TMI: Father’s Day Questionnaire

"I never looked into my father's eyes, for fear of finding something of myself..."

TMI QUESTIONS:

Questions designed to reveal Too Much Information

Link: http://tmiquestions.blogspot.com/

This week's topic: Father’s Day Questionnaire

My dad's name is Maynard.

He is 78 years old.

He is as big as the heart that beats inside him and all the love that it can hold.

He has no hair and pale, pale sky blue eyes.

His favorite food is candy, chocolate, and Little Debbie cakes.

His favorite color is blue.

He likes to go to bed.

For fun he likes to watch cartoons.  Favorites include: Peppa Pig, Sponge Bob Square Pants, Tom and Jerry, Franklin the Turtle, and Max and Ruby.  His favorite movie is ‘Happy Feet’.

My favorite thing to do with my dad is sit and/or feed him, watch cartoons.

I love my dad because he loves me.

At my lowest point, he accepted me as I am and let me know that he loved me.

Throughout my life, even though he didn’t ‘like’ me, I know he loved me.  I know I was a disappointment to him – not the son he had wished for, but my older brother was everything he could have hoped for and more, so the pressure was off. 

He never failed to bail me out, no matter what kind of mess I had managed to make of things.  He kept his distance when I needed him to and was there when there was no one else.  He celebrated me at my best and took care of me during my worst. 

We’ve been dealing with his Alzheimer’s for the past sixteen years.  Five years ago, he began failing, and my mother was having difficulty caring for him by herself.  The house across the street from me had gone into foreclosure.  With the help of my youngest sister, we purchased it; I rehabbed it with the help of one of my business partners, and moved them in.   

I sit with him as often as needed.  I clean their house, mow their lawn, shovel their snow, and make sure my mother gets time away.  He’s just at that point where he’s forgetting how to swallow.  If we get a smile out of him or he pays attention to his cartoons, then we term that ‘a good day’.  We have been told we can expect him to live for two more years.

If you’re asking me who my dad was: he loved to hunt and fish.  He worked very hard all his life and had an excellent work ethic.  He loved cowboys and country western music (on occasion he still responds to music).  I think he was a kind man, in many ways.  He put up with my mother throughout all her ‘difficulties’ and laughed like Popeye.

He once cried for me, right in front of me, because he was afraid for me. He was scared, and I knew in that moment that he would do anything to spare me pain.  And that is how I know he loves me.

Bonus

Who's your daddy?

Who isn’t?  I am way too old to be the ‘boy’, but damned if there aren’t enough dudes out there who want me to do exactly that.  Frequently, these men are actually much younger than me – which is why I firmly believe that being a daddy has more to do with a kind of energy and attitude than it does age.  My favorite thing to do with my daddies?  Cuddle.

Are you into daddies?

Yes.  There’s very little in the way of men that I don’t find something to appreciate.  Daddies have that special ability to make me feel safe and cared for.  I also like it when they give my ass a smack, talk dirty to me, or throw me in their sling.

How do you define daddy?

You want to be the daddy? Okay by me.  I can play that game.  Role playing is super fun, and at my age, a necessity.  Defying reality (and gravity), no problem. 

As far as a ‘true daddy’, I would think they are bald or have salt and pepper or silver hair/fur.  If they are taller than me (a rarity) that sells the illusion more.  They may be worked-out, muscled, thin and wiry, or have a delicious perfectly round hard belly.  I like them furry or smooth.   A ‘true daddy’ can either be dominant, an educator, or a cuddler.

Are you a daddy?

I have been (and have blogged about it).  On occasion, that means I flip fuck them, or it means that I get to utter one of my all-time favorite commands: “Okay boy, time to fuck daddy.”  Physically?  I am not my ideal daddy type. 

Literally?  I could be.  I fucked a lot of women.  And survived a couple of pregnancy scares (yeah, I wanted babies and would have married a woman if they were pregnant with my kid).  But, to my knowledge, the only ‘kids’ I have are my three dogs, who are kind enough to allow me to live in their home.  

Let's Blame It on the Weather...

I could blame it on the weather, but there is a lot going on right now that weighs on my mind, pushing down the brow, forcing my face into something of a scowl.  I feel as grey inside as the sky is outside.  Last year, at this time, I had a magnificent tan. I also had someone I called my ‘best friend’; a woman at work whom I confided in, laughed with, shared catty observations with, and celebrated things with on a weekly basis. 

She stopped speaking to me about two months ago (although it feels much longer), for reasons known only to her, for she hasn’t really shared what the hell went wrong.  I know it began the day I confessed to having shared a bit of business-related information that she had passed along to me.  It had to do with who was being interviewed to become my new boss.  The information she gave me contradicted what I was being told by other employees.  When I told her I’d shared the information she acted as if I’d raped a puppy in front of her. I apologized and immediately set about trying to remedy things by swearing those I had told into secrecy.  Not that it mattered: turns out the individual who was being interviewed was quite vocal about the fact that he was interviewing for the position (and that the interviews had not gone well).  So, that should have been the end of it, but no…

I knew something was up.

Emails went unanswered.  There were no IMs.  I wasn’t getting the usual quick response/feedback to work that I would send her way.  We stopped going to lunch.  Three weeks went by.  Out of the blue, she suggested we meet for coffee.  Fine.  I showed up, and she… didn’t.  Not really.  It was like having coffee with a Stepford wife; all glassy-eyed smiles accompanied by overly-crisp, polite conversation.  I brought up the matter of things having changed between us – for we were rather inseparable before this.  We used to joke that she was my work wife.  We’d go out and celebrate birthdays with her spouse. She shared about her family difficulties and I shared… well, way too much.  I even knew her children.  So… what gives? 

She told me she wanted to concentrate on her job more.

Unaware that I was preventing her from doing so, I smiled and accepted that.   And that was it.  The end.  We parted, not hugging, not making plans.  And so I sit, almost daily, since, staring at this empty bag in my hands - this bag that once held our friendship, and I am, to say the least, bereft. 

It’s affected and colored everything.  My sleep.  My joy level.  My fear level.  I have some medical and legal issues that are requiring attention on my part.  She used to help me through such things.  Without that support I feel… frightened.  Alone.

It’s also affecting my writing.  Something cold has nestled its way into my brain.  Words refuse to flow.  Everything feels forced and unnatural, the poetics stifled, the magical flow gone… for now. 

I regret having shared things with her.  I fear what she may share with others.  I worry that the day may come when she tries to take credit for things I have done.   Much like the slow-to-arrive summer, my days now move at a glacial pace, full of brooding and gloom.

I remind myself that this is hardly the first time a ‘best friend’ has suddenly and inexplicably left me for dead.  No, actually this is more like the fifth time.  They all haunt me. For they all share one thing in common – the fact that I can never achieve any type of closure.  Those that are not dead are dead to me.  Oh, I have tried to reach out, but they have made it abundantly clear that they have no interest in helping me understand or quantify whatever shortcomings I may have that led to the abrupt end of our friendship.  This woman and I?  Four years.  Previous friends?  Two to twenty years. 

They were my anchors and each one eventually set me adrift.   (Boo-hoo.)

Each time it happens I tell myself, ‘I don’t need friends.’  ‘I don’t want friends.’  ‘I won’t trust or love again and that I don’t like and don’t need people in my life.’  No, I will have to hold the world off at arm’s length.  My life?  No one enters here.

Of course… it’s karma.

In my youth, I failed to value the friendships I had garnered in High School, abandoning them rather quickly (and not always respectfully) for a hoped for ‘new’ life.  I left two of my best friends in the lurch and with a year’s lease on a house, because after living with them for six months I felt like I could not breathe. When you live with someone, you lack the privacy that would shield others from knowing all about you… you, know, like the fact that you’re gay, for instance.  I couldn’t talk to them.  They were endlessly happy.  I was mired in myopic, naval-gazing, and adolescent depression.  My abandoning them was the first bitter pill I think either had ever had to swallow.  Needless to say, I moved out and they never spoke to me again. 

My bad.

And my karma?  My lesson to learn?  My mistake to repeat?

Apparently I don’t ‘get it’.  Because I never see it coming.

The friend before this one?  Twenty years of friendship.  I saw him through a horrible relationship with a man that was based on their love of crystal meth.  He was ‘in loooooove’ (with a drug).  I travelled to his father’s burial.  We shared a lot.  He moves to St. Louis and I go to visit.  During my last visit, walking to a restaurant, he points out a man that he hasn’t worked up the nerve to talk to yet, but is really hot for.  The day before I am to leave, that same man hits me up on-line and wants to get naked.  I ask my friend what he thinks.  Would it be okay?  Would it affect our friendship? He tells that I can do as I like. Apparently it was a test.  A test I failed.  Or not.  Maybe that wasn’t it. 

He was also in a recovery group at the time.  I went to have dinner with all his new friends from the recovery group.  They hated me, I could tell. I thought they were all sticks in the mud and I’m sure they felt I was some idiot hick interloper that threatened my friend’s sobriety – because I was – ooooooooo – from the past.  During that same trip, I also had lunch with another  of his new friends – a real snob: designer labels, partnered with a doctor.  All he wanted to talk about was his incredible house and how it was being decorated.  Then the subject turned to dogs and my friend mentions that he was considering getting a new one.

What?

If you know me, then you know that I will not stand mistreating animals.  This friend?  He had owned two dogs previously.  He purchased them because he liked the idea of the breed and the image of ownership.  That said he was a horrible dog owner.  He threw the first one down the stairs in anger because it peed in the house and broke its leg.  I and his other friends convinced him to return the dog to the breeder.  Then, having moved to Florida, he buys another very expensive dog.  He can’t train it and tells me he frequently locks it in a closet when he’s at work.  I work with the dog while I am there.  The dog is fine - nothing wrong with the dog.  Again, after much convincing, he accepts that he doesn’t have time for the dog and it is taken to a rescue group for that breed. So, needless to say, when my friend suggests that he is thinking of getting another dog, I have a few harsh words of reality to share.

This leads to the end of the lunch and an argument wherein I confront him with the fact that, while I applaud the fact that he is in recovery, he has failed to make amends and own his past behavior during his ‘crystal meth phase’.    He tells me he’s not an addict and that it was never that bad – and by not that bad, I assume he means he didn’t have to resort to turning tricks to get his fix.  I fill him in on the horror I experienced standing in his living room watching him and his boyfriend put a Bic lighter under a piece of tin foil holding a couple of rocks.  And I remind him about a certain trip he made to New York to rescue one of his meth friends.  It involved owing a dealer a great deal of money, his friend running around wearing nothing but a mink coat in his apartment where all the mirrors had been covered, and the dealer showing up, pouring lighter fluid under the door, soaking the carpet, before lighting it.  Oh, and then the escape… with bullets(!) whizzing past his head.  No, I wasn’t there, but he has never taken responsibility for the fear he filled all of his other friends (those not doing meth) with and the worry he caused us during such escapades.

Before I leave?  We patch things up.  I think.  He tells me he’s horribly bored (he’s a trust fund baby).  I tell him to go volunteer.  I tell him to go wait tables at a restaurant he thinks might benefit from his skills (which for some reason he takes as an extreme insult). I tell him that the only thing seeing a therapist three times a week is accomplishing is to help the therapist pay for their summer home.  I tell him to stop staring at himself in the mirror and start thinking about the rest of the world - any part of it. Go do some good.  Go help others.  Think about others.  Thinking I’d succeeded in getting through to him, we part on good terms.

We email each other daily for another three weeks and then… nothing.  Did he die?  No, mutual friends assure me he’s alive.  And doing well.  But I, apparently, am dead to him.  We never speak again.

I’m always the last to know.

I’m powerless to prevent it.

I never see it coming.

Am I at fault?  Of course.  I’m a horribly flawed human being – one honest enough to point out those flaws to anyone who expresses an interest in being my friend.  Hey, forewarned is forewarned in my book.  And I’m not going to be much of a friend if I don’t try to help you recognize and work on your own flaws.  Granted, I have not always been so self-aware or so forthcoming.  But let’s face it – after a point, being naïve without wising up?  Well, that’s just stupidity. And I am not stupid.

 

Except when it comes to keeping friends.

So, why am I blogging about this?  I was hoping it would prove to be therapeutic.  I know, who cares, right? Entertain us!  But I can’t do that right now.  Sorry to bore you with this, but I can’t write about my sex-capades or much of anything else until I work my way through this latest wrinkle. 

That said, I have actually thought about taking a break from blogging.  Take the summer off, you know?  Last summer, I did that with my other writing and was able to pick up where I left off in the fall without missing a beat.  And while I may do that with my other writing, I won’t stop blogging.  Why?  Because blogging is a different kind of writing – it’s a living, active thing, subject to the whims and foibles of its creator.

So, I guess you’re gonna be stuck with me as is; whining and sighing and being horribly human.   But don’t worry, things will get back on track shortly… I hope.  In the meantime, at least I have TMI Questions to write about, so while that’s more of my usual naval gazing (all about me!), at least it’s a tad less myopic and infinitely more entertaining than me simply being human.

You know, a little sun would probably clear this whole thing up, am I right?

Bring on the sun…

TMI: Summer Reading Lists

I love to read.  The printed page is one of my true passions in life.  Language, words, syntax, a turn of phrase… for me it is movement, music, poetry and dance.  That’s why I was only too happy to answer this week’s TMI Questions.

TMI QUESTIONS: 

Questions designed to reveal Too Much Information

Link: http://tmiquestions.blogspot.com/

This week's topic: 

Summer Reading Lists

What are you reading this summer?

I plan on finally finishing ‘Three Junes’ by Julia Glass.  I am just finishing the second portion, so one more ‘June’ to go.  She is a ‘literary’ writer, as opposed to a simple story teller and I find her style and voice a tad off-putting (snobbish, classist), placing distance between the page and the reader.  I don’t find her characters particularly well-drawn or believable (emotionally).  It’s an ambitious story pivoting on an interesting literary device.

Then it’s on to Janis Ian’s autobiography, ‘Society’s Child’, which I expect to devour in short order.

I have stacks and stacks of books that are begging to be read and that I plan on getting to in the next 30 years.  So even though I truly love books, I really wish I would stop buying books.  I feel like I am slighting the ones I already own and plan to read, while doing a great disservice to the new arrival, for they will inevitably end up sitting on the pile for some time to come.  Those damn piles make me feel awfully guilty, but I am a very slow reader.

Is your summer reading material different during the summer then from the rest of the year?

Different?  No.  Though I tend to do much less reading in the summer.  During summer, I am typically outdoors and lack time to merely sit.  When travelling, I will take a book along with me and never crack a page.  People tell me I am ‘scattered’ and that is particularly true in summer.  For me, reading requires quiet and stillness, and summer is a time of noise and movement.  By autumn, I start drifting back into ‘school’ mode and am much more apt to read (and write), a habit I have always attributed to my love of academia; its structure and discipline having been indelibly etched into my morphed DNA.  

What are your favorite genres?

Biographies, character driven novels (usually written by women), and the classics.  And BAD BOOKS.  I love reading horribly written books, because I learn so much from them.  James Patterson is my go to guy in this category, although there are a number of authors whose work is so bad that  I cannot seem to read beyond the first few chapters, mainly because I keep re-reading the same paragraphs over and over again, trying to discern exactly what the hell they are trying to communicate.  Dean Koontz springs to mind.  His writing also gives me headaches and makes me nauseated.

Do you have a favorite author?

Many.

Among them:

·         Anne Tyler

·         Faye Weldon

·         Sue Miller

·         Charles Dickens

·         Edgar Allan Poe

Poets:

·         Stevie Smith

·         Sylvia Plath

·         Emily Dickenson

Do you have a favorite book?

I have a book I consider to be ‘the best written book of modern times’ that I cite as my favorite: ‘The Confederacy of Dunces’ by John Kennedy Toole.  It is brilliant and I think everyone should read it.  It’s a pity the author took his own life, because he was very gifted.

Others I would like to note:

Ferdinand the Bull by Munro Leaf

Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss

Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

  

I am disappointed that you did not ask us about books and authors we loathe.  So, forgive me for spilling blood, but I have to vent.  ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ reads like something a Fifth Grade girl would write while learning how to masturbate.  It is a horrible book; poorly written and badly edited.  The fact that it is one of a series of three boggles my mind.  Stephen King and Anne Rice both need to allow their publishing houses the opportunity to edit their books; their early work (guided by skilled editors) is quite good while their latter works suffer from word diarrhea and excessive ego/adolescent myopia rendering them unreadable. James Patterson and Dean Koontz should not be termed writers so much as typists.

And there is another category I wish you asked us about – books you have attempted to read but could not make it all the way through.  Typically, I commit to finishing anything I start and have trudged my way slowly through a number of really tiresome novels.  That said, ‘The Cider House Rules’ by John Irving vexes me.  I have attempted to read it three times.  Each time I get to the middle of the book and develop a strange kind of amnesia, as in, I forget I am reading it and never finish. I like John Irving, but cannot manage to get through ‘The Cider House Rules’.

Where is your favorite place to read?

My bed.  Which you would think would be reserved for sex, but no.  In fact, my bed is the one place I never have sex. But I do read there.  It is the only activity other than sleeping that is allowed there (well, also thinking and dreaming).  I have a window behind the head of my bed, which I love to crack open so that a breeze wafts over me as I read or sleep.  There is a giant lilac bush (currently in full bloom) right in front of the window and, this time of year, the fragrance is subtle and lulling. 

Do you like to reread books? Which one(s)?

Never.  It spoils the experience, tampers with the memory, destroys the magic.  If I reread, it becomes a textbook or a manual (which are the only books I have ever revisited). 

Can you read while in motion?

Not in a car.  It makes me nauseated. On a plane?  No problem.  And people that read while running on a treadmill?  Wow.  That is an amazing skill.  Unfortunately, due to balance issues, I am doing well if I manage to remain upright when running on a treadmill. 

The debate continues: paper vs. electronic.

No debate here.  I love books.  I love their covers, their pages, their smells, their typeface, their bindings, their thickness, and their weight.  I love to see them in stacks or on shelves.  I like touching them.  Libraries fascinate me.  It’s like works of art you can touch and caress.  Someone bought me a Kindle for my birthday two years ago.  I was touched, but made them return it.  I knew I would never use it.  I read enough crap on the internet on my laptop.  I don’t want the romance and affection I feel for literature to become associated in anyway with that experience, not that those feelings are transferable. 

Growing up, books were a great source of safety for me.  I hid behind them (learning everybody’s secrets). Libraries have always been sanctuaries for me (in fact, I believe I spent all of 7^th Grade in the library).   

BONUS 

Do you get off on trashy novels? Recommendations?

Define ‘trashy’.  Well, this is my definition:

• The Sookie Stackhouse Series (True Blood) by Charlaine Harris
• Anything written by Fannie Flagg
• Any book that got published because it reminded an editor of ‘Sex and the City’. 

I don’t dig books about werewolves and vampires.  I think Anne Rice killed whatever enthusiasm I might have once had for them. But Charlaine is different.  Her writing is simple and plain.  That said, I tried to read some her other series, but found them lacking.

Fannie Flagg just has a nice flair for nostalgia, small town life as we wish it were, and great spirit.

‘Sex and the City’ rules.  I love slutty bitches in high heels. And all those knock-offs by other authors that followed?  I love those, too.  They are like eating potato chips.

And for the record, I love those naughty homo pulp novels they sell at dirty bookstores.  They are not well written, but then it's pretty hard to pay attention to proper tense and word usage when reading and turning pages using only one hand!

Sock Puppets with Teeth: FOX NEWS and the Unnatural, Natural Social Order of Things.

The myopic, greedy, insanity-infused world that is FOX NEWS continues to amaze, amuse, and disgust me.  The latest scandal has to do with recent comments made by pundits/sock puppets Lou Dobbs, Erick Erickson, and Juan Williams regarding the rise of female breadwinners in families, complaining that it could ruin society, hurt children, and "undermine our social order."

Huh?

Let’s take a look at that last phrase… “undermine our social order”. 

Now, look at it this way: “undermine OUR social order”.

Whose?

Please note that all three are well-to-do older males whose salaries and lifestyles are provided by an immensely wealthy, immensely older male.  Yes, one of them happens to be black, but still part of that ‘threatened’ oligarchy.  Something tells me that same phrase “undermine our social order” has probably been tossed around the offices of FOX NEWS about a number of things, including gay marriage.  Just what are these men afraid of?  And who ceded ‘the social order’ to them in the first place?

I’ll tell you who.  We did.  A long time ago.  Because we were afraid.

I know I’ve touched on this topic previously, but I think it bears repeating.  I didn’t realize just HOW frightened I was of the world, society, and living my life as an out gay man until recently.  With the passage of the Same-Sex Marriage bill here in Minnesota, I found my shoulders relax a little and I began questioning the motivation behind many of the decisions I have made in my life thus far.  A lot of those decisions were based on a particular type of risk assessment.  There were many situations where I could not be myself or share who I was because it simply was not safe to do so. I was told there would be consequences.  I would be ostracized.  I would not be successful.  I would be run out of town (Iowa Falls).

You see, I didn’t want to become Matthew Shephard.

Matthew Shephard, whose name I invoke in order to bring to mind the chilly reality that many gay people have had to, and continue to, live with every day.  Those who are intimidated, bullied, threatened, hurt, attacked, hit, or, abused because they have been identified by the social order and deemed ‘other’.

I also mention Matthew because it occurred to me: that while I believe gay rights to be a matter of civil rights, I have lacked concrete examples of why I feel our plight as gay people has something in common with the unbelievably wrenching battle faced by black people in this country during their struggle to ensure their civil rights. I struggled with such a comparison, because our fight has been significantly less bloody. 

At first glance.

And then I remembered Matthew. And Matthew’s horror brings to mind the horror experienced by Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith and all the other people who had their lives threatened or paid with their lives because of the color of their skin. Rodney King?  Trayvon Martin?  The list is amazingly, embarrassingly long.

But then so, too, would be the list of gay men and women who have lost their lives or had their lives threatened because of their sexual identity.  That is, if we knew their names - for so many have suffered in silence for so long and it’s only recently that we started keeping our list (gay teen suicides, etc.). 

Not true, of course, of the many names of the gay men who died during the AIDS crisis.  We have a quilt to memorialize many of them; a travelling reminder of the subtle kind of genocide that can take place in these modern times right before of our very eyes.  Those memorialized on that quilt are, sadly, dead.  And many of them?  Our dead.  And yes, it is hard to say, but I believe, and I am not alone in this belief, that many of those deaths could have been prevented and their suffering at least lessened had AIDS not been viewed and termed ‘the gay plague’ as it simmered in a social conspiracy of silence.

In light of that, and those like Matthew, I think we have a right to make some noise.  I think it’s okay that we say ‘enough’.  I think it’s okay that we confront bigotry.  I think that it’s time we stop allowing others to behave in ways and say such things, that we live our lives in fear.

I think we’ve earned the right to live without fear.  Obviously, those that feel our very presence undermines the social order aren’t going to allow us to take a seat at that table without a fight.  So, I also think we’ve earned the right to make a little noise.

You know, I wonder; how much longer before gay folk go from being the squeaky wheels demanding change and acceptance, to the day when gay folk are accused of playing “The Gay Card”?  Because that is the flip side of bigotry, my friends; after a once-silenced, disenfranchised minority finds their voices and their footing, once they become politically viable, and begin to infiltrate the mainstream or, as the folks at FOX would have us believe, begin to undermine the social order… once those who have been victimized for so long refuse to be victims anymore?  Then those same bigots will claim that when we complain we will be playing “The Gay Card”.

I, for one, hope to live to see the day.  I will chuckle every time I hear it.

Okay, I’m going to let this go.  But, before I do, let’s take one more look at that phrase: “undermine our social order."

Do you think that by ‘undermine’, they actually mean ‘change’, as in change our social order?  Is that what they really fear?  Yes, deep down I do. And therein lies the happy and eventual, historical inevitability of reality vs. Rupert Murdoch’s sock puppets and people of their ilk.  That change they so fear? 

They are powerless to stop. 

Because even in a world where money can buy you virtually everything, it cannot buy the hearts and minds of the people - the same people who make up the living body of that social order which so many misguided souls are currently bent on protecting and preserving.  Do you know what happens when you preserve something?  It lives in a state of stasis.  Where there is no change.  No immediate decay, but no growth either.  And the sad thing about something that has been preserved is; it is still at the mercy of natural laws, such as gravity.  And eventually, no matter how well preserved, some degree of decay is inevitable.

Living things that are restrained in an unnatural state or manner will eventually die. 

Gay folk are not the ones living life in an unnatural manner.  The only thing ‘unnatural’ about us is the way we have been restrained by the very social order the folks at FOX NEWS are fighting so desperately to preserve.   

But those folks at FOX NEWS?   The clock is ticking.  Gravity is winning.

Well, we know how it’s all going to end, now don’t we?

Never fear - the people will always come to recognize what is truly right and what is truly unnatural.