Another post about my dead friend

I posted this at my Myspace account becasue that was where she blogged and where her blogger friends are:

Sunshine is dead I am going to post this here because this is where she let us all know what was going on in her head.

I've known Sunshine a long time. I of course fell in love with her immediately. She became a sort of anti-hero, a punk goddess, a beautiful raging siren in my soul. She was and is a huge important part of who I am. Now that she has gone away, I feel that she has left me a piece of herself to carry on.

When I first heard that she killed herself from Beth on a Myspace email, I was shocked into insanity. I wept, and I swear to god I thought it was a horrible prank being played on me. My heart was ripped into tiny pieces. They are still floating around my head now, and I look at them in wonder and fear. I don't think I want a complete heart again. I just want to stare vaguely out the window at the stars until my soul evaporates.

When she started this blog thing, I was glad because I could then keep up on the goings on in her patchwork life It was so fucking hard to get a hold of her, what with phone number and address changes. I tried at least once a week to get in touch with her.

Her last couple emails expressed things that will be dear to me for the rest of my life, and I will reflect on her words, her face, and her spirit on my deathbed. She also expressed hope about many things, including relationships, education, and the possibility of having children. She also commented on the fact that she felt like she was becoming way to conventional as a person.

I wish to fucking hell that I could talk to her one last time, been there with her one last time. How could this possibly be that that is impossible now? What is death that it is so final?

Her words on this website really express a lot of things and I believe we should all read and reread them to understand all that she was going through, try to grasp her essential sadness and her tough external shell. We need to realize that with this final and devestating action, she has given us a gift that could possibly be the most important gift we will ever receive in this lifetime, which is the crystal clear knowledge of death, the horrifying reality of this present moment, and the importance of living life fully while we can.

With her passing I look around at old friends and new, relatives and grocery store clerks, pretty much everyone, with a new and clear vision. These are the people that I share my time in this world with, these are the people that could be gone tomorrow. So I need to love them today, as a much as I can. And I know I could be gone tomorrow, so I want to give them whatever I can in this short time we walk on this planet.

I am not in charge anymore, I realized. I have many responsibilities.

But then of course there are all those painful thoughts and hazy memories that attack me every few minutes now. What was she going through that night? What was her last thought? Why wasn't I there to help her, to keep her from doing this? Remember that time we walked from Morris halfway to Hancock, remember that time we drank ourselves silly in the middle of the day, remember that time she gave me that crazy haircut? Hanging out at Karls Coffee. Drinking beer over the Flowershop. Walking around Morris.

Fuck it all. It's just impossible to put into words the ridiculous pain of this senseless act. I thought she was tougher, tough enough to handle anything at all. Forever. What an idiot I was. She was a fragile human being, not really a punk goddess. It's so hard to see the true nature of her real pain and fears. I just didn't think she would ever be overwhelmed.

I want to hug her, I want to kiss her, I want to have a smoke down by the water and a beer back by the fire and watch her play with her dogs and smile that smile we all knew and were addicted to. We would do, say, make a funny face, anything for that smile and laughter. It was like a gift from heaven, an ambrosia dripping from the cups of dragons.

And I look around and the world keeps on going, making computers, bombing Lebanon, eating sandwiches, and I want to scream out, "What is the point of all this?" A week has turned into a lifetime. A day has reversed the flow of time.

Choices, my friends, they are all important.

Namaste, Sunshine. I love you. Goodbye.

Sunrise

I woke up a little before 5 in the morning today. I went to the top of the barn and watched the sun rise. Constant change, ephemeral beauty. The cold coffee helped me become conscious again.

Yesterday I fished for the first time in more then a decade. I didn't catch anything.

The day before that I went to my friend's funeral. The pastor said something about Christ's blood shed on the cross as a symbol of peace, and I wanted to strangle him, but I laughed out loud instead. I suppose you could say my friend died for your sins. I suppose everyone dies for someone's sins. Why make the club exclusive is all I'm trying to say.

It's all going to change. That's what I've realized. I'm leaving it all behind. I'm going to start something new, something good. I'm going to grow vegetables. I'm going to make music. I'm going to create community. Life is not as long, nor is it as permanent as I imagined. There is no time to wait for tomorrow to come, there is no time to wait for joy to be given to you in a gift-wrapped box. There is nothing but now. There is nothing but you and me, alive right now.

If I can take advantage of some available resources I should. If I can stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before me I should. All I have is energy. All we have are the reflections of the jewels of this reality.

Right now I hear the loon call. I am reminded that the only thing that is permanent is impermanance.

I'm going to go make breakfast.

Death

One of my oldest and dearest friends killed herself on Sunday.

I found out yesterday. It seemed like some horrible cruel joke. But it is true, and her funeral is on Friday.

She lived in Smalltown, USA and lived a smalltown life, with all the drinking, gossip, and bullshit that entails. She never went to college, but one of the last things I heard from her was that she was planning on taking a course in carpentry at a community college in a nearby town. I was glad for her. I knew she could succeed if she truly wished to. Sometimes I wondered if anybody else ever encouraged her to succeed, to enjoy life. Somehow I doubt it.

She loved her pets more then she loved people, I think. She was always picking up strays, and babying them. I think she did that with people, too. I think she felt like a stray cat gone feral.

Her family is poor and troubled. Her younger brother committed suicide a few years ago. Her father tried to commit suicide while in jail, suceeding in permanently damaging himself for life. I knew she felt alone, abandoned by her family and older friends. I feel like I abandoned her, but I don't know what I could have done differently. She lived with us in Minneapolis for a few months, but she didn't really fit in, it seemed to me she was overwhelmed by the sheer complexity of big city life, but I am sure she would haev gotten used to it and maybe benefited from it. As it was, she moved back to Smalltown, USA, for I don't know what reason. Maybe to be with her then boyfriend.

Last time we exchanged emails, she had a new boyfriend, and was actually considering having children. Knowing her, you would realize this was a new and important development in her life. Her boyfriend sounded like a steady type of person, who had owned a house before and had a good blue collar job. I guess he wasn't enough to keep her from despair.

I can't understand it very well. Death is somewhat new to me. My grandmother died, and so did my girlfriend's, as well as all my pets in various horrific ways. But this is new. I grew up with this person, I remember her early sadness and despair. It must have evolved into a very serious and complex cage in which, finally, she just could not extricate herself from. I wish I could have at least talked to her one last time.

Her last message to me was on my answering service. It was a Friday and we were far from Minneapolis, and she was trying to call late at night, drunkenly. She said something like "I called, I try calling you all the time, but you never answer, you fucker." I tried calling her all the time, but she never answered.

I still love her. I don't think it matters that her body is dead, her spirit will be with me as long as I live, and my spirit will be with someone else as long as they live, and in that way we can keep each other alive, afloat in this sometimes sad world.

The world, this reality, is nothing but constant changes, and sorrow is merely a reaction to these sometimes abrupt and suprising changes. Love is the glue that binds us together and when we are ripped apart it hurts like hell.

I am going to miss you, Sunshine.

Winnipeg Folk Festival 2006, overview

Oh, the Folk Festival. It came and went again, in it's inevitable infinite and supersonic way.

This is my 5th one I think. Every year it is different, every year it opens up my mind to something new, and renews my commitment to dedicating my life to this amzing stuff we call music. Music is water for our souls.

We took our time going up, and camped at Grand Beach, Rushing River, and Someplace Else. We saw ancient petroforms, supposedly where the first Ojibweh peoples came down from heaven unto this earth. We saw endless rocky lakes, and picked fresh blueberries from misquito besotted woods. Our car was loyal and it continued until the very end.

Is there anything better then a beach? Is it because the beach is where our minds began to form, the meeting of water and earth?

We got to Bird's Hill on Wednesday, and all the good campsites by the trees were already taken. there is only the Festival Campground of course. We set up our ancent screen tent, the decrepit two room tent, and our two new dome tents, in preparation our five family members who where to arrive on Thursday night.

And beer was drunk.

It was so hot the whole time, we didn't want any food except for the Festival Food. Between all seven of us we probably ate 20 meals at The Good Indian Place. Yum.

The tents blew down once, but with so many people we got them up again relatively easily.

The highlights musically, in order of importance:

1. Hawksley Workman
This man has inspired me to find my true voice. He has inspired me to tell you my true thoughts. He has reassured me that people appreciate emotion, humor, thought, and sexiness. He is a revelation, and I am eagerly awaiting a call from the Electric Fetus so I can get my album.

2. Chad Vangaalen
This man also made me happy with his quirky freeness. He had the best made-up song about bugs, and I will try to get back to you with the lyrics. I bought his album, and it is good, but not as good as he was live.

3. K'naan
He is the best rapper I have ever heard. The dancing was fun, but the real treat was when we listened to his album on the way home and realized it was the best album ever. Get it, now.

4. Vishwa Mohan Bhatt and Salil Bhatt
Wonderful wonderful wonderful Indian music played on modified Hawaiian guitars.

5. Taqaq
The best inuit throat singing I have ever heard, with an awesome DJ that had me dancing like a fool in the beer tent. So happy, so sexy.

6. Mihirangi
She was an awesome looper with an incredible voice. the workshop she had with Taqaq was by far the best one at the Fest and I will never forget it. It was full of this incredible womanly energy, a fierce joy, and creative freedom.

7. Greg Macpherson
He sounded great.

8. That 1 Guy
How can you beat a guy who plays a giant instrument he made out of pipes and has smoke coming out of it at the end of the set? You can't, unless you're any of the above performers.

Son Volt, Afrodizz, and a number of the other Singer/Songwriters were awesome. I heard Crooked Still and Oh Susanna were good. The workshop with Vangaalen, Sparhaw (Low), Hawksley, Macpherson, and Vic Chestnutt was wonderful. There was just so much good things happening, musically, culinarily, and spiritually, it's hard to note all of them.

The weren't many highlights at the campground this year except for the glowing dragon.

The ride back was long. The border crossing took a long time, and finally the guard just asked me if I play the drum and I say not very well and we got through quickly. The life that had luster now lacks in love. The things everyone does constantly are stupid. I hate the way they look at me when I walk down the street. TV is the worst thing in the whole wide world. It is too easy to turn into a psycopath. It is too easy to get fat and order pizza. Fuck all this horrid DEATH that just parades around like it's nothing. Stop doing what you're doing and do something else.

So here I am. If you were at the Folk Fest and would like to chat about it, please do so with me. Leave a message. Awesome.

Potential

I understand that the most important thing to do right now, the most important work we can do as human beings is to to envision, create, construct, and harmonize our realities in accordance with the principles of permaculture and sustainability. That to me is our primary task; there is an intense need for our society to reconfigure, to rearrange this unusable mass of impotence, this garbage heap of useless infrastructure destined to fall fallow in the low tides of the inevitable onrushing lack of energy. The oil will run out, the coal will run out, the slate will run out, the gas will run out, it will all run out. All the alternatives rely on some form of natural capital, and without the concentrated efforts of all nations to create solutions immediately, now, there will be no salvation. We will all die or exist in servitude, except those who have control of everything.

Bleak? Yes. Hopeless? No.

When one realizes that there is no salvation, one becomes supremely free. When one realizes that, in the end, every one and every thing will turn to dust, to particles of sun and surf, to a whisper in the Milky Way, and ultimately to nothing, then one understands that the struggles we undertake to free ourselves and others are relatively meaningless in a cosmic sense, but so extremely important in personal sense as to be almost all-consuming. There is nothing more important then self-realization, to come to some semblance of wisdom, to comprehend enlightenment, because each thing is a universe unto itself, and each universe is a fragmented self, struggling in the infinite confines of time to be whole, to be free.

When one understands these truths inherently, with no need for fragile reasoning, one develops compassion for those who can't or won't or don't understand, or even those who don't feel the need to understand, to come to wisdom, to comprehend enlightenment. One realizes that the fundamental truth of the world is that it is made of energy, that we are all energy interracting with energy. That this is the primary mode of existence, and energy communicating with energy is the primary work of existence. When we eat or drink we take on energy from other energy. When we sleep we store up energy. When we walk or talk we spend energy. Just little balls of energy. Nothing too complex.

And then we find that the earth, a big ball of energy, is rapidly losing its energy, because we, the human conglomeration of energy, are rapidly taking on its energy to expand our masses, and we're suprised.

It all comes down to energy. Simple Zen physics. "Those not busy being born are busy dying."

All I want to do is find my potential and expand my spirit. All I want to do is exist and decrease my consumption. All I want to do is begin again today and tomorrow, be born again every moment of every day, remember myself every breath that I take. And one day I will become more or less a featureless particle of energy, or many, and I will not remember this day, or maybe I will. Maybe every particle in every chair, sofa, hotdog, or rose remembers every thing its ever been. Maybe I remember being a mushroom and a tree and a river and that's why I am attracted to those things. Energy communicating with energy. Like attracted to like.

I feel that the potential of communciation is essentially limitless and that it is so important to continually work on that aspect of our lives. And not just with other humans, but with plants and animals and objects, as well as ourselves. There is so much to learn from yourself. I mean, I'm a galaxy, for God's sake.

10

I have ten minutes. Ten minutes of my life to kill. Ten minutes before I get up and put my wallet in my pants, go outside and lock the door, get in the car and pick up my SO. Ten minutes in which I continue to live, to breathe, to think, to hear and smell and taste the environment. And so I sit here and write about how I have these ten minutes to use up, to waste, to commit to memory. And I continue thinking about the Folk Festival in Winnipeg and how annoying going across the border is, especially on the way back when we're exhausted and just want to get home. They almost always search our car, probably because we're from the Festival and are deemed Highly Suspicious by those in authority. I think about that and the weekend, and work and what we'll have for dinner and the DVDs we might watch tonight and the heat and then I have four minutes.

Four minutes to exist in, to lick like a lollipop of pure awareness.

I just had a shower and I feel refreshed.

And then it's over. My ten minutes are up. And I'm still not famous.

Mind seeds

I sit here on this dark day after reading that article on Zen and composting and I think of why it is that I am enamored with the natural processes that surround me every day. I wonder at the way the universe collides with itself to create a perfect harmony of enzymatic reactions and rainbows of fungal spores. I wonder how we as humans look at each other and speak our words and communicate somehow. I wonder how coffee can taste so good somedays, yet another example of natural perfection, fermented beans roasted and brewed with crystal pure water. Somedays it shines, somedays it seems so dull.

I think of what I have done this summer and what I will do and where I am going and what I really think I am doing on this earth, in this universe. Am I really here to figure out how to be comfortable or am I here to figure out how to communicate with you, with a crooked cucumber, with a maple tree, or with that otter? Trying to decipher the vibrations between what I perceive as myself and what I perceive as something else. Trying to be a cosmic musician, a wordly artist.

When the day tires me out it is so hard to feel like that matters, that anything so esoteric has any validity. But how does it not? How can we just go blindly through the motions to arrive at somewhere so comfortable only to eventually die? Death is the ultimate teacher to us. It reminds us that nothing we possibly can do has any permanance. That doesn't mean that there is no point to anything, only that the point exist only in the present. Nothing stays the same for long. Nothing has any reality based architecture. We live in dreams and rivers, rainbows of fungal spores and mind seeds sprouting in black earth. And someday we will go to seed and spread ourselves infinitely or become mulch. Either way, it has meaning.

Composting Yourself

This is an awesome article about zen and shit:


Growing Ground

Cultivating compost in the murky depths of a monastery toilet, Steve Krieger learns to break down his raw material, inner and outer.

View the print version of this article in PDF format

IT BEGAN AS A FINE PLAN: replace the primitive outdoor toilets at our rural, monastic-style Zen Center. The head monk at the time was an idealistic German, and he made the final call to install composting toilets. CTs are based on a beautiful principle. It’s a principle with great metaphorical as well as practical value. The way the toilets work is, you crap down a long, narrow chute, and it accumulates in a large, plastic box. Once a week you shovel a bag of wood chips into the box. Eventually heaps of rich, earthy soil appear. This manure, or “humanure,” makes primo fertilizer for your gardens. What you took from the earth in food, you return to it as food. Beautiful, right?

http://www.tricycle.com/issues/editors_pick/2458-1.html

The sun comes up and I wake up in a blur. My glasses are greasy and my house is warm. I try to focus on what is real, I try to focus on what is good in life. Life slides past me fastly like broken jelly.

I taste phlegm and brush my teeth. I don't even want to speak about the day time, when I earn my pay. When my hours are counted as something worthwhile. I struggle, I get through, nobody else seems to care.

I just want a shower. I snidely remark about something. The air is too hot. I make excuses. I want to leave or go to sleep. It's killing me, this world.

-blue, a pencil, Tangerines-

I take a breath of air, I inhale the cosmic surf, I smell the pine needles and grubby earth.

Goddamn the day is done.

She's off in the distance, a flying dakini. The choices I choose I chose quickly, with no weighing.

Too quickly, smelling of beef, tired and scared of the bare naked realness. Sleeping.

-night, the rushing of Aspens, zookeeper-

Fellow

Come play

Down in the soil

You remember the rhymes?

The taste of mineral salts?

The stagnant water hanging still in the marsh?

You remember the gravel road bridge over the dark sucker filled river?

Fellow

Come play

With us in the dark

Are you afraid?

flavor of the month

Today today today. What is it about today... Where can I go to play, what can I say?

The man took away the fun. The sun is done. Morning turns inside out and falls apart and kisses the sky. The farewell.

Dust in my eyes. In the cumulous clouds floating so high. I don't want to die.

The sun is undone. A great white bird is floating away. No one cares. No one cares.

Flavor of the month. Give me a lift. The asphalt is hard and smells of death.

terrible terrible terrible things
floating in spurts of black paint and screams

but the ocean does have a bottom!
She outputs.

I give in to my weakness and sleep. Terrible sleep. Waste of life. Morning is broken.

Tell me you stupid fucker do you have a purpose? He says to the mannequin.

Plastic handholds on steel limbs.

Give me a beer and a pizza anyday, he says, he has said, he does not know why he has said it.

Nothing I want to do makes money, he thinks, he has thunk, he doesn't know why he has thunk it.

flavors flavors flavors bittersweet
cooking with shards of glass and steam

No one can steal what he has hidden in his head. No one can replace what he has lost. There is nothing he hasn't lost. There is nothing to lose.

No One Thing

quick update

I always go to a friend's blog and find that it hasn't been updated in weeks and I go, " Come on, lazy!" but now its been a few weeks and I haven't updated my blog even though I have actually done things for a change. Well, suffice it to say that since my last entry I finished my novella, went backpacking for a week, and got to sleep on a sailboat. I am still alive, and I still want a new job, one where I get to travel around and drink beer.

My friend and his boyfriend moved back to town, and that is good. It is good to have real folk to talk to and do stuff with.

I don't want to write any more.

Good Article in the Orion Online

This is a really good article in Orion Online that talks about giving up hope, as a positive action. I really agree with most of it's premises. Please read it.

Beyond Hope
Derrick Jensen

THE MOST COMMON WORDS I hear spoken by any environmentalists anywhere are, We're fucked. Most of these environmentalists are fighting desperately, using whatever tools they have—or rather whatever legal tools they have, which means whatever tools those in power grant them the right to use, which means whatever tools will be ultimately ineffective—to try to protect some piece of ground, to try to stop the manufacture or release of poisons, to try to stop civilized humans from tormenting some group of plants or animals. Sometimes they're reduced to trying to protect just one tree.

http://www.oriononline.org/pages/om/06-3om/Jensen.html

Update

I am at 23,000 word and 34 pages. This, I can assure you, is a lot of work.

Project Info

I am not going to write here for awhile, as I am channeling my writing into some more serious writing pursuits, specifically a possible novel or novella. I will be updating word count/page count and all that every now and then. Having already started a project I am awed at how much editing and reworking I am doing already, and I barely started. Wish me luck, and any encouragement would be helpful.

I am at about 7,000 word and 10 pages.

blew

There is nothing new under the sun. All my thoughts have been thought. All the places I have been or are going to are populated. There is nothing new.

I need to go to a place I haven't been, to see a thing I haven't seen, to hear a sound I haven't heard, to smell a new scent, to taste a new taste.

Spring fever. Getting Out Of Here! Making Wild Ass Plans (WAPs)! Eating and drinking too much whilst thinking and dreaming.

MAPS! I need more, I need more gear, I need more money. Fuel is expensive, should I take a train?

Should I just start walking now and walk around the world?

I only have One Life. Unless reincarnation is true in which case I am sure I will be a bird.

I will be a blue bird that flys around the blue world over the blue ocean.

I found the haiku.

there is sun under
dark and mossy places where
newborn green things grow

friend or foe?

I wanted to talk today a little bit about friendship. I tried writing about it last week, and it came out really didactic and foolish, so I hope I can just put a few thoughts out there before I descend into the maelstrom of idiocy.

I love my friends. I wouldn't be who I was without the reflection of myself friends provide me with, as well as the examples of their own lives. I don't have a lot of friends but the friends I have are strong people who are very individualistic. I'm sure sometimes they don't think so, but they are.

I have a friend who is coming to live in the Twin Cities again after an absence of at least 4 years, This makes me happy, because like I said I don't have a lot of friends but those select few are pretty important to me. He is a person that showed me that life is large and exciting, and it is important to live it well. He showed me that "well" can mean a lot of things.

I have a friend who I see about every three years, but she makes me happy every time I get to see her. She reminds me of who I am and where I came from. She reminds me that I need to keep in touch with those I love.

I have a friend who I've lived with for the past 8 years. She reminds me that I need to keep challenging my fears, that life isn't about settling into a pattern of work/sleep/eat, that love isn't about reinforcing each other's insecurities. She keep me on my toes.

And then I have friends who some would call relatives, but I just see as people with their own problems, fears, joys, and tears. They remind me of the interconnectivity of all life, and they provide a continuum of reliability.

Maybe someday I'll be able to repay all of my friends for what they do and have done for me.

Do you see what I mean? When you start talking about friendship or love you start sounding like a bad Oprah episode. But the feelings are true. I try to do what I can do.

Peace.

WOOOOOOO!

Easter came and Easter went. I am tired. Much beer was consumed, lots of good food, lots of good company. I am not a fan of holidays. But sometimes they are a good excuse to relax and have fun.

If I could, I would holiday with all of you. But I can only be at so many places at once.

Tomorrow I will explain why humans act the way they do...

Exit the monolith

Why is my profile down on the bottom of my page here? I don't get it. It annoys me, and I can't seem to do anything about it.

What is there to say today? Spring is here in a major way. The SO and I are getting out on more bike rides and walks. The air is sometimes balmy, sometimes clean. The little green things are poking their heads out of the earth, seeking answers to their questions, getting a taste of what's to come. They remins me to start planting my seeds, physically/spiritually/mentally. I need to work on cultivating the correct conditions for the successful growth of my soul.

I wrote a haiku, but it ran away.

Life is.

It is interesting to contemplate the interconnectedness of all things in relation to the growing digital network of communication. The latent Christian part of me says "Is this a good thing or a bad thing?" My current Buddhist mindset says "This is a thing." Is there no morality attached to these vast webs of communication? On one hand you have the ability to talk or text or send images to friend or family in different parts of the world, on the other you have the opportunity to spend large swathes of time mesmerized by the stream of human thoughts, stories, myriad gaming opportunities, music, eBay, etc... Basically a dynamic window into the inner workings of samsara, the karmically enhanced cyclical condition of suffering via greed/desire/craving. When you stop and think about it, you are doing nothing while you stare at the computer, TV, cellphone, camera, or car window screen. A world of screens.

The question then arises in my mind "Is doing nothing a good thing or a bad thing?" I think it depends on your idea of nothing. There is active nothing and passive nothing, sad nothing and happy nothing, tired nothing and energetic nothing. While you weed the garden are you actually doing anything? While you clean the bathroom are you doing a thing, or are you doing nothing? While you meditate are you actively meditating or passively existing?

I find the internet extremely helpful if I want a thing, or want to know a thing, or want to do no thing. Want, of course, is desire, which is the primary cause of suffering on the planet. I feel better when I talk to a friend or play guitar or cook a meal then when I do anything involving a screen. Those activities are relatively free of desire. You may say "But you want to eat a tasty meal, or you want to hear a nice tone, or you want to shake off loneliness." But I say "My desire for those things are good for me and for others." What am I doing that is good for me and or for others while I am on the internet? I can say with some certainty that it is usually nothing. I do some research on environmental, political, or spiritual issues. I write this blog as a place to put my thoughts for others to read, in case they might find some use or insight or entertainment. I guess at the end of my contemplation I would have to say that the majority of the time I spend online is wasted time.

I really believe you can only spend time, you can not save it. Well, I also believe time is a mirage, but I won't get into that. If you feel you are not spending your time wisely, you should change your behavior, correct? Therefore if I feel I spend eighty percent of my time online doing nothing with desire I should instead use that time to do something without desire.

At the end of it all, really, everything you do is good if you do it mindfully and for others. At the end of the end of it all, really, life is but a dream. At the end of the dream, life is. Life.