Author Archives: admin

Nothing much to say really

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So the point is to reawaken my enjoyment of writing.

How I miss those wild west days of explaining what a ‘blog is. At this glorious time in history, we have reached saturation. Now, almost, the only polite reply is a resigned, “Oh, you have a ‘blog,” said with the vim and élan of “Oh, I think there’s something hanging from your nose.”

Sigh.

In the current age where everyone is a writer, commenter, curator, I am a member of the great internet unwashed.

Actually, i tend to still have hope. I tend to still fine this stuff interesting. How the fuck other than the internet could there be worldwide awareness of a beleaguered grandmother and bus monitor. Karen Klein, a newly minted half-a-millionaire, cried on the bus and the world cried with her, and tossed in a few bucks while they were at it.

Imagine what the intertubes could have done for Rosa Parks.

Through the wonders of modern binary code, I could virtually meet up and submit a story to a veritable stranger about smoking and death, at least one of my favorite topics. Only to find out that the editor not only is into death herself, but she writes about life, end of life and a smidge of afterlife, all of which factored into my little submission.

Whatever causes the human brain to pick up on coincidence and synchronicity, advances exponentially on the web, and how fun can that be.

So, I write to amuse myself. I write, because it’s maybe the only thing at which I feel full on competent (‘cuz I can whip up the correct usage of shit like “at which.”) And, I write, because maybe some fucking day, some other stranger out there will read and understand.

Maybe without the marrow sucking

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I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
— Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau has been running through my head, although it’s really not in line with his Walden fantasy. It’s more like the reality, when old Henry David would take a break from living deliberately to scam a meal over at the Emersons’ house. Instead of the woods, I’m living deliberately in the halls of a place literally valued in the billions.

Anywho, here’s the dealio, a professional coach has recommended I journal to focus and reflect on some daily interactions and communications. You know, like I could try writing stuff out to think about it. Now why ain’t I thought of that.

Nah, the point is I’m trying to really pay attention to some of the mundane interactions during the day to learn how to handle it all better. I plan on being the zen master of office communication, a meeting ninja, another martial arts cliche of epic proportions for giving and receiving feedback. To that end, here are some thoughts from the world of thought experiments.

Observation 1: I don’t have any idea how to handle other people’s internal dialogs. Like the woman who always phrases a question like it’s a game show challenge. “Am I in charge of this invoice?” Um, I don’t know how to rule paper, as it were, so none of us are in charge of it. Let’s Roshambo for it.

Similarly, if you launch into something and I have no idea what you’re talking about, because like maybe I haven’t yet read the email that just came in two seconds ago, the look on my face isn’t meant to convey anything but confusion. Please don’t ascribe a mood to my furrowed brow, I’m just busy thinking, nothing more or less, until you give me a chance to say, “Huh?”

The paragraph above also pertains to when you walk up quietly and I’m reading. The look on my face — Startled. It’s not personal. When I’m on the way to the kitchen — Hungry or thirsty. Also not personal. About to talk with someone else, and you stop me with your question — Momentarily unfocused. Not personal.

Here’s a secret prayer for the person most apt to walk up to my desk when I’m in the middle of something and start speaking just at the right time to make me jump. Start talking a little sooner and a little less abruptly and if I’m staring at my screen or typing fast, you might want to ask if it’s a good time.

Here’s my ninja coping strategy, as my prayer goes unanswered. Smile. Ninja’s don’t show their pain.

Observation 2: Since people drop by and ask for my help or for feedback already, I’m not feeling too corrective. I think I’ll just avoid the people who don’t want my help any way. Win win.

Observation 3: Sometimes I think people are waiting for me to say things at meetings. Sometimes I think people are waiting for anyone else to say something at meetings, and then to stop saying things. Meetings aren’t really communication.

Observation 4: Man, humans can put spin on anything, and personal insecurities can amplify that to 11. There’s a person I know that a hefty portion of conversations sway from what I think is an amusing anecdote to her set of worries. “Hey, this guy said this funny thing to me about that.” “Oh, really, do you think he was suggesting that the world as we know it is off kilter?”

Oops, yeah, nevermind. Note to self, ninjas don’t share amusing anecdotes.

Observation 5: The “open” questions my coach says are a nice trick for negotiating a conversation don’t work for everyone. I’m not saying those folks want to be led, as much as maybe they are rehearsing for a revamp of Abbott and Costello. “What do you think we should do?” “I’m not sure, I thought you’d know, do you?” “I’m OK with whatever you think, will X work for you or do you want Y?” “Do you think Y is better?”

Time might be infinite, but my life is limited. I don’t know if we both have time to passively consider every course of action in the known universe. How’s about we just decide and keep it moving?

Observation 6: It doesn’t take me any different amount of time to write a vaguely interesting or amusing email than to keep it straight. I tried both this week. But the amusing ones actually get a response.

Addendum to above: A lot of people are shitty writers (and maybe don’t know it) or struggle with writing. Those folks don’t understand the possibilities, but I’m guessing that it’s not a good target to cater to them.

Addendum two: People who shave off prior chunks of an email should either (1) start a fresh email and give enough info to start anew or (2) stop shaving off the prior chunks of email. You know what’s confusing? “See below” when there’s nothing down below.

Subpart to this addendum: those people are also the ones who don’t cc everyone who needs to know stuff.

Observation 7: Mindlessly playing with my iPhone keeps me from biting my fingernails at meetings. Putting away my electronics, because other people think it’s disrespectful, means after a week of meetings, I have hangnails and a couple of bloody cuticles.

Observation 8: Mostly, I work with some cool people. The ones that aren’t, well, whatcha gonna do?

Observation 9: All of the above — Problems of the privileged and whiny. I wonder if Thoreau hated himself a little at the end of a day, especially if he encountered some of that there meanness.

The more things change

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First things first — I opened this here writing program, and the first thing I saw were these words:

After a tiring week of having to deal with members for the human race, I’m a tad disappointed that today’s solar eclipse isn’t a harbinger of the earth’s destruction. Sigh.

I have decide to thoroughly dislike a fellow human.

Clearly, I was having a bad day.

Now, days, if not weeks later, I am a goddamn font of contented calm. I’m so fucking zen, I could snatch the pebbles from the sensi’s hand at the same time as I leapt from my good leg to the bad one that was swept by the Cobra Kai and kicked some ass. I’m centered and my chi is on FI-Ah.

Here’s the crazy shit of it all. My historic working shelf life ain’t been grand to tell the truth. My best, most serious jobs have gotten to the five to seven year mark, and I have managed to fail in epic, truly epic, proportions. OK, maybe not epic like Odysseus tying himself to a mast while sailing over rough seas, but as epic as a cube (or in the case of one job, supply closet turned into an office) dweller can live it. I’m not Greek after all.

I had my whole manifest destiny vision quest just over seven years ago, when I moved here to the Golden West. Shortly thereafter, I got my paying gig that contributes to the mortgage and keeps my addiction to munching on groceries alive.

In fact, it’s seven years this week that I started this job. I’ve crossed the Rubicon.

Only this time, it’s a whole other ball of wax, a new ball game, a freshly minted cliche. Unlike the job where the director was banging not just one but two women in our office, blessedly not me; unlike the job where a back-stabbing asshole, who incidentally had stolen some computer equipment, used his work email for sex classifieds, and was an all around weasel, convinced HR I was a violence risk, unlike the job where everyone was convinced the top two execs were likely embezzling at worst or reporting fraudulent data on federal grants at the best, unlike all of them, I seem to be coasting just fine.

No, not just coasting. I’m doing just fine. Like in a crazy, are you sure, no way this must be a trick, doing just fine. Fine like is Allen Funt going to come walking through the door and telling me it’s a joke? Fine. Or maybe in these modern times, Chris Hansen, will explain it all.

Here’s the skinny, which I hesitate to write about, in case there is a weasel waiting behind a cyber door ready to do me in, but I’ll take the risk. Although, I won’t get into enough detail that said cyber door weasel can bite me.

I now have a professional coach. Someone who actually is meant to prod me into achieving shit. And, one of the goals I’m meant to be achieving is doing more writing and pushing myself to actually do what I keep promising myself and then managing to self-sabotage. I’m bound and determined to not let this opportunity pass me by, and I aims to have something that looks like a book in the end.

It may be a shitty book that no one ever buys or reads. But I if it’s three dimensional, or even virtually so with animated pages on a tablet screen, I’ll be feeling alright.

And the bloody miracle of my checkered work life is unlike my last gig, the folks in charge of my employment are A-OK with that side project. I’m practically being begged to forego my workaholic ways, put in no extra hours or thought, watch the clock and slide down my dinosaur the minute the whistle blows at the end of the day at the plant. Like you’re done for the day, go forth and write.

At my last position of stressful employ, not only did those folks in charge tell me I couldn’t be a “real writer,” whatever the fuck that is, they told me I was throwing away opportunity by not giving up my dreams for my corporate welfare. Yup, no dreams of my own just their image of me as a good worker bee content in the hive.

Don’t fucking pinch me, because I don’t want to wake up yet. I’m planning a summer of cutting out of work in time to see the sunset drop over our oceanside town, forcing myself to write and listening to the boss, when she tells me to take it easy.

Live and learn

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What a week it’s been for the old ego. Here I am a bit more ragged and a bit more paranoid and a bit more raw and sensitive and wounded and pathetic. And, here I am stronger and smarter and perfectly fine.

It all began on a day when I consented to not just listen to others but to go out of my way to solicit their opinions about me, myself and I. An idea born from the bowels of hell, doubtless, or at least from the sewers and muck and mire of man’s meager experiences.

They call it a 360 review. It’s the workplace, salt mine, hell zone, productivity, performance management equivalent of “Do I look fat in these jeans?” You line up a jury of your peers and your not peers and a professional, who voluntarily does that kind of thing for money, interviews them. The questions seem to range from, “Management doesn’t think she sucks, but what do you say?” to “”Seriously, tell me something you hate about her.”

Maybe there were some constructive things in there. I lost sight when the report turned personal.

Here’s what really got to me, though. I didn’t learn anything. Nada. Nothing. Zilch. But I did remember all of the emotions of being a kid, all of the stupid struggle almost anyone with any soul at all remembers.

The report said that the people surveyed thought I was smart, creative, quirky, funny, a good writer and interesting. Yeah, on some days, I manage OK. The report also revealed that some people don’t understand me, and I bug the shit out of some.

Wow. Revelatory. I find myself growing already.

The bitch is, at the suggestion of my manager, and in an open-minded moment of intellectual weakness when it sounded like a valuable experience, I asked exactly those people who I don’t really get along with to participate in my personal witch hunt.

Here’s a fucking bulletin: there are reasons we don’t get along and they ain’t all related to my being a flawed human being.

The same people who don’t like me at the age of 48, are the ones who in junior high told me I was weird. The girl who wanted to marry and stay in our town and have babies and just be normal, subtext unlike me, is now a woman in my office with the perfect nuclear family in a suburban home who works part time for the extra cash to ensure a model life. She doesn’t hesitate to point out to me today my flaws, just like her doppelgänger back then.

My whole life I’ve wondered why folks with the most boring lives are the ones who proselytize others to be like them the hardest.

Every conversation with her reminds me of my junior high crush crush on Greg Maharis. In addition to being cute and well-dressed, he smoked cigarettes and exuded cool. He also looked past my awkward, uncomfortable, unfeminine, uncoordinated, inelegant, ungainly teenage self, and we had some great conversations. Other, prettier girls in my class couldn’t comprehend why he talked to me at all.

Two of my junior high triumphs were via Greg. In another class, when some twat started making fun of me and doing what junior high girls do, he stood up for me and declared me “cool.” My friends who were there and had overheard the conversation in hushed silence assured me of the moment’s epic nature. Then, on a fateful spring evening he crossed the abyss of the gym floor separating guys from gals and asked me to dance.

My suburban colleague in my grownup world today is all of those girls who never understood why Greg would talk to weird me.

The other people who don’t get me today are the competitive ones who didn’t get me then. My whole dorky life, I had an easier time talking to the adults around me. Apart from my close friends, my peers weren’t thinking or reading or interested in the same shit as me. Other kids didn’t read the newspaper, for example, except to cut out items for a current events assignments.

I found myself in conversation with teachers and Blue Bird troop leaders and moms. I like hearing other viewpoints and stories. In adulthood, one of my good friends was almost slack jawed as her own mother told me the alternative, risqué version of her family’s journey from Hungary. A version she had never, ever heard.

Apparently, in today’s modern office I’m a self-promoting douche who curries favors with the higher ups by horrors of horrors, engaging in conversation.

Funny how none of the people deriding me for talking with our president gave a shit that I’m also friends with my buddy who runs the facility. Uppity I very well may be, but I’m equal opportunity in my talking with interesting people. It’s not self-promotion if people like talking with you and seeking you out.

I’m older by a week and wiser not at all. My journey of self discovery told me what I already know.

And for whichever narrow mind labeled me as “immature” and hopes that I grow out of my traits — Sorry, dude, it’s only going to get worse. I refuse to “act my age,” dress like you, stay quite, act appropriate or conform to what world order you deem correct. My job is to to fuck up your order. The older I get the louder I get.

Me, my friends and my tribe, we’re the crazy ones. The disrupters. Artists and dreamers. Our fun is to speak out of turn.

I will never be able to explain to you why a good friend insisted on wearing girls patterned socks with the uniform of a bailiff, a court officer of the Massachusetts State House, and face getting reprimanded. You can’t understand the friends who walked away from solid jobs for love and for travel and adventure. It’s beyond your understanding that what you label as a “normal” life leaves many of us cold or scared shitless.

We don’t want what you have. And you can’t have what we want.

And, here’s the part that I think you can’t stand. People like me. They like my friends and our kind just fine. They seek us out, promote us, thank us and befriend us. They also hate us, fire us and shun us in equal measure. Same as they do for the regular folks, like you, also in equal measure.

But, we have a lot more fun.

M. and an Impala

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What the hell am I?

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In a timely coincidence, this image has been making the meme rounds in Facebook and whatnot:

 

I don’t know the exact source of this version of the list, but it comes from this article by Linda Kreger Silverman.

It’s timely because I just got the results back from a Myers Briggs personality assessment. Happy to say this time around it was paid for by work, but I’m still all working and employed and shit. Unlike the last official “personality assessment” on my permanent record this one was all warm and fuzzy.

Anyway, turns out I have a personality. Of sorts.

Here’s the timely of the timely part — heretofore, I tested as INTP. I totally have thought of myself as a giant, big old, introverted “I.” I love being alone. I love processing shit my own way in my own time. Better a couple. of great friends than a crowd, yada, fucking, yada.

Then, round about a decade ago, probably longer, I decided to come out of shyness with a vengeance. Now I totally dig that Carl Jung wasn’t saying introversion is the same as shyness, but I never got “my energy,” as the pop psych crowd would have it, from crowds. Holding back seemed like a fine response to life.

Only thing was, I had journals and private writings. I had words I wanted to say, thoughts rattling in the brain pan. The older I got the more I realized that the world was going ahead without me.

Like a terrible version of the crazy that was G. Gordon Liddy overcoming fear by eating a rat and tying himself to a tree in a lightning store, I took an adult ed class in stand up comedy. To overcome a fear of public speaking, to bring my writing public, to speak out, to shake my own personal status quo, to step up and out, I thought going on stage would be a good idea.

I almost puked and shat myself the final night of class, when we stood behind a mike at an actual comedy club. I didn’t try again for two years, when I screwed up the courage and took another class.

Ultimately, I whacked away at it for a while and got comfortable(ish) on stage. Comfortable enough to combine most sane people’s two biggest fears, getting naked and standing alone on stage with nothing but my jokes. The butterflies and/or gurgling fear of evacuating my bowels stopped.

I have no scientific proof, but I feel like I took the skills acquired on stage to other settings. The stage and writing cliche is that I found my voice.

Turns out that voice had other things to say besides jokes. When I moved west and interviewed for a job, I was outspoken and direct and more outwardly reaching than I remember being back east. Whatever made me get in stage sunk in and stuck

So the other day, I fired up the interwebs in my workplace and took the Myers Briggs dealio on account of some professional coaching I’m doing. Well, I’m not coaching. I’m subjecting myself to a little coaching action on account of wanting to be a better person and cog and all.

Lo and fucking behold, my trusty reliable “I” is now and extroverted “E.” This time around the test says I’m ENTP.

I don’t know how the hell it happened, but I turned into somebody else.

If I never been born

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I totally missed my usual Ides of March tribute to my dear, old Pat. If she had seen this March’s birthday, she would have been 83. She’s never that far from my thoughts, Pat, mostly when I’m doing something wacky.

Recently she’s been in my thoughts, because while we never specifically talked about birth control–hell I’m still waiting for someone to take me aside and explain the facts of life–I think she’d have much to say about Rick Santorum, the Catholic church and the country’s “progressive” conversations on contraception that will ensure we move back to circa 1956.

Seriously, the national dialog has backslid into a parallel universe where medicine hasn’t changed and women are just gals waiting on husbands to save them from spinsterhood or sluttiness.

For some reason, I flashed back over 30 years to a classic Pat moment of logic clashing with the status quo.

I’ve written before about a certain friend I had back from junior high to high school past college into adult life. For ease of reference, I’ll call her Sally Mae. Now old Sally Mae caused a great deal of friction between my mater and me. Pat never liked her, and I didnt really understand until I got all growed up and had problems of my own with her.

One of the ironic aspects of Sally Mae’s and my friendship was how her mother always thought of me as a bad influence. I was a special kind of bad influence as far as school kids go. I got pretty good grades in the highest level classes. At the time I didn’t swear or drink, and my biggest hobby was reading.

Still and all, Sally Mae’s Ma didn’t trust me. She didn’t cotton to my book learning. In retrospect, I also think she thought my vocabulary was kind of uppity, which was maybe understandable given that my 12-year-old self knew more words than her. She bristled like a wet cat one of the first times I was in their house and asked where there books were. I had never been in a house without any book shelves.

Non sequitur alert: I just thought of a downside of dating in the age of tablet computers. How the hell can you just someone new if their bookshelf is virtual? You’d never have the early warning of standing in an apartment and coming upon an entire collection of Ayn Rand.

In addition to distrusting my precocious self, Sally Mae’s Ma was suspicious of my mother, because she worked and by necessity left us alone some of the time. Not for very long, mind you, since Pat was a school teacher precisely because it let her be home when her kids were.

Like a few people in our town, I think Sally Mae’s mother would have been more comfortable if instead of raising us kids to be smart and take care of ourselves, Pat just found another husband and settled herself down.

Now when I look back at that time in my life, I realize that my mother probably didn’t dislike Sally Mae as much as our fights might have indicated otherwise. Nope, I think she just knew that the family of my bestest best friend was more conservative, more bigoted and more narrow than anyone I had known to date. And by god or by nagging, she had to try to protect me from my choice in friends.

All of this relates to the current state of women’s choice and contraception through one particular day, a day in which my mother came home from the grocery store spitting with rage. Pat was apoplectic. Purple with anger. All kinds of heated. She could barely sputter out the reason.

Pat had run into Sally Mae’s mother at the store. Over the aisles of canned goods and produce they had an interesting tête-a-tête.

Now getting back to my being a bad influence and my whole family being suspect, the ironic twist is how much trouble Sally Mae and her brothers were able to attract. Their mother worried about the evils in the outside world, but overlooked the demons under her roof. For example, her darling daughter used me as a foil to hide that at 15/16 she was dating a 20+ hippie with his own apartment and van. Her special friend was a friend of her oldest brother.

Today, at the age of 48, my oldest brother still wouldn’t let me date one of his friends, let alone spend the night at his apartment or drive around in his van.

At 19 one brother in Sally Mae’s family got his girlfriend pregnant.

A mother of three boys herself, Pat, in the grocery store aisles bumped into Sally Mae’s mom and offered her sympathy for the trouble in which the kids had found themselves. I wish I had a transcript of what went down after that, but I know Pat came home enraged.

What I do know is that Sally Mae’s mother brushed aside any notion of trouble and started talking about the upcoming wedding. And, Pat, logical, unconventional, and now I realize radical Pat, told her that they shouldn’t ruin their lives. They shouldn’t marry so young, because they “had to.” The kids had choices and as the adult, Sally Mae’s mother should know that and help them make the right choice.

Words were exchanged. Much more than that, I don’t know. I’m almost certain my mother’s sanity and morals were both brought into question.

The wedding happened. So did the inevitable divorce.

Thanks to my mother’s politics, or practicality, Sally Mae’s mother took a closer watch of me. Nonetheless, her daughter lost her virginity years before I did. (Cruelly and sadly, Sally Mae told stories about me, implying to our friends that I had done all of the things that were in fact her secrets. Who knows what she told her mother.)

Now, 30 years later or so, it’s stunning to me that this conversation is still happening. Instead of more choices, we have the same or less. And narrow-minded people still get away with calling women sluts.

The story I meant to tell

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Arghhh. I just began some navel-gazing, introspective, intellectual vomit. Then I remember that I might be the only person who ever reads this page, and I didn’t want to read that kind of boring shit.

So I scratched the dandruff off my head and remembered the thing I meant to write about a month or so ago. God, no wonder I feeling like I’m getting older, I keep letting time slip by me.

To whit, the story. There’s one great thing I love about traveling, and maybe it could be true the next town over, but it’s definitely true when you are far away, no one’s talking your language and every thing feels strange, foreign if you will. It’s when your brain sort of gets into the place where your normal routines just don’t apply, and your willingness to do anything is expanded canyon wide.

The best travel stories are the ones in which the teller knows for a brief flicker the rules weren’t for him, but invincibility was.

Obviously, I have one of those stories.

Penang is an island state of the coast of the mainland of Malaysia. Not far off the coast, mind you, there’s a bridge. Parts of the area are as over overdeveloped as a place that’s been trod as part of a trade route since the 15th century can be. But other parts are wilder with narrow winding roads and hills green with rain forest-y overgrowth.

Thanks to the narrow, winding roads, and maybe a island vibe of not entirely giving a fuck, the locals are repudiated throughout the country as the worst drivers around. The local paper’s stories of traffic gore kind of bear out that reputation. Alongside the usual vehicles, there are swarms and swarms of folks on tiny motorcycles, slightly more roadworthy than scooters, warning in and out of the traffic havoc.

It probably means something that both M. and I come from places that have renowned bad drivers. At least his home state doesn’t have the equivalent of Massholes, like mine.

Anyway, whenever I’m there, between looking the wrong way when crossing the road, on account of that driving on the left thing, and the nutty drivers, I figure I might get picked off in the streets.

On the other hand, we’re in vacation mode. Nothing can touch us.

Near our hotel there was a network of women handing out flyers for a manicure, pedicure, reflexology, massage, whatever you want we got kind of place. Actually, it was four places, and there was one woman who we kept seeing in front of a different place every day. Turns out she owned all four places, and, while to the tourists they might have seemed like different places, for her they were part of a continuum.

One day, walking across the street from one of the places with time in our hands, an older woman called to us the usual sales pitch. We called back does she take credit cards, because we had no cash. She said, “yes.”

One thing I’ve figured out from traveling. — if you are in a tourist area and seem agreeable to spending cash, a good chunk of the time the proprietor of a business or her staff will agree with you. There is time enough to sort out the negativity, and from the outside they just want you in the door. “Sorry, cash only,” doesn’t get you in the door.

Tricked again, we entered the cash only business. And the old woman who brought us in was an affable problem solver. She turned right to M. and told him not to worry he should start on his foot massage, she would simply take his ‘wife’ on the back of her motorcycle, and we’d go to the ATM. She called it her “moto,” and given that she was approaching or had surpassed 60, I actually didn’t realize what she meant at first.

With a borrowed helmet on my head, I sweatily clutched her matronly love handles and headed down the road. Even though I couldn’t completely understand her Chinese accented words over the roar of the engine, I gathered that she was going to take a couple of back roads to keep us out of traffic.

Check. I’m on the back of a motorcycle, driven by a stranger on some back alleys of an urban area on and Asian island.

In retrospect that could have gone awry.

I laughed when I came back and told someone the story. She reacted, “Oh my god, there could have been people waiting down the alley or outside the ATM.” For all I knew, it could have been a ruse to mug a tourist.

That had never occurred to me. I was thoroughly in the travel headspace where you go with the flow and everything works out. Here I am to testify.

I wonder if my demise will be in a foreign back alley some day. I have to admit, I’ve always relied on the kindness of strangers.