going off on the barista who insists on calling me bro

Dear Heath or Seth or Sunbeam or Breeze or whatever the f*** wholistic, featured-in-the-organic-foods-section element you decided to adopt as a name,

No one is thinking this but me. And I’ll just say it. Stop calling me bro. Stop it now, stop it tomorrow, and stop it for the remainder of the days while you are standing upright and in humankind’s general circulation.

At 7:15 in the morning, when I’m walking into your store, as I do about four times a week, I’m not interested in anything beyond the coffee you serve me. As in, the coffee you pour, not the coffee you are theoretically capable of making from scratch. A cup of straight black coffee has been my routine for about 15 years, plus a glass of o.j. and a snack, which is either a banana or a pastry. It depends on what’s available, I don’t ultimately care which, I’m not there to overthink anything. I’m half-awake, kinda cranky, and fully aware that coming into your store is a tacit admission that I’m too lazy to do this in my kitchen at home.

That’s probably why I’ve long assumed that the tradeoff for my indolence was being inundated with your saccharine, wastoid remarks that start with the moment my place in line moves directly in front of the pastry bin. Such as “Bro’s getting’ busy wit’ da’ biscuits today!”, if I decide to go with the bran muffin because the crossaints are gone, or “why don’t you supersize that biatch, bro!!” as a means to suggest I get the venti instead of the grande, or the fallback “bro’s o-kay wit’ da’ o-jay!” because of the Odwalla in my hand. And that’s how you say it too, wit’ da’, as opposed to with the, which most working class Americans like me, and yes, you, normally (should) say it. And sometimes you don’t even say bro, sometimes you use the infinitely more irritating br’, which sounds sorta like brah and implies that you’d consider living in a vowel-optional universe.

I’m not sure why you zero in on me and not any of the other people in line. Maybe it is because I save the multisyllable answers for the woman at the cashier, Michelle. And if you were wondering why a 38-year old guy would be more interested in talking to a 60-year old grandmother of two than a 19-year old trust fund brat, it could be because Michelle offers questions while I’m paying, and not asinine declarations. Sometimes she asks about my morning. For a while, she was asking about my cat when it was sick. Last month it was about the project that I worked on and caused me a lot of stress and overtime. In all such cases, she asks me these questions with a smile that doesn’t appear sarcastic, and in a tone that doesn’t suggest she’s shouting above the internal iPod hardwired to her brainstem and permanently set at 11.

I’ll give you a pass on the hemp necklace and earrings. Everybody needs some individual declaration on the job, I understand. In the interest of disclosure, I had an earring for several years. I guess I never confused the need to look/be cool as carta blanca to affect the sort of ersatz Zack De La Rochian dialect you’ve intentionally adopted. You work at a Starbucks. Let me break it down for you: there is nothing remotely cutting edge or countercultural about Starbucks. That veneer ended with Store 1 in Pike Place Market, which I’ve been to a few times, possibly before you were born. The green apron you’re wearing doesn’t mean the environment is necessarily their priority, nor a nod to their Pacific Northwest origins. It means Starbucks acknowledges it is about money. Look around you. Ninety-five percent of your morning clientele are trophy wives, Navy retirees, and cranky people like me on their way to work and trying to beat rush hour in the process. It’s a service-based business, not a drum circle.

I guess I’m frustrated because you tap into a separate memory of various guys I’ve known since junior high, guys who earmark their personality with abundant flippancy, and act as if they’re the lead in some knockoff Hornby story, and everyone else is a collective straight man to their public, self-anointed snarkery. As early as 12, in one form or another, friends, relatives, baseball coaches, teachers, even a clerk at the Rancho Bernardo library once would repeat a variation of the same mantra: Pay them no mind. Those guys always get theirs in the end. This eased my temper a little, when I’d find my bicycle thrown in a dumpster after school, or whenever a certain girl passed on me at a dance for the guy who asked her in the form of a wisecrack, instead of a question.

But somehow you guys keep getting past puberty alive and, dammit, emerge unscathed. No one ever calls you on your crap. And I sense now that it’s a neverending cycle with your kind. In twenty years, I’ll be interviewing someone your age because they want to date my daughter. And my eyes will be on the hands in their lap and the Eddie Haskell smile, but my mind’s on the Camaro in the driveway, and I’ll wonder what that racing stripe implies.

And you’ll probably insert that other overused expression guys use to establish a rapport with each other: back in the day. And I’ll know you’re probably referring to something like the year 2027, and I’ll calmly explain that, to me, the day implies looking at daguerreotype photographs and recalling the time of a smallpox epidemic while crossing the Mojave in a covered wagon, all the while fearing your own family might eat you because the canned beans ran out weeks ago and there are no rats in sight. And refrain from throwing my shoe at you because you said something like, “I ain’t never heard of tha’ Mahava, bro, but I had chicken pox in kindergarten, they put Neospo’ on it, so it’s all good, it’s all good.”

And twenty years after that I’ll be throwing my bedpan at you, because you shorted me another fruit cup during the midafternoon snack run. Not because you’re malicious, but because I saw a fruit cup with the name AMOU on it, wheeling away from me in the cart with which you amble about the rest home. My dementia notwithstanding, I’ll know in your bonghit indifference that said fruitcup just slipped your mind. That’s what you’d say too, something like “whatevs, bro, just slipped my mind!” And after that I’d just want an ether drip as a substitute for a fiber-based lunch.

Sure, this all may be paranoid conjecture on my part. And the problem will be a nonissue once I find another coffee house more convenient than yours. Or, another one of your pod will be at that place and, rather than inure myself to all sorts of new, intentionally obnoxious malaprops, I’ll decide it’s better to return to square one and be regularly affronted with the dickhead I already know. I haven’t decided yet whether the rules of business and/or conversational English have changed/slackened and I need to get with the program, or that you’re a sign that a cultural apocalypse is creeping upon us, one obnoxious set of manners at a time.

It’s something I think about. Until then, I’ll see you tomorrow. One biscotti please, and I never thought I’d say this, but do me a favor and from now on, please call me sir. Got that, boy?

Kind regards,
Sonny Amou

your name here

I usually arrive to work between 7:30 and 7:45, traffic permitting. On yesterday’s commute, I learned a couple of things. For one, the building down the street from where I work turns on this really cool fountain every morning at 7:30, so I had the (extraordinarily minor) luxury of watching the initial cascade of water roll down its mock stepladder for the first time that day. I guess you’d call that a zen garden moment, and for the final two minutes driving up the hill I had a minor epiph, recognizing that I actually look at natural elements on workdays as a means to deal with the unpredictable jackassery that is San Diego’s southbound I-5.

I was in this happy face bliss while grabbing my computer bag and breakfast from my car and heading into work. 99% of the time this breakfast consists of one container of o.j., one cup of black, and one piece of fruit, most likely a banana. I mention this because I spend the two minutes it takes to walk to my car adjusting the computer bag to one side while holding my breakfast in two hands, forearms outward in that Rock ‘em/Sock ‘em robot style that keeps the bag from flopping around or sliding off my arm altogether. Yeah, I know it’s awkward. Give me a break, I’m not exactly awake. Be thankful I didn’t act out one of my white knuckle fantasies on the freeway coming in.

There are four sets of doors serving as the entrance to my building. However, since I normally arrive before 8 a.m., three of them are still locked, which means that I have to enter the fourth set at the end, which is badge-accessible and monitored by a security camera. So I normally spend the last 20 seconds of my microcommute – the part where point A is the car and point B is the building – fumbling around the front pocket of my bag where I left my badge at the previous day’s end, while wondering why I still haven’t tightened up the arm band that would bring the bag above thigh-level and make this daily search more ergonomically viable.

This morning, some guy coming from the opposite direction got to the security-access door ahead of me. He nodded to me and held open the door as I walked up. “Thanks man, I appreciate it.”

He smiled tersely, “did you forget your badge?”

“Uh, no.” An awkward pause ensued. I realized now that Gandalf was not going to let me pass. I began fumbling around my bag, still holding the coffee and banana in my other hand, trying to grab my badge, which kept slipping out of my hand. Damn plastic. This went on for about 20 seconds, all the while this guy was looking at me, his arm blocking the still-open front door, which I now took as peculiar strain of burdened politeness.

“I’m sorry, but I have to check.” He said to me. Thankfully I had my sunglasses on, otherwise he would have seen the mother of all eye-rolls. I finally pulled my badge out, still tangled up with my iPod headphones. I actually looked at the guy now, noting he was six inches shorter than me, and compensating his midlife baldness with the sort of moustache that says, “hey, how does a gun show sound this weekend?” The half of my brain which normally comments don’t make blanket assumptions in these circumstances was drowned out by the other half that reliably proclaims of course.

This Dwight let me pass, shrugging his shoulders “hey, sorry,” as he walked away. I mumbled to myself “whatever, a******, I usually let myself in anyways.” Whether or not he heard me, I didn’t care. I was already plotting a subterfuge. I understand that life affords one all sorts of unforeseen hazards, big and small. But when a very short one goes out of their tiny way to ruin my fountain zen epiph, I want payback.

And payback sometimes starts with the company’s comprehensive photo directory. By and large, I generally don’t look at the directory other than to find office locations of engineers with whom I’ve been assigned to for the first time. This time, I was trying to figure out the location of a guy who was going to find a Jell-O stapler. I did manage to catch half the name on his badge (the other half being obscured by his shirt or my latent rage – pick one), Christopher. The problem is that Christopher could either be a first or last name, so I was not surprised to find about 250 Christophers during this search. Dammit. Do I want this admittedly petty grievance to involve a little research?

Yes. Yes, I do.

I began scrolling down. Funny thing about company photos is that they afford one the occasional time waster, that of making snap judgments of people they’ve never met. Said activity is a relatively harmless one, when the company one works for has several thousand employees. So while looking for my mark, I inferred which guys probably surfed in their spare time, which ones probably were the married-with-kids, straight-home-after-work types, and which ones probably drink at Bondi in the Lamp on Friday nights. In the interest of fairness, my pic undoubtedly connotes the sort of chunky, disheveled sarcasm one experiences when they meet me. It’s not a great photograph, but hey, I like getting paid, so I had no problem putting on a crooked smile for two seconds in front of a camera and add my dome to the ranks, as a potential future exhibit of the sort of inane activity I was conducting now. At least I smiled. Unlike the jerk who gave me a hard time five minutes earlier.

I almost missed his picture because he hadn’t yet grown the moustache that basically gave me an oily sensation. But by dint of the baggy eyes and midlife crisis frown, I could tell it was him. I scrolled through the rest of the list end-to-end to make sure there wasn’t anyone else that resembled him, like a witness on a back ep of Homicide: Life on the Streets. Then I clicked on his profile. What didn’t surprise me was that he didn’t actually work in the building I did. What did surprise me was that the guy was a “consultant” which in my company is a slightly fancier term for “temp.”

That provided some context. I understood the guy’s industriousness. I was the same way during my first six months here. Much to her annoyance, I’d check out with Claire every night before I left, until a day in January 2008 when she said one day “dude, this isn’t kindergarten. Get your work done and everything will be okay.” I lightened up after that, although I still probably am overkill in other areas of work.

Regarding badges, nearly all the time I keep it in my right pocket…once I’ve actually gotten in the building and sat down. I have thought to ask for someone’s badge once or twice, but given the fact that there are cameras in the parking lot, in the building, multiple security accesses to just about every door in the building, I assume that security is pretty comprehensive. Jeez, I have to re-enter my own password on my computer two dozen times a day just to access basic websites hosted by my company. Even if one were able to somehow access information here (which I don’t recommend), they’d leave a breadcrumb trail that’d include the location of the computer they hacked and either the license plate of their car or even a profile via the many installed cameras.

It’s a safe place to work, regardless of whether Gandalf stopped me. Which probably explains why I don’t display my badge for everyone can see. I see and work with the same 50-150 people virtually every day, and on more than one occasion I’ve let an engineer through Door A or Door B because they left theirbadge absent-mindedly before taking a lunch break. Everyone has done this at one point or another. And I’ll come right out and say it, I don’t like the aspect of having to wear a nametag of any kind. It reminds me of grade school. Putting the badge in my pocket I guess is a mild rebellion against what I consider, given my company’s expansive security, to be an excessive policy, while at the same time adhering to the policy itself, by technically keeping the badge on my person at all times. That’s the broader grievance. It may seem like a dumb technicality to you, but that’s exactly my viewpoint about name badges themselves. To me the only thing missing is the obnoxious “HELLO! My name is…” preceding the name itself.

But I’m getting off track of the more important issue, that is, the petty grievance. At the end of the day, I was owned. In my own yard. By an angry little man.

I’m stopping at Von’s on the way home to grab Jell-O mix. Did I mention I’m a pretty good cook? This is not over. Flavor suggestions, anyone?

like flies

I few days ago, I went to one of my regular reads and noticed that gde… was dropped from his blog roll. I admit it stung a bit, mainly because I’d been reading his blog for close to a year, his had started a few months after mine, we’d exchanged a few personal emails here and there discussing books and music. And I thought, huh, if we’d lived in the same city, yeah, we’d probably have met up for a happy hour to chat by now.

His drop was the third in about two or three months, the first two being the French websites I’d read when I first started: Nightclub Sandwich and Cremlystella. Those guys are long gone, but in those cases I understand. In recent days, after long-ass days of writing and editing electrical engineering documents, I’m not up for reading something in a second language, and truthfully I hadn’t read either of those pieces since before Christmas. So when those cats basically took my links down, I smirked and thought, well, so much for Normandy.

I know this is common. Blolleagues do this all the time, they sort of eMeet each other via the commenting feature, and develop an odd symbiosis where they promote each other’s work via blogrolls, frequent commenting, and so on. I do it just like anyone else. Then Person A writes something that reads a little too mean which upsets Person B, and either they stop talking to each other, or the flames ensue, snowballing readers in between were thinking, jeez, I liked it better when he was talking about his obsession with felt. Kinda junior high, if you ask me. I have thicker skin than that.

With me, it could be my occasional rant from the political left, but I’m pretty sure it’s more to do with the combination of infrequency for my posting, combined with the length of the posts when I finally get them up. I have, in recent weeks, gone weeks without writing anything, and when I do it’s blammo! Here’s a mini-novella about the wonders of my new cat. Zzzzzzz.

Work has lightened up a bit. And with my free time I started wondering, why am I doing this again? What was the reason? I believe the idea was to sketch out a book, get some critical feedback on the side, then polish it once the rough draft was in place. My core audience is essentially 30-50 people tops, some of whom are from the blogosphere, some of whom are from back north, and a couple that straddle either of these communities. I haven’t picked up the gang of 13 thread since February, and I need to get on that again. I figured I could intersperse those pieces with smaller pop culture pieces, but anytime I try to do pure snark, it turns into a going off tangent and I find myself trying to stay under 2,000 words.

I am seriously wondering whether I’ve finally lost the trail of the green fairy once and for all, that maybe perhaps that my calling was in fact, to be a lifelong comma chaser, editing technical documents for nerds, taking home a nice paycheck and spending the rest of my life making Charlotte happy and keeping the cats from killing each other. It’s a good life, but that scenario doesn’t include working on a piece of creative nonfiction that will get me away from the desk life for good. Now, I’m not sure if that last detail is necessarily required either.

It bothers me a little bit, but then again it’s hard to get too upset for the moving-on of someone I’ve never met, particularly someone who has four hours of subway commute time to polish up a post and engage in the occasional mild misdemeanor (I speak out of jealousy here, not contempt). I can’t assume that everyone is going to keep checking back when I’ve disappeared for several weeks at a time, when most people post three or four times a week, and do it with remarkable fluidity/creativity.

Can you tell I’m ambivalent? It’s like when I get home from the gym, and ultimately the only things I want to do are take a shower and sit on the couch and watch I’m A Celebrity! Get Me Out of Here! Only it’s not a gym trip. It’s trying to figure out how to get back the 80 minutes I lose every day on the freeways. It’s remembering to make sure I get all my vitamins, specifically the glucosamine for my joint pain, the fish oil and folic acid for cholesterol, the pycongenol for triglcyerides. It’s checking in on my email periodically – the personal one, not the work one – and replying to the friends who wonder where I didn’t return their phone calls. It’s making sure the sections of the lawn are watered that aren’t covered by sprinklers, twice a week. It’s staying on top of a rolling list of errands and tasks each week so that the house stays clean, all the while setting aside time to make time to get to that gym three times a week. Maybe after all that, after all is done and paid for, there’s time to enjoy a glass of wine or a burrito at 11:00 p.m.

Somehow this all used to be easier to manage, ironically during the times when I was far more reckless and nearly always broke. But in either scenario, then or now, I read the morning paper, looked out the window while in traffic, remained engaged in one form or another with life as I passed through it. I like to think I’m pretty good at it. I’m just frustrated with having recently lost sight of the one thing that engages me the most. And remain not quite ready to fess up and call it writer’s block.

86 and a deuce

My ability to get a hold of Louie depends on his job. About every four weeks, the email threads taper off and he stops returning my calls. I don’t take it personally, it just means that the Firm is unloading the latest round of invoices to several hundred clients, which means Louie pulls about three or four long days and drops off the grid. Kinda like PMS for accountants. Invariably Louie pops up a few days later, sending me a picture of a cat holding a Bowie and bursting out of Kate Gosselin’s womb, and all is good again.

This past month was different, when Louie texted me the following, which I read while stuck on the 5:

fyi [The Firm] let go a bunch of secretaries today, J. Smith, K. Roberts, Reliable Source #2, Shelley Doe, a few others, about 11 total…not a happy place right now.

I recognized the names of several friends. I stared at it until the car behind me honked. I looked up to see a musclehead gesturing to me from his SUV, saw that the traffic had moved onward, and stepped on the gas. I could see out of the corner of my eye my phone in the passenger seat, the text blinking at me whenever I drove over one of OB’s many potholes.

I wasn’t shocked that the Firm did this. Three years earlier, the firm had forced about 10 secretaries into retirement – but most of those secretaries were in their 60s, so those cutbacks made sense under some superannuation rationale. This was more random. The one that bothered me the most was Reliable Source #2, who was in her late 40s, and one of my best friends in the office. Also, among the most troubled.

I knew more about the Firm’s general office politics than I cared to know, mainly because I was in a vantage point to accrue such knowledge. I had worked at the Firm in for five years, 4½ of which were in (and later with) the office’s Marketing department.


Whenever I sense I’m about to rip into my last job, I remind myself of the four-months before I worked there. My 2002 tax return says it all: a patchwork quilt of W-2s, with $200 from one temporary agency, $500 at another, $95 at a third, and so on. I worked at ten different places in three months, including several one-day assignments of administrative potato peeling. Pure hand-to-mouth subsistence. During numerous mornings in this period I woke up not knowing if I’d even have a job, and spending the subsequent (suddenly free) eight hours looking for a misspelled word or misplaced comma on my resume, any evidence that would have cost me work that day. This led to a lot of time spent overstaying my welcome in cafés with lenient staff, writing long journal rants over one slowly-sipped cup of coffee.

Eventually, in July 2002, I acquired a crucial one-day assignment at The Firm. By day’s end, I had talked my way into making it a multiple-day assignment, doing data entry for Litigation. A few weeks later, I was hired on as the marketing coordinator. And as recently as Christmas 2002, I was still reminding myself how lucky I was to have this job. Every bus ride home, I consciously reminded myself; a lot of petty politicking, sure, but still a paycheck.

Within a year, I was half-heartedly looking elsewhere. The local economy had begun pulling out of the 9/11 doldrums, and writing jobs were returning to the eWant-Ads. These opportunities helped me master the art of emailing one’s resume while appearing to be working. By the time I received my eighth boilerplate TNT (“Thanks/No Thanks”), I sensed I was swimming upstream, against the many comma chasers put out of work but still in town. Comma chasers who had the same degrees, but more work experience and professional connections. The want-ads were most likely an EEOC formality.

I was disappointed, but in the way I am when the grocery store’s out of Minute Maid, and I have to opt for Tropicana instead. The Firm had a couple of benefits which maintained a minimal loyalty. The first was explained when I was completing my hiring interview by Mrs. Claus: “One thing you should know is that among the legal staff, over 50% of our employees have been here for 10 years or more, and 20% have been here for 15 years, and 5% for 20 years.” I should have asked whether this type of retention was any better than other established law firms, or any other company for that matter. But I heard what Mrs. Claus wanted me to hear, and at the time all I really wanted was a desk that wouldn’t disappear the next day.

This didn’t register with me until I noticed that several of the staff had responsibilities that were either unclear or at least underwhelming. Like Clara, the data clerk who read bodice rippers at her desk. Or Donna, the floating secretary that spent the majority of her time looking at used furniture online. I noticed these people, among others, were likely near or well beyond the traditional retirement age. I surmised a hidden detail to Mrs. Claus’ statistics: in order to lose their job, one had to be a real piece of work themselves.

That quelled most of the anxiety I’d experienced in the summer of 2002. I still wasn’t doing what I wanted, however. And after a day that ended with a petty argument with someone else in Marketing, or with my feet sore, I’d decide to start up a new job search while riding the bus home. I’d grab the mail on the way to my front door, and get a reality check.

Sometimes it was a credit card bill, one of several I’d subsisted upon during my prolonged unemployment. Sometimes it was a health benefit statement explaining how the Firm’s health plan had paid for 90% of the physical therapy I needed for recurring lower back pain. And sometimes it was the quarterly statement I’d received from the firm’s profit sharing plan, listing how the Firm had given me about 3-4% of my salary in the form of a 401(k) investment. However pro or con, the mail always transformed a night of intended proaction into one of staring at an episode of Meerkat Manor from my futon, thinking about the letters in my lap. Are you sure? Things are starting to look pretty good. Well, certainly adequate. I think.

I found my breaking point and jumped ship two years ago, but not before completing a successful job search on the Firm’s time and resources. I found myself in a new city and the job for which I’d patiently waited five years. Six months after that, I found myself in a terrific new relationship and the extensive debts of my early 30s all but completely wiped out. One minor health scare last summer notwithstanding, life again returned to enjoyment.

Now, I find myself wandering through a weird state of mind from time to time. I like the people in my department, and the work, while repetitious, is also exactly the sort of job I wanted: moderately challenging, but the kind I can check out from once I get in the car. I’m in a city that’s 75 degrees 85% of the year, where people say things like “far out, man” and “righteous, bro” without any hint of sarcasm. What the hell is my problem?

A clue appeared while checking my investments online. Via a combination of boredom and jumping on the 2008 Panic bandwagon, I built an investment portfolio tracker using Excel. It started with a couple of simple columns of data connected to a line graph. Then I started breaking up the Roth IRA by charting the individual funds in the portfolio. And did the same thing for the funds in my 401(k). Then I turned the line graph into a stacked area chart, like the ones on CNBC that chart individual stocks. Then I started plotting growth trends against my initial investments. Then some of my stock options began to vest, and I developed functions that would compute the growth (or loss) against the individual strike price of each stock option, plus one larger function that denoted the combined growth/loss of all of the stock options as a whole. Then I discovered the RANK function, and installed it to compare the value of my investments at the current days’ close against the previous days, creating a Historical Hot 100 of sorts for Sonny Amou, Inc.™. And then I—yeah. You got there first. One elaborate, boring-ass waste of time.

The other person who beat me on this learning curve was Charlotte. One night she’d had a long day and wanted a night in front of the tube. Recognizing I hadn’t yet maxed out my inner spaz, I logged on the computer and began researching historical data on one of the mutual funds in my Roth. An hour later, she walked in, holding Selina. “What are you working on?”

“Oh, geeking out on investment stuff. I figured out how to track the growth of each of these funds since Ed converted my index fund last month.” Ed was the financial advisor I had used for years, with whom I kept in touch via a couple of phone calls a year, but hadn’t seen since 1995.

I toggled over to the master chart, and pointed to a stack of colours resembling a Rocket Pop. “See, this fund here has grown about 4.27%, and this one here is about 4.8%, but this fund, which covers emerging markets, is at about 12.61%, which is good, because since it was about 37% of the initial split, it brings up the overall growth by 9.82%.”

Charlotte grinned and rolled her eyes. “You’re totally obsessed,” she said, and walked back into the living room.

“Yeah…uh, I guess I love numbers.” And this was true, yet not the whole story. Since moving into the beach house, I’m trying to phase out of living like…well, like an overgrown graduate student who has a big cabinet of poison, a cool collection of hats, and not much else. By dint of years of jobs that were either tenuous or allowed me to tread water, I’ve never had to figure out the next phase. I’m doing it now. The stakes are higher, because the prime number I’m now considering is two.

All sorts of ifs arrive with two, like where do we live next, whether we want to stay in San Diego, and most critically, what resources become available should I or Charlotte lose my job. Louie’s text brought that back into focus. Even in an established law firm, (among the most airtight places to work), one could find themselves in the unemployment line. It crossed my mind I could have been among the latest batch of pinkslipped if I were still working at The Firm. With this recession, the impact seems higher, definitely worse than the last one. And forgive me for being obvious, but I don’t want myself nor Charlotte added to the economic body count already out there. I’ve seen that movie already. Twice.

--for Alma, who put up with a lot