An Anti-Romance Novel

     The first Elena Ferrante novel I read, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2013), third book of the celebrated, internationally popular Neapolitan Quartet, is noticeably misshapen. A conversation lasts about 75 pages, seven years pass within one. This may sound like carelessness of structure that distracts and obscures, dousing the material. But Ferrante tells the story of a relationship that doesn't fit snugly into a plot, one lasting from childhood to adulthood, in episodes and shards, whatever matters most as life proceeds. Form matches content, following along isn't a problem, and the material burns undiminished. The Lying Life of Adults (2019), Ferrante's latest novel, is about a girl named Giovanna, living in Naples, Italy in the early 1990s, and the years leading to her becoming a woman. First sentence, first lie: She overhears her father call her ugly. Actually, he says she has the face of his hated sister, her aunt, Vittoria. Giovanna, ashamed yet curious, eventually sets off to meet Vittoria. The novel unfolds neatly and chronologically, chapters broken up into numbered sections of about equal length, with no shifts in approach from one to the next.

Ferrante's conventional choice of structure conflicts with what brought me back to her work: the real, presented before a misguided sense of propriety can censor it. Uncomfortable details. Messy relationships. Seething and the ineluctable explosion. Giovanna passes over stretches of time too but it has no influence on the shape of the narrative. Alone, this might not even qualify as a minor criticism if structure serves the basic purpose of smoothing the reader's path. But form matches content, the twist, the revelation, the gasp-inducing moment occurring precisely when needed. For instance, Giovanna goes from guys occupying no mental space, hardly exploring her romantic or sexual feelings, to falling madly in love, at first sight, not with a boy but a man, and not just any man but precisely the man she shouldn't, which would cause more of a programmatic explosion. In addition to being handsome, he's remarkably intelligent and charismatic, we're told.

Giovanna has no distinct verbal stamp - no tics, no slang, no depth of lexicon, no particular gift for a memorable line. (The good reviews do not savor her voice.) She frequently refers to the difference between Italian and dialect but, possibly due to the difficulty of translating the difference, never goes further than pointing it out. What's more, the character's sense of self is narrowed to the drama of her family life. Even modest, passing references to what else is going on with her, who she is outside of it, what else she thinks, are few. Thus, in language and personality, Giovanna, the most fully drawn character, isn't.

The world of the novel is highly circumscribed. Given the paucity of anything to distinguish the time period, the 90s could have been the 70s or the 50s. It's not a novel of place. And though the book covers years of her life, external events never break into the narrative - no storm, no car accident, no change in the country's political makeup, no errant ball to the head. 

So what's left to involve the reader? What seems to come easiest to Ferrante, what I came for, her brand of the real. She's inconsistent with it. And after what devolves into a fatiguing wash of incidents, of rifts and reshuffled alliances and sudden changes of heart, they coalesce at the very end, with perhaps the best scene, a sexual encounter, brief, squalid, and farcical. After all the lies, the swerves, the sheer confusion, adults pulled one way or another by sexual desire, a declaration of freedom, an anti-romance novel.

The element of soap opera in all this is pronounced. Ferrante doesn't wildly escalate, into the realm of amnesia and evil twins (although there is a "magic" bracelet). But things happen at regular intervals because they must, to bring the viewer back for the next episode, to keep the book going. Soap opera in the guise of a diary: venting (controlled), honest and heated, narcissistic and tedious.

The Lying Life of Adults reads like a competent debut.

The Literary Life, 2

    I'm rummaging through my books looking for a book to counteract the effects of the book I'm reading. The idea is that I'll dutifully endure as many pages as I can of the one and switch to the other as needed but half the time I don't bother to switch back. I return with three, none of which I thought of before I retrieved them. The first is a thick volume, the collected stories and novels of Saki. According to the inscription, it was given as a gift to "Kate" in 1989. Set that aside for later. The next is a cult writer's essay collection, bought on impulse years ago. After sampling a few pages, it'll probably be donated. The last, also an impulse buy, is called Mortification (2003). It's an anthology of writings on the title theme. Nearly every one takes the reader to the dark side of the literary life.

The editor, Robin Robertson, came up with the idea thinking back on the day he was doing a poetry reading for an audience of six at a bookstore when he looked up to see some football hooligans (soccer enthusiasts) pressing their bare asses to the window. Inspired, he sent forth a request to writers to tell their own such stories, publicly, for inclusion in a book. Some replied. Of those who didn't, Robertson required no explanation.

The form I'm most interested in these days, as a writer, allows for a piecemeal read. I keep my favorites close at hand to page through upon waking, as a change of pace from another book, during meal preparations, in the bathroom. The entries in Mortification are the right length for it, as short as a couple of pages and no longer than seven, and while the book isn't essential, not what I'd keep closest at hand, I'd have it around to pick up now and then.

The benefit of multiple contributors is variety: voices (in Mortification, mostly Western European and North American white men and women), approaches, pain levels. The entries I placed an asterisk next to in the table of contents, to indicate the best, outnumber the entries I crossed out. And since almost everyone writes about real mental bruises and scars, the book isn't an empty or frivolous read.

Irvine Welsh, awarded an asterisk for what is by far the most revolting entry, tells two stories, with an important distinction tucked in between: 

This type of embarrassment is intense, but relatively routine. The big problem in trying to dredge up a really mortifying memory is that there are so many and you suspect that you've repressed the best (or worst) ones. 

Routine embarrassment and scalding, traumatizing embarrassment. The book contains both.

Common experiences can be gleaned. Interviewers on radio and TV shows who get the writer's name wrong, couldn't care less about the book being promoted, look past the writer to a worthy guest. Although William Boyd, a novelist, has one encounter that tickles rather than rankles me: 

He makes great play with the fact that I have the same name as the actor who was TV cowboy Hopalong Cassidy. He also uses me to introduce the ad breaks. "Do you like potato chips, William?" "I do," I confess, "but we call them 'crisps' in England." He repeats the word several times, rolling the "er." "Then I think you'd like these American potato chips, too." In the course of our interview I similarly endorse Shake 'n' Vac carpet cleaner ("Do your carpets ever get dirty, William?") and a brand of motor oil.

Maggie O'Farrell, on the other hand, has more tolerance than should be expected of anyone for a radio show host she overhears loudly complain about booking "bloody nobodies" like her. Leave, I scribbled in the margin. She stays and he demands to know where she is. Insult him, then leave. She stays and the producer asks weakly whether she's heard. She says uh huh and stays. Stay long enough to insult him on the air, then leave. The show starts. As he introduces her, the host gets her name wrong.

2021: Podcasts, hosted by readers and recorded for a niche audience of readers, have no doubt mercifully reduced such encounters. Also 2021: Social media and everything that comes with it, the least of which is mortification.

Then there are sparsely attended readings. The luckier ones, it seems, greet an audience composed entirely of a few friends and family members, a fan or two, a sympathizer. But it's the unlucky ones, like Paul Muldoon, who make me laugh most. He goes to the trouble of traveling to a remote university campus. The professor who scheduled his appearance, he discovers, isn't there, having been indisposed after a three-week bender. No one with any serious commitment to the guest has replaced him, so the promotion for the reading consists of a single flyer posted the day before it's to take place, already "obscured by an 'Anxious? Depressed? Suicidal?' poster." And though the university has booked him a hotel room, no arrangements have been made to pay him. Nevertheless, Muldoon forges on, gets lunch, and goes where the reading is to be held. Some students enter and take a seat at the back. The time for him to read arrives. Without introduction, he gets up and begins. His audience seems to like the first poem. He starts reading another poem when one of the students interrupts to ask how long he's going to be. It turns out his "audience" picked that room to study, thinking it was unoccupied. Muldoon travels some distance without getting paid to read for no one. And there's one more disaster awaiting him.

Naturally there are some words on alcohol. A poet named David Harsent most vividly illustrates why, telling the story of a day spent drinking, leading up to a group reading at a bookstore. Hammered, he orders everything on the menu at an Indian restaurant and consumes it all. Later on, after he finishes his reading, he takes a seat in the audience and quickly falls asleep, snoring. Then he rouses himself to fight through the audience to get to the only bathroom in the store. Harsent shows off his music producer's ear for the many sounds of vomiting:

There can, I know, be discreet upchucks of the cough-and-gob variety, or even the girlish whisper-and-slip. This is not either of those, nor is it the twenty-gauge-shuck-and-reload or even the storm-drain-rib-racker. No. This is volcanic. This is a fully orchestrated, bass-pedal-active, hog-hollerin', boot-soles-to-bog-bowl, ten-gallon tsunami.

Harsent is among the survivors. He continues drinking.

Because the book prompts one to reflect on personal mortifications, because the tone is casual, stories related as if over dinner, and out of fairness, I share some gems from my own archive.

After finishing the book, it now strikes me as odd that the last reading I did, close to a decade ago, seems downright triumphant by comparison. San Francisco. An audience of about thirty people, few of whom I knew, no one I knew well. The woman who informed me of when I was supposed to read didn't make eye contact as she spoke. Waiting, idly flipping through a book, listening to the chatter and clatter of the bar, I felt alone and awkward but no more than usual. It wasn't my first reading and, with preparation, public speaking isn't so bad. My introduction, improvised, more or less, got laughs. My piece got laughs. Afterward, I was told some of those in attendance actually wanted to read the rest of the little literary magazine we were promoting. Success. Well, I only had one drink.

Not so on the day I took the train to Berkeley to watch the latest Jim Jarmusch movie, Paterson, at the United Artists theater on Shattuck. It's about a poet living in the city of Paterson, in the state I now call home. I didn't like the movies of his I'd seen previously but I was intrigued that he made one about a poet, an unpublished poet at that. It was as good as the reviews made it out to be. Perhaps most of all I admired Jarmusch's skill at telling the potentially boring story of how a writer gets material from mundane surroundings and incidents. The mundane, for some synonymous with banality and vacuousness, can so easily blur past, unseen. One may come to believe that there's nothing of value in it, nothing to see, and nothing lived. That's a mistake. The real problem is whether one cares to see what's there to see or not. Life, the full scope of life, is within reach, thriving, and the mind is perfectly free to roam beyond the self and its perceived interior boundaries to graze. An astonishing gift. In Paterson, the viewer follows a writer as he uses that gift to transmute experience (which, with proper attention, becomes a message to decode) into humble lines. Without sentimentality, without romance. With affection, with mischievous humor. Feeling invigorated, I thought I'd extend my trip by stopping at a bar located a couple of blocks from the university for a drink before heading back to Castro Valley. As I settled on a stool, I remembered this was the place, years before, where I was having a conversation with my brother about literature. While speaking, I'd noticed a waitress and a bartender glancing at us, stepping closer, obviously eavesdropping. I became uncomfortable, worried about what I was saying. I stammered. The waitress and bartender exchanged dubious looks. The waitress crowed: "Oh, he's just drunk!" I hadn't taken a single sip of my drink. (Routine.) I ordered a beer and finished a long article about Albert Woodfox. A woman sat a couple of stools over. Soon a man walked up to her and introduced himself. He asked her what she was reading. This led to them revealing that they were both writers. Shakespeare came up because she was a playwright, I think. The man said, with excessive cheer, that he'd been working on his first novel for over twenty years. He proceeded to summarize the plot in detail. She listened patiently. Closing the magazine and finishing my drink, I thought: What lies behind this mundane scene? A continuation of the writing theme of my day, that much was clear. But what message was I receiving? Finally, the woman climbed off the stool and said she had to go. They exchanged farewells. I ordered another drink and started reading a novel. The bar was becoming more crowded. I sipped and thought about Paterson and Woodfox and writing. Twenty years. I doubted he'd ever finish. Maybe his novel existed merely as something to talk about. Putting my glass down, I spilled beer on the page of the novel I was trying to read. The bartender and I looked down at the huge brown drop. (Routine.) Time to go. I pressed a napkin to the wet spot, finished the rest of my drink, and headed for the station. To my credit: I had no trouble getting there and stepping aboard the correct train. I took a seat in the middle of the car and fell asleep clutching my backpack. I awoke with a jolt as the train neared my transfer point, Bay Fair. And I started vomiting on my backpack. So often Miguel and I had exchanged BART horror stories. Now I was the story! (Scalding!) The train came to a stop and I jogged out, my backpack held under my chin like a tray to catch any additional blown chunks. Across the platform, down the stairs, to the bathroom. And I blacked out again. I woke up to pounding on the door and a man's incoherent shouting. I was lying next to the toilet, in the fetal position, on the filthy floor of a BART station bathroom, with its flickering fluorescent light, clutching my vomit-covered backpack. By then I was lucid enough to realize this was a low point for me. (Traumatizing.) 

Another distinction: Earned mortification, such as when you overestimate your ability to handle strong drink and pay the price, and unearned mortification, a price paid for getting out of bed and facing the world. (Suddenly I remember the terse phrase "nothing comes free.") Discussing the book's subject at length with Miguel, he shared one of his gems. A high school kid spread his arms to hug a girl. As she approached, a seagull shit on his chest. The girl fled, screaming. I like to imagine he stood there for a while with his arms outspread. A symbol. But in the book, the embarrassments that come through no fault of one's own, that can't necessarily be anticipated, feel more like stabs. Bitterness is also common. The genre writer repeatedly looked down upon. The invitation to an event that turns out to be worse than a waste of time, a series of petty humiliations. And bitterness is magnified by what's expected. Some writers harbor thoughts of fame and fortune. Some, though, simply expect better, after the work put into writing the novel or stories or poems, than indifference or contempt. 

I felt sympathy but no shock. How many readers are there? And among those, how many are truly devoted to reading - reading more, reading deeper, reading with aesthetic appreciation, reading to refresh memory, reading to be shaped, reading to make the most of one's capacity for absorbing the world, reading because it's inextricable from the way they lead their lives? I've met a startling number of writers or people who aspire to be writers. I've met many people who find it notable or strange or unsettling that I read. I've met very few readers. And among those few who do build a life around reading, one inevitably runs into snobs, cavilers, creeps, touts, maniacs, and their worshippers, types that don't exactly fill one with confidence that they know how to read at all. So, presented with stories of indifference and contempt for the writer, not just bad writers or troublemaking writers but any writer, I think: Of course. That's closer to the rule than the exception. And the book doesn't cover other aspects of the literary life, like "creative writing" programs or the academy or publishing, each of which could have a book of mortifications.

On the other side: Hope. The writing matters, whether there's anyone in the audience or not. The reading matters even more. And there are and will be true readers. Sometimes they manage to find each other, on or off the page, and laugh.

Exhalation

     How does writing done without literary intent, to make a living, shape the writer? Asked during a live Q&A if his job as an advertising copy writer had any influence on his literary works, Don DeLillo replied: "No." Next question. William Trevor once worked in advertising and wrote no odes to it. From the books of theirs I've read, I didn't detect a hint of their previous contact with the language of the corporate world. But it's hard to imagine any literary writer worth reading consciously and unreservedly adopting it as a crucial influence. With journalism, say, one is far less likely to encounter such denials and rejection among those who've worked in that field. Plenty of esteemed literary writers have been journalists, at all stages. There are those, too, who produce journalistic fiction, hardly straying from the conventions of journalism to venture boldly, furiously, strangely into fiction. 40 hours a week and the reinforcement of a paycheck, year after year, decade after decade, can become an obstacle if the goal is to be unconventional.

Ted Chiang, author of a pair of sci-fi short story collections, Stories of Your Life (2002) and Exhalation (2019),  is a technical writer. In college, during a temporary bout of pragmatism, I registered for a class in technical writing. One of the first things the professor said was that it's not "creative writing," warning anyone who was in "creative writing" it'd probably be a difficult transition. By the end of the lecture, the only one I attended, I understood what he meant. If you're writing an instruction manual or a funding proposal, anything other than dry formality of language can be distracting, inappropriate, unprofessional. Employers looking to hire a technical writer aren't asking for originality, for freakiness, for linguistic play or beauty. Quite the opposite. What they want is clear, sanitized, anonymous writing, malleable enough to fit whatever house style dictates, delivered on schedule. 

That's pretty much what Chiang's writing is like and, in the context of fiction, it's antiseptic. Put another way, he comes dangerously close to transporting the reader to work, specifically that horrible moment, sitting in a cubicle, face down at a desk, nowhere near the end of the day, GAH!, jumping out of your seat, running down the hallway, down several flights of stairs, past security, through the turnstiles, knocking down some executive, apologizing profusely, stepping over him, the front doors locked, beating frantically on the doors, frightened passersby, tackled by security, security piling on, and on, darkness, waking up at your desk in a cold sweat to find that maybe a minute has gone by. Gah. Not to say that these stories are without appeal. Every subject Chiang takes on, from time travel to raising AI animals, is delineated with care, fascinates and challenges, which is why I eagerly purchased the book. And every story nags at me for what's missing.

Exhalation, like his earlier collection, which I want to reread partly because now I'm not so sure it's as good as I recall, gathers stories written over the course of more than ten years. Their arrangement is roughly chronological, permitting the reader to track Chiang's development, however minimal, during this period.

The first three stories are first-person reports on a phenomenon. People, when speaking for themselves, employ a certain speech and rhythm, draw on a unique past, make personal references, (often inadvertently) display peculiarity, commit verbal blunders, digress, (knowingly or unknowingly) reveal themselves. With the exception of drawing on a past, and only because of the demands of a plot, Chiang's narrators, individuals belonging to totally different time periods or realities, are the same in possessing none of these basic human qualities. Or, since one isn't technically human, qualities expected of an entity that communicates thoughts and has an internal life. It's the storytellers, not the stories, I have trouble accepting. Who they are is secondary to what they observe, so while the subjects change, the problem of conspicuous absence is exacerbated by repetition. 

Years later comes the novella-length fourth, "The Lifecycle of Software Objects," which switches to third-person and tentatively depicts living, breathing people. It's the story about humans raising AI animals, the evolution of their relationships through the years, and the difficulty of protecting a software entity through technological advances and the vagaries of commerce. The least shocking part of it, and the entire book, is that the principal characters meet at work, at a tech company, and a significant portion of the story takes place there. Of all the stories in the collection, it comes closest to reading as though the events have been lived - ideas are debated among colleagues with their own views, users of a product convincingly discover ways to abuse it. Chiang achieves parity between human and creature, bonds firmly established on both sides, one no more or less alive than the other. The creatures have distinct voices, the rudiments of a background, genuine hopes, fears, and frustrations. The humans have indistinct voices but more background (by default), genuine hopes, fears, and frustrations, along with the thinnest layer of romantic tension to rest the story on.

"The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" is the weakest long story. On the surface, it would seem to be an attempt at a new form, shuttling back-and-forth between two stories, separated by centuries, on different continents, connected by the ways in which the mind is molded. It blends first- and third-person. Chiang maintains the same degree of emptiness in his characters but at a couple of points his fiction breaks down further. One of his strengths is taking an idea and acutely examining its implications before drawing a conclusion, satisfying in its completeness. However, he makes the too convenient choice to have a journalist narrator report on a piece of technology, the augmentation of the mind with a system that allows perfect recall of past events, changing memories from vague (and possibly suspect) fragments to searchable video evidence. Instead of letting the reader get lost in the experience, the narrator affords Chiang the opportunity to just openly speculate on the implications in pages that could be the story writer's notes:

It seemed to me that continuous video of my entire childhood would be full of facts but devoid of feeling, simply because cameras couldn't capture the emotional dimension of events.

And what will the consequences be when people can claim to remember their infancy? I could readily imagine a situation where, if you ask a young person what her earliest memory is, she will simply look baffled; after all, she has video dating back to her birth.

Part of me wanted to stop this, to protect children's ability to see the beginning of their lives filtered through gauze, to keep those origin stories from being replaced by cold, desaturated video. But maybe they will feel just as warmly about their lossless digital memories as I do about my imperfect, organic memories.

It seemed to me that a perfect memory couldn't be a narrative any more than unedited security-cam footage could be a feature film.

For all this, in the end he doesn't even examine the full implications at all, coming to an abrupt conclusion that's untenable, absurd. Of course, people are capable of thinking little and coming to absurd conclusions they'll base their whole lives around. But the narrator is barely a person, so I don't care that he's reached it. What's left is an argument for a radically life-changing, seemingly virtuous decision that's easily dismantled and ridiculed.

The last story of the collection, "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom," is the most successful. Chiang doesn't manage to escape the carefully drawn lines of a plot but nevertheless it's the story that comes closest to achieving balance. Once more, a technological innovation: Computer access to yourself in an alternate timeline. Once more, his exhilarating ability to envision what happens next: for example, people cash in by selling content harvested from alternate timelines. Click to see what your favorite star is up to in another world. Click to see how a popular movie ended in another world. Then, on a smaller scale, there's a chance of profiting off someone's grief, another abuse of technology, and one woman's moral conflict. Unlike the ease with which he imagines humanity's actions on the broad scale, he stumbles imagining the source of an individual's actions. And once more: there's a degree of emptiness. But not so much that it prevents me from caring about what decision his character makes, which is a decision that matters in whatever timeline she belongs to.

There are writers that start with people and are such masters of presenting them authentically that one can take their existence for granted, as if passing them on the street without noticing them. Exhalation ends with Chiang's notes on the origins of his stories. I don't know why he's tasked with doing this when most every other story writer isn't, unless maybe for a career-spanning collection or reissue, but it's welcome and illuminating. Among other things, it confirms that for every story, he doesn't start with a person or a relationship but the abstract idea. I have no doubt that he'll come up with more. And the book, though colorless and bloodless, ends by suggesting that he can potentially correct in the future.

Mrs. Caliban

     Rachel Ingalls has been rediscovered to acclaim for incorporating elements into her books others might consider schlocky, fantastical and melodramatic elements such as those featured in B-movies. (She had a tolerable professional experience with Hollywood.) Reading a short story collection, the one book of hers available in the library system back in California, Times Like These (2005), I found the mode of storytelling at once reminiscent of Shakespeare and The Twilight Zone. Her approach isn't gimmicky, nor is she making a point of blending genres. Instead I sense it comes naturally, a weird product of style and love. My reaction to the collection overall was lukewarm but I was still curious to see what would happen when she applied her approach to a longer form, the short novel or novella. Mrs. Caliban (1982), which the library system here in New Jersey did have, is the book she's chiefly known for, the one I'd originally been seeking out. It's the story of a romance between a housewife and a monsterman. 

The sudden intrusion of this "monsterman," a 6-foot 7-inch humanoid frog creature named Larry, is what gets the plot rolling. As both torrid love affair and tale of a visitor to our world, however, the novel is predictable and rather dull. There's some human-on-monster sex, in case you were wondering, and if the notion is amusing or hot,  reading the one or two pages in total devoted to it doesn't add anything. Larry, meanwhile, whose people aren't individualized, doesn't have a personality. He likes avocadoes. But when it comes to cereal, he'd sooner eat the box. And that's about it. 

Despite what its reputation may suggest, the title tells us whose book it is. Ingalls's use of ambiguity is what lifts it from being wholly forgettable, creating at least two different stories, depending on whether Larry exists or he's the imaginary lover of Dorothy, childless after one dies accidentally and another is lost in miscarriage, married only in legal terms, quietly stagnating. I have to disagree with readers who describe the book as comic or tragicomic, since I didn't laugh, really, and not because I think Ingalls tries to make me laugh and fails.  One version is tragic. The other isn't so easy to classify.

To escape a life of suffering, to have a chance of starting anew, one option, this other reading says, is to shatter it.

I don't remember "The Metamorphosis" merely for its premise. I remember the apple lodged in Gregor Samsa's bug flesh. And to remember it is to feel it. I remember Ingalls's fantasy but I don't feel it.

Slice of Cheese

     Lying in bed, in the dark. Staring and gesturing at the ceiling:

There are people who risk serious injury - and their very lives - to save lives. 

There are people who risk serious injury because they get paid millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars to do so. 

Then there are people who risk serious injury to obtain a packet of colby jack cheese.

Early morning memory of the time I witnessed a manager of a grocery store balance on one foot on the handle of a step ladder to reach a product.

Rather than take the time to get the proper equipment to do the job, he appeared not to think twice about saving whole minutes with his dangerous workaround. The person he was assisting didn't bat an eye. Neither noticed the look on my face. And the fans in the refrigerator must have concealed my mutterings: What are you doing? What am I looking at right now? What is wrong with you? There's something I am never doing at this job, etc, but with more cursing. One little slip as he's taking his time to cut through plastic wrap and open a box, a momentary shift in his body weight, and he hits concrete, breaks his foot, breaks his leg, snaps his neck. For cheese.

I baffle him. Bereft of an explanation for me, he settles for: People sometimes. That's the way it goes. There are some real crazies out there. It is what it is. It's not what it's not. It wasn't what it wasn't and it's not going to be what it's not going to be. He sees the look on my face as he walks by and thinks: I hate him. 

Cheese.

That recording playing throughout the day is a lie. He couldn't care less about anyone's health or safety. See how much the authority figure cares about his own. I mean, cheese.

And with that, I leap carefully out of bed, air guitar, and start the day.