Two Too Many

A few of you following this raggedy little blog may know that I have been dealing with the inevitable loss of a very dear online friend, George. Well, on Sunday night I got home and logged on to learn that George's struggle was over. He is gone from us.

There are many of us scattered across the globe, from Liverpool to Puerto Rico, who have been struggling with this. How can you define a friendship, let alone grieve such a friendship, when it primarily existed in the spaces between the ones and zeroes out in the ether of an online community? And yet here we all are striving to do that very thing while trying to grapple with a very real sense of deep loss and sorrow.

I have said before, and will say again, that online communities are the very definition of a "meeting of the minds." There is a purity of communication unmarred by pheromones or hormones or physical distraction that cannot be found anywhere else. Pen pals do not loom large in the physical realm and so their words can be truly absorbed, taken into account, and accepted free of any other consideration. And now we have all lost a great mind, a great friend, a good voice stilled before we had heard all that we wanted to hear. It is strange and hard and the reality seems cruelly surreal.

Tonight I received a phone call that has shocked me to stillness. Another death, this time wholly unexpected. A good, kind, gentle and generous man, a man I worked with four days a week, died suddenly. John had a heart attack, I am told.

What am I to make of all this? One death would be too many. Two deaths in the space of three days? It is too much. It is two too many.

The truly notable thing about all of this is that one loss feels no different than the other. Each of these good men left their mark on my life, on my heart in their own unique way, and the disbelieving grief I feel is the same in both situations. There is a hole in my life where these two voices used to be. I am poorer today by the loss of two good friends. And no matter how I met them and knew them, I did know them. I was fortunate enough to know them.

I am so sad. I am so lucky. I got to tell each of them how special they were to me before it was too late. In fact, one of the last things I said to my friend John before he left the last time I saw him was how glad I was that I knew him, how glad I was that he was with us and doing all the things he did for everyone. And George? I got the chance to call and talk to him in Hospice, and I got to thank him for being my friend.

Thank you both, gentlemen. You were good, gentle men. I will miss you both and I will take your friendships with me through the rest of my life with gratitude.

Good night.

George

I always used to consider the friendships I formed online to be transient, shifting, intangible things, meant to last as long as my interest in the places where they were formed.

Then some things changed. I met one or two people who seemed to either share my thoughts exactly, or had the thoughts I hoped to have someday when I "grew up" and became a more mature version of myself. I met some people who, once befriended, refused to come unstuck, refused to spin away off into the ether of the internet.

I met some people who knew how to hold on, and they taught me that real friends are where you find them. They taught me that I was worth holding onto. They taught me that an online friendship was the purest and truest definition of the phrase "meeting of the minds."

Out here on the internet we don't have facial expressions unless we use pictures or the funny squiggles at the top of the keyboard, so we learn how to talk to one another truthfully, simply, honestly, and clearly. We share our thoughts as clearly as we can, and we meet one another out here mind to mind in a way that can't be matched out in the "real world," where hormones and facial expressions and distractions of the flesh can lead us astray.

And among all these meetings, the one I have treasured the most and for the longest, and have taken for granted so foolishly, is my friendship with George.

He has told me many times that I am like a little sister to him. He's known me when I was nice, and when I was not nice, and when I was downright cat shit mean. And through it all, he was there, just being my friend anyway.

George, I hope you somehow can know how much I care, how much I miss your words out here in the fragile air of the internet. I hope that somehow you can sense that I am just as much your friend as you have been a friend to me. And if you never get a chance to see these words, I just wanted them out there, trumpeting loud for the world to see, that this good man was, is and always will be...

...my friend.

I'm Only Afraid Of The Darkness Of Humanity

A recent discussion on a forum I frequent sent me into the old, feared and all-too-familiar tailspin.

Why children? Of all the people that someone could choose to harm, befoul, or destroy, why children?

Oh, I know, I know all the old information about the feeling of power a sociopath garners from exerting that fleeting physical superiority over the small and clean and innocent. I know all the tripe about how children are convenient victims, being more malleable and inclined to trust and respect those in positions of authority. I know that the very young don't know all the rules and thus can endanger their own lives simply because they don't recognize the danger, the lurking death around every corner, behind smiling faces that cover dark souls.

But damn it. Damn. It. I can't seem to untangle my thoughts and my heart from all the pain and agony and misery that the smallest, weakest members of our society are forced to endure simply because they are convenient targets.

Every fresh story that erupts on the news that involves some monstrous act perpetrated against a child fills me with a sick horror. And, being a person who has been endowed with an overactive imagination, it takes all the power of will I possess to keep from picturing (and picturing, and picturing) the last hours of those small victims' lives. And it tortures me. It torments me, it disturbs my sleep, it casts a pall over me for days.

Do you remember the woman who buckled her children into their carseats and rolled them down a boat ramp into a lake, then ran screaming that a black man had carjacked her? Do you remember why she did it? I do. I remember that her children were an impediment to a new relationship she hoped to start, so she just... disposed of them. Threw them away like garbage. I am haunted by the idea that those little children, as they felt the water rising, could see her standing only a few feet away on the shore, doing nothing to help them. By the idea that they wondered why their mother was punishing them. That fills me with such impotent rage and hatred I can't even find words to express it.

I could put a catalog of such events down here in this space, things that haunt and send me into a frenzy inside my head: Polly Klaas, Adam Walsh, and on and on and on. Every one hurts me. Every one breaks my heart. And every time another child is lost, I am subjected to the same parade of faces and thoughts. Carly Brucia being led away, terrified, her parents' last portrait of their child captured on a grainy surveillance camera behind an abandoned filling station. JonBenet Ramsay, dead and defiled in her own home, the killer never discovered and so never brought to justice.

My mother-in-law has a quote that she paraphrases, and I've tried unsuccessfully to find its source for years; whatever its source, it is so terribly sad and so terribly true: "A society that eats its young is doomed to extinction."

I just wish the ones being eaten weren't the children. I wish that the evil manifest in the minds and hearts of those who would do harm to an innocent would simply metamorphose into a real darkness, one that would eat them from the inside, destroy them before they could destroy a victim. I wish that all those little shining pieces of potential had had their chance to grow and become. I wish that I had the power to will all that evil out of existence.

But I don't. And I think that's the worst of it - the impotence, the inability to find a way to protect all the little ones, the innocent victims of a world that wants to eat them.

More than anything else, I wish my thoughts would leave me alone. I wish I had a "care/don't care" switch that would permit me to stop the tailspin. But since I don't, I, and so many other people in this world who are not filled with the darkness that would cause a person to do such horrible things, are also the victims of the monsters.

We are simply being consumed at a slower rate, one bite of sorrow and pain and misery at a time.

Family Trait: Bop Bag Clownism

In my family, there's a definite tendency to roll with the punches. Life smacks you a good one? You go down and then come back up and knock the current obstacle on its ass with your forward momentum. That is a true fact about just about everyone in my family, on both sides. We are hardy, like weeds. We will come up swinging. We will bounce back up, a "fuck you" smile on our faces, and dare you to try that shit again.

like this scary bastard.

But sometimes? It can be tempting, after the latest in hundreds of smackdowns, to just... stay down. To stop bouncing back up. To lay down and give up and just quit. Fighting. Every. Single. Thing. Every. Single. Day.

Luckily, I'm just not wired that way. Luckily, there's a part of me that just flat-out refuses, refuses to stay down. It's an involuntary response, like blinking or the beat of my heart. It's beyond my control. With or without my input, the Standard Operating Procedure after any new life-punch is that upward spring, that teeth-clenched smile of sheer you're-not-bigger-than-me, that stupid-stubborn refusal to quit, that inability to admit when I'm beaten.

So I'm never beaten. I'm never down for long.

I will keep on practicing that upward bound. I will refuse to admit defeat. After all, I'm wired that way. I'm preset for refusal to give in. There's no quit in me.

There is, however, a healthy dislike of both clowns and dolls. Why the hell did I find that photo? Thanks for the nightmares, self.

So Basically That Sucks

Another hit from the Bad News Fairy:

Apparently, my aunt has to go in for a procedure to determine whether or not she has fucking cancer.

Cancer.

CANCER.

I hate cancer. I am sick unto the very death of its bullshit and I am sick to the very heart of me that yet another person in my life has to go through the gut-wrenching terror of being told they may have it.

I am disgusted with the knowledge that we can make phones that will do everything but make our coffee and paint our toenails for us, we have cars that will fucking park themselves, we have every bullshit stupid lazy innovation there ever was to keep us fat fucks parked on our sofas like cattle, mindlessly cudding while we watch New Jersey Housewives Think They Can Dance Like America's Next Top Supermodel, but we don't know how to stop fucking CANCER.

I'm just a little fed up with the concept that we need just one more inane congressional time-wasting session of any description more than we need to tax the ever-loving shit out of the superrich and send even a portion of that money toward research that would prevent the deaths of countless thousands of people every year. That some people deserve more medical attention than others. That make-your-dick-bigger pills are more important than AIDS or cancer research.

Not that I'm surprised. I have spent the last year among the frail and elderly population of my town more often than not; I see how little society as a whole cares what happens to them. And these are the individuals who can make it out of their homes to come and be social at our little dive cafe. What of the people who are too old, too frail, too broken, or too broke to leave their homes at all? What of the people whose false teeth are broken and can't afford to replace them, so stay home from shame? What of the people who have cancer, fucking cancer, and live a life of quiet terror as they wait to die because we haven't figured this shit out yet?

What's the goddamn holdup here? Top of the food chain, most advanced society in history, but we can't fix a cellular aberration yet?

The fuck?

I am raging, I know; I don't make sense, I know. I am throwing straw men out left and right, I know. But jesus, JESUS, why haven't they fixed this yet? Why is cancer still a tolling doom-bell?

Things Are The Same. Things Are Different.

Bullet-form blog entry because I am a lazy, lazy human being:

• The car is dead. Long live the car. Basically, it is broken in an expensive way that will take a month or two to save for, and then it will be paid off and will need to be put into my name and insured all over again, so fuck it, we're taking the bus for a while. I'd be sadder if we lived in BFE where there wasn't a bus that ran practically outside my front door every day, but since that isn't the case? Meh. Catching up on my knitting in a BIG way.
• It is... I guess...?... springtime headed into summer here, but you'd never know it by looking. Mother Nature is being as bipolar here as she is everywhere else, and as such has seen fit to dump bucketloads of rain on us instead of sweet, tremulous spring sunlight. Again, meh. I don't have a seed planted anywhere to be impatient over, so I am doing okay. Although that makes me wish that I had a yard to plant seeds in to be impatient over, kind of.
• Coming up here in three days is my mother's birthday. Should I tell you, Internet? I think I will. The last time I went up to the cemetery, I couldn't find her grave. I ended up wandering the general area where I remembered her grave to be, wild-eyed, on the verge of tears, feeling like the worst child in the history of children, even though it has long been my philosophy that I don't need to visit a patch of earth to love and honor my lost loved ones. Also, I have specifically requested that my loved ones scatter my ashes in some top-secret place of no value (the side of the highway would even be fine) so that people will do the same for me: honor and respect my memory wherever you happen to be, and place no value on the place where my ashes are deposited.
• Like how I sidestepped how my mom's birthday will be making me feel? Alright, I will admit it. It will be miserable. I will pretend to be normal, all the while feeling a bitter, churning mixture of emotions on the inside. But nobody will be able to tell, and I will spend another year trying not to feel sorry for myself because nobody is able to tell.

And on that cheerful note, that's all the news that is news here. What's going on in your world? (Donna, I have been following along. I'm so glad your knee is working out so well. Really, really glad.)

I love you, Infinity

I was talking to my aunt on the phone this evening. She's had a rough time just lately; she's had to stand by and watch as several people she loved fought their battles, unable to lend anything but hope and sorrow as each won or lost their individual struggle.

So when she told me that she went to the beach to recharge her batteries, and that she felt more at peace and close to God there, I knew exactly what she meant and what the ocean had done for her, because it does the same for me, only in a different way.

When life is just too hard, when things have come to a place where I feel that the box full of emotions I keep locked tight inside me is about to burst its chains and spill forth on everyone around me, I make for the ocean. When I stand on the shore looking out to where the sky and the water become a place of mist and illusion, each echoing the other until they are an indistinct, twinned line, I feel as though my seemingly insoluble problems are a waste of infinite space and time.

When I watch the endless, repeating cycle of water lapping the shore, pulling away and overflowing back again forever and ever and ever, I think: How is it that I feel that my little problems are so large? On this scale, where these waters will come in and go away again until the Earth ceases to hold tight to the Moon, my worries are as fleeting as a breath.

When the wind blows the tingle of salt into every pore of my skin, chilling me and sealing out the babble of all of my more trivial thoughts, I am set free from old ideas and old fears. I am able to be alone inside my head, in some way more alone than at any other time. I am able to dispassionately view the things that have haunted and harried me and put them into perspective.

As an irreligious person, I don't feel the need to be close to a creator, but I do feel a great sense of wonder and awe that I am a part of such a beautiful, complex system as this shore, this world, this galaxy. My tiny little self is a part of something so immense, so wonderful, so amazingly complicated, I can't help but revel in that sense of delight, of oneness with all things. I can never forget that I am made of star-stuff:




Symphony of Science - 'We Are All Connected' (ft... by wamane


So when my auntie tells me she feels better and closer to God after her visit to the ocean, I get it. Oh, I get it. She was reminded of her part in the great Infinite, and how beautiful it is to get to be alive as a part of it all.

Actually, that makes me want to get away to the ocean myself, and as soon as I can. I need to refresh my sense of my place in the infinite, as well.

Guest Post: MAH BABY

You guys, you guys, my kid is a writer. Holy crap. Here is her composition for English class, called "How It Feels To Be Me." (I've changed names to protect the innocent, and she's going by Brel for the purposes of this post.) Share my joy! (Except the woman part. She's seventeen, so I DISAGREE with the woman part. But I'm a mom. What do you want from me?)

---

I often wonder what people think of me.

By often I mean constantly.

Constantly means when I'm taking a shower. When I'm getting on a bus. When I'm wrestling my coat into my locker. When I'm putting on makeup in public bathrooms.

Sometimes people say what they think of me, but when I hear it, I often decide they're wrong.

I've heard people call me a bitch. I'm not, though, really. I am a know-it-all, I am bossy, I do complain about people who irritate me. I don't go out of my way to hurt people. I don't talk about people behind their backs. In my little neighborhood between Martin Luther King and Dekum street, I learned better than that. I am not a bitch.

According to some I'm a hipster. After watching “Portlandia” I sincerely hope not. I don't think I have the holier-than-thou attitude hipsters come programmed with, and I don't own any old English riding boots or look good in tiny floral skirts.

I spend most (all) of my time with a group of boys. They spend all their time playing Magic™ and talking about their Dungeons and Dragons™ characters. Looking at my friends, it'd make sense for me to be a nerd.

But guess who isn't a nerd?

I'm not so lost in a fantasy world that I can condone myself blowing off priorities and failing classes. I'm not so tangled up in a game that I allow myself to spend upwards of thirty dollars a week on cards. Where I come from, in a little red house full of brown-skinned abuela and a blonde-haired mama, I learned better than that.

People seem surprised when I say I have Latino heritage. I don't think it's so hard to believe. I've actually found myself in arguments over the subject—“Shut up, Brel, you are not Mexican.” I didn't say I was. “You are not Hispanic.” Yes, actually. “You ain't got nothin' but white in you.” You don't know me.

It's almost worse when people believe me, especially adults. It seems like after the fact is public that I'm Hispanic, people expect something different from me—like somehow my entire self changes because they know my racial background.

Well, where I come from, where half the people around me are white Southerners and the other half Hispanic Coloradans from Pueblo, I learned better than that.

If I'm none of these things, then what am I?

I'm a big sister. If I was asked my best friend, I'd say [redacted] or [redacted] or [redacted] (sorry, readers, protecting the innocent, etc. - M.). If I was asked who I'll love for the rest of my life with no conditions, I'd say my baby sister. In a way, she's also my baby. She's my number one inspiration, second to none. She's made of the same stuff I am, only different—she got more of the Southerners, with her honey hair and sturdy body. She's gonna grow up and be tougher than me, but right now she's just irritating, aggravating, impossible, and the best thing my parents ever gave me.

I'm a woman. I'm not a little girl anymore, but sometimes the veil that separates is blown aside, and I can be both for awhile. It takes a woman to look at a situation and say “Let's make the best of this” and then do it. It takes a woman to run interference between a group of seven teenage boys and three teenage girls. It takes a woman to know exactly what to do when [redacted]'s carsick and [redacted]'s homesick and [redacted]'s just plain sick. Where I come from, kitty-corner from J. and her five kids and their however-many kids, across the street from M., down the street from C., and with a little sister of my own, I learned that.

I'm a singer. I sing in multiple choirs and multiple bands, as well as being notorious at home for loud, midnight-showertime concerts. I know how to croon jazz, I know how to open up and sing opera, I can turn my vocal vibrato on and off. I am in the honor choir at my school, I am part of a family that is held together by music. Where I come from, singing bluegrass while stacking dishes into a cabinet, I learned that.

I'm a Brel. I don't know what a Brel is really, but am I supposed to yet? It sure seems to me that if I knew exactly what I was already, there'd be no reason for me to live.

That's how it feels to be me. It feels like nobody knows, not even me yet, and by the time I've figured out what I am, I'll have lived that definition out. It feels like a book where the end's gone and got lost, and now I've got to go find it. It feels for all the world like I'm alive—and I wouldn't have it any other way.

March Second

I love and miss you, my mama.

Today is the anniversary of your death. I was watching a show just now and somebody said, "Someday you'll be standing over a rock with your momma's name on it and it will be too late," and I just sprang a leak, silent sorrow dripping down my cheeks and causing one of those I'm-not-crying-no-really pressure headaches.

And it's a weird place I'm in, Mom. I still love you so goddamn much. I still miss you, even though I think we'd have beaten each other senseless several times had you lived into my young adult years. I still wish I had you to talk to. I still think that when you died I lost my very first unswerving ally, a person who, right or wrong, would have had my back without fail, without ceasing, without a question or a qualm.

But I don't hurt as much as I thought I would for some reason this year. I don't hurt as much as I used to. I don't know what that means, if it means I've healed some more or if I'm so numbed and callous that I am a terrible daughter to you and should be ashamed of myself. I don't know.

I just didn't want this day to go by without remarking on the fact that you aren't here. You deserve to be remembered. You deserve to be missed. You were an amazing, talented, beautiful and loving woman. You made mistakes. You hurt me. You were special and funny and I adored you and fuck, you adored me right back and I wish you were still here. I wish you were still here. I really, really do.

So yeah. Disjointed, goofy, repetitive and all, here's my shout to the world that you were here, mama. You were here and now you are not and I wish that wasn't true. Since it is, I do my best to deserve your love and respect even though you can't actually bestow them on me anymore. I am living up to you every day. Maybe, since that is so, I don't need to miss you, since I carry you with me always.

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling)

                            i fear 

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

-E.E. Cummings

Re-reborning

I am really struggling with the impulse to blog. I can't decide whether I want to give it up or not.

I think I wanted the rebirth of a blogging space in the first place as a kind of screaming, wild-eyed, coming-at-you-with-me-broadsword-swinging act of defiance against the human excrescence that worked their very Phelpsiest black magic to ruin my original blog. However, I didn't realize that by yielding that space, by fleeing the scene, I was losing all the joy in the act along with the venue.

I occasionally stop by if I have something I want to say, but Jesus, could I be more of a Debbie Downer lately? Depression, to me, should be written about with a scalpel-like finesse, not used to bludgeon the reader to death. My writings about my feeeeelings are like the lead pipe of blogging. I step right up, clonk you repeatedly about the head and shoulders, then run away for months at a time.

Fuck, I'm the Emotional Mugger of the blog world.

I have a plan, though. I think I may just go through the years of posts I managed to save from the original blog and sort of kind of paste one in from time to time. I think in that way I might be able to steal the comforting wallpaper from the old apartment and paste it on, in jigsaw patches, in my newer, draftier quarters. Maybe rediscovering some of the old words, the old happiness, will restart my engine in a more wholesome, happy context.

If I haven't scared you away forever, what do you think of that idea?

Falling

I still think about it when the leaves start changing colors. Not all at once, but bits and pieces, little flakes of color from the kaleidoscope, random scenes from that part of my life. Today it shook loose memories of a car ride and the first rumbles of the earth that signified the beginning of the end.

To be honest, I don't know why fall takes me there. I can't even remember what time of year it was when she got the diagnosis. All I remember is waiting in the car with a book, and seeing her come out of the doctor's office, pale and quiet and somehow smaller than she had ever seemed before. In my world, she loomed. Who am I kidding? She was the world. But on that day, she was almost a stranger, a frail and milky woman standing where my strong, scary, vibrant mother should have stood.

I don't remember what was said exactly, but I remember quickly decoding the cryptic speech they were using as Dad drove us toward home. I remember knowing, knowing, with a bladder-loosening terror, that it was bad. Really bad. As bad as when Grandma got sick; when Grandma died. That we were falling toward a dark, terrible place, and there was no way to stop the descent.

I remember that she said, "Stop me by the store. I can't deal with this without a beer. Just a couple, then I'll quit." She hadn't ever said anything like that before. Mom and beer, beer and Mom, that was the combo. And Salem Lights, of course.

Everything else from that day is a blur, but those few little vignettes keep popping into my head, driving me to my computer to pull up old Bob Dylan tracks (god, how she loved Dylan, and I love him, too, because she made him a part of the soundtrack of my childhood) and Judds songs and even, lord help us, Elvis singing "In The Garden," a song I hated off an album I hated by an artist I hated for most of my life. Tonight? It made me cry. And I listened to the whole song.

Tonight, Bob Dylan's harmonica and organ and weather-beaten drone sounded like lullabies, like connections to a pair of hands that I can no longer touch, to a lap in whose comfort my head will never again rest, to a face I will never see except in a kaleidoscope of pain and loss and lifelong lonely regret for all the things I will never get to ask her. Show her. Go to her for comfort over.

More than two thirds of my life have gone by since she died. You would think that all these memories would be shadows by now, vague things, and that the hurt and sheer solar plexus-punch gasping shock of it all would be gone away and over with by now. But it isn't. It isn't. It isn't.

It's still able to step up and stab me in the tender places, randomly, viciously, slyly. I can go for months without even thinking about it, and then it's in my face again, biting, bitter, freezing-hot and hideous.

I used to love the fall. I used to love the smells, the feel of the air, the gray skies. I used to look forward to the metamorphosis of the leaves and the first smoke from the chimneys and the ozone-scented streets after the first serious rain. Now I hate it all, because, regular as clockwork, the kaleidoscope kicks up another little shard of sorrow for me to cut myself on. And I bleed, and I cry, and I wonder: Will this ever ease? Will it ever not hurt? And what would that make me, if it didn't hurt me anymore?

Just another broken soul, falling, falling toward the dark?

I will accept the pain and the stealthy grief. But I will resent for the rest of my life the fact that death has stolen from me another thing that I love, and that it has done so across the span of time the way it has.

I don't have so many beloved people or ideals or dreams that I can afford to lose any more.

Invader

You insidious, hateful monster, how I loathe you.

Slowly, slyly, you spread your tendrils and coils through her brain, taking from her first this small memory, then that one. Then you steal her sense of recent things, making her ask for reassurance in a small, frightened voice every few minutes that she is indeed who she is, she is where she is, and inquire timidly who all these people are.

Stealthily, you stretch out your fog-filled hands, taking more and more in greater and greater portions until she sits, silent, tiny in her favorite chair, eyes dark with the shadows you've cast over her mind and spirit. I see the child you've left behind in her eyes, without even the comfort of knowing she will soon understand how it all works, because from moment to moment she forgets even that she would like to understand.

And then your friend attrition joins in, adding first one small problem, then another, then piling on still more, until her frail little body can't handle either the causes or the cures.

Meanwhile, we all watch, and mourn, and wait for the moment when we will be sorrowing and rejoicing at the same time; sorrowing because we have lost a beloved and beautiful being from our lives, rejoicing because she has won free of your filthy, vile fingers.

Oh, yes, I loathe you. I hope they find the way to destroy you very soon. We aren't alone in our vigil, not by a long way, and the fact that so many others know exactly how this feels just enrages me more, fuels my hatred. The only consolation I have is in knowing that you will die when your host does, and so you taint even a clean grief.

Someday we will find a way to bar you out, you invading filth, and I hope I am alive to witness it.

I will be waiting and hoping for just that very thing.