Thursday, February 17, 2005
Two shots today, one in each bicep, a Hep B in the seahorse and a Pneumovax to the phoenix. The phoenix hurts like hell. Can't lift my shoulder bag with either style or grace. Throat hurts. Wonder how that came about. Last night asked Vanessa for a ride to work, offered her ten bucks a week to drive 1/3 mile through a rough neighborhood that makes the papers often enough. The bitch said no and went sailing tits-first out into the night, up the block, to see her drunken boytoy. Thank you for being a friend, you dumb hystrionic cunt. Can't help a little righteous manipulation, but will get to that in a bit. The night before, I got the stuffing beat out of me by this small demented man. Socked me in the left eye and made neck-snapping contact with the same temple, and scratched me up like a wildcat. (Nobody seemed to care about this event one way or the other, but I was asked if I wanted to come in early.) Went home, slept, got up at eight p.m., fucked around, and asked Vanessa about the ride business. Shot down and pissed off, I called this poor man I met in AA, and he agreed to take me over if I could go at ten p.m. That' s one more hour of Babel than is acceptable to me, but I took him up on his offer. As we pulled up to the front of the facility, I saw a police car, lights twirling, in the lot of the apartment buliding across the street. That's when I got this cildishly brilliant idea. Understand that I was a woman without keys. I'd left them in the house, andhaving exhausted all amateur lockpick efforts, had to knock on the back door to get in. Vanessa answered, sneering like Elvis. That was the moment the idea fleshed into paper, a note on the refrigerator door. It had to do with the possibility of police wanting to speak to me, and included instructions to let me know when I could call them back. Police? Yes, our graceless public servants, investigating muggings and such as time permits, halfway up the ladder of criminal intent. And muggings? Yeah, that was me, the hapless vic in scrubs (they thought I was a nurse, maybe had money?), jumped by four girls in puffy coats and eyes like mad beans in their heads, three Mexican and one black, maybe twelve, fifteen, never could tell kids' ages...one was almost six feet tall, though, I'd remember her).Hit my head hard on the concrete but didn't seek medical treatment, cuz I didn't have the money. Got hit in the torso, mostly. Gave as good as I got, though, four of them on me. Feel sorry about that, you blubbardly hag. She lies, has lied all along. We have dirt on each other. I have more on her than she has on me, we recognise this. So why would I lie? Because I felt like it. It's not often that I do. So it's the short version of the Serentiy Prayer: FUCK it. The day I awaken not gutshot by yet longing for the past and a chance to change it is the day I think I might rise again. babbling horse
Monday, February 14, 2005
correct all of the typoes and file that shallow sketch away. there is a point there maybe, or maybe not,
Meltdown Friday night. The glibly conniving staffing woman first refused to honor my request that irregular aides--those not permanently assigned to one side or the other--rotate through East Hell. Then, post-meltdown, I located her, explained that once again I'd been stuck with someone who baldly refused to work with me (and one irksome little patient in particular, who was on my hall that evening), and indicated that I could't function well--"for the patients", I said--in such a "hostile" work environment. Said I was an ex-addict, and may have implied that if my needs were not met, I would relapse in a catostrophic way. That wasn't my intention--to relapse, or imply that I would. However, that's how it may well have sounded. This woman stood there and lied to me, though. When I volunteered to "go on the cart", she looked at me as though I were singing in Maori. I'm a CMT, and permitted by law to do this--pass pills, check and read blood sugars, but nothing any more invasive. She, the staffing woman, is also a CMT, and I have seen her "on the cart", which leads to this puzzler: why did she then deny that any CMTs were allowed to push pills and prick fingers? The most obvious answers aren't terribly attractive. Though not in a catastrophic way, I did then proceed to relapse, on booze. I'd been planning to go to the folks' stead for what was left of the weekend; and I thought about this, in a way, as I trudged through tearful daylight to the Speedway to purchase a cheap twelve-pack. My plan was to cancel the visit, drink a few to sleep, and allow myself to be awakened by the roommate's kids later, when they would arrive to participate in the state's second most prevalent religion, basketball (smoking cigarettes is the first). I'd sit up, turn the volume down low, watch UKY rout whomever, and go on back to sleep. This is pretty much how it shook out, with a carb binge thrown in for further trouble. When I arrived at the damply cold duplex and settled into my newly darkened room (Indian throws pinned up over the windows, black with white elephants and zebras done in stripe), I confirmed what I'd been suspecting--Ma Nature had shown up for a visit. That may have, or not, explained a few things. But I still called and cancelled, agreeing to let myself be picked up on Sunday, yesterday. Then arrived there and did nothing but sleep some more, with agonizing dreams to spell me. There is this boy, now a man of forty, forty-one, from my childhood. He was a good boy--bright to brilliant, darkly handsome, a gifted competitive swimmer, earned an appointment to Annapolis, I think. When I was fourteen, I had my first deep and abiding crush, on this guy, who'm I'll call Will. He was a lifeguard at the neighborhood pool. I had a small set of girlfriends, third-tier populars, who also crushed on this young man. It would never occur to me that Will might have been shy. Though not a partier himself, Will was given more respect than you'd think partiers were capable of lading out. No one fucked with him, and plenty of Popular chicks wanted to, literally. It's quite possible that he was then a virgin, but that's not the point. I sometimes thought I saw him looking in my direction. I was the quietest of my little group, and found it difficult to consider that he might have actually have been looking at me, and not, say, Carol with the green eyes who looked like Most Popular Jenny. Sometimes he smiled first, maybe said something. I don't remember. But when the tenth-graders went over to high school, he took himself a popular girlfriend for awhile. No clue what may have, or not, happened there. Shortly afterwards, I found speed and punk and a suitable stoner crush (the thought of actually speaking to JD himself, the crush, a local rich kid with loaded genes, made me similarly chokefaced as the idea of actually speaking first to Will). Will was forgotten for the time being. Two years after that, I crashed a holiday party thrown by one of the boys' contemporaries. I was waiting for my date, also a couple of years ahead. As I coopted a love seat and a tall glass of whiskey, looking around for JD as I waited, Will sat down with me. This is what he said: "I really liked you then, but, you know...Tammy...". I told him that yes, I did know. I didn't say that there will always be a Tammy--now I am crying, dammit, rubbing salt into my eczematic sores-- --and eventually, my date, a Stonewith brother, showed up, and so did JD, and we chatted some, and then all went black. I was later told that I had to be dragged out of there and parked in the back of the brother's van. The brother returned to the party. When I came to with my shirt wet, I asked him about it--he said, not without anger, that someone had probably thrown water or beer on me. A few years later, I entertained the thought that I might have pissed myself. And somehow cut hell out of my right eyebrow. I have a scar there that remains today, though it has grown pale and vague. The story of WIll ends, probably, with his marrying not Grace but the bucktoothed, sandy-haired, electric-blue-eyed Carla. I dream of him often these days. Before she moved to Australia, one of my two closest associated from that period, lost long years back in SouthEastern PA, told me that she'd seen Will around Philadelphia on a few occasions, that he was working as an engineer, and that he had lost most of his hair. A minor loss, I think, given the range, amplitude and duration of losses that one might experience, for whatever reason or confluence thereof, over twenty years. I'd like to, like to, like to. Get off Klonopin, for one thing, so that I might do some necessary moving. Upwards, sideways, maybe back in time. Tell Will that I'm sorry for whatever else transpired that night, a richness of embarrassments for me, I have no doubt. Tell the man, now a contented father and husband, that he had in hand the chance to allow me to redeem myself and I was the one who chose to turn away. Ask him if he ever thought of me, and would he like to have coffee someplace quiet... DAMN. JUST ANOTHER VERSION OF THAT NO-MOTION PONY. --c h
Tuesday, February 08, 2005
There is this girl. Woman. Whatever. Her name is Saundra, vicious speed machine of blotch-faced death, alive on cigarettes and bad air and I'd-fuck-you-up-honey-on-the-outside-ness, you are nothing to me. This is someone I cross paths with, a peer. I recognise her from a facility I worked at two years and some ago; she recognises an inept drunk and addict. Regardless of my tox screen results, she sees, untimately, a feckless doormat. Plus, I look kinda funny: three weeks ago, some wannabe wigga did a hack job on my bangs. My frown lines are all over the place. Three years ago, I'd get carded every now and then, and almost always, taken for twenty-five. So I look almost as crazy as I am, face but a scarred and troubled heart. The other day, someone, claiming to be fifty-one, took me for forty-five. I was too exhausted to react. I saved that for later. But then again, this is supposed to be about Saundra from the Other Side. That would be the East Side (of this particular nursing home). They abuse, technically, their charges at the common breakfast table, hollering at them, implying punishment: honey you don't eat your breakfast, there be no pop for you. The ones who spit and fight, who cuss with uncommon ferocity and color--Chinless Mimi sits at more than arm's length and laughs. Saundra is brash, no-nonsense, and almost did it again yesterday morning, ordered me out of the way, that is, as I was trying to convince a puke-addled old man with Alzheimer's and lord knows whatever else--dementias are often layered, Chinese-menu style--to remove his puke-covered shirt that lay beneath the jonny I'd given him to protect me as I lay down. How do you short-circuit a Saundra? She is tall and appears that muscular kind of thin. She might be doing ups along with the cigarettes and coffee. There are kids at some point in her life: her flat-brown face is blotched to black in the middle, this sometimes called the mask of pregnancy. She has buck teeth stained yellow, and Buckwheat-looking hair, the picture of Dirty South efficiency. Somewhere deep in the pockets of her leather car coat, one can imagine a small gun. She dealt with this fellow tenderly and fast. He complied with her ministrations, and I could see where someone he didn't know could be a hindrance. But she didn't have to BARK, although she thought to add a "please" when she told me to get out of her way. Is this good, or the result of a good talking-to by the Powers that Are? I don't recall asking them to. I avoid Saundra, coming, going, sideways. But back when I rambled naively on about wanting to be humble and wipe shit for the health-care equivalent of minimum wage (9.40/hr for someone with seven years' experience and school factored in there somewhere), I had no idea that THOSE ppl from my past three years would be there, and that even if they were, that I would so easily be found lacking and therefore subject to overriding bullyshit whenever I was around. WHAT WAS I THINKING? In this line of work, in this area, and probably in many midsize and up cities in the nation, there will always be the vicious, people upwards of thirty, forty, acting like mean little kids. I'm saying, hello! I had my own set of mean little kids. I need no more exposure to the mindfuck equivalent of gum in the hair, tacks on the seat, graffiti on the bathroom walls. I am real fucking tired of having to figure out a new way to get home every school day just to avoid the bullies and their self-serving shite. The bus? It was there, but with more bullies per square inch, and this in a confined space in which the driver inevitably took the side of the bully squadron. Humility, then? I got none: if this attitude were authentic, I' d just shrug, maybe smile more than usual, and go about my job with my nose to the necrotic grindstone. Compassion? I got it for the patients, except for the ones that bitch, lie, and are "particular", meaning that they each have their own way of doing things, procedures that aren't easy to begin with. I can understand book-logic to this behavior--control v. hopelessness--but all of this understanding ends when the particularities start to take more than an hour and I still have eight more heavy patients to "do", as they say in the Warehouse of Necrotic Bodies and Decaying Souls. Borderlines are real sensitive, and narcissists don't like to work, period, unless that work brings them wealth and glory. Man, am I one skill=deficient puppy, most likely in the wrong line of work. But there's an upshot: and then you die. horse as dog
Sunday, February 06, 2005
Borderline and Narcissist: these are some bad cards. Figure in depression, disthymia on the best of days, and the result is a piddling little bag of shit and air. I'm gonna cuss here, b/c this post ain't gonna make the Post of the Day. It almost never does, so fuck it. That is how I am feeling. I could do some dissociation now. It is interesting, and almost fun. I'd like to develop some alters. One would have to be violent by design. That way I could--I could--I could--never mind what I could do, but I'd almost surely get away with it, and the punishment would be necessarly light, perhaps almost cushy. Then again, someone might introduce this blog into prosecutory evidence. My goose would be cooked, regardless of whether I had grown any alters or not, and my gander would be fried. I'd have to do time with more mean people who would work me over good. Might make a woman out of me, instead of this ineffectual pus-bag. Fucked either way--the psycho's Catch-22. So. yesterday morning I took five trazadone, one Klonopin, a couple of Benadryl (mild sleep-inducing properties) and a few sips of beer. By the time I had arrived at the beer, I was already on the blessed fringes of a hypnogogic state. I leaned back, curled up, slept, and when my bladder informed me that I had to get up, I pushed my purple silk scarf (c: Goodwill, 1986) up into my wild greasy dreads--hadn't seen water or shampoo for days--, exposing the strips of tape on my increasingly angry forehead, and ran for the bathroom. And found Vanessa, whom I thought to be missing in action. She was curling her hair in the mirror. Vanessa is vainer than I am--if she lost her gut, she'd be a really nice-looking woman. She could pass for a happy--crow's feet=a life full of laughter--28 year old. I guess she caught a look at me in the mirror and freaked al little. With good reason. She let me use the toilet, and later left a message for me on the fridge. She'd used a heavy hand to express kind sentiments. Scary stuff, but I was so drugged that I didn't think about it until I'd slept again, this time for eight hours. I awakened to a clean, dimly-lit place. That was good. I could sleep some more, curled up in a splint that somehow appeased the pain in my hip. Since the onset of this pain--maybe three months ago, and horrific from jump--I've found myself in odd positions. I should be sleeping on my back--no sleep-marks to contend with later, but I guess I don't feel secure enough to do this. (Once I had shared a pricey apartment with this guy, an engineer, and he snuck his girlfriend in as the third party in the arrangement, a very visible ghost who wasn't paying shit. It took me about three months to introduce my comprehension of the situation--what I wanted to say, actually, was something like this: I ain't paying that golddigger's rent. But I did the weasel, of course, cloaked beneath the rubric of diplomatid behavior. The golddigger slept in a lot. She was a busty second-generation Italian who bore more than a passing resemblance to Sophia Loren. One time I passed their room--he had gone to work--and I looked in to see her, sleeping calmly on her back, one side of her face turned toward sunlight, and smiling. I'd come close to the edge of a story when I saw that, but never tried to write it. I retain this image more than ten years later. The principessa, boobs and high heels and canny faux submission. There was much I might have learned from her, but she had dismissed me early on. That might have had to do with my sneaking her wine and Nutella. We had it out on the day that we were all moving. Shortly afterward, she pulled a cute one--my mover had come and gotten my stuff ready to go, and when we had humped it all into my new residence, I found that I had forgotten a few important items. So, on the mover's clock, we went back, and I found that Sophia Golddigger had locked the place. I didn't have the key I needed, for I'd given that to Engineer Boy to turn in. I was really really pissed off, but I went through my bag and discovered an old driver's license--as good as a key with a lot of locks, even deadbolts. I used it. I took the stuff I left. And I left the place unlocked, and hoped that someone would break in and steal their shit. I felt good about this. I had money in hand, and tipped the movers for their extra time. Sophia was secure. I have always, until the onset of this hip trouble, slept on my stomach. There's a moral there, but this place--la biblioteca'--is too loud for me to think to find it. ??? If I sleep on my back, will I learn security? If I get my wee bedroom looking tight, will my mental condition improve? I've read that the appearance of one's surrounds is a working barometer of one's interior processes. Today, that reading strikes truth in me. I wish that I could buy me a twelve-pack and hole up and watch my Iggles all night long, but I have to go that place, where my own appearance seems to reflect my messed-up mind at work. There is the hair, twice butchered and bangs still in need of traction. There are the frown lines, and odd little smile lines below the mouth and on both sides. There are other things that can be fixed by an "inexpensive mini-facelift".asically makes a little cut and goes in to hoist up the sag with something like fishing line. 1,800 bucks for this procedure. If I could see some real, live patients of doctors who do this particular trick, walking and talking and all that, I might start to save up for it: if my appearance begins to improve, maybe I will reflect less of the negativity that seems to plague me these days, and I might reflect a more peaceful attitude. --although I'd probably be reflecting an absolute fucking lie. old hoss, due for a cop-killer between the aging eyes
Friday, February 04, 2005
After getting a pass on the night shift in favor of doing yet another escort, I returned to my spiderhole--increasingly so, that--and took the usual 400 mgs. of trazadone, and all of those milligrams combined couldn't dent me unconscious. Knowing that I would have to get up at about six to do yet another escort today, I swallowed four hundred more. No lectures. I know what I'm doing here--pharmacology is one of about three things I know a lot about, among trillions of other things squared. I could not get comfortable on either side, and turning over onto my stomach was a no-go, an insectile series of discrete movements instinctually designed to minimise as much as possible my hip pain. So I wound up on my back, thoughts gibbering into one another, fragments of thoughts telescoping to nonsensical packages of worry. I could feel my femoral pulses through a sturdy comforter, so I moved my hands away. Eventually I fell to something like sleep, and at about 4:20 in the morning, awoke again, heart pumping sugar water.Couldn't go back to sleep, but for some reason remained in the bed. The cut-through traffic, from Vur-Sales to Alexandria Drive, was near incessant. An hour and a half later, as I hurled myself out of bed, I had this thought: I want my mother. I had accumulated bad bad thoughts like some people accumulate Hummel figurines, plastic surgeries, social diseases. Down for full-time nights, I couldn't ask my folks to pick me up after work one day and take me back to the Lex the following night. It takes eleven bucks in gas for one round trip, and now neither of them can drive in the dark--their eyes are going. Asking them to come and get me, only to let me sleep and eat and play with the little animals and maybe go to church: an exploitation. But but but I felt trapped, by that full-time business, by having to walk through a dangerous little honeycomb of mostly Mexican apartment buildings, by listening to call bells, by chancing the death of True, my favorite dog, before I could be loosed to get to see her. It was as though I were in a position to chew off my own head. I'd been there before, had tried to reason my way out of that place with those platitudes that are found in a secession of church basements across America, with foxhole prayer, with the Short Version of every program that would have tried to adjust my purview. No luck every time. And there was I, putting bare feet to a rank, cold carpet, most likely having dreamed that I'd been begging some unseen person to call me in sick, or of actually being in an emergency room, imploring some health person to call the job, have them tell whoever took the call that I'd been assaulted in a particularly vicious manner. I'm going to start a band. Call it Baby 81, if someone hasn't already. As much as I disenjoy children, that's one appealing little creature. Nine couples enacting some bible story: each wanted a part of the kid, a darkskinned male infant with a black smear of egg between his eyebrows, this to ward off evil. I am disenjoying these particular children, a noisy bunch, in the downtown library. I would like to drop each of them over the edge of the atrium, I think it is called, and see what kind of noise they make then. The melon, bursting, the wet kerplops. I can't do this much longer. I need a computer of my own. Typing is faster and easier than putting pen to paper. But if I were to be gifted with such a machine, Vanessa--evil roommate--would doubtlessly spill sticky drink and Saliva au Grease all over the keyboard, and murderise my hard drive--she knows just enough to do that, and I think she would. I want my mother. About as long as I've been posting here, I've referred to her as 'the mother', but today, I want the caregiver, the warm thin little figure bearing warm cola on ice chips, yoghurt on the side, miraculously bearing the beginnings of yet another habit--Lortabs, Percodan for my right hip, which is beyond the grasp of the usual OTC kidney-killers. I may be flipping through roles, each as dehumanising as the next, but I want darkness, the whir of a small indoor fan, good drugs for a bad life getting worse as every day pops up again like that infernal clown figure. I want dogs at the foot of that broad clean bed. Their smell is not a bother. True's anal glands are dripping now. She has cataracts, and barks and coos, expresses herself wantonly, because she can hear herself no longer and has no idea when to stop. A queen-sized steak, medium-rare. An ultimate makeover and official change of name. This non-stop strugglin is wearing me to chicken-fleshed gristle, and yes, this is all about me, all of it except for the part last night when Vanessa wouldn't get off the phone. I'd wanted to call the parents. Three times, I'd tried, over the course of an hour and a half . Vanessa was herself cooing at her drunken teenage boyfriend, and as much as I wanted to break her door down I took refuge in Wise Chicken Mind: why create further trouble? At 1986A Fair Oaks Drive, trouble just about creates itself. I had this feeling that if I did not call them and talk to them calmly, that they would die. I don't magical-think too much any more (if I did, I might actually become good at it, and take some vengeance DAMN THESE KIDS). That job was closing its pincers. At one point, I'd thought that I might have the weekend off, so that Northern Dad and I could watch some Eagles together. That was what I wanted. I guess, then, that I wanted--v. transitive--too hard, that the want had gone back on itself and become a needle-toothed vicious thing. I want some coddling now. Who knows, I might be nice in return. Someone to rub my big back with cool Asian flowers, drop some green on me and promise me that "it", whatever "it" might be, would once again be "all right". Never mind the fact that quantity "it" has a long and trusted history of being all wrong. Baby 81 Horse, so very tired.
Tuesday, February 01, 2005
Today was unexpectedly rough. This chinless young lady from the other side got drafted to come over and work with me on the first group, as this collection of individuals is called. Chinless lady came with lipstick, attitude, a flat ass, and rumours generated there about me. I'm 38, she's about 22: do the math. I could be biomom, though I don't really dig chinless men that much. One thing I have learned to heart is not to take people on other's words about them. So, the two of are assigned to shower this man. A quad, diving accident, pretty common in these parts, looks like (I used to take care of this one guy who dove into a quarry and hit his head on some kind of giant turtle. And twenty years later, he's still talking about eating pussy). This guy is A/Ox3, so we have to do what he says--this idiotic impromptu transfer method, involving two able-bodied ppl and one towel for a sling. Dude has no muscle tone at all, one person could lift him the usual way; but coming up with this method is his way of exerting control over an intolerable situation. Two girls come in with this great, insectile shower chair and do it his way. Then this chinless little twerp drives him off to the shower. I'm supposed to assist (in these situations, one usually takes the back, the other, the front--it's faster,Tupid. Wat is wong with you?) Twice, she tells me, archly down her odd bumpy nose, that [she's] got it. Says this as though looking at maggots, or somebody eating boogers. On the third 'I got it', I was out the door. Then, I copped a patient escort. She was a neat little lady, diagnoses of R/O Alzheimers, and paranoid schizophrenia. Wasn't getting a whole lot of Risperdal--she's tiny, and headed toward renal failure--but told some entertaining stories nonetheless. Lordy, I was glad to get on that bus, to be held up at the hospital because she wasn't able to pay in full for her visit to Dr. Expensive, M.D. The whole time over, I stewed: what to do? Be a rat? Try to discuss the situation--raw cliqueism among ppl in their thirties and forties, with a vigorous dose of racial tension thrown in--with a way higher up, and in a manner that wouldn't force revealing their names? Pray? Use 'Wise Mind'? Well, I used the Half-Smile, or tried to, the rest of the day. Felt like playing a trumpet, blowing up a balloon. I don't think it worked the way it was supposed to by the Almighty Linehan. Then, on some right-here-right-now blast to the gut, I passed the DON's office, waited while she wound up a phone call, and asked for a moment of her time. LSS, she offered me a position on night shift. Said she'd work it out with the staffing girl. Guess I landed in Wise Mind after all. Huh. How about that, and another dollar on the hour, so, barring any administrative interference, I'll be rolling in it at 10.40/hr. Add some overtime, or another job, to not having to deal with those awful cliquesters, it's all good. (Plus, she complimented me on my work re: the night she and I worked together.) The one little LPN that had to work the whole hall had been really cool, up to this point. I asked her a couple of questions about transferring this quad guy, and she did the exasperada hing, just one stop short of turning to the wall and throwing up one crooked arm and weeping. So I dropped some heavy grammer on her, as in "She (the nasty chinless aide) and I can't work out a way to transfer Mr. X. He's very particular about these things." Her mouth opened, like a guppy's. These people can get nursing licenses, and here I am, on the edge, all that useless college behind me, treated like THAT. Exasperada, indeed. There were more than one this morning. Ppl threatening to walk and everything. Auras bumping shoulders. Well, I'm not there now. I will be, six or so hours from now, again. When I punched in today, the pending examination of my apartment was much on my mind. I actually made my bed (an anachronistic gesture harking back to class, caste, bullshit). So if I passed, the bed will be unmade. That dense little social worker will be dispatched to minister to others, and that's all good. Got the night shift. How the fuck about THAT? I think I can manage on less sleep that I've been having now, maybe ease the trazadone down, maybe see Lisa, my shrink, get some Topomax, all good drugs to ward off pounds and elicit interesting episodes of derealisation. I think the experts who see near-death experiences as neurological events are, to pun badly, dead-on. So, drop some money on me, G-man. Send me back to school again. I dig this, I dig that, I could truly dig my declining years being spent on something that really moved me. Why was I so damn toopid? If there's a reason, I am deaf and blind to it. off to surf, c h
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rant of career screw-up, social retardate and bad references walking, all grown old
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