"Welcome to our Ool"

There’s something wrong with you if you don’t like AMC’s The Walking Dead. Despite the viscera and brainstem separations intrinsic to the zombie sub-genre it’s a mega hit - shattered records - captivating everyone from lucky preteens with permissive parents to baby boomers introduced to the show by their kids.

I’m not blind, I see that the show has value: strong principle actors, lush, sweltering Atlanta-for-Atlanta setting, perfectly putrid zombies (thank the CGI folks and the make-up guru promoted to producer for the second season) – but it’s not enough. What’s most upsetting, is that not liking the show makes me feel inanely possessive of the “cult” or “genre” material I so love, and inherently, and pedestrianly, contemptuous of big-budget genre success, which I don’t want to be.

I like shows like True Blood and movies like Independence Day as much as any entertainment junkie and Alan Ball and Roland Emmerich are/were working with thundering budgets and studio support. Am I nuts? Why does AMC’s Herculean serialized zombie drama feel like a betrayal?

I don’t blame the show for not living up to press superlatives. Every outlet treated it like an infallible institution after six quick cuts. Those episodes were handled with such care, they constructed the heightened Dead world in striking imagery – a quixotic cop riding a horse down a highway packing serious heat, a group of survivors trapped in a department store wearing lab coats, elbow-length rubber gloves and face-shields while hacking a zombie corpse for sent camouflage, lots of tear and dirt streaked faces, lots and lots of zombie carnage – and they had discernable narrative structure: the escape from Atlanta episode, the CDC episode, etc.

They were good, but far from flawless. They did little for character and adrenaline-low periods were filled with protracted melodrama tolerable only when sandwiched between action and horror. Serious “real life” issues feel phoned-in when zombies are trying to eat you. Gang skirmishes, in-fighting, attempted rape, and racism are nuisance obstacles to survival, and no one wants to see rape as a cold side dish to a global plague.

Season two of The Dead has been a monotonous, biblically tragic playing out of a few tired plotlines, and the slowest dramatic storytelling I’ve encountered on film, maybe in books as well, including Victorian literature. Episodic television has done “heightened world” and “drama” at the same time, and done it for more than six episodes: Battlestar Galactica, 24, Lost, to name a few. Nancy Franklin, in a New Yorker review for a different show, writes: “It’s understandable that people working in TV would welcome the chance to stretch out a story, but that doesn’t necessarily make the story better.”

In addition to what feels like a disregard for entertainment conventions, character arcs are missing (aside from the male counter-lead developing into a solipsistic, murderous, emotionally regressed survival automaton.) We’ve seen mood swings from the rogue hick, group father, repressed widow, conflicted but loyal wife, but no arcing. Fans have argued that Glen is newly assertive since his romance with the farmer’s daughter – but they’re forgetting that he’s been authoritative, he ran a team op. in episode two, even Rick followed his lead.

The visual storytelling hasn’t been as good this season, which may have something to do with the loss of super producer/screenwriter Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile) who was largely credited for the success of season one. The show, as entertainment, on a network producing stellar content (Mad Men, Breaking Bad) is falling short.

Are we watching because we’re supposed to? Are Andrew Lincoln’s stubbled jaw and Jon Bernthal’s pectoral muscles tipping the Kinsey scales? Are times so hard, the small pursuits that impel the majority of us so burdensome that we need to watch the death of ideals and possibilities in hour-blocks Sunday nights on AMC?

Critics and civilians call producers and writers bold, edgy, for risking dollars and time bringing genre to broader audiences – whether it’s Darabont and Gale Anne Hurd with The Dead or Colson Whitehead with his latest book, Zone One. Zombies (vampires, space travel, witches) are good stuff. Use it. Everyone should know the joys of reanimated brain-hungry corpses. But don’t mess it up.

The swimming pool in the mobile home community where my great-grandparents lived in Oceanside, CA had a sign that read: “Welcome to our Ool. Notice there is no “P” in our Ool. Please keep it that way.”

They’re peeing in the zombie pool.

Genre isn’t fringe because its stewards are lonesome misanthropes who like to watch grisly violence and laser-fire. There are different rules, different assumptions and priorities. It’s a place that shows the worst and best in human beings in a world beyond what is reasonable and common sense, beyond the flying cars or voodoo magic – a place that baptizes heroes in tears, blood, terror and triumph.

The world of The Walking Dead destroys its heroes. Poor Rick, when not on horseback he can’t keep the look of punishing torment off his face, even when he’s not having to put a cap in the crown of the zombified child of a group member. I loved the show for bringing Laurie Holden, the icy-hot, double-dealing, ultra high clearance fed from the X-Files, back to the small screen, until in an early episode her character asked, “would it be considered looting?” when contemplating taking a necklace from a display case (post zombie apocalypse, this is just bonkers) and later spent numerous episodes in a dreary fugue between fight and flight.
 

Equally sad to me, is that the show, in season two, is also destroying its villains, chiefly by entertaining the idea that zombies retain humanity, that they’re people. Zombies are frightening because they used to be our friends, but they are scourge, undead, soulless. Krista Tippett did a TV hour, Monsters We Love: TV's Pop Culture Theodicy (Dec 1, 2011) on her radio program On Being and focused largely on The Walking Dead, her guest Diane Winston, Knight Chair in Media and Religion at USC, said “Zombies kind-of push the boundaries of what is human … and so what is our response to them and our responsibility for them?”

Wrong.

It’s fine for unfamiliar viewers to be disturbed that zombie heads can be chopped off with no remorse, but this cult theater has never been about the zombies, it’s about the humanity of the people, however flawed, who survive. The show splitting humanity between zombies and survivors is not philosophically interesting and it’s not entertaining.

 

Fantasy, horror, or sci fi done wrong hurts genre more than a bad family or romantic comedy, like the Solyndra scandal hurt green energy in a way the BP spill could never hurt oil. Which leaves this true fan doubly disheartened.

In a recent NY Times piece, Robert Kirkman, creator of the graphic novels that inspired the series, now a producer on the show, said he hopes “The Walking Dead will run at least 20 seasons. Zombies are the new Simpsons.” With all due respect to Mr. Kirkman and all the talented people working on his show, The Simpsons have managed to tell topical stories, with comedy and drama and romance in entertaining episodic format for twenty-five years – I’d be surprised if The Dead made a fifth of that, without a serious identity overhaul.

For now, I’ll get my zombie fix with Romero and Raimi, I’ll watch every Resident Evil sequel Paul W.S. Anderson and his wife make, and I’ll keep my eyes to the horizon for the next promising flesh-eating horde.

PSYCHONEURO NEUROPSYCHO

For those who don’t remember Anna O., née Bertha Pappenheim, the infamous "hysterical” case study and partial impetus for the birth of psychoanalysis, here’s the rundown: the poor woman suffered severely in a number of ways, her symptoms included acute paralysis and hallucinations, most uncommonly, she exhibited all the physiological signs of pregnancy whilst not actually supporting a fetus.

Freud attributed Anna/Bertha’s false or “hysterical” pregnancy to transference but post second/third wave feminism (all the waves) and myriad social and academic movements, Freud is so tenuously trusted that his explanations of this case read as a sort of myth, a soapbox for the dissemination of a deeply flawed theory.

The zeitgeist of the English-speaking world has shifted dramatically in its support or rejection of psychoanalysis since Anna O. and Freud’s 1895 “Project for a Scientific Psychology.” In recent decades, we’ve denounced case study-based induction, condemned scientifically unverifiable assertions and questioned the effectiveness of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic tool along with the bizarre metaphors for brain function upon which it’s based [1].

The man himself has been taboo in scholarly circles, caricatured and snidely cited as anathema to truth so frequently in various media that he and his body of work have been reduced in popular consciousness to something two dimensional and comic (like the doodle pictured above.)

Evolutionary, behavioral and cognitive approaches largely replaced psychoanalytic theory in the quest to understand the mysteries of the human mind.

We’ve studied animal and human behavior extensively and comparatively, called the mind a computer and an inference machine and studied how information is processed and responses generated with advanced scientific tools i.e. functioning magnetic resonance imaging and the electron microscope, we’ve dissected neural structures from the dura mater to the deepest ventricles and down the brain stem.

Although psychoanalysis hasn’t fared well under empirical scrutiny, subsequent methodologies aren’t without weaknesses, and Freud’s ideas continue to remain topical, particularly his ideas concerning the unconscious. 

In a 2008 Yale publication, John Bargh and Ezequiel Morsella write: “Freud’s model of the unconscious as the primary guiding influence over daily life, even today, is more specific and detailed than any to be found in contemporary cognitive or social psychology.[2]” And in accepting a Division of Psychoanalysis Scientific Award, also in 2008, interdisciplinary psychologist/neurologist Allan Schore, said: “After a century of disconnection, psychoanalysis is returning to its biological and psychological sources, and this re-integration is generating a palpable surge of energy.[3]”

Moving past categorical disavowal of Freud is a good thing. Psychology as a science, adolescent in comparison with the physical sciences or astronomy, has broadened. Vestiges of the belief that humans are radically different from animals, neurologically, have been swept away. Perhaps most importantly, we’ve corrected the error of Cartesian mind-body dualism. We now know that the body and the mind (brain) are intimately connected. As Schore, Bargh and Morsella and many others have noted, a big part of that connection is unconscious.

Awareness, even our broader notion of 'consciousness' alone does not explain the mind. What we think of as “self” far exceeds what is intentional and reflective in the individual – it’s also perceptual, evaluative and emotional, seated in structures of the brain inactive during conscious thought.

Jaques Lacan, a Freudian/neo-Freudian and a giant in the field, believed the beauty of analysis was that it could explain what science and philosophy failed to. Paradoxically, it has been the integration of these fields that has resurrected Freudian interpretations and produced the happy lexical marriage: neuropsycho, or psychoneuro, and exciting sister disciplines: neuropsychoanalysis, neuropsychopharmacology, and psychoneuroimmunology (it’s real, check out this book that explores how intersubjective ideas about self and other lead to illness.)

As it turns out, Freud’s diagnosis of Bertha P. was specious, but her symptoms were not. Mary Tudor, "Bloody Mary" is reported to have had a false pregnancy, the phenomenon’s clinical name is psuedocyesis and the condition has been observed in otherwise sane and stable women from Hippocrates’ Greece to modern day Rochester, New York.

The neuropsycho explanation for this, explained in this 2005 NY Times article, is twofold: firstly, pseudocyesis is seated in an unconscious emotional drive to become pregnant and/or that there is a kink in the mind-body feedback loop in the brain, localized in the pregnancy hormone-producing pituitary. The self-reinforcing loop working something like: conscious or unconscious pregnancy drive – surge in prolactin and estrogen production – physiological changes (distended abdomen, cessation of ovulation) – drive reinforcement – continued hormone fluctuation – more physiological changes, etc. etc. false pregnancy.

Wow, right?

Pseudocyesis is simultaneously discomforting and miraculous, and standard shattering. If a woman can believe she is pregnant for nine months and clutch her melon-sized stomach in pain when she believes she’s in labor, then the door of possibilities - for mind over matter and alternative definitions of reality and truth - is wide open.

The mind is open, the field of brain science is open, it’s a good time to be mystified and lost in all the research. There’s an NYU lab that does bees, only bees, with complex electronics, experimental results have implications for perception in all animals, including humans. There are guys at Imperial College London feeding volunteers magic mushrooms and interpreting fMRI scans through a neuropsychoanalytic lens - for more, read: Mo Costandi's neurophilsophy blog on the Guardian site.

A layperson keen on keeping things straight, might start making a list – a list of convincing brain stories.

Why not start with false pregnancy? Not specifically, pseudocyesis is rare and historically creepy, but generally, with the awesome presentations of mind-body connectedness. The world of psychosomatics is fascinating and rigorously documented – by shamans and faith healers of all creeds and scientifically with studies on the placebo effect.

Depression researchers see so much of the placebo effect that they’re almost throwing up their hands. It’s belief the treatment will work, conscious or unconscious, that yields positive returns for patients. Does Prozac treat depression? Sure. Does a sugar pill? Yep. Does the sugar pill work on hopeful patients even when they know it’s only a sugar pill? Yes, it does.

If the guy who faces flu season with a wholesome conviction he won’t get sick can stay healthier, what about the smoker who deeply believes he won’t get cancer? It would be ludicrous to deny evidence of the harmful effects of smoking. No, no, cancer happens, but - what if - not for everyone?

The range of derangements observable in the human animal is vast but most of us are ordinary. The prosaic majority is normalizing and while there’s something to be said for predictability and order, the potential that the body is alterable through the mind is seductive. It’s certainly not hip to be the outlier eschewing medical science, shouting about how illness can be prevented or treated with a peculiar mind-body harmony – even if there are thousands of years of corroborative stories.

It might not be practical to live in a world without limits. But it’s colorful. What bridges the conscious/unconscious and generates feedback loops in the body is a complicated question but we’re shrooming in the lab, we might have answers on this soon. 

Perhaps in this period of un/underemployment and sporadic access to healthcare it might be wise to act in advance of the peer-reviewed journals. Eat oranges, drink water, and cultivate an abetting psychoneuro environment. You might stay healthy. Stranger things…

 

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[1] Evans, Dylan. “From Lacan to Darwin,” ed: Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson, The Literary Animal; Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press: 2005) 38-55.

[2] Bargh, John A. and Ezequiel Morsella. “The Unconscious Mind,” Perspectives on Psychological Science, Vol: 3, #1 (Yale: 2008) 73-79.

[3] Schore, Allan N. “Paradigm Shift: The Right Brain and the Relational Unconscious,” Official Publication of Division 39 of the American Psychological Association, Volume: XXVIII, (No. 3, Summer 2008) 20-26.

In Between

Diotima - Plato's Symposium

Anyone who has interacted closely with a speaker(s) of another language for any sustained period likely has no dearth of miscommunication anecdotes rich with the small triumphs and humiliations that follow verbal collisions.

International business has developed protocol for cross-linguistic exchange that includes polyglot professionals and translators and something like a Google Translate can help average monolinguistic citizens live-chat with fellow gamers during online raids or write atrociously disjointed emails to an uncle’s second cousin in France looking to come westward to study English but there aren’t many solutions for in the flesh communication.

Trying to buy your daily pastry from the staunchly non-English-speaking women with huge biceps and floury hands behind the counter of your neighborhood Ukrainian bakery can be an Olympian struggle. Then, there are restaurant kitchens. Sweeping horizontally across cuisine types and geography, the monopoly of kitchen jobs held by Spanish speakers in the U.S. has created compelling linguistic environments in kitchens small and grand.

According to the National Restaurant Association, the industry is one of if not the largest private sector employer in America, netting around 600bil in profits last year, comprising 4% of the GDP and employing about 13 million people, challenging a large chunk of them to build some kind of communication-bridge. Whether you’re a sleepy morning commuter who wants a coffee and a bun from impermeable Ukrainians or you’re a server and need a line cook to hold an ingredient to avoid sending a customer into anaphylactic shock, you’re going to need to communicate.

Often, what isn’t related in hand gestures and exaggerated facial expressions also isn’t spoken in English or Ukrainian, English or Spanish, but in some middle tongue between the two. In kitchens, the resulting hybrid language is called “Kitchen Spanish” (visit the eponymous website to learn more about this marvelously useful chimera.)

We’re familiar enough with the concept of lingua franca; it develops in geographical regions where people from different linguistic cultures coexist or in pockets of confrontation like a restaurant kitchen. What’s relatively undocumented is the ubiquitous and persistent generalized process of adjustment and the inception of an intermediary (language, art form, design style) between two poles.

Even speaking to someone with moderate English proficiency, we often modify our language. One might say: “make” rather than “throw” a party, or “do exercise” instead of “go to the gym” to a speaker of a Romance language. It’s also common, if insulting folly, to order Chinese food in a fractured jumble of nouns and verbs with just a whisper of an Asian accent. In either case, it’s not quite English that’s being spoken. Any CELTA certified ESL instructor (probably others too) will tell you that this is not the way to teach but we’re not teaching, we’re communicating, in a space between two languages.

This in-between space is created by confrontation in many theaters. Going back to restaurants, in the ZAGAT guide for NYC, listings under “Italian” will include, without differentiating, restaurants serving two distinct types of food: Italian-Italian and Italian-American. Italian-American is the cuisine hybridization of Italian and American cookery traditions and is part of the legitimate cultural heritage of people of Italian descent living in the United States. The Italian chefs and staff who run Italian-Italian restaurants would take major issue with the stuffed calzones and baked lasagna at a Brooklyn Vinnie’s being labeled: Italian. It’s not quite Italian food that’s being served. It’s material evidence of a new form resulting from the confrontation of two distinct entities, food entities, all delicious.

 

Likewise, the Mediterranean homes speckling the hillsides of the Southwest, which so many families enjoy living in, architecturally, aren’t Mediterranean or American Modern, they’re in-between. There’s space here too for comparisons to pop science and pop art - that products and practitioners are in-between - but as these issues are contentious and here “between” is often seen as “less than” we’ll avoid protracted discussion and move on to speculation about the significance of in-between states.

Perhaps, new forms born in negotiation between existing bodies speaks to something fundamental in the nature of human beings. Humans seem to be constantly adjusting and amending ourselves to ourselves and the outside world; in our private conscious minds can be found fodder for the personalities of ten men, often, outgoing behavior flourishes around gregarious friends, while we’re somber and reflective in pensive company. Romantic relationships are frequently described as being successful when two people can learn to exist both as individuals and harmoniously as an adjusted pair.

In Plato’s Symposium, party guests, including: Phaedrus, Aristophanes and of course Socrates agree to discourse in praise of the god Love (Eros), to pass the evening soberly, as they’re hung-over from the previous night’s celebrations. Socrates relates the speeches of Diotima, a woman from Mantinea, who taught him that Love is able to constantly seek what is good and beautiful because he is between god and mortal. A great spirit of in-between, Love is between: wisdom and ignorance, wealth and destitution. Any knowledge of the true form of beauty comes from Love, that “always is and neither comes to be nor passes away, neither waxes nor wanes.[1]”

 

To some, life is a constant state of becoming; humans search for the best, truest ways to be ourselves, and in this search we bond with what we see as good or beautiful, material and immaterial, and through this process, negotiate new selves and new ideas, and are improved. In love, we create, through reproduction, which allows the best parts of ourselves a mortal’s chance at immortality, and we create immaterially (for Socrates/Plato, loftier enterprise) through art, philosophy, and laws, which endure to make life better for posterity. It is the state of in-between and the desire for good, truth and beauty that spurs all of man’s most inspired creations.

Kitchen Spanish is probably not an exalted art, fruit of Eros, but it’s certainly a product of this in-between state, reminding us of a process of negotiation and adjustment through which new forms are born and we progress. It allows us to communicate, and might save your life if your hyperactive immune system attempts to deprive your lungs of oxygen when you ingest peanuts, and that’s certainly a good thing.

Post Script:

Anyone who needs to convince an intransigent homophobe that a man’s love for another man is a natural and beautiful thing has a powerful tool in this B.C.E. dialogue and should present the afflicted party with it as soon as possible. Also, John Cameron Mitchell fans will recognize the basis for Hedwig’s "Origin of Love" in Aristophanes’ speech, so that’s a treat.

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[1] Plato. “Symposium,” trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis: Hackett: 1997) 457.

Distain is Unbecoming

Distain is unbecoming. This piece has been forwarded around, we’re not with you Mr. Diamond, we’re sad for you.

Do you want to name drop The Paris Review? Do you want to tell other people you’re better than them in a public forum? Congratulations. Follow Diamond’s model.

Read: Diamond's NY Times opinion and it’ll be clear that this man feels markedly better than - others, his past self, goodness knows who else for having once prepared coffee drinks and moved on.

Despite his conciliatory last sentence:

And while I may always be more recognizable on the city streets for my great steamed milk than for my killer prose, there are worse things than having a legacy, even one so strange and aromatic.

Mr. Poor-Surpassed-What-He-Once-Was-Man spends eight hundred words or so shaming the life he and close to thirteen million other Americans live(d) working in the restaurant industry. It’s as though he wants you to put your hands to your cheeks and inhale quickly because - he was able to entertain outside thoughts and goals and perform respectably at a day job. GHASP.

There are coffee snobs and there are writing snobs (any prefix or modifier accepted) and then there are people like you, or who represent yourself to be, Mr. Diamond.

Still, we’d like to think there’s hope for you.

Take pride in what you do. If you spend your paid hours behind a bar, make those drinks with enviable finesse and facilitate customer interactions that make lives better, yours and theirs.

As for your “killer prose” - to influence hearts and minds and you need a perspective grounded by at least an ounce of balance, perhaps with a touch of humility. It’s hard to anticipate that from you, but we’ll keep an open mind.

The text at the bottom of the NY Times post reads: Townies welcomes submissions at townies@nytimes.com.

Please write to Mr. Diamond, if you feel like you can help him.

Place and the New Collective Unconscious

NY - 3rd looking south toward Cooper Union

I'm going to change my city today. I'm going to change my town. This place is going to be different because of me.

If thoughts like these belong to anyone, they're traditionally seated in the realm of architects, landscape engineers, maybe gardeners and farmers and the like, and dreamers. Beyond conventional aspirations to prominence: corner office, staff, celebrity, there are fantasies about effecting change by influencing hearts and minds. There are the Madison Avenue types and the VC folk in San Mateo county, people who build buildings and create dreams, but, without dwelling on outliers, arguably the recently deceased Steven Jobs, they are not dreamers. Not this kind.

Waking, facing skylines, walking to work in reverent fantasy, reshaping physical and cultural space - dreamers of this kind are rare and subversively hip. They touch the fringes of psychopathia, if you agree with Norman Mailer on hipster psychopaths - his subjects are not privileged pseudo-rebels in black pants and vintage boots, not exactly. Certainly not in clothing or speech affectations, his article was published in 1957, some adjustments are necessary.

For Mailer, a hipster is an enfant terrible turned inside out, a thief and a criminal who can't be interviewed or recorded because he or she would stand apart from a society that homogenizes or destroys itself with equal irreverence for the individual. The internet changed that. Open access. No censorship. No curation. We differentiate as we record.

We project ourselves in text, pictures, sound and video into the online environment. Identities remain fixed in lapidary statements of self and intellectual property is dispersed at unimaginable speeds to incredible distances. The collective unconscious has a bibliography, updated and referenced by millions hourly. The forum is both present and timeless.

In a sense, the internet has made hipsters of us all (in the developed world, where, increasingly, the cost of web access is absorbed as essential) or, at least provided an avenue for self and group acknowledgement void of any conventional social restraints. Mailer's hipster, psychopath, not psychotic, product and author of an unidyllic cultural theater, has been turned inside out again, and set free.

We are able to source our identities from the freely published content of others, from the personal lives, creeds, activities and ideas in the miasma of the super-organic supersphere of collective consciousness plotted online. We are changed physically, neurochemically, by the transmigration of self experiences and self consciousness. The process of osmotic absorption of identity is individually and communally observable, and may well apply to place.


Places have identities, physical and cultural, now just as public as our own. Today, videos from Berlin are streamed in Pretoria. Someone in Sao Paulo can be intimately familiar with life in Barcelona without traveling farther than a computer screen. Organizations like FUTURECITY in the UK actively employ "place-making" techniques to shape culture through the development of new physical spaces. It's conceivable that we may be changing physical space by recording cultural space.


One might say this about any place, but: New York is special. The city is a modern marvel less for it's physical stature, which coruscates with cosmopolitan and prurient wonders, than because it is a global focal point for creativity and the expression of that creativity. This aspect of the city's identity attracts the creative elite, who then draw future creatives in a kind of helical symmetry perpetuated through time.

With online sharing enfranchising claims to places and connections to their uniqueness, and as place identity is documented and accessed over and over again, the powers conjured by uncommon imaginations - those dreamers whose minds seize on the shameless, unjustifiable, awesome reveries of altering their environments - may have been disseminated through the collective unconscious.


If anyone can read The Village Voice online or read, see, or watch what's going on in New York in real time via Twitter, is the city losing some of what makes it ineffably attractive? It's a disheartening prospect for anyone who loves where they live, be it New York or Newfoundland, and the physical consequences of the dissemination of place uniqueness is yet to be seen.

The sharing of information concerning places shouldn't be, were it possible, stalled. Transparency provides the foundation not only for education but for understanding, and if we're sanguine, a future of more peaceful coexistence with anyone who is "other" - even as cultural lines may blur.

Still, twenty, fifty, a hundred years from now it seems possible that New York's creative adrenaline will be less palpable, perhaps less visible on the ground. A good enough reason to live presently, be hip to the now, experience the city, any place, for what it offers. I'm going to live in my city today. I'm going to be where I am.