Some Losses

1. Grief as Paranoia

    I flew down to Bend for my cousin’s wedding over the weekend. Flying to Bend is always a bit of an odd experience — the flight, which only covers 120 miles or so, usually takes about 25 minutes, so that getting to and from the airport is a bigger ordeal than being in the air. When I got down there, nobody was there to pick me up. Not a big deal — the Redmond-Bend airport is not much more than a glorified bus station, so there’s nothing arduous about getting in and out — but I wondered, sort of, if I’d been forgotten, so I called my mom to see if someone was on the way. She said my dad was, but he was running a little late.

    Then a weird thing happened. A couple of minutes later, I was still waiting, and she called me back. When I saw her name on the caller ID, I became convinced that she was calling to tell me that my dad had been in a wreck on the way to pick me up, and was dead. This is a completely ridiculous, irrational fear, but it was so strong that I almost didn’t answer the phone. When I did, she just wanted to say that she’d talked to him and he would be there any minute. Even as she did, I spotted his car pulling up to the curb. Everything was fine. Nobody had died. Of course nobody had died.

    When I was a kid, my dad hated answering the phone, and the explanation given was always that he associated unexpected phone calls with answering the call that informed him that my half-sister, his oldest child, had been killed in a car wreck. I sort of pretended to understand that — it made sense in an abstract way — but I never really did. It wasn’t until I got a similar call a couple of years ago that I started to understand. Now — now, my grief over that event has largely subsided to a background noise, something that’s always there but rarely all-consuming. It has, however, manifested as this very specific form of paranoia. If there’s a way for my brain to line up events in such a way that someone has died, it’ll do it. And though I know it’s ridiculous, I can’t help it. Every phone call is a disaster in the making.

2. Grief as Public Rite

    When David Bowie died, I was as surprised as anybody, I suppose. But what really surprised me, far more than the actual fact of his death, was the response to it. My Facebook feed erupted in a collective cri de coeur, one which roared for a full day but still hasn’t really petered out. Links to his videos, teary-sounding tributes, lots of agreeing, head shaking, and digital hugging went around. The rending of garments was elaborate.

    This surprised me because David Bowie meant exactly nothing to me. I don’t begrudge anybody else their fandom or their grief — God knows, most of them will all be mystified when a small minority of us are totally crushed by the inevitable death of, say, Stephen Fry — I just don’t understand it. I always found Bowie’s music to be a little bland; it always seemed to me that the theatrical aspect of his art rendered the music qua music not very interesting, much of the time. My favorite Bowie record is probably an Iggy Pop record. (The Idiot, btw.) My favorite Bowie song is probably a Queen song. (“Under Pressure”.) The only time I ever saw Bowie live, it was because he was touring with Nine Inch Nails, and I spent most of his set (he was in Thin White Duke mode that night) idly wondering when Trent Reznor was going to come out.

    And it’s funny, because in many ways Bowie seems to have stood foursquare against a lot of the things I despise: rote fetishization of the authentic; reflexive privileging of emotion over intellect; the idea of perfection in art. Bowie was weird and daring and sometimes sloppy. He took risks that didn’t always pay off. This is the kind of artist I usually love; it’s the kind I try to be. He stands with Neal Stephenson and Richard Linklater and Margaret Atwood in this way. And yet, somehow, I just never locked in with him. My failure to lock in caused me to have a blind spot as to his massive cultural significance.

    It’s weird to be reminded so viscerally of the ways in which you’re out-of-step with the zeitgeist. If Bob Dylan or Mick Jagger had died and this been the response, I would have been as all in as everybody else. But the death of David Bowie, even at the relatively young age of 69, did not rock my world. I kind of wish now that it had. I’m obviously missing out on something.

    The night Bowie died, I was walking up Clinton Street in the dark, and I saw a big crowd gathered around a firetruck and an ambulance. My first instinct was to take out my radio gear and see what was going on. But as I approached, I heard a boombox playing “Under Pressure”, and then “Rebel Rebel”, and I realized something public, important, but not necessarily newsworthy was going on here. It had something to do with David Bowie, though I couldn’t tell what. I never did figure out what the firetruck and ambulance were there for — nobody was hurt — and eventually I moved on. Really, I probably should have taken out my gear anyway and started asking around. I’m sure there was a story there. Maybe, though, I was not the person to tell it.

3. Grief as Public Rite 2: The Re-griefening

    But then Alan Rickman died. Rickman and Bowie were both English, both 69 years old, both died of cancer. I was actually shocked to find that Rickman was the same age as Bowie — his rise to fame came 15 years later, with his iconic performance as Hans Gruber in Die Hard. I think I would have pegged him at about 55, if you’d asked, though I don’t know why you’d ask me how old Alan Rickman was when you could just Google the guy. But it gave me a window into what other people were feeling about Bowie. A reminder, really; I’ve been getting bummed out by celebrity deaths since the suicide of Kurt Cobain at least. I don’t know that I’m gutted, the way some people seemed to be by Bowie’s death. But I’m not happy about it. It scares me — not least because Rickman was younger than my father and not much older than my mother. And it feels completely not real. Like, how is it possible that Alan Fucking Rickman is dead? Hans Gruber sure isn’t dead, even if he is. Severus Snape isn’t dead, even if he is. (Spoiler alert, Potter newbies.) How can the man who brought them to life be dead?

    A few years ago, I was poking through some website looking for an Adventure Time t-shirt, when I ran across something far better: a baseball undershirt with blue sleeves and, positioned smack in the middle, an airbrushed glamour shot of a young Alan Rickman, sandy-haired and, in his weird, beaky way, very handsome. I knew immediately that I had just found the greatest item of clothing ever made. I will admit that some of that was the seriously WTF nature of the person on its front — Rickman was famous (very, after his turn as Snape), and seriously talented, but he wasn’t a celebrity in the way that the people who get their faces on t-shirts usually are. His dalliances didn’t make the pages of People magazine. I have no idea where he lived. I’m actually not entirely sure whether he was straight or gay. Until he took the role of Snape, he had been a slightly-more-handsome-than-average character actor. Even after he took the role of Snape, he was still a character actor — it was just that he was probably the single most famous character actor in the world. Why was he on this shirt?

    But there was more to it for me. Rickman had always been one of those guys that I felt a little bit of ownership of. One of the things I used to do, back when I had a membership to a fabulous brick-and-mortar PDX movie rental shop called Movie Madness, was fall in love with an actor or actress and make a project of plowing through every movie on their IMDB page. The whims that took me could be capricious, weird — I watched every terrible movie that the terrible actress Jennifer Morrison (of the terrible TV show House) made, for instance. But one of the more rewarding ones of these projects was Rickman. I never finished — he’d been in over 40 movies and TV shows by the time I took it up, some of them quite hard to lay hands on (I never managed to find a copy of a BBC miniseries called The Barchester Chronicles, in which Rickman plays a reportedly very minor role, for instance). But you’d find Rickman doing solid work in the weirdest corners of cinema and television — as the title character in an HBO movie called Rasputin: Dark Servant of Destiny, for instance; or as the nasty Outback imperlalist Elliot Marston in the dopey Quigley Down Under. Though he was often typecast as the heavy, he could do just about anything, as attested by his comic turn as The Metatron in Kevin Smith’s Dogma, or his unexpectedly heart-throbbing Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility. When finally he was tapped to play the role that would make him a worldwide icon — Severus Snape in the Harry Potter franchise — it felt like there was no other actor on Earth who could breathe life into JK Rowling’s most complex, dangerous, and magnetic character.

    He was probably too old to play Snape, really; the Severus of the books is still a relatively young man (some rudimentary math would suggest that he’s in his early 30s by the time Harry and the gang show up at Hogwarts), but Rickman was 55 — old enough to be the father of the character he was playing, if you think about it. But still he seemed perfect. Rickman’s specialty was the character who was supercilious, hyper-intelligent, malevolent. Snape was all of those things. He was scary and mean and cruel. The thing is, a lot of people could do that. But the part called for someone who could play all of those things, and then make it convincing when he finally displayed something many never expected him to have — vulnerability. When the moment came, Rickman was more than up to the task. By that point, seven-and-a-half movies in, the Harry Potter franchise was not really featuring the acting skills of its players very much; the books were far too long and complex to be adapted into movies, especially when the movies made the mistake of concentrating on the action at the expense of the things that truly made the books special — the characters and the humor. Rickman was just about the only adult with a big moment to play in either of the final two films. Many other very fine actors — Ralph Fiennes, Helena Bonham Carter, Michael Gambon, etc — were reduced to little more than cackling villains or noble godheads by that point. But Rickman nailed it. Inasmuch as the bloated, overstuffed behemoths that were the last few Harry Potter movies had a heart, Rickman’s Snape was it. He pumped hot blood through a cold franchise almost single-handed.

    I still kind of can’t believe he’s gone. I no longer follow movies as avidly as once I did, but the idea that the upcoming flicks Eye in the Sky (a star-studded techno-thriller in which Rickman stars opposite Helen Mirren) and the certain-to-be-dreadful Alice in Wonderland sequel, in which he’ll voice the Catarpillar, will be his last? That just seems wrong. I re-watched Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban, and every time he was on the screen, I tried to convince myself that he was really dead. I never got there. Somehow it just doesn’t make sense.

Touched with Fire Podcast Episode 1: Seven Scenes from a Trip to California

Hey hurrbody -- As promised, the pilot of my podcast project. This is a personal essay called "Seven Scenes from a Trip to California".

It's my hope to release one of these a week until Thanksgiving. This would comprise Season 1 of Touched with Fire. We would then reset after the new year.

Hope you enjoy.

Music featured in this episode:

"Headphoneland", Mice Parade

"Girth Rides (A Horse)", The Dead Texan

"Leaving Home (Alternate Version)", Yo la Tengo

"Emily's Theme 2 (White Rabbit)", Nathan Johnson

Haunted Cities

Los Angeles

    I’ve always liked Los Angeles, a position that is borderline heretical if you’re from Oregon (or any of the other places I’ve lived, now that I think about it). There are a lot of things wrong with it, of course, most of them to do with the sprawl. But it’s a haunted city, where the present lies atop the past as lightly as the dust lies atop the buildings — it sometimes seems like a good rain might wash it away, and leave behind one of its previous iterations. It’s the biggest city I’ve ever been in where I can point at a street-corner and say, When my father lived here, this was an orange grove. When my grandmother lived here, it was a sandy desert.

    As you can see, it’s also haunted by my family, which is true to one degree or another of almost every city in California. I like to imagine my grandmother here during the War — the big one — when she arrived from Nebraska on a bus. Did she have dreams of glamour? I’ve never known, and I didn’t think to ask until it was too late. She was a thin, pretty Irish girl from a minor railroad hub called Falls City, and over the years I’ve heard her make reference to nights out dancing, to seeing Glenn Miller play live. These are just the vaguest hints of what it must have been like to be young and single in LA as it boomed with movie and military money during, and just after, the war. At some point, she met a handsome young man of American Indian extraction who hailed from Nemaha, just up the road from Falls City. He had been with the Coast Guard before the war, but was being seconded to the South Pacific with the Navy now. They fell in love. I’ve never been clear on whether they married before he shipped out, but by 1943 he was back in the States and the knot had been tied. In spring 1944, my father was born. In summer 1944, the handsome Indian man — my grandfather — fled, and never really came back.

    But there was that time in Los Angeles. If there hadn’t been, there would be no me.

Fresno

    Anytime you bring up hot weather around my parents, they will mention one of two family reunions: the trip back to Falls City in the summer of 1980, when I was an infant and my sister was 15 and my father had a broken arm and the Quigleys suffered through a heatwave so awful it has its own Wikipedia entry; or the trip to Fresno in 1983, where the Chandlers have been stoically weathering temperatures north of 110 every summer for generations, and I learned to swim in a pool behind our motel.

    I have no memory of Fresno as it was then. I was too small. It was half the size it is now, a busy metropolis of about 200,000 in the midst of some of the country’s most productive farmland. With prodding, some people can be provoked to talk about “the old Fresno”, a place of commerce, a solid, not to say stolid, mid-sized city in mid-century America.

    Fresno isn’t like that anymore. I was there a couple of days ago, on a stop along the route from Los Angeles to Portland. It was a 111 degrees the day that my brother and I came tooling into town in a U-Haul with all his worldly possessions in the back. The next morning I got up to go running before the real heat began. After a couple of wrong turns, I was treated to a sunrise tour of the grim reality of a city that has not only grown but mutated since that family reunion all those years ago. I ran past tumbledown shacks and vacant lots, places where rusted toys and other detritus were gnawed at by leashless dogs. Somewhere along the way there was a set of barracks, abandoned, adorned with Christian crosses. As the heat rose, a thick, ecru fog began to collect in the air, so that by the time I finished I felt as though I was smoking cigarettes and running simultaneously.

    There’s another element here, less poetic, but more important than the musings that precede this. Fresno has doubled in size, adding a layer of desiccated slums, because it has added an underclass of Hispanic people, people systematically kept poor and disenfranchised by an agricultural economy that increasingly produces a few huge winners and very many losers. It’s sad. It seems as though there must be a solution. I don’t know what it is.

Weed

    When I was a senior in high school, I starred as George in John Steinbeck’s stage adaptation of his own novel, Of Mice & Men. This was the first time I was introduced to the idea that there was a town somewhere in California called Weed. My castmates and I all found this hilarious, for the reasons I imagine my loyal reader can guess. Little did we know that the town was named not for a plant but — and I confess that this is a disappointment to me — for a timber baron named Abner Weed. Oh, well. The name remains funny, and almost every time I drive through the Siskyous I make a point of stopping there. It’s actually kind of a pretty place, high up in the mountains near the Oregon border, a little outpost of a few thousand people borne up against the pine forest.

    It is haunted by the curse of little freeway towns all over America: no matter where you go in Weed, you can hear the roar of traffic not far away, people in machines from far away going somewhere else far away. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to grow up in a place like that, where the commerce consists largely of gas stations and restaurants designed to cater to through-drivers, and the sound of cars is a constant reminder of how insignificant you and the place you live in are. What percentage of people from places like Weed make it their business to escape? Is that more than you get in other little towns? Do people ever leave Weed and come back to stay?

Ashland

    When I was in the fifth grade, my entire class piled into a school bus and trucked the six hours down I-5 to Ashland, where every year one of the world’s most famous Shakespeare festivals is mounted. We had spent several weeks in Mrs Dundon’s class reading, not the plays, but comic book versions of the plays, written in simplified language. I remember reading Othello in comic book form, thus eliding everything about Shakespeare that makes it artful, beautiful, or at all worth caring about. To this day, that’s the only time I’ve read Othello.

    We stayed in dorms at what was then Southern Oregon State University, and is now Southern Oregon University. I don’t remember much about that. I do remember going to see Merchant of Venice in some kind of modern dress — were they wearing trench coats and fedoras? That sounds right. This would have been 1991, so maybe that wasn’t a cliché yet.

    We were given a very stern warning before the play began: any fidgeting, or noise, or moving around too much, was strictly verboten. I’m not sure that the consequences were spelled out, but I got the idea that the punishment would be something in the neighborhood of summary execution. And yet, somehow, I neglected to use the bathroom before the show. Then I neglected to remove my coat — a very cool neon windbreaker — after we sat down. When the lights fell and the actors entered, I suddenly realized that I was in big trouble. I needed to pee, and I needed to take off the coat. Oh, how I needed to take off the coat. I was hot, and then I was itchy, and then, in the way of children, I was crazy. I was dying either of boredom or suffocation or a burst bladder or something. I was far too young for Shakespeare, of course, but I was a pretty smart kid and I might have been able to make a go of it if I hadn’t been, you know, concerned that I was going to die. But then, if I took off the coat, or got up to pee, I was dead certain I would die. It was a classic rock or a hard place: die of heatstroke and urine overdose in the theatre, or leave, go pee, and take off the coat, and be beheaded by Mrs Dundon upon returning.

    I somehow survived until intermission, which I was pretty sure made me a great hero of some kind. Somehow, I have no memory of the second half of the play, either. Did I fall asleep? That seems possible. Ugh, what a waste of money that trip was.

Portland

What a bunch of fucking hippies.

I got nothin'.

I spent all morning loading up a U-Haul. Check that, I spent all morning and 3 hours of the afternoon loading up a U-Haul, from an apartment on the second floor, with the help of one other guy and of my lazy-ass brother who spent most of the day worrying.

So I'm exhausted. My Fitbit says I took more than 22,000 steps, covered nearly 11 miles on foot, and climbed 125 flights of stairs. All of that seems like it's probably accurate.

Then I drove from Los Angeles to Fresno, which is not the longest drive of all time, but it's kind of a lot on top of all that other stuff.

I got nothing. I wouldn't even be writing this if I didn't feel so guilty about slacking off for a week. We'll see what happens tomorrow, when we're supposed to drive 750 miles.

The Disappointing Truth about Living in an Obscure Place

    Portland International Airport is — let’s face it — kind of shitty. I have an emotional attachment to the place because it’s been the start of so many adventures for me: when I moved to New York, I boarded a plane here; when I went to France, there to live in deep sunflower country outside Lyons, I boarded a plane here; when I went to Ireland alone, I boarded a plane here. And landing here, especially in spring when coming home from the frigid, gray landscape of Minnesota, has always had a certain verdant poetry to it. When I was younger, before 9/11 and the security lines, I used to come here just to hang out, so taken was I with the romance of the place.

    But in truth it’s nothing to write home about. It’s chintzy and ugly, and parts of it are truly grim, especially down by the A gates, where it’s just shuttles to Seattle and all the faces wear sour, stomach-pain kind of expressions. The famous carpet is famous for being ugly. The new carpet that replaced it is just as ugly. Yeah, there are brewpubs and a branch of Pok Pok, but on the whole the place is redolent of the 70s, a time when the city’s population was stagnant and the place was mired in a kind of conservatism of spirit. (That conservatism still haunts the place. I have never lived in a place where people seemed so oblivious to the fact that cities change, or die. I’m looking at you, “Save Portland Homes” graffitists.) The place stinks.

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The famous PDX carpet.

    I think maybe I notice this now because I’ve been in so many airports, so many of which are built in a modern, monumental style that seems to befit the purpose of such a place better. I mean, for the love of God — this is a place where you go to fly. To fly! This is as close as most of us will ever get to experiencing a miracle. The space should be miraculous. The Denver airport feels that way. Sky Harbor in Phoenix — though it services a city that is notably lame — feels that way, especially as the sun goes down over the desert horizon. SeaTac, SFO, JFK. These places feel right.

    PDX is more of a piece with LaGuardia, which inspired a fantasy I once had, one which has gripped me ever since: under New York, there are portals to hell, and they manifest as horrible places on the earth’s surface, places like LaGuardia, and Union Station, and the Atlantic Avenue branch of the US Post Office. It’s not as genuinely horrible as LaGuardia, but it shares with it a similar sensation of having been forgotten about forty years ago, and then buried in the collective subconscious, so that none of us ever think about it except when we’re there. Holy shit, I used to think whenever I got to LaGuardia. This is still here?

    I realize that part of the reason PDX remains small and dingy is that it’s not a hub of any kind. SeaTac and Denver and Phoenix have flights spidering out of their many terminals all over the country and the globe, all the time. I am, for instance, flying north from PDX in about 45 minutes, so that I can change planes at SeaTac and go to Los Angeles. There’s no reason, practically, for my local airport to be anything but a weigh station. But I wish it was. I come from generations of cynics on one side and pragmatists on the other — I haven’t believed in a political ideal since John Kerry defeated Howard Dean all those years ago. Normally I’m not suceptible to this kind of thinking. But an airport should have, if nothing else, grandeur. This is where we go to FLY.

My 600 Mile Mistake.

It’s raining in Portland. It’s not cold, though, which is unusual, I guess. I didn’t really get that much of a taste of it: I came flying over the mountains on a bouncy little plane, and as we descended the western facade of the Cascades, we plunged through the clouds.

I almost wrote, “Into a storm.” But that’s not true. Maybe I’ve spent too much time away in the last few years — I’m typically here for only a few weeks a year, anymore. In Minneapolis, when it rains, it rains, in gusting torrents that surge against the windows of your apartment and make it difficult to see as you drive. In Portland, it simply comes in a steady, meaningless thrum, like the too-loud music of your impolite neighbors. It rains, it rains, and then it stops for just long enough for you to grow cheerful and excited, and then it rains again. There’s an old joke told ruefully by Portlanders: it only rains twice a year in Portland, the joke goes. Once for six months, and then again for another six months.

I’m here on the back of the most ridiculous misadventure I’ve had in a long time. I’ve come to think of it as “my 600 mile mistake”: a few days ago, I piled all my worldly possessions — three months’ worth of clothes and musical instruments and general what-have-you — into my car, rounded up my cat from my parents’ place, where she’s been staying all summer, and set out to the east, across the high desert, headed for Boise, then Billings, then, theoretically, Minneapolis. I was feeling weird: it’s been a weird summer, and I was glad to be leaving the lack of structure and the boredom and so on, but I am heading back to a place that I do rather hate living in. Minneapolis is ugly and the weather is bad; the women don’t know how to flirt and the men can’t take a joke; the restaurants are boring and the terrain is flat. I don’t like it there. So I believe ambivalent is the right word for how I was feeling as the cat and I trucked out through the Drinkwater Pass and into the scrublands of Idaho: I just couldn’t decide what I wanted.

Maybe, then, what happened that night was indicative of some sort of total uncertainty of being. I got to Boise, checked into a cheap motel by the side of the highway, called my parents to report that I had arrived safely, and then set about hunting up my computer so I could watch something on Netflix or whatever. And I couldn’t find it. I found shell of an old, broken computer that I had shoved into my backpack. I found the six books I’m teaching this semester, each about half-read and marked up. I found Hana’s toys she never plays with, the bed she never sleeps in, the brush she doesn’t like me to use. I dumped out all the clothes in all my bags, I tore out everything from the back of my car, from baseball bat to life-sized Buffy cutout, and in the end I was reduced to real, literal tears of rage as it became clear that I didn’t have the thing. My computer was gone.

I can hear you, Dear Reader, as you smirk. Yes, the poor little rich boy cannot watch episodes of Scrubs on his thousand-dollar laptop. I agree, it is ridiculous. But there’s more to it than that, or at least I like to think so: on the hard drive of that computer (this one, actually, that I’m typing on now) was the only complete, extant copy of my 3/5-finished novel, the book which is already eight months overdue to my agent and which is meant to make up the thesis that gets my MFA and makes me, theoretically at least, employable in academia. I thought about calling my mother to ask her to ship the thing to me, but I just couldn’t risk the possibility that 19 months of work, the cause of at least two spiritual crises (one ongoing), would vanish through the rough treatment of a FedEx delivery guy who works that kind of job because it leaves him ample time to get stoned in the evening. So I loaded everything back in the car, and the following morning I set forth once more, back through the scrublands, over the Drinkwater Pass, and back to Bend, where I have been shiftless and depressed for the last several months. I found the computer sitting on the bedside table, idly burbling an NPR stream that I had set it to the previous day.

And so now I am in Portland, at the airport, and it’s raining. Is it weird that I get nostalgic for bad things as they end? I did not enjoy myself this summer. I worked hard — that was good — but I drank too much, smoked too much, spent most of it lying around, feeling fat and bored and depressed. And yet: as I watched Central Oregon slip away under the plane I took to get here, I began to feel sad. When I landed in this depressingly typical Portland non-storm, I really began to feel like I didn’t want to leave. Is that crazy, or what?

And the airport. I used to love airports, back in the pre-9/11 days when you could wander down by the gates and watch the passengers coming and going. But I don’t anymore. I’ve lived too much of my life in stasis, stuck between adolescence and adulthood; I don’t like to be reminded of this by such an obvious metaphor. I am becalmed, let me not be reminded. I would rather, I think, be driving back again, storming the Drinkwater and the scrublands for a third time, than be here, waiting.

You see strange things in airports. As I was walking from my gate of arrival to my gate of departure, I bumped into a woman I worked with in New York, years and years ago. We weren’t friends. We weren’t enemies, either; we were barely acquaintances: I worked upstairs, in the café, where things were fast-paced and I got to flirt with the girls (I was skinnier then, and more confident); she worked in the dark and studious basement. I couldn’t even remember her name when I saw her today. I recognized her because she looks a little bit like Snoopy the dog from the Peanuts cartoons, and as I was trying to remember where I knew her from, we made eye contact: oops. She recognized me, too. What do you say to somebody you spent two years studiously ignoring at every work party there was? It turns out that this woman and I said nothing — instead, we made strange, eyebrows-arched faces at one another, and moved on. We registered our surprise that such a token of our past would appear in such a strange place (she can’t have known I was from Portland — hell, she might be from Portland, but I wouldn’t know), and mutely agreed not to press our luck by trying to expand on the moment.

So now I’m in a bar. My flight boards in half an hour. I might be making another mistake, but I won’t know until it’s over.