walked in front of his class, apologized then shot himself. The principal, Jay Townshend said this: "This has never happened here before." You know pal, it's not like it's an everyday occurrence at other schools across the country. But this is expected reaction of the soulless bureaucrat that is a public school administrator. To them it's all about appearances. This kid shooting himself makes us look bad and we've got to get out in front of the story and assure people that our students don't make a habit of performing ritual hari kari in full view of their classmates. I'm reminded of the last principal I worked for, a chubby walking buzz cut of pseudo man who personified the modern de-flavorized administrator, who wouldn't allow in school suspensions. Was it because they were counter productive or harmful? No it was because they "looked bad." This bad look stemmed from the fact that most students who would be serving on campus suspension would be African American. So forget about addressing the problems our young black students are having, let's just make sure we keep it under wraps. Appearances. As a teacher the evaluation process never -- I literally mean never -- examined the tests I gave, how I graded them or how I prepared students for them nor did it ever consider the projects I assigned or how I graded them or how I prepared students for them. But the arrangement of my desks and the amount of student work displayed on my walls? Always. Sadly, I kid you not. It was all about appearances, how the room looked, not what went inside it.

Answers to Questions Never Asked

A portly woman in early 30s who chuckles constantly at her own inanities. Pleasant competent was a solid student and is headed for a middle management career and a late marriage to a pleasant if banal fellow. She has been stripped of any originality by the sheer weight of her competence and hours of television popular modern literature and a total lack of nuance. She has bad colds but no serious injuries failed romances from 17 to today with one bad sexual encounter because she gave herself to the wrong guy. She likes everyone and everyone likes her but she lives without passion and avoids risks by never thinking of them. So many things in her world are what happen to other people and she just chortles forever content and completely and totally empty and shockingly unaware of it. She'll say the wrong thing occasionally -- punctuated by a titter -- but won't notice it and it'll be quickly forgotten anyway because she is after all such a nice person. Very nice.

There are moments that turn your insides outward and alter the way in which you process the everyday events of every day. They are not moments of great joy or pain or insight but are borne of numbing ordinariness. That  insipid comment the breath of a breeze that dropping of a pencil that has the taint of so much endless repetition. That street has been crossed so many times that it is not stirringly unique and brilliant and shining and now we understand what so much has meant. Through these wonderful blazing rays of incandescent light shining brightly on the baby carrot you just bit...we see what has been missing for so long. An answer. To a question unasked. Clarity. A window into how we function. Who is around us and how we relate. From nothing comes all that LSD never could see -- truth. But like a drug we seek more of it. This endless drive to make meaning. The unquenchable desire to make sense of the inherently senseless. Like explaining a dream that is only half remembered. We are what we think. But patience always. Frustration with our ignorance blocks. Let it come and be surprised and happy and wiser.

Question: why do some people feel the urge to tell you that thing you enjoy...they don't like it. Odd. Straight out. You're watching soccer? I don't like it! You love Bergman films? I don't like them! You like fog? I don't! What an all consuming ego an amazing self possession a soaring insecurity it must require to constantly apprise people of how your personal and by the way superior tastes conflict with theirs. Imagine the responsibility. One would think the sheer weight of such a burden would render a person immobile. But no they trudge on the peerless contradictors. Never at a loss for an opposing view. Vive la difference!

The Satori of Early Autumn

On the doorsill the Paranoids, as we leave milk to propitiate the leprechaun, had set a fifth of Jack Daniels. - 'From The Crying of Lot 49' by Thomas Pynchon.

And so there is in every day a way. A path for muddling through or soaring and tearing and maybe rending as we seek to survive or understand higher truths or digest hard realities. There is the merry mixture of the what and the why with hows for good measure and let us not forget the oft significant when and where and whos that can perplex. Perplexed in Purple that dazzling rock band from the 1980s whose sole hit was -- like them -- non existent. Gads.

On the trolley to work this morning a large black woman (why does it matter? I don't know, why doesn't it?) had her i pod blasting away disturbing my reading. So I put mine on careful not to be too loud and listened to Hendrix. Purple Haze all in my brain...excuse me while I kiss the sky. Having to look up I saw across from me two characters from a Wes Anderson film. The man of about 33 wore a loud striped shirt that was decades old and never looked smart or stylish even when an old aunt gave it for a birthday gift -- cue the, "thanks Aunt Louise!" and the "try it on" and the "oh good, it fits." He was totally bald and and tall and dorky in a pleasant kind of way. He spoke of the weather. His companion was an Asian American woman about five years his junior, equally pleasant looking though plain as brown paper bag. She'd survived the rages of acne. Her attire suggested someone in a hurry with piles of clothes strewn about the closet. They were not lovers nor destined to be. Co workers probably and on friendly terms. It was nice to sit across from them. Hiya.

Hey, speaking of Wes Anderson, have you seen his latest? Moonrise Kingdom (2012). Should do. Let's talk about it sometime. Uh huh.

I had causal car pooled to San Francisco as I do every morning. This was a bad one as the car radio was tuned to an AM station which meant constant and loud and obnoxious commercials and faux brainy news readers who were more into reading the news than understanding and boy did I miss NPR.

The US is crazy loud and filled with advertising. You can't sit in a movie theater, a football game, a car or in front of your TV without being besieged. And lawdy those disclaimers in which they ejaculate a word a millisecond. I'm rather amazed at how excepting most Americans are of these loud intrusions. There is a certain passivity that has set in. It's like being in the dentist chair as the novacaine takes full effect and you settle into the chair surrendering your mouth to whatever the dentist has a mind to do. Let it come, I will not resist.....

"I cry at the drop of a hat, so please, keep your hats on." - David Letterman.

People are too willing to take on faith who they are. They except without question the role that has been fitted for them by parents, teachers, peers, role models, media bosses, authority figures. There should be a greater thirst to define oneself both as an individual and as a member of society. We are us and can be what we want to be we should be we must be. Verb yourself pick your modal and selectively go through all applicable adjectives -- even the non applicable ones. Boldness. No need to let Mrs. Crank your third grade teacher or that drunken uncle with the big mouth or Sassafras McGee from next door dictate what you be -- you know the verb "to be" right?  Well be it, brother -- or sister.

Brother. Mine still deceased. Two weeks now and...

Well that's that.

I guess.

Hitler loved the film The Lives of  a Bengal Lancer (1935). Hunh!

Yes, I Know, Life Goes On

I just finished one of those highly acclaimed modern novels that is supposed to be a biting commentary on contemporary society, particularly consumerism and blah blah blah. Critics loved it because it is so easy to admire for its satiric wit and noble intent. I found it as subtle as a jab in the ribs. But it's what passes for smart in American culture. Overblown, easy to create characters who are as unbelievable as their eccentricities and constant philosophical musings. Time magazine named it one of the 100 best novels of the century. But to me it is one of those cookie cutter novels with the facile protagonist in a small college town surrounded by what are supposed to be a collection of quirky characters but are ultimately unbelievable and annoying. Post modern American literature reads like some wise ass precocious teenager making fun of his neighbors. There is insight without wisdom and pith without pathos. Intitialy you feel like you're feeding your intellect by reading one of these novels but by the end you see it as merely witty and a good read. (When someone tells me a book is a "good read" I know it is empty calories.) No thanks. Will read Thomas Pynchon next. There's always a cure.

A burial. A memorial. Endless hugs and tears and comforting and being comforted and being offered sympathy. Grieving is exhausting. Just moving on is simple enough but hard earned and there will be pangs of grief and remembrance forever and yes life goes on. I only got the one brother and now he's gone. All stages of grief checked off. Lately people have said to me: "you and your family are in our thoughts." What exactly, I wonder, am I doing there? What if I want out? I feel a sense of discomfort being in other people's thoughts. How do I know what they're thinking while I'm in there? I'm troubled enough by being in my own thoughts. I think. All right I grant you it seems I'm being flip about very sincere offerings of sympathy. I'm not. Just a little fun with words is all. But I've also heard "may god comfort you..." If  there is a god, why the deuce did she/he take my brother's life in the first place? Then I wouldn't need her/his comfort. Surely an omnipotent god could have let him live longer. He'd have seen his first grandchild for a few more years and could have met his second who will born next March. I have, no pun intended, grave doubts about this god and how capricious it is. This is my thing and I have no quarrel with anyone who has an abiding faith in an almighty. I am an ardent supporter of religious freedom (which includes being free of religion) so long as that religion is not a weapon to oppress. I thank everyone who has offered kind words these past two weeks and neither my wordplay or my strong doubts about a higher power should be seen as any rejection of these heartfelt offerings. My brother was a pious man. I'm just difficult.

I watched Amarcord (1973) last night. I did not really need another reminder for why I love cinema or why I love Fellini, but there it was. A cornucopia of a film positively brimming with memorable characters and situations. Amracord is like a reaffirmation that life is filthy rich with the amusing, the unpredictable and the beautiful. Beautiful not in the sense of physical attractiveness but in the discovery of wonderful, amazing, exciting moments. Characters who pulsate with the excitement of being an active member of the human race. The father who threatens to kill himself and proceeds to simultaneously pull his upper jaw up and lower jaw down. The teens who spontaneously sway in the wind to unknown music. The mental patient on a family outing who climbs to the top of a tree and shouts that he wants a woman. The town beauty who is proud to be ogled by one and all as she sashays around town with a big grin. The local historian who offers the town history into the camera despite hecklers aplenty. What a fine madness! There are sweet little films, there are taught thrillers, there are hilarious comedies, there are moody noirs, and then there are bombastic audacious swirling and shambling and rambling delights like Amarcord. Oh it does't flinch from anything. There are fascists, there is a premature death there is unrequited love and the insane. In other words there is the rich stew of life. Sup, everyone, sup. You must because time is fleeting. We come we go we are left we leave we must enjoy. Bellissima!

Goodbye Big Brother

Robert leading his youngest daughter up the aisle two months ago.

I cried on the cat. She was very good about it. I held her tightly and finally sobbed as I'd wanted and needed to do for several hours. Ever since I found out that my one and only sibling, my big brother Robert had died.

Robert Hourula was one month shy of his 65th birthday. He had four fantastic children and one grandchild. He was as good a big brother as anyone has ever had. I feel so alone and so....

All I now know is that Robert died in his sleep. He'd been plagued by various ailments for years and was hoping to avoid any further prolonged hospital stays. He hated hospitals. He won't have to deal with them anymore. But I don't get to see him on Thanksgiving or Christmas or at barbecues at his house. I called him yesterday and left a message because I wanted to see if we could have lunch Friday, my last weekday off until Thanksgiving.

Shit.

The older I get the more people I know who die. This is not unusual in human experience. It particularly afflicts people with friends and families. I do not have either a huge family or a whole lot of friends but there are enough that every so often someone close to me is gone. Forever.

But only one of them was my big brother. We used to toss the football back and forth when I was a kid. He was a lot older and traveled a lot and would bring me presents. When I was an older teen I would visit him and he'd buy wine and drink with me. I could talk to him about most anything and did.

Actually we didn't have a lot in common. He inherited the fishing gene from my dad and I inherited the sports fan gene. He became a Christian and I became an atheist. But we always got along. In later years we would reminisce a lot about childhood, the Berkeley we grew up in and of course family. He seemed to love telling stories and was becoming as accomplished at it as my dad was.

Of course this is what your supposed to do, happily remember  a person's life and not simply mourn their death. Death can, after all, be the exclamation point on a life well lived. Robert's life was a decade two too short but he made the most of what he had. A family that loves him so is sufficient evidence of that.

I miss you, big brother and am shocked that you are gone so abruptly. I'm damn sorry I didn't tell you how much I loved you and how much you meant to me. Maybe I never fully realized what a positive impact you had on my life and what a great example you set for me. Just like a big brother should.

"No! I'm not like you. I don't feel like you. I'm Sister Alma, I'm just here to help you. I'm not Elisabet Vogler. You are Elisabet Vogler." Thoughts After Watching Bergman's Persona

Solitude and the desperation of lost chances. The unforgiving nature of time. Tick.

I think a sign of real intelligence in human beings is the ability to listen to and ask questions of others. You'll note that the especially empty headed will ramble on obliviously saying nothing, hearing nothing, asking nothing. It's an apt metaphor for their lives that they try to fill with work and chores until they burst, because the alternative is to face reality. Then too, some people go to religious services and there imagine that by giving themselves to the infinitely unknowable they are answering all of life's mysteries.

I saw that the fat guy who is governor of New Jersey said at the republican convention that his party loves teachers but not the unions. Translation: we want you to continue educating our children for little renumeration but we don't want you to have any protection or security while doing that work and by the way, shut up!

So I was trying to be useful today on a Monday of a week I have off. Trying to do things. Be productive. Make full use of my time. But I was having trouble. The impulse was to fiddle about doing a little of this and a little of that, none of which was going to "accomplish" anything. No sustained tasks at all. I was contemplating this inability to be "get going" while sitting on out back deck. There beside me was our cat. Sprawled out in the sun, not a care in the world. I realized she had it right. The old fleabag is an adept mouse slayer and is skilled at keeping laps warm, especially those watching a movie. She is also quick to grab a bite to eat and to crawl into boxes and explore paper bags. But when there's nothing else that catches her fancy, she is more than content to just flop somewhere. This is not laziness, this is living. She makes no apologies for spending hours upon hours in complete lethargy, nor do we expect her to. Yet, when I allow myself some time to "do nothing" I feel the guilt of a thousand pilgrims glaring at me. Enough. Some days were meant to be lazed away and by god I mean to do it (which doesn't account for me busily typing right now).

"I don't know what to do with my tenderness." - Mr. Vogler, from Persona.

I watched Persona (1966) today as is obvious from the title of this post. Ingmar Bergman films have the effect of making me feel better about being alive. They are like deep meditations on the nature of existence and the lives we lead. They help us explore our perceptions and our quest for meaning. They don't so much force as allow us to examine the unique human capability of questioning. Our innate ability (too often repressed out of fear or religion) to ask: why?

God's silence is a theme in many a Bergman film but in Persona it is the silence of the actress, Elisabeth  (Liv Ullman). She is with a nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson) at a rustic island retreat recuperating from a mental breakdown that has robbed her power of speech. Elisabeth and Alma, Alma and Elisabeth, become intertwined as they share the confines of a house and the vastness of the outdoors and more than that, as they share life. One talks and talks the other listens and listens. Symbiotic. Bergman even morphs their faces at one point. Symbiosis.

Elisabeth is that most compelling of film characters, the emotionally disturbed. It seems that people who have or are suffering some sort of emotional or mental crisis are not just interesting, but they are on to something. Isn't their psychosis evidence of a fundamental understanding of reality? Can't insanity or mental instability be a sign of someone who has reached a higher truth that renders it difficult if not impossible to dwell in the world as most others do? When reality is understood at such a basic and deep level, the trivialities of life and the tedium of so much of existence is rendered impossible to comprehend.

But in Persona we are talking of two people. The duality. Twins. As Alma talks and talks and Elisabeth listens, as Alma violates confidentially by reading a letter Elisabeth has written, as Alma threatens to throw boiling water on Elisabeth, who is the stable one? Who is in charge? Who is the nurse and who is the patient?

Questions always from Bergman. Challenges. As we see with the opening sequences of the film that reappear in an abridged form in the middle. At times quizzical at times disturbing at times maddening. Carbon, film breaking, sheep, a child, a heart an erect phallus, a woman's face. It means everything of course just as it means nothing, because it is so very much up to us to determine why. Because we have the capacity to do so.

Great films are to be watched again and again but a film like Persona demands it on another level. Because in repeat viewings we see so many different things, view the same through such different lenses depending upon where we are in our life and out thinking and our understanding. It is a film that especially lends itself to the power of wonder.

So much in the world to wonder at. So many ways to do it. So lucky to think of any of it at any time. Chance.

Will Did You Evah?

You ever know someone and at one point think: this guy drives a car? Hard to imagine. Then one day you catch a ride with the person and it makes you really question the wisdom of his having a driver's license then you question the notion that in the US driving seems to be right rather than a privilege then you get to thinking that way too many people drive which is a major cause of global warming and traffic deaths and congestion and noise and that less people should be able to drive and more people should want to use public transportation which would increase the demand for busses and trains and subways and maybe create more routes and an increase in service so you're much less likely to stand around for 30 minutes waiting for a bus. And then do you think that if you brought this up in some sort of forum that conservatives would start hollering about another assault on individual freedoms and you're reminded how conservatives equate freedom with being able to do whatever the hell you want to and that there seems to be a growing chasm between liberals and conservatives that is getting to be tribal and intractable and making for more hostility and less of a likelihood that anything can get done in this country? That ever happen to you? Cause the thing is that it happened to me. Seems a lot of things get me thinking about the polarization of American politics and culture. In some ways I feel sort of not involved because I feel less and less vested in this country especially as a self identified socialist but at the same I live and work here so I should really be concerned but then I feel there's so little I can do aside from living my life as an example of my values. Values. My....

Belief system. Which is not necessarily connected to or for that matter separate from the man I was. Who was. Different. The theoretical. But I am trying and am conscious and I do think of the insanity of all these cars and people driving a few blocks when they could walk and is it any wonder obesity is such a big fat problem in this here country. I work in SF in an area lousy with tourists and one way you can tell the Americans from foreign is waistlines. Nine times out of ten an overweight person will not have a foreign accent unless you consider Alabama foreign which in many ways it is from the Bay Area. Dig it.

You ever know someone and at one point think. Yeah, me too.

But getting back to the rift in this country...I saw a comment on a non political online forum from a conservative who said republican women were prettier than democratic women who, he said, tend to be "butt ugly." You see that? Us/them. And THEY are not only wrong politically but bad all around, even their women are ugly. It's like when Ann Coutler said that "our blacks are better than their blacks." We don't have different political parties or philosophies, we have different breeds. It's like the Crusades, man. It's like football rivals. Beat em!

Where do we go from here?

"I go to bed with horror on my wings. In my pillow is sad comforts." - Jack Kerouac.

There are the unchained voices of yesterdays sorrows that visit from long lost travails. They whisper to us of how and why and we ignore them at our own loss. This is our sad burden as empty nights go by and we clamor for a dream that we never even had. America the confused. Desperate to climb some holy hill without taking so much as a single step. The easy path. The easy answer. The simple mind. The lost and the loss of those who venture to challenge. Stuck in the mire of dead end minds. Braying at us from TVs. Promise us everything. Every. Thing. You promise. With no plan on how to give it. We --

The sarcastic laughter and ineptitude of our scholarship are evidence of bereft intellects and a swollen pride all out of proportion to any accomplishments.

All that is asked is hope.

I get into cars and see so so many others and die a little bit each time. It's all very tired.