Picture Tones

Originally published at RajanKhanna.com. You can comment here or there.

For those who are interested, I will definitely be attending World Fantasy this year (in just a few weeks) in Calgary. It’s the only con I can attend this year and I’m looking forward to it.

But looking ahead to next year, it looks like a more con-a-licious year. If it all works out. It’s dependent on my job and money and time, of course. And who knows what the economy will allow for. But this is the current plan:

Early Feb: NY Comicon - it’s local, it’s easy, and it’s my birthday weekend. I missed last year, so this year I plan on going.

Mid Feb: Boskone - it’s drivable and my CW friend Kristin encouraged me to come, so I will try.

May: Wiscon - a mini Clarion West reunion perhaps? And one of the better cons in the annual lineup. Plus I love Madison.

July: Readercon - again, I missed it last year, and I like the con a lot (and it’s driveable), so this year I want to make it.

November: World Fantasy - in San Jose! If I’m lucky, I’ll get to go and then drive up to wine country for a few days.

Not on the list right now is Worldcon - Montreal is not too far away, so I can probably make it, but I’m going to think about this for a while.

That’s the plan, of course subject to change, but that seems like quite a bit. But I will definitely be in Calgary in a few weeks. Hope to see some of you there.

Speaking of electrical problems, do you remember that nine-day blackout we had in Queens a couple of years ago? I swung by the old apartment one day last week to pick up our mail (which our stupid old post office has thus far utterly failed to forward), and found amongst the pieces a check from ConEd back in New York. It was a hundred bucks in compensation for the power outage. We didn't have it as bad as some, since for some reason we at least had power for the appliances in the back half of our apartment, but hey, I'm not going to turn down money from a utility. In fact, given the state of banks lately, I deposited it as fast as I could.

It's been almost three weeks since we moved into our new apartment, but I remember it like it was ... well, twenty days ago.

Things were going great. Three strong men had made short work of our boxes, which were now stacked neatly in the truck. Laura and her mother were ready to follow the truck to the new place in her mother's car and oversee the start of the unloading. The dog and I were going to stick around for a bit to tie up some loose ends, then join up with everyone else at the new place.

Good thing I slipped behind the wheel of our car to take the prime parking space my mother-in-law was about vacate. When I turned the key, nothing happened. Not a click.

I should have known this was coming. For a week or so, the car had been taking longer and longer to turn over, the starter motor hacking like a heavy smoker. This time the battery was obviously completely dead. My mother-in-law had no jumper cables, and neither did the movers. But at least I hadn't discovered this with Ella on my hands after everyone else had left.

Still, we didn't have a lot of options—the movers were on the clock, and our car was already loaded with stuff that I wasn't willing to leave unattended for any significant length of time. We sent the moving truck on ahead, and I sent Ella with Laura and her mother to follow them. I walked a few blocks to an auto-parts store, where I bought a new battery, a socket set (since mine was already packed into the moving truck somewhere), and a portable jumper kit (for future emergencies only—it needed 36 hours of charging before it was usable).

A car battery is a heavy damn thing to carry a quarter mile, even without two other purchases to worry about, but I made it. It took me some time, what with the rusted bolts I had to deal with, but I managed to switch out the batteries and tighten up the leads just fine—or so I thought.

The car started right up with the new battery in place, and I set a course for Dunkin Donuts to pick up a dozen for us and the crew. On the way I reset all the preset stations on our radio, which had vanished along with the battery's juice. At a red light a few blocks from the doughnut shop, though, the engine started to sputter a little and felt like it was going to stall out. I was in a left-turn lane, where stalling would be rather inconvenient, so I put my left foot on the brake and moved my right foot to the accelerator to keep the engine just above idle. I made it to the Dunkin parking lot and turned off the car. When I flipped the switch that works the locks, nothing happened. The electrical system was dead again.

Of course, the mechanical locking system still worked, so I was able to get out of the car. I bought my dozen—priorities!—then came back to the car and raised the hood. The problem was staring me in the face. I hadn't tightened the positive lead well enough and it had jiggled loose somewhere along the way. No problem. I slipped it back onto the post, tightened it up a little more, and closed the hood. Back in business.

I tried to maintain a sedate pace, not wanting to take a chance on knocking the connection loose again. It's about a five-mile drive from the old place to the new, and the fastest route is to take Western Avenue north for most of that distance. Western becomes an overpass for a few blocks to jump over its gnarly intersection with Belmont and Clybourn, though, and there's some awfully rough road at the start of the front slope and the end of the back slope. I tried to take it gingerly, but halfway up the rise all the instruments on the dash board died out for an instant. The lead was off again, though it had likely bounced up and come back to rest touching the post. I couldn't pull over on the overpass. No choice but to maintain my somewhat low speed and try not to let the engine stall again.

That went well enough until I crested the overpass and saw traffic stopped ahead at the red light at the bottom of the slope. I gently pulled to a stop behind the car ahead, and I tried my brake-and-accelerator trick from before, but I still stalled out. Just as I was turning the starter key in vain, the light turned green.

Again, no choice. Good thing I had the window down already, because there is no mechanical handle for it. I stuck my arm out and waved the traffic behind me around. I couldn't put my flashers on, so I just hoped a) that I could be quick, and b) that the drivers coming over crest behind me would be paying attention. I popped the hood, ran around the front of the car, raised the hood, jammed the loose lead back down on the post, slammed the hood, raced back to seat, and started the car.

I turned off Western at the first opportunity and took smaller streets the rest of the way. I kept my speed around 20. My hands were clenched on the wheel. But worst of all, I had lost my reset radio presets again.

I made it to the new place fine, but it took a while for me to unclench everything. I had missed the most exciting part of the move, when the three dudes had to hoist our couch straight up over the railing of our back deck on a rope to get it into our second-floor apartment. But that's okay because, boy, watching that would have reduced me to a bundle of crazy nerves.

I'm happy to report that this was the only remotely ominous occurrence that day, or since. I tightened up the battery lead a whole lot more, and it's been absolutely fine since then. We love our new place, and being here has made all the difference in our outlook on this city. Even Ella likes this place. She and I are sitting on the back deck right now, and squirrels are running back and forth along a power line strung down the alley just above our eye level. And it doesn't look like that power line is going to jiggle loose.

Hey kids, it's time for another edition of IT'S IN THE BAG (okay, this is actually the 1st Edition, but whatever)! Wherein you randomly take all the crap you carry around out, and take a picture of it (wow, how novel). Okay, here we go:



IN THE BAG (clockwise from top):
Bike gloves
Little funny Acme fold-up grocery bag thing (for when you need another bag pulled outta yer bag-- wacky, right)
Glasses case
Pencil, sharpener, eyedropper pen, skull erasure, correction tape
Moleskine (...sorry)
Some socks Natasha just gifted me that have a skull and some spider webs on them (bought in Manhattan, for $1)
Some copies of the pamphlet I made "Life Is Utterly Miserable Because Of You Personally" (text by: The Tiger Lillies)
Webster's Thesaurus
The Road by: Cormac McCarthy ("Papa, I'm so scared")
Water bottle
1/2 bottle Grande Canadian whiskey (to my defense, I don't usually carry a bottle of whiskey around with me all the time-- a flask, maybe-- but it just happened to be in there)
Rechargeable batteries
Crack Bros. bike tool
A fortune cookie, some granola bars I took from work, and some pita bread and garlic basil and tomato homos
...oh yeah, and my camera

That is all (SO much crap!). What've you got in there?!

I'm delighted to see that my short story "Colin and Ishmael in the Dark" will run on PodCastle on October 24th, just a week before Halloween. The story is mostly dialog and takes place in pitch darkness, and I've always thought it would play best as an audio work, so I couldn't be more excited to hear it. I haven't heard who the reader is, but I know M.K. Hobson is doing the introduction, which should be a hoot.

The story was originally published by scottedelman in Science Fiction Age in 1993—Jesus Christ, Scott, that's fifteen years ago!—and it was only my second professional sale. The icon for this entry is a miniature of the full-page illustration that appeared with it.

Meanwhile, back in Chicago, we're going to Schuba's tonight for this week's Field Museum Café Science lecture, on ancient climate change. The speaker is the brother of one of Laura's coworkers. Science and beer, what could be better?

So, if we were going to London next week on the cheap, what sorts of things should we not miss that guidebooks would not tell us about?

Open a Asian fusion restaurant in New England called: Chow Maine (heavy on the crab). Though, I guess it's already the name of a restaurant guide for the area.

*
This phrase came to me while riding my bike a few weeks ago:
"I am going to give up borrowing for Lent."

*
Yesterday I left the New House drinking some delicious warm cider outta one of their jars. I felt kinda bad so I left the fence gate slightly open. Thusly-- I took a jar, but left ajar.

Just admit it's all hilarious, and let's move on. Hope you are all peachy-keen.

VoicePost 1043K 5:09

“see post” Transcribed by: asphalteden

In Our New Great Depression, we'll see the return of obscure candy bars, rising phoenix-like from the ashes of our economy, the Mars Bar, Oh Henry!, Zagnut, Abba Zabba, 5th Avenue, Clark, Valomilk, Sugar Daddy. We'll sit upon our front porches, or stoops, or stand on the lines outside the offices of unemployment, regarding the empty wrappers of the new Drifter bars, the charming double paks of Hoover Shoes, and, of course, the delicious Bindlestiff and its rich coconut center.

In Our New Great Depression, we'll likely feel the freedom we always imagined we'd have if we were unshackled from the chains of our money and status and power, all as we continue hunting down money and status and power. All of our pains and headaches and stress conditions will disappear, replaced only by the dull ache in our stomachs; it will seem as if it can never be filled.

In Our New Great Depression, we'll come to see the great automotive graveyard, two lanes of sagging heaps miles long, and marvel at how they used to build 'em. Remember the Escalade and the Land Cruiser? Remember how the H3 used to glide down thin country streets, like a great yellow Wandering Albatross, its magnificent lines like the flowing arteries of our nation's trucking industry? Remember the X5, the LX, the Cayenne? Our tremendous shipping crates, filled with the bounties of democracy, in this case two children and their preoccupied parents; like a fleet of Flying Fortresses over Japan and Germany; like great sharks.

In Our New Great Depression, it seems to us that the Moon is always the same in the sky, some nights an ever-vigilant eye, other nights a tiny sliver of a scalpel, constantly regulating and deregulating. Some nights it isn't there at all.

In Our New Great Depression, or perhaps after, grandpa will hoard all sorts of useful items in the basement of our home, because you never do know what you might need someday. This box will contain cellphones of every description, ones that can text, ones that can Tweet, ones that can blog, ones that have blurry photos of intoxicated faces stored upon the bountiful hidden green dales of their microchips, all grins. This box will contain purses of every description; this box will contain the heels of a hundred pairs of shoes; this box will contain pages and pages of old manuscripts, careful memoirs and suspense tales, good for fire starting and scrap paper and insulation of our home's thin walls. The mule out back has a Prada feedbag.

In Our New Great Depression, we will sadly load a DVD player and IKEA mattress atop the frame of our ailing Ford Focus, and begin our way west. The poor dog might well get hit by a cruising H3 on the highway, and poor grandpa might not make it either. But we heard from a handbill there's work in the great valley in California, work picking peaches and other fruits, and maybe a decent place to live with showers and real flush toilets, and no place a man with a tractor might come to and knock the walls down. We've just got to try and find it, JC, we've just got to.

In Our New Great Depression, there's this old shirt we have. We never really wore it much, but now it's a good shirt, maybe the best one. They all get worn out in a while, but this one is still fresh and new inside the closet, waiting, we think, or at least it looks like it is. Sometimes we take that shirt out and hang it on a chair, button it up around the chair's back, primp its button collar, smooth the sleeves. That shirt is waiting and we're gonna wait too, just keep waiting.

In Our New Great Depression, Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears and Paris Hilton and Anne Hathaway and Amy Winehouse and Jennifer Aniston and Matthew McConaughey finally find love in the pages of their new mimeographed Tijuana Bibles, made somewhere uptown. We snigger and trade copies as we ride the rails in the cramped baggage compartment of the Amtrak Acela Regional train to Scranton, PA. Looking for a dead little town to kick around in, maybe an abandoned foreclosure to squat inside, all hunched around a barrel fire, roasting squirrels for our Appalachian stew.

In Our New Great Depression, the sex is so much better now, for we clutch at each other on the ground and try to pull ourselves down and down, almost through each other, down to under the ground, as fast as we can.

In Our New Great Depression, some guy on the internet, one of the few left, says we only have to live through ten years of this, only ten years of it all, and that World War III will probably pull us out of this terrific mess the Democrats have gotten us in.

In Our New Great Depression, we hear a faint knock on our door, should we still have doors, and, upon opening, we find it is Little Orphan Annie and her plucky dog Sandy. She looks up at us with her two great voids, the ageless eyes that have seen decades come and go, the two beautifully vacant orbs of fortitude and love. We fall to our knees before her and she tousles our unkempt hair, whispering softly, "Chin up, chin up," as little, magnificent Sandy nips gently at our fingertips.

This is me running away for a while and this is the world seeming to be ok with it.

I'll be in San Francisco next Tuesday! Welcome, observers of varying interest and disposition, to what will be a very public display of travel affectedness!

I'm sick today. Therefore, you get a Father Ted clip.

We had a fine anniversary weekend and I am feeling pretty good. Last night, in the pool, especially in the deep end, I thought about the vagaries of the current market—when younger, I used to fantasize about a new depression, and how it might change the public psyche of conspicuous consumption for the better in the long run. Such fantasy seems so naïve to me now. My pelvic difficulties appear to be exacerbated by my lengthy swims, but the health and mood benefits of the latter outweigh the discomfort; a trade-off I've decided to live with. Like dealing with the market panic, attitude is truly all.

I like to watch Bill Moyers Journal on PBS—I guess it's slewed liberal, but only because we're in an America where everything to the left of the gibbering nationalistic disaster-porn of today's right wing is considered liberal bias. It, and the New Yorker, are the two places I read about the current state of affairs—wry fatalism from NY musos, (rather like that guy in Les Miz who makes fun of the revolution shortly before his bullet ridden body collapses on the barricades); and compassionate, concerned commentary in a country that, largely, understands and appreciates neither.

After seeing Echo & the Bunnymen, followed by Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist a day later, I'm thinking of and remembering high school a little. I haven't enjoyed a movie more this year; it's something of a paean, it seems to me, of what it was like to be a teen in NYC during the late 80s and 90s, fogged up by its supposedly current setting. That movie, for all its occasional single dimensionality, hit me with nostalgia for back-then real hard. It's funny, because, intellectually and emotionally, I don't really miss it at all. Things were so lonely back then.

To those of my friends in NJ: if you're looking for fine Polish cooking, may I recommend Ania's? Finest pierogies I've had since childhood, and if there's anything we need right now, it's good comfort food to remind us of the agrarian good old days in the old country. The owner even tried to convince my father, in Polish, to hook me up with her daughter. "He's married already," he replied.

Thanks to everyone who weighed in yesterday on my version-control questions. I know it may seem like overkill, and I'm prepared to be made fun of, but I finally decided to go with Subversion (a/k/a SVN), which I'm running through Apache 2.2 with SSL on one of my boxes here.

A lot of factors came into play for me. We have several computers at home, and I like to be able to work on whichever one is convenient, which means it's nice to be able to grab the latest copies of drafts and my notes quickly from wherever I am. I need to be able to do this from outside our home network, in case I'm around the corner at the coffee shop, on the road, or over at the Writers Workspace. And since I obstinately continue to work in WordPerfect, I can't rely on solutions like Google Docs that are geared specifically toward Word files. Since I've been using CVS for years, SVN seemed like a natural step up for me, since it's similar but does a lot of things more smartly.

The coolest part of this whole setup, to me, is the SVN client I'm using, TortoiseSVN. This lets you access all the SVN commands from right-click menus directly in Windows Explorer. It also adds layover icons to the file icons so you can see at a glance what files and directories need to be committed. And SVN itself handles tasks like renaming and moving files and directories so much better than CVS, I wonder why I didn't start using it for code a long time ago.

I already use a free dynamic IP address from DynDNS to access my home music server from the outside world, and I'll use that to access my SVN repository from out there as well. The one slightly tricky thing that hung me up for a long time last night was writing a Perl script I could run on my laptop from the outside world to update the "svn" alias in my HOSTS file from an internal IP address to the current value of my network's dynamic external IP. That way I would never have to change the URL through which my laptop attempts to access the SVN repository.

Actually, it wasn't the writing of the script that was difficult so much as trying to figure out how to get it to run under the Administrator account in Windows Vista. Vista provides no simple mechanism for this, and it won't let a script update the HOSTS file unless it runs as Administrator. But this morning I found a power toy that enables this, I've tested external access by logging into our landlady's unsecured wireless network, and now I'm ready for field-testing.

Coffee shop, this afternoon!

A technical question for you techie writer types out there. Do you use version-control software to keep a repository of your work? If so, what? What platform do you run it on? What do you like? What don't you? I know CVS pretty well from my programmer days, but I'm not sure that's what I want to use for my writing. Maybe Subversion? SVK? I've just started looking into this, and there are a whole lot of options.

I used to just use the Windows Briefcase to keep my writing in sync between machines, but my new laptop with Vista doesn't seem to implement Briefcase in a way that's entirely compatible with older versions, and anyway it doesn't do squat to keep copies of older drafts around. I'd like to start doing something a little more sophisticated than that.

september has taken on a distinct flavour. It tastes a little like raindrops falling right this minute on our heads, and a little like th flash and distant crackle while everything is still dry. I have been doing heavy research on a variety of topics, which would remind me of college if anybody else were around ordering a pizza. It's just me in here, though, and a fire hydrant of information. My head is a firehose, and th fire--where is it? There's my problem. No fire.

Still, on auto-pilot, I researched. It started w/ Daredevil, th blind superhero, whose radar sense allows him to run and jump around New York City w/o bumping into things. I wanted to see if my memory of him as th only chronically-depressed superhero was correct. His Wikidpedia entry, though furnished w/ wall-to-wall tragedy, is silent on th topic of chronic depression. His girlfriend got AIDS, but it turned out to be a joke. Daredevil's writer during what I remember as his chronically-depressed period was a lady named Ann Nocenti. Though I kept many individual issues of Nocenti's long run (1986-91) on DD safely preserved in plastic sleeves, I'm afraid to go back and read them. There was something holy about my experience of these comix that resists literary analysis--holy in th sense that glowing haloes hovered above both me and these comix as I read them, as I hovered inches above a magick carpet that itself was hovering above a cloud. I'm scared that going back and reading them now would fail to reproduce anything like that.

Nocenti was not th best comix writer of her era, not anywhere near.^[1] Even 15-year-old me had a sense of her writing as "bad" from a certain angle: too didactic, too simple, too heavy w/ its leftist politics, not funny enough, not surprising enough, and too reliant on an unrelentingly somber voiceover narration. But, you see, I was in love w/ it. Nocenti took th long-standing tradition of DD as a guy who continually gets th shit kicked out of him and used it to give our hero a new mood: a Zen acceptance of things as they are. Anybody who is or has been an American teenager should know how thrilling this might be to recognize this mood inside th mind of a superhero. This world sucks, but whatever--from a guy who puts on red tights to fight crime!

"Live in the inch. Forget the long mile," DD said in one issue. I never forgot that line. If it was thrilling to hear him say it, it might have been more thrilling for me to imagine a writer coming up w/ that line to put in DD's mouth. Ann Nocenti was responsible for DD being a vegetarian--or implicitly endorsing vegetarianism by shutting down a cruel pig farmer's operation? I forget. It was a silly story, no doubt, but it was told in a wholehearted way -- fearlessly -- and I really loved her for it. Her Daredevil was utterly adrift and rudderless in this corrupt world, but he couldn't stop being himself no matter how many times he got whacked on th head and got amnesia. In Nocenti's stories, Daredevil loses practically every time he leaves his house, but he wins because he keeps going out there. His girlfriends are crazy, but he is never bored.

I thought, "Will I one day have a crazy girlfriend like Ann Nocenti?" I did! Nocenti might have been my first, primitive case of loving a girl for literary reasons. (It would repeat.) I never found out what she looked like. Even in this post-Google era, traces of her existence are scarce. There's a picture of her as a cartoon that I'm guessing came from one of her comix. She quit writing comix in th late 1990s, edited High Times in 2004, and wrote a screenplay for a movie starring th "I'm a Mac" guy (currently in post-production). Her most recent work of which I am aware is a fascinating 27-minute documentary about troubles in Baluchistan,^[2] an oil-rich region that spans th borders of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran. This movie will be famous if we invade them.

Did you know that Pakistan became an independent nation in 1947, and that before that, they were part of th British Empire? That th Khan of Baluchistan had signed an agreement w/ th British -- months prior to th creation of Pakistan -- that promised Baluchi autonomy, but that th British then handed Baluchistan over to Pakistan, anyway?

(Again, this will all be important to us if we invade.)

That John Belushi, despite a spooky similarity in pronunciation, has about as much to do w/ Baluchistan as you or I do, because he is actually of Albanian descent? That Belushi's fatal speedball was administered by a lady named Cathy Smith, who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter for her action and served 18 months in prison? That Natalie Wood, who died three months before Belushi and was wearing a heavy coat and wool sweater when she fell in th water, was born Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko? That Governor Palin never said, "I can see Russia from my house"--she just thinks it would be really cool if she could? So why are you being such a hardass about it? Do you know th story of Lurleen Wallace, Alabama's first and only female governor?

Lurleen Brigham Burns married George Wallace in 1943, when she was 16 and he was 23. They met while she was working @ a five and dime in Tuscaloosa, and neither of them guessed that he would go on to become perhaps th most well-known segregationist of our time. Twenty years and four children later, in 1963, George was elected governor of Alabama, where his hard-line stance in favour of racial segregation made him popular.

George'd begun his political career as a moderate on racial issues. "You know," his biographer later said that George said, "I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. And then I began talking about niggers, and they stomped the floor."^[3] He used th same rhetoric to run for president in 1964^[4] and 1968.^[5]

Meanwhile, Lurleen had took sick. In 1961, her surgeon had found suspicious tissue during Caesarean delivery of Janie Lee, Lurleen's last child. Her doctor informed George, not her, of his discovery -- common practice @ th time, apparently -- and George, for reasons unknown to Wikidpedia, decided that no one should tell Lurleen. She didn't find out until 1965, when she had some abnormal bleeding and saw a gynecologist. Diagnosis: uterine cancer. If George wasn't already going to hell for being a wicked celebrity racist, this cancer thing probably sealed th deal. Naturally, Lurleen was furious, but she apparently forgave him enough to go along w/ his next shady idea: having her run in his stead in Alabama's 1966 gubernatorial election.

Alabama governors were not allowed to serve consecutive terms.^[6] George figured he could circumvent this inconvenient statute by using Lurleen as his face and running things from behind th scenes. It worked. Lurleen campaigned vigorously while secretly undergoing radiation therapy. She had a secret hysterectomy in January 1966. In th fall of 1966, she won a landslide 64% of th vote and became only th third female governor of a U.S. state. "Nobody has to know I'm dying just yet," she thought.

Governor Lurleen B. Wallace will never be remembered as a superhero. As governor, she increased funding to a mental hospital. That was her one political thing, it looks like. She appears in one photograph not looking well and warning Fourth of July motorists of th top four causes of car accidents; it was th summer of 1967, and she was about to have her second surgery, this time to remove an egg-sized tumour from her colon.

In January 1968, she informed her staff of her cancer. Three more surgeries followed, but by April th cancer had metastasized to her liver and lungs. That same month, George, absorbed in his presidential campaign, told th press Lurleen had "won th fight" against cancer. He would continue to hit th campaign trail hard in th last weeks of her life. On 7 May 1968, Lurleen Wallace died. George had cancelled a 6 May television appearance to be by her side. Their three youngest children were subsequently "distributed" (?) to family members and friends.

Meanwhile, in September 2008, Lurleen has continued to hunt turkey, be offended by poor conditions for mental patients, sell useless junk in a five and dime, love her children, secretly hate her husband, and just as secretly forgive him -- in my head. I invite her to dinner, she and me and David Foster Wallace (no relation) and Ann Nocenti. It's a vegetarian restaurant; I'm pretending to be a vegetarian to impress Nocenti. Lurleen is making fun of us for being hippies. DFW is empathizing w/ Lurleen's pain in such a ridiculously detailed way that his uterus starts to ache. And I say, "Lurleen, if George hates black people so much, why did he marry a woman who looks sort of like a light-skinned black?"



^[7]
________

( Footnotes )

Originally published at RajanKhanna.com. You can comment here or there.

I just found out that I sold my story, “The Emperor’s Gift” to Shimmer Magazine for their Clockwork Jungle issue. It’s like having deja vu.

This has been a good writerly week for me.