Tag Archives: philosophy

Peach Pie

peach pie12

In the 1960’s back in Iowa, family reunions started happening around this time of year.  We would make long treks to distant parts like Spencer, Iowa or Coralville, Iowa to meet with cousins by the dozens, with Great Aunts and their great families… people we looked somewhat like and were actually related to, but usually didn’t see more than twice in any given year.  And there were some who lived in far off Cleveland, Ohio that you only saw twice in the entire decade.  And it isn’t real easy to play with the kids you are related to but don’t see every day.  Squabbles happen more often than not.  What was the solution to that kind of warfare?  According to Great Aunt Marie, the solution was a nice piece of peach pie.  The offending cousin and I would each get a slice of the solution to eat side by side.  Aunt Marie always had peach pie for family gatherings.  She learned to make them exquisitely when they lived in Texas in the 1940’s.

Now that I live in Texas myself, and the governor of Texas, the heir to Emperor Rick Perry, the estimable Republican Prince Gregg Abbott, has declared that we can’t risk letting Syrian refugees into our State because, out of the thousands seeking refuge from violence and murder, one or two might be terrorists, I am reminded of the way Aunt Marie taught peace with a piece of peach pie.  The alliteration was glorious, and the sweetness lingered long after you had eaten your share.  Why can’t we offer the Syrians a little peach pie?

The Syrians (actually less than one percent of them, ISIS is not a majority of Syrians or Muslims either one) hate Texans for the same reason they hate the French in Paris.  We are dropping bombs on their homes.  Texans went out of their way to insult the Prophet Mohammed by hosting a hate cartoon contest and exhibition in Garland, at the event center next door to the high school where I used to teach.  You have to expect squabbles from people you treat like that.  And I am not saying that we don’t need to fear folks like the two terrorists who died in a shootout with Garland police as they tried to attack the insult-the-prophet event with guns.  But those two guys were not from Syria.  They came from Arizona.  By rights, we should have Governor Abbott refusing to allow refugees of any kind from Arizona to enter our State.  Especially since he is a vocal advocate of their right to openly carry firearms even into restaurants.

I want to give a piece of peach pie to each of the little refugee kids with big, brown, terror-filled eyes.  They haunt my dreams.  Their only desire is to escape the people trying to kill them and blowing up their homes.  Peach pie makes it better.  Aunt Marie is in heaven now, but if you could ask her, she’d tell you, “You should teach to each peace with a piece of peach pie.”

 

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Page-Filler Friday

I have had a monumentally horrible week.  And one of the hardest things about it, is that I cannot tell you about most of it and make fun of it for the sake of healing by humor because, after all, real mental health issues are a very private thing.  So, I am left with a mish-mash of free-associations and brainstorming to fill up a page with random and unthinkable thoughts.  (When I brainstorm, sometimes it is more like a brain-hurricane.)

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Under the general heading of; Things a relatively sane older man who is battling hoarding disorder should probably not do is the new collection I started of Sparkling Disney Princesses.  As you can see above, I unfortunately acquired some of the more recent Disney Princesses in sparkle form within the rules for collecting (not costing more than $20 and not spending more than $50 in any one month).  I even added a rule to slow down the collecting mania.  (No buying sparkle princesses of characters I already have in my Disney Princess collection.)  Tiana, Merida, and Elsa add up to only $30 over the last three months.

This is actually Cowboy Mickey in the middle of the bedroom he shares with about 500 dolls and action figures, 1000 books, and the fairy in the foreground who is real.

This is actually Cowboy Mickey in the middle of the bedroom he shares with about 500 dolls and action figures, 1000 books, and the fairy in the foreground who is real.

The thing about the relentless doll collecting is more the space it fills than the money it burns.  A few years back I completed a five year stint of buying, selling, and trading action figures in which I learned how to make the obsessive-compulsive-disorder part of it turn out to be profitable.  I ran a used-toy and collectible E-Bay store that helped me pay for my mental health issue.  Of course, I did not get ahead, as all the profits are tied up in the dolls, action figures, and stuffed toys that I have kept.  Still, I learned how to do the thing effectively enough to believe I can effectively do that again if I need to, in spite of the fact that E-Bay got wise and raised their fees to make a $5 and $10 business far less profitable.

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I should note that I gave up toy-selling on E-Bay after an irate Barbie collector teed off on me in the comments section over a misidentified 80’s Barbie.  (Heck, how was I to know that the date on her neck was a copyright date only and not an indicator that she was sold in the 1970’s?)  Lady Godiva Barbie on the wingless Pegasus from the Goodwill store is a new project I put on the project table.  There is at least a month’s worth of hair-combing necessary and clearly visible in the picture.  Mane and tail alone will take weeks.

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And I am not yet done with the notion of collecting beautiful sunrises.  The recent rains and cloudiness of Texas wild weather have provided some interesting color and variety to the skyline of the park next to our house.  It all helps to keep my mind off of troubling issues that developed from dental pain and attendance woes.  This has been a very rough week, but the sunrises keep coming, and I look forward to a new day.

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The Jesus Logic

Danse 4Here is a syllogism to explain Jesus logic;

  1. Jesus walked on water.
  2. Cucumbers are 80 per cent water.
  3. I can walk on cucumbers.
  4. Therefore I must be 80 per cent Jesus.

Here is another.

  1. Jesus turned water into wine.
  2. I can drink wine and turn it into urine.
  3. Urine is an icky kind of water.
  4. Since I can do the opposite of Jesus, I must be the anti-Christ.

You can draw your own conclusions about the mathematics of believing in religion.  I have no qualms about letting others believe whatever they want to believe about the universe, its purpose, and who made it.  I think it is very pompous and self-serving to think you are qualified, either from science or faith, to say you know the absolute truth about those things and others must accept your logical conclusions.  Here is my own pompous and self-serving opinion.  There is a God. I know this because I talk to Him daily.  He speaks to me through signs and resonances and Bible-reading and feelings.  But, here’s the rub; I have hoarding disorder and diabetic depression and other mental illnesses.  Since I am crazy, you probably shouldn’t believe the voices in my head that I listen to.  But I get comfort from my belief in God.  Christianity teaches that we should love one another.  This, I think, is the most important truth we can possibly accept.  Part of loving others is not condemning them for what they believe and trying to impose my beliefs upon them.  God, to me, is everything that there is.  The universe around me is vast and complicated.  I will never know even a half a grain of sand worth of all the knowledge wrapped up in grains of sand on all the beaches on all the planets in the universe.  But the universe is alive and self-aware because I am alive and self-aware, and I am part of the universe.  And here’s the kicker, my conclusions about life, the universe, and everything make no more sense than the Jesus logic I presented at the outset.  After all, I am provably crazy.

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Puzzle Fizzle

Puzzle Fizzle (a poem about pieces)

When life shatters into a potpourri of pieces,

One must pick up possibilities,

And puzzle them back together… into poetry.

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Yesterday was the bottom of the valley of a hard week.  I have to climb another mountain to get out.  And I can’t afford the psychiatrist I need because the health insurance we have gave us strict guidelines to follow for choosing one, and no one in our area fits their requirements.  My car is showing warning lights again, and I am afraid to take it in.  It runs fine.  But I don’t need that warning light giving any of the local mechanics the idea that they can charge me large fees for car parts and service hours when they might not actually be needed.  Money is running out and I do not have the good enough health required to get even a part time job.  I write a lot.  But my writing career at this point is an expense, not an income.  Many shattered pieces to this puzzle.  But I did finish the putting together of the latest grand Paffooney, the portrait of Mary and the Invisible Captain Dettbarn.

Mary and the Captain

So, how will I put everything back together?  My family depends on me doing so.  The old puzzle piecer must never give up and must always keep puzzling, fitting bizarre piece to jagged hole.  You may have noticed that this post is short of the 500-word goal, but a picture is worth a thousand words, and I have created two original pictures for this post.  And there is poetry pieced together by the penultimate alliteration of the proud letter “P”.

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A Sense of Wonder

Flower val memeI have told you repeatedly (if you are foolish enough to read more of my blog than is probably healthy for normal people) that I am a pessimist.  Like Benjamin Franklin, I believe it is best to always prepare for the worst that can happen and actually expect it.  With current gun laws in this nation, and the way corrupt politicians and businessmen continue to profit off the suffering of the rest of us, and people’s basic selfishness and cruelty to others in word, thought, and deed, we rarely get a glimpse of anything but the worst of human nature.  We are never disappointed when we expect the worst to happen.  And yet, since I am never taken by surprise by bad things, only by unexpected good things, all that is surprising is wonderful and made up of very good things.  Human beings are capable of amazing goodness and works of wonder, not in spite of their many failings, but because of them.  The miracle of life is how the lowly worm turns into a beautiful butterfly.  How the tiny brown seed becomes the brightly colored blossom in a vast field of other flowers.

swallowtail

When I tell others that I believe that people are basically good and that I believe all students can learn, I often get an argument.  Mass shooters like we had last week and wars and terrorists crop up by the multitudes in order to refute my belief.  People who think I am an atheist tell me i’m being a hypocrite to think we should operate our lives around facts and proof and then hold a difficult-to-prove belief like this.  Maybe it is an act of faith… but an act of faith that my theocratic friends call a belief in humanism, which they prefer to see as something from Satan.  Well, I do believe in God.  I just don’t believe in a god who waves a magic wand and intervenes.  I believe that God Jehovah (or possibly Allah or the godhead or whatever you want to name Him) made us like the flower seed, meant to grow and transform, and to be winnowed like grain by the winds and rains of life experience.  Not all flowers blossom.  But more of them do when you water and weed and nurture them.  And what is true for flowers is true for men and women.  What can I say more about human beings to convince you that I am not wrong to be in awe of them… even the weedy ones?  Probably nothing.  If you are not open to such ideas, you haven’t read this far.  But whether you read this far or not, I am fascinated by you, and will always want to know more.  And I am not going to start a new church or something.  I am merely going to continue to watch and to wonder.

Not Alone

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The History of Government as I See It

Raygun RonnyIn the beginning, God made men naked and helpless.  He made women naked and in charge.  And then he tossed an apple to the women and said, “let there be evil and monsters and such.”  So, naked people began to huddle together in caves to get out of the storm.  They began to kill and eat other animals that didn’t eat them.  They began to wear the fur of whatever they killed and ate.  And then because Cain had a you-like-him-better-than-me fit, they began to kill (and hopefully not eat) each other.

So, the need for government came about as a matter of survival.  Cavemen put their thick heads together and decided that some guys were bigger and tougher and got more girls than the rest.  And some guys knew how to use their heads for something more than a place to keep their animal-skin hats.  So, when all the heads were put together, the smartest ones realized that if they made weapons for the big guys to kill other guys with more efficiently, then the big guys could protect all of “us” and kill all of “them” and we would all be safer and live better lives.  Of course, the big strong guys wanted to keep all the better girls and all the stuff they took from others, and they expected everyone they protected to give them more stuff.  Thus, taxes were born.  And when you had to count stuff and plan stuff and figure stuff out (like managing taxes and keeping track of who you need to hit because they haven’t paid) that task went to the scrawny guys with the big heads.  And so, Kings were born.  And queens were mostly the kings’ sisters, because, after all, the big guys still got all the best girls.  And as time went on, we had kings and their big guys and all the other “common” people.  But you couldn’t just kill (and hopefully not eat) all the “common” people, because they were useful too.  You could put them to work so they could pay more taxes and make more stuff for you and it made your life better if you had a lot of them working for you.  But some old king named Louie discovered you had to make the “common” people a little bit happy too because they outnumber you by a lot.  Unfortunately for Louie, he didn’t discover this until they cut his head off… some argument about eating cake or something.  So, some other smart guys with big heads got together and decided to make a new government.  It was really still the old government.  They just had the brilliant idea of re-naming everything and lying to the people.  Now, instead of kings and their big guys who got all the good girls, you had “elected representatives” who were actually the kings of old.  They just figured out how to lie to people and make them believe they worked for the “common man”.  And the big guys were re-named the “Military Industrial Complex”, or maybe it’s the Illuminati.  I’m not sure.  And then there’s a Pope, and possibly some alien beings from Roswell, and… okay, maybe I need to save the rest for the Tinfoil Hat Club when we meet every Wednesday evening and plot how we are going to “wake up, sheeple” and take over the world.  (Dues are fifty cents.  We are meeting again on Sunday because we think the world ends next Tuesday… or something.)

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Weirdie Poetry

Mr. R RabbitThe Man Who Had Bird Knees

I once knew a man…

Who had knees…

That bent backwards, like a bird’s…

And this man…

Could only walk…

Like a limping, lame old duck.

The children all laughed…

And pointed at him…

When he passed them in the park…

And it made him smile…

And laugh to himself…

That his handicap made them happy.

Every single night…

He oiled his weary knees…

And tried to fight the pain…

And every single day…

He used his silly legs…

To do the Chicken Dance for kids.

And then there came a day…

When the bird legs came no more…

To be noticed by kids at the park…

And the parents all learned…

That the poor man had died…

And the whole world brought him flowers.

The next day in Heaven…

St. Peter saw a man…

Whose knees bent backwards like a bird’s…

And all of Heaven laughed…

As he did the Chicken Dance…

While angels clapped in Heaven.

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The thing I find to be most witlessly true about both poetry and life is that things can be funny, and make you laugh, and at the same time make you cry on the inside.  Humor is hard to write because it can be both happy and sad at the same exact moment.  How do you define that quality?  The bitter-sweet nature of nature?  That’s saying it in a way that is both contradictory and odd.  It can give you a wry smile at the same moment it both confounds and confuses you.  So better just to shrug your shoulders and tell yourself you know it when you see it… and this either is or isn’t it.  Sorry if I made you think too hard, cause I know that sometimes thinking hurts.

Mickey at the Wishing Well of Souls

I found a country well, and I thought I had a quarter,

But I fished in pockets hard, and found nothing for the warter,

And since I had to warp a line to make the poem rhyme,

I figured I would just look in, because I had the time.

I looked into the warty water which sat there still and deep,

And could not see the bottom, and I began to weep.

The water was clear and dark and black,

And the only thing I saw… was Mickey looking back.

And nothing of the wishing well, its magic could I see,

For only there just staring back, the secret thing was me.

Kops

I apologize for inflicting poetry on you when you probably came here looking for goofy stuff to laugh at.  But my poetry is just like all my word-mangling and picture-crayoning.  It tends to be goofy and weird and walking a tightrope over a shark tank between chuckle-inducing and tear-jerking.  You probably can’t even tell which is the poetry and which are the burbled brain-farts of commentary that pad this thing out to five hundred words.  Four hundred and ninety six, actually.

mANDY

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Matters of Religion

old mad gods

People around this country are busy expressing their religion.  They refuse to do their government clerical jobs and deny people marriage licenses.  They do it because of their beliefs.  They picket military funerals with signs about “God hates fags” (though I don’t see why the creator dislikes English cigarettes so much) because of their beliefs.  They refuse to bake wedding cakes because Christian fundamentalism has somehow become about who gets to eat your cooking.  They condemn parts of the Middle East and pray for war because there is religious head-chopping going on, and certain countries are not promising to give up their nuclear daydreams sincerely enough.  Expressing religious beliefs seems to be mostly about condemning stuff.  And, admittedly, some of it is bad stuff… like the head-chopping.  But is that what religion is for?

The Paffooney I am using today is called “One Day the Old Mad Gods Will Be Made Whole Again” which is a nutcake picture created during my grad student years in response to the basic undercurrent of fear that underlies most of Christianity.  I think I may have written it wrong, though.  It used to be about “fear”, and today it has become about “FEAR!”

angel by Adolphe-William Bouguereau (1825-1905)

angel by Adolphe-William Bouguereau (1825-1905)

People turn to religion primarily because they fear death.  Christianity promises an ever-lasting immortal life, either in Heaven (Which I have my doubts you will ever find on a map) or (as the Jehovah’s Witnesses in my family believe) on a Paradise Earth.  To never die you are expected to follow a secret formula, or somehow cast a magic spell that will guarantee that even if you are killed, you will never die.  If you knock on enough doors to share the “Good News of Christ’s ransom sacrifice” you will be resurrected to everlasting life.  If you “Love what is good and hate what is bad”, you will claim a spot in Heaven.  But you can’t earn this undeserved kindness.  God gave his only son to die on the cross so that everyone else might live.  …But not sinners.  Not people who do not get the formula right… or do not express the right views… or say the wrong thing.  What the… Heck?

It is not a logical construct.  Elders among the Jehovah’s Witnesses explain to me that is all about belief.  You have to express belief through action.  And where belief conflicts with science or logic, you must prefer belief.

So, the man puts his hand down in an old aquarium full of rattlesnakes, and God is supposed to protect him.  But if the man gets bitten and dies, well, he must’ve been a sinner or needing to be punished.  Hellfire for all eternity… you can’t beat fundamental Christianity on the matter of punishment for sins.

If you have gotten this far through my essay without throwing up your hands and consigning my sinful soul to the darkest pit of hell to burn for eternity, then you have probably concluded that I am just another old philosophical atheist spouting semi-logical nonsense about why there is no God.  And you would be dead wrong.  There is a God.  I talk to him daily.  He helped me write this post.  I am a Christian existentialist.  I believe there is a God, and he can be found in the Bible at First John 4:8.  “He that does not love has not come to know God, because God is love.”  I don’t believe in everlasting life.  I believe I am a part of the whole.  I believe in love, because loving my fellow man is part of loving myself.  I would willingly lay down my life to save another, out of love, because that other person and I are one.  And when they bury me to become worm food and fertilizer, I won’t be feeling the pain and confusion and fear anymore, but I will still be part of the whole.  And the whole is God.

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Lying as a Form of Social Responsibility

Mark Twain had a lot to say about lying.  Like in this quote from Following the Equator ; Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar; “There are 869 different forms of lying, but only one of them has been squarely forbidden. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”

Mark Twain

Now, I would have to agree with the Biblical admonition against lying to get the people you dislike thrown into prison or beheaded.  I am especially concerned with some of the false witness pooping out of the mouths of some presidential candidates that would like us to believe their anti-science, anti-climate change, and anti-immigration lies would make good laws for our country.  If they go with Donald Trump’s idea of taking away birthright citizenship from the children of immigrants, then my three children will lose their citizenship and could be deported from the only country they have lived in.  After all, after twenty years of marriage and applications and legal fees and enough frustration to make her give up on the whole idea, my wife is still not an American citizen.  She is from the Philippines, and Filipinos are one of the main groups that politicians site as reason for taking automatic citizenship away from foreign-born marriage mates back in the 1980’s.  And if we truly believe that climate change is a hoax and disproven by having Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe bring a snowball into the senate chamber, I believe we are all going to fry in Venus-like atmospheric conditions (Venus is 400 degrees Centigrade on the surface due to rampant greenhouse gasses like those emitted by the factories of Senator Inhofe’s primary campaign donors).  Some lies have fatal consequences, (and also, apparently, got Senator Inhofe the chairmanship of the Senate Science Committee).

But not all lies are bad lies.  Twain also says; “In all lies there is wheat among the chaff…”
– A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

And; “The lie, as a virtue, a principle, is eternal; the lie, as a recreation, a solace, a refuge in time of need, the fourth Grace, the tenth Muse, man’s best and surest friend is immortal.”
– “On the Decay of the Art of Lying”

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So I have actually started to think that the lies not forbidden by the Bible because of their fatal consequences are actually all good things, and not bad.  Yesterday in a post about talking to stupid people, I suggested that you should tell them lies about how you care about them and want the best for them, and you should lie about it so hard that you believe in the lies yourself.  After all, story-tellers like me tell nothing but lies.  My made-up stories are based on real events and people, and reveal real perceived truths about life, but they are basically nothing but lies.  This essay is a lie.  I was brought up in Iowa to be truthful and always tell the truth… and that was repeatedly reinforced by religious training from every church I ever attended.  And yet, the more I tried to tell the truth, the more I realized that I could never say anything that was not a lie.  Think about it, what is there in all the factual things that you know that you can actually prove is true?  “I think, therefore I am,” (a quote from Rene Descartes) is the only thing anyone has ever said that I can prove by my own perceptions.  Every scientific theory is constantly reviewed for lies and untruth and inaccuracy so that they can be revised for something better that is also not ultimately provably true in every detail.  It is entirely possible that everything else truly is a lie, and then the whole universe, science, physics, logic, and everything is basically untrue.

So, what do I do?   Anything I say is a lie.  Some of the lies are hurtful, even deadly.  So I have to be careful about those lies.  I should fight against those lies.  But the lies that make our existence in life meaningful and full of hope and mystery…  I have to let those lies live, and even learn to do them artfully.

“One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.”
– Pudd’nhead Wilson by Mark Twain.

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How to Reason With Stupid People

Okay, I know… I keep promising that I will never resort to insult humor, and then I go and write mean-spirited stuff about Donald Trump and other Republicans.   But I need to point out that as a middle school English teacher for 24 of my 31 teaching years, I had to talk to a lot of stupid.  And I am not being mean when I say that.  Unformed, immature minds are full of misinformation and wrong-way pig-headedness.  Those are both synonyms of “stupid”, aren’t they?  And I have the further disadvantage of being a freakishly high level of smart.  I have a lot of experience dealing with stupid.

HarkerAnd it often begins with, “Well, I know you are very, very smart, but I have common sense!”  That’s how the argument started this morning with my beloved wife.  When we are wrestling with financial and health and family problems, we always start with the assumption that I am completely wrong and headed for disaster.  An acceptable compromise is when the two of us talk it out for an hour, with me listening and agreeing and her laying on me a thick layer of sometimes-aromatic common-sense solutions.  We reach a compromise, by which we mean I accept that she is right and I am wrong.  And then we talk about the yes-buts.  “Yes, but have you thought about the consequences of that expense when it comes to the APR on your credit cards?”   “Yes, but if you talk to your boss that way, would she consider firing you?”  “Yes, but if you give that prized possession to our son as a gift of love, will he be resentful if you take it away again as a punishment for a minor error?”  Sometimes the common sense people have to be gently reminded that their simple solution might need to be looked at from the back side as well.  (Don’t get me wrong.  I am not calling my wife “stupid” here.  She is not.  And I am not looking to make a fatal mistake in my blog.)

witch of creek valley

It helps when talking and reasoning with stupid people that they know you really love and respect them.  When I have to talk politics with my more Republican relatives, well, I have to be very reasonable and polite.  Some of them are clinging to toxic candidates that, if they elect them, are going to do the exact opposite of what is good for people in their socio-economic group.  Ted Cruz and Donald Trump are intentionally playing on the fears and prejudices of people that are thinking with their “lizard brain” instead of their higher-level thinking functions.  It helps them to see that you care enough to explain things like “socialism” and “labor unions” and “taxes” in simple terms that help them to grasp that there is a good side to those things as well as a bad.

Cool School Blue

A large part of the lives of stupid people is the pain and uncertainty that being a part of humanity brings to them.  So many of them have no idea of the value of what they do and who they are.  They are so caught up in the pain of being themselves that they never realize how much the world around them appreciates and loves them.  They don’t understand that being stupid is the common condition of mankind, and just because they are not as smart as God himself, it doesn’t make them bad.  Sometimes the only way to talk to stupid people is to stop thinking of them as stupid, and reassure them that you love them and you will do everything you can to help them.  If you say it and mean it, they will not be stupid people any more.

“And that is all I have to say about that…”  -Forrest Gump

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