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An Absolute Gentleman– review on Goodreads

An Absolute Gentleman: A NovelAn Absolute Gentleman: A Novel by R.M. Kinder

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I came across this book in the library one day when I was searching for Geocaching for Dummies. I was in one of the situations where I felt like the drive to the library needed more justification than just one book that I was only going to flip through anyway. I found R.M. Kinder’s novel, opened it, read a few pages to get a sense of the prose style, liked it, read the front flap to see what the plot was about, liked that too, and added the book to my “to-read” list. Then, last week, on vacation, having finished two other novels in just a few days, I started in on An Absolute Gentleman, and finished it in about 24 hours.

It was that engaging. R.M. Kinder’s style is as gentle and stoic as her main character, choosing to titillate and horrify with what isn’t written, only pulling out the stops and giving you the gory details in a few choice places. And although Arthur Blume is a serial killer, you can’t help but root for him, a little.

I’m not going to give away the plot, because there isn’t much of one, but what follows are spoilers of a sort, so stop reading if you want. Arthur Blume is a misogynist, less in the sense of hating women than in the sense that he simply has no respect for them. And while I was reading this, I know this was fictional misogyny… but then, only after I was done with the book, did I realize that R.M. Kinder, the author, is a woman. Which changes the tenor of that fictional misogyny. When a man writes about misogyny, he may be expressing his own opinions, or he may be asking you to judge what he feels is a horrible point of view. But when a woman does it, surely she can’t be expressing her own opinion—is she describing her own experiences at the hand of a misogynist? Is she misinterpreting the experience, taking it more personally than it should have been taken?

I wish to cast no aspersion on Kinder, nor her intent, because it’s all mere speculation on my part and truly I detest this kind of analysis. But I bring it up because, for me, the book changed when I found out the sex of the writer. And I find this unsettling, and I am not a little ashamed of myself. But what can I do. I thought this was a man writing about a horrible man, and now I find myself, unfairly I admit, wondering if this a woman writing about horrible men.

Why say as much? This is my plea, to myself and to you, to find a way to ignore who or what the author is at all times, when reading any novel. An impossible task– I will read books just because they’re written by authors I’ve read before. After all, there’s so many books out there, how can we choose which one to read if we don’t, to some degree, judge them by their covers?

Nevertheless, we should try to ignore the author. I need to swallow my shame and recall what I thought of the book when I didn’t know who the writer was at all. Still a bit sexist of me (I thought it was a man) but at least I’m not trying to compliment Kinder by saying “she writes like a man!” She doesn’t. She writes like a writer. And a damned fine one at that.

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Plugged– review on Goodreads

PluggedPlugged by Eoin Colfer
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Plugged started off so promising, in my opinion, and I wonder if that’s why I’m a bit more let down than I might otherwise have been. I read the sample of the book offered by Barnes and Noble, and when I got to the end of the free part, going ahead with the purchase was a no brainer. I liked the way the main character talked: sarcastic, bitter, old before his time but not so long before that he hadn’t earned his fatigue. I liked the setting: a dive casino in an otherwise affluent New Jersey bedroom community, gritty and dirty a seamy and all those other things so perfect for a crime novel. I liked where the plot was going: used-up ex-army doorman’s one-time fling gets a hole in her head, and he needs to know why. Clichés, all, but this is why we read genre fiction sometimes

But then it got silly. And maybe if I had known it was going to be silly, I would have been ready for it, and accepted it. I like a good farce. But this doesn’t read like satire at all: it reads like someone who read a satire, didn’t realize it was satire, and decided to write something “just as good.” It’s like all of the cliché’s that were acceptable in the first few chapters gave the writer license to keep adding in more and more nonsense. Yes, I said that’s why we read genre fiction, sometimes. But we really are hoping that the writer takes all of those tired old ideas and does something unique with them.

I almost said “unique or clever,” but I think I’m getting a little tired of clever. To his credit, Eoin Colfer maintains all of the tropes from the first few chapters throughout the novel, so it’s still readable. But I feel like “original” was sacrificed for “clever,” and the result may be readable, but hardly memorable.

I know that sometimes writers write just to find out what happens. They’re as much slaves to the plot as the readers are. Maybe Colfer just kept writing himself into corners, so he took the goofy way out. But he’s allegedly an experienced writer—he wrote the Artemis Fowl novels, after all, and was commissioned to write the 6th Hitchhiker’s book. So I don’t know what his excuse is. Maybe it’s all my fault, going in with high expectations. Maybe genre fiction is just genre fiction sometimes. Oh well.

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The Family Fang- review on Goodreads

The Family FangThe Family Fang by Kevin Wilson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Family Fang is about a functional family. One might be tempted to call them dysfunctional, but that hardly reveals anything: all families are dysfunctional, to a degree, and certainly all fictional families are dysfunctional. What would be the point of writing about a non-dysfunctional family? And note that functional is not the same as non-dysfunctional: The Family Fang is about how a dysfunctional family functions, and if by now the word “functional” has been said too many times to have any meaning anymore, then I’ve done my job of capturing the essence of the Fang Family (the people, not the novel).

Caleb and Camille have two children, Annie and Buster. I don’t want to give the author too much authority here, but in as much as naming the kids A and B was quite purposeful (for that is how they’re referred to by their parents, as child A and child B) it seems obvious that the parents are C and the Fang Family is F. Letter grades or merely a list from most to least important? If letter grades, that begs the question: who/what is D? Is it the movie Annie made, Date Due, the only thing she’s proud of? If a list, what or who is E? I/m probably reading too much into this. Indeed, there’s another double F, Annie’s other good move, Favor Fire… which is also about a dysfunctional family…

The Fang Family are performance artists, to a degree, which comes across as silly as one expects at first, even as the nature of these performances becomes more and more horrible as the novel develops. But what at first seems almost satirical turns out to be all too real. Caleb is the visionary, and for him, nothing is more important than art. Nothing. His pieces are meant to evoke reactions from strangers, and at first you may think he fails to realize what a terrible toll these performances take on his offspring. Strangers react to uncomfortable situations, and are recorded on camera. The film freezes these reactions and documents them, but how long will the memory of the event stay with the audience? Only later does it become apparent that Caleb is all too aware of the scars he’s left on his children, themselves living documents to his art.

Which is why he cannot fathom art without them, once they leave home, and attempt to become their own people, wholly removed from the Fangs. Child A and B manage to lift themselves up enough to make their fall the more painful, although by the end of the novel, they find a way to finally achieve some level of independence in artistic success– ironically, by finally drawing on their pain and suffering to create new art altogether.

This is how the Fang Family functions, and as novels go, I found this one much more satisfying than a lot of the Franzen and Sedaris stuff out there. Wilson’s prose style is easy, managing to capture, in third person, Annie’s angst in her chapters, Buster’s depression, and Caleb and Camille’s weirdness in flashbacks describing performances from the children’s childhood. It’s subtle, transparent, and allows the reader to fall into the book enough to understand without falling in so far as to identify with them or even sympathize. The Family Fang is a kind of performance piece, and the moral of the performance is: there are weirdos out there, they have families, and as much as we might want to point and laugh, our experience is ephemeral– we cannot possible know how terrible it is to live like that every day. Or maybe we can, once we start looking back at ourselves and listen for the laughter.

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Different Rules, Same Game

fiction by Jason Edwards

Gary Allweather, number 9, forward for the Gila County Rattlers, Arizona Outdoor Basketball League (AOBL), dribbles, sets, shoots. The ball disappears into the blazing sunlight, blinding anyone foolish enough to track it. On instinct, Bert Fourtrees jumps up for the rebound, but the ball goes swish, and it’s 87-85, Rattlers. Gary hustles back on D.

The Graham County Scorpions play the ball in-bounds, barely past some good D from Bert, then move up the court, quickly. There’s only 10 seconds left on the clock. A quick pass, Gary tries to dive and intercept but misses. Number 7 is on the outside, sets a pick, moves past the Rattlers defense, fakes a jumper and passes it outside to number 83, who sets himself for a three. Bert appears out of nowhere to try and swat at the shot, but he misses, and the ball rises and falls. Swish. Scorpions by one, and there’s three seconds left on the clock.

Three Scorpions at the base line, waving their arms in front of Bert, who fakes an overhead pass, a pass from his hip, then takes a step back and simply tosses the ball over their hands to Gary. Gary catches the ball, dribbles, spins around some sloppy D, dribbles, brings the ball up for an impossible shot. He’s barely at half court, he needs to hurl it. He throws it up high. The ball’s off his fingertips and disappearing into the sun as the buzzer sounds.

The buzzer wails as the ball goes up, and continues to wail. The old men in the stands rise to their feet, picking up their shotguns. Their eyes are fixed on the scoreboards, which is propped on the scorer’s table at half-court. Mickey Torrance, 47, has his finger on the red button to smash it down if the ball goes in. His own eyes are glued to the basketball rim.

None of the players are moving. Sometimes, once the buzzer goes, a few cowards start to run for the hills, but the old men are excellent shots, and usually cut them down before they get too far away. This time everyone’s frozen. Watching that rim. A few idiots are squinting up at the sun, looking for the ball, blinding themselves.

Gary’s frozen too, because he doesn’t want to get caught in the crossfire. As soon as that ball left his fingertips, he knew. He just knew. That ball is going through that basket, will go through with a swish. There isn’t a cloud in the sky. There isn’t a lick of breeze. It’s a sweltering August Tuesday in Cochise County, Arizona, this is the championship game, the losers get their heads blown off by the old men with the shotguns, and the winners get to go home with the losers’ wives. Gary is going to go find number 7’s wife and show her what winners do in the sack, and he doesn’t give a good god damn if she is fat and ugly. Serves number 7 right, throwing elbows the entire game.

The game should have been a slam dunk, no pun intended (slam dunks are not allowed in the AOBL). Should have been an easy win for the Rattlers. But there was chicanery. Gary knew there was going to be chicanery from the start, because none of the Scorpions wives bothered to stay home with their doors locked. They were all at the game, sitting in the fan stands, behind the bullet-proof plexiglass. None of them were even wearing black. They should have been afraid of the Rattlers, been afraid of Gary, and especially afraid of Bert Fourtrees, who’d already won three championships and had four wives and sixteen kids to prove it.

But the Scorpions were out for blood, threw elbows, travelled, stepped on the line and didn’t get called for it. The damn refs. Gary knows better than to blame the refs for a bad game, but this was absurd. Foul? You call that a foul? A lumbering number 7 plowed into Gary who’s standing flat-footed two feet off the free-throw line, and you called that a foul? Are you looking to have a man sneak into your house later tonight and open you up with a serrated bowie knife, ref?

But it doesn’t matter. That ball is going in. Gary knows it like he knew his first was going to be a boy and his second a girl. Knows it like he knows where Bert was at all times, without looking, and could feed him a pass with his eyes shut. Knows it like he knows that Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross so that poor sumbitches likes the Scorpions had a shot at heaven after the old men get done mowing them down in the next minute. Just as soon as Mickey presses that red button and the scoreboard reads 90-88. Just as soon as that damn ball comes out of the sky and through that rim.

A buzzard flies across the court, lazily, sensing the incoming carnage. The ball drops out of the sky, hits the buzzard, hard, knocking it to the ground. The buzzard makes a squawking sound, loud in the sudden silence of the buzzer going quiet. The ball misses the basket by three feet. The buzzard flies away. Mickey dives under the scorer’s table, and the old men open up with their shotguns.

Later, the buzzard comes back, with friends, and they dine on Rattlers for most of the night.

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Forces of Nature Equal the Masses times Acerbic Opinion

Have you ever been angry at the wind? I have. I was out for a bike ride, or maybe I was trying to get somewhere on my bike, or maybe I was lost or something. I just remember at one point making a turn into a strong headwind, and finding it frustrating, and actually jerking my front wheel up and down a few times in anger.

I was young, full of hormones, took everything personally, et cetera. It’s silly, of course, to be angry at the wind. To think that the wind was blowing just to slow me down, just to keep me from my destination, to sap my enjoyment.

Been feeling that way about the internet, lately. And by “lately,” I mean for a long time now. So many vicious people on the internet, writing awful things about, well, everything. And while such viciousness is not necessarily a core definition of what the internet is, the ubiquity of it is almost too readily accepted by all.

I just read an article about how wrong it was for Shailene Woodley to wear Vibrams to a Golden Globes after party. I’m not sure if the writer was being serious or not, or purposefully hyperbolic as a kind of sardonic parody of other fashion criticism. Doesn’t matter, though, because the comments that followed where obviously not written tongue-in-cheek. Back and forth they went, calling the shoes ugly, calling anyone who didn’t recognize how good they were for you stupid, calling people who like wearing them sheep, calling people who called them sheep idiots, and so on.

I have friends who tell me I’m an idiot for reading internet comments at all. But I’m looking for more than one opinion. If I read an article about, say, Newt Gingrich’s equating food-stamps with laziness with African-American culture, I don’t trust that the article told me the whole story. So I read the comments to see if anyone can give me more information. It’s like an instant fact-check. I know I come to stories like that pre-biased, I know I’m the choir being preached to, and I want to make sure, at least, I’m not being fed dogma-food.

But instead of getting a different perspective, I end up with a brick-ton of mean-spirited perspectives. And I find it frustrating. I find myself wanting to make my own pithy comments to put all those jerk-holes in check. I want to say something brilliant and to the point, so that they’d all be forced to reply “Oh my goodness, I was a fool, you are so very right. Thank you for humbling me.”

I might as well shout at the wind for blowing. I need to remember that, for the most part, anonymity is a force of nature, and I can’t take personally anything said by someone I don’t know. (Not even if an anonymous person is directing his or her comments at me, personally.) Without being able to contextualize what’s being said with the personality of the speaker, comments like that are just a lot of hot wind.

What I really need to do is stop reading the comments on anything that’s ultimately just an opinion piece. Hoping for a fact-check on regular reporting is fine. I was an idiot to think I’d find anything useful or good in the commentary on article about footwear of the star of “The Secret Life of the American Teenager.”

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Assumption– review on Goodreads

AssumptionAssumption by Percival Everett

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Assumption is three short stories featuring the same setting and characters, and the ending of the third story casts enough of a shadow over the main character as to make you rethink what happened in the first two stories. This last feature, I guess, is what makes this a novel. If you like. Or just call it three stories. Or look to the title and realize Percival Everett is messing with you.

Percival Everett likes to mess with you. Go read Erasure, or American Desert. I normally don’t approve of that kind of extra-textual criticism, but I’ll be honest, Assumption left me scratching my head. So I’m looking at Everett’s other characters to try and figure out what’s going on. He likes to write about Invisible Men (the Ellison kind) and while I apologize for lumping together two writers who are both black, I can at least tell you that for Everett it’s not just a matter of race. It might be a matter of class, or profession, or even location. And race, too. People who are pigeonholed just as soon as they’re regarded, and everything they do contextualized by that label.

For what it’s worth, Thomas Berger does that too in the aptly titled Being Invisible, but in Assumption, the main character does not, in the end, play to type. It’s an abrupt revelation, and like I said, it forces the reader to reconsider everything that’s been read up to that point.

And it’s told in Everett’s easy style. The prose is plain, almost sparse, and it flows without any apparent effort, matching Assumption‘s setting in the New Mexico countryside and the (alleged) simple way of life out there. This, too, is part of Everett’s oeuvre, these tales told in a place we city folk would call out in the middle of nowhere. Horses and pick-up trucks, shotguns and rattlesnakes. What westerns would be if no one bothered to label books with genres at all.

The thing is, I read a book by Percival Everett by random chance a long time ago, and since then I’ve been hooked. As soon as I saw Assumption on the shelves, I picked it up without question. And once again he’s satisfied. I’d like to encourage you to read Assumption, but I’m only doing so because I think you should try all of what Everett’s written. Even if you’re not into any kind of meta-textual analysis, I think you’ll enjoy his stuff.

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We Accidentally Found a Trillion Dollars

fiction by Jason Edwards

We knew it was going to be expensive but once we came up with the idea we knew we had to do it. We started by collecting DNA from John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Out of all of them, who do you think was the toughest to dig up? Turns out it was Ringo, who’s got some pretty weird fans. We had back-up samples of DNA taken from museum artifacts, which were easy enough to get a hold of. But Ringo’s DNA was always too damaged, which is not an indictment of his lifestyle, just the truth about the way DNA decays on various objects. And digging him up proved very difficult, in large part because of a cult that sits at his grave side twenty-four seven. But we managed to trick them abandoning the place for a day, by infiltrating their organization, getting into their upper-level management, adjusting a few of their corporate tax holdings, and announcing a fake tribute concert half-way around the globe. They all went in protest, leaving behind what they thought were loyal members to guard the grave. But it was us, and we got the DNA samples we needed, and then some. In fact, we took a whole foot. We had planned on taking a hand, but then it was pointed out that Ringo was a drummer, and his hands were probably the most important– and thus worshiped– part of his body. Also, we deduced that the DNA in Ringo’s hand might be too damaged, itself, owing to all the blisters he regularly got in the recording studio. So we left the hands, and took a foot. However, even this caused some controversy amongst us, as the foot is itself used for the hi-hat pedal and the bass pedal. We argued for hours, with some of us insisting it didn’t matter, since he was going to be buried again and no one would be the wiser, and still others suggesting that this cult could one day, conceivably, dig up Ringo’s body and find the foot missing. Of course they’d never trace it back to us. Indeed, if our plans came to fruition, one of the side effects would the dissolution of this cult altogether (a minor side effect, and not a guaranteed one, but highly probable, and accounting for only about thirty or forty lines of code in our prediction engine). But if things did not go as predicted, there was a chance this cult could dig up Ringo, find the foot missing, assume it had something to do with something spiritual, lop off their own feet, and embark on a globe-sweeping journey to remove the bass-pedal track from every Beatles record, tape, cd, and mp3 in existence. We had at least 15 chaos mathematicians working with us that that time, and they all agreed (!) that since nothing can be predicted with 100% accuracy, the only sure thing was that things would go exactly as we thought they would, which had an exact 0% chance of happening. So, in the end, we decided to take the foot, and leave behind a fake. Several of us volunteered to sacrifice their own foot for the fake, and that’s when we realized our group had been infiltrated by members of the Ringo Graveside cult, who had joined us to avoid a schism which was burgeoning thanks to some members wanting to dig the poor man up. Other did not want him to be dug up, but recognized that there might be other organizations that did want to dig him up. The ones in the cult who wanted to dig up Ringo put forward the idea to infiltrate our group, ostensibly to stop us from digging him up, but really to partake in the exhumation. A careful check of our minutes from the graveside event show that these were the same people who had argued vehemently against taking one of his hands, but were just as vehement about taking one of his feet and leaving a decoy in its place. Turns out the cult members who wanted to create a pro-exhumation faction had themselves suffered a schism, with one side wanting to dig up Ringo, and the other side wanting to swap one of his body parts for their own. But they couldn’t decide who’s body part amongst them should be swapped, so they decided to let fate determine it, by infiltrating our group and volunteering for the foot swap. Why not a hand swap? They all had identity tattoos on their hands– three, actually: one from the grave side protection cult, one from the dig-him-up faction, and one from the body-part-swap schism. We asked them why they used tattoos on their hands to identify themselves, and they said it was to avoid anyone sneaking into their cult. When we pointed out that we had snuck into their cult, they pointed out that they had allowed us to do so to support the factionalism and the schism. We felt very stupid at the point. But we got the DNA, and that was what was important.

The rest was cloning the Beatles, cloning the audience at their Ed Sullivan show performance, and raising the clones in environments identical to what they’d each grown up in, then setting up a reenactment of the show. It went pretty well. We got the whole thing on video, but this time in color. Worth it.

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The Meaning of Night- review on Goodreads

The Meaning of NightThe Meaning of Night by Michael Cox

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I came to read The Meaning of Night via the recommendation of a friend, someone I respect but would not have guessed liked this sort of thing. Which just goes to show you how shallow I am. The guy’s a Harvard MBA, and yet I would not have picked a modern novel set in and written in the style of mid-nineteenth century England. And on that same tack, I would not have otherwise chosen this book to read on my own. That I earned a degree in English only goes to show you nothing can be taken for granted; I just don’t much care for books of that era. They’re readable, in their way, but usually drawn out and dull. If there’s going to be several chapters in a row of people sitting in gardens worrying about how someone’s whispering will sully their name, I need the prose style to be a little bit better than readable. At least chuck in a murder or something.

Which is where Michael Cox is an improvement, in my opinion, on the books he’s emulating. He starts us off, first sentence, with a murder, and then spends the rest of the book justifying the murder. And it’s not what you think. I used the word “justify,” but truth be told, there’s no justice in it, and the narrator is well aware of this. As anguish goes, this murder’s got more for a reader to sink his or her teeth into than the anguish of wondering if Miss so-and-so is going to marry beneath her station

Folks who like bibliographical novels (I abuse the term) such as Shadow of the Wind and Ex Libris will enjoy a tale steeped in book love– and I do mean “book,” not just stories and literature, but paper and cardboard and leather. I tend to read into things too much, and I couldn’t help identifying with the narrator, the murder he commits, in that I read this book on an e-reader and so confounded pretty much everything the narrator held dear. Which is as much a note to myself as it is fit for this review, so forgive me this additional digression.

I mentioned “readable” prose stlyes, and Cox’s writing is exactly that. Nothing too scintillating or evocative here. I don’t know if he could have written this otherwise, however, in as much as the book is very immersive, and dazzling the reader with a brilliant prose style might have been a little too removed from the heart of the text. So it sounds like I am making excuses, but I’d like to give credit to author for sticking true to the voice of the middle nineteenth century.

There were bits of the novel I could do without, and I’m sort of ambivalent towards any explanation that these, too, were true to late Victorian novels. Dream sequences, opium-induced and otherwise, which are always so tiresome, in my opinion. Can’t stand them, really, but at least they were few and far between, and not overlong. Maybe Cox hid some symbols in there, but at least he didn’t hinge the plot on them, some sort of “aha!” moment that helps solve the mystery.

Because this does read, in parts, like a mystery novel, with the narrator chasing down clues, conducting interviews, and finding secrets hidden in the tombs. This is also, as I said, one of those “great expectations” type novels, borrowing the phrase from Dickens to name stories about humble, hard-working young men brought into a higher station in life to see what they can accomplish. It’s also partly a romance, which I could have otherwise done without, except this time the romance does hinge the plot, so I muddled through.

And it’s also, as befits the murder at the beginning, a revenge novel, and while I don’t want to give anything away, I can at least tell you I was glancing down at the page numbers every once in a while, knowing the narrator needed to get on with it, wondering when he would, and then, desperately, wondering if he would. He was a bit of a Hamlet in that sense, and, again, don’t know if Cox meant it to be so, but I was on pins and needles through certain passages.

My understanding is that Cox took a long time to compile notes and outlines for The Meaning of Night, and only under the influence of disease-fighting drugs did he get a sudden burst of energy and finish the darn thing off. There are some parts where intrigue is high, only to have it all explained away at the end, which makes me wonder how much if this was “invented” as he wrote and how much was planned. But I’m going to give Cox the benefit of the doubt again, and let it be explained that he was emulating the serial novels of the time, drawing things out as much as he could and then stitching them up at the end to the best of his abilities. After all, who reads a novel just for the plot?

Then again, when the first sentence describes a murder, sometimes, that’s plot is the only reason to read it. And so, finally, this is why I’m rounding the 3.5 stars down to 3. But really, this is a 7 out of 10.

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Buzzard Beater

Well, crap, I’ve lost control. I got my days mixed up. Here I am, trying to get a fresh start on this blogging thing, trying to find my rhythm, and already I’m a mess. I’m posting things days late and back-dating them, posting them out of order. Chaos. Why bother. Ask Camus. I’m going to write a story tomorrow and call the main character Kamiss.

I posted a slam-style poem yesterday, thinking today was the day for one of those newspaper-column type posts. But now here I am doing more of a personal whinging kind of thing. I tried, I really did, I went to Huffington post to see if there was something there that might inspire me. Just a bunch of nonsense about Mitt Romney, and then I scrolled to an article about Olivia Munn getting naked for a PETA ad. Yeesh.

But I will prevail! I have not plated WoW in months! I’ve been flossing my teeth every day and doing crunches on the exercise ball! Today, I was only supposed to do 8 pull-ups, and I did NINE. Do you hear me? I will smell what the Rock is cooking!

I swear to god I’m not drunk right now as I write this. But I did have a LOT of fried chicken for dinner. Text for a future tweet: “I have a love-hate relationship with fried chicken. I love to eat it, and I hate when it’s all gone.” Folks can steal that one, use it for anything they like. I don’t mind.

Okay, sorry about this horrible blog folks, folks. And by “folks” I mean the two of you who read my claptrap. I’m going to write-me-up a cheat sheet and a post it and stick it on my monitor. And I’ll try to get some things written in advance. And drink lots of water, because we all know what that fried chicken’s doing to my innards. Meanwhile, here’s a random picture of a bird.