I've Fallen and I Can't Get Up

Here I am.

I'm sore. I'm tired. I feel like sitting on the couch and watching TV.

I'm turning into one of those old women who fall. I hate being the woman who falls. Last Sunday, I missed a step that I'd always thought would trip me some day.

I was at church. There was a chair and I thought I'd take a load off, so I put my right hand on the back of it in case it skittered away from under me as I turned to sit.

I forgot about the odd half step in front of it and instead of sitting or even turning, I rocked that chair backward on two legs and proceeded to splay over it.

Great, an embarrassing moment.

Then, the pain hit.

Did you ever notice that for a hard fall, it takes more time for pain to arrive? What is that? Is my brain temporarily out of service? Do hard knocks take longer to traverse my neural pathways? Do I have clutz's block?

"Are you okay?" a half dozen voices said in unison.

"I, I, I ... just give me a minute," I said as the bell of pain continued to chime. I sat there with my mouth open and my eyes unfocused.

When the chair had rocked backward, the seat had come up deep under my right breast and made contact at my right rib. I dropped my left hand to the floor and over-extended my ring and middle fingers. Wait, I needed my middle finger for important driving messages. And my right knee hit the edge of the step.

Finally, the pain subsided enough for me to say something.

"Sh...," I edited half way through a non-church word. "That felt like a mammogram!"

Everybody laughed. My right breast had just encountered the same kind of smash and pull maneuver that a sadistic technician had once performed on it during a procedure that left me sore for a couple of weeks.

I sat very still for a bit while people tut-tutted over me and repeated their question. Finally, I got up slowly and said, "I'm okay now. Thank you."

I hate being the center of that kind of attention. Then, I shuffled to the back of the sanctuary and sat down for the services, fiddling with a little bottle of Aleve that I had in my bag for just such gymnastic adventures at the altar. I endured while a few more people patted me on the shoulder as they moved toward their places. I pulled out gum. I don't have grandkids, but I keep gum in my purse for long sermons. The kids around me love this. I have learned to chew without actually looking like I'm masticating. It's a gift. I'll show you how if you want.The kids are never that great at being discreet and I think the minister is on to me.

I kept my head down and bolted home right after the benediction. There was no way I could stay and chat.

When I got home, I brought Mike into the bathroom with me while I looked for evidence of my self-abuse.

Nothing.

Seriously? My middle finger felt like it might be broken and even went numb as Mike poked and prodded like a TV doctor.

"I don't feel anything broken."

"Well then, look at this."

To hell with my middle finger and my sore knee. I lifted my right arm to show him the rib where I landed on the edge of the chair.

Nothing.

It just looked like I was flashing him the high beams with my arm raised in the air. He raised one eyebrow. I hate when he does that.

"I really did hit it. Hard."

"I have no doubt you did, but I don't think you broke a rib. Does it hurt when you breathe?" He even sounded like a TV doctor

"No. Not at all, but it hurts when I reach for anything or bounce."

"So don't reach for anything or bounce," he said.

"Thank you, Doctor Mike."

"No problem. Do you want me to look at your knee?"

"No, it's just sore, not flattened by a truck."

"Ice and Aleve, then."

"Got it," I muttered. I finally lowered my shirt, as if a bruise might have appeared while we still talked.

Nothing.

Then, I spent the next four days trying to keep from reaching or bouncing. Or being compressed. All week, people seemed to want to hug me. It was impossible. I lived on a regimen of Aleve and ice until last night when I thought I could feel a little less swelling in my rib and remembered less often that I had squashed a melon.

That night, I dreamed that my right breast was six inches longer than the other one. I woke up from this very realistic dream after sleeping only four hours. When I prepared to get into the shower, I happened to look in the mirror again.

I had a black and purple bruise the size of my open hand almost completely hidden under all that fluff. When Doctor Mike got home, I brought him back into the bathroom to show him evidence of my pain.

"The stupid bruises always appears when it's starting to feel better."

"Wow. That really looks like someone is abusing you."

"Yeah, that would be me."

And he hugged me, but not too tightly.

Thank you for listening, jb

The Truth Revealed in Your Crystal Ball

I don't have enough time to do any bit of writing justice today. I resent that. I find myself thinking as if I'm talking with candor to my students:

Be prepared. Unless you're part of the 1%, your dreams will be crushed. What about all that joy with which you contemplated your future? Useless, all of it. Forget hope. Forget the American dream of working hard at what you love and earning money at it. Just resign yourself doing drudge work that looks a little like what you used to like to do in your free time so that you can earn enough money to get by.

There's an inverse relationship between how much you like your job and how much money you can make. That's because nobody wants to do the truly crappy jobs, so they pay better. You can earn a decent living driving a garbage truck. Did you know that? Then, because you're unhappy, you can leave people's garbage strewn about the highway and drag the bin half way down the road in an act of weekly passive aggression because the kid put it in the wrong spot and you don't want to bother leaving a note. Nobody can read your writing anyway and you can't spell. But you can earn a decent living driving garbage.

Wait. You should check the color of your skin. There may be corollaries to that inverse relationship. If you have dark skin and smooth hair, you might earn more money doing what you don't like to do because your parents began to grill you in the second grade to get your math facts right and told you that an A- is as good as an F. No worries. If you play your cards right, you'll become a low-level manager at a fortune 500 company with a slightly larger dumpster-sized cubicle. You'll wonder why your workers stare right through you when you try your parents' management skills on them. You won't be any happier, but you'll have some money to spend on your misery.

If you have dark skin and curly hair, you're pretty much fucked because our current President makes it okay to keep you in shackles. You'll be harassed more often by teachers. You'll be accused of crimes you didn't commit. You'll be imprisoned more often. You might even get arrested while waiting for a friend too long in front of a store or shot in your own car by a police officer who believes you stole that car because he could never afford it even though your wife and child are inside it with you.

If you're a woman, you'll earn only three-quarters what your male cohorts will earn. If you confront your bosses, they'll tell you that the men have families to support and secretly call you a bitch when you leave the room. You'll have to learn how to dance away from the guy who you know will stick his fingers under your skirt if he thinks no one else can see. If you work full time and are married, you'll do most of the chores at home anyway because that's what you're supposed to do. Be smart, marry a man who knows how to plug in a vacuum cleaner and load a washing machine. Then, leave the cat puke lying in his shoe for a while and see what happens. Throw a red sweater in with his underwear and T-shirts a few weeks after the honeymoon and let him imagine wearing pink underwear until it fades. If he does the laundry after that, you're set for life. Then, without much effort, you'll have converted the home to a more equal place. If he yells at you, file for divorce without waiting to see if he'd change a diaper. That shit is not funny in the home.

And if you're a privileged white male, you still have to work. You have to make more money than your wife to be considered a real man. Don't even think of being a stay-at-home dad. The real word for that is 'unemployed.' You'll have to learn to fall down and not cry. You'll have to go to college when robots take over your manufacturing job and the mines become more automated. Even after you get a degree in computer science, you'll have to work ten hours a day in a warehouse containing a hundred and fifty cubicles each with a footprint smaller than a dumpster.

There will always be that guy who opens your lunch in the refrigerator in the break room and steals your cookie. There's that guy who interrupts you every time you have a bright and shining idea at the brainstorming meeting, then tries to pass it off as his own later in the meeting. It'll work and if you complain, you'll look like you're whining. There will always be someone who switches his broken chair for yours or his sticky keyboard or some other nonsense that the company handed out without caring if it worked or not. There will always be coffee so black there's an oil sheen on the top and a group-passive-agressive play over who makes the next pot.

There will always be a guy on the way to work who tailgates so tightly that you wonder what an airbag tastes like and you wonder how your very existence in the line of cars has become an annoyance to a person you never met in real life.

This is your future, that time you spend in your car, in your cubicle, on your couch in front of a television screen when the day's penance is paid. This is what you are destined to become. Welcome to the real world, asshole.

Yeah, I'm not sure it's a good idea for me to be honest with my students today. Candor is not always appreciated but it is an SAT word you need to memorize.

Thank you for listening, jb

Ringworm with Teeth and Extra Chores

You'd think that when school called a late-start, your day as a mom would be easier. Well, I can guarantee you that it wasn't.

This morning, well after some kids were already waiting outside for the bus to come, we got that text that pinged all three phones at once.

Late start. Yay! It snowed a little and we're still not done with winter. It was just a two-hour delay, but it was our only snow day this year. Yay! We all thought as we slowed into snow-day routine without thinking of the ramifications of a two-hour delayed start.

First, everyone was already awake and half ready for school and work. This meant that there was no true added value to anyone except Nick who watched Jim Gaffigan on TV for an hour and a half after he got out of the shower. He'll have to make up the school work anyway. It's not a zero sum gain. It's a lose-lose even though he won't recognize it as such.

When the students lose time in school, everyone has to work harder to make it up before testing happens. Stress will go up incrementally.

As for me, I still had to nag about the garbage and the recyclables, extra since I thought he might miss the garbage truck if he waited to take it out. I still had to talk about homework status and studying for the SAT. I still had to announce the hurry-ups and the better-get-goings, only this time, they happened almost twice. Remember, we were pretty far into our routine the first time before we got the late-start texts.

I still had to make lunch, but I also had to make Nick a coffee because he said he might fall back to sleep for a while if I didn't. At the last minute, he announced that his lunch was too small. Too small. Too big. Every day I do the same thing and I still get it wrong. I had to scramble to make it right. That boy is this close to making his own lunches. This close.

Then, I had to do an extra load of laundry because the school informed Nick that the gym has a ringworm infection and his gym clothes might be infected.

Nice.

So, I'm running the dryer on extra-hot. Then, I'm going to run the clothes through the washer again just in case.

I hate having fungus, parasites, viruses, shit like that in my house. I get started looking at the Internet and get seriously grossed out. Those things have teeth? Since when do fungi have teeth? Sometimes those pictures don't actually match the search criteria, but some kind of microscopic worm with teeth is what I'd expect to see when I looked up ringworm and so there it was, along with photos of the worst case of ringworm ever seen. I can't unsee that.

Don't look that shit up on the Internet. Just don't do it.

So now, everyone has departed. The laundry is drying and almost ready for round two. I've already had my cup of coffee for the day. And I'm an hour and a half behind in my morning schedule.

See what I mean?

You get awarded with a late-start day for snow and you end up somehow doing more work rather than less. Plus, the image of that worm with the four teeth is going to gnaw its way through your brain all day as you try to get back on track.

Thank you for listening, jb

The Alien Kale Invasion

I just finished eating one of my junk-in-the-back-of-the-fridge omelettes. It was so good, I have to brag about it. Eggs, butter, sausage, spinach, tomato, onion, mushroom, and kale. Yes, I added kale.

See, I resolved to throw away less food. So almost every day, I eat some kind of junk from the back of the fridge. The other day, I made hot dog soup.

Even Nick admitted that it was delicious, all those little bits of leftover food thrown in together with a couple of diced hot dogs and some beef broth.

Here's the thing - when I look through the back of the fridge, it doesn't always look so great. Kale, for example. I have never looked at kale without first thinking of the original 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' movie. That stuff does not look like normal food. Remember at the end of the movie when the doctor saw the pods in the back of the truck on the highway? Yeah, when I look in the back of my fridge and find old kale, I see that scene all over again. Every single time.

Endive too. It's all those veins.

I try not to think of the veins when I slice the tough stem out of the kale. If I do, I just try to imagine my surgery is to assist the good doctor in his attempt to eliminate the pods.

But then, I cook it and eat it.

Onions, butter, leftover meat from dinner are all okay, but some vegetables, when you look at them closely, don't pass the alien invasion test.

Asparagus. The tight little bunch of pods at the tip of a long reach. What plant do you know that grows that way? And the white ones? I can't even make myself buy the white asparagus.

And with enough asparagus, there's that pee smell afterward. You know what I mean. You're half way through a pee shiver the next morning when that smell wafts up to you. Not you. No, that smell is not you. It's an alien smell, an awful smell that means you've been taken in by the alien asparagus but you just don't know it yet.

There was a show on the cable the other night, something about aliens living among us. I didn't even watch it. I knew, just like when I stared at that bunch of kale at the back of the fridge, that if I watched too long, something would shiver, just a subtle shift so I could see the alien life right here on the couch with me. Who was my husband Mike anyway? Where did he really come from?

One of those curly leaves at the back of the fridge would roll into a tentacle for an instant, stretch out, and grab me by the face. Then it would slowly drag the whole bunch of kale toward my mouth and make me swallow it all in one bite.

Then, I would be an alien too. Never trust a woman who likes kale.

Thank you for listening, jules

World Dominance

My kitten misses me. Last week, I started a new part-time job and was gone more than usual. I feel bad about that. He's getting fat again because he's not getting as much exercise as he usually does. Now he nags me whenever I'm in the kitchen even when he has food, water, and I just finished petting him.

Who would have thought that the whole of my previous job was to feed, water, exercise, and pet two cats and a dog. This just confirms my theory that cats and dogs rule the world and humans are in denial about it. Aliens that arrive on Earth will attempt to communicate with the species that has the most power, the ones that subjugate everyone else.

That would be the cats.

Dogs are the next tier down. People are third and after that?

Mosquitoes are probably the clear winner. Mosquitoes could drive me to leap off a cliff if I were out without a bottle of Deet to cover any bare skin. Who cares if I die of cancer in ten years. I have slathered that stuff all over me for days on end to the point I tasted it. I know I'm going to die of cancer, but with my dying breath, I will say, "At least the mosquitoes weren't biting."

Did you know that mosquitoes are responsible for more deaths than any other animal on the planet? I wonder if ThoughtCo, the people who made that assertion, included humans in this calculation. It's a good question, what with all the genocide in Myanmar and Syria, don't you think?

Did you also know that carbon dioxide is how mosquitoes find their victims? They fly back and forth through my plume of carbon emissions until they find the back of my neck. Well, as carbon dioxide levels rise, maybe the female mosquitoes will get disoriented like the poor moths at our porch lights looking for the nectar of white flowers in the night. Wouldn't that be a small mercy?

I think I got bit by a mosquito while I sat on the deck earlier. I was only there for a few minutes because I got too cold, but it was warm enough that I saw a mosquito flying by. The bitch. We'll get you. We'll release so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that you and your whole species will eventually starve to death. It would serve you right. I hope we don't starve to death too.

Thank you for listening, jb

The Danger of Half an Ice Cube

This morning, I got my smoothie mug out of the dishwasher and it wasn't clean. Crap. This new dishwasher sucks. Just because I put a big flat muffin carrier bottom in the top rack, none of the water got where it needed to go.

Then, I realized that the little dishwasher tablet was still in it's tiny drawer and I hadn't even started the thing last night. Great. Operator error. My dishwasher is fine but my brain is broken. Just what I needed since I have an interview this afternoon. Five hours of sleep and I'm fine. No really, I'm fine.

I had to set the dishwasher on delay so I didn't use up all the hot water before the guys got into the shower. That would be so sweet, wouldn't it?

'Honey, the fucking dishes are clean, but you get to have a cold shower on a Friday morning,'

I imagined the look on Mike's face if I told him that.

I had to start and cancel the cycle three times before I figured it out. I couldn't press the start button twice like I do to make sure the elevator comes because it canceled the delay and started the wash cycle immediately. Three times. Now, it's counting down. Yes, I'm sure. I got up to check.

I got the spare smoothie mug out of the cabinet, but I hate that mug. All but one of the little tabs have broken off so it's an operation to get my Nutribullet to spin with it. Cashew milk, a splash of half and half, cocoa, stevia, rice protein, and ice. Yummy, right? You betcha. I have a chocolate milkshake for breakfast every single damned morning. Don't tell anyone. Plus, it's only ten grams of carbohydrates. We love our Nutribullet.

But I'm moving slowly this morning. Did you know that I can hold six ice cubes for my smoothie in each hand? I have big hands. I don't know why I have to brag. I only need ten but today, I dropped an ice cube on the floor. I do that when I'm tired. It broke in half and I could only find part of it. I know I need more sleep when I plan to leave half an ice cube to melt under the stove figuring that it's just water and it'll dry up on its own.

Not lazy, just tired. It's-Friday-and-I-haven't-done-any-good-work-all-week kind of tired. Netflix-binge-watching kind of tired. You know what I mean. I know you've gotten up off the couch after a marathon of Mad Men with that special feeling. Your eyes burn. Your butt is so damned sore from all the work of sitting on the couch that you wonder why butts don't get callouses. Your mind is so settled into the cigarettes and misogyny of the show that you have a bad taste in your mouth. Or maybe you forgot to brush your teeth that morning. You can't remember. It's a special kind of exhaustion. Get used to it. With robots taking over our jobs within the next century, we'll all be hot-wired to Netflix or whatever embedded-brain technology that takes over when Netflix becomes obsolete.

I know. I've lived through eight-track tapes and five channels on a black and white TV. I've seen VHS, cassette tapes, DVDs, CDs, and audiobooks become obsolete. But will people be able to walk around, work, and shop for groceries while they watch all these shows that screen straight into our brains from the chips we allow to be embedded under our skin? No. Couches will endure. Couch will never go out of style. Did you just picture the little pods on Matrix? Cozy, right? We're voluntarily moving toward that scenario. Very low carbon footprint. Good for the environment. We could take up so little space in the world that we could use our internal energy to power the storage unit we house ourselves in.

Then, I realized I was staring into space as I stood in my kitchen. Did I look like Robert DeNiro in Awakenings? Blitz meowed at me and I woke up. He does that. He nags me in my own kitchen.

'Play with me.'

He brought his green paracord into the kitchen where I'm sure to step on the hard little burned knot at one end. It's like having Legos on the floor again. He sat on his string and meowed at me while I tried to think of what I needed to do next to finish my smoothie. I ignored him for the moment.

Screw driver.

I needed the screw driver.

See, the Nutribullet is great, really spins those ice cubes, except for the half lying under my stove, and there are no little annoying nuggets left over when I drink it. But Mike and I are both a little, shall we say, conservative with our money.

Cheap? No we're not cheap. We just don't run out and buy a new Nutribullet whenever a tab breaks on the best mug for our old one.

Okay, we do. We bought the next version of Nutribullet in case that last tab breaks off and we can't even start the thing with a screwdriver at five in the morning on a Friday. But we're not using that yet. We still have one tab left on one mug and all of the tabs on another.

 So, I screwed in the part with the blades, seated the whole thing upside-down in the base, plugged it in, then used a screwdriver to push down the plastic switch where the little tab at the edge of the mug would have gone if it existed. That little tab will probably end up in the belly of a dolphin in the ocean. This operation required dexterity. If someone in the house was asleep, I had to pick up the whole shebang and cradle it in my arms to keep it from rattling through the wooden bones of the walls and waking people up. Resonance. It works like the sounding board of a piano. That blender was so much louder when it sat on the counter. But when I cradled the thing in one arm and tried to hold the screwdriver in that little slot where the plastic switch expected the mug-tab, it was a test of dexterity.

At that point that I hoped I hadn't overfilled the thing because something in the design loosens the grip the blade-part had on the mug when I overfilled the mug. Then, smoothie goop could fly all over me, the inside of the Nutribullet base, and splash on the counter and anything on it. When I cradled the base in one arm, used the screwdriver to spin the thing, and this overflow thing happened, I got smoothing goop all over my pajamas. It sucked.

Today, somehow, I managed without getting smoothie goop all over my pajamas.

But Blitz wasn't done. He never realized how fucking underfoot he was in the kitchen. I stepped back and turned to rinse the blade-part so it would be clean when Mike made his smoothie. I felt my foot coming down on a paw or a tail, something soft. I twisted that tender spot in my right knee trying to step somewhere else while Blitz banged off my ankle in exactly the wrong direction trying to get out from underfoot, literally.

That cat has no survival instincts. The only thing he has to worry about regarding survival in our house is how to keep from getting stepped on. He doesn't get it. He's afraid of the UPS truck driving half-way up the driveway, but he's immune to lessons in protecting his tail from the crush.

He ignored my little ACL-tearing dance and stayed focused on a spot under the stove. Not a mouse in my kitchen. Please. God. No.

Do you think that God gets annoyed at these kinds of prayers? You know, the stupid ones that fall out of our minds when we're being honest about what we want? Do you think there's a special kind of hell in my future for all of my misdeeds? Yesterday, I forgot a good friend's birthday in all my morose binge-watching busyness. If God is really an angry God, my penance for it could be to eternally have to clean against the potential for hanta virus whenever a mouse got into the house and found my Cheerios. Yes, in my special hell, there is a lot of cleaning required and dirt and disease is everywhere anyway.

Hmmm.

What was the cat looking at, pawing at, under the stove?

I leaned down. My knee cringed.

It was white, not grey with big ears and sad eyes.

Blitz found my half-ice cube under the stove. I picked it up, but then put it back down on the floor for a minute. He tapped it with one paw, then shook his foot. He put his nose to it then backed away. I kicked it and it slid a couple feet. He chased it, paused, and tapped it with one paw again.

He shook his paw and looked at me.

'Is this dangerous?'

I stood there supplying no answer. Meanie. He touched it one more time. Then, I thought he might lick it. He didn't. It was too scary to lick it. Might kill him. He looked at me again. Why wasn't I answering him? He stretched his neck out to sniff it and backed up.

'This has got to be a trick.'

It was like the first time my cat Angel walked in grass when she was a kitten. She shook her feet with every step. Eventually, she fell over in that pathetic way a cat has of giving up. When it didn't kill her, she lolled about in the grass stretching her forelegs up over her head.

Blitz never rolled in the ice cube. Finally, he backed away and my fun was over. That shit was dangerous. Ice cubes. Awful. He looked back at it before he left the kitchen.

Maybe I wasn't so tired after all.

Thank you for listening, jb

Breaking the Fourth Wall of Writing

I feel so pathetic today. I wish I could say I have a thick skin. I don't. Maybe I should have spent the rest of my life writing in deep obscurity. I shouldn't have to worry about relative obscurity. I'm there.

As a writer, I feel ridiculous.

So, I got onto Twitter and posted a bunch of shit this morning. That was supposed to make me feel better, but now that my phone's battery is dead, I don't feel much better.

Yesterday, someone who read my book, Angry Housewife Fights Tyranny, my reaction to Trump's election, told me she thought it was repetitive. Of course it was repetitive. The news was repetitive. I didn't tell her that. Instead, I wondered if I should try to fix it. Someone I don't know also wrote that it was pathetic in my Amazon review when the book first came out and that word has stuck in my craw for months now. How do you fix pathetic? Never mind all of the encouragement my friends and a few strangers have given me. Why can't I blot out the hate? Because of this book, someone called me promiscuous. He didn't know a thing about me. He just said it because I support Planned Parenthood and wrote that they had helped me when I was young. His words didn't make sense with regard to who I am, but they still hurt.

The day before yesterday, Mike said I needed to get a job. He's said this before so I thought we were really hurting for money but then yesterday he suggested that we fly to Las Vegas for spring break. I've been making my espressos at home for months now because I thought we were broke. I'd been thinking I was causing trouble in our house because I didn't bring in cash to the equation. Then, he says we're going to Las Vegas on vacation, hotels, shows, and gambling? Does he think that walking away from my dream of making a living as a writer and getting a 'real' job is going to make me feel better?

I know he's not trying to be mean. I know he thinks I'll feel better if I earn a paycheck for a while. He may be right about that since my royalties are a joke. But there's a part of me that wants to keep trying, to keep marketing, to keep editing, to keep writing until I get somewhere. I feel some kind of compulsion to do this job even if it is hard, even if I am ridiculous for continuing to try when I'm obviously not succeeding. I'm pretty sure that Mike will never understand my passion for these projects. I'm not completely sure I understand it myself.

Three days ago, the agent who was interested said that my wild kitten book, Dirty and Afraid, was warm and funny, but also languid so she couldn't sell it. Since when should a book about a kitten keep you on the edge of your seat? The problem is that she doesn't think she can sell it. Can't sell it. CAN'T SELL IT.

Those words keep going around and around in my head.

What now?

What the hell am I supposed to do now?

Here's the plan I keep telling myself to implement:

• edit the kitten book for its pacing,
• send queries for the kitten book to other agents,
• casually continue to market my Tyranny book,
• protest to protect our country-I'm probably missing a Seattle DACA protest right now, and
• edit my next book. 

But there's this rotten little worm that keeps boring through good wood. Why bother? What if all the silence means I'm not a good writer instead of one who doesn't know how to manage search engine optimization? Does the devil work in this way, selling doubt as truth, diminishing the light of joy that comes from creating something for the world?

This is not the type of thing I want to write in a blog, but it's what's on my mind.

I feel broken, so I'm breaking all my rules about the fourth wall. Here I am staring into the camera at you. I admit that I'm a writer. I always will be. Yet, I'm a writer who's broken. It's hard to put it all out there, to stand naked on the stage speaking the lines. It's hard to put my whole heart into my work only to think the audience might stand up, pick up their coats, and leave the room. This isn't an easy path.

Thank you for listening, jb