Love at a Reasonable Price

What does it mean when strangers call to say,
I’m sorry for your loss and when can we
possess what’s vacant now? What, anyway,
is “sorry for your loss” supposed to be
in worlds where piled people slide on past
and alligators climb glass walls to dash
across cement black-tarred at child dressed
in T where puffy dino roars on chest?

From creatures trooped in shared realities,
Once grouped in bands of twelve to oh say twenty-five:
What mean we here in pluralities
some billion strong,
in towns where millions throng
in bustles moving, mooded — seemingly alive?
What mean we here with fleeting empty hugs?
Some kind of love? Smile with shoulder shrug,
explaining, “Just the price we must all pay
for evolving in interesting new ways;
and anyway, who wants to stay forever stuck
in narrow gods, cares, answers, looks and lucks?

What do you say? You’re better than me and mines?
Less savage? Wiser? wider, deeper? More?
What ho?, hello! A noble savage steps the line!
Stars ‘bove, passions ’round, Love within: same for
you micro-, tele- scoped, computer-yoked
and
we time-popped, earth-, sun-, rain-, fire-soaked.

We’re part of who we know
our bands our human-homes
We’re part of what we “know”
our reality-domes.

But only God is fully known
to mortals. And then but through
a darkly-glass is Godlight shown
And all we feel, think, say or do
is either God as First Cause or God
as proximate cause — God as Bod,
not God as soul. God as scud,
not God as thinking joy-ing Love.

Then well we’re met and well we’ll part
to strange ends you, and me to stranger starts.

Author: BW
Editor: AW
Copyright: AMW

I know them
I am them
I don’t understand them
I would fix them
I would change them
I can’t reach them
Who are they?
How are they me?
I can’t remember them.
They don’t remind me of when I was a kid running free
They don’t remind me of when I was a young man being funny
They don’t remind me of anything that feels like me
Except
for so long now
the lonely
the loneliness
feels like
my whole world

Now I’m older and feel a hurt long hatching
We were young and owned the world
Shame grows bolder, but still hides, latched in
my heart my gut, there where I would unfurl
The good yet latent in my soul
I’ve a wound, a hurt, a hole
Deep down — I’ve found.

Could please you contest evil strands
Of human passion wrapped in false light?
Could you please tell your friends to stand
Against Trump, against the lie that might makes right?
Could please y’all believe in us enough
To choose reality over this sticky fluff
That reduces “true” and “false”
To weapons, and naught else?

I’ve grown tired, worn, raw, without the strength
Of purpose that marked my youthful step
The soul’s no width nor breadth nor length
Without limits she ranges, beyond all precepts,
All notions of you and me, of how things are
Still I am stuck as if from my own soul so far
that I reside in some little space
some sordid broken boring place
cut off from the Light
shorn from what makes all alright.

A spear in my gut, long launched by arm unknown
A tear through my heart, long crunched in harm unseen
Walk home from dance, bent over the hurt that’s shown
Through my façade. I heave, yell, grunt like a wounded thing
Through center Brooklyn. I sob I say I can’t do this alone.
I say I said but no one wants to hear a man whimper, moan
About this wound he’s wound around,
Of some story he’s never found,
About lonely, tired, empty — not just for a minute but on twenty-some years

I see us through pines over sandy earth
You with your overkill bowie knife
In it’s giant leather sheath as we search
For nothing, confident that life
Will open forward as it should

Do you remember when elections were adjustments?
Before our nation stopped hearing itself?
A hole was left when shared-meaning up and went.
A hole for Trump, for the conman whose stealth
Is only lying over and over again.
Not so clever. But adequate when
Republicans have already learned
That what Democrats say must be spurned.

I don’t know what to do.
A man injured in his pit,
Still trying to make it through,
But caught on some old shit
He can’t hold, can’t catch, nor see
So many years alone looking to be
A man a person a this a that
And Trump breaks elections, peddles lies
He wanted to help, push back
On the evil, on how democracy dies
And with it our shared meaning
Our path to grow together singing
God’s praises in our own voices
In ways true to our own choices
True worship is a free act
True fellowship’s the compact
That I will hear you and you me
That I will not fear you nor you me
That together we will think, feel, be
Not perfectly, but well enough to build
Our conversation and country as we jointly will

This life that’s become me doesn’t match me
though I’ve become it and it me
strange strange
tiringly odd

Author: De voor Dorc
Editors: Bartleby Willard and Amble Whistletown
Copyright: AM Watson

I had a weird dream last night
It was a weird movie

Michael J. Fox played a young man with thick hair who had somehow ended up with a magical elevator. It could go straight up as high as you wanted, with, as your companion throughout the ride, a built-in circus sideshow type hologram or puppet (the puppet in the booth in Tom Hank’s “Big” meets the Wizard of Oz’s floating face and booming voice in Frank L. Baum’s “The Wizard of Oz”) with spinning psychedelic eyes and a wooden-looking pinocchio nose and wooden-looking doll hands projecting out on either side of a red satin cloth.

Michael J. Fox invited a three young people (two women and a man; I think the man and one of the women were a couple) into the elevator disguised as an enclosed balcony set with a small table bearing a delicious spaghetti meal. Soon it turns out that one of the women (I see dark brown hair in forward-sweeping bob cuts on all my ladies) would’ve only charged like $10,000 for whatever the couple had charged $30,000 for. And the elevator rockets up and everyone panics until the couple agrees to come down to a fair price. Something to do with contracting? Construction?

But Michael J. Fox just leaves the elevator on the ground outside of his apartment building, and a couple teenage boys that the dream seems to think are the same people who were in the elevator, even though they clearly aren’t, find the elevator there on the grass between the bushes and they take it for a joy ride, and the crazy puppet with the crazy spinning eyes and the wooden-looking mouth with teeth painted in white warns them in increasingly desperate tones that they are moving into air they cannot breath, completely losing it with even eye-spinning that protrudes beyond and obscures his face and with wooden mouth opened wide to reveal dark hollow. Finally the two young idiots relent and dial the elevator back down, but in their panic they dial it down too fast and it crashes on the ground and they walk away shaking their heads from the broken elevator which now looks like a giant smashed-up and rumpled Cookie Monster outfit or puppet or something big and lying across the lawn next to the base of a nondescript cement (at the base), shiny dark-yellow plastic siding, and regular windows in black metal frames apartment building.

And the dream morphs into a narrator lamenting how we lost the movie before we found out how the Michael J. Fox character reacts to the demise of his magical elevator. But not lamenting much, since, after all, in this genre of easy-drinking 80s movie, the magical tool would of course have to be lost, leaving our hero with no choice but to find his happy ending without it, and losing a magic elevator that only goes straight up is not much of a loss, when compared to the typical wonders of magic. And then the narrator is wondering at the fact that Michael J. Fox, though an extremely short man, was a favorite lead in Hollywood films for the better part of a decade many decades after Hollywood had changed its mind that short men were better proportioned for the screen.

And then we see Humphrey Bogart in his typical all-grays gangster suit and upturned-collar trench coat (looking exactly like Albert Camus in that famous picture with him in a trench coat, cigarette on his lips, and determined eyes screwed thoughtfully forward) walking in a trench so he can be taller than some leading lady in a flapper’s silver sequin dress, or maybe in a nice white flowing dress.

And there’s a little talk of how it’s kind of a shame that now short men have no particular professional niche. Sure, they can be jockeys, but for that they have to be both very short and incredibly slight, and the world can only support a few jockeys at any one time in history.

Author: Amble Whistletown, with Bartleby Willard
Editor: Bartleby Willard, with Amble Whistletown
Copyright: Andrew Mackenzie Watson, with Andy Mac Son O’ Watt.

Trump is popular with MAGA partly because liberals are terrified that he will destroy democracy.
This proves to Republicans that he can do what they need to do: hurt liberals.
Why do they hate us so much?
Who do they think we are?
What is going on?
They are going to harm the country out of this need to hurt us.
I don’t know how badly; I can’t tell if this really is the tipping point from which we cannot recover.
What is the point where playing politics turns into supporting political evil?
I think Trump supporters have passed that point here in 2024.
Am I right?
If so, how can I clarify the picture in a way that allows them to see things as they really are while there is yet time for them to change course?

But the number of our fellow Americans who hate “us” (whatever that is) is not enough to power the Trump coalition. And our haters also love Trump and are certain he will save both the country and their souls. It must just be that many people either don’t believe us that electing Trump in 2024 poses an existential threat to our democracy or are so delusionally cynical that they think this is already Putin’s Russia (try living there a while and then come back to us about that). It seems obvious to me that you don’t make things better by blowing up a system of government that keeps government out of tyranny’s hands by letting the people regularly vote their leaders in or out.

Do we trace the beginning of the end to our democracy to Democrats choosing globalism and adding in redistribution over protectionism and unions, rather than pushing back completely on the Republicans? (The Republicans had long prioritized Wall Street, but then with Clinton the Democrats jump in, with the caveat that via redistribution all will be well?) Because a man wants to tell a woman that he is worthwhile, and part of the case that he has (since I guess time immortal) made to her is that he has a good job, he is a good worker? No man wants to put his arm around a woman and explain that he has no way of providing for her, but hey, that’s okay, the government will look out for us. And no woman wants to explain that of her man to her family. And the government can’t provide everything anyway. But Biden is pro-union in a way no US president has been in a long time. And the Democrats could put together a compromise between competition and prioritizing good, secure jobs. Maybe the Republicans could too, but there will be long-term good government without democracy (for the simple reason that in democracy the point is to govern well and be rewarded at the ballot, but in autocracy, the point is to stay in power and to stay in power and to stay in power), and Trump poses a unique existential threat to US American democracy. Why is it that that is so obvious to me but so many people think it’s all just politics as usual? Well, maybe a third of the country knows Trump is dangerous, a third knows he’s the savior needed to cure all our ills and destroy all our personal and collective evils, and a third knows it’s all just politics as usual. In short: it’s the normal Democrat-, Democrat-, and ShoulderShrug-true-believer breakdown in 21st Century US American politics. But this time there really is a twist: the Democrats are right and the Republicans are wrong, and our nation is facing an existential crisis. But how to convince a nation so used to believing only its side and/or so used to believing nothing?

Can our democracy survive a 2024 Trump presidency? Who knows? But why would we want to find out? What is the great thing to expect from a more streamlined administration under the control of an unhinged would-be authoritarian? Now that he’s figured out he doesn’t need pesky people like that crazy lib William Barr who kept moronically telling him that the election wasn’t stolen? People like that, who simply couldn’t see that “reality” and “truth” are just tools for getting what you want: finally the GOP is ready to move beyond all that, into pure nihilism! Who can’t feel the energy? Who doesn’t want to get up out of their seats and praise the Noise?

Do nations rise and fall based on how many a man can tell his woman he’s got a good job, that he’s a valued worker, that he won’t let her down?

Why do I wake up at four in the morning worrying about the country?
Because this is what I hear from Donald Trump:
This is how we do America from now on: I pick who wins major elections.
Because I am the King of the Greatest! And you need to suck my dick and admit you like it!
And this is what I hear from the GOP:
OKay, yeah, that’s an approach we could work with.
That’s a workable strategy. We can come up with think tanks and talking points for that.
And this what I hear from Trump’s fans:
That’s right! Make them suck it!
And this what I feel like:
Don’t you hear? He’s saying everyone has to … glug glough uck

Rules, rules, rules.

Bartleby is only permitted to turn into a sea creature and go sit on the bottom of the deepest darkest sea for ten hours a week, and for no more than four hours at a time.

Amble is only allowed four bottles of tainted love a week, and no more than one per day.

Andy can have only five units of alcohol a week, and no more than 2 units in a day (2 units would be equivalent to one of those giant glasses of wine he’s wont to pour himself).

Why these rules?
These rules are just to say that these three men — a fictions within fictions, a real character within fictions, and a person (whatever that is) in the real world (whatever that is) — are not allowed to abuse substances for the duration.

What is the duration?
And what happens when they transgress the bounds?

Good questions!
The duration is from now until someone other than Donald Trump becomes president of the United States.
If they break their rules, they are not permitted to touch their substance of choice for one month — a penalty which terrifies them all.

Discipline! To stop the evil!

For so long now we’ve wished to the stop the evil, whatever that is.

What eats a human, a relationship, a family, a pile of overlapping groups, a nation from the inside out?
Why, the evil does, of course!

But what is this thing “the evil”?

In individuals: the evil is corruptions in the communication between an individual’s soul and their own feeling/thinking/acting.

For example: We see someone knocked down and this little flinch of meanness rises in us, a little desire to shove them further down, and if we give in to that flinch — either out of pure malice or goaded by surrounding circumstances playing with bits of malice, bits of cowardice, bits of confusion, bits of self pity, bits of … — we look away from the Love shining through each moment, and worship our own self-centered weaknesses rather than the Love that chooses everyone. Every time we do this we corrupt our own relationship with our own heart of hearts and drift a little further away from our own sense of meaning and order. To the degree we so drift, we lose the ability to feel/think/act in ways that are meaningful to ourselves. And so we slip a little further into the empty noise chaos of nihilism.

In groups and nation states: the evil is systems that select for evil actions.

For example: In authoritarian states, the supreme political good is getting, maintain, wielding, and exploiting power. To the degree a state slips into the logic of might makes right, success in the state requires collaborating with people and organizations that routinely hurt their own citizens in order to suppress dissent and exercise power. And without “success” in such a state, one often has trouble providing for and protecting oneself and one’s loved ones. And so corrupted states select for crimes against humanity, which encourage, reward, and foster internal corruptions. That is to say: Serving a dictator encourages, rewards, and fosters personal evil.

But when can we say the other side has gone too far?
For thirty years the gulf between Republicans and Democrats has widened.
We already think the other side is some mixture of incompetent and evil.
So we’re inoculated against their critiques and beholden only to those on “our side” for self-analysis.
That’s how we got into this jam, where I am almost certain that in supporting rather than repudiating a known enemy to democracy the Republicans are placing our democracy in extreme jeopardy, therewith committing a grave political evil, and they say I’m just full of shit and if anything the evil dictator of error is Joseph Biden.
I know that they are seeing everything upside down and this topsy-turvy vision is a willful, a self-imposed error, and thus not just a wrong-headed political opinion but an act of evil.
But they know I’m full of shit and aren’t worth the paper I’m printed on.

They are wrong this time, but we’ve been crying wolf on each and huddling in our separate echo chambers for so long now, it is easy for them to picture me as the unfaithful shepherd, who cries “wolf!” in order to direct everyone’s attention away from his own (party’s) crimes.

What’s to be done?
I am right this time, but what good does that do me if they can’t see that, though I’m not always right, and sometimes it’s more a matter of opinion than of straight up right or wrong, this time I am right and they are wrong, and they should stop supporting Trump and start demanding politicians who respect and honor the outcomes of both elections they win and elections they lose?

Still, here we are, and we ought to try to help somehow or other. So let’s at least step away from the mindless stupors.

But how will we shake out the jangles if we can’t collapse into controlled demolitions of our thought and feeling?
Surely we must shake out the jangles to avoid even worse collapses! Surely we must shake out the convoluted meshwork’s of hurt hearts and desperate emotional/mental lunges! Otherwise we’re sure to fall into uncontrolled demolitions of our thought and feeling! Surely we must regularly flee from the tension that constantly bends our shoulders down and forward, our hips and pelvis up, our head over and down, our knees up, fly from the tension that forever makes a panicked roly-poly out of our inner space. Otherwise we’re sure to lose our balance and run to harder drugs and more reckless spiritual retreats! And that would surely be dangerously irresponsible. Right?

Anyway, how can we think and feel fresh if we don’t regularly liquidate our thinking and feeling?

What are we getting wrong here?
We know we’re not quite catching the nuances, but we can’t quite make out our missteps.

Be that as it may!
Let’s turn off the substance abuse while seeking other was to relax the jangles, shake out the convolutions, and melt our thought and feeling.
Maybe meditation?
Running?
Freewriting?
There’s things we could try.

Author: Bartleby Willard
Editor: Amble Whistletown
Copyright: Andy Watson

How lucky we have had it!
How easy we have had it!
How pleasant it has been!
How docile and yet bouncy.

A safe place to stay.
Good food and clean water.
Even perks like amazingly good decaf teas and coffees, too much high quality wine, strolls in the park, restaurants and museums, periodicals and music rushed to the telephone, books and other riches delivered to the door, movies beamed into the laptop.

And so many years of never worrying about being bombed, or being persecuted for political opinions, or being jailed for no reason or without appeal!
So many years luxuriating in a well-functioning liberal democratic republic!
How sweet it’s been.

What is political evil?
Is it not true that people supporting Trump now are committing crimes against humanity?
We think they are.
Are we right?
Would telling them to please stop being evil help?

What is the task of the citizens of a democratic republic?
Is it not most fundamentally to act as a final check on madness and corruption in government?
And aren’t those Republicans who vote for Trump in the 2024 presidential primaries failing in that most basic duty?

Remember when John Goodman / Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski would go on those tirades about how he didn’t watch his friends die face down in the mud in Nam so that [whatever he was outraged in that moment] ?

Remember laughing at his character and that the movie was so clever and flowed so beautifully and with so much verve?

Did we, so young and snug in our Pax Americana and never-fail-empire, laugh too far past the poignancy?

Hard to say.

But it is true that people have fought hard and sacrificed much so that you and I and we all together could enjoy the safe harbor of a government of by and for the people.

And you, Trump voters: All you’ve been asked to do in the service of our shared nation and home is accept reality and your place in it, and vote accordingly. But you can’t even make that little intellectual/emotional sacrifice of admitting that you have a political responsibility that goes beyond owning the libs. You talk a big game about personal responsibility, but here you can’t even be bothered to get your heads out of conspiracy theories and huff-and-puff certainty in your own moral and spiritual superiority and/or the infinite, and all-justifying depth of your grievances. You can’t be troubled to prefer a realistic narrative about Donald Trump’s actions vis a vis democracy to a fantastical one. Is there not a point where willful ignorance of the reality surrounding a core moral duty shades into regular old evil? And have you not sailed past that point by voting for Trump in 2024?

One never knows everything and you can always find someone willing to claim anything. But Donald Trump, though lacking any justifiable grounds for declaring the election stolen, attempted to coerce state and federal leaders to throw the election to him, rallied a mob with the lie of a stolen election and set them to march on the Capitol while the Senate meeting to confirm Biden’s victory, exhorting them to “take our nation back”, and performed other actions meant to thwart the will of the people and undermine the peaceful, law-based transfer of power fundamental to a working democratic republic. This much anyone with any willingness to choose reality over la la land can easily know. Not KNOW in some infinite perfect sense. But know deep and well enough to know that Donald Trump, who rather than repenting of these attacks on our shared government continues to repeat well and consistently repudiated lies about a stolen election, should not be entrusted with political power ever again. Add to this how conservative think tanks and Trump insiders alike are planning how to rid the next Trump administration of pesky dissenters (not liberals, but people with enough principles to tell Trump that he’s wrong–like, for example, William Barr when he repeatedly investigated and dutifully shot-down Trumps many desperate stolen-election conspiracy theories; or like Mike Pence, who, though both privately and [with perhaps life-threatening consequences] publicly pressured by Trump to not certify the 2020 election, did his constitutional duty and certified the election), and handing the keys to the most powerful nation in the world back to Donald Trump can only be described as criminally irresponsible.

What should we do? No one’s perfect. And many Trump voters are in many ways better citizens than many Trump detractors. However, Trump voters are together pumping poison into our shared democracy, and this is a crime against themselves, us, and humanity.

Because a functioning democratic republic is a spiritual good: It is a framework through which citizens can together evolve both their shared conversation/reality and their shared government, while serving as a final check on madness, corruption, and tyranny. And in this way the citizens can create an environment that selects for ideas and actions that benefit the general welfare of the nation and her citizens, rather than an environment that selects for ideas and actions prioritizing stealing power away from the people.

Why are thugocracies invariably incompetent? Because you usually, over time, hit the target you are aiming for, and thugocracies aim not to rule well and be rewarded for it at the ballot box, but to suppress dissent and hold onto power at all costs.

What should we do?
Telling people they are being evil rarely helps.
And Trump supporters are primed to see half the nation as their sworn enemy, as traitors to America, God, family, and everything deserving of love and affection in this wide world.
But maybe if we gently point out the plausibility of our account and the implausibility of the one they are serving: Maybe a gentle but consistent reminder of and appeal to our shared humanity and the principle — without which all is chaos, nihilism, and hell — that what is true is true for everyone. Trump’s most fundamental tactic is an assault on this principle. He uses truth and facts as weapons, with the implicit claim that “reality” is just stories you make up in order to get your way. What is going on inside his supporters? Are they not at some level and to some degree bowing to the Donald’s nihilistic narrative that “reality” is nothing but a tool for getting, holding, and wielding power — that claims of “true” and “false” are to be judged not by how accurate they are, but by how well they serve the one true good of dominating other people?

Trump’s fantasy has the power to wreck this nation, since we cannot meaningfully share government if we cannot meaningfully share reality.

The counter to Trump’s basic lie is this basic truth: We are all in this together; we all share the universal values (aware, clear, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind, joyfully-sharing); and we all, as citizens of a democratic republic, have both a right and a duty to seek (as individuals and in the many overlapping groups and organizations to which we belong) the active spiritual, ethical, emotional, and intellectual clarity needed to together nudge our shared government away from the worse and towards the better.

We humbly ask GOP voters to stop being evil and start voting exclusively for candidates who have not attempted to replace democratic rule with their own immortal reigns. Not because we are good and you are bad, but because we are all both good and bad, and what you are doing here and now is bad and we see it and feel it in our bones.

People always have reasons for the bad things they do. But at the end of the day, we are responsible for what we do. It is never completely clear what’s going on. But Trump’s authoritarian tendencies (see Trump’s Threats to Democracy), his concentrated and prolonged efforts to cheat his way to victory in 2020, and the lessons he’s learned about how to be a more successful authoritarian are clear enough that the wise course is clearly to steer clear of him.

“We’ve cut more regulations in a year and a quarter than any administration, whether it’s four years, eight years or, in one case, 16 years,” he said. “Should we go back to 16 years? Congressman, can we have that extended? The last time I jokingly said that, the papers started saying ‘he’s got despotic tendencies!’ No, I’m not looking to do it, unless you want to do it.”

That was Trump in 2018. There’s other examples from other years. Abusers will sometimes prep their victims. They’ll sometimes work a long time at twisting their victim’s reality until abuse to both abuser and abused alike as something reasonable, normal, deserved, maybe even good.

Okay, there’s that angle, but there’s also the way an abuser will feel a person out — see what they can get away with, gradually expanding their territory of domination. That has an element of prepping and seducing, but also an element of cautious exploration.

Or do we go too far?
We feel that Donald Trump is abusing the nation.
Why don’t his fans feel abused?
Why do his biggest fans feel safe, snug, loved, sheltered, beloved, prized, heard, exalted, ecstatically free?

Author: Bartleby Willard
Editor: Amble Whistletown
Copyright: Andrew Watson

What if you were a Christian after all?
Not the kind that believes Jesus Christ is the Son of God, or that after he was crucified he descended into hell, where he whiled three days, before returning to heaven to sit at the right hand of God the Father, where he will judge the quick and dead for eternity Amen.
Not that kind of Christian, but the kind that reads the Bible and goes to church and prayers and meditates, and generally seeks to relate to the Love prior to all traditions via the Christian tradition.
Because? Because that’s the one that you know in your bones, the one that reminds you of being young and decent.
What about that?
Why not?

My wife
my wife
my wife

a soft belly upon which I might rest my head

my wife
my love
my home

a joyful giggle upon which I might lay my days

my wife
my girl
my baby

a gentle hand upon which I might hang my world.

my wife
where are you?
and could you push against me enough
to keep me from melting in the rain like dirty old snow
and could we push against the evil enough
to keep this land from running down the gutter, shimmering with oily writhing, with bright plastic detergent bottles floating here and running aground there.

He’s done.
Why is he still alive?
Long ago he stopped living, but still he remains, pouring himself another drink, putting on another playlist, writing another memo to the void.

The drinker is a boring tale.
The drinker is going nowhere.
The drinker is getting stale.
The drinker is full of show-care.
The drinker is an empty husk
His soul has left his chest
Left in the rain, he rusts.
Caught by some pain, he’s pressed
against the clapboard wall
of an old shed ready to fall

The drinker is done
So what does the man inside the drinker do?
The emptiness won
So what does the plan inside the world come to?

I’m on the give-up
I’m on the fall-apart
I wanted to tell someone
about how it hurts
and how I can’t solve it
can’t riddle my way out of it
how I need a friend who would believe me but no one believes me and I can’t even believe me anymore, but still this truth (not any kind of Truth!) undoes me from the inside out.

But all that
feels like a luxury
in this time of war
in this age of evil
in this crime sneaking through
in this lie winning easy
in this sabotage invited in, no, no need to hide in a Trojan horse or anything! Come right in! We’re ready!