November 9, 2011 by Susan Hansell.

R.I.P. to my father-in-law:

Noritsugu (Nochio) Uyeno, 3/15/26 - 11/5/11, born in Long Beach CA, grew up in Compton, riding horses and hunting abalone on the beaches of Palos Verdes. Relocated at age 15 to the Japanese-American internment camps of WWII, then drafted by the Navy at age 18, shortly after marrying Shizue Kumai. After the war, graduated from CSULA, made his home in Los Angeles near Bellevue Park, and taught elementary education for LAUSD until retirement. Father of Gerald Uyeno and Nancy Kamei; grandfather of Thomas Kamei; will be dearly missed by many friends, most especially Betty Lim.

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December 30, 2010 by Susan Hansell.

When my father asks me if I’ve seen my mother, I don’t tell him that she’s dead anymore.  He doesn’t remember anyway, and it just upsets him, as if he were hearing it for the first time.  if I don’t tell him the truth, I don’t have to go though seeing him look like someone punched him in the gut, and I don’t have to listen to his same incredulous questions:  When did that happen?  Where was I?  Where were you?

Besides, since when have I told me father “the truth”?

Lying means I don’t have to answer his questions, either; something I’ve never been able to do with much satisfaction, on his part at least, though maybe on my part as well, no matter the subject.   The reason why is, perhaps, as an old friend of mine from high school liked to put it, as did his girlfriend, who never knew my father in his most vociferously self-righteous prime:  My dad likes to dominate.  Even in his new residence, a very good memory care center that looks like an old house from the 1940’s and that is staffed by people who give lots of care and concern to the old folks who live there, my father likes to think he’s in charge.  He likes to think all the people there work for him, that he’s at work, giving orders, and that my mom is at home, at his house, and that he’ll be seeing her just as soon as he can find a way to leave.  “Next weekend, I’m not going to work so much,” he told me, as he looked out over the big cozy common room with some mild disgust, the last time I was visiting him.

The first time my dad asked me where my mom was, years after she had passed, I felt a sense of panic swell up to my neck, and could utter only, “uh, uh, uh, well, uh…”  he interrupted me, mocking my stuttering with a sarcastic “uh, uh, uh, well, uh:  are you fighting with your mother or something, huh, is that it?” Then he laughed.

So now when he asks me about my mom, I say, “I think she’s working on the election returns,” or “I think she’s over at the library; it’s her day to work there,” or, “She’s babysitting for ____,” or “She’s visiting_______,” and, if he’s in a good mood, he might reply in a light sarcastic vein, “Oh, that’s right, she’s always volunteering for something!”  Adding, with mock indignation and a humorous air of protest, “But I don’t see her anymore!”

Such conversations become more difficult when my father insists my mom must be “seeing” someone else, a ludicrous assertion if you knew my mother.  Even if she were alive to make the suggestion possible, the truth is that my mother bragged to me on her death bed, with great pride, that she’d only “Known” one man in her life.  Sure mom, rub it in, I said.  And although she was in the excruciating final throws of metastatic cancer, she laughed and laughed, and she probably blushed, too.

My conversations with my father are much more painful to me than that, though.  Especially when, after taking him out for a walk, or for a bite to eat, he looks at me, stricken, and says “I don’t have any cash, but send me the bill, and I’ll write you a check for this!”  Or, worse, “Who are these people?”  “Why are you taking me here?”  “Take me home!”  “I want to go home!”  “I want to go back to my house!”

Fortunately, for the first time in his life, my father is easily distracted.  He forgets everything in a minute or two, and if, for example, I ask him for help carrying a box or a bag, the imprint of his era’s gallantry requires of him he help a lady, and by the time he’s finished “helping,” he’s forgotten how upset he was, or what he was upset about, or what’s different about the place he’s in now from any other place, or any other people, he’s ever known.

I’m preparing for the day my father will not recognize me as his daughter, or recognize anything, or know who he “is,” and probably, because he’s so totally helpless, and because his helplessness evokes in me the sort of wrenching pity I feel for someone who could never admit a weakness, but who was, in actuality, weak, in a variety of ways, due to this inability, probably because of these reasons, and to lots more that I might one day or may never understand, I will continue to visit my dad, finding ways to communicate with him, or just ways to help him feel as happy or as comfortable as he can, given the daily dyings of his life.

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July 9, 2010 by Susan Hansell.

The other night, after dinner, and after reading Alexander Cockburn’s essay in The Nation of 7/12/2010, and after thinking more about the oil-based Gulf Disaster, I asked my genuine math-whiz husband this pretty and profound question:  If NOAA’s estimates of the oil, currently spewing as much as 100,000 barrels of oil a day (@55 gallons per barrel) — if this oil keeps spewing at such a rate into the Gulf until the entire reserve unloads itself (estimated by BP at 2.1 billion gallons), then how long before all 2.1 billion gallons enters the Gulf?

The answer goes terrifyingly like this:  100,000 barrels = 5 million gallons per day.  This means that if NOAA’s worst case scenario estimation of the amount that’s currently spewing is correct, 5 million gallons are polluting the Gulf every single day.  In ten days that’s 50 million gallons.  In 100 days, it’s 500 million.  This means it will take only 400 days for the entire 2.1 billion amount to empty itself into the Ocean.  We might be a quarter of the way there now folks, and if you’re thinking about this like I am, you might want to open another window on your browser and watch BP’s live spew-cam, imagining the pressure under which such a viscous fluid is enabled to spew itself from the Ocean’s floor like a fountain, or like a volcano.

Now, following this horrifying math, if the entire Gulf Ocean coastline, including all of West Florida and all of East Mexico, equals 10,000 miles, then according to NOAA estimates, right now, enough oil is spewing to coat every foot of that coastline with 0.1 gallons (about a cup) every day.  This means that there’s 1 gallon per coastline foot every ten days, and ten gallons per coastline foot in 100 days, and if the entire 2.1 billion gallon reserve enters the Ocean, there will be 40 gallons of oil every foot for every 10,000 miles of Gulf Coastline.  And we will soon be at the ten gallons per coastline foot (or the 100 days) amount.

If you’ve ever known someone who can do on-the-spot-&-in-the-head math and even calculus problem-solving, then you know how illuminating it is to ask such a person a few extraordinarily pertinent questions that really need answering…  And I’ve gotta think that BP has people working for it who are maybe almost as smart as my husband, and who maybe have even also done this math.  Which means they already know the possible amount of the spew (the total reserve), and the possible rate it can spew and is spewing, and the possible fact that it may only take 400 days to completely empty.

So I think we have to ask why BP has not vacuumed more oil and separated it from the water (100% possible and doable though such work takes vessels and workers and thus costs more than burning it off, along with LIVE sea turtles); and I think we have to ask why BP did not immediately employ an army-sized force to get on this disaster faster and more thoroughly and more competently (oh yeah those flimsy booms have worked so well);  and I think we have to ask why the oil corps keep saying the world is out of oil (hello, 2.1 billion gallons).

Unforch, not all Qs can be broken down directly or mathematically, but answers about numbers and rates imply conceptual speculations that may answer to BP’s motives and actions:  Like maybe they already know they can’t stop the entire oily load from emptying into the Ocean in 400 days; like maybe they’re doing whatever is cheapest for them while they send their media flacks and their private security corps out to do damage and info control; like maybe they’re just acting like they’re on it when they’re actually just waiting for 400 days to go by; like maybe they lied about all this and more from the beginning like always, like forever; like maybe they know where all the oil will eventually end up and permanently reside; like maybe in Mexico, or in the Caribbean, in places where people have even less ability to make the facts known, and less money or power or international clout to be able to do anything about it.

NOTE:  if you google NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) you can link to their site, which has further information on the numbers of dolphins, sea turtles and sperm whales washed up on the Gulf coastline oiled and dead, which does not include the uncountable numbers of oiled and dead land and sea birds, and the unknowable numbers of eggs and larval offspring of the unfathomable number of these affected birds and fishes, which does not include the affected plant life, or even the oxygen count in the Gulf waters themselves.  And of yeah, the eleven humans who were blown up on the rig, and those fishing professionals who have committed suicide since seeing their lives and their livelihoods washed up in the oily BP mess.

UPDATE:  Now emergency capped after 87 days of Full Spew (worst case scenario=500 million gallons or 1/4 of the total “reserve” — but since BP never placed a simple meter on it’s drilling rig or pipe, we’ll never know), this current 3-day cap on the Oil Spew is showing signs of deep fissure wounds down within the pipe that goes a mile under the Gulf’s floor, evidenced by methane gas or crude bubbling through the Ocean’s floor in the vicinity of the Original Gash.  As of the morning of 7/19/2010, the U.S. is trying to force BP to fork over all the information about what’s going on “down there,” and although BP is stalling, they may have to uncap the Spew in order to stop an even larger Rip of hydrocarbons from bursting into creation.

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April 28, 2010 by Susan Hansell.

In the desert, to have a walled garden, in summertime, where you can sit, all night, and watch the moon set, or the bats flit, maybe eat an ice cream, or listen to the owls doves quail wrens red-headed or yellow warblers, or brush your teeth, or wait, for the news, your last pet cat growing old, then disappearing, or your husband’s mother’s cancer is back, or your own father doesn’t remember that you already know your-mother-his-wife died, four years ago, this fall, while reservations get reserved, phone calls called, appointments appointed, disappointed, hey, hey you there, see, the moon’s sinking into the buttery clouds, watch, watch yourself, watching, watching you, watching the garden, watching the walls, watching the ceiling, watching the sky, watching the moon stars planets satellites, setting, and rising, the sun, the sun.

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January 31, 2007 by Susan Hansell.

Another January come and almost gone. Finally. Yay.

Among my least recondite January memories, I hereby recall a New Year’s Eve at a club around 10th and Folsom in San Francisco back in the 80’s, whense I left with a black eye due to overly zealous dancing (on my part), but without my coat and scarf, the latter items having been pilfered by some cold thus-and-such, seemingly after observing me carefully stashing said stuff behind a partition, due to the fact that I had not wanted to pay the coat check fee.

Oh well!

My bee-u-tee-ful below-the-knee black wool coat I had scored at the buy-by-the-pound used place on Valencia or somewhere, but it had fit me perfectly, and so we dutifully searched the painfully-lights-up-closing-4-am.-club-space, to no avail, natch. As my friendship clique squished ourselves exhaustedly into our (truly responsible) designated-driver’s car (not in any bike condition that night!), and he fired it up (oil, again), the radio blared out a mid-song rendition of maybe the Grateful Dead’s version of “I Guess It Doesn’t Matter Anymore…”

Hey, yeah, WTF, Happy 2007!

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December 26, 2006 by Susan Hansell.

How did I get here, to Torrance, CA, sharing a hot tub with another middle aged blond, who happened to have been in Cancun in 1985, four years after I was there in 1981, on my way to Central America?

The short answer is that the blond and I were both going through back problems, and together we had sunk ourselves into the tub for a little relief. The longer response involves her honeymoon, marriage, children, and South Bay SoCal lifestyle, I guess, compared and contrasted with my journeys onto various countries, cities, jobs, relationships, and writing gigs.

It’s not an essay question, but a second class bus ride from Mexico City had been my literal vehicle to Cancun.

Although the Cancun airport was able to take passenger jets for a year or two prior to 1981, what occasional and expensive flights there were originated from a very few U.S. cities and a couple of points in Europe. No doubt the tourist aspects of the place built up fast, and by 1985 the flights were cheaper and more numerous. The blonde had jetted in.

Her destination was the Club Med on the point that had been the only “nice” place around Cancun until the Hilton Pyramid was finished, an event that had just happened when I arrived. In fact, the road that would become Hotel Row was still under construction in ‘81, mostly labored upon by Mayan Indian Mexicans who lived either in the town of Cancun or in its surrounding ruralities, the human abode constructions of which vicinities were almost exclusively thatch-roofed palapa huts.

The town itself at that time consisted of a divison between two sections: the Mexicans of apparently mostly Mayan descent were on one side of town, living on dirt streets and in tin-roofed hovels of homes stacked side by side; the middle-class (and generally more European-featured) Mexicans, along with a small contingent of American expatriots, lived in cement, stucco, or cinderblock and tiled houses spaced evenly along curving paved roads.

Through a friend from Berkeley, I had a contact to an American who ran a small language school on the “right” side of town, and I was able to stay there in an attic room of the school for about a week before I made my way further South. It was not possible to see the ocean from the town, but one morning I headed off in the sea’s direction, expecting to arrive at the beach after an easy two-or-three mile walk.

Before long, an open air jeep driven by two white guys who turned out to be Brit tourists pulled alongside me and offered a ride; I hopped into the back of their rented old jeep. We proceeded on until the paved road came to an end and a group of men, somehow both standing up and bending over, working with picks and tar, made hand signs for us to stop.

Ours was the sole vehicle on the road. The workers appeared to have had no vehicle to get them to their worksite; perhaps they walked everywhere they went, as Cancun was teeming neither with cars nor people back then. The deserted-jungle-nature of the road and its environs, from whence Cancun-as-international-vacation-destination raised itself, is really something, I should say, although I never returned after 1981 to see it that way in person.

Anywho, the Rich Brits got out of their jeep, pulled out their wallets, tried to talk, then bribe, the workers into letting us drive further up the unpaved road. When the Mayan-Mexicans refused their money, this pair climbed into their jeep in a huff, preparing to roar back to town in a royal cloud of indignation. Not before I got out, however, and told them I would find my own way to wherever it was I was going.

Maybe they remember me as some (one more) Crazy American Girl, or more likely they don’t remember me at all, but I turned to the guys who were working on the road, and asked them the direction of the beach.

Ah, you want to see the beach.

One of them told me he would escort me along the path; he gestured for me to follow, and I did. He led me to an incline and up through a thicket of topical trees and deeply green shrubs. I had a moment of second-guessing myself, when I turned behind me and could no longer see the road, then looked ahead without being able to see anything but more overgrowth. Yet it was too late to do anything differently at that point, so what good would being afraid do me?

And within a few minutes we cleared the growth and then, yes, a cliche, the untouched and unoccupied beaches of Cancun spread their white sands and blue waters as far as I could see in any direction. I gave a whoop of shocked joy and ran down the rise to the sand, waving my thanks to the guy who had been nice enough to take his time to show me the way. He returned to paving the road for Hotel Row.

Insert your comment here on my arrogantly brief foreshadowing of 21st Century globalisms.

Yeah, well, like life itself, essay tests have a way of coming around full circle, if they’re C’s, or, if they’re better, to ironically (and perhaps endearingly) resonating insights. A’s are generally reserved for the transcendently bitter (sweet?) “truths” of experience, which brings me again to the blond, and to my aching privileged self.

My own back muscles had been pulled by all kinds of over-stretches I had put myself through, or endured, over the past two years: I married, moved, finished twenty-years of college teaching, moved again, and turned I’m-not-going-to-tell-you-how-old. My cat died, my mom died, and I found myself living near enough to Torrance to join a gym where I could swim everyday, and where, if I had to, I could soak in a hot tub or sweat in a steam room, nearly in solitude.

The blond had hurt her back playing tennis, she said, so when she gingerly made her way into the tub with me, looking older than I, IMHO, and a wee worse for wear, dare I say, I offered the solicitous concern I politely present to someone slightly older, whatever that means!

She claimed to be worried about being able to be as active as she usually was with her husband and their children on their annual family golfing, tennis, and beach trip to Cancun, Mexico, the trip she had taken every year since she and her husband had married in Torrance, California, and then honeymooned together at the enviable locale of Cancun, in 1985.

And, listening to her describe Cancun as “really nice after they cleaned up and rebuilt all the hotels after that last hurricane,” I comprehended that, oily-joking-snobbery aside, I was likely the same age, if not older, than this blond lady, and oh, so tre, well, downright unglamorously, my life now signified the “same as it ever was” (i.e., “Once in a Life Time”) song, a Talking Heads ditty I often lip-sync’d in the 80’s (so much for being cutting-edge) without the least prefiguring awareness that in twenty-five years I would have no G.D. idea how I had gotten here, or there, or to any of the times, places and peoples of my life, nor how little faith, nee good humor, I might have left upon said epiphany.

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November 24, 2006 by Susan Hansell.

Plus or minus fifty years of reading, writing, thinking, (and watching movies) on the meaning of life, and death, yet I add up to inexactitude when faced with the actuality of failing, paralyzed, tumor-ridden bodies, then subsequently, with their cremated, ashy remains, those of my mother’s on October 4, and of my-15-year-cat-friend Spot’s on August 3, both of this year.

Weird or inappropriate that I place my mom and my cat within the same prozac-free paragraph? A comment on 21st C. American “personal” lives? Or on something else I’m too stupid to think up? Who knows why these two deaths together have sucked me into what has been maybe a not-so-sweeping-or-fearless inventory of my pensive past, and my present.

My cat Spot adopted me one night when I was carrying groceries, sola, up to my apartment. A month later she gave birth to four kittens, for which I found homes, before I took her to live with me in New York. She was there for me through the mean-street Brooklyn years, until I brought her back to Cali, still trying to scrape together a backyard or some such corner in the sun where we might have found a form of our own happiness. I didn’t manage to make that happen in time for Spotty, but I’m pretty sure she didn’t blame me for it; I’m pretty sure she loved me in spite of my failings, in her sweet cat-sized-brain way. Human love is more complicated, isn’t it?

I hear my mom calling me to breakfast, to dinner; I hear myself calling back, I’ll be right there. Not a great example of how the young take their received worlds for granted, but can any mother ever be adequately appreciated? Even “bad” mothers give us birth, even “bad” mothers make all of life’s joyful moments possible, and “good” mothers make life’s suffering probable, for which fact neither agonizing questions, nor thank yous, suffice.

I think I was a disappointment to my mom. I turned out differently from her plans for me; I lived far from any of those ways she imagined. We were essentially incomprehensible to each other. In some ways my cat knew me better, in some ways my cat was a better friend (hence my comparison, perhaps); but I’m pretty sure my mother and I felt the same feelings for each other that would have come with a knowing friendship; had we been similar in temperment and in inclination, we might have met life’s perplexing Qs with some really Big Shoes of our own - hell, we might have become friggin’ Dear Abbey or Ann Landers! Or whichever one it was who had a daugher take over the philosophizing where she left off - or was it a daughter-in-law?

That last question, I think I can find the answer to that one, if I cared to do so. It’s the one about the cat’s last breath, and how I felt her gone, right away; the one which made me wonder what she was in the first place, and how I knew, felt, that whatever she was, just wasn’t anymore, and never would be again; it’s the one about some of my mom’s last words to me, the ones I could understand, the ones when she thanked me for doing some chores for her that needed doing, and for doing some personal things for her that made her more comfortable; it’s the ones about knowing afterwards that, that would be the last time I would see her, and how I was so surprised by her thanks to me over the phone, that I didn’t know what to say, only later realizing that the thing to have said would have been, mom, thank you; it’s how I didn’t know that then, and all the other times I didn’t know the really simple answers for the really simple questions I had; those are the ones that bother me.

I wish my mom were still here, so that I could ask her if I’d ever have the answers I need to the questions that might tell me how to act in the future, or if this is even a reasonable request from “life.” And if my mother couldn’t have responded to my “strange” queries, or if I would never have asked her them anyway, it would be comforting to think I still could.

My mom always asked about my cat; she loved animals, too.

I wish Spot were here, so that I could call her to me, and hug her in my confused human way; even if she couldn’t hug me back, even if she didn’t want to, it would be comforting to think she could, the way a human being might.

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September 19, 2006 by Susan Hansell.

Back in 1996, when I was teaching at a variety of CUNY schools, simultaneously, including at one 2-year campus where I taught developmental reading to kids who possessed NYC high school diplomas but few educated skills, I had the brite idea of using a Jacques Cousteau article on global warming as a vehicle for teaching vocabulary and critical thinking on a subject larger than good grammar. In front of the class during that special session, as I explained the delicate balance between oxygen and carbon dioxide, between animals and plants, I mentioned in passing how OIL develops (of course!) from the decomposed physical bodies of formerly living same said symbiotically related (even to us!) plants and animals, thus the term fossile fuels, I can still hear myself joking… However, none of my students in that class were acquainted with these interesting OIL facts; rather, they were visibly disturbed by my inadvertent presentation of How Death Becomes Oil, And Is Therefore So Useful To Modern Life. “What did she say? What did she say?” Students broke into spontaneous discussion asides and shifted angrily in their seats. While they hadn’t been paying attention, I had morphed from their mild English teacher into a full-on mad-witch, betraying their fragile horizons with an incidental fact I took absolutely for granted. I don’t remember how I extricated myself from that particular room altercation; there were so many! Wait. I don’t remember why I started this New York anecdote in the first place. Ah. I wanted to write about Death, and its oily surfaces. But now it’s too late, and I’m cross-eyed tired, so I’ll have to sign off right here and write Part 2 next time. Pues, adios.

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September 11, 2006 by Susan Hansell.

Once upon a time, on 9/11 in 2001, I had recently moved from New York to California, which, for me, ended up meaning that I would “have people there,” as we started saying. Due to my M/W teaching schedule, I would be off that day, (it was a Tuesday); plus, I happened to have been recovering from an emergency appendectomy, which meant I wasn’t sleeping well, so I had been listening to the radio all night long. At about 5:30 am., West Coast time, I thought I heard John Dupree, then on KPFK, making what I thought was some kind of a sick joke, talking about a plane hitting the World Trade Center; (I never did like him). I changed stations to my local NPR, but everyone was saying the same thing. I proceeded to rise from my bed and open my window, imagining I might somehow see my morning-person neighbor, a guy from Jersey, up. And somehow he was. When I called him on the phone at that odd hour, and simply said “Ed?”, he said, “You have to come over here and watch this.” Now I, up to that (and this) point in my life, have managed never to outright own a TV, but I got to Ed’s place in time to witness the second plane hit. We watched both towers list and collapse, we heard the debris storms whistle through lower Manhattan, and we gasped when those poor people jumped… And a lot more, of course, mostly images I never saw after that Tuesday. Maybe I didn’t want to see them, since, when I moved again just a few years later, I came across the front pages, printed on the next day, that I had saved from the NY Times, and from the LA Times, and I put them in the recycling bin. Because for me, the most memorable, the most socially salient aspect of the 9/11 event had consisted in how people everywhere, for a few short days, stopped participating in life-as-usual. Everyone sort of ceased participation in the repetitive activities that tend to fill up, and clutter up, a life, and we stared thinking about more important “things.” I rode my bike to the Queen Mary, watched the sun set without the sounds of planes or helicopters, and when I wore my Brooklyn College T-shirt around, strangers would pull over in their cars and ask me if I was okay, (in a nice way). Later, I seem to remember the “president” telling us we all had to start shopping, immediately, or the “economy” would, what was his word, collapse? Not so funny, in retrospect.  But it occurs to me now, when I think about 9/11’s aftermath, that without each person’s continual and constant participation in whatever “this” that-we-call-living represents, the whole “thing” could not go on: Not as is, not without our acquiescence. Which is fine, I guess, if it’s what we want. When and if we do things differently, “things” will change. Meanwhile, back at the majoramericanmassmedia, there appears to be some fetishizing of the 9/11 dead going on, am I right? Yet with so many more dead and damaged, and so much more destroyed, absurdly, horrifically, since then, world wide, why mark 9/11 so vehemently, so obsessively, so nationalistically? Yes, on that day we saw real people really die. It wasn’t a cop show; it wasn’t embalmed. We watched real people see, smell, taste, hear, touch real people who were really running falling screaming crying dying, in “real time,” with their own eyes noses lips ears hands, and that was all very shockingtraumatizingupsetting, to say the least, not to mention the personal ramifications for some of us, not to mention that actual New Yorkers got hit way harder, way more viscerally, and for way longer. But in five years more, will these memories, our memories, merely serve yet another mediagovernmentfrenzy over whatever icons rationalize that OIL which requires rationalization? Will we think about those three days in the immediate aftermath, when we made our own actions, our own worlds, new? Or will we become manipulated objects, remembering the past as it’s currently being reified. Will we remember only where we were, not who, not what, we wanted to be?

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August 22, 2006 by Susan Hansell.

Guess what I found out from my oil internet today? Drew Barrymore and I share the same love for cleaning. She scrubs the bathroom too! Wow. I feel so NOR-MAL. Well, gotta go clean that oil. It’s taking over the world, you know.

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August 21, 2006 by Susan Hansell.

I live in an L.A. oil house. Okay, technically, my house is called a “condo,” but the carpet is oil, the paint is oil, the vinyl is oil, the dog - just kidding; I don’t have a dog, but my cat just died so I can’t joke about THAT - my computer (and yours, dear reader) is oil, the desk chair is oil, the thingie under the desk chair that makes the carpet smooth down so I can roll my chair around on it is definitely oil. The washing machine washes my husband’s oil clothes and the dryer dries them to an oil dry. The faucets spout oil and the noise from the cars and the trucks and the backup beeps and the radios in the alleys and the bombs going off all over the world are definitely oil noises. So compare me, or you, to an oily CEO well, why not to Paris, to Hilton, to my next vacation, to Hawai’i, to the Rez, to a Pakistani child diamond chip cutter, to the grand grand canyon, to NYC, to Brooklyn; we’re all living on, dying on, oil, while we’re busy blaming someone else. Cheers!

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