…it should be something to do with maids a-milking, but the only thing that got milked on my New Year’s Day was time as I tried to recover from over-celebrating New Year’s Eve on top of staying awake for about 20 hours. A formula for slow-maneuvers the next day. Let us then ponder this:
[don’t think I’ll get to #3…]
Black Friday is Un-Leap Day. Unlike February 29th which is Leap Day and disappears three-quarters of the time, Black Friday always comes around, promising a beautiful day of absolute disassociation with reality. Not for me streets, crowds, stores, obligatory family walks in the park, online shopping, chores, responsibilities, or anything that smacks of “have to” and “well, I really should.” Black Friday for the past 40 years means I have a day where Conventional Reality doesn’t exist. It is a day of nothing, a day of meandering in a mental (and sometimes physical) sense.
Black Friday is to Fridays what Black Holes are to holes. They both suck up time like a temporal vacuum cleaner and spit it out. I’ve no idea where Black Holes spit their time, but I know that Black Fridays spit it out onto The-Saturday-After-Thanksgiving, the day when life begins to engage me again.
Black Friday gets echoed by New Year’s Day, but I can’t totally disengage on NYD. Its ridiculous premise that something new is beginning grabs me every time, makes me believe I should be resetting my life, cleaning out files, organizing my bills, planning how I will be a better person in the coming 365 days (or 366, yes, I know Leap Day, there, there). Both Black Friday and NYD invite introspection, or at the very least, the last grasp at annual goals still unmet–but only in a laissez faire manner.
One strives little on this day. Breakfast is leftover pie from yesterday. Dinner reruns the big turkey thing of the day before. All food in-between consists of noshing all of Thanksgiving Day’s appetizers, crudités, snacks, etc., before turning to that leftover Halloween candy or the box of chocolates someone forgot to take with them when they left yesterday’s feast. Beer makes an early appearance…or not. It doesn’t matter. It’s Black Friday.
Warnings & Notes: This post contains a few graphic depictions of death, some examples of socially unacceptable behavior, and is just generally a downer if you look at it a certain way. Also, some of these observations have been made before. If you read this blog regularly (there’s only a half dozen or so of you), well, sorry….a little.
This year All Souls Day, November 2nd, marked the fourth anniversary of my mother’s funeral. It’s the day I most think back upon her life and death. The anniversary of her death, October 24, I barely note. Sometimes it even slips by me before I realize it. The funeral symbolizes my mother’s love, her life, and all those influences we spend a lifetime unraveling. In contrast, the date of her death represents thoughts I acknowledge but do not celebrate, and her passing is hardly something to celebrate in and of itself. I would rather focus on the entirety of her life and death: the funeral marked that, not the death.
My mother and I lived more than 2100 miles apart at that point. My profession had taken me to the eastern United States; she remained in Spokane, WA, from where she had encouraged me to follow my dreams wherever they led. Her parents had, my father’s parents had, they had themselves, so why shouldn’t their children? Still, it didn’t reduce my guilt much for not being more available to her in that last year, indeed that span of a half dozen years when she lived on after my father’s death. My brother lived nearly ten times closer in Tacoma but it took me only a few more hours to get there by plane versus him taking a drive across the state. He encouraged her to move to Tacoma. I half-heartedly supported him. She refused, saying her friends and neighbors were in Spokane. I strongly pushed that she could move to a “retirement community” there in Spokane where some of her friends lived. She demurred, then refused. Her best support network were the good neighbors she had. She was right. We were wrong. I saw one of those retirement homes at the end of her life. I was really wrong, and–
But I’m not going to rehash that whole period. I’ll just note this: I watched her steadily decline during the five years after my father died, visiting her more and more frequently. (The Fates blessed me in several ways when 13 months after my father died, I started traveling the country for work. It became just as easy to fly to Spokane as to Raleigh.) In December 2018 my mother learned she had Stage IV breast cancer. At 89 years, she recoiled from and declined chemotherapy, threw her lot in with hormone receptor treatment (a pill, nothing more), and for various reasons was in and out of hospitals, convalescent homes, and her new apartment in a “retirement community” through the fall of 2019. She celebrated her 90th birthday in that apartment.
I visited my mother a dozen days into October 2019 as she lived her final days. I returned home only to receive The Call two days later. It was a Thursday. Knowing my brother could drive there quickly, and emotionally exhausted from watching her exist in a morphine-induced stupor, I rolled the dice, told him I wouldn’t come until Monday, and I let him spend Friday through Sunday with her. I flew back on that Monday, and sat beside her bed a lot until she passed away on Thursday. My brother had returned to his home and job. Thus it fell to me to handle the first round of details.
From the moment a loved one dies, those closest to them experience a bewildering whirlwind of details thrust upon them which must be handled immediately. As the elder of two children, the most controlling of us, and frankly, just because I was the one there, it fell to me to make those arrangements. Again, I shall refrain from a step by step accounting of it. This is supposed to be an accounting of All Souls and a celebration, not a macabre dwelling on those days of death. One example shall suffice: on Thursday morning, the day she died officially at 10:22 a.m., I had to leave her to be at the bank when it opened at 9 a.m. The instruction manual entitled “What You Will Have To Do When Your Second Parent Dies” never made it into my mailbox, I guess. If it had, maybe I would have been better prepared than to learn in her final hours that her investment accounts would be frozen for disbursement when she died, and that as her executor I would be paying bills with whatever sat in that bank account for the foreseeable future. The bank account had less than $3200 in it when I dumped a huge amount in there. Take note if you’re ever in this position: for the next year, I had to pay bills from that account. If I hadn’t done that, my brother and I would have had to agree on splitting the bills. Really, take note.
My mother’s death came as a relief. I’m saddened to admit her death came as a relief. I know many have said this, but I feel as I feel. She had suffered with increasing pain from the breast cancer for a year. I doubt anything can prepare you to listen to your mother slowly drown and die, to realize the fluidic sounds of her breathing come from her lungs as they slowly fill, to watch from a removed perspective as your voice sharply criticizes the health staff which insists on turning a patient even when this obviously makes the breathing worse. Beyond prayer, I simply endured. I carry with me that immense relief I felt when I re-entered her room after a short phone call from her cousin and discovered my mother had died. I also carry with me the commensurate load of guilt for not being there at that moment. The part of me formed by social mores scolds me perpetually; the accepting, independent side of me simply says, “that’s the way it happened. There’s nothing which could have been done at the time, and there’s no shame in feeling relief.”
In contrast to the anniversary of her death, which represents a smorgasbord of feelings, few of them good, even fewer comforting, the anniversary of the funeral represents a day of love. It’s the day remaining friends and family gathered to mark how much they loved your mother and how much they would miss her. It’s the day you created all the little remembrances which would afterward become powerful symbols in your life. It’s the day you got to reminisce about all the times: mostly good, some bad, some funny, some sad. It’s the day when many told you “You did a good job by your mother,” even if they were lying a little bit. And it’s the day you closed the door, for just a bit, on all of those things which just have to be done. It’s the day when you looked forward to a few days where nothing about your mother’s funeral and estate needed to be accomplished: those things would wait a few days–with luck, a few weeks.
Each All Souls Day since that time refreshes all these memories. It’s the stem that gathers all the roots of remembrance and supports the branches of What Has Come To Be. For me, it’s inextricably bound up with my decision two weeks after her funeral to retire. Those twin events, her passing and my retirement, have become tied to those crazy years when a pandemic changed our society, or perhaps, when it revealed who we had come to be. All Souls Day, which exists quietly in the immediate shadow of its more important sibling, All Saints Day, and is heralded by All Hallows’ E’en, tells us it’s important to mark the passing of those we loved and to pray for them, to remember them, to honor them. By its existence, it says to ignore the ones who have been declared important, and that we must instead recognize the importance of each of us.
Mostly, though, All Souls Day reminds all of us of the death of those we loved. It picks at the scab of a wound which will not scar over and which has become part of who we are.
Be! Dot-unique, singleton on Life's plane. Dance! Tip-zipping laser beam on Life's wall. Shout! Bellow-strong carrier sound o'er Life's noise.
Be... Amorphous, substantially less than fog. Dance... Molecule between droplets hung in fog. Shout... Your whisper sound-dampened by Invisible fog.
I’ve just completed reading My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She’s Sorry by Fredrik Backman. He’s the one who wrote A Man Called Ove which was made into the movie A Man Called Otto with Tom Hanks recently. It’s a tear-jerking adult fairy tale of a book which skirts the edge of formulaic, contains frequent self-referential passages (which I find tiresome), tells a well-worn tale without breaking any new ground,…and I gave the book a five-star rating. For one thing, I like a pathos-riddled book which adroitly brings tears to my eyes. Mainly, though it’s for two other reasons I gave it those stars. The book re-taught me a lesson about reading (and therefore about life a bit): when you dislike a book (or a person or whatever) because it isn’t what you thought it was going to be, then you’re not disliking it for what it is, you’re disliking it for not living up to your expectations. If those expectations were based on very little, as most of our snap judgments tend to be, then it isn’t the book’s fault. In this case, my expectations were built upon some not-very-specific blurbs which said what the book was ‘about’. I expected a different storyline. Once I accepted it wasn’t going to follow my imagined plot, I realized I liked the book very much. (Had I not, I would have put it down, but with the acknowledgement that I did so based on what it was rather than what it wasn’t.)
Since the blurbs I read led me to expect a book where an adult protagonist runs around Europe delivering letters from her now-deceased grandmother, here’s my blurb, only slightly more accurate and still very vague:
When the grandmother of the “almost-eight-year old” protagonist dies, the granddaughter is charged by her Granny to deliver a series of letters to people from her grandmother’s past. Through this device, Backman weaves together the competing narratives of being someone’s hero and being a shit, and teaches a young, precocious girl that Truth (and Life) lie somewhere between the two. Oh, and along the way he makes a good case for forgiveness and tolerance, fairytales, loyalty, courage, and that anyone can redeem themselves and become a hero.
Me
Other than that, I liked the book for its style which led to some lovely little quotes:
“Only different people change the world,” Granny used to say. “No one normal has ever changed a crapping thing.”
Backman, Fredrik. My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry: A Novel (p. 89). Atria Books. Kindle Edition.
Children know that time is just an emotion, so “now” is a meaningless word to them, just as it was for Granny. George used to say that Granny wasn’t a time-optimist, she was a time-atheist,…
Backman, Fredrik. My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry: A Novel (p. 231). Atria Books. Kindle Edition
Because life is both complicated and simple. Which is why there are cookies.
Backman, Fredrik. My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry: A Novel (p. 368). Atria Books. Kindle Edition.
I wish there were more quotes, but I became too involved in the novel to take time to highlight them. I’ve been gifted some alone-time what with my wife gone for a week, which led me to read hours yesterday and today, which I do too seldom much as I did before adulthood. (True, many would argue about calling me an adult, but I’ve shook them from my boots like the clods they were and kept walking.)
And now, because all posts deserve a photo, here are the mushrooms I’m going to sauté in an hour or two. After the fiasco of the first kit, my purveyors made good with one which burst forth in just seven days and has yielded these fully ripe, ready-to-harvest golden oysters in just 11 days:
When I converted an old, seldom-used blog into this one, I envisioned a writing outlet and ‘daily’ blog combination. After all, I’d just canceled Facebook for reasons too obvious and previously stated. I figured my need to communicate, to shout into the gale winds of social media would inevitably fill this site up with lots and lots of pithy writing punctuating my daily doin’s. It’s now time to admit something about getting older I had witnessed but not from this side of the divide, so to speak: that driving urge to make something happen and accomplish something fades. Some of this is good. Recently I’ve reflected on my typical mindset four years ago when I juggled weekly trips across the continent to San Diego and Seattle from my Raleigh home, monthly visits to attend to my ailing mother in Spokane, and to arrange her final rites in October. (I ended it all with an audit performed in Toronto…in rainy November weather. Yay.) I barely recognize the person who kept multiple itineraries in his head, who could tell you which airports had which kiosks at which intervals, who had a set and efficient routine for unpacking and packing a suitcase, who parleyed sarcastic cynicism into a business persona, and who grabbed beers and food as time allowed. I wish I could convey the inner pressure which led others to give me wide berth at times, but which seemed to be crucial to my survival. But now…
Hard to thrill,
from “Hard To Thrill” by Eric Clapton/John Mayer, performed by Clapton & J.J. Cale on The Road To Escondido
Nothing really moves me anymore.
When Covid partnered with retirement to give me a crash course in inactivity, I reverted to a boyhood prototype: read; pursue an idea as it blossomed; eat; drink; repeat. But don’t call me lazy. I bristle at being called lazy. “Inside my head I’m more active than you’ll ever be,” I think. (We’ll leave to another day what steps I took to slow down and/or turn off the voices in my head.) I learned early that giving voice to my stream of consciousness at speed guaranteed a fairly quick response: “oh god, would you PLEASE JUST SHUT UP!” (Well, I somewhat learned it. I’ve received refresher courses throughout the ensuing 50 years.) Example from a coastal drive during this past week’s visit from a lifelong friend: “There’s a Free Will Baptist Church…not to be confused with a movie about orcas…and definitely Free Willy shouldn’t be confused with that series of pornographic films.” I think I saw heads spin in the car. Did I mention I liked Robin Williams because he delivered comedy at a speed I could appreciate?
All of this by way of explaining my consternation at noting only three or four posts in the past six weeks. Remove the writer’s conceit of a Virtual Vacation and I’ve posted little in the past three or four months. No promises, but I’m headed into a (slightly) more optimistic future in October. In mid-month I’m looking at two periods in the month which hold a dozen days of solitude–a gift to a loner like me.
Our shriveled photo at the top represents a failure at growing a beautiful blooming of golden oyster mushrooms. I was promised a gorgeous cluster, maybe two or three from a kit I purchased in early August. It should have looked like this…ah but that would be stealing someone else’s photo. Let’s just say it would be ten times bigger than the clump in the photo above.
Instead, nothing happened within the 10-14 days it should have. I gifted a friend with the same kind of mushroom kit, and he started a week ahead of me. He didn’t reach harvest until about day 19 or 20, so I held on. About three weeks in, I finally got some growth where it shouldn’t have occurred and it consisted of two distinct clusters which both looked like the picture at the top of this post. It’s an accurate symbol of my shriveled hopes these days. The vendor came through though and sent me a new block which arrived Friday. I started it Sunday, and noted I had not followed instructions–imagine that. This time I made the required shallow incision in the mycelium-impregnated starter block as specified. Stay tuned.
It’s possible that the advent of Oktoberfest with its namesake beer has contributed to some of the lassitude I feel. Or…others…. I’m still polishing off some representatives from the Michigan trip in July. (Though not representative of the state: it’s where I found North Coast Brewing’s Old Rasputin, an imperial stout that drinks like a cross between beer, chocolate, and coffee, all without any additions. Good stuff, but potent. Two of these babies and you’re more than halfway through a typical six-pack.)
September saw a few happenings. We got to know our new steel steed, Percy Pilcher:
We set out at the end of August to replace Mr. Lincoln, a 2015 Lincoln MKC and a beautiful realization of automotive vision, but who had become a bit outdated, frustrating, and tired after eight years. “A hybrid, dear,” I told my wife. “That’s what we need. And probably a minivan, though I’m loath to admit those words. We need the cargo room.” We went shopping. Hybrid Toyota Sierras would be available six to eight months–if we pre-ordered. Chrysler Pacificas looked cheap, even at the so-called high end of the model spectrum. The others were DOA, and so…we headed back to the Lincoln dealership where we were treated like returning royalty. No hybrid Aviators? There’s a familiar song. A ‘pre-owned’ model? (Hmm. Weren’t those called “used” not long ago? I think I’m differently opinionated!) Sure. And that’s how we wound up with a current-year Aviator which was returned after five months because the purchasers just loved the vehicle they had traded in, so they bought another one and used this one to cover the cost. Their disappointment was our gain. We bought a vehicle with less than one year’s mileage on it, looks sharp, has all the features we wanted, and…it’s a Lincoln. When I woke up from the euphoria, though, I realized we had purchased another gas combustion engine and that it had 25% worse gas mileage than what we had traded in! Ah, no matter. For now Percy is our new Aviator. Why Percy? Because Percy Pilcher, a relative for sure–there aren’t many Pilchers in the world–achieved quite a bit of notoriety as an inventor and aviator, and likely would’ve bested the Wright brothers at the first to fly a heavier-than-air aircraft if he hadn’t been killed right before attempting it. If you click through to that link, the photograph of him looks similar to my grandfather, the Rev. Howard B. Pilcher, enough that he could’ve been a cousin. I’ve not done much with genealogy, so I’ve no idea how close the relationship is.
Tuesday marked the beginning of a month of travel, both us and others. Or more specifically, both my wife and others. I’m not going anywhere. In my teen years I became acquainted with a guy who later became a good and close friend. Throughout junior and senior high I knew who he was, saw him in groups, but not until I dropped out of college after my freshman year in 1973 did I start working at a Spokane hospital where he also worked. We started hanging out, and because I had become just a little more “normal” we connected. Though diametrically different, we became friends. He was the best man at my first wedding in 1983. We fell into and out of touch, but by 1990 we had renewed it for good. I moved away, and he served in the wedding party for my second wedding. (It was only fair. I participated in multiple weddings for him. Perhaps I’ll tell that tale later.) This past week represented the second time he visited us in Raleigh; the first occurred only because he had followed a woman to Florida in 2009. Had that not happened….but that’s also another story.
This week my brother visits for the first time in over a year. When he leaves a week later, one of my wife’s triplet sisters drops in the next day to pick up my wife and continue to Florida where she (my sister-in-law, not my wife) will look for her retirement home. When that’s done my wife and I will enjoy a whole seven days all by ourselves before she takes off again with a group of friends called The Biker Chicks (though my wife has never ridden a hog or any other type of motorcycle that I am aware of). Finally, as October bows itself out with Hallowe’en, and All Saints and All Souls ushers us into November, I will settle into a sedate period of enjoying my life with my wife. I really don’t need much else. She lets me be to sit here and write these screeds, matches me drink for drink and recipe for recipe, creates handcrafted art in a panoply of media, and joins me in a love of good video, good music, and good times.
What could be better? It’s why I sometimes don’t post here regularly. I’m having too much fun.
In 2014 we vacationed to Edisto Beach, an off-the-beaten path resort area in South Carolina. I was over a year into the Job from Hell (as it has been known to my wife and me). Though this vacation started on some bad notes, Edisto worked its magic. I returned refreshed by a simpler time spent walking, staring at scenes like this, and strolling to one of the dining/drinking establishments at dinner. Sometimes one just doesn’t know until one knows. (“How profound,” says the Editor drily. “Been smokin’ that ganja again, boy?”)
We watched, sadly horrified when little human-things took down Lokisson--one fine oak with humors unusual. "I lean over their rock-paths, put down by these silly human-things: they look up fearful, ignorant of my deep-rooted stability." He would laugh at his humor. If only he were stable as his roots! No. Humor's ultimate end: fearful, weak-full, they attack first. Angry, snarling chainsaws bit from all sides, ganged up, velociraptors hunting arboreal prey. We knew their type from so long ago. Elephant-bellows issued from metal contraptions which looked vaguely tree-like, screaming their masters' fears skyward, their cries sometimes oddly resembling bugling elks we heard in times before. Lokisson's beautiful limbs disappeared first, fed into hungry maws, exiting pulverized to bits. Metal sheets rang thunder to our sky. Then...section by section...his segments fell, crashing, loudly cutting off his jokes forever. We cannot laugh through our hurt, perhaps won't for many seasons. For two days afterward our living sky cried and grumbled.
I love rock and roll. (Put another dime in the jukebox, baby.) For years I’ve wanted to visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, and on Day 13 we did just that. I selected a hotel downtown specifically to be near Progressive Field where the Guardians play baseball. On this day our boys, the Phightin’ Phillies of Philadelphia, would open a three-game series against the Guardians and we planned to be there. Having a hotel which was more or less across the street from the park satisfied my first requirement, and offered an extra perk: one mile straight north from the hotel sits the Hall of Fame.
We both liked the Hall despite the thick crowd of people everywhere. I felt let down, though. I’ve been to the Baseball Hall of Fame several times, and to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, and both of these establishments have a more formal visual presentation which leads to a better understanding of the subject matter. I had a great time remembering the various decades of popular music (the RnR Hall uses the term “rock and roll” quite loosely), smiling as songs from big names (Rolling Stones) and small (Link Wray, early pioneers in the 50’s) blasted out of the speakers in front of each display case. The Hall does a great job explaining the antecedents of rock, and it dwells on early stars with entertaining and memorable videos which loop back to the beginning when completed. This last feature facilitates watching the video as soon as you see it; you’ll pick up the beginning sooner or later. Several displays, however, were mystifyingly not connected to other areas to which they chronologically belonged.
One of the special exhibits featured Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back in a multimedia curved display. No one stopped me from taking photos, so…
Of course signature instruments, clothes, and miscellaneous items jam the displays: an electric guitar used by Howlin’ Wolf at the beginning of his career, a 1952 Kay K-161; one of Gregg Allman’s organs with a Jaimoe kick drum and a guitar from brother Duane; a large window display with many items each for quite a few signature acts, such as The Faces.
If you go, be sure to go all the way to the top. Each floor in the Hall gets successively smaller–look at the shape in the photo above. At the top a small room featured short films on four acts. My memory should be better than this…one was Nine Inch Nails… Alas, the others have escaped my porous memory cells. Too bad because I do remember eagerly awaiting a film up there, and it wasn’t NIN. Ah! A second film featured Quicksilver Messenger Service. This leaves two including the one I wish I could remember…
We returned in mid-afternoon, snapping photos along the way and prepped for our early dinner and the true highlight of the day: the Phillies meeting the Guardians. A decent dinner later we walked the one block to the field, presented our ticket QR codes….and heard the dreaded “ANCK” all scanners seem to produce these days when they can’t electronically parse the information they’ve just reviewed. One more try, one more ANCK and the ticketmeister said,
“Oh, these tickets are for tomorrow.” I’m going to need quite a bit of time to expunge from my memory the shock and sadness I saw on my wife’s face. We walked back to the hotel, a lot more slowly on the return than on the approach. As a consolation, the hotel’s TV featured the regional sports network which carried the game that night. While the game started I crunched some numbers: if I canceled the hotel for Day 14 and added one more night to our stay in Cleveland it would increase our vacation lodging expenses by over $350, the cost for one night when the Guardians were playing at home. The other hotel room was on points; no money saved there. In addition, we would have a nine-hour drive on Day 15 to get home, not something we like doing on a vacation. Alternatively we could stay out on the road another night, incurring one day’s additional expense for the cat sitter plus the $350+ for the room, plus the extra food we’d need to eat. We didn’t take long to decide to resell the tickets on SeatGeek. Two weeks on the road is enough these days, perhaps a function of my flying weekly to locations all over America during the final five years of my working life. SeatGeek rubbed some vinegar into the wound when we realized less than 50% the original price of the tickets.
I still can’t figure out how I managed to buy tickets for the wrong day. On the MLB website for each team, the game calendar features large squares just like a printed calendar. Difficult to believe I clicked the one furthest right (representing Saturday) instead of the one next to it. Unless I had a brain fart….did I momentarily think we were going to the game on Saturday? No matter; done is done. This was to be our only Phillies game for 2023, though. [insert crying emojis].
We drank a bit extra that night–and the Phillies lost in a dispirited contest, although Bryce Harper played first base for the first time in his MLB career and made a fantastic catch into the photographer’s area.
Returning from dinner the day we arrived in Cleveland, I noticed statues of what I took to be saints on top of a parking garage across the street from our hotel. As I followed the line of statuary eastward, I saw that the parking garage must serve a church since the statues continued up to there. I snapped one of the lesser photos of my life, then went inside to look up the name: Saint Maron Church. Thus do we learn new things.
Saint Maron lived in the 300’s AD, a Syriac Christian hermit monk in the Tarsus Mountains. His followers established a religious movement after he died, and this movement became known as the Syriac Maronite Church. This church is in full communion with the Holy See (the Vatican) and the Catholic Church. From my readings it’s debated whether the Syriac church ever left the communion, but it’s definitely in communion now. This makes them my religious family since I’m a Roman Catholic. The Maronites are part of the Eastern Churches, what we loosely call Orthodox churches. There are six traditions in the Catholic Church; one is called Latin, what most Americans think of when they hear the word “Catholic”. Maronites were re-established after Islamic rule by the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch, hence the official name Antiochene Syriac Maronite Church. Today its parishioners are primarily Lebanese, with smaller amounts of Syrians, Cypriots, Israelis, and Jordanians.
Huh!
all the voices in my head 