wonder/wander

In Brussels, there's a beautiful old film museum, with two projection rooms, and three screenings a day. (or at least that's how it was back in the summer of 2001). For two months, I lived in those projection rooms—everyday, I chose from the selection, up to three, no less than one. The most familiar sight in my Brussels routine was the men who worked at the museum. One was dark, straight-toothed, and never returned my smiles. The other was taller, blond and wore loud colorful ties that smiled along with him.
The only other place I visited on a regular basis was the small grocery store across the street from my father's apartment. There was a butcher and a produce guy, but I forget which was which. One of them was tall and sharp, the other short and stout, and they yelled at each other a lot. I remember telling them I was Canadian, I also remember the cheapest thing to eat in Brussels was leeks.
Otherwise, I spent most of my time alone, writing music and experimental prose, and familiarizing myself with my fathers record collection, which consisted of exactly 2 greatest hits cds: Bob Dylan and Jacques Brel.

It was before midnight, I was out for a stroll around the block, to clear my head before going to bed. A bus pulled up alongside me, opened its accordion doors to let me in. I don't know what I was thinking; I must have decided this was a sign. The bus went all the way to the film museum. Did I know this is where it was going? I'm sure I did. My mind was racing, much faster than the bus, I was going to change something important. The bus ride was a long one, despite the empty streets.
I got off near the museum. That neighborhood was dead at night, with large courtyards and steps leading from one garden to another, and government buildings, and cold stone walls--it was September--stone grounds, stone steps, all light gray, or cream and empty. One thick black line, a paved street cutting through the stone, which I crossed, towards the museum. In the museum, the tall blond man was closing up, bright tie dipping in the cash register.

I squeezed into the heavy door. He looked up, annoyed that he'd forgotten to lock it. I'm sure my words stumbled, I was nervous. Did I know he was going to be there? I must have.
What did I ask him? I can't remember, not exactly. It was exactly the kind of moment I've experienced so many times, running to a place before it closes, to see if they've found my favorite hat, or my wallet. And that's what I remember feeling—the apologetic shyness that comes with making a very small request, and the toughened quickness that comes with being told no—trying to act like nothing happened.

I saw him later, while I was wandering. Yes, I'm sure of it; his classic figure moving through the dark street. I have this memory, a small desire to hide, the image of his back, the strangeness of our wishing each other a good night, again, someplace else, a little absently. I remember him telling me how dangerous it was for me to be walking alone, at night. I can't remember if he told me this on the street, or in the museum, but I remember walking that night, until late.

Recap:
1—a young man is wearing a bright tie
1—a woman who looks like a giant bird physically accosts me after a David Lynch film
1—another movie-goer, whom I only saw twice, is annoyed with me, comes to his door in a bath-robe
1—a beautiful one-eyed homeless man walks up to me in the metro and takes off my glasses
2—Brel and Dylan sing about love that was never there
2—I spend a summer in Brussels, alone
2—strangers are looking for something, they follow me, its dark
3—the bus opens its doors
4—I tell myself that something important is about to change

Homunculus

I went to bed last night, to the image of the Homunculus—Dr. Penfield, drawing the image of a body with giant lips and hands on the surface of the brain by shooting tiny electrical impulses, and asking the subjects what they felt. I can't help but imagine him doing this on the sidewalk, at the corner of Penfield Avenue and Mctavish, with people walking by, and dust rising with each car, and the subject sitting in a chair with a sheet over them, and their brain exposed to particles of air.
Last night, I fell asleep to the thought of how small my back is on these diagrams, compared to my lips and hands, and that thought made me sad. It also made me feel disjointed, my whole body mapped out on the surface of my brain—I think I'm three dimensional, but really, depending on how we look at it, I'm thinner than that, my body is drawn flat inside my scull.

I went to sleep with the vow to make my back bigger, even if it takes my whole life—to draw my back to scale, or at least larger than my hands and lips together, I wondered if my life would be long enough, is that enough time for such a huge endeavor?
Why do I find this so unsettling? The image isn't new to me, why does it suddenly make me dizzy? I fell asleep to two versions of me, one of them monstrous, staring at me, inculpating me: “you don't use your back enough, your hands, your lips, your legs look like sticks”. Every mirror distorts, and flattens. I imagined my back the size of a continent, and I knew that today I'd be writing, not traveling.

gray lies

Throughout my life, I've had a strange respect for the ability to lie well, to lie quickly, the ability to dismiss the truth as merely one possible version of events. I think of this ability as access to deeper level of truth, the shapes storytelling give to identity, the way memory rewrites itself every time it gets pulled out. In my mind, the liar understands this, and works with lies to build a richer self, to give memory the space it needs to breath.

I'm thinking of someone I know whom I suspect is a great liar—wouldn't the best liars be able to organize their worlds so that their lies are impossible to notice? I may be making a giant leap, but I've always associated this suspected liar's immense forgetfulness with lies. And in this light, lies seem like the saddest thing in the world; a reality that is continually rewritten, that can only be the size of a single moment, a single impulse, and the manipulations that are required, in that moment, to shape things to one's desires.

Perhaps lies are like any other tool, marked by the impulses that drive them. But I'd like to believe that lies have mechanisms that are proper to them, to how we negotiate them, whether we use them habitually or not, whether we use them as a tool to manipulate others or not.
I was listening to WNYC's RadioLab, the episode on deception. In it, a study is highlighted, in which liars are found to have more white matter in their brains, a lot more.
Ok, so the part about the white matter doesn't mean a whole lot to me. I just imagine a bit of white in there, layered between the gray. White... the secret folds of alternate truths.

I think some more about lies, I'm confronted with an aspect of lying I'd forgotten about; the liars I knew as a child. They seemed so callous, so stubborn to carve a place for themselves that they didn't let anyone else in. They persisted in their lying; I'm sure they never grew out of it—they just got better at it. They had secret worlds, worlds of white within the thick and grey world we shared. I have to admit, this frightened me. I never thought that their physiology might be offering them an approach to reality that wasn't within my grasp.

The links between white, gray and lies, they don't necessarily mean that lies burry themselves in the brain's snowdrifts. White matter is related to the ability to make connections. White connects gray, to more gray... from what I understand. Gray skies, more gray skies, more gray. Between my adult fascination with the ability to lie, and my childhood disdain for it, and my solitary anecdotal account, in which I find manipulation and forgetfulness, I'm appreciating this comparison with gray skies, silver clouds, looking for shapes in clouds, and the gusts of wind that pull them apart.

Neuron forests

I'm tempted to believe that Freud was right; in the thickness of night, the unconscious tries to articulate desire, to negotiate wish fulfillment.
Late last night, while awake, walking around a familiar corner, my eye snagged on a book cover: Fundamentals of Human Neuropsychology. A sigh pushed through me, like a sleepwalking ghost rushing through my wind-pipes, struggling for freedom. The same kind of sigh that might push through when a beautiful stranger walks by, the sound of their steps echoing inside.
I caught myself sighing, out-loud, looked back at the book cover, and the part of me that was sleeping told the part of me that was awake what I wanted: to travel through a forest of neurons. Is this how Einstein felt when he dreamed of traveling on a ray of light?
The text-book cover shows a photo, beautiful density of pink trunks, and branches, soft.

Do you know those photos of Einstein wearing flip-flops at the beach? He makes funny faces at the camera. I've always wanted to be there, to feel that sand. I spent my teenage years walking on the beach, by my house. I remember wondering when I'd meet that strange collection of people, who make funny faces at the camera and travel on rays of light. I imagined what it would be like to discover their backyard forests, junkyard rust, silent wishing-ghosts, haunted forests.
Sometimes I get frustrated with how much of my understanding of reality is tangled up in my imagination. But today, I feel comforted that all of my imagination is tangled up in attempts at understanding reality.

great tragedies

Great tragedies are multi-tiered. It's difficult to understand why their events can't be derailed—but what makes the greatness of a tragedy is, in part, the impossibility of derailment. Those intimately involved do everything in their power to untangle themselves; everything they do just tightens the knots.

Can life really be like this? When I encounter these stories, I marvel at how the writer has managed to create such a tight web—it seems impossible that real life would act so seamlessly. The real-life person would have to be a genius, carefully plotting their own demise.

And yet, when I look at my life, the lives around me, I see all kinds of entanglements—a turn of bad luck rarely rotates immediately into place. Usually, it sets a number of other things into motion, it pulls on those parts of a person's character that are the strongest, and weaves them into the momentum, pulls them tight—like trip wires.

Oh, the word “tragedy” is so dramatic!—and forget the word “luck”. But you know what I'm talking about, right? There's a momentum, a structure in experience, that makes tragedy such an appealing form, such a fantastic mirror.

Dead neurons

I'm trying to remember my first impression, back in high-school, when I met my first neuron, drew its shape, gave its parts names. They came across as prickly cells, electric cells. Other cells, soft and rounded like pillows, could adapt, divide, propagate. Other cells were bunny-cells, traveling about, cozying up to different parts of the body. But neurons were glass cells—they were sharp, and they broke, fried, exploded. They did not divide to make new cells. They just lay there after they died, like broken bottles on the side of electric highways, as you slowly lost your ability to think clearly.
So, ever since high-school, something about neurons scares me. Lately I think of them differently, I'm actually surprised by this memory of exploding glass. But I'm reminded of this fear that invades various parts of my life, various versions of mortality... in which there is no precise end where everything stops--no, rather a lingering end, where the highway is littered with broken glass and you smell something like alcohol, or spilled milk, or the ocean, but you can't quite place the smell, what it is, what it means.

Smart neurons

As neurons are connected to the processes of thought, well—I think of them as smarter than other cells. Ridiculous, I know. What does “smarter” mean? I have no idea, but whatever it is that differentiates neurons from other cells, that will inform my definition of “smarter”.

Okay, so I'm looking on the internet to find out what is unique to these cells. I'm told that the main differences are that when neurons die, they are not replaced. They make new connections throughout life, but they don't reproduce. Their membranes are specialized to communicate with other cells both electrically and chemically.
Hm... So, in conclusion, smart people fall in love fast, and hard, and often—they are well connected, they are always making new connections. They communicate electrically (static electricity) and chemically (they smell good). They don't have kids, ever. And when they die, no one is able to replace them. Or maybe no one really wants to replace them.

a home village

A dog is lying next to me, in the shade--my mother's home village. The water, fishing nets hang in a low line over the blue surface. A small white boat in the distance, this house was once a post-office. I'm sitting with my back against an old brick well, old and dirtied drinking-water somewhere under me. I flew over those clouds to get here, a whole landscape of them. They've thinned and spread, to show me the sky-blue reflected on the "grande rivière" and the ocean beyond.
This was once the post-office, letters from soldiers would wait here, people who ate and drank with my great grand-parents would come here, to pick up thick envelopes filled with scrawling narratives about things I can only imagine, and they'd come here to see, past the forking road, the traffic coming from three directions plus the river, and they'd come here to talk about the same sorts of things they would fold into envelopes, only maybe with more words, and without the same kinds of flourishes.
Now the post office is elsewhere, that generation is thinning. Boxes full of my childhood letters are in the attic. While exploring, this morning, alone in the house, I spotted my handwriting, not recognizing it--in a small crate, stacked up over a heap of boxes recently moved here from storage, with the furniture and coffee cups from my childhood in other houses. My mothers still hangs on to a few things for me; a thinning number of things. There is a beautiful and tanned family lowering a boat into the water, I hear their child, a heron, cars over the old bridge, cattails amongst the wildflowers, a wind from the ocean, and the boat's motor starts up. I smell a whiff of gasoline, the song I'm planning to sing at my sister's wedding comes on, a NB flag sways on the other side of the river, crickets, like the mechanical sounds of other places, the background music of tall grass, of tall memories that I don't have a firm grasp on because they aren't mine yet.
I'm trying not to think about anything too close to me, but it's strangely difficult to pinpoint what makes something close.

without personality

Every now and again, I think about L’Écume des Jours, a novel by Boris Vian in which very little attention is given to building the characters. We can tell them apart―all four of them have distinct characteristics, maybe two or three each. Our understanding of them relies on our stereotypes. And beyond this, the story isn't about characters growing, changing through circumstances. They experience their circumstances, the vivid poetic quality of experience turned into a surrealist tragic fantasy.
I'm brought back to how much of appreciating life and experience doesn't rely on an understanding of personality. In my looking at psychology texts, I'm intrigued by this small divide that seems to exist between attributing behaviour to circumstances or to personality.
I often find myself wanting to leave characters simple within their circumstances, merely vessels that exist and move within situation. Situations that aren't overwhelmingly dramatic, sweeping through life and overpowering the inclinations of personality–just life… with the smallest of its details, breezes rustling hair, the kind of hair we all have, even those of us who shave our heads, tweeze our eyebrows.

Vaughn, John, Yawn

I’m very much drawn to writing narratives where characters names are similar. Almost everything I write has at least two characters with quasi-identical names.
Why am I drawn to this? I don't think I always do it consciously; often it isn't even a name that I particularly like; often the characters emerge at different times, and it surprises me they've ended up in the same story, and that they're so firmly attached to keeping their names despite the possible confusion.
What is it to give multiple characters same/similar names? Does it flatten them out? Or does this create a layering: contradictions, conflicts and similarities becoming parts of one multi-bodied, similar-named, fuzzily defined individual?
These questions are, for me, magical ones. They're questions about reading, crafting texts, about hiding meaning in random connections, like a god might, if it wanted us to look for signs, clues, some secret message.
I'm looking out the window, watching people walk by, wondering if this kind of meaningfulness is the one experienced in some psychological disorders. A hurried girl holding a bright yellow handbag waits at the cross-walk, an old woman approaches wearing a bright yellow sweater; its the same atrocious shade of yellow. On the other side of the street, a few meters away, a bright yellow car is parked. Yellow is a complex symphony, layered, the light goes yellow, the cars speed up, and, I can't help but want to believe in beauty. In the magical ability of coincidence, to give me the desire for meaning (or speculations about meaning).

*Following a similar tangent, and to explain the significance of the drawing, one of Ashphalt's first names was "never the same name twice"--very energy consuming, as far as names go. We try to stay true to it, and hardly ever call him Ashphalt.

Candide

My middle name is Candide. My great grandmother’s name was Candide, and so is my aunt’s. My mother and my aunt Candide are close, so it comes as no surprise when she makes the mistake, and calls me Candide every now and again. There’s always a slight moment of pause after she does this, first apologetic, and then… well, we agree that it is my middle name.
And what is this Candide, that can body swap? I don’t think its mere habit, that has my mother saying Candide. I think its something else, the role I’m playing, the beat playing in her head as she sorts through what she’s saying. For a moment, Candide and I are the same, much like in other moments, I am Mé and share that name with a sixteen year old my mother ate dinner with every night all those years ago.

Autobiographies

When I was 22, I lived in this converted office space. I had the smallest office on the floor, shared a washroom and a kitchen with five fellow artists and one physicist. Over the previous three years, I'd moved away from home, lived in about five different countries, and I had a wild sense of possibility, life moving forward in so many potential directions, the past being told in so many possible ways.
So, on this one particular night, in the quiet of my empty office, where there was just enough room for me to roll out the inch-thin futon, squeezed tight between close walls, and the child-sized desk where a computer from the mid 90's shone the green light of an “experimental” project I was working on, I decided to write my life—not just the chaotic pile of experiences I already carried, but the ones I was bound to live in the future. This future I wrote about was the future of that precise moment—the future of everything within that moment, if things followed their natural course, if I remained unchanging, and the world kept unravelling in the manner in which it seemed to be unravelling. I wrote myself into my eighties. It was a slow journey from year to year, grad school, art projects, failed relationships, more travels, every imagined experience stemming from a deeply anchored sense of self. This was a time in my life where I was very centred, focused, and singular.

I was thinking about this autobiography, a few days ago. In a way, the autobiography itself is fiction—its predictions for the future meander far from my present reality. But, I carry this future in my memory, it branches out next how I saw my past, at that moment, on that office floor.
Superimposed, onto that autobiography, are the unwritten autobiographies of so many other moments. For each of these moments, for each of these slightly different people I've been, both past and future vary, experiences are told differently, different experiences are remembered or forgotten, emphasis and meaning shift. My singularity breaks down, over time. This breakdown allows me to carry multiple pasts, multiple futures, every present-self is complete, nestled within an ever-changing appreciation of its placement within a mostly-imagined life.

*I'm reminded of Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, and his story, “The Lost Mariner”, where a man (suffering from Korsakoff's syndrome, experiencing partial and anterograde amnesia) is unable to form new memories, or remember anything since the war (hence forgetting his whole adult life, family, etc.). He reverted to that moment in time, right after the war, when he was much younger—to a previous autobiography, a previous self. I'm endlessly fascinated by the idea that we might carry an accumulation of these complex systems of thought, and of identity, throughout our lives—as we change, and rewrite our pasts and our futures.

Silences in the studio

I’m contemplating different kinds of inactivity, the shifting species of silences that *momentarily absorb me.

Yesterday, I wanted to write a plan of attack. To draw a map, if you will, for a project I’ve long put aside. I’m often drawn to the notion of placing ideas, images, narratives, on a map. Time lines are great too, but maps have added dimension. When I think about placing things on a map, or—more appropriately—in a space, I think of method of loci, the ancient Greeks dropping small sections of their speeches along a well-walked path so that all they had to do was imagine walking along that path, to find the bits of memory emerge slowly, and form a whole.

Through this past winter and spring, with all their leaves gone, I drew trees. Branches are like a million pathways arching out. But since the leaves are back, I’m faced with too much complexity. I try to group them into sections, according to the branch they’ve sprouted from, or according to how much light they’re reflecting, but I’m mesmerized by the way each individual leaf cuts through my ability to see what’s behind it. The tree isn’t just that amazing structure I tried to draw in the winter, it’s also the path memorized by the Greeks, it’s the sum of the map I want to draw for my forgotten projects, it’s everything at once, and it pulls me into moments of silence.

*When I say momentarily, the moment can extend through meal times and coffee breaks, into getting ready for bed, dreaming. Sometimes the moment (the silence) wakes up just before me, and whispers that I should wake up too, and join it for another day of fruitless pondering.

Poetic Suture II

Poetic gestures are soothing.
I’ve worn small pins of flowers, invisible to everyone but me. And the times I’ve done this, I’ve imagined I’m carrying a secret garden. So I feel magic seep into my life.
But this feeling of magic, I’ve discovered, hinges on a very particular activity. The dramatics have to be in place: a small whisper, to call someone into confidence. The secret gesture of revealing an inner fold in my sleeve, “look, a flower I planted this morning…”

On one hand poetic gestures re-affirm my power to create meaning—meaning that I can carry all by myself. This meaning doesn’t rely on its being shared with others, it’s a form of poetry that I can offer myself. But when I offer myself the image of a strange miniature garden growing in the hidden seems of my clothes, I have to think of myself as another person, I have to see myself from an external position, in order to get the desired effect… the soothing warmth of being anchored in poetry.

Poetic Suture I

There are moments in my life that reference myth, but the reference rarely emerges naturally.
(I’ll use the word myth broadly, to talk about the poetic, metaphorical, allegorical, visual, melodramatic, archetypal, etc.)
Every story I write has at least one moment: someone drops a trail of dog food behind them (like in Hansel and Gretel), someone feels discomfort because there’s semen on the underside of their mattress (like in the princess and the pea), there are seven men in the house (like in Snow White), the person lying in your bed isn’t who you thought they were (like in the little red ridding hood).
But this is fiction. In real life, when the references to myth aren’t immediately perceived, I think it’s important to highlight them and even to fabricate them.
Every story, every experience can only persist in its telling. I’m coming in on the side of poetry, even if it means sometimes grafting in some metaphorical wolf-valves into the metaphorical heart.

Underground Mirrors IV

There’s this guy I’d see every Monday morning, between the metro and my apartment.
The first time I noticed him, I decided we were twins. Monday mornings, we each wore a blazer and a shirt. He looked classy, his first button undone. I look raggedy, my first button undone. A blazer is a blazer, they were both likely the same color, only mine was a polyester blend, and you could see that the night had seeped into it. His was as fresh as the morning; I could almost smell him pass by.
Our hair was the same color, it caught the wind in the same way; it was the same length, curled in the same places. I was sure we looked odd, that moment we passed each other, like a mockery of each other, me the shorter end. I’d see him from a bit of a distance, and imagine that this might be the day he’d smile at how strange we were. We were each other’s dream-selves, each other’s shadows. We transitioned from wakefulness to sleep at the same moment, trading places, I’d be climbing back above ground, he’d be rushing bellow ground.
One morning, a few months ago, he saw my destination, my little fence, and the door to my apartment building: I saw him look, and he saw me notice. He jolted back to pretend he wasn't looking; he’d found the end of our shared path.
That’s the last time I saw him. I’ve often looked for him. I’ve wondered if his sudden disappearance had anything to do with his seeing my apartment, my looking back towards him.

Underground Mirrors III

I had a dream the other night where I was driving, holding two roadmaps. Both referenced human internal organs. I was trying to drive to the Heart. Instead, I got lost—drove to the US border.

Map #2: A diagram, skin peeled open in two flaps, right under the ribcage.
Map #1: A stubby word tree:

Head
Airway
Heart
Lungs
Stomach
Foot, Other Foot

I woke up thinking of the surfaces of maps, the surfaces of skin, and the underground—where the internal organs were supposed to be.

Underground Mirrors II

I’ve been thinking about the ways trees branch out.
I had coffee with a geographer the other day; we talked a little about how trees draw similar paths to rivers (he talked about water flow). I asked him about underground water sources, because I was thinking of root systems, in trees—and how they mirror above ground branching systems.

And this brings me to think about something a little different; if trees or water branch out both above and bellow ground, what’s the difference between the two?
Above ground: breathing, expansive, flourishing (even in this end-of-winter leaflessness).
Underground: murky, pushing through rock and worms, fighting and groping for water.
I’m thinking with my senses. I realize the underground has oppressive connotations for me. It’s interesting to imagine another part of me, a mirror-me, that understands tree roots and underground thirsts.

Underground Mirrors I

There’s a passage I was working on yesterday; in it M. is lying on her camping mat, the dog—Oscar—is sleeping by her feet. Now imagine, if M. was dreaming of a ground underneath her feet, and Oscar too was dreaming of a ground underneath his feet, both their grounds would be at the same place, only one of them would be underground, like on the other side of a looking glass.

Okay... so I drew Asphalt, while he was sleeping, and spun him around so he looks like a dancer, and then--inadvertently--made the whole thing look like a photocopy. Pretty much illustrates my idea.

Hollow, Empty, Thud

Three words from a 1973 psychology study by David Rosenhan.
Twelve participants (many of them psychologists) walked into clinics, complaining of one strange occurrence: they’ve heard a voice (or voices), other than their own, in their head, saying: hollow, empty or thud.
All were admitted into psychiatric wards. None complained of relapses. Some took notes about the experience… all waited to see how long it would take to be discharged, to be seen as sane.
And so the discussion was about being sane in insane places.

At this moment, I’m thinking of the study a little differently. Imagine flying out to a Northern community—somewhere in Alaska. Imagine walking out to where there’s no one, possibly for miles. Imagine the sounds things make. Sometimes all you can do is hear. You’ve walked so far that your traces have vanished. Its just you and the North.
Now, imagine deciding that this isn’t right, this isn’t really what you wanted… you wanted something else. Who do you turn to, to say that you never heard that voice, that you just made it up, that you want to go home now.
And so the discussion seems to be about those places in the world where the only voices are those in your head, imagined, invented, or otherwise; being social in unsocial places.

wall cut-outs

I remember my mother would cut up little images from magazines and art-books. She put them in shoeboxes and kept them for school projects with her high school students.

Today, I decided to gather a few images—from two second-hand books I bought on Mont Royal. I got my exacto-knife out, and felt like my mom. All the colors were her: the way I held my knife, the way long rectangles of yellowed paper curved under the blade and landed in a small pile at the edge of the book.
Klee’s colors look like dye seeped into silk: batik, the kind of images my mother made when I was young… the same colors, similar lines. Art school was all about contemporary art for me, when I was an art student. But today, I’m cutting out the text, the titles and dates and I’m finding a more childlike appreciation.

Invitation

I’ve been wanting to make dinners lately… where I invite philosophers and artists, colleagues, close friends… people scattered across the world. I want everyone to meet each other. So, this is my invitation, to share cigarettes and smoked salmon—on rooftops, in cold winters, I'll get a little barbecue, make green papaya salad, with that feeling that came with the Autumn, when we were kids and classes were starting, and all our binders and pencils were shiny.

So here I am, building a small virtual studio, inviting new friends, old friends, people I miss deeply, people I wish I could get to know to better. I'll share little snippets of the different things that populate my studio/mind, so that when you do come over for dinner, it'll feel like we saw each other yesterday.
I have a few projects on the go… I made a joke yesterday that the characters from one novel might just end up invading the other novel, a coup! I guess, if it’s going to happen anywhere, it’s going to happen in this blog.