false dream

The Wednesday before Thanksgiving I went to the Cantab lounge for the third time. There, in the basement, people read their poems at an open mic (the second time I went and someone I had gone on an okay cupid date read), then an invited performer uses their slot (the first time I went it was Melissa Lozada-Oliva, whose poems I had already read) and then the slam poetry, which always happens too late for me to stay.

This time, it was me who read a poem at the open mic, followed by the drunken clapping of people who do not know my face and therefore are not as thrilled to see me. People who only understand poetry that burns, that competes as to who. is. the. most. miserable. I AM. if. I. speak. like. this. SEE MY RAGE. swallow my sadness i.am.shoving.it.down.your.throat. Who forget to value words and who just want to be heard by drowning out the rest of the screaming crowd. I am wrong to say these things. I was very excited to go there the first couple times, the idea of seeing some sort of active artistic scene, the odd good line in a mountain off poor attempts more than I would find otherwise. When I saw someone I had spoken to the first night working at a the coffee shop near me, I was thrilled at feeling like I knew people here who did words. But I haven't been able to go after the third time.

I read an old poem because I told myself "I will mourn. I will do it constructively, healthfully, watch me learn to mourn the way we are told we should". So I read a poem I had read for This Bardian Life, because it is something I can be grateful for - being told to speak my words aloud by Zappa, to let my voice be heard off of the page. Be glad for what he gave me. After I sat down I still wanted to disappear but then I got an e-mail and everything again seemed taken from under my feet is such a small pathetic way.

Hey Roomies,

I've decided to move out of the apartment. I found a place for mid-December. I know this is rushed but I'm positive you can find a roommate very quickly since this apartment has been extremely easy to fill in the past even during odd times. If someone else wants my room let me know before I post in the next day or two to Craigslist.

Thanks

The fighting that I had been ignoring had come to its apex. All three had talked to me at some point about it, and I just listened and waited for it to go away, for so many things to go away. About ten interviews later we have someone moving in, two weeks from now. I helped Therese move her things downstairs while her boyfriend just sat there. She told me to take a break and I said I was fine and she said "you're so stubborn" "when have I ever been stubborn with you?" "never! but I am stubborn too, so I can recognize it in other people" and we both smiled at that.
I helped Adrian move into Therese's old room - painting the walls, transporting carpet from home depot, cut by what seemed like robotic mice housed in a giant machine. I can hear the sigh of relief reverberating around the apartment. Hopefully everyone will be happier now.
 
I woke up this morning on Emily's house, from a dream in which Zappa was still alive.

He was slightly delusional, but I could still recognize him through that, having raced down elevators at the mall to find him and a bunch of his Bard friends at a cafe. He said "the first time I left this earth forever..." meaning that he thought he had killed himself twice, but he had returned, alive, and we had just lost track of him and he had thought he was dead and so that's how the misinformation surrounding his death (or lack thereof) happened. I ran towards him and jumped on him for a hug and he spun me around and then we all passed out Christmas or Return of Zappa gifts from him to us. I got a bunch of measuring spoons and a glittery golden pin. He folded up around my legs, lean and long, like a child and looked up thoughtfully. He said something and then added "but I guess that's considered to be an auditory hallucination", in an irritable tone, and we told him that that's okay, that that's not inherently bad, that we just want him safe and happy and taken care of.

I woke up and he was still dead. I had fallen out of touch and couldn't help. I had begun to morn before he had died because I assumed he was gone, not even taking into consideration the parts of him that were still there. I wanted to go back to sleep but I couldn't.


There are so many good things too but I'm afraid that if I pin them down on paper they will disappear, unable to exist without vibration, doubt and exhaustion. But I'll try again soon.

Friday the 13th

At some point in early October, Max came across some candles in a wooded area. Tall white ones, tags still attached. So he took a couple, and then a couple more, and then some more. Imagine then his horror when he realized it was a memorial. The rest of the candles got thrown out eventually, but he still felt like his karma was out of balance following the desecration of the site.

So he asked me if I would accompany him to a graveyard to return the candles to the memory of the dead, to light about ten by tombstones and hope to amend the wrong. I have my own graveyard karma to reverse, so I agreed.

Yesterday was a windy night. We had to climb over the fence and the candles did not stay lite for long - like lives, flickering out. Like lives, some shone brighter than others. Like with the dead, it is the living, us, that memorialized the fleeting light - in photos, in writing, in remembrance.

Max feels that his karma has been re-calibrated. Thank you, Forest Hills Cemetery and to those who lay there.

not a ghost

Months passed I had a dream - A boy I liked from high school but had lost touch with was dancing with me. It was in a building that used to be a psychiatric hospital years ago, by a lake with tall stone walls and hallways that echoed. Ghosts would pop up and then disappear just as suddenly. I've since wondered: if ghosts are usually freed to the spiritual world by resolving the issue that was tying them to the earth past their due, what do you do with a ghost of a paranoid schizophrenic? Are they more likely to get stuck here forever, unable to be brought clarity?

A week ago a friend I had in college killed himself. From my last communications with him, it was clear he had become increasingly disorganized and paranoid, overburdened with false guilt, annoyed by the lack of freedom. When Kelsey called I knew from her voice what she was going to talk to me about, I just didn't expect it to happen so soon.

He had been so sensitive, he was so bright - I can’t imagine what it is like to see yourself losing that, especially for a person to whom intellectual acuity is paramount - emotional sensitivity key - and he certainly felt that the medications blunted him in so many ways. 

At one point he had been one of the people I hung out with a fair amount, he came to a couple of my movie nights and I took photos for This Bardian Life, and we went out dancing, and he came to my 21st birthday party and numerous lunches and dinners together, he called wine vino and had a particular way he nodded his head, large bony hands, hair that had to be constantly swept to the side, low voice and eyes that paid attention when you talked; conversations not to be had in passing. 

I wish I had more I could find of him, it's a strange drawback of having communications in person, in vivo; you can't look over them later. I read something for TBL, he was thinking maybe I should expand it, I was concerned -- 
You mean you think the re-work would weaken it? I think that's reasonable. If you're interested in a remaster, go for it, although, with my bit of experience with creative work I was thinking your past self might have more to say. But it's up to you, of course. Send me the new version if you're comfortable; i'm also open to talking more about your process if you'd like.
 

We lost touch, he had started to lose something, and I was busy and attributed it to other things until we had stopped trying to speak to each other once I had graduated over a year ago now and only recently did I hear from him again, but not him, some other person. I miss the he who I knew, who he was, but both are entirely gone now. I know I can’t feel like I could have done something, but I wasn’t there, one of my last messages to him an apology for us not having maintained contact, and somehow I want to apologize for him being dead, to apologize to him for the sorrowful mix of genetics and environment that led him to not be here anymore, age 22 forever, for the world for having played such a cruel trick on him, that I couldn't do anything to stop it.

I don’t believe in restless ghosts: I have my memories of you on this side. 

The Idiot

I finished reading The Idiot earlier this week. I'd been so frustrated with it. My reading speed in Russian is slow, slow enough that I had already been reading it when I interviewed for the apartment in December. When you read that slowly, the fact that Aglaia was blushing for two pages and then it is stated explicitly that she, was, in fact, embarrassed - it feels like the author is condescending to my ability to comprehend the redness in her cheek. I got why she was red when you started, Dostoevsky, and three pages later I'm quite sure I don't need an explicit statement. I'm sure if the process had been less painstakingly slow it wouldn't be so glaringly annoying.

And I'm not as enamored with Knaz Mishkin as I ought to be. I do not like that he conflates pity with love. I do not like Dostoevsky's hysterical women, strange caricatures of some Russian ideal. But I love when, near the end, (here, I found a translated text) Knaz says he loves both and that he just needs to explain everything to Aglaya, and receives in response "No, prince, she will not. Aglaya loved like a woman, like a human being, not like an abstract spirit. Do you know what, my poor prince? The most probable explanation of the matter is that you never loved either the one or the other in reality."

And I did quite enjoy the way the writing changed nearing Mishkin's epileptic fit, flickering like something quite modern - Faulkner? - and the change the fit caused in Knaz. I think the rambling of Ippolit in his letter reading is quite great too, though I never figured out what Ippolit is, as a character, and ended disappointed in him.

And then, nearing the end of the book, I decided that Knaz Mishkin and Rogozhin are the same person. Rogozhin is like a shadow: eyes imagined in a crowd, a spirit met at first after many sleepless nights, a knife sneaking up right when a fit is about to occur. His being present in all these moments is not a mere coincidence, nor, I think, because Rogozhin as a person is fixated on Mishkin. Rather, it is Mishkin fixated on himself, but it is his dark side, one that her refuses to acknowledged as himself.

They are so similar, in some ways: both abandoned at the alter, both feverish in temperament, both preoccupied with Anastasia Filipovna, both feverishly passionate at times. Mishkin knows Rogozhin so well he states at the very beginning that he is likely to kill Anastasia Filipovna. At the end, on that fateful day in St. Petersburg, Rogozhin answers in synchrony: Here was a question Knaz had while trying to track down Rogozhin - and Here is the thought Rogozhin had, exactly relating to the thought Knaz had, almost as if they had a conversation throughout the day. After a day of the two of them being in the same place at the same time with almost the same thoughts, Knaz is not surprised to find Anastasia dead, remaining calm as Rogozhin tells him what happened, asking the wrong questions but overall acting as if he already knew, he just had to realize he already knew. Rogozhin insists on sleeping near Knaz - the two souls need to mingle in proximity, finally the two sides of the same coin together.

However, once Knaz, filled with goodness and naiveté, has killed Anastasia (as Rogozhin) he can no longer exist as the image of goodness. Knaz looses himself fully to his epileptic idiocy, unable to exist as a murderer. Rogozhin, loosing half of himself, (as Knaz ceases to exist) suffers an inflammation of the brain, but survives as himself, a dark murderous shadow still in synchrony with its own identity.

so in the end, I did manage to keep myself entertained, albeit with a rather modernest take on the novel.

Jetlag 7th Ed. 

infinite party people

I have been told I look like Lorde, Kate Winslet, Elizabeth Taylor, Anne Hathaway and Miriam Sekhon. But by far the closest anyone has gotten was my boss this morning, when he said I look like a Vrubel demon.

Mikhail Vrubel - Head of Demon

***

dream -- It was daylight but this party was being set up in a field in a city. On the other side of the field I could see people running around, young people, and others from their group were in other places as well. You could tell they were one of the same because there was something mystical about them, and they were so fervently happy and sharp. One looked straight at me (through me) with dark eyes.

But I went indoors and there was this strange creature, like a bird or a dog. Some of these people were there, and everyone was standing around chatting. I came up to the creature and petted it. I felt like there was some chance that it would bite my arm off (it was very large) but it was impressed by me, and I felt like a shock though my system, all my hairs were on end, goosebumps. It's feathers were bristly and it pretended to eat me up whole, because for some reason I needed to appear like this other group of people, and they were already dead.

One boy with a beautiful face and dark eyes whom I had seen earlier in the field had an intestine from someone else. They were like patchwork people, except that they remained youthful and beautiful and intact. Not quite zombies, flitting in and out of here and now [8:05 alarm, back to sleep]

 
Then I woke up in my bed in a room I was sharing with two other people. I was parched from all the drinking of the night, and I took an appetite suppressant because it was cheaper to eat those than to buy food. I was very poor. But I went out and met this woman who was also from the other plain, but not quite, still too attached to this one. A witch. She was trying to find the middle room in this large doll house, but it kept disappearing - it existed when you looked at the roof of the house, but the space contracted when you looked inside. Finally she found it, and there was a chicken inside wired up. She created a path back to the field, and then, to put the (dead, cold, featherless, headless) chicken out of its misery, she snipped just one wire. [8:15 alarm, back to sleep]

I was at this crazy party, no longer in the park, no longer in this world. We had kept walking and walking until I was only surrounded by dead people. The scavenged soul of Zeus was a glow the size of an elephant. People on stilts and in fantastic dresses through all different time periods. A band was playing on the stage, and the party went out and out forever into the dark, but it wasn't the dark of night. But then the band starting singing a song attacking the dead boy who led me there (the one from the field, except now blond instead of a brunette, and with an entirely different facial structure, shorter too. I was also now viewing from third person, so it felt...less). The band said that he was foolish to think he could let me be here, that he shouldn't have brought me. I tried defending him but turned into a cartoon.

Then I woke up in a hospital, wired into life support. Making the connection with the chicken and the immortals, I snipped on wire and hoped that I wasn't going to disappear, but die like they had died, the infinite party people. I started to feel light headed and someone I love, who is familiar (but whom I can't specifically remember) came in and I said good bye and [8:30 alarm] woke up.

what is substance

Death: We attended a memorial service for our neighbor Frank Musinsky who passed away in August. I remember one of my first conversations with him, I was nine or so and told him that I would love a boy if he was good and smart, regardless of how he looked: I almost believed it too. He had participated in founding the Paris Review, but I met him years later when he the sharp and inquisitive man in a wheel chair. As I got to know him he became more: the man who loved music and worked for most of his years and enjoyed a good conversation -- as evident by the number of people who attended the service. may he rest.

Growth: Sima just came from school and his roti chapati flatbread got a bit scorched in the toaster. He asked if the burned parts caused cancer, and then asked what cancer was. That he's heard that theres lots of different types and that one is not curable. That this little girl fell and her stomach hurt and when they took her to the doctor they found out she had cancer. He has homework now and a birthday party to attend soon.

Celebration: Eloosha came home for the Rosh Hashanah, so Yulka and I came over. Honey for a sweet year.

Future: Jo told me I seem calm and happy yesterday when we met for dinner. Alana joined and we walked around Cambridge and Sommerville. The future keeps coming and coming.

Season: It is undeniably autumn. Some trees standing bare and some are not ready to part with their emerald tapestry, but the others are yellow and orange and red, parting with their leaves, which one by one hit the ground.

(not at all like in the photo below)

a couple weekends ago; Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary - Mass Audubon

Pursuing Forsythia

The following is a piece I wrote at this time freshman year, and edited a tiny bit just now. It's quite strange to see where I was emotionally (in a way that I didn't not communicate here) and what I was thinking about. Probably more interesting to me than to anyone else, but somehow it seems appropriate to put it here now that I'm in the last stretch of my undergraduate education.

Removed.

“Clair, I don’t think you’re drunk” says Marie, yawning – her knees bent and feet bouncing her little body up and down before she plops down on Andrew’s bed next to me and sips some more yellow orange juice and rum. I doubt that she should be drinking anymore. Marie is on her computer and on occasion rocks towards me, the frame of her computer nearly bumping into the rim of mine.

I’m sober and thus isolated, uselessly. Isolation does not create the craze that is romanticized as a byproduct of productivity. (Imagine: a thin man locked up in his room for nights on end, composing his final masterpiece. Imagine another: cooped up in the middle of the woods, tapping into his brilliant mind away from the humbug of his fellow human. Not fellows at all!).

It is like a normal night, all of us in one room. But their minds are clouded gray. Isolation does not create independence. I almost wish I was drunk with them, silly (or that they were sober), but I had been writing and then I came, and they were already inebriated. I wish that I didn’t care.

Only very few people can be independent; it is a prerogative of the strong. Yes, I am dependent on society—is that weakness? Is enjoying companionship, preferring companionship—weakness? Is to feel lonely in a group of friends removed by a few glasses of diluted yellowish liquid—weakness?

And does it impede one’s ability to produce?

Leaning, swaying, smiling, giggling, and then dancing: just the two of them, in the middle of the room.

***

Removed.

My face is covered in the thin sheen of sweat, my breath is audible.

Hot air in and out of my lungs.

I feel almost lighter, perversely, melodramatically. My eyes feel lively, darting around.

It’s death I tell myself. Death. Just death? Death (panic).

Easter. I saw it and at first I thought the deer’s head had been ripped off. Then I realized it was its tail, white fluff. Cold, wet, its long neck swung over a rock so I couldn’t see the head at all. I raised my hand urgently, pointing at it and giving a panicked looked at Emily who as scrambling onto the other side of the road: away from it as I walked towards it, its large body cold, wet, four legs jutting out of a large brown gray body. I looked at her walking away and followed. It was raining. I imagine its eyes, rising it from the dead.

I can feel my sweat now that it’s growing cold against my skin. We walked up the path towards the water processing plants, yellow forsythia in full bloom. I remembered that I hid in them one time in middle school, because I didn’t want to walk back home yet. I came up towards it and smelled the bright yellow flowers, grayed by the cloud light and rain, the water dripping onto my face. Emily was standing making a face with large eyes, trying to look vacant and dead. It seemed like one of those moments when one tries to arrange ones facial expression to how it should look, and more effort goes into that than actually feeling. She stood. I stopped smelling the flowers, feeling that perhaps I should also make a dead face. We walked to the dorm. The tree branches let through water droplets, there were deer hoof prints in the gray mud.

On campus there were people; a violinist was practicing above in one of the dorm rooms made of cinderblocks, a boy skateboarding by. I let her go in front of me to open the door to our dorm and didn’t (couldn’t) respond when someone in the common room said hi. Neither of us could. We walked up to our rooms silently. I put down the empty 40 bottle I had fetched out the Hudson and took off my coat and sweater and looked at my face, still covered in the thin sheen of sweat.

Death. Just death? Cathartic because it brings my emotions into perspective—they are nothing in comparison, but are also there, solidly expressed in nature. The tips of my fingers feel lively; I write quickly with a tinge of guilt — perhaps my classification of Emily's facial expression as a simulated version of what it should be is simply bitterness on my part…

A knock.

“Come in”

“Okay”

“Is it locked?”

“Yes.”

“One sec…”

I get up and open the door, Emily gives me tea and I say “come in” again, and wave at the room for her to enter. “That was disturbing” she says. Yes, yes it was. Disturbing. I should feel disturbed, which I do, but mostly with myself by this point. My initial reaction had been wrong, morbid even, like one of those old women who attend stranger’s funerals to wail, in hysterics. But then all I could think to do was write.

We make small talk about work, and then about boys.

“I think you should go after your trombone player” she says. I don’t really want to talk about boys, so I shrug. I don’t really have a trombone player either, but I know who she means. “Seriously though. I saw him talking with a girl the other day. She was not pretty at all” because that’s it, right? Beauty—but I don’t want to pursue this conversation, so I just say “He’s always talking to someone. At chamber singing, behind stage, always. In Czech and in English,” I sipped the tea.

“I really think you should.”

“I don’t really feel like pursuing anyone right now. Or anything, really. Just writing and producing art” I say it straight out. My voice isn’t bitter, but it isn’t bright and yellow either, it isn’t forsythia.

“What time is it?” she says, because she has orchestra rehearsal soon, and we haven’t eaten.

“17, do you want to go quickly to dtr?” after 5, that time of day when nothing has yet been done.

“Yes, let me go put on socks” but we have done something, we have seen a dead deer.

***

Removed.

not to be dependent on any person, not even the most beloved-every person is a prison

It seems that isolation is romanticized, that the virtues of writing or painting alone in a room for days straight augmented: that it is only way to go past normal human capacities for productivity, driving oneself to the point of insanity to create. Genius (inspiration, perspiration) is strange, seductive, a person willing to forgo society for creation (isolation)…

I am not alone, lying in the middle of Blithewood at night, a yellow pink light of the road lamps shinning onto a yellow tractor, painting out the yellow tinted leaves against the dark sky. It pushes up against the creamy yellow columns, calm, strong, melting into shadow. Little bugs flying, their transparent gray wings, and another person is with me, typing, sighing at the trouble of work, listening the sound of the waterfall in the distance, its water hushing, hissing, humming. The air is warm and the clouds over the Hudson are gray; the rumble of the cars in the distance, as well as the sounds of people talking, reaches here.

I enjoy the non-silence around me, the yellow lights, and the sound of another person typing by me. But still, something inside me thinks I want…full independence, full non-reliance, an unattainable illusion of strength: this ideal.

The misconception that pure isolation is the perfect form of independence, it plagues…And when independence is attempted by someone who has the right to it, but does not need it, we have proof that this man is probably not only strong, but bold to the point of recklessness

And that (only) this recklessness allows for creation? Only the independent are strong, and that this independence is ultimate, uncompromising?

It is a lie, but I can’t shake it.

dismantle

After heroically fighting cancer for eight years, a member of my community; wife, mother of two, sister, aunt, and friend – passed away.

---

I feel like there is a haze between my eyeballs and my skull; hopefully this cold will dissipate soon.

Wednesday on the way back from NYC I saw the collapsed buildings in Harlem as we pulled out of Grand Central Station. Nine hours after the explosion, the debris was still strewn across a couple blocks, the firemen swarmed around the buildings, and the smoke indifferently rose up to the sky.

Last Friday Hannah threw a small party. We read animal-related writing, drank mulled wine, ate coconut cake and painted our face wild colors.

• Intro to The Golden Compass - Philip Pullman
• The Eighth Eulogy - Rilke (translated)
• Black Cat - Rilke (original and translated)
• Traveling Through The Dark - William Stafford
• Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio - James Arlington Wright
• The Cow - Robert Frost
• Nightwood: Watchman, What of the Night? (last line) - Djuna Barnes
• Cat - Tolkein
• Jabberwocky - Lewis Carroll
• Jubilate Agno, Fragment B
  Jubilate Agno, Fragment B - Christopher Smart
• Schoolboys in Winter - John Clare

I went to Olja’s birthday party the next day, finally legal in this country as well as her own. 

It was the anniversary of a Bard student’s death from last year. I’m not supposed to know how she died but do, and have seen the pain it brought to her mother and friends.

After getting off the train and onto a bus, I listened to two women talk. They were both young and with children: one had a two year old girl, the other a four year old boy. They were struggling with being single mothers, living in a shelter, walking in the rain for an hour to find a job, not having access to the internet to search anywhere but the library, where it was difficult to search because libraries aren’t set up for little children to run around while you try to find job leads.

When I talked to Shimon on the phone last time, he told me that he and one of his friends pretend to be Pokémon. The transform and have made up new ones and wait for Ash to collect them.
 

we are [small; one]

On the 26^th, a Bard professor was killed in a car crash on his way home. A day later we got an e-mail that a girl had collapsed in the parking lot but had been found and was now at the hospital post operation.
Last night I went to Manor for pub fair and to see Told Slant play. It was pretty intimate and mostly upper-classman, and on the way out S told me and K that the girl from the parking lot was now on life support and announced brain-dead. It’s been a day and we still haven’t received an e-mail. I think a lot of the freshmen know. Heart failure? K received an e-mail from one of her fysem tutees canceling the appointment. Everyone knows. H & E’s housemate was friends with her and she was supposed to play at the Root Cellar tonight so people are going in commemoration.

edit: her sister had been keeping updates from her facebook page a few days ago, first saying that she is not yet able to receive visitors and flowers, and then that she will not survive the cardiac arrest and that her organs will bring life to up to twelve people. May she rest in peace.

she sleeps

There was a dusting of snow today. I was singing Verdi’s Requiem at the time, and now the wind aches against the ears of those outside.

I had ten dreams in two consecutive nights last semester and I wrote them all down.

1) worms from eating seafood coming out of my throat; parasites. This one is clearly influenced by watching the Tin Drum.

2) grandmother dying.  

3) grandfather undead: playing poker with my father and a red-headed mean version of a friend who has played poker in real life.

Last night I was at Hannah’s house. We ate soup and then I decided to treasure hunt in her house. The place has seen many students come through, and many of them have left strange things, beyond the simple furnishings. I found a nice glass jar and three tea pots and a book titled “Is Sex Necessary?” from which we read aloud as we drank tea from a new found teapot, with chocolate and ginger. 

4) a rooster who was harassing me, following me around; literally a cock being a dick.

5) a man who had no reflection and then was a scare crow. When I spoke to him he told me he got into the MIT engineering school, but never had a chance to go because he died. I told him “but you’re aging”; I did not believe spirits could age, and so I knew either I was incorrect, or he was wrong about him being dead.

6) a boy at my college, but he was Georgian instead of Indian. I talked past him to someone else.

Kelsey is coming over in an hour and we will watch The Science of Sleep (2006 USA) upon Zoe’s recommendation. We went to a consignment store that went out of business a few days ago, and now I have two skirts, leggings, a velvet shirt, a a small bag, and a necklace.

7) terrifying physics defying roller coaster with no clear safety measures

8) the dead undertakers traveling through eternity: dead cats

9) a TV series with two female leads. The main character is an uncharismatic and awkward leader, for whom everyone is waiting to fail. And at some point you see her through the eyes of her right-hand woman: Marlin Monroe smoking a cigar.

My housemates have arrived back to our home. I was going to go to NYC again on Wednesday but I felt like I was coming down with something; sleeping for 21 hours over a 48 hour period seems to have successfully mitigated the threat.

10) The merchants. Someone asked “What was here before?” and the merchant said “I don’t know, maybe hot dog stands, we didn’t set anything up” and then I came by and said “before this, Native Americans lived here, but we murdered them”. And then someone tried to destroy my computer data.