Taking the Day

The Fourth is coming up, which, I know that's not news to any of you. I work for the state, so I'm off that day. It's a Tuesday. I'm off Saturday, Sunday, and Tuesday. Monday, I'm supposed to be here.

I want to go to visit Mrs. P. A two-day break isn't long enough for that. So, I'm not working on Monday. I'm taking the day.

I like that expression, "taking the day." Americans say they're taking the day OFF, but to the British, it's "taking the day." It makes more sense. Deleting that one word makes a huge difference in what we're saying.

The American version sounds a little bit guilty, like you're getting away with something. You're supposed to be working, but you're not. It's like we think we're skipping school.

But the British, whose expressions are nearly always more elegant or wittier than their American equivalents, they get it right. I'm taking the day. My various jobs have stolen all these days from me, thousands of precious and limited days over the course of my life, and now I'm stealing this one back. It's mine, goddamnit, one of a limited number allotted to me, and I'm gonna do what I want with it.

I wanna get out of town. I want my Mrs. P. I wanna hang out and travel with Sarah. I wanna be off alone in the wilderness with Clan Dooley and with all the interesting people I've heard so much about.

To the state of West Virginia: get off me, you sons of bitches.

I'm taking the day.

The Story of My Life

There's a T-shirt I love which shows a guy, just a face in the crowd, suddenly looking at all the near-identical people around him and thinking, "Hey, what if I'm not the main character?"

When I was younger I definitely considered myself the main character in the story of my life (and back then there was some evidence to support the theory). These days I really don't. I mean, if I was gonna make a movie of my life, nobody as ugly as me could star in it. Actually, I'm hoping to get Chow Yun-Fat for the role.

No, I don't really want to be the main actor anymore, I don't think. I'm better behind the scenes. I think I want to direct my life rather than star in it. And God knows this life needs a new director. Whoever's running the show right now has no skill for the dramatic.

So, okay. The first thing I'm gonna do is fire the screenwriter. I mean, the original idea was pretty good, and he's got a knack for snappy dialog, but the plot is beginning to drag a little bit. So much could be done with this story; certainly a few of the characters are very well-drawn and interesting. But it needs a little spicing up. For one thing, it could certainly use a steamy sex scene or two. And we're gonna need a complete rewrite in Act Three...I mean, this ending needs work. Who wrote this garbage? You know, people are getting tired of movies that don't have happy endings. How's this: boy and girl go to Italy and take up raising goats on a hillside overlooking the Mediterranean? And have three perfect little girls named Xenia Voltaire, Circe Rousseau, and Virginia Mercy? And live simply and happily ever after? Everybody loves a movie like that.

Today's scene sucked ass beginning to end, writing, shooting, scenes and performances. The star was hungover and sick at heart, much of the dialog was turgid and excessively emotional, and at least one of the costars has gone completely off the script. Let's snap this up a little, huh? That little bit of violence with the fruit juice machine looks pretty good in the rushes. Let's build on that. Tomorrow we'll start with a car chase. Those are a lot easier to write.

Also, the production designer had better start pulling his weight. This setting is getting pretty dull, the same sad sorry tiny little town for nearly five years. What happened to the old guy, the one who set scenes in California and New Orleans and DC and New York and Boston? What happened to those wonderful old sets like the Southern Belle, Third Street Diner, Madison Square Garden, the Village Cafe, and the Art Institute in San Francisco?

We'll need to work on continuity next. In too many of the main character's relationships, the nature of the relationship changes from one day to the next. It's too confusing for the audience, and seems to make it hard for the actor to learn his lines, as well...half the time he's up there on the screen and you can just tell he doesn't know WHAT'S going on around him. We can't have the movie changing so radically from scene to scene. Let's go back to the tried-and-true formula, "Boy meets girl, boy falls for girl, girl digs other boy, other boy turns out to be unworthy, girl eventually comes back 'round to loving the hero." And for God's sake, let's try to be linear.

The casting director did a good job for a while but these days her choices are pretty lousy. We need to change all the actors who play co-workers, for example. They're nice enough folks, sure, but they should be doing commercials for the Kentucky Lottery. Bring in Sarah Polley, Peggy Lipton, and Jeremy Irons instead. Oooh...do you think Diana Rigg is free?

The prop man needs to get off his ass. The principal possessions of our hero are WAY too left-over-90's-slacker. I mean, they're so last decade. We're trying to make a hip, happening film here, and you can't do that with a twenty-year-old TV, a jukebox with blown-out speakers, and burned-out light fixtures in the john. That furniture is atrocious, and the kitchen is simply too small to be convincing. Can we get somebody in here to work on that, please?

I need to light a fire under the producer and get a bigger budget for this thing, too. $12,000 a year just isn't cutting it. How are we supposed to afford location shoots on that? We can't even get decent meals catered with that kinda money.

And somebody do a little research, alright? We need a little quality control here. I mean, a little while ago we're shooting a scene in early June and it's raining and forty degrees out! Somebody wanna get on his horse about fixing that?

For Christ's sake, I'm a hella director, but you can't expect me to do everything.

Lucid Dreaming

Amy and I watched The Waking Life the other night. There's a bit in it where the main character is talking to another guy about lucid dreaming, the idea that, if you know you're in a dream, you can control it. I've been hearing this for years. I think it's bullshit. I'm gonna tell you why.

Probably a year and a half ago I had a dream. This is when I was still working at Hank's, and I'd walked home dead drunk at around five a.m. and collapsed into the bed. I fell asleep immediately and suddenly I was walking home down the alley again. I thought it was strange, having to walk home twice in one night. Then I noticed that, though the alley was a perfect representation of my alley, it was very slightly too small, like it was a movie set that had been constructed to 7/8 scale. It was very nicely done, down to the trash in the gutters and all the broken glass, but it was just too small. And there was a guy following me, and a guy waiting for me at the end of the alley, and a guy coming towards me across the bus station parking lot. I figured they were gonna try to mug me. I wasn't worried, 'cause the guys were in 7/8 scale too. Figured I could take 'em.

Anyway, what with the repitition and the scale, it suddenly occured to me that I was dreaming. So I stopped under a light and said, "Okay, then, punk bitches, come on and get your Matrix-style ass-whuppin'" and they disappeared. So I thought, "Hey, awesome, this must be one of those lucid dreams where you can control what happens. I can do any cool thing I can imagine. So, what to do?"

So I thought for a while, about flying into space or burrowing to the center of the Earth or going back in time to hang out with Ben Franklin or Audrey Hepburn, and then finally decided, "You know what I need, though, is a blowjob. I haven't had a blowjob in forever."

I wasn't exactly sure of the procedure for this. "Now, what am I supposed to do? Just concentrate on fellatio? Okay." So I closed my eyes and thought REALLY REALLY hard about a blowjob, and then I opened 'em back up, but there was still no one in the alley.

"Well, when I threatened the bad guys they vanished. Maybe it's an aural thing. HEY, WHOEVER'S OUT THERE...MAN IN NEED OF BLOWJOB," I tried again, no luck.

"Well, shit," said I. "I might as well just wake up, then." And I looked around, expecting all the buildings to melt and fade away and my room to appear, but that didn't happen either. "Okay, fine, so what do I do now?" I thought. I couldn't decide on anything, so I just went the hell on home.

So, either there's a piece of my brain missing (and after the ungentle way I've treated myself over the years, that wouldn't surprise me) or this lucid dreaming thing is pure bullshit. When I'm dreaming, I almost always know it, and yet I'm just struggling to keep my head outta the water.

Scene from a Waffle House, Sunday Dinner

SCENE: Waffle House (THE HAPPIEST PLACE ON EARTH), int., early afternoon. An incredibly handsome young man (ME) sits with an older woman (MAMA) and two small boys (JOSH and JOE). The woman is having a conversation with the boys while the man sips his coffee, until someone says something that brings a Beatles’ song to his mind. He sings a verse of it, then turns to one of the boys…

ME: The Beatles are awesome. They’ve got a song for every situation.
JOSH: Do you like the Beatles?
ME: Everybody likes the Beatles.
JOSH: Not everybody likes the Beatles.
ME: Everybody who counts likes the Beatles.
JOSH: Everybody who counts?
ME: An appreciation of the Beatles is considered a baseline requirement for admission into polite society.
JOSH: I don’t like the Beatles.
ME: Then you won’t be allowed into polite society.
JOSH: ‘Cause I don’t like the Beatles?
ME: (thinking of all the other reasons the boy isn’t ready for polite society) Well, that’s what we’ll tell people, anyway.

The Litter Bug

I don’t mean to scare ya, my friend, but I betcha
Come Father’s Day the litter bug’s gonna getcha
The urge is righteous, but the face is wrong
I hope that something better comes along

I want to have children.

Well, more accurately, I want someone else to have children, sired by me. Not a wife, don't want a wife, and who'd have me, anyway? Just a surrogate mother, is what I need, so I can have my children.

I don't necessarily want to KEEP them, you understand. Children are kinda nightmarish, really. I just want to name them.

I want to have three girls. No boys, please. I was a boy myself, and I know what an asshole I was. If my sons would be genetically programmed to be like me, then No Boys Allowed.

You know how your more hysterical conservatives worry about abortion on demand because they think that people will abort fetuses because they don't like the sex of the child? I'm the one that they got that idea from. "It's a boy? I'm making an appointment at the clinic."

Anyway, yes, three girls. And if they have the same last name as me (there are no guarantees), then their initials will be CRW, VMW, and (my favorite) XVW. They're gonna have hell finding monogrammed clothing.

One name is a nod to my Slavic heritage, a good solid Russian name, a very beautiful Russian name actually, which is Xenia. Not ZEE-nia, like those idiots in Ohio pronounce it, but ZEN-ya, which is the proper pronunciation. Also there will be a Circe, connecting one of the girls with the classical age. Their middle names will be in honor of the great French thinkers, Rousseau and Voltaire. Neither is a feminine name, but they're both lovely-sounding enough for my beautiful little girls. And anyway, I'm heavily into androgyny. So, Xenia Voltaire and Circe Rousseau.

The third little girl will be named for my home, Virginia, and we will call her Ginny, which folks will think is Jenny and they'll say "Thank God he gave ONE of his daughters a real little girl's name." Her middle name will be Mercy, which I've always thought was just a beautiful name for a girl, even though Ace appropriated it from me for one of his stories. Virginia Mercy. That just sounds so wonderful. And then, because they all would have such beautiful names, I would prob'ly end up falling in love with them and keeping them anyway.

So, all I need is a prospective mother with 27 months to kill, and then we can get on with our lives. Any takers?

Yeah, Eddie, But Is It Art?

You know what I hate? Well, that's a lot to ask, really. Lemme rephrase that question. Do you know what item #17846 is on my hate inventory? It's semi-realism in movies. I don't object to realism. I'm not a huge fan of it, of course...after all, my favorite movies are zombie movies.
Realism, however, is okay. But incomplete, half-assed attempts at realism in the movies aggravate me. I hate it when, say, two ostensibly German characters are speaking to each other, and they speak English with a German accent. I'm gonna let you in on a little secret: Germany is really not full of Germans speaking English to each other in German accents. It's full of people speaking German to each other. That's why they call it that.
If you want realism in your movie, let your characters speak German with little English subtitles. And if realism isn't that important to you, just let 'em talk normally. You're not fooling us with these crappy accents, okay? We know they aren't really German, they are American actors pretending to be German, and that's okay.
Movie watching is about the willing suspension of disbelief. Forget the stupid accents. Just tell us they're German. We'll believe you. That's what we came to the movie for.
I'm gonna make a movie someday, and I'm gonna cast my friends in it, but I'm not gonna write particular parts for particular folks to suit their particular character traits or appearance. In fact, I'm gonna cast the movie by putting the names of my actors in a hat and drawing them at random. If we do that, then hopefully Mrs. P will be the 6'11" professional basketball player from Zambia. Stephen will be the beautiful woman that everybody's falling over themselves to get close to. Amy will be the fat girl with the great sense of humor that everybody loves and nobody wants to sleep with. My brother will be a six-legged Martian goatherd.
All of this without makeup; my brother, for example, will not have six legs, and Mrs. P won't have to stand on a ladder for the whole movie. I'll convince people of who my characters are through the use of clever dialog, stellar performances from my cast, and just repeating the big lies over and over. After twenty or twenty-five people make fun of my sweet little Amy for being fat, or walk up to Heather and say "How's the weather up there?" I think people will start to get with the suspension-of-disbelief program. It worked for the ancient Greeks; I'm gonna make it work for me.
On a not-entirely-related note: on payday, I have decided, I am going to Latta's and buying myself a new set of pastels. I miss doing my colorful little sketches. And what I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna start doing pictures on every surface I can find, and I'm going to sketch the pictures of what you really see when you're wherever the picture is. For example, I'm going to sit at one of the big concrete tables outside the library and do a picture (on the table) of what you'd see if you were looking up, out over the campus, instead of down at the table. I'm gonna lacquer it when I'm done, too, so it will last forever (and not ruin people's clothes). And my picture is gonna look exactly like the campus on an early-summer afternoon, only better, 'cause it'll be brighter and more colorful and the folks in it will be more beautiful, and people will sit at the table and compare my lovely picture to the actual campus and think, "Jeez, I wish the real world was like that."

Scene from a Sidewalk Cafe, Tuesday Evening

SCENE: Two young folks sit at a table outside a mom-and-pop coffee house, just before sundown. He’s sipping a China Black, and she’s drinking grape juice and eating dried fruit and cottage cheese. Their conversation turns from vaguely political and spiritual topics to the more practical matter of what they should do with the rest of the evening…

HE: Well, we could just go home and watch those Marx Brothers movies. They’re due back on Friday, so we need to watch them sometime soon.
SHE: Maybe. I don’t know, though…I don’t think I could really focus on a movie right now. Although, shit, I do want to see The Omen. Is that out yet?
HE: Yeah, it opened today. You didn’t think they were gonna miss this date, did you? I think the only reason they decided to remake the movie at all was so they could release it on 6/6/6.
SHE: I forgot that today was 6/6/6. The apocalypse is supposed to be tonight.
HE: Oh, right. (pause) Well, then, I guess we don’t have to worry about getting the Marx Brothers movies back on time. You wanna go to The Omen?
SHE: No. Not really. I guess we could just wander around…
HE: Yeah, we’re pretty good at that.

[a motorcycle roars past, obscuring her response. She gazes after it with loathing]

SHE: I want a Tommy gun.
HE: I’ll get you one for your birthday.
SHE: No, better not. If I had one, I’d use it.
HE: I’ll get you a paintball gun instead.
SHE: We don’t need a gun anyway. We could just stand along the sidewalk with, I don’t know, a crowbar or something, and when a motorcycle passed us we could jam the crowbar into the spokes.
HE: (grins) Oh, evil girl. (brightens) Hey, it’s 6/6/6!
SHE: I know. We were just talking about it.
HE: Right. We need to go out and do something evil in commemoration of the day.
SHE: Evil? Like sacrificing babies?
HE: Well, maybe not that evil. Just something fun. Something cheerfully, randomly, celebratorially evil.
SHE: What did you have in mind?
HE: I don’t…I don’t know, off the top of my head. Couldn’t we just walk around until evil came over us? You know, searching for inspiration? Just ‘til we ran across a kitten we could drown or something?
SHE: You know, now I’m not sure wandering around is such a good idea tonight. I’m not wearing good wandering shoes.
HE: Oh. Well, any ideas?
SHE: None.
HE: Our evil production has fallen well below quota recently. (lost in thought, gazing around) I’ve got it!
SHE: What?
HE: I’m gonna go over to that newspaper machine, and I’m only gonna put in 50 cents, but I’m gonna take TWO newspapers.
SHE: (with a tolerant smile) Oooh, that IS evil.
HE: In fact, I’m gonna take EVERY newspaper in the box! How’s that for evil, baby?
SHE: That’s about as evil as it gets.

[she rolls her eyes and shakes her head as he wanders off, stage right, only to return sheepishly a few seconds later, empty-handed]

HE: Damned thing’s empty.
SHE: Yeah, that kinda thing doesn’t work so well at 9:00. We should’ve done it first thing this morning, and hit every newspaper box in town, so that no one could have their paper.
HE: Well, next time, we’ll know.

[She speaks, but stops and stares with even more hatred than before as another, even louder, motorcycle passes]

HE: WHAT?!?!?
SHE: Automatic weapons!
HE: Noisy.
SHE: I’m serious. We need, I don’t know, submachine guns or something.
HE: Yes, but with silencers.
SHE: Oh, of course. They’re very loud.
HE: And we’ll go around very quietly killing noisy people. We’ll be the Noise Pollution Killin’ Bandits.
SHE: That sounds like a good name for a band.
HE: Yeah, and we’ll play on street corners, but if people throw change into our hat we’ll shoot ‘em, ‘cause the jingling makes us crazy.
SHE: And we’ll play electric guitars but they won’t be plugged into anything, ‘cause we hate the noise…and instead of singing, we’ll whisper the songs.
HE: And I’ll play my saxophone, only with socks stuffed down into the bell so it won’t make any sound.
SHE: I didn’t know you could play the saxophone.
HE: With socks down the bell, neither will anyone else.
SHE: And with the money we make from our music, we’ll buy automatic weapons and kill bikers.
HE: Now, THAT’S evil. There’s our next evil project.
SHE: No, it isn’t evil, really. I mean, they kinda deserve it, making all that noise. It’s justified.
HE: Retributive.
SHE: They asked for it.
HE: Performing a service really.
SHE: Plus, we can’t start that tonight, ‘cause we don’t have the guns yet. We need something evil for tonight.
HE: Let’s just get some cans of spray paint and exercise our artistic impulses while committing the evil act of vandalizing.
SHE: I don’t know. I think I want to break something.
HE: Well, we’re in a town full of glass.
SHE: True. (thinks for a moment) If you were in a riot, I mean if you were living in a city and there was rioting, would you be a vandal, or a looter?
HE: Hmmm….that’s a tough one. I’d probably be happy vandalizing, really. Looters get caught too easy, ‘cause they’ve got the evidence on them, right? Plus, I live in a fucking closet, and I don’t know where I could put the loot.
SHE: Yes, I suppose we don’t want to be too materialistic.
HE: Plus, I don’t really need anything. Except I need a toaster. I’d loot a toaster, and then I’d go about vandalizing, I think.
SHE: Yeah, you can’t just go out looting at random. You’ve gotta look for things you really need.
HE: Right. I’m looking forward to being in a riot with you. Everybody else will take to the streets, and we’ll be sitting on the balcony with a legal pad saying, “Okay, we’ve gotta hit K-Mart, ‘cause I need some new bath towels,” or...
SHE: …or “Don’t forget the drug store”…
HE: …or “Hey, better grab some smokes”…
SHE: …or “What do you think is the best route from Latta’s to the liquor store?”
HE: Oh, yes, better plan the route carefully. Gotta be careful which streets you go down during a riot.
SHE: We’d be very organized looters.
HE: That's right. We’d have our little grocery list…
SHE: Only it would be a looting list…
HE: And money would be no object. Maybe we should start compiling it now. ‘Cause, you know, when the riot actually starts, there may not be much time.
SHE: Well, that’s something to do with the evening, but I think that’s probably for later. What are we gonna do right now?
HE: It’s too bad you can’t loot the things you really want. You can’t, for example, loot a dinner from Waffle House…
SHE: Okay, stay with me. What are we doing tonight?
HE: You wanted to break something?
SHE: Yes yes yes!!! Maybe we should go throw bricks through the windows of really posh places. And have really stupid, subliterate obscene notes attached to them... like, "You Stink!!!"
HE: We could do that. Personally, though, I was hoping to set something on fire.
SHE: Hmmm...well, instead of bricks, we could throw Molotov Cocktails.
HE: I don’t know if that’s a good idea. Me, you, a lighter, and flammable liquid…
SHE: Right. I can see it now: you light the cocktail, and then stand there staring at it, “Ohh, it’s so pretty” and then it blows up in your hand.
HE: Yeah, that’s probably out, then. Plus, you can’t attach a note to a Molotov.
SHE: We could do burn-pattern designs in people’s front yards with gasoline.
HE: I’ve never had any luck with that. I always draw things really carefully but just end up with a big round patch of fire.
SHE: Oh. Well, something else, then.

[both sit thinking for a while]

SHE: We’re really pathetic.
HE: I’m still waiting for the apocalypse to start. Plans might well prove to be superfluous anyway.
SHE: I forgot about that. Maybe it isn’t the apocalypse, though. Maybe it’s the Rapture. I wonder when it’s going to begin?
HE: It might have already happened. Done and over. I mean, if every “True Christian” on Earth suddenly disappeared, you and I might not know about it for a few days.
SHE: I don’t know. We can’t seem to manage any evil; maybe that’s a bad sign. Maybe we’ve been saved without knowing it. Maybe we’ll have to go, too.
HE: Jeez. Think of something evil, quick!

[blinding flash, both disappear]

GOD: TOO LATE!!! (maniacal laughter)

CURTAIN.

Lighter Karma

Been out walkin' in the rain. Only briefly, unfortunately, 'cause the rain gave up on me not long into the walk. But that's okay. It was fun while it lasted. Leaving my house required a tricky bit of navigation, actually, because both Fourteenth and Fifteenth Streets flood when it rains this much this fast, and so of course Four-and-a-Half Alley transforms into a canal between these two great lakes. By the time I headed out, my apartment was an island in a sea of glistening glop. Now, I love splashing in puddles as much as the next guy, but I've seen what's on the ground in my little alley, and I don't want it floating past me in the dark. I waited 'til I got a little further away and found some slightly less-contaminated puddles to splash in.
I brought my favorite lighter with me. I call it the Magic Lighter, because it lights no matter what. I mean, it's a cheap-ass disposable lighter of indeterminate make and eccentric design, but it really is magical. It works when it's wet, it works when it's cold, it works in a car without rolling the windows up or in the wind when I've only got one hand free. I save it special to use in bad weather, 'cause it's the only lighter I can trust to stand up to the tempests the world occasionally throws at me.
But it's finally beginning to run out of fluid. I say "finally" because I've had it for over a year now. It's a really big lighter, you see (I mean BIG...I've never seen another one like it), and held a lot of fluid. It would, in fact, make a formidable weapon. I'm terribly depressed that it's dying on me, because I can't replace it. I can't just go to the store it originally came from and buy a new one, because it's stolen, and I have absolutely no idea where it was purchased.
Now, before you get thinkin' ill of me, I'm not really a thief. I mean, you could walk off and leave your wallet next to me on the bar and I'd chase you down and give it to you. But lighters...stealing lighters doesn't count as stealing. It just doesn't. I mean, in the first place, it's something most people do unconsciously. For a smoker, you light your smoke and then slip the lighter into your pocket in one motion. The pocketing of the lighter is part of the act of lighting the cigarette. Because of this, when I give someone a light, I usually light the cigarette for them rather than letting them actually handle it. It's a simple rule of self-smoking-preservation.
Also, I've come to subscribe to the Great Karma Lighter Wheel theory of lighter justice. See (an aside to the unitiated), there's this Great Karma Lighter Wheel that devolves lighters into and out of the possession of smokers (depending on diverse factors including merit, luck, and personal alcohol content), and this wheel has a Yin and a Yang. Yes, I know I'm mixing metaphors (or worse, unrelated concepts from two eastern religions that have nothing to do with each other), but try to come with me on this...
The Yin of the Great Karma Lighter Wheel: Anyone who fails to pay sufficient attention to prevent the theft of this object, which is probably the single most-stolen personal item in the long, dark story of humanity, does not deserve to have one anyway.
The Yang of the Great Karma Lighter Wheel: The person that you're stealing this lighter from came by it by virtue of its theft from ANOTHER person, and will steal it back from you at the first opportunity. In fact, this lighter probably belonged to you in a past life.
Because it's one of those bizarre facts of life that no one ever, in the history of the world, has actually bought a disposable lighter. I am completely at a loss, in fact, to explain how lighters get into the economy in the first place. I carry three or four lighters everywhere I go, just in case, and I've got probably fifty more in my house, and I can't remember ever taking money out of my pocket to buy one. The closest I come is that the little cigarette store I shop at, up at the corner of 20th Street and Fifth Avenue, gives away free lighters when you buy a carton of smokes. But that little place just can't, on their own, be responsible for every lighter on the market. Bill Gates himself couldn't have flooded the market with this many lighters.
I think the government's behind it. I think that the CIA decided to get everyone they could hooked on crack, and then they suddenly realized that in order to smoke crack you need a lighter, and so they hid a couple billion a year in lighter expenses in some HUD bill or something, and now they have secret lighter agents who surreptitiously leave lighters lying on bars, or slip them into the pockets of schoolchildren, all across America. No one but the government is capable of a conspiracy on this scale.
Anyway, yeah, I'm not gonna be lighter-less, 'cause my apartment's just plain lousy with lighters, but I am gonna miss this particular one. I'm glad the Great Karma Lighter Wheel dropped it on me, and let me keep it so long. Goodbye, old friend. I hope you've achieved Bic Nirvana at last.