Night of the Living Dave

Last night I’d been at the cafe for many hours too long, just thinking about things, love related matters I can’t talk about here. Is it over again? Does it matter? Is this a pain in my stomach? What is this that I’m feeling? Is this from too much coffee?

Mars rose across the sky next to a bright full moon, we sat stoned on the back porch here becoming comfortable with the speed of moving planets, an hour spent motionless watching bright lights in the sky was no problem, two hours, all night long, no problem…, but eventually I went back to my undisclosed location.

Every time my ex cheated on me a door would open somehow, someone new would come smiling at me wanting to see what all the fuss was about, when it happened yesterday I met it with dread and fear, I didn’t want a new door to open though I admit I’ve always loved the chaos, I’ve always loved the crowds and the perfect conversation with whoever had the strangest eyes that day. Yes I know its supposed to be good for me, who am I to say nature is wrong, but still I defy these angels all the time, the ones that tell me how to love something new. No, this robot does not obey, this robot will cut off all transmissions and remain on a parkbench for days to keep from moving on. One zero zero one zero zero one. Worst case ever. Believe me.

I walked back to P’s house and saw there was no work for me there, so I almost went to sleep reading Rimbaud, who had just been kicking my ass with weird cooincidence all day long.

“Dave-o, are you there?” It was P. wondering where I’d been, it was leaf pick-up day the next morning, it was eleven-thirty at night but we had to rake the lawn or all was lost. So raking we did, quietly in the dark, trying not to wake the neighbors with too much conjecture. I went downstairs to sleep when my watch said it as 12:02 am.

This morning I woke up staring at the rafters again, it clicked again this time, I could hang myself from those, I could do it today couldn’t I. Yes. When I first started staying with T. he was very clear about this, “no hanging yourself in my basement” he said, “and no using my axe either!” I had actually been eying the axe earlier that day he’d mentioned this. I could drop it on myself in just the right way couldn’t I, I could cut my own head off somehow couldn’t I. There is a suicide on record of a man who cut off his own head with a chainsaw. He got enough momentum behind his swing that the saw kept going before his arms went limp, I always thought this was either hilarious or admirable or at least a true feat of strength of some kind, though I don’t know what it means now.

When I got myself standing I went out for a smoke and discovered the street still covered in leaves, leaf pick-up hadn’t happened yet, so I grabbed the rake and started raking again in case I could beat the leaf guys to the sidewalk. After I’d been there awhile this strange guy walks up and nods to me and goes past me toward the house next door, where he went into the garage and came back holding his own giant rake.

He started furiously raking the yard next door while all around us on both sides of the street the giant street sweeper vehicles had arrived, huge hulking things with turbines and roll-bars just eviscerating mountains of leaves that had been there for half the year. They swooped past us, getting closer to the edge of the sidewalk with each pass, it was quite menacing but there was still time, it was hard to say whose side they were on, these masked street-sweeping men, they seemed like they were trying to get all the leaves done before we could get the last of the shit off our lawns, but at the end it seemed like they paused to let us finish. A mystery. Still we hurried as if everything depended on our raking.

When it was done, and the masked men had finished with our square feet of pavement, I looked west toward the old man and he took out a smoke and lit it, which was awesome, and so did I, and then he said “see you later” in a thick native Italian accent and he left and I never saw him again.

There are longer palindromes out there, some of which actually including true narrative meaning beyond those ones that start with “dennis” and end with “sinned” and have a bunch of crap in the middle, but to my thinking there is no finer palindrome in the English language than this one I found a few weeks ago:

Elapsed,
a frail aria’s timid tone damned rage.
So ran I,
to order a note we both sang.
I laid low,
on miserable bald locations.
Sent I was,
all it is, I was.
I wondered,
Is no cost set as I deliver debts I made?
Will a foe rise?
Dare I pass or can I leer?
In eve’s yawn,
it left some gain.
On,
On I age,
most felt in ways even I reel in
Across a pier,
a desire of all I wed,
a mist bed.
Reviled,
is a test so considered.
Now I saw.
Is it ill as a witness?
No,
it a cold label bares.
I’m now old,
I align ash to be wet on a red root.
In a rose garden made not dim,
its air, a liar,
fades pale.

“Do you think that I’m crazy?
Out of my mind?
Do you think that I creep in the night
And sleep in a phone booth?“

A long, long time ago when Sara lived at That House on 37th and Cora, we were wasted coming back from the Gladtav and I went to sleep on one of those big comfy chairs on the front porch and it was summertime so it was all cool and friendly and the next day I was hungover and I somehow made it back home to Woodstock.

Maybe six years later, I’m walking back home to Woodstock wasted off my ass after drinking at the Gladtav, and I walk by That House and this dude Rob lives there and I hang out with him for a while before again, totally falling asleep on their porch curled up into a ball on one of their giant comfy chairs.

Five years after that, which was this October, a weird thing happened. I wasn’t wasted, but it was cold out, and it was late, and I’d been meaning to ask the housemates there about maybe staying over for a bit and I knocked on the door for Ryan, but no one answered so I sat on one of the big comfy chairs and waited, and I fell asleep there curled up into a little ball again.

A few days ago I was thinking about this, because I was remembering that the middle time there, the one that happened five years ago, that particular time I fell asleep on their porch, because that time when I awoke I had a blanket on me. I was totally confused when I woke up about where I got a blanket and a few days later I was hanging out there again, and Diana said that she’d seen me out on the freezing porch and that she’d put it on me.

I was like “Thank you! That’s so cool! Thank you!”

That was five years ago this October.

This afternoon I’m walking downtown after running into Becky inside Pioneer Place shopping mall, Becky was buying video games for her kids and nephews and stuff. So Becky is shopping on her lunch break and she has to go back to work, she goes back to her office and I’m walking down 5th Avenue and I walk up a hill to finish my smoke and stare at my reflection in an office building window.

I’m curious about how my hat looks because I kind of like it, I like this kind of maroon winter hat, and now that I’ve had it off my head for a few minutes it feels kind of weird, because I’ve been wearing that hat all the time for days now, and I feel like I want to keep adjusting it except its not there, its only the phantom feeling of having my hat squeezed on the wrong way, and I’ve actually reached up to fix it a few times and I look pretty stupid adjusting my imaginary hat is what I’m assuming. When I’ve taken my hat off I mean. When I was standing on the sidewalk there on 5th Avenue, I had it on and I was staring at it in the glass.

Anyway, I’m standing there on the sidewalk by 5th Avenue. And Diana, from five years ago, Diana, who left town five years ago, who disappeared way back then, walks across the street at me and smiles.

“How are you?” she says and she hugs me and its totally amazing to see her and I tell her that I’ve been staying at That House again, except now its called the ASIA House, and she says “Yeah, I was just at the ASIA the other day to see my old cat Beast!” and I was like “Holy shit! Beast was your cat? Oh my god! Beastie is like my favorite cat! He totally only has like, three legs!”

Diana says we should go get some tea and so we go to Stumptown and she tells me that she’s in town from Ohio for a few days, she’s out in Columbus doing post grad work in plant biology but she came back to visit friends during break.

She has to go after an hour or so, and I stayed at the table and got more coffee, and when I got up to leave afterward I was high-fiving this giant imaginary sky with all my furious being, having to hold on to guardrails and things in case I accidentally started flying.

Had a meeting at the Housing Authority yesterday, while I was waiting I asked the guy sitting next to me if he was Steven. He said why do you want to know? I said it was because I saw the name Steven ahead of mine on the waiting list, and I thought if you were him then I could see you through the windows if I went out for a smoke, so I would know when my turn is coming, so I wouldn’t miss it when they called my name because I was out smoking.

He says “Oh a smoker, I see, yeah, did you know that the things they put in cigarettes are so bad that they don’t even tell you what they are?”

Yeah yeah, I know all about this see, he says “George Bush and the White Man and Big Money and all those evil scum, they keep the tobacco industry safe you know, they put the poison in the smokes so you get hooked and can’t stop and then you die.” I tell him that the Ligget Group explained all this years ago, I know already, but he doesn’t know who they are. I tell him that the Ligget Group specializes in tobacco for poor people, they’re the worst of the worst, they make GPC cigarettes for instance, and I think Basics too. But still he won’t shut up about every single irrelevant factoid he knows, this was supposed to be a brief interchange in a lobby between two strangers, and five minutes later I still can’t get him to shut up about every bad thing that’s ever happened to anybody. “They test cigarettes on baby whales! CAMEL FILTERS ARE MADE OF PEOPLE! PEEEOOPLE!”

Yeah yeah see, you have no idea how much I know about this already. He says “Its these rich white men that keep us down, smoking and all that, not taking up smoking was the greatest thing I ever did actually”. But I just did not want to hear this shit, I only had a few minutes and I wanted to get a smoke while I still could, I could hear pontificating at any time. He says the Big White Man kills us with cancer and only people like him are truly free. He continues off on a long tangent about everything, about the military industrial complex, about fake science he’s pretended to read, about Lewis and Clark and how the Native Americans blame them for helping to steal their land, and this of course is all about my smoking, of course. I say “what about the French?” Accustomed to other kinds of French-bashing he gets wary. I tell him that Thomas Jefferson didn’t actually steal the land that Lewis and Clark explored, it was purchased from the French, how come the Native Americans don’t hate the French instead for the actual act of stealing their land?

This confuses him, he says “no, it was the Americans who stole the land” but I correct him, you should know this mister Steven, the Louisiana Purchase was made during Napoleon’s time, it was a straight up trade of land for money, there was no literal theft involved. It was the French who “stole” the land, and sold it to us.

At this point he starts to get scared that maybe I’m a conservative of some kind and have no sympathy for the original indigenous Americans, so I try to help him out. He thinks that the people who stole the land are the same people who invented my smoking, who are the same people who manage Diebold and who are the same people that wage illegal war in Iraq and the same people who do all this heinous Republican shit, I of course understand what he’s talking about, but find him intensely annoying. I’m used to a far higher grade of babbling know-it-all than this individual, for instance, most smokers, this person’s associations were getting ridiculous. And I still wanted my smoke, and he still wouldn’t tell me if he’s the Steven I saw on the list so I’m getting a little upset.

I say “Yes, it was the Americans who gave the Indians smallpox-infected blankets during the winter, gave them poisoned food when they were hungry, broke every treaty they ever made, waged illegal war, herded the Indians into camps, stole the resources, raped the land, yes yes, this is all obviously true. Its just that the particular event of the Louisiana Purchase was technically not theft, or else no money would have changed hands. And you know what the Indians did in return?”

And he says, “What, die in pain?”

And I say “They gave us tobacco. They held it up and said ‘Here, the kids will love this stuff.’ Do you know that tobacco is the single largest cause of preventable death in the United States and is more dangerous then all hard drugs combined according to our own Surgeon General? Do you know how many Americans die from smoking every year?” He nods his obvious yes.

I say “don’t you think that’s interesting that we took everything the Indians had and now we die by the thousand every few days because of tobacco?” at which point I could see his gears churning.

I said “My mom smoked when she was pregnant with me, there’s this big long story to it and everything about how I kicked from the womb and knocked the ashtray off her stomach, I was addicted to nicotine before I was even born” (I didn’t tell him how my friend Brendan actually got me smoking years later). I say isn’t that weird that we were born with this strange original sin kind of thing where even from birth we’re paying for the decisions of the people who came before us? Don’t you think that my smoking is actually the wheels of justice turning and helping to destroy the White Man from within? And it’s a better statement on humanity in general that I would know this but keep smoking anyway?

And they call his name, “Steven!”

He gets up to go to his meeting but he turns back and says “Don’t go anywhere, I want to keep talking to you!”

While he’s gone I realize I don’t have any smokes anyway and that I’m really happy I won’t have to talk to him again.

So we watched Rosemary’s Baby last night, which I’d never seen all the way through, and now I get things like the tanis root references and the curse of Mia Farrow’s haircut. One of the things that popped up was Satan’s love of anagrams, how this one character’s name was in fact an anagram for his real identity, because he was in hiding after becoming famous as a scion to a particular line of well-known witches. The lead Satanists’s new last name became “Castevet” after the scrambling, which then stuck out to me because I’d misremembered the name of the actor who played Rosemary’s husband, who turned out to be Cassavetes. And this stuck out because of that Le Tigre song my friend recommended called “What’s Your Take On Cassavetes” which seems to be about the social pressure of getting along with someone interested in totally irrelevant Hollywood trivia.

First I thought he was some kind of young Ben Gazzara, then I thought he looked like my employer in Queens, then I decided that Mia Farrow was playing Gwyneth Paltrow in a parallel universe where Cassavettes played Ben Affleck and they’d stayed together despite Affleck’s open Satan worship. The amazing thing is how Affleck won’t even try to hide it, he’ll play an angel rebelling against God, he’ll play a dude in a bondage suit named Devil, and he’ll say things like this to reporters in 2003: “I would rather say, ‘I worship you, Satan!’ than ‘My favorite baseball team is the New York Yankees.‘” I remember reading that quote on the Greyhound back to New York last year, on Christmas Day, while he was promoting his Phillip K. Dick movie, who is a writer famous for his attempts to locate messiahs and devils and old gods of all sorts.

Affleck’s involvement in politics of course, involved infiltrating the Kerry campaign and ruining it from the inside, assisting the rise to power of our current President (burning?) Bush, who is well known for his fixation on Revelations, the end of the world, the general abuse of Christianity in all its forms and the total destruction of the Holy Land. Otherwise Affleck was known recently for his love of the openly cursed Boston Red Sox, whose World Series win has long been attributed to the use of evil magic.

Truly the resemblance to that old story showed up a number of times, young Mia Farrow before the Peter Pan haircut looks a lot like Gwyneth used to look, it freaked me out more than once or twice. Gwyneth of course, got her huge break in a movie about the triumph of the se7en deadly sins over a struggling human society.

So I figured it seemed important to decode the movie for clues to the actual movement of Satan across the movie business, with Roman Polanski being kind of a gimme as Director, the man who lost his baby to the Manson Family, with the lead Satanist in the movie having his name rearranged so that the spare letters after Castevet gave him the first name “Roman”. So the idea this morning was to rearrange the letters in “John Cassavetes” to find the secret message, and what I got was: “No jest, save cash”.

And remember, that comes directly from Satan’s mouth. The End is near, save your money kids!

So anyway, yeah, I broke lots of shit in June and just started walking again in the last few weeks. Pretty fun time with the surgery and the pills and everything there. Every time I come back to Friendster it looks different.

Its funny that people say that snowflakes are unique. They are not unique. I’ve met too many of the same people to think that a lot of snowflakes are similar enough that they shouldn’t count as the same damn thing.

People are cruel, there’s just no getting around that. There’s no system to deal with people who lie to themselves, there’s no accounting for the massive sociopathic hordes who actually believe the shit they say about themselves, about the world.

All I know is that I can walk now and I’m sure it feels a lot better to me than someone who has never lost the ability to walk. Probably. At one point this Summer I couldn’t even remember walking up stairs anymore, I simply had no recollection of going up stairs on foot because I was so committed to doing it correctly on crutches. Total immersion in recovery had blotted out the original version of health. Its like eating a sumptuous meal after weeks of starving. Its like knowing that the words of liars don’t matter anymore because the feeling in the legs trumps the everyday sensing by the ears. It doesn’t matter what you say, I can walk.

There’s this guy Atmosphere, or Slug, or Sean Daly, whatever, he has this song God Loves Ugly that I listen to.

“how long i gotta wait for these fools to sit down?
appears more clear in its simplest form
nobody sees tears when youre sittin in a storm
abandoning the norm, and handling the harvest
measuring the worth by the depth of the hardships
I accept all the hate you can aim at my name,
I held on to the sacred ways of how to play the game

talkin to my shadow, he advised me not to worry
he said i should plant my tree and let it rise out of the fury
so give me some light, a little love and some liquid
im gonna creep through the night
and put a plug in the spicket
and when the water grows
and the dam starts to overflow
ill float atop the flood, holding on to my ugly”

I had a bunch of writing to put up today but there’s some style sheet issue with the linux machine I’m using, none of the html coding seems to work and everything came out fucked up, I was scared to leave the essays up as they appeared on my screen.

However! This would be an excellent opportunity to point out that you can turn off those damn New Blog Posting alerts that get mailed out to everybody on my friends list, its somewhere in the preferences, I don’t remember where now because of happy hour at The Know on NE Alberta.

I’m just saying, if you got an alert and got all the way here and there was nothing new to read, I did all I could, and suggest humbly that you can turn the damn alert off somehow if you were bothered.

Many apologies from all of us at Night of the Living Dave.

So I was walking around Downtown sometime a week or two ago, after Laurel got to class one day and I had a few dollars in my pocket wanting to be spent on a bottomless cup of coffee and lots and lots of smokes. Same as usual. I tried the front tables at Stumptown Coffee but could only handle the scrutiny from the scenesters there for so long. Walking walking walking, inside the Korean store this lady I used to know told me that Brian the bartender was back working in downtown, the Rialto is open again after all these months, and Brian was back Dave, you should go and see him!

So the Rialto is covered in scaffolding and dudes with hard hats are screaming at each other over the construction noise. There’s dust everywhere and orange tarps to keep falling debris off the sidewalk. In the middle of one of the tarps in tiny letters it says “Rialto OTB bar is open!” so I tried to figure out where the hell the front door was supposed to be in all this mess.

And hey, Brian was in there, he smiled when he saw me and I was like “Yeah! I still have a bartender friend around here, yeah!” and we sat and talked about shit for quite a long while.

He worked in this little room attached to the Rialto proper, it was the room filled with horse races from all over the country on about two dozen monitors. Every day the helpless gambling sots of downtown would come in, play video poker, drink beer and lose money on horses, every day Brian had to pretend he knew anything about horse racing at all. I myself hate the shit, but my family was pretty much raised at the horse track in Saratoga, it was interesting to be watching the weirdness on so many screens.

There’s this girl Sara who’s come in to talk to Brian. She’s an ex-gymnast who got married and agreed with her husband that stripping was the best way to get through Law School, though now she works with the Federal Prosecutor’s and seems pretty depressed about it. She and her husband were buying a house somewhere, and she wanted to talk to Brian to see what he knew about doing such things. He kept giving me more coffee, and I was getting twitchier and twitchier, and the art magazines I’d brought with me were becoming useless, I was losing the patience and the blood sugar needed even to look at the things.

But I’m sitting there reading one of the free mags around town, and noticing that I’d missed a contest that Voodoo Doughnuts had put on at Berbati’s. Apparently, the deal was that guys would see how many doughnuts they could suspend in the air using only their erections, like a shishkebab kinda thing, and whoever could spear the most doughnuts without any of them falling off won a prize of some kind, which was probably more doughnuts.

So I’m all upset that I’ve missed the fun, I was busy at the printing company those last few months there and I never got to go out and play, it sucked. I was secretly hoping that Voodoo would crumble and disintegrate in my absence, but here it is in the newspaper, they’re organizing things like this mass gang-fucking of pastries, and damn, I wish I’d seen that. I missed the Voodoo wedding of Miss Mona Superhero as well, I don’t know how to explain how fun that must have been.

Then of course it hits me, I actually have done stuff like that, inside Voodoo Doughnuts when the store was closed. It started coming back to me. Last Summer when there was no one around, Laurel and I would have sex in the store all the time, pretty much all over the place, on the front and back counters, at the desk, by the front door where people could look in and see even, everywhere except the bathroom and the loft where the organ player is supposed to sit. And there were times when we took the day-old doughnuts and used them in our games. So I fucked a bunch of doughnuts is what I’m saying, and I got paid to do it.

The gamblers were being pretty quiet and not talking to anybody else, Sara the house buying person was busy talking to Brian, and the only other person in there besides me was this lady who was also scamming the unlimited refills, she seemed disoriented somehow, Brian was even going to 86 her at one point for giving off this weird anti-social vibe, but she wasn’t doing anything more crazy than that so we all kinda ignored her.

And then I’m reading the thing about the doughnut contest and start laughing out loud. I was suddenly remembering all the sex inside the store, and that thing with the hand especially. The strange quiet lady finally decides to speak, she says to me “What are you laughing about?”

And I say “Everything is alright you know! I had sex with that wax hand in the display case at Voodoo Doughnuts!”

She says “Excuse me?” and I continue, I tell her “Yeah, that wax hand! If you’ve ever been in there I’m sure you know what I’m talking about! And we had sex on that counter there too!”

And now she’s full on “WHAT the FUCK” and I say “Yeah! And that chair by the desk in back, over there and I think that cutting board place where they make the doughnuts too!”

And now she was just fucking scared, but really, it was relieving. “Working all those 14-hour days was no problem” I said, “I didn’t miss a damn thing because I know that I had sex with that wax hand in the display case! I don’t need to see a bunch of dudes fucking some doughnuts man, because I LIVED THE DREAM!”

Then Brian got off the phone and we started talking about normal stuff again, and the quiet woman with all the coffee refills stopped trying to listen in on our conversation.

Again around Downtown today, doing it on crutches, giving off a Massive Headwound Harry vibe in a pair of torn surgical scrubs and one shoe and a hospital bracelet, flailing crutches akimbo in the strangest most asymmetrical way.

Further research into grocery shoppers has me scared of them again, but I got some things I needed this morning, elemental things, and was then dropped by tanker plane from 10,000 feet over Pioneer Place in order to perform soft landing and extraction of new pair of glasses from LensCrappers. I had not eaten yet so I bought orange juice and these kind of tube shaped fast-food things for breakfast in the Food Court, among the only Courts now left to be made into a syndicated afternoon tv show. I don’t now why this is so, it seems that there is plenty of crime there to adjudicate. The food was atrocious and I wound up ditching half of it, sipping mightily on the water I brought with me. I know by now what oxycodone does with the ability to feel the need to pee. Too many times now I’ve been surprised by the sudden peeing that goes on without me, often just a few feet from the bathroom after a failed mad dash. I thought these urinal things they gave me at the hospital would be useless at home, but now I see why that particular industry is so large, the economy of peeing while still in bed is just too awesome to ignore, the range of devices offered to assist in alternative deletion now fill many giant catalogs.

I peed in the actual bathroom this time, I’d made it, sixty feet across a sea of chairs while the management of numerous restaurants based on apparently delicious racial stereotypes failed to prevent every single employee from staring at me to see if I’d make it. I hogged a sink afterward, and flogged a hand-dryer, one or two folks stopping to comment on how awful that must have been there to get your leg so fucked up. Leaving the bathroom I noticed the elevator, remembering how I’d never used it before, I was never going in that direction ever, but today it was sort of going in the right direction, it had a button for “up” right? So I get on the elevator but it only goes one floor, and then there on the ground floor there’s only an exit to the sidewalk and escalators back down to Hell, and I needed to get to LensCrappers, so I went back down the Escalator to Hell to go past the Food Court again, and then over to the other escalators that would take me somewhere a few rings up to the glasses place.

I stopped by the bookstore on the way there and paused remembering how many years I’d spent stealing books from B. Dalton’s and Waldenbooks in the malls around Albany. Always either stealing cartoons or sci-fi, because they never guarded those things. This is how I know how the impulse engines work on Star Trek ships. This is how I know about Muons. I was in a mall again and that’s what it made me think about. There was nothing in there now. All those books in there now looked stupid.

Continuing on, I made it to the escalator and picked the broken front face of my old glasses out of my pocket and held it up to my face like a magnifying glass. I couldn’t see LensCrappers but I knew it was next to the coffee place and that was visible way up by the ceiling windows, so I zipped vertically there, to the 5th floor and around the corner into the empty store.

Boy were they happy to see me.

So I’m laying in the hospital bed with all the motors in the mattress, and the thing is alive, the motors keep going on without my assistance and I’m being shuffled all around the thing like I stage dived a La-Z-Boy. I’m trying to pee into the little plastic urinal thing they gave me, and I’m most proud because my roomate can’t do it, only I had the power to pee straight into the plastic opening in that room, and it came from my natural grace with doing disgusting things in semi-public. Oh how I loved that sound reverbing around the room, the proud piddle sound.

Privacy curtain halfway open, big ole ugly pirate nurse come sneaking up on me, “Dave!” she says and whoops! My hand shakes and I pee five feet straight out over the bed, onto the mattress and my left foot and all over. Fuck! “Spongebath” she says!

Young nurse, straight out of “Nurses Gone Wild: Cancun” has the job of hot toweling my ass in the pre-dawn fog, I remain silent, I allow them to do a thorough job, the pain in my leg from standing might have ruined it for most people, and maybe they were counting on that, but no, no, it was good.

Fourteen hours later same nurse is with me as we’re out looking for the car lost in their parking lot, housemate’s Mom has driven off with security to look for the car and I’m stuck alone in the wheelchair with spongebath nurse. Silence, nothing, looking the other way, squinting at a newspaper stand, we’re both thinking it, she wants to forget, I washed pee off a stranger boy’s ass today and he enjoyed it. Its only a job, it was obviously only a job, it was for a good cause.

Very awkward silence.

Oh that poor girl.