Category Archives: writing idols

On Tranquility of Mind by Seneca

Really, my deep dive into the practice of Stoicism came in the virtue of self-control because, well, I did not feel in control of myself when I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, ADD, anxiety, and depression. But really it came down to tranquility of mind. That’s what I was looking for because I’ve never had it, mostly because I didn’t understand how I was wired. So, really, Seneca’s letter on tranquility of mind is the whole reason I practice Stoicism—to treat my ADD. Here is what I take from it:

One. On the cult of productivity, and really—don’t be afraid to take a nap.

“Uninterrupted productivity will soon exhaust it, so constant effort will sap our mental vigor, while a short period of rest and relaxation will restore our powers. Unremitting effort leads to a kind of mental dullness and lethargy. Nor would men’s wishes move so much in this direction if sport and play did not involve a sort of natural pleasure; though repeated indulgence in these will destroy all the gravity and force of our mind. Sleep too is is essential as a restorative, but if you prolong it constantly day and night it will be death.”

Two. There’s a critical section where Seneca described—what read to me as ADHD. He talks about people who live with inertia and are dissatisfied with themselves. “This arises from mental instability and from fearful and unfulfilled desires when men do not dare or do not achieve all they long for, and all they grasp at is hope: they are always unbalanced or fickle, an inevitable consequence of living in suspense.” It makes me certain that this is my struggle.

Three. He then goes on to describe SPIN and SLIDE, what happens to folks with ADD who struggle to regulate the co-morbidities of anxiety and depression. We slide into shame, pessimism, isolation, and no productive or creative outlet.

“these afflictions of failure have caused people to retreat into laziness and private studies which are not suitable to a mind aspiring to public service, keen on activity, and restless by nature because of course it is short of inner resources. This leads to isolation and then boredom and self-dissatisfaction.”

Four. Then he lays out the basics of the Stoic idea of productivity: “We must take a careful look first at ourselves, then at the activities which we shall be attempting, and then at those for whose sake and with whom we are attempting them (82).”

“We must appraise the actual things we attempting and match our strength to what we are going to undertake. For the performer must always be stronger than his task: loads that are too heavy for the bearer are bound to overwhelm him. Moreover, certain tasks are not so much great as prolific in producing many other tasks: we must avoid those which give birth in turn to new and manifold activities, and not approach something from which we cannot easily withdraw. You must set your hands to tasks which you can finish or at least hope to finish, and avoid those which get bigger as you proceed and do not cease where you had intended.”

Five.In which Seneca describes the Stoic Test strategy, negative visualization, justice, and a good lesson in weekend personal activities.

“Think your way through difficulties: hardship conditions can be softened, restricted ones can be widened, and heavy ones can weigh less on those who know how to bear them. Abandoning those things which are impossible or difficult to attain, let us pause what is readily available and entices our hopes, yet recognize that all are equally trivial, outwardly varied in appearance but uniformly futile within. Let us not look envy those who stand higher than we do: what look like towering heights are precipices. On the other hand, those whom an unfair fate has put in a critical condition will be safer lowering their pride in things that are in themselves proud and reducing their fortune as far as they can to a humble level. By justice, gentleness, kindness, and lavish generosity let them prepare many defenses against later disasters to give them hop of hanging on more safely.” (91)

Finally, set advancements at some limit and not allow fortune to decide when they should cease but ourselves to stop far short of that.

Six. One of the last talks I used to give at Paul Smith’s College was on being grateful, dying, and how we’re all just basically compost. It went something like this: that really all the proof that we ever existed is what we create—the children we have, the parents we have, and maybe the work we produce. For even ten minutes a day, that writing, a piece of paper that comes from a tree is one of the most natural things we can do on Earth. When we die, we return to Earth, and writing—whether it’s in published book form or just writing a journal for 10 minutes a day- is a part of the planet’s natural order. It seems like Seneca would agree:

“Should Nature demand back what she previously entrusted to us we shall say to her too: ‘Take back my spirit in better shape than when you gave it. I do not quibble or hang back: I am willing for you to have straightaway what you gave me before I was conscious—take it.’ What is the harm in return to the point whence you came? He will live badly who does not know how to die well. So we must first strip off the value we set on this thing and reckon the breath of life as something cheap.”

Seven. 4000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman links to this: “The next thing to ensure is that we do not waste our energies pointlessly or in pointless activities: that is, not to long either for what we cannot achieve, or for what, once gained, only makes us realize too late and after much exertion the futility of our desires. In other words, let our labor not be in vain and without result, nor the result unworthy of our labor; for usually bitterness follows if either we do not succeed or we are ashamed of succeeding.”

Burkeman again, and also precisely what I’ve been doing the last four years, so quit it! “They wander around aimlessly looking for employment, and they do not what they intended but what they happen to run across. Their roaming is idle and pointless, like ants crawling over bushes, which purposelessly make their way right up to the topmost branch and then all the way down again. Many people live a life like these creatures, and you could not unjustly call it busy idleness…so let all your activity be directed to some object, let it have some end in view. It is not industry that makes men restless, but false impressions of things drive them made.”

So have experiences and not things.

The Ninth Metal by Benjamin Percy

This book is Benjamin Percy’s masterpiece. It’s the best work of fiction from him that I’ve read, and I’ve read them all at this point. Things that stood out to me the most were the principal themes of family and duty to that family colliding with the law, lawlessness, and a sense of justice that is personal that comes into direct conflict with the government conception of law, order, and justice and this sets fire to a place that is barely being held together. It’s a naturalist novel.

It’s peppered with beautiful descriptions of the natural world. It represents the ingredients of a naturalist novel in how a main character’s sheltered, hereditary, or everyday existence comes into direct conflict with the outside world. In the Ninth Metal, this is brought on by the conflict between two families: The Frontiers and Gundersons and their prodigal sons: John Frontier and Hawkin Gunderson. Both of them come into direct conflict from the prologue to page 288. They are the personal antagonists of the two main characters.

The naturalist or external antagonist for the Frontiers is Black Dog mining in Northfield, Minnesota. For the Gundersons, it’s the Department of Defense. Both are fighting over control of the mining of omnimetal that was brought here by a comet and grants powers to John and Hawkin.

So this is an X-Men story. Mother Gunderson and her followers are Magneto’s brotherhood and their religious/cult-like overtones worshipping the omnimetal (their chanting of “Metal is” recalls “Darkseid is.”), and the Frontiers are Xavier’s students. Hawkin Gunderson is Magneto, imprisoned by the Department of Defense (or the Nazis, if you’re going to follow my Magneto origin story through line). John Frontier is Wolverine who has a familial Stoic duty, which very nearly brings about his undoing.

It’s very much a local vs. outsiders story because locals almost always lose in a naturalist novel. Not this time, though, but that’s straying dangerously into spoilers.

What made this book so good for my journey as a writer these last two years. But it comes with a dilemma: I don’t know where Percy ends, and I begin. We don’t have the same ideas for stories, but we deal in similar themes: family, social sciences, and the slightest bit of the fantastic set in a world we live in now. It’s like we have similar voices, we’re of the same generation—he’s only a year and a half older than me. To be successful in the ways that I want to be and have come up short because of one thing: I did not submit my work, and Percy did, allowing him to grow where I have been playing at the same four books more or less the last fifteen years.

But I’m not going to play that anymore. Here’s what solidified why I have a book like this one in me, but here’s where it landed for me that Percy and I think along the same wavelengths.

Over the years in his cell, Hawkin had a lot of time to think, and one of the ways he occupied himself was by pretending. Comic books owned his imagination. He had always liked Batman, best of all the superheroes. It was more than his haunting mask and the militaristic Batmobile and the gadgets he kept in his utility belt and the way he crouched like a gargoyle on Gotham’s skyscrapers with his leathery cape fluttering in the wind. It was the villains. The villains who made up his rogues’ gallery were the best of any series. Because they weren’t merely masked and spandex weirdoes to punch and kick and throw Batarangs at. They meant something. They really mattered emotionally. If Batman was order, then the Joker was chaos. Mr. Freeze represented Bruce Wayne’s emotional coldness. Ra’s al Ghul was the father figure wanted desperately but had to reject for his sinister ways. Two-Face captured the constant battle between Wayne and the Dark Knight. What you eventually came to understand, if you read enough comic books, was that Batman was a unification of his worst enemies. ..
…
Dr. Gunn is the Joker and Scarecrow and Mr. Freeze and Penguin and Ra’s al Ghul and all the rest of them. And this is Hawkin’s Crime Alley, where Thomas and Martha Wayne fell in a rain of bullets and blood and pearls. It was a moment of fusion, convergence. Here is the villain and here is the place and here is the core wound that Hawkin might conquer if he is going to come into his power as a hero. That’s the way the rules work.

–Ninth Metal, pg. 280

The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green.

I started listening to this podcast back in the beginning of the pandemic, and it has been an almost weekly joy to listen to, so when the book came out, I knew I had to have it. What I found was pretty formulaic: introduction, research which shows Green’s OCD in full-effect with his details for getting the facts right. Highlights include talking about Edmund Halley and his many talents, or what went into making Diet Dr Pepper. This was always great in whatever essay I read–I always learned something new, which is awesome. This is followed by literary allusion, and the positive side of whatever Green is reviewing and his rating.

The best entries in this book are in the introduction and the postscript, and the DFW-like footnotes. My favorite essay is on Indianapolis, and the bits are like how they are the absolute best parts of our pandemic moment. The book is like a time capsule. Here are my favorite parts

On “Our Temporal Range, which makes an allusion to Stoicism’s “View From Above” in an impressive display of time condensing:

“The hard part, evolutionarily, was getting from prokaryotic cells to eukaryotic ones, then getting from single-celled organisms to multi cellar ones. Earth is around 4.5 billion years old, a timescale I simply cannot get my head around. Instead let’s imagine’s Earth’s history as a calendar year, with the formation of Earth being January 1 and today being December 31 at 11:59pm. The first life on Earth emerges around February 25. Photosynthetic organisms first appear in late March. Multicellular life doesn’t appear until August or September. The first dinosaurs like eoraptor show up about 230 million years ago, or December 13 in our calendar year. The meteor impact that heralds the end of the dinosaurs happens around December 26. Homo sapiens aren’t part of the story until December 31 at 11:48 pm. ..”

He then says that the Industrial Revolution, the dishwasher, and cars happen in the last couple of seconds of December 31.

On CNN: “What’s news isn’t primarily what is noteworthy or important, but what is new.” Saying that is basically all twenty-four news channels are good for. The newest outrage, misery, and disaster.

But my favorite essay is on Indianapolis, where Green and his family have made their home since 2007. He moved there from New York City, and he lays down a considerable number of disses on the city. All of which I laughed at:

“Indianapolis has tried o a lot of mottoes and catchphrases over the years. Indianapolis is ‘Raising the Game.’ ‘You put the I in Indy.’ ‘Crossroads of America.’ But I’d propose a different motto: “Indianapolis: You gotta live somewhere.’…

“Someone once told me that Indianapolis is among the nation’s leading test markets for new restaurant chains, because the city is so thoroughly average. Indeed, it ranks among the top so-called ‘microcosm cities,’ because Indianapolis is more typically American than almost any other place. We are spectacular in our ordinariness. The city’s nicknames include “Naptown,” because it’s boring, “India-no-place.”

He then goes on to rate the city four stars because it’s home.

I’ve long said that Indiana’s nickname of the Crossroads of America is because why the hell would you ever want to stay here? And even though Green goes onto say that the city is one of the most economically and racially diverse zip codes in the United States. The problem is, of course, that the rest of the state is rural white and super-Republican and is actively working against that diversity, and has adopted many of the voting rights laws that are being passed in Republican states across the nation. Eventually, if this goes unchecked, Indiana will be so vanilla that it’ll be see-through.

Though I think it’s generally acceptable to live in Indy and Bloomington, they are just about the only places you would want to live. Green even cites that the White River, its main waterway, is completely non-navigable. The city dumps raw sewage into it. When I look around Bloomington, I see every college town I’ve ever visited. I’ve even taught here. It’s called the State University of New York at Plattsburgh. I’ve been here before in Princeton, NJ, Providence, Rhode Island, and College Park, Maryland. It’s a college town. I bet you go to any large college town like this one, and you’ve likely been to Bloomington before too. Not that there’s anything wrong with that other than it’s normal. Average.

I give the book, and really the state as a whole, three stars.

How I leave Literature Notes at the end of books.
I just like this author photo.

Charlie Kaufman

A blind contour

I just received his first novel in the mail. It’s 700 pages. The David Foster Wallace of screenwriting has written a David Foster Wallace-ian novel. Then I read this great profile in the New York Times Magazine on what the quarantine has been like for him and it was eye-opening. The first couple of paragraphs were heart-wrenching:

Eight weeks, this went on. It was a bizarre way to get to know a stranger, at a time when there was scant opportunity to discover anything new in life at all. A bond formed: not friendship, not therapy, but a kind of reciprocal Stockholm syndrome with qualities of both. “I wonder if you and I are ever going to meet after this intimate thing we’ve had,” Kaufman asked during our final call on April 29.

“I’ve had that thought, too,” I said. “It’s strange the degree to which you’ve been the only real relationship in my life during this time, beyond my wife and kids.” I had tried setting up weekly calls with family or friends, I told him, but nothing else stuck.

“Mine too, really,” Kaufman said. Friends reached out, wanting to talk, but he usually felt too gloomy or anxious to engage. One guy, the previous week, had been uncommonly persistent, “and I finally had to text him back and say: ‘I can’t. I just can’t.’ But I couldn’t do that with you,” Kaufman told me. “That’s been good for me. I’ve had to do it.”

Man, what I would have given to be on this assignment. To talk to Charlie Kaufman, the writer of one of my top five favorite movies (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), and to see how he’s dealing with this stuff. And I love Adaptation too–it is so exactly my kind of bullshit.

“They want you to come back to talk to me because the piece doesn’t have anything to do with the time we live in. If it did ever have anything to do with the time we live in” — and Kaufman was skeptical — “I think it’s important to point out that that was two weeks ago!”

“I don’t think that’s exactly what they’re saying,” I said. “They’re not saying it’s irrelevant. …” But I’m not sure this was totally honest. Everything except a small number of things did feel pretty irrelevant to me just then.

“It may be irrelevant!” Kaufman gladly interrupted. “I accept that it’s irrelevant.” It’s why he had felt wary of doing the profile in the first place, he said. No part of him believed that he, as a person — not just his work — warranted this kind of attention. He’d written a book, and this profile was proposed, and it clearly seemed worth doing even if it made him uncomfortable. “At the time, it was fine, because I liked you, and it’s been nice talking to you,” he said. “But now, just because I wrote a book, are you going to have to keep coming back to me until July 5, or whenever this thing is published, for updates on the world? It’s embarrassing,” he said. “It’s embarrassing to me.”

Kaufman compares this stuff to the Seven Up documentary series and rather than seven years it’s two weeks. Then they talk about how Kaufman writes—how he writes himself into corners and how he writes himself out. He’s also super-meta when he writes about what he’s thinking about.

Then, of course, the most interesting thing for me is how Charlie Kaufman seems to escape description or profiling because he’s so uniquely himself.

I don’t mean to be flip about this; I empathized with the problem because I was experiencing it myself. I worried that the conversations Kaufman and I were having wouldn’t translate well in print either; that people would skim through the article I was writing impatiently, feeling exhausted by Kaufman and his tendency to process every minuscule facet of existence through a vast, clattering, Rube Goldberg machine of introspection. But in real life, it was actually pretty moving to listen to. His vulnerability didn’t make you want to turn away from him; it made you want to be vulnerable too.

To be honest with you, it sounds like therapy. Like you’re going to see a psychologist but the psychologist is Charlie Kaufman. Then they spitball ideas of how to construct the article from a material point of view and inserting the author and getting to the truth of someone’s anxiety.

It was quite an article, and I’m looking forward to talking the novel.

Happy Fourth of July

A cover job of Sam Anderson’s blind contour of David Foster Wallace.

This morning, while mowing my lawn, my neighborhood had a parade since there isn’t going to be a big one downtown. Immediately, I thought of David Foster Wallace’s October 2001 Rolling Stone essay, “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s.” on September 11.

Everybody has flags out. Homes, businesses. It’s odd: You never see anybody putting out a flag, but by Wednesday morning there they all are. Big flags, small flags, regular flag-size flags. A lot of home-owners here have those special angled flag-holders by their front door, the kind whose brace takes four Phillips screws. And thousands of those little hand-held flags-on-a-stick you normally see at parades – some yards have dozens all over as if they’d somehow sprouted overnight. Rural-road people attach the little flags to their mailboxes out by the street. Some cars have them wedged in their grille or duct-taped to the antenna. Some upscale people have actual poles; their flags are at half-mast.

Funny enough, I snickered that he was writing this from Bloomington, Illinois, and I’m writing this from Bloomington, Indiana.

Then I almost mowed over the desiccated corpse of a rabbit that may have been laying dead on my yard all week since returning from Michigan on Wednesday.

I hope you’re having a great day.

Letter of Recommendation: Sam Anderson’s Work.

Ursula Le Guin by Sam Anderson

I was introduced to Sam Anderson’s work through Austin Kleon. Really it was long before I knew of Kleon, when I read Anderson’s great piece on David Foster Wallace.

I cannot recommend his work enough. Whenever I see his byline I see someone who loves reading, and has intoxicated my own reading habits.

I highly recommend his first book Boom Town, a book about Oklahoma City from the perspective of a New Yorker. It’s informed the memoir I’m writing now and my experiences in Indiana.

This book is a history of Oklahoma City. That may strike you as unnecessary, or unfortunate. If so, I would understand. In the larger economy of American attention, Oklahoma City’s main job has always been to be ignored. When non-Oklahomans need to think about the place, we tend to fall back on cliches: tepees, wagon trains, the Dust Bowl, country music, college football, methamphetamine, radical anti-government politics.”

-Anderson, XV

Some of my favorite articles of his are Haruki Murakami, The Good Place, and recently Weird Al Yankovic.

But recently what helped me out a lot with the stress of this spring was reading his letters of recommendation on looking out the window, blind contour drawings, and the collages he does on Instagram. So I adopted those and started doing collages and blind contour drawings almost daily in June and that led to Squibbish drawing actual faces and collaging with me. As a token of appreciation I bought this Ursula K. Le Guin t-shirt featuring his sketch of her, her quote, that supports his favorite local bookstore.

A collage: “I miss baseball”

In Anderson’s style, this season’s posts will be a series of Letters of Recommendation of things that brought me joy this spring.

A blind contour of my son’s lion toys while listening to Carnival of the Animals.

The Wilding by Benjamin Percy

The Wilding by Benjamin Percy. His first novel.

I’m reading a lot of first novels by writers I respect like Mary H.K. Choi’s Emergency Contact, Drew Magary’s The Postmortal, and short story collections like Lauren Groff’s Delicate Edible Birds. This book, from one of my favorite living writers, I finished over the spring and it is the sort of book that I hope mine for the next novel I’m going to write, which thematically is sort of like this. It’s about generations, the limits and educations of those generations, and they are in a no-win situation. Here’s some of my notes:

My marginalia is copied slightly from Sam Anderson’s style. I love writing all over books because it means that I’m really enjoying it, but it is work. So often, I’ll read a book once for enjoyment and just take notes as I go. Then I’ll read it again to study it: the turns of phrases, the plot points, and then I’ll synthesize and think about what I learned. On one of the end pages. Usually highlights will get uploaded to Bear. I try really hard not to make it like work, because then reading becomes a job rather than a joy. And I’d rather stick with joy.

One of the interesting things about the end of this book is a short essay from Percy about listening to music while writing fiction. He only listens when he’s revising. I know so many writers listen to music during the act of writing, and when it comes to revision–it’s silence. That’s me. I can’t revise what I’ve written with some music in the background because I need to read it aloud otherwise I don’t catch mistakes. So Percy supplies some of the tracks he listened to while revising this book.

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

Steven Pressfield

As a result of yesterday’s video this led me to purchase the book The War of Art by Steven Pressfield [tk link]. The result was a breakthrough.

The major identification I made while reading this is what I used to call the Victim’s woods, or what my diagnosis manifests as — to use Pressfield’s term— Resistance. The characteristics of resistance are: self-sabotage, self-deception, and self-corruption.

Resistance is:

It’s always lying and full of shit. It’s implacable it understands nothing but power. It’s one objective is to prevent us from doing our work. ..Resistance’s goal is not to wound or disable. Resistance aims to kill. It’s target is the epicenter of our being: our genius, our soul, and the unique and priceless gift we were put on earth to give and that no one else has but us.

The cure, Pressfield writes is to apply self-knowledge, self-discipline, delayed gratification, and hard work.

Ultimately, being a victim compels others to come to the rescue or to behave as the victime wishes by holding them hostage to the prospect of illness and one’s own meltdown or by threatening to make their lives miserable so they do what the victim wants.

This, all of this, is what I’ve been doing for the last two years. Sure, you could say resistance is pain, addiction, mental illness. It’s all of those things and more.

For me, Resistance manifests as not doing my work, which generates as my mental health symptoms: Aspergers, ADD, Depression, and Anxiety. Now this does not mean that these things don’t exist, it’s just that I’ve been resisting the fact that they do exist for most of my life. In that denial I don’t engage in my work, or my life in a meaningful and honest way. So while reading this book, I realized what my “work” actually is: teaching books, what goes into writing those books, and writing my own books.

Not realizing your resistance generates pain, which leads to impulsivity, reactivity, anxiety, depression and that exacerbates as a lack of attention and a desire to change, make new friends or be aware in social situations. It’s basically a lack, or inconsistency of attention in all aspects of your life full stop.

But most of all Resistance is strongest—for me anyway—in addiction. That’s true of creative people. Why do you think so writers, artists, etc are drug addicts and alcoholics? Despite their ability to go professional, they still let resistance get to them through drug addiction.

My addictions are different and I think that’s why I’m on the Autism Spectrum—which manifests as wanting to keep the status quo. The comfort zone. But the addiction, specifically, is to home. Lake Placid, the mountains, the woods of upstate New York. Really New York period. My people there. Resistance wants me and you to go back to the way things were, whereas the Muse, (again: Pressfield’s term), the creative unconsciousness, God—whatever you want to call it—wants you to move forward to create something that hasn’t been seen before. Sometimes that’s being a parent, or a teacher, or an entrepreneur. But most of all there’s no going back to the way things were, and that push and pull is what makes human life.

This became clear to me when I watched a 20 minute video my friend, Tim—the novelist TJ Brearton—made of his family camping and I could literally smell the pine, feel the wind twist through the air, and shake the trees and know what the pond they were swimming in felt like. I can hear and feel the crunch of the dead pine needles under foot. It was right there in my face, under foot, in my nostrils, in my hair—while I watched the video in my office in Indiana. Now that sounds like addict behavior, right?

That’s what resistance is—it wants me to go back and not do my work. It attacks me with the way things used to be with people I love and don’t see anymore. It attacks you with addiction, which is self-sabotage.

Those people are still with me, because I brought New York with me to Indiana, but in doing so I brought my addiction to the state with me.

This attacks everyone. No matter whether you’re a writer or in business. It actively prevents you from doing what you know is your work. And that’s why you shouldn’t be afraid of it, because it points us towards what we know is our true selves.

So, in closing, Pressfield writes:

“Are you a born writer?…The question can only be answered by action. Do it or don’t do it.”

Status.

It’s been a day.

Today I found out that the new word for “pleather” is now Vegan Leather.

Here is Billy Wilder’s tombstone from a post by Austin Kleon.

Billy Wilder’s tombstone.

Here’s a great quote from Benjamin Percy in Jami Attenberg’s newsletter #1000wordsofsummer:

It begins with a glimmer. Maybe I overhear a conversation in a bar. Maybe I pause on a certain, curious detail in the Sunday paper. Maybe I wake up with a dream still churning in my open eyes. I then rush to jot down the idea before it…evaporates. If you say to yourself, ‘I need to remember this later,’ you won’t. So I send myself an email. Or I scratch something down on a napkin. Or I rip out an article with my notes scribbled in the margins. I harvest these glimmers. And pin them up in my office. Near my desk. So that I flirt with them daily. And eventually  sometimes weeks later, sometimes months or even years later  a few of them glow brightly and I realize how they are connected and they come together like a constellation. And I get to work. Often (especially if it’s a novel) I outline. Sometimes (especially if it’s a short story or an essay) I allow myself to be more impressionistic, chasing a voice, an image. But I always know my endgame. Always. Because when I know my end, everything in the story is building toward that moment, the paragraphs and chapters transferring their momentum, crashing forward like so many dominoes. People are sometimes afraid of the blank page. But if you know your end, even when you’re starting from scratch, there is no blank page. The finish line is in sight  you just have to race to get there.” 

That is all for today. Talk to you tomorrow.