writing

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Very brief report

I did write a bit of fiction this morning — 783 words to be exact and precise.  I wish it were a prime number, but it’s divisible by 3 and 9 at least, since the digits add to 18.  Oh, well, it can’t always work out.

I’m feeling quite unwell; yesterday I left the office early (not by much) and yet I still didn’t get any good sleep.  But I’ve felt queasy and weak and just kind of under the weather for the last 18 hours or more.  So, I didn’t really have the energy to write more.  I did play a little guitar and sang some this morning, but it was sub-par, probably because of feeling poorly.

I am scheduled to work tomorrow, though, so maybe I’ll feel a little better then and will write some more.  I guess we’ll see.  Have a good day.

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And writers say, the most forward bud is eaten by the canker ere it blog

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, so it’s time for my Thursday blog post.  There will be no fiction from me today, other than such ordinary, day-to-day fiction as pretending to be doing better than I really am, as well as using money to buy things*.

I’m writing this on my phone, since I didn’t bring the laptop computer back to the house yesterday.  I was wiped out, and stressed out, and I didn’t feel like carrying any more than necessary.  I did get a bit of walking in, since I had to stop at the store on the way back.  I guess that was good, though something in the way I moved caused a blister on the medial side of my right big toe.  It’s not too bad, but I’ll probably not do any serious walking today.

It’s often questionable why I bother.  Of course, I would like to lose weight and whatnot; I would rather not die the physical travesty that I currently am.  But the best way to do that would be to stop eating completely.  That would be a win-win situation, as the cliché goes.  But that is very difficult to do in ordinary, day-to-day life in the modern United States.

I got a terrible night’s sleep again last night.  It wasn’t as bad as my one-hour night earlier in the week, but it wasn’t a whole lot better.  I’ve been trying to restrict my caffeine intake to the relatively early morning, just to make sure that doesn’t interfere with my sleep, but it doesn’t seem to make much difference.

I haven’t read anything much in quite a while.  I think it’s been over a month since I read any book, fiction or nonfiction.  I have been doing some stuff on Brilliant dot org, as I’ve mentioned here, but yesterday I didn’t even feel like extending my “streak” by doing some simple work in their computer programming course.  For one thing, the constant prods to “extend one’s streak” are thoroughly irritating.

I really despise all the manipulative tactics undertaken by these companies to get people to keep using their sites.  Even Kindle does it.  I had a “streak” of something like 170 or more weeks of reading pretty much every day on my Kindle app, but that’s now been broken, and already Amazon isn’t even recommending any e-books to me.

Still, it’s not as though I ever read to maintain a “streak”.  I read because I want to read.  Except right now I don’t.  I don’t even want to read my own stuff.

I did practice a little on the guitar yesterday.  I guess that’s something.  And, as you all know, I’ve been writing fiction now for a total of over twenty days (counting only writing days).  But it feels almost disloyal to be writing without reading, though it’s only myself that I’m betraying, and I don’t like myself, anyway.  Still, reading has been a fundamental part of my identity for literally as long as I can remember, and not being able to do it makes me feel very much adrift and puzzled.

It’s getting seriously hot and muggy down here in Florida.  I’m sweating significantly and quite visibly just sitting at the train station.  I suppose, if climate change persists, Florida will at least reap what it has politically sown, since both the heat and the sea levels are likely to drive quite a lot of people out of the state, and make much of the coveted ocean-front property into literal and figurative underwater real estate.

I’m not the sort to laugh in malicious glee when people get their comeuppances; I’m much more the type to tighten my lips grimly and nod in affirmative contempt.  But that doesn’t mean it’s not ego-syntonic for me when people get fucked over because of their own arrogant stupidity.

I don’t expect to be around to see any of it happen.  And, honestly, I would not be disappointed if people actually make headway at fixing the problems and correct them in time to save even people who don’t necessarily deserve to be saved, because innocent and beneficent people will be saved along with them.

Human ingenuity is much rarer than people probably think; however, it is so incredibly powerful that it doesn’t take much of it to accomplish wonders.  I guess it’s worth it for there to be so much arrogant stupidity if that’s necessary or unavoidable in order for the occasional sparks of cleverness and even genius to be found.  But it would be nice if stupidity were more sexually unappealing than it is.  Regrettably, though, stupid people seem more likely to breed than smart ones, especially since the smart ones understand about planning and delaying reproduction, or even choosing not to reproduce at all.

Oh, well.  This is the tragic farce of life.  It can be funny if you like lowbrow slapstick in the vein of the Three Stooges.  Unfortunately, I’m not really a big fan of such things, so I don’t think I’m going to keep watching much longer.

All right.  Time to call this to an end.  My back is flaring up quite a lot, probably from yesterday’s walk, and it’s distracting me.  Please try to nurture cleverness and creativity at all levels, and please don’t feed the trolls in any sense.  They’re not worth it.

TTFN

*Yuval Harari famously pointed out that money is a “fiction”, though it is a useful and important one.  So is law and government and the very existence of rights and stuff like that.  Such things exist only in the minds and works of people.  Nature certainly recognizes no rights, unless you want to count the right to be wiped out if you don’t do what you need to survive.  Indeed, the world seems to promise only one thing:  eventually, you (as well as everything you would recognize as the universe) will die.  That’s probably a truly unalienable right.

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Very brief report, Wednesday, May 15, 2024

Despite some modest interruptions to my routine this morning, I’ve already written 1,746 words today on Extra Body.  Some comparatively remarkable and momentous things are beginning to happen in the story now–well, there have been remarkable occurrences throughout, but now we’re getting near to the final “confrontation” of the tale.  The story is over 40,000 words long already, though I plan to reduce the total significantly in rewriting/editing.

I slept a bit better last night than the night before; it’s a low bar, but I did clear it, if only by a few more hours.  Still, I’m physically just worn out but unable to sleep.  Also, the tinnitus persists in my left ear, though not as bad as the right.  My right ear is chiming away at what seems like a subjective 70 decibels or so.  I’m almost to the point of reversing Vonnegut’s quote and saying, “Nothing was beautiful and everything hurt,” but there are a few non-painful things.  Or, well, at least there’s one:  writing fiction.

Anyway, tomorrow is Thursday, so I’ll write my traditional blog post then.  In the meantime, have a good day.

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Tuesday report: May 14, 2024 AD (or CE)

Well, I’ve written 1,419 words of fiction this morning already, having decided again that I would write at least one full page and then going beyond that.  I could’ve written even more, but I didn’t want to bother, and I figured I’d write a quick blog post/report for the day during the rest of my commute.  I’m not even going to change the base font to Calibri for this, since it’s just going to be converted on WordPress, anyway.

Extra Body is getting ever closer to its first-draft completion, though I doubt it will be finished this week.  Still, it shouldn’t be much later than that.  It’s rather absurd and pathetic that my “short story” is now over 38,000 words long.  This is despite me having missed quite a few days’ writing on and off.

I really don’t feel well, though.  I had an unusually bad sleep last night, even for me—though perhaps I should no longer think of such nights as bad “for me”, since they seem to happen so very often.  Anyway, I got significantly fewer than two hours of sleep, and I had to force myself not just to get up when my brief slumber had already started to fade, nearly an hour earlier than I eventually did (and less than an hour after I finally dropped off).

It’s maddening, and I was already mad enough when I started out—in the old-school sense of “mad”, meaning insane, not angry.  Though I really think of myself more as “unsane”, since I don’t think my mental health or my mental state has ever been what most people would consider normal.

I’m severely tired of all this.  Even despite now writing new fiction, I feel a constant, varying mixture of despair and apathy, seasoned with pain and tension, accompanied by the high-pitched whines of tinnitus.  I know, there are many worse situations for someone to need to endure, and many people endure them and have endured them.  But I have no purpose, no reason, no value, and no desire to endure or to find an answer.  I’ve spent so much time and effort already trying and failing to do those things; it doesn’t work.

So, like Extra Body, I think I’m nearing the end of my own story.  I don’t expect it to end before the first draft of Extra Body is completed, and maybe not even before the story is published.  But I don’t think it will be much longer than that, and I don’t expect to do anything significant with HELIOS.  I’m too tired.  I’m too discouraged.  I have no hope for a future that’s any better than my present, and I certainly don’t think I deserve one.

I suppose there will be further bulletins as events warrant, but I doubt anyone will care.  It really doesn’t matter whether I live or die, and I’m not sure that even “regular” readers will notice when I stop doing this.  Oh, well.

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A brief report from Monday morning 5-13-2024

I intended to force myself to write a single page this morning while waiting for and then while on the train.  As often happens, once I got started, the whole thing took care of itself, and I wrote 2,103 words on Extra Body.  I can’t believe how long this story is already getting, though it is drawing to its conclusion fairly soon.  Then will come the editing and paring down and shortening (and other synonyms).

I think I may indeed publish this story in a paperback version in addition to the Kindle version, since it really does qualify as a novella.  Which makes me consider re-publishing some of my longer, old “short stories” as stand-alone novellas.  I have long had the thought that people would be more likely to buy a short-ish story in Kindle format than in a small paperback format (which would, perforce, be more expensive than the e-book version).  However, maybe there are still enough people out there who prefer a physical book to an e-book that I would make more sales that way.

I’d be interested in hearing from you, if you have any thoughts about this.  Please, leave a comment below on my blog page on WordPress if you have input to give.

In other matters, the new tinnitus in my left ear continues, though it waxes and wanes, and the right ear is currently louder.  I got some walking and some biking in this weekend, but it’s been very hot for this early in the year around here–in the mid 90s on Saturday and the low 90s on Sunday–so it really wiped me out.  Still, I remembered at least to put on a little sunblock, so I didn’t get as sunburned as I usually do, if at all.

I hope all you mothers* out there had a good Mother’s Day yesterday.  And I hope all of you have a good week.

*And, no, I don’t mean that as half a word.

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Both my ears are ringing down the curtain

I’m planning on writing at least a page on Extra Body once I get to the office, but I haven’t left yet, and so I’m starting on a bit of a blog post, which I plan to finish with an update on what I write.  I don’t want to get out the laptop computer and use it at the house before I leave.

I have some unfortunate news‒unfortunate for me, at any rate, though it may not matter much to anyone else.  Yesterday, May 9, 2024 AD, at roughly 3:25 pm Eastern time, I suddenly began to have tinnitus in my left ear, matching what I have had in my right ear since…about 2007, I think.  I have very poor hearing in my right ear as part of that process, and it’s hard to tell what’s going on with my left, so far.  I can only say that it’s quite distressing.  I felt like I wanted to scream in the office yesterday afternoon, when it happened.  I still want to scream.  It’s been going on for just over 13 hours now, and there is no sign of it abating.

I fear this may be the proverbial final straw for me.  I don’t know if I can go on like this.  There are already so few motivations for me to continue living, and so many things that make life unpleasant.  I really don’t know what to do.

It’s slightly interesting that the pitch in my left ear is almost identical to the pitch in my right ear, just perhaps an eighth of a step lower.  I’m not sure what might be behind that fact.  Perhaps that’s the pitch range at which my cochleae are most vulnerable.  I am not really sure how I would find out.

It’s worth noting, though, that there is no internal evidence of any form of “beat” phenomenon such as would happen with real, external sounds that are close in pitch but not exactly the same, as their waveforms go back and forth between constructively and destructively interfering with each other.  This makes sense, of course; they are not real sounds but are neurological phenomena, and are occurring in opposite ears, and are thus initially processed in different sides of my brain.  The “beat” phenomenon in slightly dissonant pitches is a literal, physical, external phenomenon, not a neurological illusion.  This, at least, my current experience is making clear and convincing to me, at least provisionally.  I guess I knew it already, implicitly.  Has anyone else out there had this experience?

Anyway, as I said, if this bilateral tinnitus continues, I don’t know if I can.  It’s one thing after another, or rather, one thing on top of another.  Chronic pain, dysthymia/depression, insomnia, possible ASD, solitude, and now double-tinnitus.  My cup of hemlock runneth over, and maybe it’s time I just quaffed that motherfucker.

I guess I can give this a few days to see if it resolves.  I’m not optimistic.  Since the right ear tinnitus began, in the latter parts of the first decade of this millennium, it has waxed and waned in intensity, but it has not stopped for a moment.  But one instance of a phenomenon does not a pattern make, though my knowledge of the subject from a medical point of view gives me more data, and it’s not comforting.

I’ll take a break writing now, for the moment.  I’ll complete this post later.

***

Okay, well, I wrote 728 words on Extra Body, which was basically one single-spaced page.  I guess that’s good, considering the circumstances.  It’s nice when the office is quiet‒it’s quieter than the house is when no one is here, because at the house, except in deep winter, I have to have the AC and/or fan on or it becomes unreasonably hot.

I still don’t know what I’m going to do, though.  The ringing in both ears is constant, like that high-pitched noise they play that only young people are supposed to be able to hear.  I don’t even want to play guitar or anything, for fear of it interacting.

I guess I’ll see what happens.  I’m off this weekend; maybe the noise will abate.  Or maybe I’ll finally go fully mad, like the Master in response to the drumming sound in his head.  Which reminds me, the new Doctor Who “season” starts tomorrow.  I guess there is that to which to look forward.  I really like Ncuti Gatwa so far, so hopefully it’ll be nice.  I’m off work this weekend; my coworker will be back in the office today.

I hope you all have a good weekend.

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The great blog itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and even though I’ve been writing blog posts nearly all this week so far—since I haven’t been writing fiction—this is now my more “traditional” blog post for the week.

I apologize for not writing fiction yesterday and the day before.  I’ve been feeling terrible and horrible and no good and very bad and all that other stuff.  My coworker is still out, though he’ll probably be back sometime today, or possibly tomorrow at the latest, and anyway, that’s not the main problem.  The main problem is that I have been just terribly tense and anxious and have had terrible nights’ sleep even for me, despite trying to sedate myself and optimize my bedtime habits and so on.

Last night I got almost six hours of sleep, which for me is quite good, though it doesn’t feel close to enough.  It would be one thing if I slept six hours and awoke feeling refreshed and healthy; then I would know that I had gotten enough sleep, that six hours was just how much sleep my body needed.

Alas, things are not that simple.  My body’s optimal sleep time is probably pretty typical at around eight hours, but that particular “pressure” in the system is countered by whatever the various sources are of tension and stress and pain and depression.  When the sleep need gets too strong, it overpowers those other vectors, but as soon as it dips below some threshold, those other vectors dominate enough to push me into unpleasant wakefulness again.

I can literally remember the last time I got a good night’s sleep; I’ve probably mentioned it here, before.  I don’t know the specific date, but it was in the mid-1990s*.  (I’m being completely serious about this—as serious as a bloodcurdling scream for help.)

Last night, I walked about three-fifths of the way back from the train station in the evening—about three miles.  It was quite warm out, certainly in the high 80s, so I think I sweated a lot.  At least that meant I didn’t need to wake up to use the bathroom!  Also, I was physically fatigued enough to rest, and I’d been careful to try to balance my walking so that my left knee wasn’t acting up, which seems to have worked reasonably well for the time being.

I know that’s all very boring.  I just don’t have anyone else to whom to talk about these things, so I share them with all of you.  Aren’t you lucky?  I guess you can always just skim over the boring stuff.  I’m not sure how it is that we can tell what’s going to be boring before we literally read it, but people do seem able to do that, and it works.  I’ve done it myself.

I apologize for not writing any fiction since Monday morning.  I don’t know if any of you were angry at me for that, but I feel that I owe an apology.  I guess I really owe an apology for being a big annoyance and a downer, but I don’t know what to do to change those things.

I don’t want to be a blind optimist, of course.  I want to understand the world as clearly as I can, as objectively as I can, and as deeply and broadly as I can.  Maybe there’s no way to do that without being tense and depressive.  The universe is, after all, vast beyond intuitive understanding, and the realms at which fundamental physics applies are tiny and intricate, also beyond ready intuitive understanding, and time is old in the past and so much longer in the future than a person with a finite lifespan can truly take on board.

But I don’t think that must be despair-inducing.  I’m much more stressed out by how little humans seem even to contemplate how small they are, both individually and collectively, than I am by my own smallness.  As I learn more about how the world really works at deep levels, I don’t feel frightened or overwhelmed by it, like some Lovecraft protagonist who goes mad when confronted with the Great Old Ones or whatever.  I feel that I have grown larger—not literally, of course, but the phase space in which my mind exists takes more and more of reality into itself, and it’s really quite cool, if that’s the right word.

I think at least one thing that makes me feel despair is that so few other people seem even to want to understand the greater universe in any depth or breadth.  They would much rather imagine that the universe is very small and brief, as long as they are somewhere near the center of it.

But of course, to paraphrase Gandalf, they can shut themselves into their tiny little world, but they cannot shut the universe out.  And this in turn invokes not merely the old saw that nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed (for indeed, one cannot do anything but obey nature).  But I would say, far more strongly, that nature, to be survived—even to have a chance of being survived—must be understood as well as possible.

If you don’t know the rules of chess, you’re unlikely to be able to win a game.  Likewise with any other game, including even simple video games.  But those games have rules that humans invented.  The rules of nature have to be probed and unlocked and discovered, and they are much more fine-grained and large and complex than any human-made game could be.  They must be so, for the entire human world is but a tiny little part of that game, one of the innumerable things it allows to come into being.

Oh, well.  What are you going to do?

I guess you’re going to write a blog about it, and in the meantime, try to learn as much about the world as you can, because it is interesting at many levels.  And, of course, you can write a bit of fiction, to which I’ll try to return tomorrow morning.

In the meantime, I hope the vast majority of you are getting better rest than I have been getting.  I hope you have a very good day.  And I hope you have friends and family with whom to spend your finite and precious time.

TTFN

*I remember waking up feeling absolutely refreshed, and though I was too young to think about feeling “ten years younger”, I did feel more alive than I had in some time, almost as if I’d gotten superpowers**.  I’ve known people who seem almost addicted to sleep, and if that’s how they tend to feel when they’ve slept, I can hardly blame them.

**Speaking of which, I have a stupid, joke superhero idea that I’ve been too embarrassed to share with anyone in person (I’m sure you’ll understand why):  “Bitten by a radioactive wildebeest, Anthony Edward Lopez finds himself with slightly-greater-than-human powers of strength and speed.  Deciding to use his new powers to fight crime, he becomes:  Gnu-man.”

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No fiction again today

It’s only Wednesday morning, not Thursday, but again I’m writing a blog post.  I’m on my way into the office even earlier than yesterday, since my sleep and my tension level has been exceptionally bad, even for me.

I was going to work on Extra Body while riding in, but though I opened it in the Word app and started reading through what I wrote Monday, it was too difficult to follow and felt awkward on the phone.  Anyway, I should get to the office in plenty of time to work on it on the mini-laptop computer, which I did not bring with me from the office last night.  I left the quite late, yesterday, because we had things happen right at the end of the day, and I took an Uber back to the house, just as I’m taking an Uber in this morning 

I’m burning a fair amount of money on these Ubers, but it’s not as though I’m saving for retirement or anything.  I don’t expect to live long enough to retire, even if that were an option.

Another thing that added to my tension yesterday (and today) is that my coworker had to get some medical testing done yesterday, and so he was out after lunch and will probably be out at least this morning if not the entire day.  I don’t begrudge him his healthcare, of course.  I want him to be healthy, for his own sake and that of his family.  But it does make me more stressed out, especially on Wednesday (today), when I have to do payroll.  That’s a big part of why I’m going in so early, apart from the fact that I was awake anyway and just felt confined and disgusted in my room.  It’s much easier to do work that requires concentration when I’m the only one in the office.

It’s a strange thing, and it’s pretty contemptible, but I know a few people with serious health issues and several with moderate ones, and of course, as a doctor, I saw many people with serious and even terminal health problems‒and I sometimes envy these people.  I know, they suffer and/or suffered, obviously, and I don’t think that is enviable in and of itself.  But if I could take their illness into me, curing them and sickening myself, I think that would be a real multiple boon.  They could get their health back and decrease their expenses.  I in turn would be able to let myself stop trying; I would not be a big burden on society, because I would only want palliative care, just enough to control the pain as much as possible and bide the end.

It would be nice to be able to do some good by taking someone else’s illness, especially if that someone has close friends and family who would miss them.

Of course, that’s very silly and fanciful, and of course, it’s contemptible, but then I hold myself in contempt, anyway.  And I don’t think much better of the world at large, so it’s not like there’s much motivation to stay in it.  On an individual level, or a few at a time, people can be interesting and quite admirable, but when they come together in very large numbers, they rapidly reduce to the lowest level present in each aspect‒a higher-dimensional chain that is only as strong as its weakest link in each dimension of character, so to speak.  And there are so many people in the world that the lowest level on any given axis is very low indeed.

Anyway, I’m tired of the world, and of being tired, and of being in pain, and of not being able to rest.  It would be nice to see my kids again and be part of their lives, but I don’t believe that’s going to happen.  Maybe if I did have some terminal illness, that might trigger something, some final meeting or other, I don’t know.  But that’s a stupid and contemptible thought, as I said, and though I do find myself contemptible, I don’t like it.

***

I’m at the office now, but I don’t feel like writing any fiction.  I guess I should make sure to take home my laptop computer tonight, if I really plan to do any fiction writing tomorrow‒although, come to think of it, tomorrow is Thursday, so I should probably write my traditional blog post.  I guess I’ll do that.  But I can write it on the laptop computer, anyway.  That’s what I always used to do.

I was thinking of ordering some of those smaller spiral-bound notebooks, the six by nine ones, or whatever their specific measurements might be.  I have two of the bigger five-star notebooks, but I found that those were unwieldy, especially for the commute.  However, I did write Solitaire originally in a smaller spiral-bound notebook, and though it’s quite a dark tale, I think it’s one of my best-written stories.

Also, my thumb bases are hurting a lot even though I’m trying not to use the phone to write too much; they’re even hurting when using the regular computer keyboard to some degree, and my left thumb, hand, arm, and shoulder are particularly stiff and sore.  So maybe writing some things by (right) hand in a smaller spiral-bound notebook would be good.  I don’t know.

Sorry, I know this is all exceptionally lame and boring.  What I really ought to do is just stop writing anything at all, and stop doing anything at all, and just give up.  I make even myself sick; goodness knows how other people can tolerate me.

Anyway, I don’t think there’s much else to say today, though that doesn’t usually stop me.  If I do end up writing any fiction today, maybe I’ll make an addendum, but I don’t think I will.  I did doodle an anime style face yesterday, so I accomplished something at least mildly creative.  Huzzah for me, right?

I’m very tired.  But I’m not sleepy.  It’s a frustrating conundrum, and there’s no good reason to expect that nature is so arranged as to provide any solution to the problem.  Just ask the dinosaurs.

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Monday report from 5-6-2024

Well, I got a pretty good amount of writing in this morning:  2.,088 words on Extra Body.  It helps when I’m writing conversations; the character just say what they want to say, and the conversation goes on more or less naturally.  I don’t even feel like I’m doing any work, half the time, nor that it’s coming from me.  Actually, writing fiction in general doesn’t ever really feel like it’s anything I’m doing, in a sense.  Whatever part of my brain does it, it’s not really accessible to the conscious portion until it goes down on the page.  I don’t know what I’m going to write until I read it as I write it.

As far as other matters go, I tried to ride my bike some this weekend, after getting a new seat and post that I hoped would sit lower than the other does.  Alas, there’s something in the post hole of the bike that prevents it from going lower.  I guess I could chop off an inch or so of the seat post, but I would need proper equipment to do that, and I don’t have it.  Maybe I’ll get it.

I’m not too unusually stiff and sore from biking, though I realized how out of shape I’ve allowed myself to become.  Also, my left arm and leg are notably fatigued relative to my right, as is the base of my left thumb more sore and stiff than my right.  Somehow when I ride, I put more strain on my left side, including where I’m holding the handlebars.  It’s weird.  If I didn’t know the cause, I might worry that I’d had a stroke.

Anyway, that’s about it for today.  I hope that you all had a good weekend, including a good “Star Wars Day.”  But don’t forget, today is:

revenge of the sixth

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VERY brief report for Saturday, May 4, 2024

First of all, “May the 4th be with you!”

I wrote a modest amount for me this morning–only 1484 words.  That’s still a credible amount, given that I had set my new goal to be a page a day at least, and this is more than that.  It was actually about two single-spaced pages on MS Word, with Calibri, font size 11.  Not that it matters.

Of course, it’s Star Wars Day, which is a silly play on words, which makes it just my kind of thing.  I hope you all enjoy it.  I’ll probably be watching some people reacting to classic Star Wars movies on YouTube, since I have most of the original and some of the prequels practically memorized.  I used to be able to do the first five or ten minutes of the original movie by heart–mostly C-3PO talking to R2D2, when you get down to it.  “Do you hear that?  They’ve shut down the main reactor!” and so on.  And, of course, a line or so later, Threepio being his traditionally optimistic self saying, “We’re doomed.  There’ll be no escape for the Princess this time.”

Anyway, that’s enough of that for now.  Please have a good day.

may the fourth