Next in the Series: The Blog

Wendell, Friday Evening

2011-09-21T11:32:00.001-04:00

My latest short film is below. It is a dramatic vignette called "Wendell, Friday Evening."

The Stirring of the Phoenix

2011-03-10T14:51:00.002-05:00

Every time I think that this blog has finally and completely bit the dust, it finds some way of making itself relevant again. In this case, it has to do with a short film I have recently made:

I have come full circle and, at 51, am starting to pursue the career I imagined for myself when I was 15. Since the "NITS" in "NITS Productions" stands for "Next in the Series," this blog seems like a reasonable venue for documenting this phase of my peripatetic existence.

I guess, as Yogi Berra supposedly said, "It ain't over 'til it's over."

After the End

2010-03-11T15:10:00.001-05:00

I've taken down the Next in the Series website and am packing in the whole notion of trying to pursue audio theater podcasting. I participated in a thread on an agent's blog a couple of years ago in which he asked the question, "How long do you go on before you give up?" Apparently, in my case, it takes a while.

I first became interested in audio theater when I was 15 or so. I had seen Jack Benny on "The Dinah Shore Show" reminiscing about Fred Allen and had then stumbled across a copy of Fred's first book, Treadmill to Oblivion, in the library in downtown Pawtucket, Rhode Island. As a result of reading the excerpts from the scripts of his various radio shows, I took a flyer at writing an audio sketch. It wasn't any good, but it was a start.

My friend Arthur got me hooked on The Firesign Theatre a few years later, and he and I ended up putting together a script about a guy who ran a fleabag in Maine. We gave him, as a pet, a lobster who had one peg leg. You can do those kinds of things with audio. I think I still have the script somewhere, but truly, nothing ever became of it.

A few years later, a friend and an acquaintance started playing around with recording some things on a four-track recorder the acquaintance had come into possession of. I was asked to join in, and we came to form an audio comedy team. We went for a two-or-so-year-long bumpy ride that had a couple of triumphs, an assortment of good times, various frustrations and disagreements, and a couple of disasters. After the group broke up, I, quite innocently and quite wrongly, tried to get everyone to make peace and reform. I saw potential in that grouping and that material. They did not. And, in retrospect, when one member of a trio consistently tries to undercut an enterprise, that enterprise has no future. In my initial enthusiasm, I think that I pushed someone to join in when he didn't want to, so he acted out in all sorts of, essentially, childish ways. I was wrong to push him and to assume that his idea of success was similar to mine.

Eight or so years ago, feeling the way a cartoon character looks after having tried to smoke a stick of dynamite, I decided to proceed on my own. Having gotten permission from my former writing partner (not the guy I had pushed when we were a trio) to use some of our old material, I plunged forward with adapting some things, rewriting others, and creating new scripts from scratch. Meanwhile, I tried to pitch the show to public radio and to satellite radio with no success. Eventually, I saw that it might work best, in the long run, as a podcast.

In the end, I found that I would be unable to put together a program of the quality that I wanted without money. I was wearing too many hats, trying to do too much myself, and not doing anything as well as I ought to have. I was also, at the same time, discovering my abilities as a novelist and short story writer and felt that I would be better served, overall, if I invested 100% of myself in those endeavors than to slow myself down with continued attention to something that it was unlikely I would ever pull off.

But that's life.

At the end of the day, I can be satisfied that I gave it a decent shot and that it just wasn't in the cards. Maybe someday I will be in a position to do some radio show or podcast, but until that day materializes, I will just hang up my spurs.

How long do you go on before you give up? Until you've run dry.

THE END

On the Move

2009-12-30T09:52:00.003-05:00

Part of why doing the podcast has suddenly become feasible is that my recording facilities have become mobile. Above is the system I've developed for transport. Below is what things look like once everything is set up.

And So

2009-11-19T09:16:00.003-05:00

The beginning begins. One piece of equipment and one piece of software have been purchased that will make it possible for production on the first episode of Next in the Series: The Podcast to begin. I hope to have the first episode, which is called "The Anniversary Schmaltz," available for download sometime in January.

In honor of that, I will endeavor to make more frequent contributions to this blog so that historians and scholars in the vast, dim future will be able to understand the genesis and development of this epoch-making project. It's been a long road, but I am determined to get these scripts recorded and available. From there, let the Fates do what they must, which is, presumably, to be fateful. The bastards.

A Small, Correctable Glitch

2009-10-27T11:14:00.002-04:00

There will be a small delay in going forward with the first episode, which is called "The Anniversary Schmaltz," because the software that I bought for editing doesn't do as much as I thought it did. Therefore, I will be acquiring Adobe Audition 3 in the next week or two.

The software that I got over the summer will still be useful, it just doesn't have the number of production features that I am going to need if I am going to realize my vision. Or my hearing, I guess, since this is an audio project.

Dreg

2009-09-15T09:34:00.003-04:00

I've decided to go ahead with the podcast using the resources available to me, probably beginning in January and continuing at a rate of one episode per month.

As part of the preparation process, I have been cutting down and then building back up an episode called "Let's Revue," which is a collection of songs and short plays. Since I had cut it back, it seemed a bit light in the short play department to me, and last week I had the idea of adapting three short stories I had written in the 1980s.

Adapting the first one, which was called "Seminar," was a piece of cake. I turned the whole thing around in two evenings--and late evenings at that. I still need to take one more pass at it, but it's in pretty good shape as it stands.

The next story I set my sights on was one called "Dreg of the Wildebeest," the story of a Neanderthal who is having a midlife crisis. This will not end up in "Let's Revue," however. As I started to do research on it yesterday, I found this bit of information at the Neanderthal listing on Wikipedia:

Steven Mithen (2006) proposes that the Neanderthals had an elaborate proto-linguistic system of communication which was more musical than modern human language, and which predated the separation of language and music into two separate modes of cognition.

Well, after reading something like that, how could I not realize that "Dreg" needed to be transformed into "Dreg: The Musical"? This is going to become a major project that might even begin life as part of the podcast, but not for some time. there's too much reading to do, too much thinking, too much pondering to find a word that rhymes with "paleolithic."

The third, story, an odd, Kafkaesque piece called "Odyssey," should be simple enough to adapt this coming weekend. I'll report more next week.

The Death of Caesar

2009-05-24T11:51:00.001-04:00

As I've been putting together a new version of Let's Revue, I've decided to revamp a piece--it's really more of a one-act play than a sketch--called "The Death of Caesar" that I wrote years ago for the audio comedy team I was then a part of. The Rule of Three version was good, and it took us to a new level of complexity in recording technique. We had a mix of it that made people almost pee themselves while listening to it that one of my then-partners--a guy who could find small items from the remotest sectors of his life in a matter of moments--managed to lose. The second mix--and both mixes were done by the same fellow--flat out sucked. Since that fellow had profound problems with passive-aggressiveness, one can imagine how accidental I find that sequence of events. And when one member of a team decides that it is good for his ego to sabotage the efforts of the whole, then you have no team at all. It is, in retrospect, no wonder that Rule of Three died.

Which is all ancient history, but was something that I've needed to get off my chest for a while now.

There was one part of the original script that always ate at me, though. Part of the premise was that it was a recording of an old time radio show called The Mercurochrome Theater on the Air Featuring Orson Wellfed, Certified Genius. It was introduced by Orson, and then the playlet was performed. I originally wrote the part of Julius Caesar based on a sketch I had written a dozen years earlier than that in which I imagined Groucho as Caesar. In the Rule of Three version, this was tempered into Caesar as Borscht-Belt comic, a part that I played. And that was fine, except for one thing. I knew, somewhere in the back of my mind, that Caesar should have been played by Orson instead.

This was reinforced when I realized, some years after Rule of Three had died, that the theme of the piece was concerned with the way that envious societies have of tearing down and betraying men of genius. And having Orson portray Caesar would only strengthen this theme.

And so, that is what I am doing. Oddly enough, there's a fair bit of material that I can retain, but I think the work as a whole has improved. Of course, I've been tweaking all of the material, trying to tighten and improve as I go along. That should always be the goal: to produce the best version possible without wallowing in egotism.

A New Approach Deserves a New Look

2009-05-18T12:42:00.003-04:00

Since I'm angling to get the show done as a podcast, I have decided to redesign the website. As part of that, I've redone the logo to reflect the notion of it being in support of a podcast. Here's what I came up with:

It's based on the original one, the one that I paid cash money for, and one that I think is wonderful. I just needed it to say the word "podcast."

And now on to the much longer process of redesigning the website.

I've also rewritten almost all of the scripts. I'm in the process of assembling a new version of "Let's Revue" so that it also reflects my interests in storytelling rather than being a collection of so-so sketches. (The sketch "Don't Get Rooked," which makes me laugh, has been retained.) I'm also debating whether the two sections of "The Quality of Marcy" are up to the standards that I hope to maintain.

A discussion with an associate led to us identifying a couple of possible trails for getting some money. There was nothing concrete, but you never know.

No Soap

2009-05-04T11:03:00.002-04:00

Once again, I've come acropper the need to raise money. I did not get the grant that I applied for.

On the plus side, I used the opportunity to refine a couple more scripts and to further develop my vision for the project and my approach. Not all bad.

So, I'm going to see if I can't come up with any other ways of raising money, with luck for the entire run of the show. Never give up hope. There always has to be hope.

Step 1 to the Future?

2009-03-27T10:23:00.002-04:00

I just dropped off my proposal to do three episodes of what had been Next in the Series: The Radio Show as Next in the Series: The Podcast. An application is not an acceptance, of course, and it is hard to predict what will happen over all.

Still, it could be a start.

I've been listening to comedy shows on BBC Radio 7 recently and am enjoying them quite a bit. Listening to these shows is reaffirming my love for the form. Audio theater might only ever be a hobby for me, but it's one that I love.

Resurrection

2008-11-18T10:51:00.003-05:00

When I first began keeping this blog, I did so because I was writing scripts for a radio show that I had hoped to produce, first on public radio and then on satellite radio. Unfortunately, although I am a person of many talents, the talent for being a producer has never been among them. And so, because of failures in money-raising and marketing, because of failures in vision and in acquiring a proper understanding of the industry I was trying to infiltrate, the venture failed.

There I was, with about a dozen scripts and nothing to do with them. I sent one script to an outfit called Shoestring Radio Theatre, and they accepted it and produced it this past September. All of which is fine.

Except that I have this inability to keep my mind from working. I get ideas, all the time about all sorts of things. I just can't restrain myself from thinking. And I've thought more about this show, and about the ways that technology has evolved, even over the short number of years that I've had this blog. And I've come to realize that I was a fool to concentrate on radio. Radio, especially the kind of radio that seeks to tell a story, is an artifact, a piece of history. The modern approach would be to produce these scripts as podcasts.

Podcasting, since it is not reliant on sponsorship, requires much smaller budgets than did a radio show. There is no inherent need for "name" guest stars for marquee value. It gets marketed in a completely different, viral sort of way.

I think this might be a possibility. I cannot, at this time, reveal too much, mostly because I don't want to jinx anything and also because my resolve to attempt this is so new that I can't say much of anything with confidence. Let's just say that I can see possibilities for production and even a source for small bits of funding, most of which would probably go into purchasing the proper amount of bandwidth.

But the wheels are turning.

My first challenge, though, is to find the right producer.

Change

2008-01-02T16:11:00.000-05:00

As time is passing, I'm seeing less and less reason for maintaining this blog. The radio series that it was meant to support never got going and even if I do manage to move forward with it as a piece of audio publishing, a new name will have to be found, something with the word "Theater" in it, just to make it marketable.

Sometimes it is important to simply make the past the past and move forward, and to that end, I have created a new blog called Are You Happy Now, Norman Mailer? which is where I shall be posting my half witticisms and myopic insights from now on. All are welcome to join me there.

And if you decide to not come along, thanks for your patronage, and I'll see you on the other side of the mirage.

Len

The Continuing Saga of Next in the Series

2007-12-28T14:15:00.000-05:00

Although, some months ago, I had to admit to myself that I couldn't make Next in the Series work as a radio show (mainly because it's too difficult to convince the guys with the money to take a chance on it), I haven't been able to give up the dream entirely. I really like many of the scripts I wrote and think they work best as audio plays. And I like the medium. There are things that can be done in audio that no other medium can achieve.

And so, I've started to think about it again, only, this time, I plan to concentrate on the world of audio publishing rather than radio.

I'm still faced with some of the old problems: lack of money and actors. However, I could approach the whole series differently, more piecemeal. It would cost less to get started, far less. And I could put my toe in the water by producing (or publishing, if you will) just one to start with and follow up with others if there is any sign of a demand.

I doubt that anything will come of this soon. It's all very back burner kind of stuff. However, after a period of thinking it dead, it's fun to be thinking about pursuing it again.

Dad

2007-12-10T08:45:00.000-05:00

My father died 25 years ago today. He was 56 at the time and I was 23. I've been without him longer than I had him.

I'm not sure, at the moment, what I have to say about him that I didn't already say in an earlier post. Still, it's an important milestone, a reminder of the fragility of life and the passage of time.

25 years gone, and I still miss him and regret that he never got to meet either my wife or son. It's a shame because they would have liked him and he them.

But life goes on. There is always a hole inside you that used to be filled by the presence of the person who died, but you almost get used to that emptiness, because, if you didn't, you'd end up in a padded cell. And it would be a world full of people in padded cells.

I miss you, Pop, wherever you are.

And Will It Include Forwarded Jokes?

2007-12-05T11:28:00.000-05:00

Okay. I'm going to let one of a variety of cats out of the bag. I work in the English Department at Emory University. Now, since my employer is rarely mentioned here and since I have no problem with Emory, the English Department, or my coworkers, or the professors, or the students, I'm not particularly worried about getting dooced. In fact, all-in-all, it's not a bad gig, and I've enjoyed working in an environment that puts the acquisition of knowledge ahead of the acquisition of cash. In short, good job, good people, good institution.

I had to mention it today, though, because, in order to properly discuss that which I have on my mind, I have to refer to one of our professors and a volume he has co-edited. The book is called, The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, Volume IV, (co-edited by Emory's Ron Schuchard, who is, in addition to being a crackerjack editor and scholar, is a truly nice person) and it won a prestigious award presented by the Modern Language Association of America. And reading about this book led me to wonder whether this kind of tome is completely doomed and if it were to survive, how would it have to develop.

Because the thing is that people no longer have the kind of correspondence that Yeats had. The traffic in letters dwindles and the volume of emails, instant messages, and text messages grows. A generation is already growing that will never receive a meaningful letter in the mail and who will never use a pen and paper to sort through themselves and to attempt to explain who they are to another person distant who attempts to do the same thing in return.

For letters work differently than email or any of its electronic brethren. The best letters are part of an exchange, and they form a drawn out and contemplative conversation, often about a wide range of subjects. Emails and IMs and texts tend to be short and direct and tend to lack depth. They are skewed toward screens and moments and shudder and quake under the burdens of complexity and subtlety. People can't even be bothered to type out words like "you" and "for," and the ubiquity of abbreviations and emoticons make a mockery of any pretense to depth.

Part of the praise for the Yeats Letters concerns the way that the letters show Yeats's personal development and the development of his thoughts and intellect. Would a collection of emails have the same force? Would the transcript of a chat session provide the same insight? Would it even be sensible?

It is quite possible that I'm entirely turned around on this thing, but it seems to me that something of interest and value is being lost. And I don't think it can be recovered. These sorts of collections, with their insights and delights, will be extinct, and I think, in a small way, it will be another instance in which the servers will conquer the served.

The Pumas and the Cravasses

2007-11-29T22:00:00.000-05:00

As I have remembered on this blog before, I once not exactly met, but encountered, Tommy Smothers.

I was working in a bookstore on Concourse B of what was then Hartsfield Airport in Atlanta, and in walks Tommy Smothers. He was the only customer and I was the only customee (or employee) in the place, and I noticed and recognized him immediately. He set to work in browsing the fiction section and soon enough turned up at the cashwrap with a Cormac McCarthy trade paperback in his hand. (I don't remember anymore if it was All the Pretty Horses or Blood Meridian or what. I just remember appreciating that he didn't read crap.)

Well, it became obvious from his manner that he didn't want to be recognized. He just wanted to buy his book and get on his plane, so I just rang him up and took his money and made the proper change. And that was fine. I was glad to have encountered him. My only regret is that I didn't get to say the one, tiny thing I wanted to say to him: "Thanks for the pumas in the cravasses."

This YouTube video explains it all. Enjoy.

Kindle Schmindle, Give Me a Book

2007-11-29T15:48:00.000-05:00

Courtesy of Baby Got Books, I have been keeping abreast of the early reactions to Amazon's new e-book reader, The Kindle. I have to say that I'm not impressed.

I don't see where the improvement is. You never have to recharge a book, and if you accidentally leave your book on the subway, your entire library isn't gone. Books are too easy to be replaced like that. And that's what the makers of these products don't seem to get: Books are easy.

The way most technology gets sold to us is with the notion that it will make life easier. That tends to not be true once you scratch below the surface, but is true enough up front that everyone is willing to buy into it. And some things are an improvement. The vinyl record improved on the wax cylinder, and the 45s and 33s improved on 78s. There is still some debate over whether the warmth of vinyl is outweighed by the clarity of CDs, but that is a small point.

The only improvement that the Kindle can point to is capacity. Up to 200 books can be stored on one device. The problem is this: Do you really need to carry around 200 books all the time? And what happens if it is lost or stolen? Or the battery dies, which it inevitably will? Will they keep trying to sell you Kindle after Kindle? Of course they will. That's the Corporate American Way. There will be endless software updates and threats from hackers. If it is digital, somebody out there can figure out a way to get into it and fuck it up royal.

And this is, ultimately, the difference between The Kindle and the iPod. iPods are not dependent on you going to the iTunes Store. That is one possibility, but not the whole shooting match. I have almost 500 songs on my iPod and almost all of them, at least 99% were downloaded from CDs, not from iTunes. And while other people certainly have greater percentages of songs downloaded from Apple, they are not cornered into getting their content that way.

Maybe The Kindle will take off, although it's not looking so good right now. That's fine. The world is going to go its own way whether I like it or not. But I will stick with the humble book. It's a beautiful piece of technology, a small, wonderful thing that's easy to use, never needs updating, and works just as well outside the grid as in it.

And it's also compatible with my iPod. Take that, Kindle!

He's at It Again

2007-11-26T10:22:00.000-05:00

I've gone and done it. I've created yet another blog. This one is devoted to politics and my reactions to things I read in The New York Times. It is called I'm Not Neutral, I'm Against Everybody, and it exists partly because I thought up the title.

It will also give me a place in which to post my rants and reactions to the passing scene, as well as the things I get ticked off about on The Times's website. From the Bush Administration to Stanley Fish, all my ranting will now be found at I'm Not Neutral. I will continue to update this blog with the usual dreck.

Why not subscribe to both this blog and the new one? It's quick and easy and you can even read the feeds on your iGoogle and My Yahoo! homepages. Why bother with bookmarks when you can have the bookmarks bother with you! Get a free subscription today!

Willie the Shake

2007-11-19T10:44:00.000-05:00

I just finished reading Bill Bryson's brief biography of Shakespeare, Shakespeare The World as Stage. The volume, an entry in the "Eminent Lives" series that is now appearing under the Harper and Atlas Books imprints, is a good, straightforward primer in Shakespeare's biography. Bryson writes clearly and entertainingly about what is known and unknown about Shakespeare the man and avoids the mountains of speculation and "he must haves" that litter most accounts.

Interestingly, Bryson has become enough of a celebrity writer that his moniker takes up more than three times the space on the cover than Shakespeare's. It's one of the few times in which the flea gets bigger billing than the dog.

My favorite part was the final chapter, in which Bryson calmly and systematically demolishes the notion that those plays and poems were written by anyone other than William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, writer, actor, and businessman. In doing this, and in bringing his celebrity to bear on it, he has performed an important service to both the world of literature and the cause of sanity everywhere.

For here is the truth, and it is one of the truthiest truths that I can impart: The idea that someone, anyone, besides Shakespeare wrote those works is bunkum. If you've had that thought, cleanse it from your mind. There are no other "candidates." It is all an illusion, a pretentious and muddleheaded delusion. There was never even a whiff of this alleged conspiracy at the time, and the Englishman of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period was as gossipy as a smalltown newspaper. Shakespeare was a major literary figure at the time, well known and written about. The idea that he was the beard for some nobleman (the most popular formulation) would have been all over in no time. Instead, the one item of gossip about Shakespeare we have from the time had to do with him outflanking Richard Burbage when the chance arose to consort with a young lady.

The notion that anyone but the son of a glover from a town in Warwickshire wrote those plays, poems, and dedications was popularized by a woman named Delia Bacon in the 19th Century. She ended her days in a looney bin, as should anyone else who propagates this tripe. The time has come to stamp out this fallacy and to come to appreciate how genius is just as, if not more, likely to occur among the masses as it is in the mansions.

Are You Happy Now, Norman Mailer

2007-11-16T10:00:00.000-05:00

This is almost like a meme or a virus or something, but I have to post this video that I saw on Baby Got Books. It's from, of all things, an episode of The Gilmore Girls, and nobody is more surprised about me typing that title than I am. Just give it a watch:

RIP Norman Mailer.

My Inbox Overfloweth

2007-11-13T10:12:00.000-05:00

The inbox for my Yahoo! account has taken the aspect of the legendary Sargasso Sea, and all manner of detritus has accumulated in it. When I looked at it earlier this morning, I had amassed some 1800 emails in there, most of which were either headlines from The New York Times or ads or coupons or reminders to pay some bill or other. Little to be saved, much to be discarded.

And so, the trashing process has begun. I whittled the number of emails down to 1612 a few minutes ago, with only 15 surviving the cut. At that rate, it will take me somewhere around ten days to get it back to some kind of shape, although that shape will probably still be portly. Like owner like inbox.

The accumulation of virtual trash is one of the hazards of modern life. A series of magnets click on and off a number of times, and another piece of nothing blows up against your virtual shoes. Newsletters, offers, reports, threats, invitations, come ons, blow offs, all drift in like snowflakes until there's a great pile against the door and nobody's going anywhere until spring.

Unless, of course, you have a shovel. Then, you start shoveling.

Or maybe I'll just see you in the spring.

Pat: Beware of Squirrels

2007-11-09T10:29:00.001-05:00

I submitted a comment in response to this blog post on the Opinionator at The New York Times yesterday, but I don't think I made the cut. It is possible that they may have considered my contribution to be defamatory, so I have amended it very slightly and am publishing it here.

For those who don't wish to click over to the link, I'll just sum up the post in question. It concerned Pat Robertson's recent endorsement of Rudy Guiliani and included a quote from another blog that referred to Pat Robertson as "a political hack." My response, as amended is this:

In my opinion, Pat Robertson isn't "a political hack," he's off his chump. Can anyone seriously, with a straight face, look over Robertson various antics in recent years and not conclude that he's sanity-challenged?

That is my opinion, and I think a fair one of a "Christian" who called for the assassination of a head of state. He should just change his name to Wacky Wackerson.

President of What? Scarytown?

2007-11-08T09:36:00.000-05:00

Now that I've exposed the reason why Mike Huckabee will never be President, I thought it prudent to continue my investigation on the chances of the various candidates in both parties as the thought occurs to me. And so, today, comes my second prediction. Rudy Giuilani will never be President because he looks too much like that guy Jack from The Nightmare before Christmas:

(I got this image from The Daily Show. If you haven't heard Jon Stewart's report on waterboarding, you can either click that link or just watch the full video below.)

The point of all this is that Rudy is just too damn scary looking. To sum up, we are not going to have a President with the name of a hog caller or one who looks like he's come to take your soul to the other side.

Sorry, Rudy. It's time to go back to playing chess with Max von Sydow.

No Joking

2007-10-30T13:25:00.000-04:00

As I am persuading myself to write less funny and more seriously, I am encountering one problem I hadn't expected: Most of the ideas I've come up with over the years have some humorous notion underpinning them.

The question that's developing is, "Can I get away with writing in a somewhat comic manner if I'm not trying to write jokes? And is that possible? Or should I just dump those stupid old ideas no matter how much I like them?"

The thing is that I've already used most of these plots in other media, predominantly in the radio show scripts. There's one story that's about two guys who work for an ad agency who lose their jobs. It is farcical throughout, but I love it. Now, I don't know whether this idea would make the transition to prose or not. Would the various twists and turns fit into the short story structure? I'm really not sure. Should I just convert it into a stage play? And if I did that, how in the hell would I market it?

This transition is harder to make in some ways than I had anticipated. It involves changing some very basic assumptions that I had made about myself since childhood, and those ideas don't go away easily or without a struggle. In fact, I'm feeling very much at sea these days and am trying desperately to understand once again who I am, particularly as an artist. It is a strange circumstance that I find myself embroiled in at the advanced age of 48. It's the kind of thing that a person is supposed to be done with by now.

However, the only way to go is forward and the only way out is on the other side of a forest called "Struggle." That's how it works.

No foolin'.