Orukter Amphibolos

We are still on food. Yes, we wonderful proton-powered collective metazoans needs us some foods!

Speaking of power, I didn't watch the Republican (master)debates last night, but I hear Trump slipped Jeb some skin.



Good thing they didn't fist bump, or their Wonder Tard Powers would have activated. And then what?



So, food. Again. Still. Probably for awhile. Hey, let's talk about Oliver Evans. I think in many respects, Oliver Evans kicked Leonardo DaVinci's ass when it came to inventions. True, Leonardo came with lots of unworkable and impractical inventions, a lot more than Evans, but unlike Leonardo, Evan's rubber always hit the road.

Oliver Evans, along with Richard Trevithick, came up with the high pressure steam engine.  Oliver Evans built the Orukter Amphibolos, the world's first automobile and the world's first amphibious vehicle. When he drove it through Philadelphia's Center Square in 1805, thousands gathered in amazement.

But much important a contribution was Evan's automatic flour mill, developed to fruition around 1789.

"He saw the method by which millers turned wheat into flour and he was disgusted by the crudity, waste, and dirtiness. A mill customarily employed four men and a 'hopper boy' to clean, grind, cool, sift, and pack. One strong man carried three-bushel sacks up ladder-like stairways and dumped the grain into cylindrical 'rolling screen' that freed the grain of its chaff and dirt. A boy raked the cleaned grain into a funnel or hopper leading to the second-floor millstones, driven by waterpower. The warm, moist, ground meal was packed into buckets and hoisted to the third floor. It was spread out on the floor to cool and dry. A third man pushed the dried meal into a vertical chute. Gravity carried it into cylinder covered in bolting cloth. Once sieved, the flour fell into a chest and a fourth man  shoveled it out into barrels. In all this labor, dust was raised, grain was trampled underfoot, and the flour quality was very mixed."*   

"Mixed" was an understatement, the flour typically had manure, insects, offal, trash, and any number of other very undesirable things embedded within it. Aside from the amount eaten by vermin, most of it spoiled before it could make it to market - where it was used anyway.

Evans' ingenious automatic integrated production line used one man, doing the work of, who could process 300 bushels an hour. In addition, the raw gain emerged as smooth flour untouched by human hand, devoid of hopper dust, footmarks or insects. Footmarks, in case you haven't figured it, was anything that became attached from the incredibly filthy mill dirt and mud of the mill yards.

His process was promptly denigrated as "a set of rattle-traps, and also shamelessly ripped off by millers up and down the Eastern seaboard, and it was not until Congress passed an act for the Relief of Oliver Evans, signed into law by President Jefferson in 1808, that he was able to receive partial recompense. As usual, as is such the case of so much of capitalism in America, his inventions were "stolen fair and square". From the monies recovered, he founded the Mars Works west of Pittsburgh, continuing to manufacture steam engines until his death. The steam engine was something for sure. But, more importantly, there is little doubt that Americans, eating flour milled by Evans' mills, were more likely to live to tell the tale, and certainly had an impact in being able to reproduce at "biological maximum", and spread westward ho.

*From They Made America, by Harold Evans with Gail Buckland and David Lefer

The Scale Of Government Is Not Invariant

(Or more generally, organizations are not fractals).

Napoleon is a dickless asshole. Literally.

You may recall in yesterday's essay I called Steve Jobs a dickless asshole. Jobs used this term of disparagement all the time, so it stands to reason that he found it hurtful in the extreme. It follows we as a society should make an attempt that he should forever after be known as a dickless asshole. Nothing really wrong with that, considering how powerful the asshole niche is within the society of us ape-shaped bugs, and for that matter, how it seems to be a near cosmic rule in organizations. I would hazard to guess that if we ever meet space-faring aliens, they have good representative asshole niche - unless they've managed to find a way to be both effective and nice.

Napoleon really is a dickless asshole though. During his autopsy, the doctor removed some souvenirs, and so his dick meandered through that grisly subset of the global commodities market known as reliquaries until settling in New Jersey. Cosmic irony would have dictated that it reside next to a jar filled with Rasputin's cock, but no. I guess.

Anyway, what the fuck am I talking about? I went back and read yesterday's essay, and I had to ask "Kurman? Was there a fucking point to any of that?" I think there was, is, but it's gonna take a while for it all to cohere  - or congeal - into something. I think it has to do with big picture items and long term trends. But honestly, I'm pretty sure that the general anesthesia from two weeks ago scraped a good 10 IQ points of my brain, and maybe permanently. Add that to the other four operations going under, and the ten concussions I've suffered, and I suspect one more trial under the knife, or one more conk on the noggin, and all I'll be able to type is "Meow".

Ferguson

(Oh, and that ape-shaped bug crack? Not really meant as insult, more a realistic observation of our place in the larger universe. And whether "bug" refers to Ecdysozoa or Eubacteria really doesn't matter as both have admirably solved 99.999% of the survival problem and are worthy of emulation).

So I suppose one of the themes from yesterday was about energy, but the stress was not necessarily upon our most recent sources - oil, gas, coal, nuclear - that have allowed the big accelerating anomaly our species has undergone lo these past three centuries, but rather the much more important energy source known as food.

Food, baby, food!

Any long term trend, any big picture item must treat this as the salient of all discussions. True, oil, gas, and coal, have opened up new venues and ventures to our species, but in many respects, all they've really done is added a turbocharged hemi to an already very sleek and stylish automobile - that incredible robust time-tested might-as-well-be-Promethean-nanotechnology we call eukarya in human form (and of course the holobiontic menagerie that surrounds and contains us like that hokey wizarding Force in those hokey Star Wars movies).

And if we are to talk of, to bump it up a category, Life, then we must talk of organization, networks, whether communal or parasitic, swarm or dissipative structure, centralized or distributed, fractal or Pareto dispersed.

(One quick aside about food, and another dickless asshole known as Putin. Jared Diamond's scholarship in Guns, Germs, and Steel may be slipshod, loose, and sloppy, and he may accused of geographic fatalism, but he does have a point about food zones. Longitudinal (east-west) food zones are preferable to latitudinal (north-south) food zones for propagation of staples, but in a world of climate change - assuming that favorable conditions travel to the poles, and this is a coarse assumption - the food zones will not travel with them. Latitudinal food zones (ignoring storm, flood  and drought) are to be preferred. Which means the Ukraine is fucked as a food zone, and Russia as well. Putin is wasting his time. The fact that got he caught with his pants down by failing to move most of Russia's arms-making capacity out of the Ukraine shows him to be a short-sighted fool, rather the strong manly chess master American conservatives so desperately whank off to).

So, political organizations (and, for that matter business organizations, which are based upon centrally planned dictatorships). What we know is basically every form has been tried and found wanting, but some forms are worse than others. Confederations, for example, don't work. In America, they have tried twice, and both have been dismal, utter failures. Anarchy, for that matter, I don't think has even ever been tried, as it is contrary to the very idea of organization and principles of networks of social creatures. Grover Norquist, clueless - and possibly dickless - asshole, mischaracterized Burning Man as a self-organizing anarchic emergent community when it was nothing of the kind. Burning Man was - is -  a highly regulated, highly policed, luxuriously subsidized annual expedition to the South Pole - but without the death and cannibalism and frostbite and gangrene.

So then the question is granularity of control. I for one prefer Big Government because it's so big and monitoring (at least historically) so remote and lax that it was easy to get away with a lot of shit, and still get a lot of free stuff for free from the taxpayer.

(I have to admit, my views of governance are moving away from the Lockean social contract theory, and heading more towards the Serresian layered mutual abuse social parasitism theory, and more on that later maybe).

But let's get back to that idea of layers of categorical filters and control points. The American Founding Fathers, perhaps swinging the pendulum too far the other way after being subjected to the parasitic abuse of the jolly olde British Empire (ignoring their own parasitic land theft and security needs against the dreadful Savage which said empire supplied in return). Even when the United States in Congress Assembled proved to be wholly unworkable, members of the Constitutional Congress were still staining their pants so badly over the return of tyranny that they much preferred the idea of state and, more importantly, local control.

Problem is, local government can be the most stringent dictatorship of all (and as such, is NOT the modern system of government per Foucault's observations on the panopticon). I mean, I much prefer that the government be way the hell over their in Washington DC, with layers and layers and layers of bureaucracy distancing them from me, and all the silly little incestuous CEO-type buttheads stuck in one little easily nuked enclave. True, their are always exceptions to the rule. True, technology is changing so rapidly that the monitoring points are getting closer and closer into my business and privacy, but this is the cost of being a social creature. And besides, monitoring and control technology is part and parcel of the involving arms race of deceit, which I consider a lot more fun than the usual idea of arms race.

The Spine of the S Curve

We are told that for every one person living, there are fifteen ghosts floating around. If you start at around 50,000 BCE, that puts the total number of dead people preceding our current 7 billion at around 107 billion or so.

You ever think there will ever be 107 billion people living at some point in the future? I doubt it, and if they are, they'll be infesting the solar system rather than Earth in some Kardashev level 1.4 (some 10 to the 22nd power watts to play with, if my math is right) civilization. And I also doubt you would strictly call them people, or at least, not people in ape form. And maybe not even in a watery carbon substrate.

Funny thing, or not so funny thing is, where do get the cheap energy for all those people? Well, that's the not the problem is it? It's cheap energy density that is the problem, the same way that lake or a river is good for waterwheels, but a narrow channel is much, much better.

Consider how we get by with just coal, oil, and gas. All those little archea and bacteria, laying down near teraton geologic deposits of rock and shale and carbon and all good stuff, their ghostly little selves outnumbering present populations some 20-30 to 1, means there is just a shitload of gas, coal, and oil still available. And that's not really the problem, to get an appropriate energy density to be useful, extraction has to stay below some constraint.

That's really not the problem is it? Food is the problem. Last I checked, food needs soil, air and water, and that's about it. Oh, it need a little bit more than that, but that's still far more worrisome and sophisticated a task than simply drowning in your own shit and floating to the bottom of the sea to be covered up by sediment and turned into more or less pure carbon.  



Because when you think about it, the whole system of food, which is to say the geologic environment, plus bacteria and archea, plus eukarya in the form of plants and animals, all of it based on a universal chemical dance of proton gradient and redox replenishment that makes our current best energy density look like pathetic little weenie sparks (seriously, the electric potential across a 6 nanometer mitochondrial  membrane is like 400 million volts!), and the machinery to do it, makes even our most sophisticated machine look like a cumbersome tinkertoy. And all of it done through a incredibly massive parallelism and natural selection. Why, the whole of human civilization kind of pales in comparison. No wonder the godbotherers have a hard time dropping the silly Intelligent Design argument.

Yeah, okay what's the point? You can talk about the Industrial Revolution, and I sure do agree it's a nontrivial event. But the agricultural revolution, plus the conquest of the New World ("Pangea stitch'd together again), plus good 'ol poison gas Fritz Haber, plus Norman Borlaug, and countless other experimentalists and organizations, gets you all the riches that power all the little self-replicating robots in ape form, that can take oil, gas, coal, even nukes and add only a slight addition to the actual energy budget that we enjoy and allows us to watch all our little TVs and drive our little cars and drink our little drinks and smoke our little smokes, and build our little cyberspaces, and launch our little probes out into outer space. And the really interesting thing is how all this seemingly intelligent shit, writ large as emergent global behaviors, is still not much smarter than the dumbest microbes.

Population growth of dumb things like us

America and the Soviet Union: two crabs on a beach. John Rockefeller and Standard Oil: a phagocytic amoeba. The dickless asshole Steve Jobs and Apple: an anaerobic flagellated protozoan parasite.

Come to think of it, isn't life just parasitizing the Earth? And ain't we all glad Earth is kind to have a magnetic field?

And it pretty much starts, I think, just to throw a date out there, around 1700CE. I pick that date, because (if we are lucky, and I am optimistic, and the period going forward towards, say, 2200CE or so is the spine of the S curve), that's the beginning of the Anthropocene, and everything before then pretty much looks the same. Meaning, if someone like Mark Twain, author of Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (and if there is anyone who should be allowed to time travel, it's Twain), were to start in 1700, and we send him back one hundred years at a time, there's not much that is different, noticeable different. But send him forward, and things start to happen!

1800, maybe not so much, certainly improvement in our capacity to slaughter each other, 1900, for sure differences, but still recognizable to him. But 2000? Oh, the houses and streets still the same, and he able to understand most new technology. But 2100? 2200? Oh my!

I am being optimistic. And maybe I'm underestimating Twain.

The Walking Cure

People emigrating from Europe to America, I would assume, if they had a choice, would settle in regions most similar to those they left. There were constraints of course: available land, available work, the whims and needs of the bosses. My ancestors, coming in just after the Civil War, were the cheap peoples Europe exported in exchange for cheap food from America.

The area my ancestors settled, Northern Indiana, strikingly resembles the Northern Plains of Germany. More specifically, Northwest Indiana, so I am told, very much resembles the current Federal State of Mecklenberg-Vorpommern, the "Florida of Germany", if you can believe that. My part of Indiana is called The Region, or more colorfully, the Armpit of Indiana due to all the industry.

True, great-great-grand-daddy's country of origin is listed as Prussia (and the joke is when asked of our nationality we say "Prussian-Norwegian, drunk and crazy!"  - or  - "doubly psychotic!"), but we are from Mecklenberg. Lake country. Deep glacial lakes with sandy bottoms, clay-loess sandy soil, thick dark forests, the smell of a large tract of water nearby.

(The lesser coat of arms of Mecklenberg has a bull, but I always thought it a laughing cow with a crown).

(My mother's side of the family - hill people from Norway, and not so fortunate - ended up half in Chicago and half in Minnesota - lots of Hills in Minnesota - and doubtless had they their preference would have ended up in Vancouver or Seattle).

Not so sure dad's side of the family was actually from Mecklenberg originally. When I hitchhiked Europe at the age of 19, I was pretty much topped-up full of stupid. I did managed to notice that I wanted to spend almost all of my time on the island on the island of Zealand, where Copenhagen is. It felt like home. The Danes, despite owning a peninsula, are really an island folk. And I enjoy island life.

I did not visit Mecklenberg when I was there. It was behind the Iron Curtain in Eastern Germany, and Amsterdam beckoned as a more choice destination.

I've a cold. Coughing, after surgery, especially abdominal surgery, with strains already placed upon the diaphragm, you would think would be agony. Well, yeah, kinda, but actually no.

The fever and general muscle ache is no fun, and last night was the worst, with me waking up to a soaking wet bed. But today, thunderstorms in the morning, I lay about in fresh sheets and dozed. Finally, I got up and said I have to at least try to walk.

(Eating? Not so much fun. Whatever opiates and other drugs they gave me have left a persistent bitter taste in the lower back corners of my jaw. Sugars are out of the question. Salt acceptable, and sour tastes the least objectionable. But I can tell you, like a dog given bowl of brandy, I have absolutely NO desire for intoxicants of any kind. I wish strenuous physical activity. Out of the question for a few weeks according to medical opinion).

So, I went for a walk after the storms. Sun was out, humidity up there, I went past a new city park being converted back to wetlands. Sweat popping on my brow and UV on the skin felt pretty goddamn good. But best off all were the swampland smells. Hard to describe. Again, a sweetness that the lungs appreciate more the nose, but I also detected smell of hod-hewn clay. That was a smell back of earliest childhood, gardening in the backyard, the faint organics of broken up clay, released from when last the glaciers deposited it in its inorganic mineral matrix.

The walk did me good. Feel pretty good now. I'd say the smells helped as much as the walk.

Turning Corners

I had a nightmare, actually a series of nightmares last night, which suggests that in that strange, discrete-phase, two-steps-forward-one-step back form of recuperation we all seem to go through, I'm coming closer to turning the corner. Which is to say I feel remarkably less subhuman today.

If you think of me as a turn-of-the-last-century dreadnought, and cut open my riveted hull platings to reveal a cross-section of the decks within, you'd have witnessed the black gang of the engine room desperately shoring with timbers and bedding the stave holes and breaches. And a little homunculi captain up on the bridge wing shouting useless orders to the sailors on deck scurrying about.

Still, a much better situation than if things had gone otherwise, with the cold Atlantic waters rushing in to confront superheated boiler chambers and coal-fired furnaces, the whole enterprise going to smithereens and up to the heavens in a massive explosion known to maritime folk as the release of  'the black soul'.

Oh, did I mention I'm reading Dead Wake? Just about done and had enough of that time thank you.

One nightmare I remember was actually looking at the wounds inflicted upon me through some magic glass, the tissues and fissures outlined in striking technicolor 3D. A voice, Satan perhaps, offered up as all the pain could go away and I would be rendered whole again if I liked. I wasn't sure, so a demo was performed on a separate creature, I know not of what fashion.

The interior 3D view of the creature, perhaps a grievously wounded fish or lizard, was all the blues and greens and yellows of copper-oxide shades and hues. An almost invisible conical ray, like a science fiction ray, scanned the creature and it was made whole.

I assented, and watched the science fiction conical ray pass over my abdomen. The pain disappeared, but the tissues depicted in the magic glass, formerly lustrous and glowing with a lovely inner jewel-like light, turned to cheap plastic, as if my body had been polymerized by Herr Doktor Gunther von Hagens. The vitality and internal light of the tissues were gone, replaced by cheap powdered colorants and industrial pigments.

I was no longer life, but simulated life, an ersatz creature. It made me wonder if the universe itself were not similarly created by that voice. And then I woke up. I had sweat the bed.

Well, if the Universe is a simulation, there's a lot of people I have to shoot.

Speaking of simulations, I'm thinking about that quote 'AI' unquote quote 'painting like a grand master' unquote science swoon item from the other day. It's along the lines of the fun Deep Dreaming convolutional neural net playing with image filters from a month ago.

Well, I read that paper so you don't have to.  Not sure it's that impressive, but here, the feed-forward nets combine two feature maps involving image recognition and the texture map of various painter's paintings, combining the filters to produce a grand-master's rendering of a photo. Huh.

Why is a Raven Like a Writing Desk? from Gene Kogan on Vimeo.

But this got me back to thinking how swarms and neural nets is pretty much the same thing. And that got me to thinking about Uber. Uber, of course, is the taxi hailing service that you have on your phone. We are told it is a disruptive innovation that improves lifestyle and makes the economy more efficient. Uhm, no.

Uber (and Lyft)  is a rentier app emplaced over our current walkie-talkie radio networks that allows monetary extraction from you, to them, through the very, very old labor practice of pimps and whores.

It is a parasitism. Municipalities, of course, could offer up a free app that allows you the rider and a driver to do the same thing without the need of a middle man scraping your living room walls for saltpeter. A free municipal ride app (and more importantly, swarm route optimizer) is still parasitic in the form of taxation, but still…some of the best and most efficient people moving is done by public transport. Sorry, entrepreneurs and invisible handers.

I got your invisible hand.

The beautiful thing is now we have hyperparasitism. There is an app out that will compare ride sharing prices for you. I love it. What dirty tricks will these creepy organizations play to resolve this?

So, what's the real innovation? Why, radio dispatch, of course!

I can remember taxi call boxes on the street. right up until maybe the mid seventies, which corresponds with the first cell phones. I'm almost positive, that transport optimization software was available then. I could d have been in on that, maybe using swarms. I am such an idiot.

Utopian Purgatory

I've said many times before that any sci-fi dystopian scenario in no way frightens me. What frightens me is prosperity. Not because prosperity can disappear, but because prosperity is an unknown that we as a species are poorly constructed to deal with.

Should prosperity disappear, you are back to dsytopia, which is well known, the squalid, brutish shit-covered past. We've been there. We know how deal with that.

Case in point. My healing progresses as it should. My wounds are itching. Some regularity is returning "down there". I've a major hunger for chicken and waffles, or kimchi, or bibimbap, or pulled-pork BBQ, or veggie pizza, or vanilla malteds. Nope. High fiber stuff and good bacteria for general welfare of the holobiont known as me. I've now to work on lung function and slowly expand the tissues around that big ham slice where that Godzilla of a kidney used to be.

I go for a walk through my old neighborhood this morning. (I walked a mile and a half yesterday). I walk down to the old O'keefe farm. (Now not a farm, a manicured suburbia surrounding the old O'keefe farmhouse, although the pond where I fished for bluegill is still there out back). Even though it is not the idyllic countryside of my youth, I revel in the wild sweet smells of late summer, that spicy sweet smell of weeds and overgrown ditch vegetation. It's hot. It's humid. Id' have whined about it a few weeks ago, but it's real, and out of my control, and I can do nothing but endure it.

I wonder how hot it is? I check my phone to look for Valparaiso weather, and it is more than ready to be helpful. It is suggesting spellings. Google wants to butt in to help. This is not what I want. The robots, the nets of deep learning are stumbling over each other with suggestions, assistances, cute playful coddlings and nudging assurances.

STOP  FUCKING HELPING ME!

(By the way, it is 86F and 66% humidity). The problem as I see it is we have these clumsy puppies known as Deep Neural Networks, that some cute clever goofballs are trying to reverse engineer from a not-very-well-understood mental model of how our own gestalt beings operate, are just not quite up to snuff. Is a half-assed utopia better than none at all? I don't think so. The most damning words a leader can hear about their administration is "he meant well".

Speaking of Deep Neural Nets, what about the old TV trope of Herman's Head, or the "What Happens During An Orgasm" NASA control room vignette in Woody Allen's spoof of "Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask"?



It's got to be an old theme. Hobbes' Leviathan for starters maybe. The more contemporary Gargantuan Mecha. Is there a term? Ship of a person crewed by homunculi shortened to what?

How old is this theme? Going back to a time when the old sailing vessels crew size equalled or surpassed Dunbar's number? Would that be around 500BC or so? About the same time as the Greek quinquereme?

Ramming Speed!

Nothing Personal, but It's All About Me

This essay may be the closest I come to a real random walk, considering my current cognitive state is below that required to domesticate fire. (Which, given H. erectus controlled fire a million years ago, puts me at about an IQ of 60 right now. I can barely type).

Old people are pretty shameless. At 58, I consider myself old now, ok? I can remember one old girl telling me about her ulcerative colitis in the cafeteria at the college. I said, do you mind? I'm eating lunch. Didn't faze her a bit. So, here is my shamelessness, a picture of my robot-inflicted wounds from surgery.

Have I no public sense of decency? Nope.

It's a lot better than getting cut navel to backbone with a samurai sword across the rib cage. I'm still swollen on the left side and curiously the right side hurts worse.

The thing is they had me walking the eight hours after surgery. I did about a thousand yards before I pooped out. They do it because they are worried about lung function. The nurse who assisted me was about twelve years old and weighed half my body weight. She couldn't have kept me from fainting and falling if there had been a platoon of her.

Friday and Saturday nights was off-and-on bad sleep or fever dreams. I had that recurring sick time nightmare that my brain was a calculator forced to do innumerable arithmetic operations by an evil accountant. Plus, I'm interrupted by staff drawing blood, providing medication, taking temperature and blood pressure, so it wasn't until I got home yesterday that I got a solid fifteen hour nap in. That really helped. I've walked about a mile and half since Friday, and after spending time in the meat locker of the hospital, the 90 degree/100% humidity is just the kind of hothouse conditions this delicate flower needs.

Speaking of delicate flowers, I've changed my mind about Donald Trump. I actually think he is currently doing us all a public favor by godbothering the idiot conservatards. It really doesn't matter that I am personally not a fan of his, that I find many of his views despicable. Personal likes and dislikes should not enter the picture. He's shaking things up, shaping the narrative to expose the ridiculousness of the candidates positions, and making the right people uncomfortable about the wrong things. This is classic showmanship.

The sole fact that Trump has made (anti-rich-people's-tax) Grover Norquist squirt out a little stain from his overly constricted sphincter, the idea that - oh, what a world! what a world! Trump could destroy all of Norquist's beautiful wickedness - provides me a great deal of smug satisfaction.

It's a very fine piece of performance art in the tradition of P.T. Barnum, and I appreciate it. Nothing personal.

Speaking of which, one of the things I noticed about the hospital was a lack of distraction. Oh, sure, there was safe and staid hotel art sprinkled about the floor, but I really, really needed distraction. Art would have helped. Especially bad art, something I could object to.

I'm realizing that artists, writers, and performers (pace Mr. Trump) are incredibly egotistical. How dare I share with you things about me? (Because really, that's art and letters are about: me, Me, ME! Look AT ME!!!)

And yet, it really is nothing personal. Artists and writers are trying to provide a bright and shiny lie that gets you off dead ass center and look around for a change. Enough of the navel gazing. They make you, for just a second, think about something besides you. Doesn't matter what it's about, or whether it is of good taste.

So, the hospital really needs that. A lot.

Well, I'm about pooped writing this up, and back to shameless self-promotion that is my primary mission right now. And also to squeeze out a solid poop and get myself back to some semblance of normal.

Do you want an update on that?

P. S. A solid thank you to everyone who has visited or expressed concern or asked about my well-being. I love you guys.

P.P.S. This was really hard to do, composing this. I hope none of you ever have to go through the circumstances surrounding this essay.