I recently received a digitally animated Christmas card where a pale child dreamily walks through a winter wonderland pulling his sled. He stops at a spruce tree that lights up magically. Then he proceeds through the calm forest until he reaches a point overlooking a small New England town where the church steeple is the highest point and all is tranquil and peaceful. The boy pulls a violin off his sled and begins to play along with the music that has been accompanying his walk. Merry Christmas!
And the whole time I'm wondering: "People call me idealistic? This might as well show Jesus at the gates of heaven handing out cherry pie and cigars to Nascar fans while Libertarians are cast into a pit of flames."
As I was nearly penniless up until my 80 consecutive hours lobbing lobster crates, I never was affected by the commercial demands of Hannah Montana and her Barbie Doll daughters. So I missed my opportunity to play 1% Scrooge while the 99% Bob Cratchets of the world save pennies for their crippled Tiny Tim son. "God Bless us Every one!" Such bullshit...state sponsored casinos on stolen Indian reservations and kids huffing piss and shit in a bag: that's what reality is right now. Tar sands projects that pollute and decimate; wolf bounties returning to save precious cattle for high priced steak houses on Route 1 for Rye snobs; chipmunk movies where "After surviving the sinking of their cruise ship, Alvin, Simon, and Theodore must survive on a Polynesian island"; drug cartels competing with T-mobile for domination of telcom infrastructure; guys breaking jars with their assholes; bath salt used as cheap crystal meth; pet food companies manufacturing rice and chocolate...on and on.
The status quo is some fucked up shit and I don't need the holiday ideals to sugar coat my concrete cookies.
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Un Mundo Sin Drogas
Raise your hand if you are tired of the drug war and want to stop it. The time has come to go on the attack. I read that Mexican drug cartels have started installing their own telcom towers to use for advanced warning. THEIR OWN TELCOM TOWERS! That's like your local crank dealer owning his own warehouse full of servers so he can be an internet service provider and better monitor his customers. The scales are rapidly tipping in Central America in the direction of drugs being the future. Mexican special forces are defecting to the cartels because the money is better and, frankly, the cartels have a better health care plan.
Obviously, I live in a fairy tale world where I become Peter Pan at night and fly around on my green wings planting flowers and healing wounded squirrels...so it should come as no surprise that I think I can do something about this insanity. Sure, you can shake your head in your pathetic fear castle and call me stubborn for not accepting the ascendance of drug cartels but I like to frame the debate in these terms: I'm NOT the crazy person for tying a helium filled happy birthday balloon to the ass end of the Titanic, but YOU ARE the asshole for sitting on your hands while the ship sinks. Either way, it looks like we're in for a wet and wild ride but personally, I'm optimistic and believe humans want to do spiritually rewarding work, and not manufacture and smuggle cheap cocaine and marajuana into America so the 99% can find some relief from their failed.expensive pain relief medication. I'm tired of it all and if the ship is going to sink then I prefer to die with a paddle in my hands rather than watching college football and eating franks and beans until our colons explode.
We choose our allies and I'm recruiting allies for a direct attack on the Mexican drug cartels. I don't mean we will will actually target cartel drug lords because that would be a pawn fighting a king over a spoiled bounty. No, what I want to do is retrain the pawns on the other side so they reject the drug-based lifestyle. That takes manpower and man hours. If I can toss lobster crates around then I can make a difference in the drug war. We need a grassroots movement to show Mexicans that Americans are sober and intelligent and compassionate people. We don't want to exploit them anymore. We want to peacefully coexist!
That's as far as my plan has gone but I think it's honest and it's important and it's time has come. The best way to combat the drug trade is to stop taking drugs and to encourage the people at the source of the drugs to stop making them. Who is with me?
Obviously, I live in a fairy tale world where I become Peter Pan at night and fly around on my green wings planting flowers and healing wounded squirrels...so it should come as no surprise that I think I can do something about this insanity. Sure, you can shake your head in your pathetic fear castle and call me stubborn for not accepting the ascendance of drug cartels but I like to frame the debate in these terms: I'm NOT the crazy person for tying a helium filled happy birthday balloon to the ass end of the Titanic, but YOU ARE the asshole for sitting on your hands while the ship sinks. Either way, it looks like we're in for a wet and wild ride but personally, I'm optimistic and believe humans want to do spiritually rewarding work, and not manufacture and smuggle cheap cocaine and marajuana into America so the 99% can find some relief from their failed.expensive pain relief medication. I'm tired of it all and if the ship is going to sink then I prefer to die with a paddle in my hands rather than watching college football and eating franks and beans until our colons explode.
We choose our allies and I'm recruiting allies for a direct attack on the Mexican drug cartels. I don't mean we will will actually target cartel drug lords because that would be a pawn fighting a king over a spoiled bounty. No, what I want to do is retrain the pawns on the other side so they reject the drug-based lifestyle. That takes manpower and man hours. If I can toss lobster crates around then I can make a difference in the drug war. We need a grassroots movement to show Mexicans that Americans are sober and intelligent and compassionate people. We don't want to exploit them anymore. We want to peacefully coexist!
That's as far as my plan has gone but I think it's honest and it's important and it's time has come. The best way to combat the drug trade is to stop taking drugs and to encourage the people at the source of the drugs to stop making them. Who is with me?
Sunday, December 25, 2011
Friday, December 23, 2011
Lobster Blues
Next time your lobstah roll is next to your gray whiskers I want you to think of my arthritic toe and chew long and hard on that monster from the deep. I'd like to type out a nice essay on this lobster topic but I have no time and my fingers hurt too much.
They say blues can not be faked because it is the music of the broken man.
Well, nothing like a week in the lobster processing biz will turn you into a broken man. And if your fingers are so swollen that you can't play a single note on the guitar without searing pain then that's even better. Why do the cotton pickers like Howling Wolf play and sing so well? Because they don't give a shit and their fingers hurt and they are beaten and poor and disrespected and you get what they feel. I started playing this song and it was like someone else was singing and playing, not a pretty kid who wants to be Jackson Browne. It's because my fingers are so swollen and bleeding and cracked and my voice is weakened and my neck is still throbbing. That's 62 hours in 5 days, my fucking friends. Give me shit about my lazy ways and I invite you to come down to the pound during holiday rush season and put it 62 hours. Better yet, I want you to go pick up two stacked car tires and throw them across the garage...FOR 19 STRAIGHT HOURS...and I will stand next to you and blast Slayer and Metallica in your ear and call you a motherfucker as I rip two packs of marlboro lights (along with 6 other chain smokers). You do that and then you can write your own message to me on toilet paper and shove it down my throat. Until then, you will need to shut the fuck up and keep your opinions to yourself because you'll be a fraud and a fucking asshole. "Use your big boy voice" is how the lobstermen describe it. That's my big boy voice. shut the fuck up. this is my domain. I'm lord of this castle. Me. Oggy. Not you.
Saturday, December 17, 2011
If You Don't Like It You Can Suck My Dick PART 1
"I love pill whores," shouts Bill, my new coworker. "I love dirty pill popping whores who strip on the side and fuck in the middle!"
We're standing in a cold second story apartment complex under construction. I don't know what I'm doing but I need the money and as long as I don't break a window or lose my temper then I'll probably get paid.
"Do you have carpentry experience?" the temp agent had asked.
"You bet. I wrote the code book for the White House. Frame to finish," I had lied with a straight face, desperate for money, tired of my principles getting in my way. So I ended up here at these apartments, on the clock, wasting money looking for my hammer, living the dream like the roofers from Honduras...
"If you don't like it you can suck my dick," Sings Bill as the Blood for Blood song coming from his phone speaker reaches a guttural climax.
I smile uneasily and motion my hands down.
"Ok," I whisper in my library voice.
I can hear workers downstairs banging nails in blue plastic power outlet boxes. Latino roofing crews put more Americans out of work on ladders outside. Their banging on the roof comes in morse code patterns: bang-bang-bangbangbang.
"I don't give a fuck if people hear. I'm a recovering addict," says Bill. "That means I smoke crack off the clock. Hahaha! Look!" Bill reviews his contact list in spite of my obvious discomfort. "I can get pills from him, meth from him, that skank still owes me money, cocksucker, cocksucker....pot...whatever."
"Ok. So you have contacts. I get it," I say with a fake smile.
"Fuck that. I don't deal no more. I used to pimp pill whores out of my pad. Three fucking years while I was recovering from my bulging disk. Pills and pimpin'. Fucked up, yo! I got pictures..."
Our other coworker, Nick, has been grinning nearby and suddenly pipes up in a clear and loud voice, "When I was serving time, because my public pretender was a jerkoff...I..."
Bill interrupts him as though he wasn't even speaking, "Look at this bitch. Look at that snatch!"
He shows me a self taken duck lips picture (in a mirror (could be fake)) of a twenty something girl. She's got a tattoo "BITCH" on the area above her panty line and below her navel.
"Her tattoo says 'Bitch'," says Bill, in case I missed it. He scrolls up her thin (devoid of subcutaneous fat, indicative of meth use) hip-less stripper body.
"What's her name?" I say, to humanize her in my mind.
"Jen. Her stage name was Kitten or Charlene or something...She was a rock hard stripper/prostitute."
"Escort," I clarify. "They like to be called escorts."
"I don't give a fuck," says Bill in what is his trademark phrase, impossible to imitate, almost musical, definitely rhythmic rap based, uttered with emphasize on the fuck and with almost monotone expression and deep loathing for whomever is in his presence, his accent almost southern but not quite innocent of Northern heritage. His routine arguments with the roofers begin not with "Ah-mee-go" but with "A-mee-go" as in "No, a-mee-go, you can't have that fuckin' ladder cause we gotta get this shit done." His phrasing is as beautifully and expertly executed as an Italian aria by Puccini.
"I mean...," I begin before Bill interrupts me with his last and final word on the subject.
"No! The only thing they're escorting is my cock into their vagina."
Then Bill and Nick begin to shuffle/dance around in their big steel toe boots singing, "If you don't like it you can suck my dick..." over and over, the sawdust from a hundred Honduran roofers is stirred from the plywood floors into my delicate nostrils and I begin to sneeze.
"I'm gonna play some baseball after woooork. Hoooo! Mothafuckah!" sings Bill, referring to smoking a pipe loaded with drugs. (He made good on this promise)
"If you don't like it, you can suck my dick..." sing the two of them, stomping around, as I sneeze and wipe my dripping nose with an oil soaked rag.
By the end of the day, a day filled with major and minor mistakes, misunderstandings, malicious attacks, malingering, misery and malaise, I calculate the three of us earned $180 ($60 each) while the foolish contractor paid $370 (total) and I estimate that if they (the contractor) had come down to the temp agent and paid all the employees there $10 each to NOT go to their job site, then they would save at least $100 and whatever they have to pay to fix our blunders, so possibly $500 of savings.
But that's only my opinion and my experience at construction sites has always been burdened by my endless pondering to determine the best plan of action. This irreconcilable clash manifests itself when I am tasked with fitting 2X4 wood coated with fire proof putty into a corner in order to comply with safety codes regarding draft stops and smoke chambers. I cut the 4 pieces of wood to fit but neglect to write the corresponding location on each piece of wood so when I return to the room (the saw being 100 yards away) I must fit each piece of wood into the space to determine where it goes. Then there is sheetrock that is jaggedly preventing the wood from seating all the way into the corner. So, after hunting down my hammer, I chip the sheetrock away and pound the wood into place, planning to remove the wood once I hunt down the fireproof putty. Enter Bill:
"WHAT THE MOTHERFUCKER?? ARE YOU STILL WORKING ON THIS?"
He's screaming, I believe, because he's learned that if you are yelling then you are considered valuable. But if the boss doesn't hear him yell then it would be pointless so he has to really scream for his voice to be heard down below in the boss trailer. It's worked so far because he's had a few weeks on this one job and now he's earning overtime, a gross violation of the agency's frugal methods. However, his insistence that he "Knows every motherfucking thing about construction" has been put in serious doubt by some of his commands and the subsequent outcome.
"I'm almost...." I begin...
"HOLY SHIT! YOU DIDN'T PUT ANY CAULKING ON THESE!"
"Not yet. I..."
"WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING HERE IF YOU CAN'T PICK UP A HAMMER?"
"Well, those...."
"WHY AREN'T THESE DONE? DO I HAVE TO DO EVERYTHING AROUND HERE?"
Bill screams this last line as loud as possible, slightly turning his head in the direction of the boss's trailer as he yells it.
"I put them up so I'd know they would fit when..."
"No. NO! IF YOU PUT THEM UP THEN HAMMER THEM THE FUCK ON! DON'T DUMMY THEM UP! DO IT ONCE!"
This remark has me laughing inwardly as we spent at least 3 hours running in comical circles as his earlier direction was totally contradicted by a code inspector.
Code Inspector: Don't put caulking on the bottom.
Bill: That's exactly what I told them not to do. GODDAMNIT!
Three hours earlier...
Oggy: So, put caulking on the bottom and the top?
Bill: Yes! DO I HAVE TO SHOW YOU HOW TO DO EVERYTHING?
Flash forward 4 hours:
"Alright." I say and get busy coating the fire proof putty onto the wood and hammering it into place. This works much easier than when I watched Nick attempt the procedure with the fire putty on the wood and the piece not yet fitted into the space. His face was covered with putty from when he had to chisel into the sheetrock to make the wood fit. Then the wood fell. The floor was littered with 3'' nails he had dropped as he tried to nail them through 1/2'' sheetrock using a 2' long framing hammer. Then he hit his thumb with the hammer.
"Motherfucker! They don't give us the right tools! If they only knew how to do it right the first time we wouldn't need to do this! Fucking Mexicans!"
This ongoing prejudice against Latino workers on the job irks me. Standing up for a people (Mexicans) I have grown to love and admire, quitting the job to protest the acute prejudice shown toward them, is precisely what has prevented me from getting a job in the first place. And now that I'm on the clock and making nearly $8 an hour, I would be a fool, a dreamy idealist, to risk that pirate's ransom, to defend the honor and memory of the unnamed Mexican. Furthermore, despite the lazy, shiftless stereotypes dogging the Mexican's legacy, they are all doing their work far more efficiently than us. True, some crew completely messed up their installation of the sheetrock on these walls, leading to a huge gap in the corners and between the studs and the sheet rock (some kind of metal band has been used to brace the sheetrock rather than screws into the studs) and that is a fire code violation because now smoke and air and fire can flow freely between the studs. (I can't pretend to understand any of it but I did glean some shreds of information that I will pass on to you).
However, if the roofing crew is indeed made up of politically allied Mexicans, rather than Mexican-Americans who live in Texas and travel around the country doing fast and economical (charging $33 a square foot opposed to $140) installations then maybe Nick has a valid argument. Maybe there is an injustice I'm ignorant of. Or is globalization good for commerce and real estate in general. Would these cottages be affordable if not for low wage roofers? I try to introduce myself to one of the roofers but am ignored. Another one lifts a 3/4'' sheet of plywood with one arm and drags it through the dirt. I grab the other end and he stops and looks at me with his dark eyes peering through the hood of his sweatshirt. He could be Mexican but I'll never know. "No." he says simply and I let go. He drags the plywood away alone. There is a barrier between these tropical Central Americans and my pale skinned companeros.
In the meantime, I'm trying to figure out when I can jokingly say, "We probably won't be getting to the cabinets today." That moment never arrives because the day begins in chaos and ends in tribulation but for those who want to know what cabinets I'm referring to, they are the cabinets that I was originally dispatched to instal, the cabinets that didn't exist on the job site and won't exist for several weeks. Those are the cabinets I'm talking about, which brings me to the section of this memoir where I bring to task my temp agency, the inept Work a Day hall where bad attitudes are required and every junkie can patiently await a job from a condescending dispatcher. The woman, Kim, who had called me during my Library retreat, had offered me a job "Installing cabinets, simple, if you know how to use a measuring tape...little blocks of wood...etc...you say you have carpentry experience so are you interested?"
to be continued....
We're standing in a cold second story apartment complex under construction. I don't know what I'm doing but I need the money and as long as I don't break a window or lose my temper then I'll probably get paid.
"Do you have carpentry experience?" the temp agent had asked.
"You bet. I wrote the code book for the White House. Frame to finish," I had lied with a straight face, desperate for money, tired of my principles getting in my way. So I ended up here at these apartments, on the clock, wasting money looking for my hammer, living the dream like the roofers from Honduras...
"If you don't like it you can suck my dick," Sings Bill as the Blood for Blood song coming from his phone speaker reaches a guttural climax.
I smile uneasily and motion my hands down.
"Ok," I whisper in my library voice.
I can hear workers downstairs banging nails in blue plastic power outlet boxes. Latino roofing crews put more Americans out of work on ladders outside. Their banging on the roof comes in morse code patterns: bang-bang-bangbangbang.
"I don't give a fuck if people hear. I'm a recovering addict," says Bill. "That means I smoke crack off the clock. Hahaha! Look!" Bill reviews his contact list in spite of my obvious discomfort. "I can get pills from him, meth from him, that skank still owes me money, cocksucker, cocksucker....pot...whatever."
"Ok. So you have contacts. I get it," I say with a fake smile.
"Fuck that. I don't deal no more. I used to pimp pill whores out of my pad. Three fucking years while I was recovering from my bulging disk. Pills and pimpin'. Fucked up, yo! I got pictures..."
Our other coworker, Nick, has been grinning nearby and suddenly pipes up in a clear and loud voice, "When I was serving time, because my public pretender was a jerkoff...I..."
Bill interrupts him as though he wasn't even speaking, "Look at this bitch. Look at that snatch!"
He shows me a self taken duck lips picture (in a mirror (could be fake)) of a twenty something girl. She's got a tattoo "BITCH" on the area above her panty line and below her navel.
"Her tattoo says 'Bitch'," says Bill, in case I missed it. He scrolls up her thin (devoid of subcutaneous fat, indicative of meth use) hip-less stripper body.
"What's her name?" I say, to humanize her in my mind.
"Jen. Her stage name was Kitten or Charlene or something...She was a rock hard stripper/prostitute."
"Escort," I clarify. "They like to be called escorts."
"I don't give a fuck," says Bill in what is his trademark phrase, impossible to imitate, almost musical, definitely rhythmic rap based, uttered with emphasize on the fuck and with almost monotone expression and deep loathing for whomever is in his presence, his accent almost southern but not quite innocent of Northern heritage. His routine arguments with the roofers begin not with "Ah-mee-go" but with "A-mee-go" as in "No, a-mee-go, you can't have that fuckin' ladder cause we gotta get this shit done." His phrasing is as beautifully and expertly executed as an Italian aria by Puccini.
"I mean...," I begin before Bill interrupts me with his last and final word on the subject.
"No! The only thing they're escorting is my cock into their vagina."
Then Bill and Nick begin to shuffle/dance around in their big steel toe boots singing, "If you don't like it you can suck my dick..." over and over, the sawdust from a hundred Honduran roofers is stirred from the plywood floors into my delicate nostrils and I begin to sneeze.
"I'm gonna play some baseball after woooork. Hoooo! Mothafuckah!" sings Bill, referring to smoking a pipe loaded with drugs. (He made good on this promise)
"If you don't like it, you can suck my dick..." sing the two of them, stomping around, as I sneeze and wipe my dripping nose with an oil soaked rag.
By the end of the day, a day filled with major and minor mistakes, misunderstandings, malicious attacks, malingering, misery and malaise, I calculate the three of us earned $180 ($60 each) while the foolish contractor paid $370 (total) and I estimate that if they (the contractor) had come down to the temp agent and paid all the employees there $10 each to NOT go to their job site, then they would save at least $100 and whatever they have to pay to fix our blunders, so possibly $500 of savings.
But that's only my opinion and my experience at construction sites has always been burdened by my endless pondering to determine the best plan of action. This irreconcilable clash manifests itself when I am tasked with fitting 2X4 wood coated with fire proof putty into a corner in order to comply with safety codes regarding draft stops and smoke chambers. I cut the 4 pieces of wood to fit but neglect to write the corresponding location on each piece of wood so when I return to the room (the saw being 100 yards away) I must fit each piece of wood into the space to determine where it goes. Then there is sheetrock that is jaggedly preventing the wood from seating all the way into the corner. So, after hunting down my hammer, I chip the sheetrock away and pound the wood into place, planning to remove the wood once I hunt down the fireproof putty. Enter Bill:
"WHAT THE MOTHERFUCKER?? ARE YOU STILL WORKING ON THIS?"
He's screaming, I believe, because he's learned that if you are yelling then you are considered valuable. But if the boss doesn't hear him yell then it would be pointless so he has to really scream for his voice to be heard down below in the boss trailer. It's worked so far because he's had a few weeks on this one job and now he's earning overtime, a gross violation of the agency's frugal methods. However, his insistence that he "Knows every motherfucking thing about construction" has been put in serious doubt by some of his commands and the subsequent outcome.
"I'm almost...." I begin...
"HOLY SHIT! YOU DIDN'T PUT ANY CAULKING ON THESE!"
"Not yet. I..."
"WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING HERE IF YOU CAN'T PICK UP A HAMMER?"
"Well, those...."
"WHY AREN'T THESE DONE? DO I HAVE TO DO EVERYTHING AROUND HERE?"
Bill screams this last line as loud as possible, slightly turning his head in the direction of the boss's trailer as he yells it.
"I put them up so I'd know they would fit when..."
"No. NO! IF YOU PUT THEM UP THEN HAMMER THEM THE FUCK ON! DON'T DUMMY THEM UP! DO IT ONCE!"
This remark has me laughing inwardly as we spent at least 3 hours running in comical circles as his earlier direction was totally contradicted by a code inspector.
Code Inspector: Don't put caulking on the bottom.
Bill: That's exactly what I told them not to do. GODDAMNIT!
Three hours earlier...
Oggy: So, put caulking on the bottom and the top?
Bill: Yes! DO I HAVE TO SHOW YOU HOW TO DO EVERYTHING?
Flash forward 4 hours:
"Alright." I say and get busy coating the fire proof putty onto the wood and hammering it into place. This works much easier than when I watched Nick attempt the procedure with the fire putty on the wood and the piece not yet fitted into the space. His face was covered with putty from when he had to chisel into the sheetrock to make the wood fit. Then the wood fell. The floor was littered with 3'' nails he had dropped as he tried to nail them through 1/2'' sheetrock using a 2' long framing hammer. Then he hit his thumb with the hammer.
"Motherfucker! They don't give us the right tools! If they only knew how to do it right the first time we wouldn't need to do this! Fucking Mexicans!"
This ongoing prejudice against Latino workers on the job irks me. Standing up for a people (Mexicans) I have grown to love and admire, quitting the job to protest the acute prejudice shown toward them, is precisely what has prevented me from getting a job in the first place. And now that I'm on the clock and making nearly $8 an hour, I would be a fool, a dreamy idealist, to risk that pirate's ransom, to defend the honor and memory of the unnamed Mexican. Furthermore, despite the lazy, shiftless stereotypes dogging the Mexican's legacy, they are all doing their work far more efficiently than us. True, some crew completely messed up their installation of the sheetrock on these walls, leading to a huge gap in the corners and between the studs and the sheet rock (some kind of metal band has been used to brace the sheetrock rather than screws into the studs) and that is a fire code violation because now smoke and air and fire can flow freely between the studs. (I can't pretend to understand any of it but I did glean some shreds of information that I will pass on to you).
However, if the roofing crew is indeed made up of politically allied Mexicans, rather than Mexican-Americans who live in Texas and travel around the country doing fast and economical (charging $33 a square foot opposed to $140) installations then maybe Nick has a valid argument. Maybe there is an injustice I'm ignorant of. Or is globalization good for commerce and real estate in general. Would these cottages be affordable if not for low wage roofers? I try to introduce myself to one of the roofers but am ignored. Another one lifts a 3/4'' sheet of plywood with one arm and drags it through the dirt. I grab the other end and he stops and looks at me with his dark eyes peering through the hood of his sweatshirt. He could be Mexican but I'll never know. "No." he says simply and I let go. He drags the plywood away alone. There is a barrier between these tropical Central Americans and my pale skinned companeros.
In the meantime, I'm trying to figure out when I can jokingly say, "We probably won't be getting to the cabinets today." That moment never arrives because the day begins in chaos and ends in tribulation but for those who want to know what cabinets I'm referring to, they are the cabinets that I was originally dispatched to instal, the cabinets that didn't exist on the job site and won't exist for several weeks. Those are the cabinets I'm talking about, which brings me to the section of this memoir where I bring to task my temp agency, the inept Work a Day hall where bad attitudes are required and every junkie can patiently await a job from a condescending dispatcher. The woman, Kim, who had called me during my Library retreat, had offered me a job "Installing cabinets, simple, if you know how to use a measuring tape...little blocks of wood...etc...you say you have carpentry experience so are you interested?"
to be continued....
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