2/17/08: Thelonious Monk Death Day

Today is Thelonious Monk death day. If you wish to celebrate, go out and maunder in the crepuscule. I would but it's pouring rain here. I'll have to maunder inside under the fluorescent lights.

90604

Quick update?

ok.

reading?

The Chinatown Deathcloud Peril. Pulp fiction with an historical twist. Fun stuff.

listening?

The latest Heartless Bastards. Four or so really good songs, the rest pretty good. Loses its steam by the end. But that voice...

watching?

The Wire. First Season on dvd. Easily as good as the best of the Sopranos and Deadwood. Maybe the best television I've ever seen. Seriously, it's the closest TV will ever come to being a visual novel in terms of the depth and complexity of the story and the characters. Not a single false note in thirteen hours.

working?

Hard, but with regular rewards. Got my second raise this year just the other day. I am upwardly mobile lower middle class. I have oodles of vacation time by American standards. No complaints here.

anticipating?

Moving at the end of the month. Yet again! New part of town this time around and I'll be able to walk to things, which will be nice in a city which requires an automobile for almost everything. Also, headed to Florida for two days at a nice hotel on a pretty Island with my sweetie and her folks.

feeling?

A bit melancholy the last couple days. My Uncle Jake died this weekend. We all knew it was coming. He decided against the heart surgery. But he didn't die in a hospital and it was not prolonged. He was a character. A bartender all his life. The bar, the track and the shore were his favorite places. He loved a cigar and a drink. He was thoroughly Philadelphia.

Also, my buddy Big Country moved away to Missouri this week. I'm going to miss him. It felt a bit like the end of an era in my life. But in the meantime a new one has been underway for quite some time now and things are good. My apologies to those I should have been in touch with this past week, things have been a little hectic.

zoinks!

"There doesn't have to be a beginning of time. According to our theory, the universe may be infinitely old and infinitely large."

The cosmologists are saying perhaps we've got it wrong. Not one big bang, but a series. This, they say, would better account for some of the problems that the single bang theory can't explain.

Practically speaking, it doesn't seem to make much difference for us, though going out in a big bang sounds kind of cool, and makes me think of Whitman:

But if he's right, how long have we got until the next big bang? "We can't predict when it will happen with any precision - all we can say is it won't be within the next 10 billion years." Good job, because if we were around we would instantly disintegrate into massless particles of light.

AARRGH I'm dead...

Happy Blackbeard's Death Day! Blackbeard was killed on this day in 1718 in a battle with the British Navy at Ocracoke Island in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Recent revisionist scholarship claims that Pirates were not so much roving murderous sodomites as floating autonomous communities that offered freedoms otherwise unavailable in that day and age. Either way, Pirates are cool dude.

On the mental jukebox: Ennio Morricone--I don't know the name of it, but it's from a spaghetti western soundtrack and the last line is "we are fearless men..."

mediums, witches, the dead oh my!

Some good Halloween reading:

Over at National Review there's a nice piece on the Met's exhibit The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult.

The immaterial had been made material, and in a supposedly more skeptical age, that's what counted. In great part, the enormous popularity of spiritualism in the later 19th century was a response to the threat that science increasingly represented to the certainties of traditional belief. Science had made Doubting Thomases of many, but spiritualism, by purportedly offering definitive proof of an afterlife, enabled its followers to reconcile ancestral faith and eternal superstitions with, they thought, fashionable modernity and the rigors of scientific analysis.

That the science was junk, and the evidence bunk, did not, in the end, matter very much. What counted was that old superstitions had been given a new veneer, and, if that veneer soon warped into a bizarre creed all its own, that's something that ought not to surprise anyone familiar with the nonsense in which mankind has long been prepared to believe — and still is. Any visitor to "The Perfect Medium" tempted to feel superior to the credulous old fogies now making fools of themselves on the walls of the Met should take another look at the metaphysical shambles that surrounds him in our modern America of snake churches, suburban shamans, mainstreet psychics, psychic detectives, pet psychics, psychic hotlines, spirit guides, movie-star scientology, alien abductions, celebrity Kabbalah, Crossing Over, Ghost Hunters, Shirley Maclaine, resentful Wiccans, preachy pagans, and (though I know this won’t be entirely welcome) don't even get me started on Intelligent Design.

I appreciate that last sentiment in particular, and I don't have to take a backseat to anyone when it comes to being a skeptical curmudgeon, but I cannot deny that part of me thinks snake churches, suburban shamans, and mainstreet psychics are fun in a sideshow kind of way and of considerable interest in a much less fun academic kind of way.

Also at NR, conservatives try to grasp the appeal of Wicca. Really. Kind of amusing.

Their beliefs are very postmodern — what they believe can be tweaked for each practitioner. They do not believe in absolute good or evil and don't really seem to care about the history of their religion — only the experiences they gain from it.

The author is correct to point out that Wicca, like much that falls under the heading of "new age," is solipsistic and increasingly commercialized. She comes off as being fair and even-handed in claiming that Wicca fulfills a spiritual yearning for young women, but is herself convinced that Christianity, when practiced correctly, can do a better job of satisfying that need.

And finally, in the L.A. Times, Mary Roach, author of Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, wonders why the supposed speech of the dead is so...inane:

HERE'S MY BEEF with the dead — you'd think they'd be bursting to talk about all the things us not-yet-dead are madly curious about. Such as: Hey, where are you now? What do you do all day? What's it feel like being dead? Can you see me? Even when I'm on the toilet? Would you cut that out?

But in medium-brokered exchanges, if the dead come through at all, they come through in cryptic little impressions: a stout woman, a small black dog, the date May 23. When they talk in the background on tape recordings or over the radio — and there are thousands of people who believe that the garbled, echoey words and whispers they can make out on tape or over the airwaves are coming from the Beyond — they say things like "bird songs at night" or "please interrupt" or "industrious!" It's a maddening way to communicate.

Based on such reports, ghosts strike me as quite senile, which I suppose is par for the course when you've been around 200 or 300 years.

Sounds reasonable to me. I'm not quite half that old and I already babble incoherently. Happy Halloween Tricksters.

Did Harry call?

Halloween 1926: Harry Houdini dies as a result of a ruptured appendix after being punched in the stomach. Houdini had promised to communicate from the afterlife if it was possible. We're still waiting.

shaken not interred

Those Europeans are making rapid advances in the field of body disposal:

DEAD bodies could be freeze-dried, shaken to a fine powder and used as compost under proposals to introduce a new, more eco-friendly method of corpse disposal to the UK.

The process, which is known as promession, has been developed in Sweden and aims to address the shortage of burial spaces and reduce the mercury pollution created by dental fillings during cremation.

It involves freezing the coffin and body to -18C before lowering them into liquid nitrogen at -196C, which leaves them extremely brittle.

A vibrating pad is used to reduce the remains to a powder and a magnetic field then removes all traces of mercury and other metal residues from fillings or hip replacements.

The remains are then put into a biodegradable coffin made from vegetable matter and buried in a shallow grave, where they will be absorbed into the earth within six to 12 months.

So far so interesting, but I find this a little puzzling:

A spokesman for the Church of Scotland said: "There do not appear to be any theological implications with this method of disposal, but it sounds like an appropriate thing from an environmental viewpoint."

No theological implications? Really? Oh, wait, they're European.

2019 and counting

Hmmm. According to the DeathClock, I have about fifteen or twenty years left to live. First try, I got 2023, but I lost two years the second time with 2021. The third time I got 2019. I'm knocking two years off my life every time I check! I think I will stop checking. And more good news: it tells me I'm overweight. At least I know that's not the case--I've been getting back in shape and my gut is all gone. I'm actually beginning to get nice abs. A new thing for me. Too bad I won't have long to enjoy them. Thanks Bunni.

you are going to die

I am not a computer nerd, or a tech nerd of any sort, and I don't give a whit for Steve Jobs one way or another, but I did like this excerpt from his commencement speech at Stanford:

When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "no" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important thing I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

It is refreshingly earnest--a quality not in fashion in our culture, I know. I am, in my own way, in the habit of doing what Jobs suggests (remembering that I'll be dead soon), but it is a difficult standard to meet. Delayed gratification and preparation for the future are important for our continued survival, but neither would matter much if we really knew that our death was imminent. Of course we don't actually know, maybe our death is imminent. And even if it's not immediately on the horizon it's not that far off. Perhaps the problem isn't that we will die, but that we live too long?

just another friday night

So the death party was a blast. There was a distressing lack of single straight women, but I had a good time. I completed my living will. End of life decisions and all that. In a nutshell: gimme all the morphine, codeine etc...you can get your hands on and then leave me to die. I suppose there's still the matter of all my shit. Who gets which guitar? Do I just leave them all for Bunni? What's he gonna do with a left-handed guitar? Who wants a house full of books? Can't leave the Glock for Dad, he'll wind up using it on someone. Someone please wipe my hard drive clean. Thank you.

In other news, Eugene, our favorite East Atlanta crackhead turned back up just as suddenly as he had disappeared. Most had written him off for dead. Turns out the story I'd heard was at least partly true. Held up the gas station with a cap gun and got out on time served after nine months. Or something like that. But he's back. Just like old times.

The Death Party!

The evening's entertainment.

Rather than celebrate my very good friend Mark's birthday, we are going to celebrate death. Yes we are some morbid fuckers. But we had been talking about this for a while and decided it would be fun. We all die. Why not acknowledge it and have a party? So that's what we're doing. Mark's had some intimate encounters with death in the past year, and as anyone who knows me, (or if you just read this silly blog on occasion you've probably gathered) I tend to think a great deal about death. So we hatched the idea for the Death Party.

We will, if the U.S. Post Office has cooperated, have living wills, DNR orders, power of attorney for healthcare forms and all such materials on hand for partygoers. There will be all sorts of tastelessly named shots on hand as well: the vegetative state, the Jose Schiavo, the Challenger, and others. Drunkenness and maudlin weeping will ensue. All are invited.

To death!

anything of real importance

News of impending death has me feeling rather melancholy. As I get older I do try to remind myself to be thankful for my friends and family. That's not right--I am thankful, but I try to remind myself to remember more often just what I have to be thankful for. And I do, but time and routine are powerful forces to overcome. This is from Houellebecq as well, and its sadness fits my mood:

It is possible to know someone for years, decades even, learning little by little how to avoid personal questions and anything of real importance, but the hope remains that someday, in different circumstances, one could talk about such things, ask such questions. Though it may be indefinitely postponed, the idea of a more personal, human relationship never fades, quite simply because human relationships do not fit easily into narrow, fixed compartments. Human beings therefore think of relationships as potentially “deep and meaningful”—an idea that can persist for years, until a single brutal act (usually something like death) makes it plain that it’s too late, that the “deep, meaningful” relationship they had cherished will never exist, any more than any of the others had.

I hereby dedicate myself to not succumbing to the trap of indefinite postponement. Help me out when I need it. Or when you do.

The Elementary Particles

I finished Michel Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles. Whew. I figured there was a good chance that I was going to hate it. I’d read reviews of it a while back that made me think it was not for me. Houellebecq has been described as humorless, self-important, misogynistic, misanthropic…the whole shebang. Then I read this, which made me think twice and actually check it out for myself. I’m glad I did. Make no mistake, it’s a damn bleak book (“darker even than Beckett”):

Humor won’t save you; it doesn’t really do anything at all. You can look at life ironically for years, maybe decades; there are people who seem to go through most of their lives seeing the funny side, but in the end, life always breaks your heart. Doesn’t matter how brave you are, or how reserved, or how much you’ve developed a sense of humor, you still end up with your heart broken. That’s when you stop laughing. In the end there’s just the cold, the silence and the loneliness. In the end there’s only death.

But there’s something…palpable, sorrow perhaps, below the surface, that kept me giving Houellebecq the benefit of the doubt as it implied, for me anyway, an author with a heart capable of moral despair and perhaps even love.

What the boy had felt was something pure, something gentle, something that predates sex or sensual fulfillment. It was the simple desire to reach out and touch a loving body, to be held in loving arms. Tenderness is a deeper instinct than seduction, which is why it is so difficult to give up hope.

Oh, it’s a pretty good read too—it imagines the genesis of a possible future through the story of two brothers. Houellebecq depicts our time as rushing toward dissolution and entropy, but he implies a future that resists being labeled either utopian or dystopian, though I suspect others might disagree, strongly, given the way the book ends: the imminent extinction of the human race. The future itself is only hinted at:

We live today under a new world order,
The web which weaves together all things envelops our bodies,
Bathes our limbs,
In a halo of joy.
A state to which men of old sometimes acceded through music.

Yes music can bring joy to life. It's small acknowledgements like that that preserve the book's humanity. Though Tricky must admit that he himself felt skewered, and rightfully so perhaps, by one passage in particular.

“I’m useless,” he said resignedly. “I couldn’t breed pigs, I don’t have the faintest idea how to make sausages or forks or mobile phones. I’m surrounded by all this stuff that I eat or use and I couldn’t actually make a single thing—couldn’t even begin to understand how they’re made. If industrial production ceased tomorrow, if all the engineers and the specialist technicians disappeared off the face of the earth, I couldn’t do anything to start things over again. In fact, outside the industrialized world, I couldn’t even survive; I wouldn’t know how to feed or clothe myself, or protect myself from the weather. My technical competence falls far short of Neanderthal man. I’m completely dependent on my society, but I play no useful role in it. The only thing I know how to do is write dubious commentaries on outdated cultural issues.

Ouch. I'll share some more pithy Houellebecq wisdom in the next couple days. Right now there are some other controversial novels of the nineties I need to tend to, and some nineteenth century history I've been meaning to comment on. Ouch.

funereal karaoke

So I woke up this morning with the melody of “Sins of the Father” running through my head together with the line “God said don’t send me your tinhorn prayers” and stuck on an image from a dream: There’s a secret door in the top of the freezer that leads up to some sort of attic but one has to climb up into the freezer and this is complicated because it’s frozen over and everything is covered in frost. The attempt to chip away at all this cold white stuff reveals a woman underneath it all, upright in the freezer. Is she dead and frozen? I don’t think it was related to the other image I can remember: standing in the railway yard working on my vertical leap while waiting for the big volleyball match with Duke to get underway. Oy.

When I get to work I read this essay on changes in American funerals by celebrity undertaker Thomas Lynch in the Times:

For many Americans, however, that wheel is not just broken but off track or in need of reinvention. The loosened ties of faith and family, of religious and ethnic identity, have left them ritually adrift, bereft of custom, symbol, metaphor and meaningful liturgy or language. Times formerly spent in worship or communion are now spent shopping or Web-browsing or otherwise passing time. Many Americans are now spiritual tourists without home places or core beliefs to return to.

INSTEAD of dead Methodists or Muslims, we are now dead golfers or gardeners, bikers or bowlers. The bereaved are not so much family and friends or fellow believers as like-minded hobbyists or enthusiasts. And I have become less the funeral director and more the memorial caddy of sorts, getting the dead out of the way and the living assembled for a memorial "event" that is neither sacred nor secular but increasingly absurd - a triumph of accessories over essentials, stuff over substance, theme over theology. The genuine dead are downsized or disappeared or turned into knickknacks in a kind of funereal karaoke - bodiless obsequies where the finger food is good, the music transcendent, the talk determinedly "life affirming," the accouterments all purposefully cheering and inclusive and where someone can be counted on to declare "closure" just before the merlot runs out. We leave these events with the increasing sense that something is missing.

Lynch is right, I suppose, but he seems to miss the point. The problem is not, as he says, that we have abandoned an older set of rituals for a new inadequate set, but that culturally, on some level, death itself has been removed from life. For most of us, it’s the visceral reality of death that is missing. We’ve got plenty of representations but it’s not the same thing. But this did not happen because we've swapped sets of rituals. That's a confusion of cause and effect. Funerary practice in America is just trying to keep up with the realities of culture and the market.

a sucker dies every minute

Tomorrow is my first day off in fourteen days. I've gone almost two years now with only one day off a week so it ain't that big a deal but I sure am looking forward to it.

If you too are in need of a holiday, today is P.T. Barnum death day. To celebrate: con someone in wildly entertaining fashion then buy a drink for your favorite freak.

Fey

My word for today: Fey. Always one of my favorites. I have always associated it with Thelonious Monk for some reason. In a sense the primary Scottish meaning strikes me as redundant: I'm pretty sure we're all doomed to die. Perhaps it's an old word for our basic existential condition? But together with that second meaning it seems to suggest other things. Perhaps those who truly grasp 1 are considered 2 by the rest of us? In any case a great word.

Fey:
function: adjective
Etymology: Middle English feye, from Old English f[AE]ge; akin to Old High German feigi fey and perhaps to Old English fAh hostile, outlawed -- more at FOE
1 a chiefly Scottish : fated to die : DOOMED b : marked by a foreboding of death or calamity
2 a : able to see into the future : VISIONARY b : marked by an otherworldly air or attitude c : CRAZY, TOUCHED

William James on suicide and hope

A timely discovery given recent talk of suicide: I was perusing pragmatism.org and looking through the contents of the journal published by the William James Society when I found a most interesting article. The author, while mounting a convincing defense of James and his defense of religion, discusses James's depression and his reflections on suicide:

In an address to the Harvard YMCA later published
in the volume titled The Will to Believe, James
set out to tend to the “profounder bass note of life” by
addressing the question that became the title of the
essay, “Is Life Worth Living?” His approach here is
simple and direct: what would we say to convince
someone suicidal that life is in fact worth living? James
distinguishes between suicide as the product of genuine
insanity, in which case we can be of no help, and a
more reflective melancholia that results from the studious
life, which may be remedied with yet more reflection.

James identified the hope that life might be anything other than utterly meaningless as a religious impulse. But this was far from any sort of orthodoxy--James, being the good empiricist, believed anyone paying attention to the world would have a hard time assenting to any sort of orthodox theism. The author quotes him:

The visible surfaces of heaven and earth refuse to be
brought by us into any intelligible unity at all. Every phenomenon
that we would praise there exists cheek by jowl
with some contrary phenomenon that cancels all its religious
effect upon the mind. Beauty and hideousness, love
and cruelty, life and death keep house together in indissoluble
partnership, and there gradually steals over us,
instead of the old warm notion of a man-loving Deity, that
of an awful power that neither hates nor loves, but rolls all
things together meaninglessly to a common doom.

Gotta love that James. He looked around at the world and understood perfectly well why someone might want to checkout permanently. But despite his own troubles, James could not allow himself to succumb to despair. He held on to hope and he believed that belief might prove to be self-fulfilling. As the author puts it, both paraphrasing and quoting James:

We have a hand in creating the worlds we inhabit; life is worth living because we have some say in the matter: “believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.”

Good stuff. I find James a helpful philosophical companion because he does not shy away from difficult truths even while sounding an upbeat note. I take solace from that. But I'm still ok with suicide.

If you want to read the whole article, and it's quite good, it's available as a PDF here.

House of the Rising Sun

A interesting article in the L.A. Times today: Archeologists think they may have found the original "House of the Rising Sun," the infamous New Orleans whorehouse, buried beneath a parking garage on Conti Street in the French Quarter. Others are skeptical, and frankly, it's probably best that it remain a folk legend of song and story. My favorite part of the story is Eric Burdon, who recorded the song with the Animals in the sixties, describing New Orleans :

"I like to call New Orleans the cradle of the best of the worst," Burdon said. "The place is reeking of death. It is as dark a town as it is light."

That's why I love it.

news upon returning

So I was out of town for a few days. Had a good time--more on that later. I got back last night and went to have a drink and say hello to some friends. One of whom told me that a mutual acquaintance had died while I was away. It took a minute to register. I had just seen this person a week before. I reserve the use of the word friend for very exclusive company, but this was one of many barfly pals, someone I was accustomed to seeing once or twice a week for the last two years at least. I liked him. He always went out of his way to say hello to me. We'd shot pool together on a few occasions.

His death was shocking to me not just for its finality but because I learned a good bit about him that I had not known. He took his own life. And apparently he had sufficient cause. He was a skinny guy--painfully so. I had always assumed that, like many I know, he was simply doing too many drugs. And while he almost certainly was doing some partying, I came to find out that he had once battled cancer. There are many details missing from the account I've received, and frankly I'm not sure I want to know any more, but it would seem that he was faced with the prospect of dealing with it again. And enduring the pain that comes along with it. So he chose not to. I am sorry that it came to that. I hope he is no longer suffering.

The whole thing has made me realize how much I take for granted. I will never again be able to go to the bar where I would see him on Monday nights without being reminded of his death. May he rest in peace...free from pain.

small failings

I normally don't do these survey/quiz things, but this one was worthwhile, so taking a cue from Bunni, here's some reflection on the year that was.
part one:

1.What did you do in 2004 that you'd never done before?
I started a blog for one and despite a few lapses kept it going. Though I must admit I’m still not certain what it is. But that’s ok. I did at least one thing that I cannot reveal for fear of incriminating the guilty. I taught two classes I’d never taught before and learned a great deal from both. Like what? Well the subject matter (the history of Islam in America and the history of philosophy respectively), but also about teaching, about our culture, about perception and about the fragility of human communication. Or something like that.

2. Did you keep your new years' resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I don’t remember what resolution(s) I may have made last year to be honest. Likely one of them, perhaps two, involved the bench press and I achieved one. But you wouldn’t know it to look at me now. Or, more importantly, you wouldn't know it to observe me bench pressing.
As for this year I have a few resolutions. One is financial: I will get out of credit card debt this year. It is all the more imperative because I now have student loan debts, but frankly those are not as insidious. I have already gained ground on this front and must continue to be diligent. There are a few other lesser, that is to say less defined though ultimately just as important, resolutions but I’m keepin em to myself for now.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth? No.

4. Did anyone close to you die?
I guess it depends on how you define close but there seemed to be a lot of death. Though it hit my friends and family harder than it hit me, I nonetheless found myself reflecting on it quite a bit this year.

5. What countries did you visit?
None and the realization that I have not been out of the country in more than three years is a rash on my groin that must be cured as soon as possible.

6. What would you like to have in 2005 that you lacked in 2004?
A clear vocational sense of mission. There are a few other things I can think of but I’ll leave it at that.

7. What date from 2004 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
There’s not any one date in particular that sticks in my mind, but there were a few days in late May that I will remember very fondly; a good time with a good friend.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
I don’t know and jesus that sticks in my craw. Sadly it may have been the aforementioned bench press. The literal minded answer would be “me” as I got up close to 190 lbs at one point, which is the most I’ve ever weighed, but I’m not sure that was an achievement. Actually I think it is everything I learned teaching the philosophy class.

9. What was your biggest failure?
Oy. I’d like to sign a book contract before starting in on this. Though I don’t know that there was one spectacular failure so much as an accumulation of small failings.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
This is easy: Ibanez artcore hollowbody electric guitar. It has reinvigorated my playing and composing; playing a guitar strung right-handed is now second nature.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?
This is a hard one. My buddy big country. Still sober.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
I can think of a few. Ashcroft is a perennial candidate, though special mention should go to Rumsfeld after Abu Ghraib. Though frankly neither one of them is as appalling or depressing as Islamic fanatics who seem to take delight in decapitation.

14. Where did most of your money go?
Citibank. Really. Fleet, Bank of America and Sallie Mae all got their fair shares too. Which means Amazon got less than in past years. If I added up all my bar tabs I’d see that the Earl got some too, though not as much as they used to.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Not as much as I would have liked. Attractive women are still near the top of the list. Quality time with friends and my trip with br’er Bunni were exciting.

16. What song will always remind you of 2004?
There is no single song that will indelibly remind me of 2004. Some song highlights of the year (some of these are old, nearly a century old in one case, but were new to me):
Tom Waits: Hoist that rag/Make it rain
Bert Williams: The Phrenologist Coon/Where was Moses when the light went out?
Probot: Silent Spring (with Kurt Brecht/D.R.I.)/ Shake your blood (with Lemmy/Motörhead )
The Carter Family: Hello Stranger
Sister Clara Hudmon: Stand by Me

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
i. happier or sadder? I don’t know. Objectively, probably sadder.
ii. thinner or fatter? A little heavier and a good bit weaker.
iii. richer or poorer? Poorer.