i'm tired of leaving and leaving (i can't come back no more).
on the disgusting nature of desire, "california music" and summertime sadness during brat summer.
So, let’s do this to start. I’m sure many of you reading this follow me on at least one social platform, so you have at least a vague sense of why I haven’t sent you a newsletter in a while. I’m not the most important person involved in the situation, so I’m not going to write about what happened.
I’m only bringing it up to say two things: first, I am very proud of the essay I wrote about Hole’s Live Through This in April, but I had to unpublish it from this site for my own peace of mind. Thank you to everyone who had kind things to say about it. You did not say them in vain. For a few reasons, I don’t feel comfortable putting it back up anytime soon. I hope you understand.
Second, I had so much I wanted to write in May and June about shows I’ve seen and new music I’ve heard and venues I’ve been to — and I mentally and physically couldn’t do it, and I hope you’ll forgive me for that, because I truly did want to share it with you. I kind of had to come to grips with maybe not being creative for a while as I focused on getting some of my life back in order. I have no idea what a “real writer” is, but it’s been awful not being able to do the thing I get the most pleasure out of — especially as I realize I’m probably not going to land major writing opportunities outside of the publications I already work with anytime soon and it becomes a thing where I need to express myself for the sake of it.
With all that said, forgive me if I’m a little rusty. I missed blabbering at you all.
The first person who showed any physical interest in me is now married to someone with a Bible verse in their Instagram bio. Looking back, I was like their walk on the (relative) loony bin’s side before settling on someone manageable, as my hormone-fueled intensity was then in full swing. As you’ll remember from past editions of the newsletter, this was immediately after my only real, “official” boyfriend I’ve ever had (as of the time of writing) broke up with me over text with a lengthy airing of grievances that his best girl friend clearly wrote for him. This message ended with the threat that he would tell my mom if I didn’t leave him alone. I just hung out with that very guy a little over a year ago — it was a close mutual friend’s birthday, and we went out to dinner and went bar hopping at all my East Village dive spots. I’m thrilled to report that we really had fun. I haven’t talked to this other person who came after him in…maybe a decade. Given the occasionally semi-sordid activities I’m documenting on Instagram stories, I doubt his God-loving significant other would approve of me anyway.
Around the same time I began to drift from this second person, I was selecting high school elective classes — one of which was simply entitled “Fashion” and was basically home economics without the cooking and with a whole lot more fabric pattern-cutting. This class — as you might imagine, unfortunately — was all girls, and we spent 95% of our time in class talking about Lana Del Rey. This was post-Born to Die and Paradise, which is a fascinating time to reminisce on now in the story of her career, just because we had no idea what would be coming next. One girl in my class was what I would call proto-Red-Scare disciple (minus the racism and anti-feminism) — you know, would pronounce Nabokov with the accent, told us about her older boyfriend who I still can’t swear actually existed, unfollowed me on everything literally the day she graduated. I remember the devastation in her voice when I asked her what she thought about Ultraviolence once it came out. She was beyond disappointed with it and said she’d bring her vinyl into school to give it to me — an offer I’m still waiting for her to deliver on, wherever she is now.
I’ve written before about how I distinctly remember “West Coast” coming out as Ultraviolence’s first single — about listening to “Shades of Cool” through my shitty iPhone speaker as I rode on my bike around a faceless Jersey street with filthy fingers. I can picture my pudgy little face buried in the grass behind my parents’ house and walking on the highway to get to the nearest coffee shop, all with the backdrop of this person now married to God (through an in-law situation, I guess) and I being on completely different personal relationship pages.
I think I — perhaps cruelly — just wanted someone to pay attention to me. It’s not like I knew anyone I was really attracted to. I think the only urge I knew was to make sure I had control of the situation, to make sure I took up the proverbial frame in its entirety. Where else am I going to have the freedom to do that? When else? Certainly not now, a decade later, as I initially decide I want to be one-of-one in people’s lives but occasionally come to the conclusion that being “too much myself” hurts my chances in this regard.
I think I’m saying all of this to express that I, in no way shape or form, related to Lana Del Rey. I certainly did not drink yet, did not smoke. I cried in bed over the enormity of life every night and — despite not quite believing in god anymore — prayed that things would not feel so immense every waking second of every single day. Sometimes I ashamedly prayed for a boy’s attention, though not a single person expressed any romantic interest in me through high school’s duration. I’m not sure I particularly wanted to have anything in common with Lana Del Rey either. I remember reading that “I’m not a feminist” quote and balking, just as so many others did. I can still sing every single word of Born to Die to you, but even then, I regarded something like “National Anthem” as a guilty pleasure. Pure fantasy. Words you valley-girl rap along to as you feel ugly and sound ugly and your internal world crumbles around you. You desire as no one desires you back as you scream along to a woman begging to be desired. That’s just how it goes. Let’s not make a whole thing about it.
But I will make a whole thing about it, and here’s the thing in question: I think it is undoubtedly a positive step that we’re speaking about Lana Del Rey in critical circles in a way that takes her more seriously now.
And let’s be real, Norman Fucking Rockwell! marked a turning point on that front, signaling the moment she both taps into the broader zeitgeist to some extent while also leaning into the best instincts of her most personal writing — to be fair, Lust For Life, the album which preceded it, had moments that hinted at this but still felt largely underbaked — giving her the in-real-time glowing reviews from the same critics who had written her off to begin with. As the demographic who were fully invested from the jump, I think it’s totally correct for people who were like me — discovering her in real time as a young woman, able to clearly understand how she’s influenced most of the pop stars who’ve come after her — to drive the reflective narrative now that we’ve hit the decade mark on all of her earlier material.
However, I feel we’ve approached a tricky spot when it comes to acknowledging Lana’s talent, influence, and autonomy, while also critiquing her in a meaningful way that still takes her and her art seriously. It seems like a lot of people fail to acknowledge what makes Lana Del Rey, Public Figure, interesting in the first place: how unlike any other current celebrity she is. For example, when she went on her famous “Question for the culture” rant (right at the peak of the BLM protests, mind you) she was right when she said the public and critical scrutiny she was under was unfair — she just exhibited this clear lack of self-awareness with everything else about that “statement,” throwing nearly all Black female pop stars under the bus and comparing something she did once in a video to something FKA Twigs has trained for years at in order to continuously incorporate it into her art. There have been several of these moments (remember her hating Trump but also having the cop boyfriend from the reality show?), and I’m not suggesting to you now that tone deafness is the reason we should be tossing her aside OR that we should lap something like that up. I just bring it up now to say that no other pop star would ever be allowed to send something like that without a team shutting it down, first of all.
She’s grown much more confident in interviews over the past few years and is, at times, disarmingly funny (I still think about this video of her asking a girl with a scar on her arm if she’s been “chopping it up” often), and it’s clear she’s still had next to no media training. It is so entirely the antithesis of what celebrity culture is like now. If anything, I think her mostly-harmless messiness is what makes her one of the most interesting public figures we have. It just seems like no one wants to really examine that as an extension of how her art functions as well.
Now, musically, there really is no one like Lana. No one’s arguing this. Every major pop artist over the past ten years has tried for at least one track, but she has crafted something so singular that has also evolved over time. Can you imagine her making something as strange and multi-layered as “A&W” in the Born to Die days? I’d say no, but they both still sound like her. Without a great deal of major chart success over her decade-plus career, she has the type of rabid fanbase that sustains whatever artistic whim she feels she has, existing in contradictions — I love “A&W” and but don’t find myself returning to the trad-wife-longing tracks of the same album as often — that make her interesting to listen for. She’s had career highs and lows that make you want to root for her, but once you buy into what she’s selling you, she will pretty much always deliver a product that is at least solid and never egregiously unlistenable.
To maybe broach some of what I perceive as her weak points as a writer, I actually think they’re what makes her fairly accessible: she gestures vaguely at the past without ever fully immersing herself in photorealistic references or sounds pulled from then, so it still always sounds like her. For the generation obsessed with “vintage aesthetics” (followed by a heart eyes emoji) without actually becoming passionate about or familiar with where the visual aspect derives from, she’s the full package, no need to investigate further. That drives a music history obsessive like me bananas, but totally serves her big picture. Her lyrics are largely clusters of clichés anyway, but it’s when she delivers a line that no one else could get away with (like, “If you want some basic bitch, go to the Beverly Center and find her,” in the middle of the iffy I’m-not-like-other-girls ballad “Sweet,” for instance) that I get excited about her again. I remember why I stuck my neck out for her all those times.
It struck me, falling asleep one night closer to the anniversary, that Lana Del Rey pre-NFR largely plays a 14-year-old girl’s idea of what an adult woman is. She’s admitted in more recent interviews that she was upset by people’s early perception that she was playing “the idea of somebody who was feigning vulnerability,” suggesting instead that she was indeed truly vulnerable and like that, which I can respect her admitting to — and which is why I wouldn't think she’d have a problem with me positing this theory now. My first thought while trying to explain it was “This character or person has never even given a thought to taxes.” She gets thrown around and done wrong by an older man (potentially a criminal, it depends on the song), and that is her whole identity. She exists and ends with the illusion of being cared for.
When you’re getting an inkling of your own desires for the first time as teenage years arrive, sometimes that's all you can hyper-focus on: this world of passivity where it might revolve around this person who (at that moment) is unknowable to you, placing you in the orbit of someone you might not have registered as a sexual or romantic interest until now. She picks broad caricatures or men who — let’s be honest — if you met them in real life, you would think was a loser, and shoves herself in their shadow — painting herself in this world where she emerges the center regardless. I think to suggest it’s subversive or radical or “secretly feminist” would be false, but it’s interesting to pick apart from a textual point of view.
I can’t say I’ve felt that kind of passivity often, as we’ve established. I’ve certainly craved the understanding or the acceptance that comes with a relationship, but I usually fight for control in most situations instead, which has done me no favors. Maybe it was just that one summer of 2014 where the heat and the hormonal confusion just fed into the lethargy I felt listening to the Lana slow burn — alone, feeling the weight of my own boredom and tearfulness crushing me daily.
I find Ultraviolence interesting because it feels like the most coherent, stylized version of this Lana — it lives in a monochromatic wash coloring the late-night chanteuse at the bar, singing through the smoke, dead-eyed and motionless. It’s an orchestrated apocalypse where the fate of the world rests on the unrequited, abusive love this voice so covets. It’s part character study, part doubling down on what everyone hated about her. For all the drama and violence it describes, there’s still something almost chaste or muted about it, as there’s never a real threat of danger — except for maybe the title track, which references “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)” in a way that works perfectly in her milieu of that time. Without wishing to infantilize adult victims of abuse, it makes sense that this is something young girls socialized in this specific online age would romanticize or value — an asshole who hits you calling you corny names being the supposed love of your life, simply so that you have the bragging rights of saying anyone “loves” you at all. The album sets up this tension of observation vs. intention. How much of this is a wink and how much it is Del Rey egging us on in her world of truly teenage desires – where drinking is the most dangerous thing you could do and maybe a night with the Mansons will make Kyle from your AP Calculus class finally pay attention to you?
In my universe, we never acknowledge the Black Keys by their names — only by “the Ultraviolence one” and “the one who cheated on Michelle Branch,” the latter of whom did not work on this album. Supposedly, the former was brought in after Del Rey thought the album was already finished, going on to rework all the tracks over a six-week period. This is one of the instances where I think their whitewashed blues fixation actually pays off in spades, dousing her indisputably beautiful voice with all the xanned-out waves of psychedelia that elevate the material. I would argue that the first six tracks on this album are maybe still my favorite Lana track run — at least in the sonic sense. I think it also marks Del Rey’s best use of her voice as instrument: the way “Shades of Cool” seethes with contempt on. “When he calls, he calls for me and not for you,” letting her voice fold into disgruntled Long Island housewife flown out to see her also-married boyfriend in a Malibu beach chalet, mascara running and body crumbled on the floor as her voice soars into that gorgeous chorus. There’s that vocal strain in the pre-chorus of “Cruel World,” a song largely composed of drugs/bible/guns/”crazy” girl Mad Libs lyrically, that makes you feel as if she’s truly slogging her way to the most violent of deaths, raising what you would otherwise assume to be low suburbanite stakes.
Again, are the lyrics to “Sad Girl” good? I’d say no! Yet, I’ll never get tired of just the melody — the “you haven’t seeeen my man (my! man!)” pre-chorus, the stunning lift that comes on the bridge that audibly sparkles, matched up with one of the few moments of defiance: “Watch what you say to me, careful who you're talking to.” The music would sell itself on its own if she were simply scatting throughout, but of course, the bizarre turns of phrase — often hopelessly dated to their specific time and place (think “the culture is lit and I had a ball” from “The Greatest” in 2019) while yearning for a “better” time in the distant past — are also something Lana Del Rey has nailed down so specifically that it’s pretty much her market to corner.
I’m thinking of “Fucked My Way Up to the Top” — which, at the time, was rumored to be about Lorde. That’s kind of insane to think about now, no? Considering Lorde was a teenager whose music could barely be compared to Lana’s, aside from the way they both sidestepped the contemporary sound of the mainstream, no? Still, anyone else singing “I’m a dragon, you’re a whore / Don’t even know what you’re good for,” would be absurd, but feels undeniable when it comes from Del Rey. Her only assertion that “this is [her] show,” where she exerts her dominance, comes when she talks about wielding her sexuality, but these moments are refreshing nonetheless. In a fitting turn for this particular summer in 2024, the moments where she gets bratty are when she wins me back with least resistance. Even if she’s mocking you in a childish, sing-song-y voice, it’s moment she upsets the teenage dream she’s built. I think she is more tuned into this delicate balance than she lets on.
So now, let’s turn to “Brooklyn Baby,” which is arguably still my personal favorite Lana Del Rey song. “Is this meant to be satire?” is the question everybody asked then, straight out the gate. A decade ago, I think this largely hinged on the old axiom that men will always assume everything women say is serious because they have this deep-seeded, possibly subconscious belief that women can’t be funny, but I ask the question now because this lack of self-awareness has so long been her trademark. I want to give Lana Del Rey credit, because “Brooklyn Baby” is a genuinely funny song, as well as one of the greatest musical statements she’s produced to date. I do believe the sardonic tone is an intentional choice, as it so perfectly skewers her perceived self-seriousness dating back to her days playing at Arlene’s Grocery for mid-aughts Williamsburg guys who probably complained about the L ride over in their fedoras, assuming she’s not in on the joke from the jump.
It yearns for some vague time in the distant past (“the freedom land of the 70s”), seems to play up the Marilyn-esque pin-up she’d drawn herself as up to this point (the way her breathy baby voice bends into its “Who? Me?”-delivery on “They judge me like a picture book” is near-sinister) and painfully draw out its hipster bona-fides, wailing about how free its narrator is (“If you don’t get it, then forget it / So I don’t have to fucking explaaaaaaaiiiiin it!!!!!”). All of this pretty much gives away that Lana’s winking at us, even if this is still the period in her career where she performs with a straight face. I think about that moment at the end of the second verse where a dark wash of strings emerge over “You’re up, I’m down / You’re blind, I see” — how serious it feels comparatively, how starkly it hammers the feeling of superiority home — and I get chills.
The rumor now is that Lou Reed was meant to feature on the song and Del Rey flew to New York to meet him and record on the day he passed away (which felt like urban legend in the making, but which very well could’ve been true), and I can’t imagine he would’ve contributed anything vocally except the lower counterpoint to what serves as the song’s semi-punchline anyway (“Yeah, my boyfriend’s pretty cool, but he’s not as cool as me”). Seeing as he’s name-dropped as the ultimate “remember-back-when” alternative New York music figure throughout the song, actually hearing his voice at the end would’ve landed the joke even harder — it feels like people forget how central Lou Reed’s sense of humor was to his own work, even now. It would’ve made perfect sense. Maybe part of why I still covet this song is that it’s a distinct moment where Lana Del Rey successfully takes the piss out of somewhere she knows — we went to the same college, we’ve lived in the same neighborhoods — and dreams lofty, synthetic dreams about the West Coast, which she idealizes and softens her edges for.
Maybe the true onus of Ultraviolence is to officially document Lana Del Rey going west. We’re setting her up for the laborious dirges of Honeymoon and the Laurel Canyon-inspired musings of NFR! by letting the transplant from Upstate New York and a guy from Ohio with a bunch of guitars make their swampy soundtrack to James Dean crashing his car, to the Calabasas movie stars at the shooting range, to a Hollywood wax museum melting in the sun. It’s the sound of childish, pseudo-glamorous desire that cuts away before anything more complicated can happen. It’s the so-called “Queen of New York City” painting aural landscapes of her new home, which begins as a place she’s imagined and, in five years time, will sound like a place she’s actually lived in. Guess I’ll just have to pick the crown up myself and stay here forever. Not sure anyone else is qualified.
When I interviewed Jessica Pratt earlier this year, I asked her a lot about this idea of an imagined California — as her work has often worked as a more lived-in, impressionistic depiction of her home state’s darker side. As I’m the known palest person in the Northern Hemisphere and haven’t been on a plane in at least six years, it probably won’t shock you that I’ve never been to Los Angeles and I’ve only been to California once: on a family trip to San Diego when I was in grade school. All I can remember clearly about it was how consistent the weather was. The rumors are true. Frank O’Hara, maybe the artist after my own heart, was right when he wrote that “there is no snow in Hollywood / there is no rain in California” (except for when Lana Turner collapses, I suppose), and I think there’s a part of my own morbid curiosity about the other, unknown side of the country when I’m curating what I’m listening to during the summer. Summer 2024 has provided me with the delightful mess of Charli’s new Britpop, but I have to keep returning to my seasonal standbys as well. This is where The Gun Club’s Miami comes in.
Born in Southern California to a white father and Mexican mother, Jeffrey Lee Pierce was also no stranger to imitating sounds of decades past — aping the murder ballads of Black bluesmen around the time L.A. punk emerged with its own distinctive personality, emerging as the West Coast representative joining the likes of The Cramps on the East Coast and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds overseas in the birth of “punk blues.” Aside from the fact that their sophomore album is literally titled Miami, there’s always an evocation of a mythical Deep South in his work with his band The Gun Club — the musical history, the tales of the land’s spiritual fabric, the thick mugginess of the swamp that permeates Miami’s saturated, green cover image — that are more about the cultural imagination of what the South might be rather than what it really is to someone from there. (Sound familiar?) Yet, the music itself always sounds arid to me. A dry heat, heaving in the desert. When Pierce sings his cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Run Through the Jungle,” you still picture him climbing over barren, cracked earth. He’s sun-sick and burned, but still sprints when Ultraviolence would languish, like a man possessed. He won’t endure his passion lying down.
Still, all roads lead back to New York — not so much musically, but in Pierce’s deep devotion to Blondie, once the president of their West Coast fan club. According to Pierce’s partner Texacala Jones, he carried a handwritten note from Debbie Harry in his wallet with detailed instructions on how she bleached her hair, which he dutifully followed. All of this leads to Blondie’s Chris Stein (born and raised in Brooklyn) producing Miami, a uniquely Californian album. Maybe authenticity is only produced when cut with dashes of imagined places, half-dead city-specific scenes revitalized to plant them on the other side of the world and see what grows anew.
When I think of a younger version of myself, I think of that intensity — maybe imagining for a spell I could be something passive or easy to love, but idling furious regardless. Everything still makes me angry, but it was so potent and directionless then. Devotion felt like something to either throw yourself into or exorcise, not languish in. I think I made a real effort to not let anything be thrust upon me without me getting a word in — for better or worse. I don’t know if The Gun Club is uniquely teenage music, but Pierce writes everything like it’s cast straight from the dusty Bible he pulls off his shelf in the clip below, preferring the macabre idols of his altar to Jesus’ pleas to abstain.
Instead, we get “Your love never survived the heat of my heart / My violent heart,” as our Lord’s prayer. We get “I’m calling up thunder / Hands to the open sky,” and we believe him. Everything is “The fire of love won't let me sleep / Oh my love, hear this my plea / Because of you, it's burning me,” and that confrontational heat is never extinguished. Not until he is.
Perhaps most notably, he completely rewrites the first two verses to the original “Run Through the Jungle,” in which the figure John Fogerty’s running from is explicitly Satan. Pierce spits on this notion, sprinting straight into his devil’s arms: “And get me out of this water / Before it starts to rise / I've never been no Christian / I don't want to be baptized.” Sounds like burning under a perfect sun in a perfect state, wishing you could run anywhere else.
This month, I’ve moved into my new place and away from a situation I was uncomfortable and couldn’t create in, and it’s already done wonders for me emotionally. I’m currently getting ready for a quick vacation down the shore where I’ll be able to write without worrying about work and recharge with aimless boardwalk strolls and time to read in every dive bar I can find. Now that things are kind of stable — right around the time those Ultraviolence anniversary essays started rolling out — I found myself thinking about that summer a decade ago and how dead everything felt, how antsy and hopeless I was in my teenage enclosure. A feral thing, angry at everything. Maybe that restlessness hasn’t faded as much as I thought.
I think that gnawing desire to be accepted fully hasn’t fully gone away. I have few close friends, and some of them who live here seem to be gradually moving away, at least for a bit, and I’m not sure how I’m going to face that in a few months’ time. The people I want the attention of most desperately — pathetically — don’t seem to have enough to spare, and it’s been long, sweltering months of trying not to lash out, to demand an itemized list of why I’m not worth the time. I think about myself as a teenager wanting everything that didn’t want me back, and I still see the through-line. Brat is probably more aligned with where I am now, energy-wise, but I still chafe at the mention of wanting a family, of wanting to settle — of passivity claiming to unlock this promise of bliss while the world burns. I think about boys on Twitter I’ve never thought about outside of the context of a Last.fm grid dm-ing me that they think I’m hot, and I just think about how their letter would never survive the heat of my burning hand, their love would never survive the heat of a violent heart. I don’t want any of it. I’m a goddamn adult, and now I want to lay on the beach for hours and embrace what I can’t burn. It feels like I’ve reached a stalemate with myself otherwise.
Sometimes, I do think the most popular Gun Club song and Miami’s closing track, “Mother of Earth,” is one of my favorite songs of all time. It feels like it’s descended from an outlaw blues standard, a centuries-old “Gallows Pole” outtake dug up from red dust, coughing and wheezing with just its instrumental intro. It’s easily the most straightforward, melodic of the songs on the album, vaguely gesturing to a love on the road that has to come to an end — something exhausting and primal, dead on a grimy motel floor. Even if I’ve never known dry heat (the only time I’ve been to Austin, I had an allergy attack a half-hour after we landed because my body had no idea what the fuck was going on with the air), I’ve been playing the song on a loop during the hottest summer I can remember ever living through — watching the world burn around us and wishing I could extend my hand further as I sip my happy hour cocktails and breathe in artificially cold air like it’s a luxury I can never part with again.
Every few months, I pick a new unofficial music patron saint — usually it’s the artist that fits the season, whatever’s going on in my life at that moment. When I went on a similar beach trip that I worked through last summer, it was Jarvis Cocker, hands down. Every summer is a Pulp summer, let’s face it. I had no one, but felt like I was in love that whole time, taking pictures of myself on the deck of my uncle’s house and drinking through whole afternoons with my mom — staying in my little cousin’s room and listening to “Babies” for the millionth time, waiting for that final “ohhhhh” before it ends, the one that sounds like your stomach dropping the moment desire smacks you upside the head.
For all I know, I might go right back to that the second I’m standing in sand and getting my hand stamped at a C-tier third-wave ska band’s show at the Stone Pony. For now, I ride the subway and imagine it like it’s my Paris, Texas turnpike, knowing there’s something out of reach that I need to be grabbing onto and not being able to make it out through the fog. Last week, I went to a show on a boat, and though the bands were great, I felt miserable the entire time — still in my work clothes and sweating through them, whining when people opened the pit in the crowd where I was standing, just feeling so overwhelmed and not having anyone there to tell about it. On the subway ride home, I crossed and uncrossed my legs as I listened to Jeffrey Lee Pierce sing, “Their sadness grows like weeds / Upon my thighs and knees,” and imagined myself tied to the ground by the foliage with him, needing nothing and thinking of no one for as long as humanly possible, asking “How dark can an animal be?” and howling like the vines started scratching my calves.
When we talk again, I think I’ll be in a different frame of mind — hopefully refreshed, hopefully feeling less like a sticky-fingered goblin on a Toys ‘R’ Us bike, dodging in and out of abandoned parking lots and not having anyone to tell about the boy in my phone, all the while inventing worlds for myself where I’ve never even heard his name. I’ll think about states I invented in my head and running right into the devil’s arms, scorching your hand when I pull away, and I bet I’ll feel like a new me. I’ll sing like the earth isn’t burning under my feet and come back to my city hopeful, holding onto her so tightly that she crumbles in my hands. What a way to go — in shocking color, melting to my elbows. Sun-sick and burned, not taking anything lying down.
I look forward to reading the book I hope you write someday, my friend.