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My Favorite Games (2025 Update)
My best-performing video over the past year has been My Favorite Games. Well, I’ve played a number of new games since I posted that video, so I thought it was time for an update.
Introduction
The games included in this list are ones I have played over the past year since my previous “favorite games” video and they have to be available to pick up as physical copies. So, while I have played a session of a game called Nuts, by Skrat from the A Squirrel Plays channel, it’s not eligible. I also haven’t played a session of one of my favorite games over the past year because I’ve been running other things, so Basic Fantasy RPG doesn’t appear on it. Go check out those games, though, folks, they are way fun—and Basic Fantasy RPG has one of the best communities in the hobby.
10. Monty Python’s Cocurricular Mediaeval Reenactment Programme
I was given a review copy of this game by Exalted Funeral, but was so impressed by it I went out and purchased the Head of Light Entertainment Screen for myself. I’ll also be purchasing another set of their odd dice.
What can you expect in The Programme? You can expect Monty Python. The world is dangerous, the denizens will drive characters loony, and the mechanics are simple. But, the GM will play different personas, which impacts game play, and beshrewments can send the entire table into something completely different. Watch those demerits, and get ready for a good time! You can pick up The Programme at Exalted Funeral for $50, but I recommend also picking up the HoLE screen for $33, as well as a set of their peculiar dice for $25.
9. Land of Eem
The Land of Eem has mechanics which bear a kinship to Powered by the Apocalypse games, with narrative twists and fail forward obstacles so the game is always moving. The world looks like someone combined the Muppets and Lord of the Rings, and it’s as subversive as you’d expect from The Muppets. If you’d like a game that’s light hearted and fast, but still has a good amount of depth, give Land of Eem a try.
There is a free QuickStart guide, but the beautiful Core Rulebook will set you back $40. I’d recommend going for the Deluxe Box Set—which includes a GM screen, a map, a terrific bestiary, and a mind-blowing setting book. That runs for $150.
8. Forbidden Lands
Forbidden Lands has wild lore, robust exploration, fun stronghold building, and a meta-narrative that’s there if a group wants to use it. The game also runs off of Free League’s excellent Year Zero dice pool engine, so game play is fast and dangerous. I ran a crawl of this a few months back because we had an off week and I wanted to toss something from Forbidden Land’s “Book of Beasts” at the group to see what they’d do. One character came out alive, mostly due to poor life-choices, but we had a blast getting to the end. This is a game I have not played enough.
If you want to pick up Forbidden Lands, you can pick up its beautiful box set for about $65. This set comes with a Player’s Handbook, a Gamemaster’s Guide, and a frame-worthy map. I’d have loved to have dice included in the box set but the two A5 books are hardbound stitched binding, have faux leather covers with gold foil imprints, and book ribbons. My only complaint about the game is I want to show off both the box and the books on my shelf.
Check this game out if you enjoy some grit that is challenging and fun. Oh, and it also has a fantastic FoundryVTT system.
7. Tales of Argosa
I just reviewed Low Fantasy Gaming’s successor, Tales of Argosa, on my channel. “Wow.” It carries over the low magic setting of its predecessor, while also incorporating a number of improvements to the system which were made in Pickpocket Press’ second game, Lowlife 20290.
Argosa uses a roll-under check system, which is my favorite way to play a game, but it’s combat system is the same d20 roll high many TTRPG players will find familiar. Despite the familiarity, Tales of Argosa stands out through a phenomenal exploit mechanic that is what 5e bonus actions should have been.
Tales of Argosa is very much an old school game but it’s not a retro-clone. Nor is it simple a distillation of modern mechanics which has old-school potency brought to the fore. It’s familiar, while being its own thing, and I love it. Check out Tales of Argosa if you’re looking for a game that’s fast and dangerous, but where the characters also aren’t overly squishy. You can pick it up at DriveThruRPG, a hard back copy costs about $45.
6. Shadowdark
Shadowdark is, at its core, a distillation of modern mechanics with some twists blended in to give it an old school feel. And the combination is brilliant. Torches run in real-time, so players can’t sit around dithering. Magic is roll-to-cast so a player has to question the wisdom of unleashing a spell in a particular moment. Sheets are spartan, so players need to spend more time interacting with the world instead of paging through their copious abilities. And initiative is always on, so attention seekers have to share the spotlight. I ran a Shadowdark gauntlet of zero-level characters last fall and it was amazing.
Shadowdark is an excellent bridge between old school and new school play. It’s terse presentation is clear and engaging, the artwork is a perfect vibe, and everything you need is in one book. Check this game out if you want to introduce folks who have only ever played Dungeons & Dragons 5e to some old school tropes. You can pick it up from The Arcane Library for $59.00. And if you’re worried about the game being supported, not only is Kelsey Dionne creating additional content, several other creators are following suit. There are new classes, the game’s been shifted to space, and monsters abound. This game is both good and popular. And it’s well deserved. Kelsey Dionne is an amazing person. Had I run Shadowdark more this past year I may have swapped it with the next entry on this list.
5. Into the Odd
When I first read Into the Odd I didn’t get it. It didn’t seem there was enough to it to function as a fun game! But I returned to it later and found I was more ready to comprehend how it’s designed.
The rules are so lite they can be missed with a blink! There are no to hit rolls, HP replenishes in each room, but the strength score drops when any damage taken exceeds HP and that remains. Movement is abstract. Keeping track of time is abstract. Wandering encounters help build an adventure’s fiction. And characters die, a lot. Into the Odd is a game where running and hiding from, tricking, or avoiding danger rewards a party with more dangerous spaces to investigate. Now, it’s not limited to dungeon or wilderness crawling, there are some lite rules for running a business or managing detachments of soldiers, so Into the Odd anticipates a widening experience as play continues. But it starts with crawling. And the lucky ones survive to delve a second time.
Into the Odd has become a favorite one shot game because I can have players roll their characters up at the table and be off and running in minutes. If you’re looking to try out a dungeon crawler, or looking or for some excellent tables to flesh out a world, check this game out. It’s a ton of fun and a nice change of pace. You can pick it up through Free League for around $45.
4. Sentinel Comics RPG
I first picked up Sentinel Comics RPG when it showed up in a Prime Day sale list for a ridiculous price in 2024. Since then it’s been listed for various sale prices, even as low as $9.99. This caused me to fear the system was going to be orphaned, which proved to be true. The game’s publisher, Greater Than Games, was recently shuttered in response to the tariff crisis. This is a shame because the game is phenomenal.
Sentinel comics is the first super hero game I played which felt like a comic book since the old TSR Marvel Game back in the 80s. Everything is narrative. If a player has a teleportation power and wants to use it for an attack they narrate how they do that. They don’t need a feat, there are no power points to spend, and there’s no formulas to tell people how much of an effect they can have. Instead, the player describes how they want to use their teleportation power, connects it to a quality the character has, and then adds in their current status. Each of these elements has a die assigned to them and, if a character does a “basic action” they use the middle value as the result. If they use one of their abilities, which are ways characters may use powers which have a bit of guidance, they use the dice that ability indicates. It really fast.
But what makes Sentinel Comics RPG shine is how barriers to success are dealt with. If a character is faced with any obstacle—a forcefield, a hostage being held, some bystanders standing under a falling building—they must be dealt with through an Overcome action. To deal with the obstacle the collected dice are rolled, and the result is read. But the way the results are designed means players will often have to accept a twist to be successful in the attempted action. A character might teleport through a forcefield, for example, not knowing that it was keyed to their dimensional signature. The character succeeds passing through barrier but it shocks them as they pass through and now they are hindered for a turn or two. The Overcome action is the heart of Sentinel Comics RPG.
If you enjoy Super Hero RPGs pick up Sentinel Comics RGP while you still can! As of this writing it’s on a fire sale for $20 at Greater than Games. Amazon also still has the excellent GM kit on sale for $25. The GM screen alone is worth it.
3. EZD6
EZD6 is a game of gonzo fun, present danger, and ridiculous moments. DM Scotty, who is the brains behind the game, designed it because he wanted a game that didn’t need math. It really is easy, I can have people versed in the rules in a few minutes, and if we forget anything during the briefing we can just tackle it when the situation arises.
For all its simplicity, however, character creation is fun. Different inclinations give the character a leg up in certain situations, hero paths grants some boons and abilities, and character aspects help flesh out their personality. Scotty has also created some additions to the system, including a full post-apocalyptic version, which extends the core ideas while keeping the simplicity intact. He’s currently working on a horror version, which I was able to play in, and it’s awesome.
If you want a game that is “grab and go” and sets the players imaginations free, EZD6 is a game I recommend. I love it. You can pick up a hardback/pdf combo at DriveThruRPG for around $25.
2. Cypher System/Numenera
Imagine a game where all the crunch was done before the roll. Everything in the game has a level, to make the level beatable players apply skills, spend points from their pools to give extra effort, or utilize a tool they have at their disposal. Once the final number is reached, it’s multiplied by 3, and that’s the target on a d20. Oh, and it can be played with any genre and in any setting, with minimal tweaks to the core system.
That’s Cypher System, and it’s amazing. Right now I’m using it to run a lunchtime super hero campaign once a month and have run a couple fantasy-themed one shots as well. I’m also looking forward to testing out more genres using Cypher System in the near future.
The Cypher System Reference Document contains all the mechanical information you need to run the game, and that includes their “white spine” genre books. So you can dive in to Cypher without having to lay down any cash if you want (but the books are beautiful, and look wonderful on a shelf).
Cypher’s publisher, Monte Cook Games, also has some distinct IPs which are not found in the reference document. The best known of these set a billion years in the future in the Ninth World. Numenera is science fantasy at its finest. The world is a weird mix of high technology and mediaeval fantasy. The game is set just as civilization is growing back from whatever caused the last world to collapse, an unknown number of years ago, and there are hints everywhere that the current batch of humans haven’t been around on the planet all that long. My campaign’s been going on for just about two years and I love the weird things the party encounters.
If you want a flexible system with fast mechanics that’s designed to be narrative forward, check out Cypher System. The core rulebook is about $77 for the hardback and PDF. For Numenera I recommend the two book box set, which costs about $130 for the book/PDF combo. There are also some starter sets for both systems, which can be found on Monte Cook Games’ web site. These cost around $30.
1. Dragonbane
Dragonbane is one of the first products Free League sent me as a review copy, but that’s not why it’s on the top spot of this list. It’s in the top spot because Dragonbane is amazing. In fact, I love this game so much I’ve picked up a copy of the box set to give to one my friends.
Sometimes people will call the Dragonbane box set a “starter set,” because that’s what most box sets are these days, but that’s a misnomer. The Dragonbane box set is the entire game. It includes the full rulebook, blank character sheets, creature and character standees, some pre-generated characters so a group can dive right in, a full adventure book, a reversible battle map on which terrain can be placed (but it is paper, don’t draw on it), and a set of lovely emerald-green translucent dice. And how much does this cornucopia of TTRPG goodness cost? The core set can be purchased for about $56!
Why do I love Dragonbane? Well, it’s a skill based system with roll-under mechanics. Magic is rare, but powerful, and combat is fast and dangerous. The game is fair, but it’s unforgiving if players don’t learn to make good choices. Also, monsters are both unpredictable and deadly. All this combines to create a game where negotiation needs to be on the table whenever possible, and retreat needs to be an option. That might not sound fun to folks who are used to a “clear the room” mentality, but I have so much fun seeing what my group gets into. They’ve befriended a troll, gotten swept up into an ancient conflict, and have forgotten that they are just a bunch of armed people and have no actual authority to do any of the things they do.
They’re even beginning to learn how to keep their party alive, well…most of them.
If you want to try something that scratches a fantasy itch, has players roll the familiar d20, but which also breaks away from concepts like armor class or hit point bloat Dragonbane is a terrific go to. My group has been playing it ever since our Basic Fantasy RPG campaign wrapped up and it’s a ton of fun.
#DMing #DnD #DungeonsDragons #dungeonsAndDragons #fantasy #gaming #GMing #Review #RolePlayingGame #RPG #TTRPG
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CW: Fedi meta
no wait im on wafrn. I need to use the power of tags
#According-to-all-known-laws-of-aviation #there-is-no-way-a-bee-should-be-able-to-fly.-Its-wings-are-too-small-to-get-its-fat-little-body-off-the-ground.-The-bee #of-course #flies-anyway-because-bees-don't-care-what-humans-think-is-impossible.-Yellow #black.-Yellow #black.-Yellow #black.-Yellow #black.-Ooh #black-and-yellow!-Let's-shake-it-up-a-little.-Barry!-Breakfast-is-ready!-Coming!-Hang-on-a-second.-Hello?-Barry?-Adam?-Can-you-believe-this-is-happening?-I-can't.-I'll-pick-you-up.-Looking-sharp.-Use-the-stairs #Your-father-paid-good-money-for-those.-Sorry.-I'm-excited.-Here's-the-graduate.-We're-very-proud-of-you #son.-A-perfect-report-card #all-B's.-Very-proud.-Ma!-I-got-a-thing-going-here.-You-got-lint-on-your-fuzz.-Ow!-That's-me!-Wave-to-us!-We'll-be-in-row-118 #000.-Bye!-Barry #I-told-you #stop-flying-in-the-house!-Hey #Adam.-Hey #Barry.-Is-that-fuzz-gel?-A-little.-Special-day #graduation.-Never-thought-I'd-make-it.-Three-days-grade-school #three-days-high-school.-Those-were-awkward.-Three-days-college.-I'm-glad-I-took-a-day-and-hitchhiked-around-The-Hive.-You-did-come-back-different.-Hi #Barry.-Artie #growing-a-mustache?-Looks-good.-Hear-about-Frankie?-Yeah.-You-going-to-the-funeral?-No #I'm-not-going.-Everybody-knows #sting-someone #you-die.-Don't-waste-it-on-a-squirrel.-Such-a-hothead.-I-guess-he-could-have-just-gotten-out-of-the-way.-I-love-this-incorporating-an-amusement-park-into-our-day.-That's-why-we-don't-need-vacations.-Boy #quite-a-bit-of-pomp-under-the-circumstances.-Well #Adam #today-we-are-men.-We-are!-Bee-men.-Amen!-Hallelujah!-Students #faculty #distinguished-bees #please-welcome-Dean-Buzzwell.-Welcome #New-Hive-City-graduating-class-of-9:15.-That-concludes-our-ceremonies-And-begins-your-career-at-Honex-Industries!-Will-we-pick-our-job-today?-I-heard-it's-just-orientation.-Heads-up!-Here-we-go.-Keep-your-hands-and-antennas-inside-the-tram-at-all-times.-Wonder-what-it'll-be-like?-A-little-scary.-Welcome-to-Honex #a-division-of-Honesco-and-a-part-of-the-Hexagon-Group.-This-is-it!-Wow.-Wow.-We-know-that-you #as-a-bee #have-worked-your-whole-life-to-get-to-the-point-where-you-can-work-for-your-whole-life.-Honey-begins-when-our-valiant-Pollen-Jocks-bring-the-nectar-to-The-Hive.-Our-top-secret-formula-is-automatically-color-corrected #scent-adjusted-and-bubble-contoured-into-this-soothing-sweet-syrup-with-its-distinctive-golden-glow-you-know-as...-Honey!-That-girl-was-hot.-She's-my-cousin!-She-is?-Yes #we're-all-cousins.-Right.-You're-right.-At-Honex #we-constantly-strive-to-improve-every-aspect-of-bee-existence.-These-bees-are-stress-testing-a-new-helmet-technology.-What-do-you-think-he-makes?-Not-enough.-Here-we-have-our-latest-advancement #the-Krelman.-What-does-that-do?-Catches-that-little-strand-of-honey-that-hangs-after-you-pour-it.-Saves-us-millions.-Can-anyone-work-on-the-Krelman?-Of-course.-Most-bee-jobs-are-small-ones.-But-bees-know-that-every-small-job #if-it's-done-well #means-a-lot.-But-choose-carefully-because-you'll-stay-in-the-job-you-pick-for-the-rest-of-your-life.-The-same-job-the-rest-of-your-life?-I-didn't-know-that.-What's-the-difference?-You'll-be-happy-to-know-that-bees #as-a-species #haven't-had-one-day-off-in-27-million-years.-So-you'll-just-work-us-to-death?-We'll-sure-try.-Wow!-That-blew-my-mind!-'What's-the-difference?'-How-can-you-say-that?-One-job-forever?-That's-an-insane-choice-to-have-to-make.-I'm-relieved.-Now-we-only-have-to-make-one-decision-in-life.-But #Adam #how-could-they-never-have-told-us-that?-Why-would-you-question-anything?-We're-bees.-We're-the-most-perfectly-functioning-society-on-Earth.-You-ever-think-maybe-things-work-a-little-too-well-here?-Like-what?-Give-me-one-example.-I-don't-know.-But-you-know-what-I'm-talking-about.-Please-clear-the-gate.-Royal-Nectar-Force-on-approach.-Wait-a-second.-Check-it-out.-Hey #those-are-Pollen-Jocks!-Wow.-I've-never-seen-them-this-close.-They-know-what-it's-like-outside-The-Hive.-Yeah #but-some-don't-come-back.-Hey #Jocks!-Hi #Jocks!-You-guys-did-great!-You're-monsters!-You're-sky-freaks!-I-love-it!-I-love-it!-I-wonder-where-they-were.-I-don't-know.-Their-day's-not-planned.-Outside-The-Hive #flying-who-knows-where #doing-who-knows-what.-You-can't-just-decide-to-be-a-Pollen-Jock.-You-have-to-be-bred-for-that.-Right.-Look.-That's-more-pollen-than-you-and-I-will-see-in-a-lifetime.-It's-just-a-status-symbol.-Bees-make-too-much-of-it.-Perhaps.-Unless-you're-wearing-it-and-the-ladies-see-you-wearing-it.-Those-ladies?-Aren't-they-our-cousins-too?-Distant.-Distant.-Look-at-these-two.-Couple-of-Hive-Harrys.-Let's-have-fun-with-them.-It-must-be-dangerous-being-a-Pollen-Jock.-Yeah.-Once-a-bear-pinned-me-against-a-mushroom!-He-had-a-paw-on-my-throat #and-with-the-other #he-was-slapping-me!-Oh #my!-I-never-thought-I'd-knock-him-out.-What-were-you-doing-during-this?-Trying-to-alert-the-authorities.-I-can-autograph-that.-A-little-gusty-out-there-today #wasn't-it #comrades?-Yeah.-Gusty.-We're-hitting-a-sunflower-patch-six-miles-from-here-tomorrow.-Six-miles #huh?-Barry!-A-puddle-jump-for-us #but-maybe-you're-not-up-for-it.-Maybe-I-am.-You-are-not!-We're-going-0900-at-J-Gate.-What-do-you-think #buzzy-boy?-Are-you-bee-enough?-I-might-be.-It-all-depends-on-what-0900-means.-Hey #Honex!-Dad #you-surprised-me.-You-decide-what-you're-interested-in?-Well #there's-a-lot-of-choices.-But-you-only-get-one.-Do-you-ever-get-bored-doing-the-same-job-every-day?-Son #let-me-tell-you-about-stirring.-You-grab-that-stick #and-you-just-move-it-around #and-you-stir-it-around.-You-get-yourself-into-a-rhythm.-It's-a-beautiful-thing.-You-know #Dad #the-more-I-think-about-it #maybe-the-honey-field-just-isn't-right-for-me.-You-were-thinking-of-what #making-balloon-animals?-That's-a-bad-job-for-a-guy-with-a-stinger.-Janet #your-son's-not-sure-he-wants-to-go-into-honey!-Barry #you-are-so-funny-sometimes.-I'm-not-trying-to-be-funny.-You're-not-funny!-You're-going-into-honey.-Our-son #the-stirrer!-You're-gonna-be-a-stirrer?-No-one's-listening-to-me!-Wait-till-you-see-the-sticks-I-have.-I-could-say-anything-right-now.-I'm-gonna-get-an-ant-tattoo!-Let's-open-some-honey-and-celebrate!-Maybe-I'll-pierce-my-thorax.-Shave-my-antennae.-Shack-up-with-a-grasshopper.-Get-a-gold-tooth-and-call-everybody-'dawg'!-I'm-so-proud.-We're-starting-work-today!-Today's-the-day.-Come-on!-All-the-good-jobs-will-be-gone.-Yeah #right.-Pollen-counting #stunt-bee #pouring #stirrer #front-desk #hair-removal...-Is-it-still-available?-Hang-on.-Two-left!-One-of-them's-yours!-Congratulations!-Step-to-the-side.-What'd-you-get?-Picking-crud-out.-Stellar!-Wow!-Couple-of-newbies?-Yes #sir!-Our-first-day!-We-are-ready!-Make-your-choice.-You-want-to-go-first?-No #you-go.-Oh #my.-What's-available?-Restroom-attendant's-open #not-for-the-reason-you-think.-Any-chance-of-getting-the-Krelman?-Sure #you're-on.-I'm-sorry #the-Krelman-just-closed-out.-Wax-monkey's-always-open.-The-Krelman-opened-up-again.-What-happened?-A-bee-died.-Makes-an-opening.-See?-He's-dead.-Another-dead-one.-Deady.-Deadified.-Two-more-dead.-Dead-from-the-neck-up.-Dead-from-the-neck-down.-That's-life!-Oh #this-is-so-hard!-Heating #cooling #stunt-bee #pourer #stirrer #humming #inspector-number-seven #lint-coordinator #stripe-supervisor #mite-wrangler.-Barry #what-do-you-think-I-should...-Barry?-Barry!-All-right #we've-got-the-sunflower-patch-in-quadrant-nine...-What-happened-to-you?-Where-are-you?-I'm-going-out.-Out?-Out-where?-Out-there.-Oh #no!-I-have-to #before-I-go-to-work-for-the-rest-of-my-life.-You're-gonna-die!-You're-crazy!-Hello?-Another-call-coming-in.-If-anyone's-feeling-brave #there's-a-Korean-deli-on-83rd-that-gets-their-roses-today.-Hey #guys.-Look-at-that.-Isn't-that-the-kid-we-saw-yesterday?-Hold-it #son #flight-deck's-restricted.-It's-OK #Lou.-We're-gonna-take-him-up.-Really?-Feeling-lucky #are-you?-Sign-here #here.-Just-initial-that.-Thank-you.-OK.-You-got-a-rain-advisory-today #and-as-you-all-know #bees-cannot-fly-in-rain.-So-be-careful.-As-always #watch-your-brooms #hockey-sticks #dogs #birds #bears-and-bats.-Also #I-got-a-couple-of-reports-of-root-beer-being-poured-on-us.-Murphy's-in-a-home-because-of-it #babbling-like-a-cicada!-That's-awful.-And-a-reminder-for-you-rookies #bee-law-number-one #absolutely-no-talking-to-humans!--All-right #launch-positions!-Buzz #buzz #buzz #buzz!-Buzz #buzz #buzz #buzz!-Buzz #buzz #buzz #buzz!-Black-and-yellow!-Hello!-You-ready-for-this #hot-shot?-Yeah.-Yeah #bring-it-on.-Wind #check.-Antennae #check.-Nectar-pack #check.-Wings #check.-Stinger #check.-Scared-out-of-my-shorts #check.-OK #ladies #let's-move-it-out!-Pound-those-petunias #you-striped-stem-suckers!-All-of-you #drain-those-flowers!-Wow!-I'm-out!-I-can't-believe-I'm-out!-So-blue.-I-feel-so-fast-and-free!-Box-kite!-Wow!-Flowers!-This-is-Blue-Leader #We-have-roses-visual.-Bring-it-around-30-degrees-and-hold.-Roses!-30-degrees #roger.-Bringing-it-around.-Stand-to-the-side #kid.-It's-got-a-bit-of-a-kick.-That-is-one-nectar-collector!-Ever-see-pollination-up-close?-No #sir.-I-pick-up-some-pollen-here #sprinkle-it-over-here.-Maybe-a-dash-over-there #a-pinch-on-that-one.-See-that?-It's-a-little-bit-of-magic.-That's-amazing.-Why-do-we-do-that?-That's-pollen-power.-More-pollen #more-flowers #more-nectar #more-honey-for-us.-Cool.-I'm-picking-up-a-lot-of-bright-yellow #Could-be-daisies #Don't-we-need-those?-Copy-that-visual.-Wait.-One-of-these-flowers-seems-to-be-on-the-move.-Say-again?-You're-reporting-a-moving-flower?-Affirmative.-That-was-on-the-line!-This-is-the-coolest.-What-is-it?-I-don't-know #but-I'm-loving-this-color.-It-smells-good.-Not-like-a-flower #but-I-like-it.-Yeah #fuzzy.-Chemical-y.-Careful #guys.-It's-a-little-grabby.-My-sweet-lord-of-bees!-Candy-brain #get-off-there!-Problem!-Guys!-This-could-be-bad.-Affirmative.-Very-close.-Gonna-hurt.-Mama's-little-boy.-You-are-way-out-of-position #rookie!-Coming-in-at-you-like-a-missile!-Help-me!-I-don't-think-these-are-flowers.-Should-we-tell-him?-I-think-he-knows.-What-is-this?!-Match-point!-You-can-start-packing-up #honey #because-you're-about-to-eat-it!-Yowser!-Gross.-There's-a-bee-in-the-car!-Do-something!-I'm-driving!-Hi #bee.-He's-back-here!-He's-going-to-sting-me!-Nobody-move.-If-you-don't-move #he-won't-sting-you.-Freeze!-He-blinked!-Spray-him #Granny!-What-are-you-doing?!-Wow...-the-tension-level-out-here-is-unbelievable.-I-gotta-get-home.-Can't-fly-in-rain.-Can't-fly-in-rain.-Can't-fly-in-rain.-Mayday!-Mayday!-Bee-going-down!-Ken #could-you-close-the-window-please?-Ken #could-you-close-the-window-please?-Check-out-my-new-resume.-I-made-it-into-a-fold-out-brochure.-You-see?-Folds-out.-Oh #no.-More-humans.-I-don't-need-this.-What-was-that?-Maybe-this-time.-This-time.-This-time.-This-time!-This-time!-This...-Drapes!-That-is-diabolical.-It's-fantastic.-It's-got-all-my-special-skills #even-my-top-ten-favorite-movies.-What's-number-one?-Star-Wars?-Nah #I-don't-go-for-that...-kind-of-stuff.-No-wonder-we-shouldn't-talk-to-them.-They're-out-of-their-minds.-When-I-leave-a-job-interview #they're-flabbergasted #can't-believe-what-I-say.-There's-the-sun.-Maybe-that's-a-way-out.-I-don't-remember-the-sun-having-a-big-75-on-it.-I-predicted-global-warming.-I-could-feel-it-getting-hotter.-At-first-I-thought-it-was-just-me.-Wait!-Stop!-Bee!-Stand-back.-These-are-winter-boots.-Wait!-Don't-kill-him!-You-know-I'm-allergic-to-them!-This-thing-could-kill-me!-Why-does-his-life-have-less-value-than-yours?-Why-does-his-life-have-any-less-value-than-mine?-Is-that-your-statement?-I'm-just-saying-all-life-has-value.-You-don't-know-what-he's-capable-of-feeling.-My-brochure!-There-you-go #little-guy.-I'm-not-scared-of-him.It's-an-allergic-thing.--Put-that-on-your-resume-brochure.-My-whole-face-could-puff-up.-Make-it-one-of-your-special-skills.-Knocking-someone-out-is-also-a-special-skill.-Right.-Bye #Vanessa.-Thanks.-Vanessa #next-week?-Yogurt-night?-Sure #Ken.-You-know #whatever.-You-could-put-carob-chips-on-there.-Bye.-Supposed-to-be-less-calories.-Bye.-I-gotta-say-something.-She-saved-my-life.-I-gotta-say-something.-All-right #here-it-goes.-Nah.-What-would-I-say?-I-could-really-get-in-trouble.-It's-a-bee-law.-You're-not-supposed-to-talk-to-a-human.-I-can't-believe-I'm-doing-this.-I've-got-to.-Oh #I-can't-do-it.-Come-on!-No.-Yes.-No.-Do-it.-I-can't.-How-should-I-start-it?-'You-like-jazz?'-No #that's-no-good.-Here-she-comes!-Speak #you-fool!-Hi!-I'm-sorry.-You're-talking.-Yes #I-know.-You're-talking!-I'm-so-sorry.-No #it's-OK.-It's-fine.-I-know-I'm-dreaming.-But-I-don't-recall-going-to-bed.-Well #I'm-sure-this-is-very-disconcerting.-This-is-a-bit-of-a-surprise-to-me.-I-mean #you're-a-bee!-I-am.-And-I'm-not-supposed-to-be-doing-this #Barry?-It's-pretty-big #but-they-were-all-trying-to-kill-me.-And-if-it-wasn't-for-you...-I-had-to-thank-you.-It's-just-how-I-was-raised.-That-was-a-little-weird.-I'm-talking-with-a-bee.-Yeah.-I'm-talking-to-a-bee.-And-the-bee-is-talking-to-me!-I-just-want-to-say-I'm-grateful.-I'll-leave-now.-Wait!-How-did-you-learn-to-do-that?-What?-The-talking-thing.-Same-way-you-did #I-guess.-'Mama #Dada #honey.'-You-pick-it-up.-That's-very-funny.-Yeah.-Bees-are-funny.-If-we-didn't-laugh #we'd-cry-with-what-we-have-to-deal-with.-Anyway...-Can-I...-get-you-something?-Like-what?-I-don't-know.-I-mean...-I-don't-know.-Coffee?-I-don't-want-to-put-you-out.-It's-no-trouble.-It-takes-two-minutes.-It's-just-coffee.-I-hate-to-impose.-Don't-be-ridiculous!-Actually #I-would-love-a-cup.-Hey #you-want-rum-cake?-I-shouldn't.-Have-some.-No #I-can't.-Come-on!-I'm-trying-to-lose-a-couple-micrograms.-Where?-These-stripes-don't-help.-You-look-great!-I-don't-know-if-you-know-anything-about-fashion.-Are-you-all-right?-No.-He's-making-the-tie-in-the-cab-as-they're-flying-up-Madison.-He-finally-gets-there.-He-runs-up-the-steps-into-the-church.-The-wedding-is-on.-And-he-says #'Watermelon?-I-thought-you-said-Guatemalan.-Why-would-I-marry-a-watermelon?'-Is-that-a-bee-joke?-That's-the-kind-of-stuff-we-do.-Yeah #different.-So #what-are-you-gonna-do #Barry?-About-work?-I-don't-know.-I-want-to-do-my-part-for-The-Hive #but-I-can't-do-it-the-way-they-want.-I-know-how-you-feel.-You-do?-Sure.-My-parents-wanted-me-to-be-a-lawyer-or-a-doctor #but-I-wanted-to-be-a-florist.-Really?-My-only-interest-is-flowers.-Our-new-queen-was-just-elected-with-that-same-campaign-slogan.-Anyway #if-you-look...-There's-my-hive-right-there.-See-it?-You're-in-Sheep-Meadow!-Yes!-I'm-right-off-the-Turtle-Pond!-No-way!-I-know-that-area.-I-lost-a-toe-ring-there-once.-Why-do-girls-put-rings-on-their-toes?-Why-not?-It's-like-putting-a-hat-on-your-knee.-Maybe-I'll-try-that.-You-all-right #ma'am?-Oh #yeah.-Fine.-Just-having-two-cups-of-coffee!-Anyway #this-has-been-great.-Thanks-for-the-coffee.-Yeah #it's-no-trouble.-Sorry-I-couldn't-finish-it.-If-I-did #I'd-be-up-the-rest-of-my-life.-Are-you...?-Can-I-take-a-piece-of-this-with-me?-Sure!-Here #have-a-crumb.-Thanks!-Yeah.-All-right.-Well #then...-I-guess-I'll-see-you-around.-Or-not.-OK #Barry.-And-thank-you-so-much-again...-for-before.-Oh #that?-That-was-nothing.-Well #not-nothing #but...-Anyway...-This-can't-possibly-work.-He's-all-set-to-go.-We-may-as-well-try-it.-OK #Dave #pull-the-chute.-Sounds-amazing.-It-was-amazing!-It-was-the-scariest #happiest-moment-of-my-life.-Humans!-I-can't-believe-you-were-with-humans!-Giant #scary-humans!-What-were-they-like?-Huge-and-crazy.-They-talk-crazy.-They-eat-crazy-giant-things.-They-drive-crazy.-Do-they-try-and-kill-you #like-on-TV?-Some-of-them.-But-some-of-them-don't.-How'd-you-get-back?-Poodle.-You-did-it #and-I'm-glad.-You-saw-whatever-you-wanted-to-see.-You-had-your-'experience.'-Now-you-can-pick-out-yourjob-and-be-normal.-Well...-Well?-Well #I-met-someone.-You-did?-Was-she-Bee-ish?-A-wasp?!-Your-parents-will-kill-you!-No #no #no #not-a-wasp.-Spider?-I'm-not-attracted-to-spiders.-I-know-it's-the-hottest-thing #with-the-eight-legs-and-all.-I-can't-get-by-that-face.-So-who-is-she?-She's...-human.-No #no.-That's-a-bee-law.-You-wouldn't-break-a-bee-law.-Her-name's-Vanessa.-Oh #boy.-She's-so-nice.-And-she's-a-florist!-Oh #no!-You're-dating-a-human-florist!-We're-not-dating.-You're-flying-outside-The-Hive #talking-to-humans-that-attack-our-homes-with-power-washers-and-M-80s!-One-eighth-a-stick-of-dynamite!-She-saved-my-life!-And-she-understands-me.-This-is-over!-Eat-this.-This-is-not-over!-What-was-that?-They-call-it-a-crumb.-It-was-so-stingin'-stripey!-And-that's-not-what-they-eat.-That's-what-falls-off-what-they-eat!-You-know-what-a-Cinnabon-is?-No.-It's-bread-and-cinnamon-and-frosting.-They-heat-it-up...-Sit-down!-...really-hot!-Listen-to-me!-We-are-not-them!-We're-us.-There's-us-and-there's-them!-Yes #but-who-can-deny-the-heart-that-is-yearning?-There's-no-yearning.-Stop-yearning.-Listen-to-me!-You-have-got-to-start-thinking-bee #my-friend.-Thinking-bee!-Thinking-bee.-Thinking-bee.-Thinking-bee!-Thinking-bee!-Thinking-bee!-Thinking-bee!-There-he-is.-He's-in-the-pool.-You-know-what-your-problem-is #Barry?-I-gotta-start-thinking-bee?-How-much-longer-will-this-go-on?-It's-been-three-days!-Why-aren't-you-working?-I've-got-a-lot-of-big-life-decisions-to-think-about.-What-life?-You-have-no-life!-You-have-no-job.-You're-barely-a-bee!-Would-it-kill-you-to-make-a-little-honey?-Barry #come-out.-Your-father's-talking-to-you.-Martin #would-you-talk-to-him?-Barry #I'm-talking-to-you!-You-coming?-Got-everything?-All-set!-Go-ahead.-I'll-catch-up.-Don't-be-too-long.-Watch-this!-Vanessa!-We're-still-here.-I-told-you-not-to-yell-at-him.-He-doesn't-respond-to-yelling!-Then-why-yell-at-me?-Because-you-don't-listen!-I'm-not-listening-to-this.-Sorry #I've-gotta-go.-Where-are-you-going?-I'm-meeting-a-friend.-A-girl?-Is-this-why-you-can't-decide?-Bye.-I-just-hope-she's-Bee-ish.-They-have-a-huge-parade-of-flowers-every-year-in-Pasadena?-To-be-in-the-Tournament-of-Roses #that's-every-florist's-dream!-Up-on-a-float #surrounded-by-flowers #crowds-cheering.-A-tournament.-Do-the-roses-compete-in-athletic-events?-No.-All-right #I've-got-one.-How-come-you-don't-fly-everywhere?-It's-exhausting.-Why-don't-you-run-everywhere?-It's-faster.-Yeah #OK #I-see #I-see.-All-right #your-turn.-TiVo.-You-can-just-freeze-live-TV?-That's-insane!-You-don't-have-that?-We-have-Hivo #but-it's-a-disease.-It's-a-horrible #horrible-disease.-Oh #my.-Dumb-bees!-You-must-want-to-sting-all-those-jerks.-We-try-not-to-sting.-It's-usually-fatal-for-us.-So-you-have-to-watch-your-temper.-Very-carefully.-You-kick-a-wall #take-a-walk #write-an-angry-letter-and-throw-it-out.-Work-through-it-like-any-emotion:-Anger #jealousy #lust.-Oh #my-goodness!-Are-you-OK?-Yeah.-What-is-wrong-with-you?!-It's-a-bug.-He's-not-bothering-anybody.-Get-out-of-here #you-creep!-What-was-that?-A-Pic-'N'-Save-circular?-Yeah #it-was.-How-did-you-know?-It-felt-like-about-10-pages.-Seventy-five-is-pretty-much-our-limit.-You've-really-got-that-down-to-a-science.-I-lost-a-cousin-to-Italian-Vogue.-I'll-bet.-What-in-the-name-of-Mighty-Hercules-is-this?-How-did-this-get-here?-cute-Bee #Golden-Blossom #Ray-Liotta-Private-Select?-Is-he-that-actor?-I-never-heard-of-him.-Why-is-this-here?-For-people.-We-eat-it.-You-don't-have-enough-food-of-your-own?-Well #yes.-How-do-you-get-it?-Bees-make-it.-I-know-who-makes-it!-And-it's-hard-to-make-it!-There's-heating #cooling #stirring.-You-need-a-whole-Krelman-thing!-It's-organic.-It's-our-ganic!-It's-just-honey #Barry.-Just-what?!-Bees-don't-know-about-this!-This-is-stealing!-A-lot-of-stealing!-You've-taken-our-homes #schools #hospitals!-This-is-all-we-have!-And-it's-on-sale?!-I'm-getting-to-the-bottom-of-this.-I'm-getting-to-the-bottom-of-all-of-this!-Hey #Hector.-You-almost-done?-Almost.-He-is-here.-I-sense-it.-Well #I-guess-I'll-go-home-now-and-just-leave-this-nice-honey-out #with-no-one-around.-You're-busted #box-boy!-I-knew-I-heard-something.-So-you-can-talk!-I-can-talk.-And-now-you'll-start-talking!-Where-you-getting-the-sweet-stuff?-Who's-your-supplier?-I-don't-understand.-I-thought-we-were-friends.-The-last-thing-we-want-to-do-is-upset-bees!-You're-too-late!-It's-ours-now!-You #sir #have-crossed-the-wrong-sword!-You #sir #will-be-lunch-for-my-iguana #Ignacio!-Where-is-the-honey-coming-from?-Tell-me-where!-Honey-Farms!-It-comes-from-Honey-Farms!-Crazy-person!-What-horrible-thing-has-happened-here?-These-faces #they-never-knew-what-hit-them.-And-now-they're-on-the-road-to-nowhere!-Just-keep-still.-What?-You're-not-dead?-Do-I-look-dead?-They-will-wipe-anything-that-moves.-Where-you-headed?-To-Honey-Farms.-I-am-onto-something-huge-here.-I'm-going-to-Alaska.-Moose-blood #crazy-stuff.-Blows-your-head-off!-I'm-going-to-Tacoma.-And-you?-He-really-is-dead.-All-right.-Uh-oh!-What-is-that?!-Oh #no!-A-wiper!-Triple-blade!-Triple-blade?-Jump-on!-It's-your-only-chance #bee!-Why-does-everything-have-to-be-so-doggone-clean?!-How-much-do-you-people-need-to-see?!-Open-your-eyes!-Stick-your-head-out-the-window!-From-NPR-News-in-Washington #I'm-Carl-Kasell.-But-don't-kill-no-more-bugs!-Bee!-Moose-blood-guy!!-You-hear-something?-Like-what?-Like-tiny-screaming.-Turn-off-the-radio.-Whassup #bee-boy?-Hey #Blood.-Just-a-row-of-honey-jars #as-far-as-the-eye-could-see.-Wow!-I-assume-wherever-this-truck-goes-is-where-they're-getting-it.-I-mean #that-honey's-ours.-Bees-hang-tight.-We're-all-jammed-in.-It's-a-close-community.-Not-us #man.-We-on-our-own.-Every-mosquito-on-his-own.-What-if-you-get-in-trouble?-You-a-mosquito #you-in-trouble.-Nobody-likes-us.-They-just-smack.-See-a-mosquito #smack #smack!-At-least-you're-out-in-the-world.-You-must-meet-girls.-Mosquito-girls-try-to-trade-up #get-with-a-moth #dragonfly.-Mosquito-girl-don't-want-no-mosquito.-You-got-to-be-kidding-me!-Mooseblood's-about-to-leave-the-building!-So-long #bee!-Hey #guys!-Mooseblood!-I-knew-I'd-catch-y'all-down-here.-Did-you-bring-your-crazy-straw?-We-throw-it-in-jars #slap-a-label-on-it #and-it's-pretty-much-pure-profit.-What-is-this-place?-A-bee's-got-a-brain-the-size-of-a-pinhead.-They-are-pinheads!-Pinhead.-Check-out-the-new-smoker.-Oh #sweet.-That's-the-one-you-want.-The-Thomas-3000!-Smoker?-Ninety-puffs-a-minute #semi-automatic.-Twice-the-nicotine #all-the-tar.-A-couple-breaths-of-this-knocks-them-right-out.-They-make-the-honey #and-we-make-the-money.-'They-make-the-honey #and-we-make-the-money'?-Oh #my!-What's-going-on?-Are-you-OK?-Yeah.-It-doesn't-last-too-long.-Do-you-know-you're-in-a-fake-hive-with-fake-walls?-Our-queen-was-moved-here.-We-had-no-choice.-This-is-your-queen?-That's-a-man-in-women's-clothes!-That's-a-drag-queen!-What-is-this?-Oh #no!-There's-hundreds-of-them!-Bee-honey.-Our-honey-is-being-brazenly-stolen-on-a-massive-scale!-This-is-worse-than-anything-bears-have-done!-I-intend-to-do-something.-Oh #Barry #stop.-Who-told-you-humans-are-taking-our-honey?-That's-a-rumor.-Do-these-look-like-rumors?-That's-a-conspiracy-theory.-These-are-obviously-doctored-photos.-How-did-you-get-mixed-up-in-this?-He's-been-talking-to-humans.-What?-Talking-to-humans?!-He-has-a-human-girlfriend.-And-they-make-out!-Make-out?-Barry!-We-do-not.-You-wish-you-could.-Whose-side-are-you-on?-The-bees!-I-dated-a-cricket-once-in-San-Antonio.-Those-crazy-legs-kept-me-up-all-night.-Barry #this-is-what-you-want-to-do-with-your-life?-I-want-to-do-it-for-all-our-lives.-Nobody-works-harder-than-bees!-Dad #I-remember-you-coming-home-so-overworked-your-hands-were-still-stirring.-You-couldn't-stop.-I-remember-that.-What-right-do-they-have-to-our-honey?-We-live-on-two-cups-a-year.-They-put-it-in-lip-balm-for-no-reason-whatsoever!-Even-if-it's-true #what-can-one-bee-do?-Sting-them-where-it-really-hurts.-In-the-face!-The-eye!-That-would-hurt.-No.-Up-the-nose?-That's-a-killer.-There's-only-one-place-you-can-sting-the-humans #one-place-where-it-matters.-Hive-at-Five #The-Hive's-only-full-hour-action-news-source.-No-more-bee-beards!-With-Bob-Bumble-at-the-anchor-desk.-Weather-with-Storm-Stinger.-Sports-with-Buzz-Larvi.-And-Jeanette-Chung.-Good-evening.-I'm-Bob-Bumble.-And-I'm-Jeanette-Ohung.-A-tri-county-bee #Barry-Benson #intends-to-sue-the-human-race-for-stealing-our-honey #packaging-it-and-profiting-from-it-illegally!-Tomorrow-night-on-Bee-Larry-King #we'll-have-three-former-queens-here-in-our-studio #discussing-their-new-book #classy-Ladies #out-this-week-on-Hexagon.-Tonight-we're-talking-to-Barry-Benson.-Did-you-ever-think #'I'm-a-kid-from-The-Hive.-I-can't-do-this'?-Bees-have-never-been-afraid-to-change-the-world.-What-about-Bee-Oolumbus?-Bee-Gandhi?-Bejesus?-Where-I'm-from #we'd-never-sue-humans.-We-were-thinking-of-stickball-or-candy-stores.-How-old-are-you?-The-bee-community-is-supporting-you-in-this-case #which-will-be-the-trial-of-the-bee-century.-You-know #they-have-a-Larry-King-in-the-human-world-too.-It's-a-common-name.-Next-week...-He-looks-like-you-and-has-a-show-and-suspenders-and-colored-dots...-Next-week...-Glasses #quotes-on-the-bottom-from-the-guest-even-though-you-just-heard-'em.-Bear-Week-next-week!-They're-scary #hairy-and-here-live.-Always-leans-forward #pointy-shoulders #squinty-eyes #very-Jewish.-In-tennis #you-attack-at-the-point-of-weakness!-It-was-my-grandmother #Ken.-She's-81.-Honey #her-backhand's-a-joke!-I'm-not-gonna-take-advantage-of-that?-Quiet #please.-Actual-work-going-on-here.-Is-that-that-same-bee?-Yes #it-is!-I'm-helping-him-sue-the-human-race.-Hello.-Hello #bee.-This-is-Ken.-Yeah #I-remember-you.-Timberland #size-ten-and-a-half.-Vibram-sole #I-believe.-Why-does-he-talk-again?-Listen #you-better-go-'cause-we're-really-busy-working.-But-it's-our-yogurt-night!-Bye-bye.-Why-is-yogurt-night-so-difficult?!-You-poor-thing.-You-two-have-been-at-this-for-hours!-Yes #and-Adam-here-has-been-a-huge-help.-Frosting...-How-many-sugars?-Just-one.-I-try-not-to-use-the-competition.-So-why-are-you-helping-me?-Bees-have-good-qualities.-And-it-takes-my-mind-off-the-shop.-Instead-of-flowers #people-are-giving-balloon-bouquets-now.-Those-are-great #if-you're-three.-And-artificial-flowers.-Oh #those-just-get-me-psychotic!-Yeah #me-too.-Bent-stingers #pointless-pollination.-Bees-must-hate-those-fake-things!-Nothing-worse-than-a-daffodil-that's-had-work-done.-Maybe-this-could-make-up-for-it-a-little-bit.-This-lawsuit's-a-pretty-big-deal.-I-guess.-You-sure-you-want-to-go-through-with-it?-Am-I-sure?-When-I'm-done-with-the-humans #they-won't-be-able-to-say #'Honey #I'm-home #'-without-paying-a-royalty!-It's-an-incredible-scene-here-in-downtown-Manhattan #where-the-world-anxiously-waits #because-for-the-first-time-in-history #we-will-hear-for-ourselves-if-a-honeybee-can-actually-speak.-What-have-we-gotten-into-here #isn't-it?-I-can't-believe-how-many-humans-don't-work-during-the-day.-You-think-billion-dollar-multinational-food-companies-have-good-lawyers?-Everybody-needs-to-stay-behind-the-barricade.-What's-the-matter?-I-don't-know #I-just-got-a-chill.-Well #if-it-isn't-the-bee-team.-You-boys-work-on-this?-All-rise!-The-Honorable-Judge-Bumbleton-presiding.-All-right.-Case-number-4475 #Superior-Court-of-New-York #Barry-Bee-Benson-v.-the-Honey-Industry-is-now-in-session.-Mr.-Montgomery #you're-representing-the-five-food-companies-collectively?-A-privilege.-Mr.-Benson...-you're-representing-all-the-bees-of-the-world?-I'm-kidding.-Yes #Your-Honor #we're-ready-to-proceed.-Mr.-Montgomery #your-opening-statement #please.-Ladies-and-gentlemen-of-the-jury #my-grandmother-was-a-simple-woman.-Born-on-a-farm #she-believed-it-was-man's-divine-right-to-benefit-from-the-bounty-of-nature-God-put-before-us.-If-we-lived-in-the-topsy-turvy-world-Mr.-Benson-imagines #just-think-of-what-would-it-mean.-I-would-have-to-negotiate-with-the-silkworm-for-the-elastic-in-my-britches!-Talking-bee!-How-do-we-know-this-isn't-some-sort-of-holographic-motion-picture-capture-Hollywood-wizardry?-They-could-be-using-laser-beams!-Robotics!-Ventriloquism!-Cloning!-For-all-we-know #he-could-be-on-steroids!-Mr.-Benson?-Ladies-and-gentlemen #there's-no-trickery-here.-I'm-just-an-ordinary-bee.-Honey's-pretty-important-to-me.-It's-important-to-all-bees.-We-invented-it!-We-make-it.-And-we-protect-it-with-our-lives.-Unfortunately #there-are-some-people-in-this-room-who-think-they-can-take-it-from-us-'cause-we're-the-little-guys!-I'm-hoping-that #after-this-is-all-over #you'll-see-how #by-taking-our-honey #you-not-only-take-everything-we-have-but-everything-we-are!-I-wish-he'd-dress-like-that-all-the-time.-So-nice!-Call-your-first-witness.-So #Mr.-Klauss-Vanderhayden-of-Honey-Farms #big-company-you-have.-I-suppose-so.-I-see-you-also-own-Honeyburton-and-Honron!-Yes #they-provide-beekeepers-for-our-farms.-Beekeeper.-I-find-that-to-be-a-very-disturbing-term.-I-don't-imagine-you-employ-any-bee-free-ers #do-you?-No.-I-couldn't-hear-you.-No.-No.-Because-you-don't-free-bees.-You-keep-bees.-Not-only-that #it-seems-you-thought-a-bear-would-be-an-appropriate-image-for-a-jar-of-honey.-They're-very-lovable-creatures.-Yogi-Bear #Fozzie-Bear #Build-A-Bear.-You-mean-like-this?-Bears-kill-bees!-How'd-you-like-his-head-crashing-through-your-living-room?!-Biting-into-your-couch!-Spitting-out-your-throw-pillows!-OK #that's-enough.-Take-him-away.-So #Mr.-Sting #thank-you-for-being-here.-Your-name-intrigues-me.-Where-have-I-heard-it-before?-I-was-with-a-band-called-The-Police.-But-you've-never-been-a-police-officer #have-you?-No #I-haven't.-No #you-haven't.-And-so-here-we-have-yet-another-example-of-bee-culture-casually-stolen-by-a-human-for-nothing-more-than-a-prance-about-stage-name.-Oh #please.-Have-you-ever-been-stung #Mr.-Sting?-Because-I'm-feeling-a-little-stung #Sting.-Or-should-I-say...-Mr.-Gordon-M.-Sumner!-That's-not-his-real-name?!-You-idiots!-Mr.-Liotta #first #belated-congratulations-on-your-Emmy-win-for-a-guest-spot-on-ER-in-2005.-Thank-you.-Thank-you.-I-see-from-your-resume-that-you're-devilishly-handsome-with-a-churning-inner-turmoil-that's-ready-to-blow.-I-enjoy-what-I-do.-Is-that-a-crime?-Not-yet-it-isn't.-But-is-this-what-it's-come-to-for-you?-Exploiting-tiny #helpless-bees-so-you-don't-have-to-rehearse-your-part-and-learn-your-lines #sir?-Watch-it #Benson!-I-could-blow-right-now!-This-isn't-a-goodfella.-This-is-a-badfella!-Why-doesn't-someone-just-step-on-this-creep #and-we-can-all-go-home?!-Order-in-this-court!-You're-all-thinking-it!-Order!-Order #I-say!-Say-it!-Mr.-Liotta #please-sit-down!-I-think-it-was-awfully-nice-of-that-bear-to-pitch-in-like-that.-I-think-the-jury's-on-our-side.-Are-we-doing-everything-right #legally?-I'm-a-florist.-Right.-Well #here's-to-a-great-team.-To-a-great-team!-Well #hello.-Ken!-Hello.-I-didn't-think-you-were-coming.-No #I-was-just-late-I-tried-to-call #but...-the-battery.-I-didn't-want-all-this-to-go-to-waste #so-I-called-Barry.-Luckily #he-was-free.-Oh #that-was-lucky.-There's-a-little-left.-I-could-heat-it-up.-Yeah #heat-it-up #sure #whatever.-So-I-hear-you're-quite-a-tennis-player.-I'm-not-much-for-the-game-myself.-The-ball's-a-little-grabby.-That's-where-I-usually-sit.-Right...-there.-Ken #Barry-was-looking-at-your-resume #and-he-agreed-with-me-that-eating-with-chopsticks-isn't-really-a-special-skill.-You-think-I-don't-see-what-you're-doing?-I-know-how-hard-it-is-to-find-the-right-job.-We-have-that-in-common.-Do-we?-Bees-have-100-percent-employment #but-we-do-jobs-like-taking-the-crud-out.-That's-just-what-I-was-thinking-about-doing.-Ken #I-let-Barry-borrow-your-razor-for-his-fuzz.-I-hope-that-was-all-right.-I'm-going-to-drain-the-old-stinger.-Yeah #you-do-that.-Look-at-that.-You-know #I've-just-about-had-it-with-your-little-Mind-Games.-What's-that?-Italian-Vogue.-Mamma-mia #that's-a-lot-of-pages.-A-lot-of-ads.-Remember-what-Van-said #why-is-your-life-more-valuable-than-mine?-Funny #I-just-can't-seem-to-recall-that!-I-think-something-stinks-in-here!-I-love-the-smell-of-flowers.-How-do-you-like-the-smell-of-flames?!-Not-as-much.-Water-bug!-Not-taking-sides!-Ken #I'm-wearing-a-Chapstick-hat!-This-is-pathetic!-I've-got-issues!-Well #well #well #a-royal-flush!-You're-bluffing.-Am-I?-Surf's-up #dude!-Poo-water!-That-bowl-is-gnarly.-Except-for-those-dirty-yellow-rings!-Kenneth!-What-are-you-doing?!-You-know #I-don't-even-like-honey!-I-don't-eat-it!-We-need-to-talk!-He's-just-a-little-bee!-And-he-happens-to-be-the-nicest-bee-I've-met-in-a-long-time!-Long-time?-What-are-you-talking-about?!-Are-there-other-bugs-in-your-life?--No #but-there-are-other-things-bugging-me-in-life.-And-you're-one-of-them!-Fine!-Talking-bees #no-yogurt-night...-My-nerves-are-fried-from-riding-on-this-emotional-roller-coaster!-Goodbye #Ken.-And-for-your-information #I-prefer-sugar-free #artificial-sweeteners-made-by-man!-I'm-sorry-about-all-that.-I-know-it's-got-an-aftertaste!-I-like-it!-I-always-felt-there-was-some-kind-of-barrier-between-Ken-and-me.-I-couldn't-overcome-it.-Oh #well.-Are-you-OK-for-the-trial?-I-believe-Mr.-Montgomery-is-about-out-of-ideas.-We-would-like-to-call-Mr.-Barry-Benson-Bee-to-the-stand.-Good-idea!-You-can-really-see-why-he's-considered-one-of-the-best-lawyers...-Yeah.-Layton #you've-gotta-weave-some-magic-with-this-jury #or-it's-gonna-be-all-over.-Don't-worry.-The-only-thing-I-have-to-do-to-turn-this-jury-around-is-to-remind-them-of-what-they-don't-like-about-bees.-You-got-the-tweezers?-Are-you-allergic?-Only-to-losing #son.-Only-to-losing.-Mr.-Benson-Bee #I'll-ask-you-what-I-think-we'd-all-like-to-know.-What-exactly-is-your-relationship-to-that-woman?-We're-friends.-Good-friends?-Yes.-How-good?-Do-you-live-together?-Wait-a-minute...-Are-you-her-little...-bedbug?-I've-seen-a-bee-documentary-or-two.-From-what-I-understand #doesn't-your-queen-give-birth-to-all-the-bee-children?-Yeah #but...-So-those-aren't-your-real-parents!-Oh #Barry...-Yes #they-are!-Hold-me-back!-You're-an-illegitimate-bee #aren't-you #Benson?-He's-denouncing-bees!-Don't-y'all-date-your-cousins?-Objection!-I'm-going-to-pincushion-this-guy!-Adam #don't!-It's-what-he-wants!-Oh #I'm-hit!!-Oh #lordy #I-am-hit!-Order!-Order!-The-venom!-The-venom-is-coursing-through-my-veins!-I-have-been-felled-by-a-winged-beast-of-destruction!-You-see?-You-can't-treat-them-like-equals!-They're-striped-savages!-Stinging's-the-only-thing-they-know!-It's-their-way!-Adam #stay-with-me.-I-can't-feel-my-legs.-What-Angel-of-Mercy-will-come-forward-to-suck-the-poison-from-my-heaving-buttocks?-I-will-have-order-in-this-court.-Order!-Order #please!-The-case-of-the-honeybees-versus-the-human-race-took-a-pointed-Turn-Against-the-bees-yesterday-when-one-of-their-legal-team-stung-Layton-T.-Montgomery.-Hey #buddy.-Hey.-Is-there-much-pain?-Yeah.-I...-I-blew-the-whole-case #didn't-I?-It-doesn't-matter.-What-matters-is-you're-alive.-You-could-have-died.-I'd-be-better-off-dead.-Look-at-me.-They-got-it-from-the-cafeteria-downstairs #in-a-tuna-sandwich.-Look #there's-a-little-celery-still-on-it.-What-was-it-like-to-sting-someone?-I-can't-explain-it.-It-was-all...-All-adrenaline-and-then...and-then-ecstasy!-All-right.-You-think-it-was-all-a-trap?-Of-course.-I'm-sorry.-I-flew-us-right-into-this.-What-were-we-thinking?-Look-at-us.-We're-just-a-couple-of-bugs-in-this-world.-What-will-the-humans-do-to-us-if-they-win?-I-don't-know.-I-hear-they-put-the-roaches-in-motels.-That-doesn't-sound-so-bad.-Adam #they-check-in #but-they-don't-check-out!-Oh #my.-Could-you-get-a-nurse-to-close-that-window?-Why?-The-smoke.-Bees-don't-smoke.-Right.-Bees-don't-smoke.-Bees-don't-smoke!-But-some-bees-are-smoking.-That's-it!-That's-our-case!-It-is?-It's-not-over?-Get-dressed.-I've-gotta-go-somewhere.-Get-back-to-the-court-and-stall.-Stall-any-way-you-can.-And-assuming-you've-done-step-correctly #you're-ready-for-the-tub.-Mr.-Flayman.-Yes?-Yes #Your-Honor!-Where-is-the-rest-of-your-team?-Well #Your-Honor #it's-interesting.-Bees-are-trained-to-fly-haphazardly #and-as-a-result #we-don't-make-very-good-time.-I-actually-heard-a-funny-story-about...-Your-Honor #haven't-these-ridiculous-bugs-taken-up-enough-of-this-court's-valuable-time?-How-much-longer-will-we-allow-these-absurd-shenanigans-to-go-on?-They-have-presented-no-compelling-evidence-to-support-their-charges-against-my-clients #who-run-legitimate-businesses.-I-move-for-a-complete-dismissal-of-this-entire-case!-Mr.-Flayman #I'm-afraid-I'm-going-to-have-to-consider-Mr.-Montgomery's-motion.-But-you-can't!-We-have-a-terrific-case.-Where-is-your-proof?-Where-is-the-evidence?-Show-me-the-smoking-gun!-Hold-it #Your-Honor!-You-want-a-smoking-gun?-Here-is-your-smoking-gun.-What-is-that?-It's-a-bee-smoker!-What #this?-This-harmless-little-contraption?-This-couldn't-hurt-a-fly #let-alone-a-bee.-Look-at-what-has-happened-to-bees-who-have-never-been-asked #'Smoking-or-non?'-Is-this-what-nature-intended-for-us?-To-be-forcibly-addicted-to-smoke-machines-and-man-made-wooden-slat-work-camps?-Living-out-our-lives-as-honey-slaves-to-the-white-man?-What-are-we-gonna-do?-He's-playing-the-species-card.-Ladies-and-gentlemen #please #free-these-bees!-Free-the-bees!-Free-the-bees!-Free-the-bees!-Free-the-bees!-Free-the-bees!-The-court-finds-in-favor-of-the-bees!-Vanessa #we-won!-I-knew-you-could-do-it!-High-five!-Sorry.-I'm-OK!-You-know-what-this-means?-All-the-honey-will-finally-belong-to-the-bees.-Now-we-won't-have-to-work-so-hard-all-the-time.-This-is-an-unholy-perversion-of-the-balance-of-nature #Benson.-You'll-regret-this.-Barry #how-much-honey-is-out-there?-All-right.-One-at-a-time.-Barry #who-are-you-wearing?-My-sweater-is-Ralph-Lauren #and-I-have-no-pants.-What-if-Montgomery's-right?-What-do-you-mean?-We've-been-living-the-bee-way-a-long-time #27-million-years.-Congratulations-on-your-victory.-What-will-you-demand-as-a-settlement?-First #we'll-demand-a-complete-shutdown-of-all-bee-work-camps.-Then-we-want-back-the-honey-that-was-ours-to-begin-with #every-last-drop.-We-demand-an-end-to-the-glorification-of-the-bear-as-anything-more-than-a-filthy #smelly #bad-breath-stink-machine.-We're-all-aware-of-what-they-do-in-the-woods.-Wait-for-my-signal.-Take-him-out.-He'll-have-nauseous-for-a-few-hours #then-he'll-be-fine.-And-we-will-no-longer-tolerate-bee-negative-nicknames...-But-it's-just-a-prance-about-stage-name!-...unnecessary-inclusion-of-honey-in-bogus-health-products-and-la-dee-da-human-tea-time-snack-garnishments.-Can't-breathe.-Bring-it-in #boys!-Hold-it-right-there!-Good.-Tap-it.-Mr.-Buzzwell #we-just-passed-three-cups-and-there's-gallons-more-coming!-I-think-we-need-to-shut-down!-Shut-down?-We've-never-shut-down.-Shut-down-honey-production!-Stop-making-honey!-Turn-your-key #sir!-What-do-we-do-now?-Cannonball!-We're-shutting-honey-production!-Mission-abort.-Aborting-pollination-and-nectar-detail.-Returning-to-base.-Adam #you-wouldn't-believe-how-much-honey-was-out-there.-Oh #yeah?-What's-going-on?-Where-is-everybody?-Are-they-out-celebrating?-They're-home.-They-don't-know-what-to-do.-Laying-out #sleeping-in.-I-heard-your-Uncle-Carl-was-on-his-way-to-San-Antonio-with-a-cricket.-At-least-we-got-our-honey-back.-Sometimes-I-think #so-what-if-humans-liked-our-honey?-Who-wouldn't?-It's-the-greatest-thing-in-the-world!-I-was-excited-to-be-part-of-making-it.-This-was-my-new-desk.-This-was-my-new-job.-I-wanted-to-do-it-really-well.-And-now...-Now-I-can't.-I-don't-understand-why-they're-not-happy.-I-thought-their-lives-would-be-better!-They're-doing-nothing.-It's-amazing.-Honey-really-changes-people.-You-don't-have-any-idea-what's-going-on #do-you?-What-did-you-want-to-show-me?-This.-What-happened-here?-That-is-not-the-half-of-it.-Oh #no.-Oh #my.-They're-all-wilting.-Doesn't-look-very-good #does-it?-No.-And-whose-fault-do-you-think-that-is?-You-know #I'm-gonna-guess-bees.-Bees?-Specifically #me.-I-didn't-think-bees-not-needing-to-make-honey-would-affect-all-these-things.-It's-not-just-flowers.-Fruits #vegetables #they-all-need-bees.-That's-our-whole-SAT-test-right-there.-Take-away-produce #that-affects-the-entire-animal-kingdom.-And-then #of-course...-The-human-species?-So-if-there's-no-more-pollination #it-could-all-just-go-south-here #couldn't-it?-I-know-this-is-also-partly-my-fault.-How-about-a-suicide-pact?-How-do-we-do-it?-I'll-sting-you #you-step-on-me.-That-just-kills-you-twice.-Right #right.-Listen #Barry...-sorry #but-I-gotta-get-going.-I-had-to-open-my-mouth-and-talk.-Vanessa?-Vanessa?-Why-are-you-leaving?-Where-are-you-going?-To-the-final-Tournament-of-Roses-parade-in-Pasadena.-They've-moved-it-to-this-weekend-because-all-the-flowers-are-dying.-It's-the-Last-Chance-I'll-ever-have-to-see-it.-Vanessa #I-just-wanna-say-I'm-sorry.-I-never-meant-it-to-turn-out-like-this.-I-know.-Me-neither.-Tournament-of-Roses.-Roses-can't-do-sports.-Wait-a-minute.-Roses.-Roses?-Roses!-Vanessa!-Roses?!-Barry?-Roses-are-flowers!-Yes #they-are.-Flowers #bees #pollen!-I-know.-That's-why-this-is-the-last-parade.-Maybe-not.-Could-you-ask-him-to-slow-down?-Could-you-slow-down?-Barry!-OK #I-made-a-huge-mistake.-This-is-a-total-disaster #all-my-fault.-Yes #it-kind-of-is.-I've-ruined-the-planet.-I-wanted-to-help-you-with-the-flower-shop.-I've-made-it-worse.-Actually #it's-completely-closed-down.-I-thought-maybe-you-were-remodeling.-But-I-have-another-idea #and-it's-greater-than-my-previous-ideas-combined.-I-don't-want-to-hear-it!-All-right #they-have-the-roses #the-roses-have-the-pollen.-I-know-every-bee #plant-and-flower-bud-in-this-park.-All-we-gotta-do-is-get-what-they've-got-back-here-with-what-we've-got.-Bees.-Park.-Pollen!-Flowers.-Repollination!-Across-the-nation!-Tournament-of-Roses #Pasadena #California.-They've-got-nothing-but-flowers #floats-and-cotton-candy.-Security-will-be-tight.-I-have-an-idea.-Vanessa-Bloome #FTD.-Official-floral-business.-It's-real.-Sorry #ma'am.-Nice-brooch.-Thank-you.-It-was-a-gift.-Once-inside #we-just-pick-the-right-float.-How-about-The-Princess-and-the-Pea?-I-could-be-the-princess #and-you-could-be-the-pea!-Yes #I-got-it.-Where-should-I-sit?-What-are-you?-I-believe-I'm-the-pea.-The-pea?-It-goes-under-the-mattresses.-Not-in-this-fairy-tale #sweetheart.-I'm-getting-the-marshal.-You-do-that!-This-whole-parade-is-a-fiasco!-Let's-see-what-this-baby'll-do.-Hey #what-are-you-doing?!-Then-all-we-do-is-blend-in-with-traffic...-without-arousing-suspicion.-Once-at-the-airport #there's-no-stopping-us.-Stop!-Security.-You-and-your-insect-pack-your-float?-Yes.-Has-it-been-in-your-possession-the-entire-time?-Would-you-remove-your-shoes?-Remove-your-stinger.-It's-part-of-me.-I-know.-Just-having-some-fun.-Enjoy-your-flight.-Then-if-we're-lucky #we'll-have-just-enough-pollen-to-do-the-job.-Can-you-believe-how-lucky-we-are?-We-have-just-enough-pollen-to-do-the-job!-I-think-this-is-gonna-work.-It's-got-to-work.-Attention #passengers #this-is-Captain-Scott.-We-have-a-bit-of-bad-weather-in-New-York.-It-looks-like-we'll-experience-a-couple-hours-delay.-Barry #these-are-cut-flowers-with-no-water.-They'll-never-make-it.-I-gotta-get-up-there-and-talk-to-them.-Be-careful.-Can-I-get-help-with-the-Sky-Mall-magazine?-I'd-like-to-order-the-talking-inflatable-nose-and-ear-hair-trimmer.-Captain #I'm-in-a-real-situation.-What'd-you-say #Hal?-Nothing.-Bee!-Don't-freak-out!-My-entire-species...-What-are-you-doing?-Wait-a-minute!-I'm-an-attorney!-Who's-an-attorney?-Don't-move.-Oh #Barry.-Good-afternoon #passengers.-This-is-your-captain.-Would-a-Miss-Vanessa-Bloome-in-24B-please-report-to-the-cockpit?-And-please-hurry!-What-happened-here?-There-was-a-DustBuster #a-toupee #a-life-raft-exploded.-One's-bald #one's-in-a-boat #they're-both-unconscious!-Is-that-another-bee-joke?-No!-No-one's-flying-the-plane!-This-is-JFK-control-tower #Flight-356.-What's-your-status?-This-is-Vanessa-Bloome.-I'm-a-florist-from-New-York.-Where's-the-pilot?-He's-unconscious #and-so-is-the-copilot.-Not-good.-Does-anyone-onboard-have-flight-experience?-As-a-matter-of-fact #there-is.-Who's-that?-Barry-Benson.-From-the-honey-trial?!-Oh #great.-Vanessa #this-is-nothing-more-than-a-big-metal-bee.-It's-got-giant-wings #huge-engines.-I-can't-fly-a-plane.-Why-not?-Isn't-John-Travolta-a-pilot?-Yes.-How-hard-could-it-be?-Wait #Barry!-We're-headed-into-some-lightning.-This-is-Bob-Bumble.-We-have-some-late-breaking-news-from-JFK-Airport #where-a-suspenseful-scene-is-developing.-Barry-Benson #fresh-from-his-legal-victory...-That's-Barry!-...is-attempting-to-land-a-plane #loaded-with-people #flowers-and-an-incapacitated-flight-crew.-Flowers?!-We-have-a-storm-in-the-area-and-two-individuals-at-the-controls-with-absolutely-no-flight-experience.-Just-a-minute.-There's-a-bee-on-that-plane.-I'm-quite-familiar-with-Mr.-Benson-and-his-no-account-compadres.-They've-done-enough-damage.-But-isn't-he-your-only-hope?-Technically #a-bee-shouldn't-be-able-to-fly-at-all.-Their-wings-are-too-small...-Haven't-we-heard-this-a-million-times?-'The-surface-area-of-the-wings-and-body-mass-make-no-sense.'-Get-this-on-the-air!-Got-it.-Stand-by.-We're-going-live.-The-way-we-work-may-be-a-mystery-to-you.-Making-honey-takes-a-lot-of-bees-doing-a-lot-of-small-jobs.-But-let-me-tell-you-about-a-small-job.-If-you-do-it-well #it-makes-a-big-difference.-More-than-we-realized.-To-us #to-everyone.-That's-why-I-want-to-get-bees-back-to-working-together.-That's-the-bee-way!-We're-not-made-of-Jell-O.-We-get-behind-a-fellow.-Black-and-yellow!-Hello!-Left #right #down #hover.-Hover?-Forget-hover.-This-isn't-so-hard.-Beep-beep!-Beep-beep!-Barry #what-happened?!-Wait #I-think-we-were-on-autopilot-the-whole-time.-That-may-have-been-helping-me.-And-now-we're-not!-So-it-turns-out-I-cannot-fly-a-plane.-All-of-you #let's-get-behind-this-fellow!-Move-it-out!-Move-out!-Our-only-chance-is-if-I-do-what-I'd-do #you-copy-me-with-the-wings-of-the-plane!-Don't-have-to-yell.-I'm-not-yelling!-We're-in-a-lot-of-trouble.-It's-very-hard-to-concentrate-with-that-panicky-tone-in-your-voice!-It's-not-a-tone.-I'm-panicking!-I-can't-do-this!-Vanessa #pull-yourself-together.-You-have-to-snap-out-of-it!-You-snap-out-of-it.-You-snap-out-of-it.-You-snap-out-of-it!-You-snap-out-of-it!-You-snap-out-of-it!-You-snap-out-of-it!-You-snap-out-of-it!-You-snap-out-of-it!-Hold-it!-Why?-Come-on #it's-my-turn.-How-is-the-plane-flying?-I-don't-know.-Hello?-Benson #got-any-flowers-for-a-happy-occasion-in-there?-The-Pollen-Jocks!-They-do-get-behind-a-fellow.-Black-and-yellow.-Hello.-All-right #let's-drop-this-tin-can-on-the-blacktop.-Where?-I-can't-see-anything.-Can-you?-No #nothing.-It's-all-cloudy.-Come-on.-You-got-to-think-bee #Barry.-Thinking-bee.-Thinking-bee.-Thinking-bee!-Thinking-bee!-Thinking-bee!-Wait-a-minute.-I-think-I'm-feeling-something.-What?-I-don't-know.-It's-strong #pulling-me.-Like-a-27-million-year-old-instinct.-Bring-the-nose-down.-Thinking-bee!-Thinking-bee!-Thinking-bee!-What-in-the-world-is-on-the-tarmac?-Get-some-lights-on-that!-Thinking-bee!-Thinking-bee!-Thinking-bee!-Vanessa #aim-for-the-flower.-OK.-Cut-the-engines.-We're-going-in-on-bee-power.-Ready #boys?-Affirmative!-Good.-Good.-Easy #now.-That's-it.-Land-on-that-flower!-Ready?-Full-reverse!-Spin-it-around!-Not-that-flower!-The-other-one!-Which-one?-That-flower.-I'm-aiming-at-the-flower!-That's-a-fat-guy-in-a-flowered-shirt.-I-mean-the-giant-pulsating-flower-made-of-millions-of-bees!-Pull-forward.-Nose-down.-Tail-up.-Rotate-around-it.-This-is-insane #Barry!-This's-the-only-way-I-know-how-to-fly.-Am-I-koo-koo-kachoo #or-is-this-plane-flying-in-an-insect-like-pattern?-Get-your-nose-in-there.-Don't-be-afraid.-Smell-it.-Full-reverse!-Just-drop-it.-Be-a-part-of-it.-Aim-for-the-center!-Now-drop-it-in!-Drop-it-in #woman!-Come-on #already.-Barry #we-did-it!-You-taught-me-how-to-fly!-Yes.-No-high-five!-Right.-Barry #it-worked!-Did-you-see-the-giant-flower?-What-giant-flower?-Where?-Of-course-I-saw-the-flower!-That-was-genius!-Thank-you.-But-we're-not-done-yet.-Listen #everyone!-This-runway-is-covered-with-the-last-pollen-from-the-last-flowers-available-anywhere-on-Earth.-That-means-this-is-our-Last-Chance.-We're-the-only-ones-who-make-honey #pollinate-flowers-and-dress-like-this.-If-we're-gonna-survive-as-a-species #this-is-our-moment!-What-do-you-say?-Are-we-going-to-be-bees #or-just-Museum-of-Natural-History-keychains?-We're-bees!-Keychain!-Then-follow-me!-Except-Keychain.-Hold-on #Barry.-Here.-You've-earned-this.-Yeah!-I'm-a-Pollen-Jock!-And-it's-a-perfect-fit.-All-I-gotta-do-are-the-sleeves.-Oh #yeah.-That's-our-Barry.-Mom!-The-bees-are-back!-If-anybody-needs-to-make-a-call #now's-the-time.-I-got-a-feeling-we'll-be-working-late-tonight!-Here's-your-change.-Have-a-great-afternoon!-Can-I-help-who's-next?-Would-you-like-some-honey-with-that?-It-is-bee-approved.-Don't-forget-these.-Milk #cream #cheese #it's-all-me.--And-I-don't-see-a-nickel!-Sometimes-I-just-feel-like-a-piece-of-meat!-I-had-no-idea.-Barry #I'm-sorry.-Have-you-got-a-moment?-Would-you-excuse-me?-My-mosquito-associate-will-help-you.-Sorry-I'm-late.-He's-a-lawyer-too?-I-was-already-a-blood-sucking-parasite.-All-I-needed-was-a-briefcase.-Have-a-great-afternoon!-Barry #I-just-got-this-huge-tulip-order #and-I-can't-get-them-anywhere.-No-problem #Vannie.-Just-leave-it-to-me.-You're-a-lifesaver #Barry.-Can-I-help-who's-next?-All-right #scramble #jocks!-It's-time-to-fly.-Thank-you #Barry!-That-bee-is-living-my-life!-Let-it-go #Kenny.-When-will-this-nightmare-end?!-Let-it-all-go.-Beautiful-day-to-fly.-Sure-is.-Between-you-and-me #I-was-dying-to-get-out-of-that-office.-You-have-got-to-start-thinking-bee #my-friend.-Thinking-bee!-Me?-Hold-it.-Let's-just-stop-for-a-second.-Hold-it.-I'm-sorry.-I'm-sorry #everyone.-Can-we-stop-here?-I'm-not-making-a-major-life-decision-during-a-production-number!-All-right.-Take-ten #everybody.-Wrap-it-up #guys.-I-had-virtually-no-rehearsal-for-that. -
I’m a little confused with “the 1619 project” and “the 1619 project a new origin story” are they two different books or is “a new origin story” the first book with extra content?
#books #reading #the1619project -
The built-in assumption that a professor challenged his gifted student to use to prove that #quantum computing will always be "superior" to classical #computing was so bizzare that I cannot quite wrap my mind around the mistake.
Granted, I did work at #Intel for 6 years. And my last group being the AI silicon trying to help mathematicians improve their #AI model's/models' efficiency .... but I suppose my data point just goes to show that theoretical math can stray pretty far from actual machine learning and computing.
Anybody who has ever built a program that can upload a csv to a database knows this intuitively. The "cost" of a parameter-based search ought to include both load time and compute time. One can write helpers that speed-up LLMs that tend to quantize models by key terms and frequency of those key terms in a language.... and then map heavy nodes to higher-memory compute, right? This is why models with "trillions" of parameters tend to be very expensive to compile and run.
The inherent assumption that all the data in a quantum algorithm is already loaded? This seems like a #CS 101 kinda mistake.
I love this field and cannot wait to go back to work, I'm already brainstorming a whitepaper about this topic. Writing and editing whitepapers is one of the things I miss
That being said, Ewin Tang is an astoundingly smart gal, completely deserving of the awards.
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The built-in assumption that a professor challenged his gifted student to use to prove that #quantum computing will always be "superior" to classical #computing was so bizzare that I cannot quite wrap my mind around the mistake.
Granted, I did work at #Intel for 6 years. And my last group being the AI silicon trying to help mathematicians improve their #AI model's/models' efficiency .... but I suppose my data point just goes to show that theoretical math can stray pretty far from actual machine learning and computing.
Anybody who has ever built a program that can upload a csv to a database knows this intuitively. The "cost" of a parameter-based search ought to include both load time and compute time. One can write helpers that speed-up LLMs that tend to quantize models by key terms and frequency of those key terms in a language.... and then map heavy nodes to higher-memory compute, right? This is why models with "trillions" of parameters tend to be very expensive to compile and run.
The inherent assumption that all the data in a quantum algorithm is already loaded? This seems like a #CS 101 kinda mistake.
I love this field and cannot wait to go back to work, I'm already brainstorming a whitepaper about this topic. Writing and editing whitepapers is one of the things I miss
That being said, Ewin Tang is an astoundingly smart gal, completely deserving of the awards.
-
I’ve Spent My Whole Life Refusing to Break, and It’s Slowly Breaking Everything I Love
8,993 words, 48 minutes read time.
They call me “the rock” at work.
At first, I thought it was a joke. Some intern started it during a brutal deadline last year. Half our team was losing it, one guy had a full-on meltdown in the stairwell, and I just… didn’t. I stayed late, knocked out my part, kept my voice even, answered questions, didn’t yell. Next day in standup, the intern goes, “Ask the rock, he never cracks,” and everyone laughed.
But it stuck.
Now my manager calls me that. “Put it on Matt’s plate, he’s a rock.” People say it like a compliment. Like it’s this badge of honor, being the guy who doesn’t flinch, doesn’t cry, doesn’t panic.
I pretended I didn’t like it. “C’mon, I’m just doing my job.” But I liked it. A lot. It felt like proof I’d finally escaped where I came from.
Growing up, the only thing worse than being poor in our neighborhood was being soft. I remember one time, I was probably eight or nine, playing basketball in the driveway, and I tripped. Scraped my knee so bad the skin just peeled back. I started crying, like loud ugly kid-crying—snot, hiccups, the works.
My dad walked out, looked at me, then at my knee, then back at me.
“You done?” he said.
“It hurts,” I blubbered.
He shook his head. “It’s a scrape, not a bullet. Stop crying, be a man.”
He went back inside. That phrase seared itself into my brain: Stop crying, be a man. I stopped crying. Not just that day. In general.
Whole life since then has been me trying to prove I listened.
So yeah, “the rock” fits.
What nobody at the office knows is I had to lock myself in a stall in the men’s room last week because my heart was racing so hard I thought I might pass out. I sat on the toilet lid, head in my hands, breathing like a woman in labor, trying not to make a sound because God forbid someone hears me having a panic attack.
Rocks don’t hyperventilate in bathroom stalls.
But that’s kind of my thing: feel something, shove it down, slap a lid on it, move on. I’m a professional at it now.
Church people call it “being strong.” Clinical people call it “emotional repression.” I just call it survival.
My wife, Emily, calls it “shutting down.” She says it calmly, like she’s reading a weather report, but her eyes get that glossy look that tells me I’m supposed to say something deep right there. I never do. I go for safe. Joke. Change the subject. Or pull the nuclear option: “I’m just tired, can we not do this right now?”
Which is basically our marriage in twelve words.
We’ve been married nine years. We have a seven-year-old daughter, Lily, who looks exactly like Emily except with my eyebrows, which feels unfair to her, but whatever. We met in college at some Christian campus thing I only went to because there were free burritos. She saw through most of my crap from day one, which I think is why I married her and also why I can’t stand her sometimes.
She’s a feeler. Like, professionally. She does counseling with teens at a nonprofit. She comes home wrecked from some kid’s story and wants to sit on the couch and process it for an hour. She cries at TV commercials. She said “I feel” more in the first month I knew her than my dad probably has in his entire life.
First time she cried in front of me, I freaked out internally. Panic, sirens, red lights. Externally, I was smooth. I put my arm around her, said all the right words. I didn’t know what I was doing, but she looked at me like I’d just parted the Red Sea. “I feel safe with you,” she said.
I should’ve told her then: “I don’t do feelings. I just do rescue.” But I liked being the safe guy. The rock.
Now, nine years in, that “safe” guy has turned into something else. A wall. A locked door. A black hole.
She sits at our kitchen table some Tuesday night, wine glass in hand, staring at me over a half-eaten plate of chicken and rice.
“You’re not here,” she says. “I mean, you’re physically here, but you’re not here.”
“I’m literally sitting right in front of you,” I say, stabbing a piece of chicken. “What do you want, a hologram?”
She doesn’t laugh. “Matt, I’m serious. I don’t know what you’re feeling. Ever. I don’t know when you’re scared. Or angry. Or sad. I can’t read you anymore. It’s like there’s this glass wall. I can see you, but I can’t reach you.”
I chew slowly to give myself time. Classic tactic. Delay, defuse, divert.
“I’m just tired,” I say. “Work’s a lot. Dad’s situation’s a lot. This is just… a season.”
Her jaw tightens at the word “season.” She hates Christian clichés, and I use them like shields.
“You said that last year,” she says. “And the year before. ‘It’s just a season.’ When does this season end, Matt? When you burn out? When we’re divorced? When Lily’s grown and doesn’t even bother to call you?”
“Wow,” I say, forcing a laugh. “Okay, that escalated.”
That’s another move: if I make her feel dramatic, I get to feel sane.
She takes a breath, looks down at the table. “I’m asking you to let me in,” she says, softer. “Talk to me. Tell me when you’re drowning instead of pretending you’re fine. You don’t have to be the rock, Matt. Not with me.”
There’s this moment where I actually feel it—the opening, the offer. Like a crack in the armor. I could tell her about the bathroom stall. About how sometimes at two in the morning my heart’s pounding like I’m on mile ten of a run and I can’t sleep, so I scroll my phone until my eyes burn. About the weird chest tightness that makes me think of my dad in the hospital, tubes and machines and beeping, and how I’m still that kid in the driveway trying not to cry.
I even start to say it. “Sometimes at work I—”
The words get stuck in my throat. There’s this primal shame that hits like a wave. If I say it out loud, it’s real. If she hears it, she’ll see I’m not a rock. I’m a scared dude in a grown man’s clothes with a half-charged iPhone and a Bible app he barely opens.
I clear my throat. “Sometimes at work I just need to, like, zone out, you know? Nothing crazy. I just power through.”
She watches me. She knows I pulled up right before the truth. I can see it in her eyes, that flash of disappointment before she buries it. She nods like she’s trying to accept the crumbs.
“Maybe we should go to counseling,” she says.
And there it is. The one word I refuse to let into my story.
“We’re not that bad,” I say, way too fast. “Counseling’s for people who are… like… actually falling apart. We’re just in a stressful patch. Money’s tight, work’s nuts, your job is heavy, my dad almost died. We don’t need to pay someone a hundred and fifty bucks an hour to tell us what we already know.”
“That’s not what counseling is,” she says.
I shrug. “You’re a counselor, obviously you’re pro-counseling. But I—what would I even say? ‘Hi, I’m Matt, things are fine, my wife just wants me to cry more’?”
She closes her eyes like my words physically hurt. “This isn’t about crying,” she says. “This is about you. Letting. Me. See. You.”
“I married you, didn’t I?” I say. “You see me. This is me.”
That’s the line I always throw out when I want to shut the conversation down—“This is just who I am.” It sounds like honesty, like self-awareness, but really it’s defense. A way of saying, “I’m not changing.”
She stares at me for a long time. Then she gets up, takes her plate to the sink without another word.
I tell myself she’s being emotional. That she’ll calm down. That it’s not that bad. That I’m not that bad.
That night, after she goes to bed, I sit on the couch with my laptop. I tell myself I’m going to do a little work, get ahead of tomorrow. Ten minutes in, I’m already opening a second browser window.
It’s funny how my brain knows the path without thinking. A couple keystrokes, a few clicks, and there it is: curated, pixel-perfect nakedness. I scroll, numb. That’s really what it is. Not lust so much as anesthesia. My own private pharmacy.
I justify it. I’m not sleeping with anyone else. I’m not on Tinder. I’m not at a bar hitting on girls who call me “sir.” This is safe. It’s victimless. It’s just… stress relief. And if I ever tried to talk to Emily about how I actually feel, I’d probably scare her. This way, I take care of it myself.
Self-sufficiency, right? That’s what being a man is. Handle your own crap.
I close the laptop an hour later feeling gross, but the guilt is dull. Familiar. Easy to ignore. I tiptoe into the bedroom. She’s already turned away from my side, curled in a C-shape near the edge. I slide into bed, careful not to touch her too much, in case she wants space. Or in case she doesn’t, because if she turns toward me, I might have to be present.
In the dark, my phone buzzes on the nightstand. I check it. It’s Marcus.
You good, man?
Marcus is my one semi-real friend from church. Taller than me, quieter. Used to be a cop, now does security at a hospital. He’s the kind of guy who actually listens when you talk. Like, fully. It’s unnerving.
He’s the only one who’s ever looked me in the eye and asked, “How’s your heart?” without smirking. I laughed when he said it the first time. “Bro, what are we, in a Nicholas Sparks movie?” He smiled, but he didn’t take it back.
I stare at his text for a second. My thumb hovers over the keyboard.
I’m fine, just tired, I type.
I delete “just tired.” It sounds weak. I send: I’m good. Busy with work. You?
The truth would be: I’m not sleeping, my wife wants to send me to counseling like I’m broken, I spent an hour watching porn to avoid feeling anything, and my chest hurts more days than not. Also sometimes I want to just drive until I run out of gas and start over somewhere no one knows I’m supposed to be “the rock.”
He replies: Same. Let’s grab lunch this week. Been thinking about you.
Cool, I send. Let me know when.
I set my phone down and roll onto my back, staring at the ceiling in the dark. Some random verse I half-remember from a sermon floats through my brain: “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted.”
I snort quietly. I’m not brokenhearted. I’m just busy.
Work does not care about your feelings. My manager, Jeff, cares about deliverables and client satisfaction scores and how many hours the team can bill without triggering HR. There’s a massive software deployment next month. If we nail it, it’s big for the company. If we blow it, we lose a multi-million-dollar client. No pressure.
We shuffle into the conference room for yet another war room meeting. Screens everywhere, coffee cups, people with that glazed “I’ve been on Zoom for 12 hours” look in their eyes.
Jeff slaps my back. “How’s my rock?” he says, grinning.
“Ready to roll,” I say.
“Good, because if this thing slips again, I’m gonna have to start sacrificing junior devs to the client gods.”
Everyone laughs. I do too, even as that familiar tightness creeps into my chest. I tell myself it’s just caffeine. I’ve had three coffees and a Red Bull. Anyone’s heart would pound.
Halfway through the meeting, someone mentions layoffs. Not directly, but hints. “If this doesn’t go well, upper management’s gonna be asking hard questions.” Translation: people will get cut. People like me. People like the guy who had a meltdown in the stairwell last year and mysteriously “transitioned to new opportunities” two months later.
Rocks don’t get laid off. Weak links do. If I crack, I’m a liability.
My phone buzzes. It’s a text from my mom: Dad had another episode. Doctors want to run more tests. Can you come by tonight?
I swallow, staring at the message.
You okay? Jeff says, noticing my face.
“Yeah,” I say quickly. “Family stuff. I’m good.”
I tuck it away. Mental note: hospital. Later. After being the rock at work, I get to be the rock for my mom. Then maybe, if I have any energy left, I’ll toss Emily a pebble and call it connection.
During a break, I slip into the men’s room. I splash water on my face. As I look up, my reflection stares back at me. Thirty-six, a little more gray at the temples than I’d like, dark circles under my eyes. But my expression is neutral. Controlled. Rock-solid. You’d never know that inside, there’s this constant hum of static.
My chest tightens again. The room tilts for a second. I grab the edge of the sink.
Not now. Not here.
I duck into a stall before anyone walks in, sit on the lid, elbows on my knees, hands over my face. Breathe. In. Out. In. Out. I count my breaths. I feel ridiculous, a grown man hiding in a toilet cubicle trying not to pass out.
Somewhere behind the stall door I hear my dad’s voice: Stop crying, be a man.
“I’m not crying,” I mutter. “I’m breathing.”
Same thing, really. Trying to keep the dam from breaking.
I think, briefly, of all the verses I’ve heard about not being afraid. “Do not be anxious about anything.” “Fear not.” “The Lord is my rock.” It’s funny how I’ve basically replaced God with my own chest. My own calm face. Like, I’m my own Lord and rock. That’s not how I’d say it out loud, but that’s how I live.
After work, I swing by the hospital. Dad’s sitting up in bed, watching some game show with the sound off, wires stuck to his chest. Mom’s in the chair by the window, hands folded, Bible open but unread on her lap.
“Hey,” I say, stepping in. “How’s the party?”
Dad grunts. “Food sucks.”
“That’s how you know it’s a real hospital,” I say. “If they start serving steak, you should worry.”
He smirks. Mom gives me a tired smile. I do the thing I always do in hard rooms: crack jokes, keep it light, distract from the elephant.
“How you feeling?” I ask, even though I can read the chart as well as he can.
“Old,” he says. “Doctors say it’s not as bad as last time. Just gotta ‘take it easy.’ Whatever that means.”
“You gonna listen?” I ask.
He snorts. We both know he won’t. Men in my family don’t “take it easy.” We work until something breaks, then we duct tape it and keep going.
Mom looks at me like she wants to say something spiritual. She’s the only one in our family who does feelings out loud, but years married to my dad trained her to make them small.
“Been praying Psalm 34,” she says softly. “You know that one, honey? ‘The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.’”
She says it like it’s comfort, a warm blanket. I hear it like an accusation. Brokenhearted? Crushed? That’s not allowed. Not for men like us. We’re not brokenhearted, we’re just… busy. Tired. Overworked. Slightly malfunctioning machines.
“I like the one about ‘those who don’t work don’t eat,’” Dad says. “Keeps you honest.”
I laugh, grateful for the deflection.
Mom sighs. “Your father,” she says, half-affection, half-frustration.
On the drive home, the verse keeps replaying in my head. “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted.” If that’s true, then what does that mean for me? Because most days, God feels about as close as the moon. Beautiful, in theory. Useless, in practice.
Maybe the problem is I’m not brokenhearted enough. Or maybe that’s just another way to blame myself for something I don’t understand.
Thursday night is men’s group. I go mostly because it looks good. A married Christian dad who skips men’s group raises eyebrows. A married Christian dad who shows up, brings chips, cracks jokes, and nods thoughtfully during prayer requests gets approved.
We meet in the church basement, twelve guys in folding chairs in a sad circle under fluorescent lights that make everyone look tired and slightly dead. There’s the usual spread: chips, store-brand cookies, a veggie tray no one touches, and a big pot of coffee because apparently we’re all eighty.
Our leader, Dan, is a big guy with a beard that makes him look like a gentle lumberjack. He opens in prayer, then reads a short passage.
“Tonight,” he says, “I thought we’d just… be honest. No study guide. No video. Just us, talking about what’s real.”
That sentence alone makes my skin itch.
He reads Psalm 34:18. Of course. The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.
I feel it in my chest, right where the anxiety sits. The words are like a hand hovering over a bruise.
Dan looks around. “Who here would say they feel brokenhearted right now?” he asks. “Crushed in spirit? Not in theory. Right now.”
One guy laughs nervously. A couple shift in their chairs. I take a sip of coffee to buy time. No way I’m raising my hand. Brokenhearted is for widowers and addicts and cancer patients. Not white-collar project managers with upgraded iPhones and a leased SUV.
To my left, Jason clears his throat. He’s usually one of the louder guys, all stories about sports and his glory days playing college ball. Tonight, he looks smaller.
“I, uh…” He stares at the floor. His voice cracks. “My wife left last month. Took the kids. I haven’t told anyone ’cause… I’m embarrassed, I guess. I feel like I failed. I’ve been using porn for years. Said I’d stop a hundred times. Didn’t. She found stuff on my phone and just… had enough.”
The room goes quiet. My stomach twists. I keep my face still.
He keeps talking, words spilling now. “I always thought I had it under control, you know? Like, it was my thing. My stress relief. Better than cheating. That’s what I told myself. But she said it was cheating. She said I was choosing pixels over her. I don’t even… I don’t know how to live in my own skin right now. I feel… crushed. I don’t know how else to say it.”
Tears slide down his face. Full-grown man, shoulders shaking, crying in a church basement under bad lighting. Every alarm in my body goes off. Run. Joke. Change the subject.
Instead, something weird happens. Dan gets up, walks over, puts a hand on his shoulder. Another guy kneels and starts praying softly, nothing fancy, just, “God, be close. Help him.” No one mocks. No one rolls their eyes. A couple other guys are wiping their faces too.
I feel this pressure rising in my throat. It scares me more than any panic attack.
This could be you, a voice in my head whispers. You could talk. You could tell them about the stall, the late nights, the way your wife looks at you like a stranger. You could say you’re not okay. You could stop playing the rock.
I picture it for a second. Me, opening my mouth, saying, “Guys, I’m not fine. I’m addicted to being okay. And to porn. And to people thinking I have it together. My wife wants to leave and it’s mostly my fault.” I imagine their faces, their hands on my shoulder, the prayers. I imagine God feeling near instead of abstract.
My heart starts hammering. My palms sweat. My knee bounces.
Dan looks around. “Anybody else?” he says gently. “You don’t have to share. But if you want to, this is a safe place.”
Everyone’s eyes are suddenly the most interesting thing in the room. Shoelaces. Coffee cups. The scuffed tile. No one wants to be next.
I clear my throat.
“I mean…” I say, forcing a smirk. “My biggest sin is I eat too many carbs. So, uh, pray for me, guys.”
A few chuckle. The tension breaks a little. Dan gives me a half-smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes.
Inside, I want to punch myself. That was my out. My shot. I could have been honest. Instead, I threw a joke at the most honest moment I’ve seen in years like a grenade.
The rest of the night passes in a blur of surface-level shares. Work stress. Kids. “I should read my Bible more.” I mumble something about being busy. When we close in prayer, I mumble a safe Christian phrase: “God, thank you that you’re strong when we’re weak.” It sounds holy. It’s a lie coming from my mouth.
After group, as we’re heading to our cars, Marcus falls into step beside me.
“You okay?” he asks.
“I’m good,” I say automatically. “That was… heavy, huh?”
He studies me. “Yeah. But good heavy.” He pauses. “You sure you’re okay? You were twitchy during prayer.”
“Twitchy?” I scoff. “Bro, I had too much coffee. That’s all.”
He doesn’t push. “If you ever want to talk,” he says, “for real… I’m here. No judgment. None of us are as put-together as we look. You know that, right?”
I shrug, unlock my car. “I’m fine, man. Seriously. Just tired.”
That night, Emily’s on the couch when I get home, laptop closed, TV off. That’s never a good sign.
“How was group?” she asks.
“Good,” I say, dropping my keys in the bowl. “You know. Guys. Bibles. Bad coffee.”
“Did you share anything?” she asks.
I bristle. “What is this, a report card?”
She folds her hands. “I just… you’ve been off. For a while. I was hoping you’d talk to someone.”
“Talked to God,” I say. “That counts, right?”
She does that slow blink that means she’s trying not to explode. “You know what I mean.”
I do. I ignore it. I sit in the chair across from her instead of next to her on the couch. It’s a distance of three feet that feels like thirty miles.
She takes a breath. “I called a counselor,” she says.
Something in me snaps. “You what?”
“I called a counselor,” she repeats, voice shaking slightly but steady. “For us. For our marriage. Her name is—”
“We don’t need—”
“—Sarah Stevens,” she says, talking over me, which she almost never does. “She’s highly recommended. She has experience with couples where one partner is emotionally unavailable.”
“Emotionally unavailable,” I repeat, like it’s a slur.
“That’s what you are, Matt,” she says, and now the tears are in her eyes. “You’re unavailable. I’m married to a ghost. You show up physically, you pay bills, you fix things when they break, but you don’t let me see you. I feel like I’m begging you to be my husband.”
My defenses go up so fast I’m dizzy. “That’s not fair,” I say. “I go to work every day. I come home. I spend time with Lily. I go to church. I go to your family stuff even when I don’t want to. I provide. I don’t cheat. I don’t hit you. I don’t drink myself stupid. I’m doing everything I’m supposed to do and somehow it’s not enough because I don’t sit around talking about my feelings?”
“You don’t talk about anything real,” she says. “Do you know how alone I feel? I would almost rather you scream at me than stay like this. At least then I’d know there’s something in there.”
“That’s insane,” I say, standing up. “You’d rather I scream at you?”
“I’d rather you be honest,” she fires back.
I pace. “Fine. Here’s honest: I don’t want to sit in a room with some stranger and have you list all the ways I suck while she nods and takes notes.”
“That’s not—”
“I’m not doing it,” I say. “I’m not broken. We’re not broken. We’re just stressed.”
“And I’m telling you we are broken,” she says, standing now too, voice rising. “We are so broken, Matt. I’m drowning over here. I lie awake next to you at night and I feel like a widow before I’m even forty.”
The widow line hits harder than I want to admit. My mom in that hospital chair, Bible open, eyes tired. Is that Emily’s future?
I can’t go there. Too much. Shut it down.
“This is drama,” I say, dismissive. “You’re making it worse than it is.”
Her mouth falls open. “Drama,” she repeats. “Okay.”
She walks past me, into the bedroom. I hear drawers opening, the squeak of the closet door. A minute later she comes out with a duffel bag. She starts throwing clothes in it. T-shirts, jeans, underwear, random stuff. No method, just motion.
“What are you doing?” I ask, stomach dropping.
“Going to my sister’s,” she says. “For a while.”
“You’re leaving,” I say, like I can’t process the words.
“I’m not filing for divorce,” she says. “Yet. I’m giving you space. And I’m giving myself a chance to remember what it’s like to breathe.”
“Emily, come on,” I say, moving toward her. “You’re overreacting.”
She stops packing, looks up at me, and laughs. It’s a bitter sound I’ve never heard from her before.
“You keep saying that,” she says. “Anytime I tell you I’m hurting, I’m ‘overreacting.’ Anytime I say we need help, you say I’m ‘making it worse than it is.’ I’m done gaslighting myself into thinking I’m crazy. This is real, Matt. I’m leaving because you already have. You left a long time ago. You’re just… physically present.”
“That’s not fair,” I repeat, because I don’t have any other words.
She zips the bag. “I’m giving you one more chance,” she says, voice trembling. “You call that counselor. You set up an appointment. You show me with actions, not words, that you’re willing to be vulnerable. To let me in. To let anyone in. If you don’t… I don’t know if there’s anything left to save.”
She walks past me, bag over her shoulder. She stops at Lily’s door, pushes it open. Our daughter’s asleep, sprawled sideways, stuffed unicorn under one arm. Emily kisses her forehead, whispers something I can’t hear.
“I’ll bring her back Sunday night,” she says quietly when she returns. “You can have the weekend to… think.”
“What am I supposed to do?” I ask, hating how small my voice sounds.
She meets my eyes. “Stop pretending you’re okay,” she says. “That’d be a start.”
The front door closes behind her. The house is dead quiet.
I stand in the middle of the living room, staring at the door like it might swing back open and she’ll say, “Kidding!” But it doesn’t. She doesn’t.
Instead of collapsing, I do what I always do: I make a list. Dishes. Laundry. Trash. Budget. I straighten the cushions on the couch, because God forbid a pillow be crooked while my marriage implodes.
Later that night, I get a text from Marcus.
Heard Emily and Lily are staying with her sister. You want company?
My heart stutters. News travels fast in church circles.
I stare at the screen. I picture Marcus on my couch, looking at me with those annoyingly kind eyes, asking questions I don’t want to answer. What are you afraid of? How are you really? When did you start disappearing?
I type: Nah man, we’re fine. Just needed some space. Couples fight, you know.
I delete “we’re fine” because even I can’t make my thumbs lie that hard. I send: Just needed some space. All good.
He replies immediately. You sure? I can be there in 15.
I put the phone face down on the coffee table. I pace. I pick it up again.
Come, I type. I delete it.
I’m not sure what I’m more afraid of: him seeing the stack of dirty dishes and empty wrappers that prove I’m not as together as I act, or him seeing through whatever story I spin and calling me on it.
I finally send: I’m good bro. Exhausted. Rain check?
Three dots appear, disappear. Finally: Okay. I’m here if you need me. For real.
I toss the phone onto the couch like it burned me. I grab my laptop instead.
By 1 a.m., the house is dark, the only light the blue glow of my screen. Pop-up after pop-up, tab after tab. My brain is buzzing, my body’s numb. I tell myself it’s better than thinking. Better than feeling. Better than sitting in the silence and hearing my own excuses bounce off the walls.
When I finally crash into bed, the sheets on her side are still warm from when she packed.
The next morning, Lily’s empty room hits me harder than I want to admit. Her bed is made (Emily’s doing), stuffed animals lined up, tiny socks in the hamper. I stand in the doorway, an intruder in my own house.
I go to work like nothing happened. Because that’s what you do. You compartmentalize. You put on the rock mask. You get stuff done.
My performance drops, though. It’s subtle at first. I miss a detail here, forget an email there. Nothing huge. But in this job, death comes by a thousand paper cuts.
A junior dev, Sarah, points out a flaw in my plan in front of the team. Normally, I’d thank her, adjust. Today, raw and sleep-deprived, I snap.
“Maybe if you’d read the full spec before chiming in, you’d understand why we did it this way,” I say, harsher than I mean to.
The room goes quiet. She shrinks back, face flushing. Jeff raises an eyebrow at me.
“Let’s take this offline,” he says.
After the meeting, he pulls me into his office.
“You good?” he asks.
“I’m fine,” I say automatically.
He leans back, folds his arms. “Look, I don’t need to know your personal business. But you bit Sarah’s head off in there. That’s not like you.”
“Sorry,” I say. “Just… a lot going on at home.”
“Take a day,” he says. “Or a few. Whatever you need. This project’s important, but not as important as you not burning out.”
The irony of my boss telling me not to burn out while I’m actively burning out isn’t lost on me.
“I’m good,” I repeat. “I just need to focus.”
He studies me for a second. “You know,” he says slowly, “you don’t always have to be the rock.”
I actually laugh. “You started that, remember?”
He smiles. “Yeah. Turns out sometimes rocks crack. Just… don’t wait until you blow up to tell someone you’re drowning, okay?”
Everyone keeps using the same metaphors. Drowning. Burning out. Breaking. I keep dodging them like bullets in a video game. If I just keep moving, they can’t hit me.
Days blur. Emily and I text logistics about Lily. Pickup times, homework, dentist appointments. Nothing real. It’s like running a small business together instead of a marriage.
One Friday, I’m supposed to pick up Lily at four for her school’s little talent show thing. She’s been practicing a silly dance for weeks, making me watch it every night I had the energy to pretend I was watching. “You’re coming, right, Daddy?” she asked. “You promise?” I promised.
Friday afternoon, I’m sitting at my desk, headphones in, trying to yank my brain through a spreadsheet, when a familiar tightness clamps my chest. I take a breath. Another. It doesn’t let up. My vision goes a little fuzzy at the edges.
I check the clock. 3:50. If I leave now, I can make it.
I tell myself: Just one more email. Just fix this one thing. Then go.
I look up again and it’s 4:27.
“Crap,” I say aloud, ripping my headphones off. I grab my bag, half-run to the elevator, curse at the slow doors, sprint to my car.
On the drive, my phone buzzes with texts. I don’t check them. I don’t want to see.
I pull into the school lot at 4:58, heart pounding. I jog toward the auditorium. It’s emptying. Parents filing out, kids with glitter on their faces and handmade certificates.
Emily stands near the doors with Lily. Lily’s in a sparkly shirt, hair in two lopsided pigtails, holding a crumpled ribbon. Her eyes are red. When she sees me, her face does this thing—lights up, then falters, like she’s trying to decide whether to be happy or mad.
“Hey!” I say, forcing cheer. “I’m so sorry, traffic was—”
“Traffic?” Emily says, voice flat. “Show started at four.”
“I know, I just—work ran late and—”
“You promised,” Lily says quietly. That hurts way worse than Emily’s tone.
“I know, bug,” I say, kneeling. “I’m sorry. How’d it go?”
“Fine,” she says, shrugging, looking at her shoes. The word is a knife. It’s my own word coming back to kill me. I’m fine. We’re fine. Everything’s fine.
“Mom filmed it,” she adds. “You can watch it later.”
It’s an offer. A consolation prize. I hate myself for being the kind of dad who has to watch his daughter’s life on a screen because he can’t show up when it counts.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’d love to.”
Emily just looks at me. No lecture. Somehow, that’s worse.
On the drive back to my place, Lily hums a bit of her song in the backseat. I grip the steering wheel so hard my knuckles go white. I want to cry. The feeling is so foreign it scares me. I swallow it. It goes down like a rock.
That night, after I drop Lily back at her aunt’s, I sit in my dark living room alone. The quiet isn’t peaceful. It’s accusatory.
On the coffee table, my Bible sits under a pile of mail. I don’t remember the last time I opened it for me, not for a group or to find a verse to toss at someone else.
I push the mail aside, flip it open randomly. It lands in Psalms. My eyes fall on familiar words like they’re highlighted just for me:
“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.”
No escape this time. No sermon. No small group. Just me and a sentence that won’t shut up.
I stare at the page until the letters blur. Something in my chest finally gives. Not a big cinematic break, just a tiny hairline crack.
“Okay,” I whisper. “Fine. I’m… not okay.”
The words feel like ripping duct tape off my soul. My throat burns. My eyes sting. My body, not used to this, fights it. But my arms suddenly feel too heavy to hold up. I slide off the couch onto my knees without meaning to, Bible still open on the cushion.
“I don’t know how to do this,” I mutter. “I don’t know how to be… brokenhearted. Or whatever. I don’t know how to…” I wave a hand vaguely, like God needs me to pantomime emotions.
Tears spill over. Real ones. First time in… I honestly can’t remember. Maybe when Lily was born. Maybe before that.
It feels… ridiculous. A grown man, kneeling by his IKEA couch, crying into old carpet. I half-expect lightning to strike or a worship band to appear in my hallway. Instead, it’s just me and my ragged breathing and an almost-tangible sense that something—Someone—is near.
For a second, I actually feel it. Like a warm weight on my shoulders. An invisible Presence sitting in the mess with me. Not fixing it. Just… close. The verse slams into my chest again: The Lord is close to the brokenhearted.
Maybe this is what they mean. Maybe all the sermons and testimonies and emotional people with their arms raised weren’t just making it up. Maybe God actually shows up in the raw places. Not the polished, rehearsed testimonies, but the ugly middle.
“Okay,” I whisper again. “I’m scared. Is that what you want me to say? I’m scared my dad’s gonna die and I won’t know how to grieve. I’m scared my wife’s never coming back. I’m scared I’ve already ruined my daughter’s life. I’m scared if people see how weak I am they’ll lose respect for me. I’m scared you’re not actually here and I’m just talking to my furniture.”
It all comes out in a rush. Confession, sort of. Not the respectable kind you share in group. The embarrassing kind.
For about thirty seconds, it feels like the safest place in the world.
Then, just as quickly, another voice kicks in. Not literal, not demonic, just… me. The old script.
Stop crying, be a man.
Crying won’t fix your marriage. Emotions won’t get you a raise. Vulnerability won’t put food on the table. You’re kneeling on a stained carpet, talking to someone you can’t see, while your actual life is on fire. Get up. Be practical. Make a plan. God helps those who help themselves. (Which, by the way, isn’t in the Bible, but I quote it like it is.)
I scrub my face with my hands, annoyed at the dampness. The Presence I felt a moment ago suddenly feels distant again. Or maybe I just pushed it away.
“Yeah, okay,” I say out loud, like I’m closing a meeting. “That was… something.”
I stand up, legs stiff. The room looks the same. Couch. TV. Empty picture hooks where our family photo used to hang before Emily took it. No angels. No burning bush. Just my stupid, beating heart and the hum of the fridge.
My phone buzzes on the table. It’s a notification from some Bible app I downloaded months ago and never use: “He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. – Psalm 147:3”
The timing is creepy. Or perfect. Or both.
I hover over the notification, feel the temptation to sink back down, to lean in, to actually let myself be wounded in front of God. To admit that I’m not just “off” or “tired” but actually… broken.
Instead, I swipe the notification away.
“I don’t have time to fall apart,” I mutter.
I open a browser and type the same old sites into the search bar. The algorithm knows me well. It feeds me what I want: distraction. Control. A world where nakedness is scripted and no one expects anything from me.
Later, in bed, I stare at the ceiling and tell myself I’ll call the counselor tomorrow. Or the day after. Or after this project. Or after Dad’s next appointment. Or after Emily gives me another ultimatum. There will always be a better time to be honest than now.
Months pass.
The project at work launches. It’s not a disaster, but it’s not the triumph it could’ve been. My performance review is “meets expectations” with a few pointed notes about “needing to delegate better” and “watching interpersonal tone under stress.” Translation: You’re slipping, man.
I don’t get fired. I also don’t get the promotion I’d been quietly gunning for. Jeff gives the lead on the next big project to Sarah—the junior dev I snapped at.
“She’s showed a lot of initiative,” he tells me in his office. “And you, honestly… you seem like you’ve got a lot on your plate. Thought this might be a good time for you to take a step back, catch your breath.”
Step back. Catch my breath. It’s like there’s this conspiracy in the universe to get me to stop pretending I’m okay.
I nod, say the right things. “Totally understand. Happy for her.” Inside, I feel humiliated. Replaced. Useless.
I don’t tell Emily. We barely talk beyond logistics anyway. The counselor’s number is still on a sticky note on my fridge. I move it occasionally when I wipe the counters. I’ve memorized the digits without ever dialing.
Lily spends every other weekend with me. We do what I think dads are supposed to do. We go to the park. We get ice cream. We watch movies. I make sure she’s buckled in right and that she brushes her teeth. I tell myself that’s enough. That love is mostly showing up and making sure they don’t die.
But sometimes, when she’s coloring at the table or building something with Legos on the floor, she’ll look up and just… watch me. Like she’s trying to figure out something she doesn’t have the words for yet.
One Sunday, as I’m dropping her back at her aunt’s place, she hugs me tighter than usual.
“Daddy?” she says into my shirt.
“Yeah, bug?”
“Are you sad?”
The question catches me off guard. I pull back, look at her small face. Her eyes are big, searching.
“Why do you ask?” I say.
“You look sad,” she says simply. “And Mommy looks sad. And Aunt Claire says it’s okay to be sad. But you always say you’re fine.”
The word stings again. Fine. My mask.
“I’m okay,” I say automatically.
She tilts her head. “It’s okay if you’re sad,” she says. “I won’t be scared.”
I should say it. Right there. To my seven-year-old. “Yeah, I’m sad. I miss you when you’re not here. I miss Mommy. I’m scared I messed up.” That would be vulnerability. Not oversharing, just honesty.
Instead, I pat her shoulder. “Don’t worry about me, kiddo,” I say. “That’s my job. To worry about you. You just be a kid, okay?”
She nods slowly, like she’s filing away data for later. “Okay,” she says. “I love you.”
“I love you too,” I say, and it’s the one thing I’m absolutely sure of.
After she runs inside, I sit in my car and grip the steering wheel. I feel like I’m standing on the edge of a cliff, staring down at a body of water that might save me or drown me. The jump is admitting weakness. The cliff is made of all the years I spent being told that men don’t cry, don’t talk, don’t crack.
I don’t jump.
Instead, I drive to church.
It’s easier to go when I don’t have Emily giving me side-eye during worship because I’m scrolling my phone under the seat. I can just show up, say hi to people, drink bad coffee, sing words I barely think about, nod through another sermon about some aspect of the Christian life I’m supposedly living.
Today, though, the pastor does something different. He doesn’t preach. He brings a guy up to share his story.
The guy is in his forties, shaved head, tattoos, looks like he could bench-press me. He takes the mic, clears his throat.
“I used to think being a man meant never showing weakness,” he says. My spine goes rigid. “My dad was old-school. ‘Quit crying, tough it out,’ that kind of thing. I brought that into my marriage, my friendships, even my faith. I believed in Jesus, but I didn’t actually trust Him with anything that made me look bad. Or weak.”
People chuckle. I don’t.
He talks about an affair. About losing his job. About almost losing his kids. Then he talks about the night he finally broke down on his kitchen floor, sobbing, telling God he was done pretending. How Psalm 34:18 popped into his head—“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted”—and how, for the first time, he actually felt it.
“I thought vulnerability would make me lose respect,” he says. “But hiding was what was killing me. My secrets hardened my heart. I was a shell. It wasn’t until I got honest—with God, with my wife, with some guys from this church—that anything changed.”
The sanctuary is dead quiet. People are leaning in. A couple of visibly tough dudes are wiping their eyes. I sit there, arms crossed, jaw clenched.
He keeps going. “I still struggle with pride. I still want to put on the strong face. But I’ve tasted what it’s like to let people see the cracks. And I’ve tasted what it’s like to have God meet me there, not when I’ve got it together but when I’m a mess. And I’ll tell you this: there’s more life in that than in all the years I spent playing the rock.”
Somewhere deep inside, something in me is nodding. Yes. That. Do that. Say something. Move.
I don’t.
After service, people swarm him. Thank you for sharing. That was powerful. I walk past, give a noncommittal nod. Inside, I’m seething. Not at him. At myself. At the distance between what I know is true and what I’m willing to live.
In the parking lot, my phone buzzes. Marcus again.
How are you really?
There’s that word. Really.
I stand in the cold air, thumb hovering.
I’m falling apart but pretending I’m not, I type. I delete it.
I’m tired, I type. Delete.
I settle on: I’m good. God’s got me.
Even my lies are wrapped in Christianese.
I don’t hit send yet. I stare at the blinking cursor. Beside me, a guy straps his toddler into a car seat, kisses his wife, laughs at something she says. Normal. Messy. Human.
The phrase from the testimony loops in my head: Hiding was what was killing me. My secrets hardened my heart.
I feel my own heart. Not metaphorically. Literally. My chest. It feels… hard. Numb. Like it should hurt more than it does.
Do I want God that close? Close to the brokenhearted sounds nice until you realize it means you have to admit you’re brokenhearted. Not over business, not over some abstract injustice. Over your own life. Your own choices. Your own refusal to be weak.
I could tell Marcus. Right now. I could say, “I’m not okay. Can we talk?” He’d answer. He’d show up. I know he would.
Instead, I backspace my half-typed message.
I send him a thumbs-up emoji.
That’s my spiritual state in one tiny yellow hand.
I get in my car, close the door, and the world goes quiet again. Just me, the dashboard, the buzz of the engine.
I think about Psalm 34:18. I think about my mom in that hospital chair, whispering it over my dad. I think about Emily at the kitchen table, begging me to let her in. I think about Lily asking if I’m sad and promising she wouldn’t be scared.
I think about the night on my knees by the couch, the fleeting sense that God was actually, tangibly near when I finally let something crack.
And I think about how fast I slammed that door shut.
That’s the thing no one tells you about vulnerability. You can get a glimpse of it, taste it for thirty seconds, and still decide you’d rather be alone in a locked room than risk anyone seeing you naked in your soul.
So that’s where I am.
In the car. In the locked room. Playing the part I’ve played my whole life.
The rock.
From the outside, I still look solid. Steady job. Decent clothes. Church attendance. A few Bible verses I can quote if needed. A daughter who still hugs me. A wife who hasn’t technically divorced me… yet.
Inside, I know the truth.
I’m not a rock. I’m a man-shaped shell built around a frightened kid who learned early that tears equal weakness and weakness equals rejection. I never unlearned it. I baptized it, gave it Bible verses, dressed it up in productivity and moral respectability.
Maybe one day I’ll break for real. Call the counselor. Call Marcus. Call out to God and not shut Him down when He shows up. Maybe I’ll finally let someone see how much I’m not okay and discover that maybe—just maybe—weakness isn’t the end of my story but the door to something like real strength.
But today?
Today I turn the key in the ignition, watch my reflection in the rearview mirror as I back out. My face is calm. Controlled. Unreadable.
Ask anyone who sees me drive away how I’m doing, and they’ll say the same thing.
He’s good. He’s strong. He’s the rock.
They’d be half right.
The other half?
The rock is crumbling. And I’m the only one who can hear it.
Author’s Note
I wrote this story because “I’m fine” has become one of the most dangerous lies men tell.
Not because everything has to turn into a group-therapy overshare, but because a lot of us have learned that being a man means one thing above all: don’t crack. Don’t cry. Don’t need. Don’t ask for help. Just keep performing—at work, at home, at church—and hope nobody notices how much of it is duct tape and denial.
Matt is fictional, but the patterns are not. The late-night anxiety. The quiet porn habit as a pressure valve. The marriage that looks stable from the outside but is running on fumes. The way “being strong” becomes a way to avoid being known. I didn’t want to write a neat testimony with a bow at the end. I wanted to sit in that awful in-between space where a man knows he’s not okay and still chooses to keep hiding.
If you picked up on the tension around Psalm 34:18—“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit”—that was intentional. The verse is there like a constant background noise in Matt’s life. He hears it from his mom, at church, in group, on his Bible app. The problem isn’t that God is silent; it’s that Matt refuses to be the kind of man that verse is written for: brokenhearted, crushed, honest.
Underneath all the details, this story is about fear of vulnerability:
- Fear of losing respect if you admit weakness
- Fear of not knowing what to do with your own emotions if you stop stuffing them
- Fear that if you open up to God or other men, you’ll be met with judgment or awkward silence instead of real presence
The tragedy for Matt isn’t a dramatic car crash or public scandal. It’s the slow erosion of his soul and relationships because he clings to the image of “the rock” more than he clings to God or the people who actually love him. He gets glimpses of another way—a raw confession at men’s group, a quiet moment on the carpet where he finally lets himself cry, a daughter asking if he’s sad—and he still pulls back. That’s the haunting part. Nothing changes… and yet everything is slowly falling apart.
If this story resonated with you at all, even uncomfortably, that’s kind of the point. Not to shame you, not to diagnose you, and definitely not to tell you what you “have to” do. Just to hold up a mirror of what it actually looks like when hiding becomes a lifestyle.
Some men crash hard and obvious. Others, like Matt, just slowly harden. Their job title still works. Their faith still has all the right words. Their family still posts decent photos. But the inside is hollow. And the thing about hollowness is that it echoes. It haunts.
The core idea behind this whole series is simple and costly: Vulnerability is not an optional add-on to the Christian life or to healthy masculinity. It’s the doorway. To real brotherhood. To actual intimacy in marriage. To a faith that’s more than performance. To experiencing the God who is “close to the brokenhearted,” not to the perfectly put-together.
What you do with that is up to you. This story doesn’t end with Matt calling the counselor or breaking down in front of Marcus or sprinting back to Emily with a grand apology. It stops where a lot of men actually are: still in the car, still saying “I’m good,” still sending a thumbs-up emoji instead of telling the truth.
If anything in you recognized yourself in that final scene, don’t rush past it. Sit with the discomfort. Ask yourself, honestly, where you’re playing “the rock” and what it’s costing you. And if you decide to talk to God, or to a friend, or to a counselor about it—that’s your story. Not Matt’s. And it doesn’t have to end the way his does.
Call to Action
If this story struck a chord, don’t just scroll on. Join the brotherhood—men learning to build, not borrow, their strength. Subscribe for more stories like this, drop a comment about where you’re growing, or reach out and tell me what you’re working toward. Let’s grow together.
D. Bryan King
Sources
- Psalm 34:18 – The Lord is close to the brokenhearted
- John 11:33-35 – Jesus wept
- 2 Corinthians 12:9-10 – Power made perfect in weakness
- James 5:16 – Confess your sins to each other
- APA – Men and Mental Health: Why Men Are Less Likely to Seek Help
- APA Monitor – The Crisis in Masculinity and Emotional Expression
- Masculinity and Help-Seeking: Implications for Depression and Suicide Risk (PubMed)
- Gottman Institute – How Emotional Withdrawal Destroys Relationships
- Pornography Use and Relationship Satisfaction (NCBI)
- Psychology Today – Why Vulnerability Is Essential for Healthy Relationships
- BibleProject – The Bible and Emotions
- Desiring God – The Power of Admitting Weakness
- The Gospel Coalition – Real Men Cry
- Barna – Masculinity, Identity, and the Church
Disclaimer:
The views and opinions expressed in this post are solely those of the author. The information provided is based on personal research, experience, and understanding of the subject matter at the time of writing. Readers should consult relevant experts or authorities for specific guidance related to their unique situations.
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The “High and Dry Club”: the thread about 30 years of the Forth car ferries running aground again, and again (and again)
This thread was originally written and published in April 2023.
Talking about ferries running aground, you might think that kind of thing is unfortunate, so spare a thought for the brand new Firth of Forth car ferry Robert the Bruce which ran aground at South Queensferry on Saturday 24th March, after barely 3 weeks in service. The vessel was on its penultimate cross-Firth trip of the day and became stuck fast at South Queensferry at the Hawes pier. It was not until late on the Sunday that she was successfully refloated. “New Ferry Boat Stranded at South Queensferry” said the headline in the Scotsman.
Valentine & Sons postcard of “Robert the Bruce” at North QueensferryBarely a week later, on April 5th, Robert the Bruce suffered the ignominy of grounding once more at South Queensferry, ending up sitting high and dry, perpendicular to the pier. “New Ferry Boat Grounded Again” said the headline in the Scotsman.
Robert the Bruce aground at South Queensferry on April 5th 1934.The hapless vessel was aground again 3 weeks later. It took 5 hours to get the passengers off. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to run aground once in a month may be regarded as a misfortune; to run aground twice in a month looks like carelessness. Three months later? You’ve guessed it. “Robert the Bruce” was aground again. This was getting to be rather common and the local paper hardly gave it a second mention, devoting only a single sentence to the mishap.
The ferry boat Robert the Bruce ran aground on Sunday, but was refloated at high tide without any apparent damage
Linlithgowshire Gazette, 6th July 1934In all, in her first 4 months of service, Robert the Bruce would run aground four times. Her identical sister ship Queen Margaret managed to avoid this awkward habit entirely. For now…
The Forth car ferries were the brainchild of, were built by and were operated by the William Denny & Brothers shipyard in Dumbarton. Sir Maurice Denny had crossed the Forth in the old vessel Dundee one day and had thought to himself that a purpose-built car ferry (or pair of ferries) could provide a much more efficient service. As a captain of industry he had only to pick up the phone to the London and North Eastern Railway to set the wheels in motion. The LNER paid for the ferries and leased them back to Denny, who operated them. This arrangement meant that even if the ferries poached traffic away from the railway, the railway would still profit from them.
Robert the Bruce at North Queensferry, by-NC-ND, Ballast Trust.The design was innovative and Denny had high hopes it would catch on. The vessels had a large, open car deck, with small passenger cabins fore and aft. There were ramps on each side at each end for loading and unloading vehicles. The bridge sat high above the deck on a gantry in the middle of the ship to give a commanding view in all directions. Propulsion was by paddle wheels, an antiquated system on paper, but one which had certain advantages when manoeuvring at slow speed and which was brought up to date with each paddle being independently driven by an electric motor. This, coupled with rudders fore and aft, meant for superb manoeuvrability and the ability to change power and the direction of drive very rapidly. Diesel engines under the car deck drove the generators for the motors, and exhausted through a pair of slender funnels. This arrangement allowed the ferries complete roll-on, roll-off operation for rapid loading and unloading and the ability to move forwards or backwards at the same speed and no loss of handling.
Perhaps in sympathy with and to share in Robert‘s blushes, the older companion Dundee decided to get in on the action and ran aground at South Queensferry in 1939. Again, her passengers and cars were stuck aboard for hours, the Evening News printing an atmospheric night time photo of her with the ghostly outline of one of the piers of the Forth Bridge behind her.
Dundee aground at South Queensferry, 24/1/39, Edinburgh Evening NewsThe Forth ferries survived WW2 without further incidence but on 18th August 1947, perhaps as a late celebration of victory, one of them ran aground again in the mud off South Queensferry. This time however it was the Queen Margaret at fault, and Robert the Bruce redeemed herself by towing her off the mud.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/23666168@N04/37190198854
In 1949, the ancient Dundee was replaced by a new vessel, the Mary Queen of Scots, identical to Robert and Margaret except that post-war economies meant that the electric drive system for the paddles was replaced with a hydraulic one. To welcome the new member to the team, Robert the Bruce decided to show off as only she knew how, and on April 3rd 1950 she ran aground. Again. At South Queenferry. Again. This incident was on account of the mooring rope that should have been thrown to the pier landing short combined with a sudden gust of wind that blew her onto the mud before the engines, idle at the time, could respond.
Robert the Bruce aground at South Queensferry in the 1950s. Credit National World sales.Queen Margaret tried to repay the towing compliment from 1947 back and rescue her stricken sister however the tow rope broke and then the tide receded, making further rescue attempts on that tide impossible. Two hours service was wasted and Robert had to wait to be rescued on the next high tide.
Friday May 23rd 1952. Guess what happened. Go on. I’ll give you one guess… Wrong! It was actually Mary Queen of Scots which grounded this time. Strictly speaking she didn’t run aground, as she found herself stuck when the tide receded while she was both loading vehicles and taking on oil, the additional weight incurred settling her on the mud beneath her keel. Attempts by Robert the Bruce to get her off the mud at South Queensferry proved fruitless and again they had to wait for a high tide to free her
Mary Queen of Scots at North Queensferry, with Queen Margaret behind her. Via University of St. Andrews Collections, © J. A. Weir EstateNever one to be outdone by her sisters, two months later Robert the Bruce managed to run aground 50 yards short of the pier at South Queensferry. Queen Margaret came to the rescue and tower her off the mud before the tide left her high and dry after a 20 minute struggle. It was almost a year before one of the ferries ran aground again. This time it was Mary Queen of Scots: caught by the combination of a westerly wind and an autumn equinox tide “which tends to empty the river” on August 27th 1953. She was left high and dry in the middle of the Firth for an hour and a half until a change in the tide allowed her to come unstuck. This left the passengers of a bus trip sorely disappointed; they had crossed on one ferry while their vehicle followed on the next (Mary Queen of Scots) and got stuck mid-stream. By the time the bus made it over, he found his passengers had given up and headed home to Edinburgh by alternative means.
In 1955, due to booming traffic, the three Forth ferries were joined by a fourth Forth ferry (try saying that in a hurry), when the slightly larger Sir William Wallace joined the fleet.
The Fourth Forth Ferry, “Sir William Wallace”. c. 1960, from THELMA Donor number: 0186-013True to the established tradition, Robert the Bruce welcomed her by running aground! On March 12th 1955, in dense fog, she hit a mudbank some 500 yards short of the pier. This time it was an exceptional spring tide at fault. It took an hour and a half to free her.
The following year, it as Queen Margaret’s turn again and on December 2nd 1956? she was stuck at South Queensferry once more. It would take a whole 3 years in service for Sir William Wallace to join the “High and Dry Club”, which she first managed in February 1958. Again it was at the South Queensferry end and she had 40 cars on board when she got stuck. The passengers were rowed ashore and either bussed to Edinburgh, or waited 5 hours in the Hawes Inn for their cars. One hopes that the refreshments provided were only teas and coffees. She repeated the act at the end of September that year, getting within 20 feet of the pier at South Queensferry and then grounding on the mud. 50 passengers were taken ashore in the lifeboats. She became stuck at 740AM and it was not until a high tide at noon that she floated free.
Sir William Wallace aground at Hawes Pier in February 1958. Picture from The Sphere.Queen Margaret tried something new and rammed one of the piers of the Forth Bridge in February 1961 when the wind and tide conditions conspired against her and made controlled progress impossible. There was one last grounding hurrah for the Forth ferries, when this same vessel took to the Hawes Pier mud for 1 and a ¼ hours on the appropriate date of Friday 13th October 1961. It took the combined efforts of Sir William Wallace and Mary Queen of Scots to free her.
In the final decade of the ferries on the Forth, Sir William Wallace added an additional dimension to the difficulties of running the service; she was bigger than her sisters but had the same engines and same sized loading ramps, so was slower and took longer to load and unload. This made her a logistical pain in the bum for keeping to schedule and her smaller sisters frequently had to slow down when crossing against a tide or current to let her catch up. Her car deck was also slightly differently arranged and her master found out the hard way that if he packed them on tightly the same way as the other ships, then they became wedge in, couldn’t get onto the ramp and thus couldn’t get back off again! The solution was simple but inelegant – the ship sailed around to the other side of the pier and all the cars reversed off instead.
Sir William Wallace – not aground – at Hawes Pier in South Queensferry. Date unknown, credit unknown.The owner-operators of the ferries went into liquidation in August 1963 and so the liquidators continued to run the service for a further 13 months until September 3th 1964 when the last sailed before the Forth Road Bridge was opened. Guests of honour on the last scheduled voyage were HM The Queen and HRH Prince Philip. Queen Margaret had clearly no sense of occasion and humour and refused to run aground with the royal party aboard.
Last Ferry across the Forth. West Lothian Courier – Friday 11 September 1964As a postscript, I should note that nobody was harmed in any of these groundings, beyond the feelings of the ships’ masters. In actual fact, considering the intense scheduling of the route over 30 years hard work, in tricky waters, they actually had a pretty enviable safety record. In the late 1950s, all four ships ran an all-day service at 15 minute intervals, making 40,000 crossings a year, carrying 1,250,000 passengers, 600,000 cars and 200,000 commercial vehicles.
The Forth ferries were laid up at Burntisland after the end of their working lives and the three oldest ones were unceremoniously scrapped. The press were far more interested in the new Road Bridge to be interested in three old ships. The newest and largest, Sir William Wallace, spent a few years service at Islemeer in the Netherlands before being scrapped too in 1970. After 30 years of car ferry service, the scores on the doors for running aground were:
- King Robert the Bruce, 7 times
- Queen Margaret, 3 times
- Joint, Sir William Wallace and Mary Queen of Scots, 2 times each
- Dundee, 1 time
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#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret -
I've played Ocarina of Time more times than I can count. I still have the gold n64 cart.
I am playing through it on the 3ds for the first time and I am realizing how useless some upgrades are. Like, fire and ice arrows. Who cares?
Wallets? Everything you could want in the game can be gotten for free.
I will say I am a huge fan of the big gorrons sword though.
I never played the master quest, so I will try that after I finish. At Gannons castle now.
-
I've played Ocarina of Time more times than I can count. I still have the gold n64 cart.
I am playing through it on the 3ds for the first time and I am realizing how useless some upgrades are. Like, fire and ice arrows. Who cares?
Wallets? Everything you could want in the game can be gotten for free.
I will say I am a huge fan of the big gorrons sword though.
I never played the master quest, so I will try that after I finish. At Gannons castle now.
-
I've played Ocarina of Time more times than I can count. I still have the gold n64 cart.
I am playing through it on the 3ds for the first time and I am realizing how useless some upgrades are. Like, fire and ice arrows. Who cares?
Wallets? Everything you could want in the game can be gotten for free.
I will say I am a huge fan of the big gorrons sword though.
I never played the master quest, so I will try that after I finish. At Gannons castle now.
-
I've played Ocarina of Time more times than I can count. I still have the gold n64 cart.
I am playing through it on the 3ds for the first time and I am realizing how useless some upgrades are. Like, fire and ice arrows. Who cares?
Wallets? Everything you could want in the game can be gotten for free.
I will say I am a huge fan of the big gorrons sword though.
I never played the master quest, so I will try that after I finish. At Gannons castle now.
-
I've played Ocarina of Time more times than I can count. I still have the gold n64 cart.
I am playing through it on the 3ds for the first time and I am realizing how useless some upgrades are. Like, fire and ice arrows. Who cares?
Wallets? Everything you could want in the game can be gotten for free.
I will say I am a huge fan of the big gorrons sword though.
I never played the master quest, so I will try that after I finish. At Gannons castle now.
-
Anyone Can Be Your NDIS Support Worker. Who Is Keeping You Safe?
Reflections from several years on the scheme.
I have been on the NDIS for several years. A recent re-hiring process clarified something I had long suspected. The scheme has a workforce problem, and participants are the ones bearing the brunt.
There Is No Mandatory Registration Requirement
Under current Australian law, participants who self-manage or plan-manage their NDIS funding can hire any person as a support worker. Independent support Workers require no registration or minimum training standards.
The worker who enters your home, learns your medical history, handles your medications, and has significant authority over your daily life may have no formal preparation for any of it.
The NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission exists and handles serious complaints, including abuse, neglect, and criminal conduct. Boundary violations, confidentiality breaches, and chronic unpreparedness that fall below that threshold leave participants largely without recourse. Skilled and ethical workers bring those qualities from their own formation and prior training. When those qualities are absent, the participant discovers this after the fact, and any remedy is slow, uncertain, and theirs alone to pursue.
That is the baseline. Everything that follows is built on it.
The Dog
My service dog performs specific medical functions. His effectiveness depends on remaining focused and oriented to me.
Some workers reach for him the moment they walk through the door. They do not ask.
Touching a service animal without permission is a safety violation and, in some contexts, carries legal weight under Australian disability discrimination law. A worker entering the home of a participant with a service animal has a professional obligation to understand what that animal does and what it requires. That preparation belongs to the provider. Its absence transfers the risk to the participant.
This is a professional standard.
What the Certificate III Does Not Cover
The Certificate III in Individual Support is the standard qualification in this sector and takes between six and twelve months. For many workers, it is completed online with minimal supervised practice hours, and it does not prepare them for the clinical and ethical complexity of supporting people with invisible or fluctuating conditions.
A worker with their cert may have no framework for how fatigue functions in ME/CFS or autistic burnout. Why pushing through is sometimes dangerous, why capacity varies day to day in ways that cannot be read from a plan approved six months ago, and why the participant’s account of their own condition is the primary source of accurate information.
Workers who arrive without that preparation fill the gap with assumptions. Correcting those assumptions, educating the person sent to support them, translating their own experience into terms the worker finds legible — this falls to the participant. That work is skilled and exhausting, and no NDIS plan funds it.
A Plan Is Not a Person
An NDIS plan records approved supports, written at a point in time by a planner who may have spent an hour with the participant. What it cannot capture is what a Tuesday looks like after a bad night, or how that changes what Wednesday can hold.
Workers who treat the plan as a complete picture end up supporting the document. When the participant’s actual day diverges from what the plan implies, some workers become confused, inflexible, or subtly sceptical. The participant then carries that response throughout the day.
Confidentiality Is Not Discretionary
Support workers enter your home and learn about your health, medications, finances, and relationships. The ethical obligations around that information are clear. Workers routinely underestimate them.
Information moves in cars and waiting rooms, in casual exchanges during handover. Shared without consent in contexts the participant did not choose, each instance is a breach — and the pattern across a working relationship represents a significant, under-reported ethical problem in the sector.
Providers who do not train explicitly for this are not taking their duty of care seriously. The Commission’s framework addresses the most serious breaches. Below that threshold, the everyday end goes largely unmonitored.
A Diagnosis Is a Starting Point
Workers who arrive having already decided how a participant communicates — based on a diagnostic label rather than a conversation — are making a category error with professional consequences.
Autism produces significant variation across individuals, as do acquired brain injury, cerebral palsy, and many mental health conditions. Experience with one person transfers little to the next. The participant is the authority on their own communication and needs. Workers who approach that through the filter of what they already think they know require the participant to work harder to be accurately seen.
Being Present Is the Job
A worker on their phone during support hours has decided where their attention belongs. That decision reflects on the worker and the provider, and on a regulatory environment that permits it without consequence.
Participant time is funded. Divided attention during that time is a failure of basic professional conduct.
Punctuality Has Clinical Stakes
For participants with fatigue conditions, medication schedules, or appointment windows that cannot flex, a late worker is sometimes no worker at all. The window closes, an appointment is missed, and the energy available at nine o’clock is gone by ten.
Workers who treat punctuality as a matter of general courtesy have not been told what the costs of late arrival are in this context. Providers should tell them, in writing, before they begin.
Handover Exists for a Reason
When workers do not read handover notes, participants repeat themselves. Questions get asked that the notes had already answered. Avoidable errors get made. The first portion of support time becomes unpaid orientation, delivered by the person the support was supposed to serve.
Reading the handover is the floor — it signals that a worker understands preparation begins before they arrive.
The Re-Hiring Process
When a support worker leaves, the participant does not simply wait for a replacement. A position description must be written, applications reviewed, interviews conducted, and a hiring decision made with incomplete information about a person who will have access to their home, their medical records, and significant portions of their daily life.
After that comes orientation, and the contextual knowledge that made the previous support functional has to be rebuilt from the beginning.
None of this is funded. The NDIS has no category for the labour of maintaining access to support, and for participants with high support needs or complex conditions, that labour is substantial.
What Competent Support Looks Like
Workers who are good at this job arrive having read the available documentation, ask before they act, and give more weight to what the participant tells them about their own needs than to any plan or file. When something changes during a shift, the response is immediate and adaptive.
Their presence does not generate additional work for the participant — that is the measure. Support that requires the participant to manage, educate, or compensate for a worker’s preparation gaps has redistributed the load rather than reduced it.
What Needs to Change
Mandatory registration for all NDIS workers, regardless of how a participant’s plan is managed, would create a baseline of accountability. Genuine consequences for ethical breaches — including low-level, chronic ones — would change the conditions under which workers operate.
Revised training requirements are long overdue: supervised hours in complex support settings, explicit coverage of invisible conditions, service animal protocols, confidentiality obligations, and fluctuating capacity. These are the preparations the role demands.
Wages need to rise. Turnover in this sector is directly linked to pay, and the continuity of support is a safety condition for many participants — the relationship carries clinical knowledge that cannot be quickly or cheaply reconstructed.
Participants also need a complaints mechanism they can use without fear of losing their support. Accountability cannot depend on participants absorbing the risk of speaking up.
The Principle and the Practice
Participant choice and control sit at the centre of the NDIS. On paper, participants are experts in their own lives and directors of their own support.
That principle requires a workforce framework capable of supporting it. At present, workers enter participants’ lives with significant authority over their access, safety, and daily functioning, operating under training requirements and accountability mechanisms that do not match the weight of what they are being asked to do.
Positioned at the centre of a scheme designed around their needs, the participant often ends up holding the system together when it fails to hold itself together.
That is worth saying clearly, and worth changing.
Share this with someone who trains support workers, manages a disability provider, or influences workforce policy. The problem is documented. The changes required are known. What is missing is the will to treat this workforce and the people it serves with the seriousness they both deserve. #NDIS #DisabilityRights #DisabilitySupport #SupportWorkers #DisabledPeople #DisabilityAdvocacy #Accessibility #AusPol #Australia
-
Anyone Can Be Your NDIS Support Worker. Who Is Keeping You Safe?
Reflections from several years on the scheme.
I have been on the NDIS for several years. A recent re-hiring process clarified something I had long suspected. The scheme has a workforce problem, and participants are the ones bearing the brunt.
There Is No Mandatory Registration Requirement
Under current Australian law, participants who self-manage or plan-manage their NDIS funding can hire any person as a support worker. Independent support Workers require no registration or minimum training standards.
The worker who enters your home, learns your medical history, handles your medications, and has significant authority over your daily life may have no formal preparation for any of it.
The NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission exists and handles serious complaints, including abuse, neglect, and criminal conduct. Boundary violations, confidentiality breaches, and chronic unpreparedness that fall below that threshold leave participants largely without recourse. Skilled and ethical workers bring those qualities from their own formation and prior training. When those qualities are absent, the participant discovers this after the fact, and any remedy is slow, uncertain, and theirs alone to pursue.
That is the baseline. Everything that follows is built on it.
The Dog
My service dog performs specific medical functions. His effectiveness depends on remaining focused and oriented to me.
Some workers reach for him the moment they walk through the door. They do not ask.
Touching a service animal without permission is a safety violation and, in some contexts, carries legal weight under Australian disability discrimination law. A worker entering the home of a participant with a service animal has a professional obligation to understand what that animal does and what it requires. That preparation belongs to the provider. Its absence transfers the risk to the participant.
This is a professional standard.
What the Certificate III Does Not Cover
The Certificate III in Individual Support is the standard qualification in this sector and takes between six and twelve months. For many workers, it is completed online with minimal supervised practice hours, and it does not prepare them for the clinical and ethical complexity of supporting people with invisible or fluctuating conditions.
A worker with their cert may have no framework for how fatigue functions in ME/CFS or autistic burnout. Why pushing through is sometimes dangerous, why capacity varies day to day in ways that cannot be read from a plan approved six months ago, and why the participant’s account of their own condition is the primary source of accurate information.
Workers who arrive without that preparation fill the gap with assumptions. Correcting those assumptions, educating the person sent to support them, translating their own experience into terms the worker finds legible — this falls to the participant. That work is skilled and exhausting, and no NDIS plan funds it.
A Plan Is Not a Person
An NDIS plan records approved supports, written at a point in time by a planner who may have spent an hour with the participant. What it cannot capture is what a Tuesday looks like after a bad night, or how that changes what Wednesday can hold.
Workers who treat the plan as a complete picture end up supporting the document. When the participant’s actual day diverges from what the plan implies, some workers become confused, inflexible, or subtly sceptical. The participant then carries that response throughout the day.
Confidentiality Is Not Discretionary
Support workers enter your home and learn about your health, medications, finances, and relationships. The ethical obligations around that information are clear. Workers routinely underestimate them.
Information moves in cars and waiting rooms, in casual exchanges during handover. Shared without consent in contexts the participant did not choose, each instance is a breach — and the pattern across a working relationship represents a significant, under-reported ethical problem in the sector.
Providers who do not train explicitly for this are not taking their duty of care seriously. The Commission’s framework addresses the most serious breaches. Below that threshold, the everyday end goes largely unmonitored.
A Diagnosis Is a Starting Point
Workers who arrive having already decided how a participant communicates — based on a diagnostic label rather than a conversation — are making a category error with professional consequences.
Autism produces significant variation across individuals, as do acquired brain injury, cerebral palsy, and many mental health conditions. Experience with one person transfers little to the next. The participant is the authority on their own communication and needs. Workers who approach that through the filter of what they already think they know require the participant to work harder to be accurately seen.
Being Present Is the Job
A worker on their phone during support hours has decided where their attention belongs. That decision reflects on the worker and the provider, and on a regulatory environment that permits it without consequence.
Participant time is funded. Divided attention during that time is a failure of basic professional conduct.
Punctuality Has Clinical Stakes
For participants with fatigue conditions, medication schedules, or appointment windows that cannot flex, a late worker is sometimes no worker at all. The window closes, an appointment is missed, and the energy available at nine o’clock is gone by ten.
Workers who treat punctuality as a matter of general courtesy have not been told what the costs of late arrival are in this context. Providers should tell them, in writing, before they begin.
Handover Exists for a Reason
When workers do not read handover notes, participants repeat themselves. Questions get asked that the notes had already answered. Avoidable errors get made. The first portion of support time becomes unpaid orientation, delivered by the person the support was supposed to serve.
Reading the handover is the floor — it signals that a worker understands preparation begins before they arrive.
The Re-Hiring Process
When a support worker leaves, the participant does not simply wait for a replacement. A position description must be written, applications reviewed, interviews conducted, and a hiring decision made with incomplete information about a person who will have access to their home, their medical records, and significant portions of their daily life.
After that comes orientation, and the contextual knowledge that made the previous support functional has to be rebuilt from the beginning.
None of this is funded. The NDIS has no category for the labour of maintaining access to support, and for participants with high support needs or complex conditions, that labour is substantial.
What Competent Support Looks Like
Workers who are good at this job arrive having read the available documentation, ask before they act, and give more weight to what the participant tells them about their own needs than to any plan or file. When something changes during a shift, the response is immediate and adaptive.
Their presence does not generate additional work for the participant — that is the measure. Support that requires the participant to manage, educate, or compensate for a worker’s preparation gaps has redistributed the load rather than reduced it.
What Needs to Change
Mandatory registration for all NDIS workers, regardless of how a participant’s plan is managed, would create a baseline of accountability. Genuine consequences for ethical breaches — including low-level, chronic ones — would change the conditions under which workers operate.
Revised training requirements are long overdue: supervised hours in complex support settings, explicit coverage of invisible conditions, service animal protocols, confidentiality obligations, and fluctuating capacity. These are the preparations the role demands.
Wages need to rise. Turnover in this sector is directly linked to pay, and the continuity of support is a safety condition for many participants — the relationship carries clinical knowledge that cannot be quickly or cheaply reconstructed.
Participants also need a complaints mechanism they can use without fear of losing their support. Accountability cannot depend on participants absorbing the risk of speaking up.
The Principle and the Practice
Participant choice and control sit at the centre of the NDIS. On paper, participants are experts in their own lives and directors of their own support.
That principle requires a workforce framework capable of supporting it. At present, workers enter participants’ lives with significant authority over their access, safety, and daily functioning, operating under training requirements and accountability mechanisms that do not match the weight of what they are being asked to do.
Positioned at the centre of a scheme designed around their needs, the participant often ends up holding the system together when it fails to hold itself together.
That is worth saying clearly, and worth changing.
Share this with someone who trains support workers, manages a disability provider, or influences workforce policy. The problem is documented. The changes required are known. What is missing is the will to treat this workforce and the people it serves with the seriousness they both deserve. #NDIS #DisabilityRights #DisabilitySupport #SupportWorkers #DisabledPeople #DisabilityAdvocacy #Accessibility #AusPol #Australia
-
Anyone Can Be Your NDIS Support Worker. Who Is Keeping You Safe?
Reflections from several years on the scheme.
I have been on the NDIS for several years. A recent re-hiring process clarified something I had long suspected. The scheme has a workforce problem, and participants are the ones bearing the brunt.
There Is No Mandatory Registration Requirement
Under current Australian law, participants who self-manage or plan-manage their NDIS funding can hire any person as a support worker. Independent support Workers require no registration or minimum training standards.
The worker who enters your home, learns your medical history, handles your medications, and has significant authority over your daily life may have no formal preparation for any of it.
The NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission exists and handles serious complaints, including abuse, neglect, and criminal conduct. Boundary violations, confidentiality breaches, and chronic unpreparedness that fall below that threshold leave participants largely without recourse. Skilled and ethical workers bring those qualities from their own formation and prior training. When those qualities are absent, the participant discovers this after the fact, and any remedy is slow, uncertain, and theirs alone to pursue.
That is the baseline. Everything that follows is built on it.
The Dog
My service dog performs specific medical functions. His effectiveness depends on remaining focused and oriented to me.
Some workers reach for him the moment they walk through the door. They do not ask.
Touching a service animal without permission is a safety violation and, in some contexts, carries legal weight under Australian disability discrimination law. A worker entering the home of a participant with a service animal has a professional obligation to understand what that animal does and what it requires. That preparation belongs to the provider. Its absence transfers the risk to the participant.
This is a professional standard.
What the Certificate III Does Not Cover
The Certificate III in Individual Support is the standard qualification in this sector and takes between six and twelve months. For many workers, it is completed online with minimal supervised practice hours, and it does not prepare them for the clinical and ethical complexity of supporting people with invisible or fluctuating conditions.
A worker with their cert may have no framework for how fatigue functions in ME/CFS or autistic burnout. Why pushing through is sometimes dangerous, why capacity varies day to day in ways that cannot be read from a plan approved six months ago, and why the participant’s account of their own condition is the primary source of accurate information.
Workers who arrive without that preparation fill the gap with assumptions. Correcting those assumptions, educating the person sent to support them, translating their own experience into terms the worker finds legible — this falls to the participant. That work is skilled and exhausting, and no NDIS plan funds it.
A Plan Is Not a Person
An NDIS plan records approved supports, written at a point in time by a planner who may have spent an hour with the participant. What it cannot capture is what a Tuesday looks like after a bad night, or how that changes what Wednesday can hold.
Workers who treat the plan as a complete picture end up supporting the document. When the participant’s actual day diverges from what the plan implies, some workers become confused, inflexible, or subtly sceptical. The participant then carries that response throughout the day.
Confidentiality Is Not Discretionary
Support workers enter your home and learn about your health, medications, finances, and relationships. The ethical obligations around that information are clear. Workers routinely underestimate them.
Information moves in cars and waiting rooms, in casual exchanges during handover. Shared without consent in contexts the participant did not choose, each instance is a breach — and the pattern across a working relationship represents a significant, under-reported ethical problem in the sector.
Providers who do not train explicitly for this are not taking their duty of care seriously. The Commission’s framework addresses the most serious breaches. Below that threshold, the everyday end goes largely unmonitored.
A Diagnosis Is a Starting Point
Workers who arrive having already decided how a participant communicates — based on a diagnostic label rather than a conversation — are making a category error with professional consequences.
Autism produces significant variation across individuals, as do acquired brain injury, cerebral palsy, and many mental health conditions. Experience with one person transfers little to the next. The participant is the authority on their own communication and needs. Workers who approach that through the filter of what they already think they know require the participant to work harder to be accurately seen.
Being Present Is the Job
A worker on their phone during support hours has decided where their attention belongs. That decision reflects on the worker and the provider, and on a regulatory environment that permits it without consequence.
Participant time is funded. Divided attention during that time is a failure of basic professional conduct.
Punctuality Has Clinical Stakes
For participants with fatigue conditions, medication schedules, or appointment windows that cannot flex, a late worker is sometimes no worker at all. The window closes, an appointment is missed, and the energy available at nine o’clock is gone by ten.
Workers who treat punctuality as a matter of general courtesy have not been told what the costs of late arrival are in this context. Providers should tell them, in writing, before they begin.
Handover Exists for a Reason
When workers do not read handover notes, participants repeat themselves. Questions get asked that the notes had already answered. Avoidable errors get made. The first portion of support time becomes unpaid orientation, delivered by the person the support was supposed to serve.
Reading the handover is the floor — it signals that a worker understands preparation begins before they arrive.
The Re-Hiring Process
When a support worker leaves, the participant does not simply wait for a replacement. A position description must be written, applications reviewed, interviews conducted, and a hiring decision made with incomplete information about a person who will have access to their home, their medical records, and significant portions of their daily life.
After that comes orientation, and the contextual knowledge that made the previous support functional has to be rebuilt from the beginning.
None of this is funded. The NDIS has no category for the labour of maintaining access to support, and for participants with high support needs or complex conditions, that labour is substantial.
What Competent Support Looks Like
Workers who are good at this job arrive having read the available documentation, ask before they act, and give more weight to what the participant tells them about their own needs than to any plan or file. When something changes during a shift, the response is immediate and adaptive.
Their presence does not generate additional work for the participant — that is the measure. Support that requires the participant to manage, educate, or compensate for a worker’s preparation gaps has redistributed the load rather than reduced it.
What Needs to Change
Mandatory registration for all NDIS workers, regardless of how a participant’s plan is managed, would create a baseline of accountability. Genuine consequences for ethical breaches — including low-level, chronic ones — would change the conditions under which workers operate.
Revised training requirements are long overdue: supervised hours in complex support settings, explicit coverage of invisible conditions, service animal protocols, confidentiality obligations, and fluctuating capacity. These are the preparations the role demands.
Wages need to rise. Turnover in this sector is directly linked to pay, and the continuity of support is a safety condition for many participants — the relationship carries clinical knowledge that cannot be quickly or cheaply reconstructed.
Participants also need a complaints mechanism they can use without fear of losing their support. Accountability cannot depend on participants absorbing the risk of speaking up.
The Principle and the Practice
Participant choice and control sit at the centre of the NDIS. On paper, participants are experts in their own lives and directors of their own support.
That principle requires a workforce framework capable of supporting it. At present, workers enter participants’ lives with significant authority over their access, safety, and daily functioning, operating under training requirements and accountability mechanisms that do not match the weight of what they are being asked to do.
Positioned at the centre of a scheme designed around their needs, the participant often ends up holding the system together when it fails to hold itself together.
That is worth saying clearly, and worth changing.
Share this with someone who trains support workers, manages a disability provider, or influences workforce policy. The problem is documented. The changes required are known. What is missing is the will to treat this workforce and the people it serves with the seriousness they both deserve. #NDIS #DisabilityRights #DisabilitySupport #SupportWorkers #DisabledPeople #DisabilityAdvocacy #Accessibility #AusPol #Australia
-
The States That Will Not Be Commanded
There is a class of human experience that answers to no direct order. You cannot tell yourself to fall asleep. The instruction arrives at a locked door. Sleep refuses the simple transaction of command and execution. Instead, it assembles itself once certain conditions are present, and those conditions include, strangely enough, the act of picturing yourself already inside the state you are trying to enter. Lying down begins it. Closed eyes continue it. Imagining yourself asleep, entering the self who has already arrived, completes the condition, and only then does sleep agree to appear.
This is stranger than it first appears. The imagination precedes the fact. A fiction makes the reality possible. Rehearsal of the self-in-the-state must happen before the state itself will consent to arrive. Once you notice this mechanism operating in sleep, you begin to see it everywhere in human life, running underneath experiences we mistakenly believed we commanded outright.
Aldous Huxley named the pattern in The Perennial Philosophy and called it the law of reversed effort, a phrase Alan Watts later carried into wider circulation. Viktor Frankl, working from the clinic rather than the lecture hall, called it paradoxical intention, and used it to treat patients whose anxieties had swallowed them whole. The insomniac who tries hardest to sleep stays awake longest. The speaker who strains to stop stammering stammers worst. Frankl’s counterintuitive instruction was to command the symptom itself. Try to stay awake. Try to stammer. The paradox broke the grip because it acknowledged a humble fact about voluntary will: the target state cannot be seized. It must be invited, imagined, allowed.
Taoists arrived at the same recognition two thousand years earlier and called it wu-wei, the action that is not action, the doing that happens when the doer gets out of the way. An archer who aims too hard misses. A calligrapher who grips the brush too firmly produces a dead line. Skill of that order lives in a zone the conscious will cannot enter, and the only approach is to imagine yourself having already arrived.
Consider sexual arousal. The physiological response is famously resistant to command. It answers to imagined scenarios, to remembered encounters, to anticipated scenes. Masters and Johnson built an entire clinical practice around this recognition, and their cure for performance anxiety, sensate focus, works by replacing effort with imagined sensation. A man instructed to perform often cannot. The same man, invited to picture the experience without obligation, finds his body following his mind into the state. Arousal answers to conjuring.
Consider crying on cue, the classical actor’s problem. Stanislavski solved it through affective memory. The tears come by indirection. You imagine the dog you lost when you were nine, and water arrives because the body has been invited to the feeling rather than ordered to produce it. Meryl Streep has described her process in interviews as a summoning of remembered feeling. Daniel Day-Lewis has described his as an inhabitation sustained across months. Neither description sounds like command. The actor imagines the self-in-grief, and grief supplies the water.
Consider the act of belief. Pascal, sitting in his Pensées alongside the famous wager, offered an argument about habituation that has been quietly underestimated for centuries. For those seeking faith, he advised acting as if they already believed. Kneel. Take the holy water. Say the prayers. Imagine yourself as a believer, and belief may arrive as a secondary effect of the performance. William James extended the line in “The Will to Believe” and argued that many truths about ourselves only become true after we have imagined them as true. Courage is one such truth. Generosity is another. Love, perhaps most of all.
Athletes at the top of their disciplines understand this mechanism as technical knowledge. Jack Nicklaus, in Golf My Way, said he never hit a shot, even in practice, without first seeing the ball’s flight in his mind. Swimmers rehearse the race in imagination with such precision that brain scans show neural activation patterns overlapping substantially with actual performance. The body runs the course in miniature before it runs the course in fact. Physical execution follows the mental simulation because the state has already been entered once, invisibly, and needs only to be entered again with flesh attached.
Hypnosis is perhaps the cleanest case. An unwilling subject cannot be forced into the hypnotic state, and even a willing one cannot seize it by direct will. The subject must imagine entering the state, going down the staircase, growing heavy in the chair, and that imagining is the mechanism itself. Imaging studies by David Spiegel and colleagues at Stanford, along with related work by Oakley and Halligan, suggest that hypnotic suggestion produces neural patterns distinct from ordinary pretending, patterns more closely aligned with genuine perceptual and motor processing. Imagination has done something to the body. Fiction has produced a physiological effect the subject did not will.
Creative inspiration operates by the same architecture. You cannot command an idea to arrive. You can imagine yourself as receptive, empty, waiting, and the idea tends to arrive into that imagined vacancy. Keats called this negative capability, the capacity to sit inside uncertainty without grabbing for resolution. A poet imagines the listening state, and the poem walks into the room. Composers describe the same choreography. Mathematicians describe it too, with Poincaré’s famous account of the solution arriving as he stepped onto the bus at Coutances. He had imagined himself receptive for weeks. The solution waited until it found him properly prepared to receive it.
Grief resolution belongs in this same family, though we rarely recognize it. Bereaved people move through grief by imagining themselves on the other side of it. Picturing a future morning when the first thought lands somewhere other than the absence. Picturing the moment when the dead person’s name can be spoken without collapse. These acts of imagination are how integration proceeds. George Bonanno’s resilience research and Pauline Boss’s work on ambiguous loss both describe this imaginative prefiguration as the actual mechanism of healing. The sequence matters here. Picturing a survivable future comes first, and resolution begins to assemble around the picture.
At the collective level, Benedict Anderson’s argument about imagined communities rides the same rail. A nation exists first as an imaginative act performed by millions of strangers simultaneously. Citizens picture themselves as a “we” before the institutional “we” coheres. American colonists had to imagine being Americans before they could act as Americans. Thomas Kuhn made a parallel argument about scientific revolutions. A new paradigm must be imaginatively entertained, played with speculatively, inhabited as a thought experiment, before it can be adopted and tested. Discovery through accumulation alone misses the interior work that makes discovery possible. Science imagines a world in which the anomalies make sense, and then searches for evidence that the imagined world is the actual one.
Here is the argument this pattern makes against one of the most persistent myths in the modern self-help industry. The doctrine of pure willpower, of steel discipline, of command-and-execute personal transformation, is largely false where it matters most. The states we most want to inhabit are precisely the states that refuse to be seized. Love, sleep, creative insight, courage, calm, sexual pleasure, athletic flow, artistic voice, faith, grief’s resolution, recovery from trauma, the dissolution of anxiety, the emergence of a new political identity, all of these operate by invitation rather than by conquest. A hard clamp on such a state accelerates its evasion. Accurate, patient rehearsal of the self already inside it increases the odds of arrival, because the state recognizes the address it has been given.
This observation is a claim about where real labor lives, rather than a brief for passivity. The imagination itself is labor. Stanislavski’s affective memory takes years to develop. Nicklaus’s visualization was the product of thousands of hours of prior experience that had furnished his imagination with accurate material to draw on. Negative capability, for the poet, demands a difficult kind of vigilance. Picturing a survivable future, for the mourner, takes courage most days. Real work is being performed in all these cases. That work simply lives somewhere other than where the popular literature keeps telling us to look. It lives in the imagining, in furnishing the mind with a vivid enough rehearsal that the body and the world will follow the script.
There is a political dimension to this that deserves attention. Populations that cannot imagine a different arrangement of their lives will not produce one. Authoritarian regimes understand this perfectly and invest heavily in controlling imagination itself, in prescribing what may be pictured, in criminalizing the mental rehearsal of alternatives. The censor knows the law of reversed effort by heart, and knows in particular that the imagined state of freedom must be interrupted before the political state of freedom can be prevented. Organizers and artists, working from the other direction, understand that their first task is to make the unfamiliar picturable. Once a people can picture themselves free, the mechanics of becoming free start to assemble around the picture.
The craft implication for writers, for dramatists, for anyone whose work involves summoning states in other people’s minds, is that we are running an imagination-furnishing enterprise whose surface resembles persuasion. A good novel gives the reader a vivid enough picture of the inside of another life that the feeling assembles itself inside the reader. A good play stages grief with such precision that the audience’s own grief, resting dormant, recognizes the invitation and walks forward. Argument alone has never moved anyone who was going to stay put. The form of the work becomes a staircase. Descent happens inside the audience’s own imagination. The hypnotic principle and the aesthetic principle are the same principle.
Which returns us to sleep, where we began. The oldest ritual of the human body is the rehearsal that makes becoming possible. Every night of your life you practice the technique that governs almost everything else you will ever want to enter. You picture yourself arriving, and arrival follows the picture. The repetition is so automatic it escapes notice. Seeing the principle for the first time reorders the interior map. The question that has held your energy for years, the question of how to force yourself into the state you want, reveals itself as badly posed. Sharper questions take shape around what you had been missing. What does the inside of that state actually feel like, in specific sensory detail? What would I need to picture accurately enough for my body and my circumstances to follow the picture into becoming?
Less effort, applied through better imagination, answers more of what we want in a human life than the heavier strategies that continue to dominate our self-improvement literature. That reweighting, once genuinely made, reorders a great deal.
#activeImagination #actor #archer #arousal #belief #command #dreaming #effect #human #imagination #medicine #mind #pascal #problem #psychology #sleep #states #theatre #thought -
The States That Will Not Be Commanded
There is a class of human experience that answers to no direct order. You cannot tell yourself to fall asleep. The instruction arrives at a locked door. Sleep refuses the simple transaction of command and execution. Instead, it assembles itself once certain conditions are present, and those conditions include, strangely enough, the act of picturing yourself already inside the state you are trying to enter. Lying down begins it. Closed eyes continue it. Imagining yourself asleep, entering the self who has already arrived, completes the condition, and only then does sleep agree to appear.
This is stranger than it first appears. The imagination precedes the fact. A fiction makes the reality possible. Rehearsal of the self-in-the-state must happen before the state itself will consent to arrive. Once you notice this mechanism operating in sleep, you begin to see it everywhere in human life, running underneath experiences we mistakenly believed we commanded outright.
Aldous Huxley named the pattern in The Perennial Philosophy and called it the law of reversed effort, a phrase Alan Watts later carried into wider circulation. Viktor Frankl, working from the clinic rather than the lecture hall, called it paradoxical intention, and used it to treat patients whose anxieties had swallowed them whole. The insomniac who tries hardest to sleep stays awake longest. The speaker who strains to stop stammering stammers worst. Frankl’s counterintuitive instruction was to command the symptom itself. Try to stay awake. Try to stammer. The paradox broke the grip because it acknowledged a humble fact about voluntary will: the target state cannot be seized. It must be invited, imagined, allowed.
Taoists arrived at the same recognition two thousand years earlier and called it wu-wei, the action that is not action, the doing that happens when the doer gets out of the way. An archer who aims too hard misses. A calligrapher who grips the brush too firmly produces a dead line. Skill of that order lives in a zone the conscious will cannot enter, and the only approach is to imagine yourself having already arrived.
Consider sexual arousal. The physiological response is famously resistant to command. It answers to imagined scenarios, to remembered encounters, to anticipated scenes. Masters and Johnson built an entire clinical practice around this recognition, and their cure for performance anxiety, sensate focus, works by replacing effort with imagined sensation. A man instructed to perform often cannot. The same man, invited to picture the experience without obligation, finds his body following his mind into the state. Arousal answers to conjuring.
Consider crying on cue, the classical actor’s problem. Stanislavski solved it through affective memory. The tears come by indirection. You imagine the dog you lost when you were nine, and water arrives because the body has been invited to the feeling rather than ordered to produce it. Meryl Streep has described her process in interviews as a summoning of remembered feeling. Daniel Day-Lewis has described his as an inhabitation sustained across months. Neither description sounds like command. The actor imagines the self-in-grief, and grief supplies the water.
Consider the act of belief. Pascal, sitting in his Pensées alongside the famous wager, offered an argument about habituation that has been quietly underestimated for centuries. For those seeking faith, he advised acting as if they already believed. Kneel. Take the holy water. Say the prayers. Imagine yourself as a believer, and belief may arrive as a secondary effect of the performance. William James extended the line in “The Will to Believe” and argued that many truths about ourselves only become true after we have imagined them as true. Courage is one such truth. Generosity is another. Love, perhaps most of all.
Athletes at the top of their disciplines understand this mechanism as technical knowledge. Jack Nicklaus, in Golf My Way, said he never hit a shot, even in practice, without first seeing the ball’s flight in his mind. Swimmers rehearse the race in imagination with such precision that brain scans show neural activation patterns overlapping substantially with actual performance. The body runs the course in miniature before it runs the course in fact. Physical execution follows the mental simulation because the state has already been entered once, invisibly, and needs only to be entered again with flesh attached.
Hypnosis is perhaps the cleanest case. An unwilling subject cannot be forced into the hypnotic state, and even a willing one cannot seize it by direct will. The subject must imagine entering the state, going down the staircase, growing heavy in the chair, and that imagining is the mechanism itself. Imaging studies by David Spiegel and colleagues at Stanford, along with related work by Oakley and Halligan, suggest that hypnotic suggestion produces neural patterns distinct from ordinary pretending, patterns more closely aligned with genuine perceptual and motor processing. Imagination has done something to the body. Fiction has produced a physiological effect the subject did not will.
Creative inspiration operates by the same architecture. You cannot command an idea to arrive. You can imagine yourself as receptive, empty, waiting, and the idea tends to arrive into that imagined vacancy. Keats called this negative capability, the capacity to sit inside uncertainty without grabbing for resolution. A poet imagines the listening state, and the poem walks into the room. Composers describe the same choreography. Mathematicians describe it too, with Poincaré’s famous account of the solution arriving as he stepped onto the bus at Coutances. He had imagined himself receptive for weeks. The solution waited until it found him properly prepared to receive it.
Grief resolution belongs in this same family, though we rarely recognize it. Bereaved people move through grief by imagining themselves on the other side of it. Picturing a future morning when the first thought lands somewhere other than the absence. Picturing the moment when the dead person’s name can be spoken without collapse. These acts of imagination are how integration proceeds. George Bonanno’s resilience research and Pauline Boss’s work on ambiguous loss both describe this imaginative prefiguration as the actual mechanism of healing. The sequence matters here. Picturing a survivable future comes first, and resolution begins to assemble around the picture.
At the collective level, Benedict Anderson’s argument about imagined communities rides the same rail. A nation exists first as an imaginative act performed by millions of strangers simultaneously. Citizens picture themselves as a “we” before the institutional “we” coheres. American colonists had to imagine being Americans before they could act as Americans. Thomas Kuhn made a parallel argument about scientific revolutions. A new paradigm must be imaginatively entertained, played with speculatively, inhabited as a thought experiment, before it can be adopted and tested. Discovery through accumulation alone misses the interior work that makes discovery possible. Science imagines a world in which the anomalies make sense, and then searches for evidence that the imagined world is the actual one.
Here is the argument this pattern makes against one of the most persistent myths in the modern self-help industry. The doctrine of pure willpower, of steel discipline, of command-and-execute personal transformation, is largely false where it matters most. The states we most want to inhabit are precisely the states that refuse to be seized. Love, sleep, creative insight, courage, calm, sexual pleasure, athletic flow, artistic voice, faith, grief’s resolution, recovery from trauma, the dissolution of anxiety, the emergence of a new political identity, all of these operate by invitation rather than by conquest. A hard clamp on such a state accelerates its evasion. Accurate, patient rehearsal of the self already inside it increases the odds of arrival, because the state recognizes the address it has been given.
This observation is a claim about where real labor lives, rather than a brief for passivity. The imagination itself is labor. Stanislavski’s affective memory takes years to develop. Nicklaus’s visualization was the product of thousands of hours of prior experience that had furnished his imagination with accurate material to draw on. Negative capability, for the poet, demands a difficult kind of vigilance. Picturing a survivable future, for the mourner, takes courage most days. Real work is being performed in all these cases. That work simply lives somewhere other than where the popular literature keeps telling us to look. It lives in the imagining, in furnishing the mind with a vivid enough rehearsal that the body and the world will follow the script.
There is a political dimension to this that deserves attention. Populations that cannot imagine a different arrangement of their lives will not produce one. Authoritarian regimes understand this perfectly and invest heavily in controlling imagination itself, in prescribing what may be pictured, in criminalizing the mental rehearsal of alternatives. The censor knows the law of reversed effort by heart, and knows in particular that the imagined state of freedom must be interrupted before the political state of freedom can be prevented. Organizers and artists, working from the other direction, understand that their first task is to make the unfamiliar picturable. Once a people can picture themselves free, the mechanics of becoming free start to assemble around the picture.
The craft implication for writers, for dramatists, for anyone whose work involves summoning states in other people’s minds, is that we are running an imagination-furnishing enterprise whose surface resembles persuasion. A good novel gives the reader a vivid enough picture of the inside of another life that the feeling assembles itself inside the reader. A good play stages grief with such precision that the audience’s own grief, resting dormant, recognizes the invitation and walks forward. Argument alone has never moved anyone who was going to stay put. The form of the work becomes a staircase. Descent happens inside the audience’s own imagination. The hypnotic principle and the aesthetic principle are the same principle.
Which returns us to sleep, where we began. The oldest ritual of the human body is the rehearsal that makes becoming possible. Every night of your life you practice the technique that governs almost everything else you will ever want to enter. You picture yourself arriving, and arrival follows the picture. The repetition is so automatic it escapes notice. Seeing the principle for the first time reorders the interior map. The question that has held your energy for years, the question of how to force yourself into the state you want, reveals itself as badly posed. Sharper questions take shape around what you had been missing. What does the inside of that state actually feel like, in specific sensory detail? What would I need to picture accurately enough for my body and my circumstances to follow the picture into becoming?
Less effort, applied through better imagination, answers more of what we want in a human life than the heavier strategies that continue to dominate our self-improvement literature. That reweighting, once genuinely made, reorders a great deal.
#activeImagination #actor #archer #arousal #belief #command #dreaming #effect #human #imagination #medicine #mind #pascal #problem #psychology #sleep #states #theatre #thought -
The States That Will Not Be Commanded
There is a class of human experience that answers to no direct order. You cannot tell yourself to fall asleep. The instruction arrives at a locked door. Sleep refuses the simple transaction of command and execution. Instead, it assembles itself once certain conditions are present, and those conditions include, strangely enough, the act of picturing yourself already inside the state you are trying to enter. Lying down begins it. Closed eyes continue it. Imagining yourself asleep, entering the self who has already arrived, completes the condition, and only then does sleep agree to appear.
This is stranger than it first appears. The imagination precedes the fact. A fiction makes the reality possible. Rehearsal of the self-in-the-state must happen before the state itself will consent to arrive. Once you notice this mechanism operating in sleep, you begin to see it everywhere in human life, running underneath experiences we mistakenly believed we commanded outright.
Aldous Huxley named the pattern in The Perennial Philosophy and called it the law of reversed effort, a phrase Alan Watts later carried into wider circulation. Viktor Frankl, working from the clinic rather than the lecture hall, called it paradoxical intention, and used it to treat patients whose anxieties had swallowed them whole. The insomniac who tries hardest to sleep stays awake longest. The speaker who strains to stop stammering stammers worst. Frankl’s counterintuitive instruction was to command the symptom itself. Try to stay awake. Try to stammer. The paradox broke the grip because it acknowledged a humble fact about voluntary will: the target state cannot be seized. It must be invited, imagined, allowed.
Taoists arrived at the same recognition two thousand years earlier and called it wu-wei, the action that is not action, the doing that happens when the doer gets out of the way. An archer who aims too hard misses. A calligrapher who grips the brush too firmly produces a dead line. Skill of that order lives in a zone the conscious will cannot enter, and the only approach is to imagine yourself having already arrived.
Consider sexual arousal. The physiological response is famously resistant to command. It answers to imagined scenarios, to remembered encounters, to anticipated scenes. Masters and Johnson built an entire clinical practice around this recognition, and their cure for performance anxiety, sensate focus, works by replacing effort with imagined sensation. A man instructed to perform often cannot. The same man, invited to picture the experience without obligation, finds his body following his mind into the state. Arousal answers to conjuring.
Consider crying on cue, the classical actor’s problem. Stanislavski solved it through affective memory. The tears come by indirection. You imagine the dog you lost when you were nine, and water arrives because the body has been invited to the feeling rather than ordered to produce it. Meryl Streep has described her process in interviews as a summoning of remembered feeling. Daniel Day-Lewis has described his as an inhabitation sustained across months. Neither description sounds like command. The actor imagines the self-in-grief, and grief supplies the water.
Consider the act of belief. Pascal, sitting in his Pensées alongside the famous wager, offered an argument about habituation that has been quietly underestimated for centuries. For those seeking faith, he advised acting as if they already believed. Kneel. Take the holy water. Say the prayers. Imagine yourself as a believer, and belief may arrive as a secondary effect of the performance. William James extended the line in “The Will to Believe” and argued that many truths about ourselves only become true after we have imagined them as true. Courage is one such truth. Generosity is another. Love, perhaps most of all.
Athletes at the top of their disciplines understand this mechanism as technical knowledge. Jack Nicklaus, in Golf My Way, said he never hit a shot, even in practice, without first seeing the ball’s flight in his mind. Swimmers rehearse the race in imagination with such precision that brain scans show neural activation patterns overlapping substantially with actual performance. The body runs the course in miniature before it runs the course in fact. Physical execution follows the mental simulation because the state has already been entered once, invisibly, and needs only to be entered again with flesh attached.
Hypnosis is perhaps the cleanest case. An unwilling subject cannot be forced into the hypnotic state, and even a willing one cannot seize it by direct will. The subject must imagine entering the state, going down the staircase, growing heavy in the chair, and that imagining is the mechanism itself. Imaging studies by David Spiegel and colleagues at Stanford, along with related work by Oakley and Halligan, suggest that hypnotic suggestion produces neural patterns distinct from ordinary pretending, patterns more closely aligned with genuine perceptual and motor processing. Imagination has done something to the body. Fiction has produced a physiological effect the subject did not will.
Creative inspiration operates by the same architecture. You cannot command an idea to arrive. You can imagine yourself as receptive, empty, waiting, and the idea tends to arrive into that imagined vacancy. Keats called this negative capability, the capacity to sit inside uncertainty without grabbing for resolution. A poet imagines the listening state, and the poem walks into the room. Composers describe the same choreography. Mathematicians describe it too, with Poincaré’s famous account of the solution arriving as he stepped onto the bus at Coutances. He had imagined himself receptive for weeks. The solution waited until it found him properly prepared to receive it.
Grief resolution belongs in this same family, though we rarely recognize it. Bereaved people move through grief by imagining themselves on the other side of it. Picturing a future morning when the first thought lands somewhere other than the absence. Picturing the moment when the dead person’s name can be spoken without collapse. These acts of imagination are how integration proceeds. George Bonanno’s resilience research and Pauline Boss’s work on ambiguous loss both describe this imaginative prefiguration as the actual mechanism of healing. The sequence matters here. Picturing a survivable future comes first, and resolution begins to assemble around the picture.
At the collective level, Benedict Anderson’s argument about imagined communities rides the same rail. A nation exists first as an imaginative act performed by millions of strangers simultaneously. Citizens picture themselves as a “we” before the institutional “we” coheres. American colonists had to imagine being Americans before they could act as Americans. Thomas Kuhn made a parallel argument about scientific revolutions. A new paradigm must be imaginatively entertained, played with speculatively, inhabited as a thought experiment, before it can be adopted and tested. Discovery through accumulation alone misses the interior work that makes discovery possible. Science imagines a world in which the anomalies make sense, and then searches for evidence that the imagined world is the actual one.
Here is the argument this pattern makes against one of the most persistent myths in the modern self-help industry. The doctrine of pure willpower, of steel discipline, of command-and-execute personal transformation, is largely false where it matters most. The states we most want to inhabit are precisely the states that refuse to be seized. Love, sleep, creative insight, courage, calm, sexual pleasure, athletic flow, artistic voice, faith, grief’s resolution, recovery from trauma, the dissolution of anxiety, the emergence of a new political identity, all of these operate by invitation rather than by conquest. A hard clamp on such a state accelerates its evasion. Accurate, patient rehearsal of the self already inside it increases the odds of arrival, because the state recognizes the address it has been given.
This observation is a claim about where real labor lives, rather than a brief for passivity. The imagination itself is labor. Stanislavski’s affective memory takes years to develop. Nicklaus’s visualization was the product of thousands of hours of prior experience that had furnished his imagination with accurate material to draw on. Negative capability, for the poet, demands a difficult kind of vigilance. Picturing a survivable future, for the mourner, takes courage most days. Real work is being performed in all these cases. That work simply lives somewhere other than where the popular literature keeps telling us to look. It lives in the imagining, in furnishing the mind with a vivid enough rehearsal that the body and the world will follow the script.
There is a political dimension to this that deserves attention. Populations that cannot imagine a different arrangement of their lives will not produce one. Authoritarian regimes understand this perfectly and invest heavily in controlling imagination itself, in prescribing what may be pictured, in criminalizing the mental rehearsal of alternatives. The censor knows the law of reversed effort by heart, and knows in particular that the imagined state of freedom must be interrupted before the political state of freedom can be prevented. Organizers and artists, working from the other direction, understand that their first task is to make the unfamiliar picturable. Once a people can picture themselves free, the mechanics of becoming free start to assemble around the picture.
The craft implication for writers, for dramatists, for anyone whose work involves summoning states in other people’s minds, is that we are running an imagination-furnishing enterprise whose surface resembles persuasion. A good novel gives the reader a vivid enough picture of the inside of another life that the feeling assembles itself inside the reader. A good play stages grief with such precision that the audience’s own grief, resting dormant, recognizes the invitation and walks forward. Argument alone has never moved anyone who was going to stay put. The form of the work becomes a staircase. Descent happens inside the audience’s own imagination. The hypnotic principle and the aesthetic principle are the same principle.
Which returns us to sleep, where we began. The oldest ritual of the human body is the rehearsal that makes becoming possible. Every night of your life you practice the technique that governs almost everything else you will ever want to enter. You picture yourself arriving, and arrival follows the picture. The repetition is so automatic it escapes notice. Seeing the principle for the first time reorders the interior map. The question that has held your energy for years, the question of how to force yourself into the state you want, reveals itself as badly posed. Sharper questions take shape around what you had been missing. What does the inside of that state actually feel like, in specific sensory detail? What would I need to picture accurately enough for my body and my circumstances to follow the picture into becoming?
Less effort, applied through better imagination, answers more of what we want in a human life than the heavier strategies that continue to dominate our self-improvement literature. That reweighting, once genuinely made, reorders a great deal.
#activeImagination #actor #archer #arousal #belief #command #dreaming #effect #human #imagination #medicine #mind #pascal #problem #psychology #sleep #states #theatre #thought -
The States That Will Not Be Commanded
There is a class of human experience that answers to no direct order. You cannot tell yourself to fall asleep. The instruction arrives at a locked door. Sleep refuses the simple transaction of command and execution. Instead, it assembles itself once certain conditions are present, and those conditions include, strangely enough, the act of picturing yourself already inside the state you are trying to enter. Lying down begins it. Closed eyes continue it. Imagining yourself asleep, entering the self who has already arrived, completes the condition, and only then does sleep agree to appear.
This is stranger than it first appears. The imagination precedes the fact. A fiction makes the reality possible. Rehearsal of the self-in-the-state must happen before the state itself will consent to arrive. Once you notice this mechanism operating in sleep, you begin to see it everywhere in human life, running underneath experiences we mistakenly believed we commanded outright.
Aldous Huxley named the pattern in The Perennial Philosophy and called it the law of reversed effort, a phrase Alan Watts later carried into wider circulation. Viktor Frankl, working from the clinic rather than the lecture hall, called it paradoxical intention, and used it to treat patients whose anxieties had swallowed them whole. The insomniac who tries hardest to sleep stays awake longest. The speaker who strains to stop stammering stammers worst. Frankl’s counterintuitive instruction was to command the symptom itself. Try to stay awake. Try to stammer. The paradox broke the grip because it acknowledged a humble fact about voluntary will: the target state cannot be seized. It must be invited, imagined, allowed.
Taoists arrived at the same recognition two thousand years earlier and called it wu-wei, the action that is not action, the doing that happens when the doer gets out of the way. An archer who aims too hard misses. A calligrapher who grips the brush too firmly produces a dead line. Skill of that order lives in a zone the conscious will cannot enter, and the only approach is to imagine yourself having already arrived.
Consider sexual arousal. The physiological response is famously resistant to command. It answers to imagined scenarios, to remembered encounters, to anticipated scenes. Masters and Johnson built an entire clinical practice around this recognition, and their cure for performance anxiety, sensate focus, works by replacing effort with imagined sensation. A man instructed to perform often cannot. The same man, invited to picture the experience without obligation, finds his body following his mind into the state. Arousal answers to conjuring.
Consider crying on cue, the classical actor’s problem. Stanislavski solved it through affective memory. The tears come by indirection. You imagine the dog you lost when you were nine, and water arrives because the body has been invited to the feeling rather than ordered to produce it. Meryl Streep has described her process in interviews as a summoning of remembered feeling. Daniel Day-Lewis has described his as an inhabitation sustained across months. Neither description sounds like command. The actor imagines the self-in-grief, and grief supplies the water.
Consider the act of belief. Pascal, sitting in his Pensées alongside the famous wager, offered an argument about habituation that has been quietly underestimated for centuries. For those seeking faith, he advised acting as if they already believed. Kneel. Take the holy water. Say the prayers. Imagine yourself as a believer, and belief may arrive as a secondary effect of the performance. William James extended the line in “The Will to Believe” and argued that many truths about ourselves only become true after we have imagined them as true. Courage is one such truth. Generosity is another. Love, perhaps most of all.
Athletes at the top of their disciplines understand this mechanism as technical knowledge. Jack Nicklaus, in Golf My Way, said he never hit a shot, even in practice, without first seeing the ball’s flight in his mind. Swimmers rehearse the race in imagination with such precision that brain scans show neural activation patterns overlapping substantially with actual performance. The body runs the course in miniature before it runs the course in fact. Physical execution follows the mental simulation because the state has already been entered once, invisibly, and needs only to be entered again with flesh attached.
Hypnosis is perhaps the cleanest case. An unwilling subject cannot be forced into the hypnotic state, and even a willing one cannot seize it by direct will. The subject must imagine entering the state, going down the staircase, growing heavy in the chair, and that imagining is the mechanism itself. Imaging studies by David Spiegel and colleagues at Stanford, along with related work by Oakley and Halligan, suggest that hypnotic suggestion produces neural patterns distinct from ordinary pretending, patterns more closely aligned with genuine perceptual and motor processing. Imagination has done something to the body. Fiction has produced a physiological effect the subject did not will.
Creative inspiration operates by the same architecture. You cannot command an idea to arrive. You can imagine yourself as receptive, empty, waiting, and the idea tends to arrive into that imagined vacancy. Keats called this negative capability, the capacity to sit inside uncertainty without grabbing for resolution. A poet imagines the listening state, and the poem walks into the room. Composers describe the same choreography. Mathematicians describe it too, with Poincaré’s famous account of the solution arriving as he stepped onto the bus at Coutances. He had imagined himself receptive for weeks. The solution waited until it found him properly prepared to receive it.
Grief resolution belongs in this same family, though we rarely recognize it. Bereaved people move through grief by imagining themselves on the other side of it. Picturing a future morning when the first thought lands somewhere other than the absence. Picturing the moment when the dead person’s name can be spoken without collapse. These acts of imagination are how integration proceeds. George Bonanno’s resilience research and Pauline Boss’s work on ambiguous loss both describe this imaginative prefiguration as the actual mechanism of healing. The sequence matters here. Picturing a survivable future comes first, and resolution begins to assemble around the picture.
At the collective level, Benedict Anderson’s argument about imagined communities rides the same rail. A nation exists first as an imaginative act performed by millions of strangers simultaneously. Citizens picture themselves as a “we” before the institutional “we” coheres. American colonists had to imagine being Americans before they could act as Americans. Thomas Kuhn made a parallel argument about scientific revolutions. A new paradigm must be imaginatively entertained, played with speculatively, inhabited as a thought experiment, before it can be adopted and tested. Discovery through accumulation alone misses the interior work that makes discovery possible. Science imagines a world in which the anomalies make sense, and then searches for evidence that the imagined world is the actual one.
Here is the argument this pattern makes against one of the most persistent myths in the modern self-help industry. The doctrine of pure willpower, of steel discipline, of command-and-execute personal transformation, is largely false where it matters most. The states we most want to inhabit are precisely the states that refuse to be seized. Love, sleep, creative insight, courage, calm, sexual pleasure, athletic flow, artistic voice, faith, grief’s resolution, recovery from trauma, the dissolution of anxiety, the emergence of a new political identity, all of these operate by invitation rather than by conquest. A hard clamp on such a state accelerates its evasion. Accurate, patient rehearsal of the self already inside it increases the odds of arrival, because the state recognizes the address it has been given.
This observation is a claim about where real labor lives, rather than a brief for passivity. The imagination itself is labor. Stanislavski’s affective memory takes years to develop. Nicklaus’s visualization was the product of thousands of hours of prior experience that had furnished his imagination with accurate material to draw on. Negative capability, for the poet, demands a difficult kind of vigilance. Picturing a survivable future, for the mourner, takes courage most days. Real work is being performed in all these cases. That work simply lives somewhere other than where the popular literature keeps telling us to look. It lives in the imagining, in furnishing the mind with a vivid enough rehearsal that the body and the world will follow the script.
There is a political dimension to this that deserves attention. Populations that cannot imagine a different arrangement of their lives will not produce one. Authoritarian regimes understand this perfectly and invest heavily in controlling imagination itself, in prescribing what may be pictured, in criminalizing the mental rehearsal of alternatives. The censor knows the law of reversed effort by heart, and knows in particular that the imagined state of freedom must be interrupted before the political state of freedom can be prevented. Organizers and artists, working from the other direction, understand that their first task is to make the unfamiliar picturable. Once a people can picture themselves free, the mechanics of becoming free start to assemble around the picture.
The craft implication for writers, for dramatists, for anyone whose work involves summoning states in other people’s minds, is that we are running an imagination-furnishing enterprise whose surface resembles persuasion. A good novel gives the reader a vivid enough picture of the inside of another life that the feeling assembles itself inside the reader. A good play stages grief with such precision that the audience’s own grief, resting dormant, recognizes the invitation and walks forward. Argument alone has never moved anyone who was going to stay put. The form of the work becomes a staircase. Descent happens inside the audience’s own imagination. The hypnotic principle and the aesthetic principle are the same principle.
Which returns us to sleep, where we began. The oldest ritual of the human body is the rehearsal that makes becoming possible. Every night of your life you practice the technique that governs almost everything else you will ever want to enter. You picture yourself arriving, and arrival follows the picture. The repetition is so automatic it escapes notice. Seeing the principle for the first time reorders the interior map. The question that has held your energy for years, the question of how to force yourself into the state you want, reveals itself as badly posed. Sharper questions take shape around what you had been missing. What does the inside of that state actually feel like, in specific sensory detail? What would I need to picture accurately enough for my body and my circumstances to follow the picture into becoming?
Less effort, applied through better imagination, answers more of what we want in a human life than the heavier strategies that continue to dominate our self-improvement literature. That reweighting, once genuinely made, reorders a great deal.
#activeImagination #actor #archer #arousal #belief #command #dreaming #effect #human #imagination #medicine #mind #pascal #problem #psychology #sleep #states #theatre #thought -
The States That Will Not Be Commanded
There is a class of human experience that answers to no direct order. You cannot tell yourself to fall asleep. The instruction arrives at a locked door. Sleep refuses the simple transaction of command and execution. Instead, it assembles itself once certain conditions are present, and those conditions include, strangely enough, the act of picturing yourself already inside the state you are trying to enter. Lying down begins it. Closed eyes continue it. Imagining yourself asleep, entering the self who has already arrived, completes the condition, and only then does sleep agree to appear.
This is stranger than it first appears. The imagination precedes the fact. A fiction makes the reality possible. Rehearsal of the self-in-the-state must happen before the state itself will consent to arrive. Once you notice this mechanism operating in sleep, you begin to see it everywhere in human life, running underneath experiences we mistakenly believed we commanded outright.
Aldous Huxley named the pattern in The Perennial Philosophy and called it the law of reversed effort, a phrase Alan Watts later carried into wider circulation. Viktor Frankl, working from the clinic rather than the lecture hall, called it paradoxical intention, and used it to treat patients whose anxieties had swallowed them whole. The insomniac who tries hardest to sleep stays awake longest. The speaker who strains to stop stammering stammers worst. Frankl’s counterintuitive instruction was to command the symptom itself. Try to stay awake. Try to stammer. The paradox broke the grip because it acknowledged a humble fact about voluntary will: the target state cannot be seized. It must be invited, imagined, allowed.
Taoists arrived at the same recognition two thousand years earlier and called it wu-wei, the action that is not action, the doing that happens when the doer gets out of the way. An archer who aims too hard misses. A calligrapher who grips the brush too firmly produces a dead line. Skill of that order lives in a zone the conscious will cannot enter, and the only approach is to imagine yourself having already arrived.
Consider sexual arousal. The physiological response is famously resistant to command. It answers to imagined scenarios, to remembered encounters, to anticipated scenes. Masters and Johnson built an entire clinical practice around this recognition, and their cure for performance anxiety, sensate focus, works by replacing effort with imagined sensation. A man instructed to perform often cannot. The same man, invited to picture the experience without obligation, finds his body following his mind into the state. Arousal answers to conjuring.
Consider crying on cue, the classical actor’s problem. Stanislavski solved it through affective memory. The tears come by indirection. You imagine the dog you lost when you were nine, and water arrives because the body has been invited to the feeling rather than ordered to produce it. Meryl Streep has described her process in interviews as a summoning of remembered feeling. Daniel Day-Lewis has described his as an inhabitation sustained across months. Neither description sounds like command. The actor imagines the self-in-grief, and grief supplies the water.
Consider the act of belief. Pascal, sitting in his Pensées alongside the famous wager, offered an argument about habituation that has been quietly underestimated for centuries. For those seeking faith, he advised acting as if they already believed. Kneel. Take the holy water. Say the prayers. Imagine yourself as a believer, and belief may arrive as a secondary effect of the performance. William James extended the line in “The Will to Believe” and argued that many truths about ourselves only become true after we have imagined them as true. Courage is one such truth. Generosity is another. Love, perhaps most of all.
Athletes at the top of their disciplines understand this mechanism as technical knowledge. Jack Nicklaus, in Golf My Way, said he never hit a shot, even in practice, without first seeing the ball’s flight in his mind. Swimmers rehearse the race in imagination with such precision that brain scans show neural activation patterns overlapping substantially with actual performance. The body runs the course in miniature before it runs the course in fact. Physical execution follows the mental simulation because the state has already been entered once, invisibly, and needs only to be entered again with flesh attached.
Hypnosis is perhaps the cleanest case. An unwilling subject cannot be forced into the hypnotic state, and even a willing one cannot seize it by direct will. The subject must imagine entering the state, going down the staircase, growing heavy in the chair, and that imagining is the mechanism itself. Imaging studies by David Spiegel and colleagues at Stanford, along with related work by Oakley and Halligan, suggest that hypnotic suggestion produces neural patterns distinct from ordinary pretending, patterns more closely aligned with genuine perceptual and motor processing. Imagination has done something to the body. Fiction has produced a physiological effect the subject did not will.
Creative inspiration operates by the same architecture. You cannot command an idea to arrive. You can imagine yourself as receptive, empty, waiting, and the idea tends to arrive into that imagined vacancy. Keats called this negative capability, the capacity to sit inside uncertainty without grabbing for resolution. A poet imagines the listening state, and the poem walks into the room. Composers describe the same choreography. Mathematicians describe it too, with Poincaré’s famous account of the solution arriving as he stepped onto the bus at Coutances. He had imagined himself receptive for weeks. The solution waited until it found him properly prepared to receive it.
Grief resolution belongs in this same family, though we rarely recognize it. Bereaved people move through grief by imagining themselves on the other side of it. Picturing a future morning when the first thought lands somewhere other than the absence. Picturing the moment when the dead person’s name can be spoken without collapse. These acts of imagination are how integration proceeds. George Bonanno’s resilience research and Pauline Boss’s work on ambiguous loss both describe this imaginative prefiguration as the actual mechanism of healing. The sequence matters here. Picturing a survivable future comes first, and resolution begins to assemble around the picture.
At the collective level, Benedict Anderson’s argument about imagined communities rides the same rail. A nation exists first as an imaginative act performed by millions of strangers simultaneously. Citizens picture themselves as a “we” before the institutional “we” coheres. American colonists had to imagine being Americans before they could act as Americans. Thomas Kuhn made a parallel argument about scientific revolutions. A new paradigm must be imaginatively entertained, played with speculatively, inhabited as a thought experiment, before it can be adopted and tested. Discovery through accumulation alone misses the interior work that makes discovery possible. Science imagines a world in which the anomalies make sense, and then searches for evidence that the imagined world is the actual one.
Here is the argument this pattern makes against one of the most persistent myths in the modern self-help industry. The doctrine of pure willpower, of steel discipline, of command-and-execute personal transformation, is largely false where it matters most. The states we most want to inhabit are precisely the states that refuse to be seized. Love, sleep, creative insight, courage, calm, sexual pleasure, athletic flow, artistic voice, faith, grief’s resolution, recovery from trauma, the dissolution of anxiety, the emergence of a new political identity, all of these operate by invitation rather than by conquest. A hard clamp on such a state accelerates its evasion. Accurate, patient rehearsal of the self already inside it increases the odds of arrival, because the state recognizes the address it has been given.
This observation is a claim about where real labor lives, rather than a brief for passivity. The imagination itself is labor. Stanislavski’s affective memory takes years to develop. Nicklaus’s visualization was the product of thousands of hours of prior experience that had furnished his imagination with accurate material to draw on. Negative capability, for the poet, demands a difficult kind of vigilance. Picturing a survivable future, for the mourner, takes courage most days. Real work is being performed in all these cases. That work simply lives somewhere other than where the popular literature keeps telling us to look. It lives in the imagining, in furnishing the mind with a vivid enough rehearsal that the body and the world will follow the script.
There is a political dimension to this that deserves attention. Populations that cannot imagine a different arrangement of their lives will not produce one. Authoritarian regimes understand this perfectly and invest heavily in controlling imagination itself, in prescribing what may be pictured, in criminalizing the mental rehearsal of alternatives. The censor knows the law of reversed effort by heart, and knows in particular that the imagined state of freedom must be interrupted before the political state of freedom can be prevented. Organizers and artists, working from the other direction, understand that their first task is to make the unfamiliar picturable. Once a people can picture themselves free, the mechanics of becoming free start to assemble around the picture.
The craft implication for writers, for dramatists, for anyone whose work involves summoning states in other people’s minds, is that we are running an imagination-furnishing enterprise whose surface resembles persuasion. A good novel gives the reader a vivid enough picture of the inside of another life that the feeling assembles itself inside the reader. A good play stages grief with such precision that the audience’s own grief, resting dormant, recognizes the invitation and walks forward. Argument alone has never moved anyone who was going to stay put. The form of the work becomes a staircase. Descent happens inside the audience’s own imagination. The hypnotic principle and the aesthetic principle are the same principle.
Which returns us to sleep, where we began. The oldest ritual of the human body is the rehearsal that makes becoming possible. Every night of your life you practice the technique that governs almost everything else you will ever want to enter. You picture yourself arriving, and arrival follows the picture. The repetition is so automatic it escapes notice. Seeing the principle for the first time reorders the interior map. The question that has held your energy for years, the question of how to force yourself into the state you want, reveals itself as badly posed. Sharper questions take shape around what you had been missing. What does the inside of that state actually feel like, in specific sensory detail? What would I need to picture accurately enough for my body and my circumstances to follow the picture into becoming?
Less effort, applied through better imagination, answers more of what we want in a human life than the heavier strategies that continue to dominate our self-improvement literature. That reweighting, once genuinely made, reorders a great deal.
#activeImagination #actor #archer #arousal #belief #command #dreaming #effect #human #imagination #medicine #mind #pascal #problem #psychology #sleep #states #theatre #thought -
Biohazard – Divided We Fall Review
By Steel Druhm
Biohazard are one of those bands that held my interest and affection, but only for a small window of my life (1992 through 1996). While their mean street NYC tough guy hardcore-meets-metal sound resonated with me as a dumb, loud 21-year-old, by the time I was approaching 26, it all started to feel too “try hard” and adolescent, like something I should move beyond. After that, I would still enjoy the hits from Urban Discipline and State of the World Address on gym playlists, but I rarely went back to the actual albums or sought out their new stuff. When it was announced that Biohazard had reformed the original lineup for a new album, some 13 years since the last release, I had more than a few reservations. The NYC badass schtick is a perishable one with a definite shelf life, and the idea of a bunch of dudes in their 50s shouting about curb stomping me just wasn’t a selling point. Still, the Cro-Mags pulled it off, so maybe these guys could too. I sampled the early singles, and to my surprise, they were quite entertaining. And here I am reviewing Divided We Fall against my better judgment. Can these Brooklyn goons deliver the burly goods all these years later?
The short answer is…yes. Divided We Fall is a shockingly spry, punchy outing with catchy writing and enough testosterone to power 4 Cam Skattebos. It’s basically the album that could have followed Urban Discipline, with a collection of short, angry anthems about staying hard no matter what life throws at you. Opener “Fuck the System” sounds exactly like you’d expect. It’s enough like classic NYHC to conjure memories of Madball, Agnostic Front and crossover acts like Pro-Pain. They keep that rowdy, pissed-off tone going on bruisers like “Forsaken,” and the uber rugged “Eyes on Six,” which is one of their most catchy and entertaining tracks ever. This one stinks of BO and malt liquor, and it will hit you a pipe and dump you in the Gowanus Canal.
Slower cuts like “Death of Me” blend well with the bouncy, classic hardcore urgency of “Words to the Wise” and “The Fight to Be Free,” and at no point does the machismo drop below mega-toxic levels. There are a few missteps though. “S.I.T.F.O.A” is too rap-centric and ends up sounding like a cross between Anthrax’s “I Am the Man” and one of the godawful raps by SNL in-house comedy act The Lonely Island. Closer “Warriors” mostly works and has cool parts, but Evan Seinfeld singing “the warriors” oh so seriously doesn’t really help. Still, 9 out of 11 tracks landing and delivering more or less vintage Bio-sounds is quite a shocker. And the band smartly keeps every song in the 3-minute window so everything motors by in a sweaty fury. The sound is what you’d expect from this kind of band, and production is credited to Jonathan DeMaio. I’ll assume that’s actually Joey DeMaio from Manowar because that’s way too fucking funny.
Both Billy and Evan sound fine vocally. I’ve always preferred Billy’s rough bellowing, and he still sounds like he could beat your ass. On tracks like “Eyes on Six,” he sounds angry, mean, and murderous, and that’s essential for this kind of music to get over. Evan sounds like Evan, not better or worse, and he only irritates me when he tries that rappy-metal bullshit or tries to sing too much. The guitar work from Billy and Bobby Hambel is sharp and recalls the glory days quite clearly. You get a collection of very NYHC-inspired riffs designed to get you pumped up and into the pit leaping over pizza-rats and comatose hobos. The minimal embellishments work well in the songs, and I even hear traces of Prong at times, so that’s a win. This ain’t prog, folks. It’s simple, fugly noise for the mouth breathers and lunkheads, and that works just fine for me since I’m both.
Divided We Fall has no business being as good as it is, and it’s on close to the stuff Biohazard were churning out during their peak. That means you get rough, confrontational meathead metal for those with fatty beef in their brain, and there’s a demographic for that. I can’t say I will be blasting this one way into the future, but I already moved select cuts to the gym playlist for maximum gainz. Maybe I still needed a few good curb stomps. Maybe you do too. If so, Biohazard want to say hello from the gutter.
Rating: 3.0/5.0
DR: NA | Format Reviewed: Fucking STREAM!
Label: BLKIIBLK
Websites: facebook.com/Biohazarddfl | instagram.com/biohazarddfl
Releases Worldwide: October 17th, 2025#2025 #30 #AgnosticFront #AmericanHardcore #AmericanMetal #Biohazard #BLKIIBLK #CroMags #Crossover #DividedWeFall #Madball #Oct25 #ProPain #Prong #Review #Reviews
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By Carcharodon
15 years ago, on May 19, 2009, Angry Metal Guy spoke. For the very first time as AMG. And he had opinions: Very Important Opinions™. The post attracted relatively little attention at the time, but times change and, over the decade and a half since then, AMG Industries has grown into the blog you know today. Now with a staff of around 25 overrating overwriters (and an entirely non-suspicious graveyard for writers on permanent, all-expenses-paid sabbaticals), we have written more than 9,100 posts, comprising over seven million words. Over the site’s lifetime, we’ve had more than 107 million visits and now achieve well over a million hits each and every month. Through this, we’ve built up a fantastic community of readers drawn from every corner of the globe, whom we have (mostly) loved getting to know in the more than 360,000 comments posted on the site.
We have done this under the careful (if sternly authoritarian) stewardship of our eponymous leader Angry Metal Guy and his iron enforcer, Steel Druhm, while adhering to strict editorial policies and principles. We have done this by simply offering honest (and occasionally brutal) takes, and without running a single advert or taking a single cent from anyone. Ever. Mistakes have undoubtedly been made and we may be a laughing stock in the eyes of music intellectuals, socialites and critics everywhere but we are incredibly proud of what AMG Industries represents. In fact, we believe it may be the best metal blog, with the best community of readers, on the internet.
Now join us as the people responsible for making AMG a reality reflect on what the site means to them and why they would willingly work for a blog that pays in the currency of deadlines, abuse, and hobo wine. Welcome to the 15th Birthdaynalia.
Thou Shalt Have No Other Blogs!
Steel Druhm
AMG and me
I stumbled into the world of AMG Inc. by chance, one day in early 2010 and just never got around to leaving. To put a finer point on it, I’ve been slaving in the AMG salt mines so long, even the extremely sabbaticalized Happy Metal Guy thinks my mind is gone. Over time, I’ve evolved from unpaid assistant to the Founding Overlord Himself to become site overseer and brvtal enforcer of deadlines, and morale (still unpaid). The journey has been a wild one, full of moments I’ll always cherish. It’s also introduced me to a collection of loveable oddballs I care about, even though I want to murderize them most of the time (you would too if you had to deal with their outrageous bullshit daily).1
The site and the extensive work that goes into it have provided me with a satisfaction that my real job often lacks, and even helped me find my soulmate. In short, AMG means the world to me and that’s why I’ve given so much of myself to this little blog these last 14 years. Looking back, I regret nothing (except the staff’s penchant for wildly overrating complete garbage) and I’d do it all again in a heartbeat. Thank you to the writers past and present who helped make the site possible, and thanks to the readers who make it worth the effort, even though most of you are woefully deficient in the good taste department. Here’s to 15 more years of this burning shitshow of a trainwreck!
AMG gave to me
As I’ve been a part of AMG since the early days, it’s nearly impossible to come up with just three albums the site gave me because it’s given me so many. Instead, I’ll enumerate the biggest non-musical gifts AMG has bestowed upon me over the years.2
Madam X // Be My (Pri)Mate / Down with the Steelness – The best thing AMG gave me by far was the chance to meet my best friend, soulmate and life partner, Madam X. She had read some of my early reviews for AMG and by chance, we happened to run into each other on a now-defunct Facebook metal fan page. She reached out to discuss my reviews and get some recommendations, we started chatting, and the rest, as they say, is history. I’m the luckiest guy in the world to have her and, since she lived in South Africa and I in New York, I highly doubt we ever would have found one another were it not for AMG. For this reason alone, I’ll cherish this little blog until my rusty metal heart explodes in my hairy ape chest. Fun fact: I never had a girlfriend that liked metal, and now I have a wife who listens to stuff that’s so extreme and out there, I end up sounding like my parents and saying shit like “This isn’t music, it’s just crazy noise!” Life is funny sometimes.
The Sadistic Pleasure that Comes from Unicorning Kvlt Strangeo Bands // You Axed for It – One cold, gloomy day back in February 2015, I was reviewing a cold, gloomy release by Danish doom/death act Dwell. Their Vermin and Ashes album didn’t especially thrill me, and I was annoyed that they had opted not to include a band photo in the promo materials. Sure, I get it. They wanted to be dark and mysterious. Who doesn’t? I searched online for a suitable image of them but there were none to be found. I became quite vexed. Where the inspiration came from I cannot say but I decided to bestow upon them a bright, mega-cheesy unicorn image, in place of the non-existent band shot. As I contemplated how the vomit of rainbow colors clashed with the murky gray malaise of the album cover, it looked so wrong that it felt so right! And so a blog protocol was born. Send band photos or face extreme unicorn judgment!
The Joys of Initiating Unsuspecting n00bs into the AMG Meatgrinder // Taste the Skull Pit, Poser – When I joined AMG back in its embryonic, protoplasmic stage, there was no probationary period or brutal abuse (aside from assigning me metalcore albums). Things changed as the blog grew and we started bringing on new writers. Soon, a system of impressment, indoctrination and re-education was put in place, and ruthlessly weaponized in service of internet “fame” and “glory.” Each carefully selected wannabe writer, eyes glistening with the ghosts of their past, would serve a tumultuous probationary term, working in complete isolation under the iron thumbs of AMG management. If they somehow survived this experiment in terror, they would be cast into the general population in the Skull Pit, with a besotted cadre of jaded, glassy-eyed veteran staffers. That’s when the real initiation would begin! Imagine Lord of the Flies mixed with The Hunger Games and The Devil’s Rejects, and you get the general idea. Through ritualized humiliation, unreasonable deadlines, and confrontational teaching methods, we slowly transform these sniveling amateurs into barely functional hack reviewers. Believe in the system or be buried by it me.
I wish I had written …
White Wizzard – The Devil’s Cut Review. Yes, the infamous review that’s hung around our necks like a rotting albatross ever since it saw the light of day in 2013. Had I been tasked with doing the review, I would have given it the rating it truly deserved, which is a big, fat, greasy 3.0. Just like the album that came before, and the one that followed. Now, I have nothing against White Wizzard and I enjoy the retro 80s metal style they play, but let’s face it, nothing they ever did came anywhere near a 5.0 (whether in its “Perfect” or “Iconic” guise). My common sense, real-world review would have spared us all a great deal of embarrassment, as well as saving the effort and bleach it took to scrub the office down after the First Grand Sabbaticaling. If only…
I wish I could do over …
Amon Amarth – Sutur Rising Review. As a relatively new reviewer, I got the unexpected chance to weigh in on a new Amon Amarth platter, while I was at the peak of my feverish AA fanboyism. This proved a deadly combination and, before my better angels could caution restraint and moderation, I stamped this thing with a 4.5, and got the album cover tattooed on my dog. With time (and much hobo wine), I realized that I let the moment get the better of me. Despite the presence of a few killer cuts like “War of the Gods” and “Destroyer of the Universe,” Sutur Rising is far from Amon Amarth’s best work. I dutifully submitted a groveling apology in a Contrite Metal Guy piece and tried to move on with my life. 13 years on, this one still stands as my biggest rating misadventure and a source of bitter regret. I blame society (AKA: you, the reader).
I wish more people had read …
Retro-spective Review: Hall Aflame – Guaranteed Forever. The side project of Metal Church’s Kurdt Vanderhoof, Hall Aflame saw but one release in 1991. But what a party this thing was and still is! Adopting a style somewhere between The Cult and The Four Horsemen, Hall Aflame roar through a collection of wildly catchy, burly rockers, making for a highly replay-able album, with only occasional reminders it’s made by the brain behind Metal Church. Cuts like “Shake the Pain,” Child of Medicine,” and “Money” are absolute monsters, and “Another Heartbeat” is one of my favorite songs of all time across all genres. The hugely ass-kicking vocals by completely unknown (then and now) frontman Ron Lowd alone are worth the effort it will take to track down this rare gem. The world continues to sleep on this killer, as evidenced by my retro-spective review scoring exactly ZERO comments. Don’t let this injustice continue. You need to hear this thing, especially with the recent news that Vanderhoof is releasing the long-awaited (by me at least) follow-up in May. You have my word as a Viking ape that satisfaction is Guaranteed Forever.
AMG is Now a Good Capitalist! In this gap-filler post from 2015, I posited the concept of AMG building a merch empire based upon goods of questionable quality (see our branded Uni-Friend and Sabbatical Sausage Maker pictured above). It got reads but, since I found the concept amusing, I wanted MOAR clicks. I credit this piece with motivating me to finally get a batch of actual AMG t-shirts printed up for the undeserving staff. If you see someone wearing one of these rare treasures and kill them, you take their place in the Skull Pit forevermore. It’s just like The Santa Clause, but much, much worse.
Dr. A.N. Grier
AMG and me
Back in the day, we’d be lucky to get two reviews a day at AMG. This led to me refreshing the site every few hours hoping for a bonus review for the day.3 I was obsessed with the writing and these gems I would never have found otherwise. Before I began writing here, I would do that regularly from 2010-2011. One morning I left the lab of my failing start-up and walked into my office to do some work. The post that morning wasn’t a review. Instead, it was instructions on how to apply to be an AMG writer. Without thinking—because I’d been up for roughly 40 straight hours—I submitted a review of 1349’s lackluster Demonoir. Weeks later, I was a n00b in these decrepit halls. And I’m still here regretting that decision, almost ten years to the day since I submitted my first review. It’s funny, now that I’ve gathered everything for this piece, that I found those early days the fondest of times. Those days when I still loved the writers, the readers, writing about metal, and well… music. Now I’m a broken soul, stalking the halls as a sex-depraved ghost,4 avoiding eye contact with Steel because his ape eyes make my pants tight.
But, in all seriousness, it’s been a wild ride and it’s odd to be one of the lucky few who have contributed to two-thirds of AMG’s existence. I’m proud to have kept the output so rounded, delivering correct scores and takes, and providing X-rated content for the younger generations. So, join me in celebrating AMG’s birthday, as I travel back to those early years when I became part of the family and discovered records that shaped the man known, for today at least, as Dr. All. Nostalgic. Grier.
AMG gave to me …
Mors Principium Est // Dawn of the 5th Era – As a n00b, Angry Metal Guy‘s review of Mors Principium Est’s Dawn of the 5th Era made me realize two things: I needed this band in my life and never release an album in December. Thankfully, AMG caught it (while everyone else was busting their asses to write their year-end lists) because it’s a stunning achievement. From that point on, I consider myself one of MPE’s biggest fans. That continuation of the At the Gates sound results in incredible performances and riff after massive riff. Not a single song on this album goes stale and I’ve been listening to it regularly for ten fucking years. I can never seem to find a melodeath group whose entire catalog I march through from beginning to end.5 But MPE is one of them. And, because you might be wondering, … And Death Said Live is their best album.
Voices // London – Back in 2014, I ranked an album I never reviewed. Weird, right? Not only was it a great album, but it was one of my favorite reviews from the illustrious Jean-Luc Ricard, who opened his thoughts with: “If you’re anything like me, you’re super awesome.” Still makes me laugh my ass off. Beyond that, Ricard conveyed the absolute nightmare that you experience when you listen to London. Though Akercocke has since reunited, Voices was an incredible substitute, which takes you through a journey that, somehow, Ricard was able to describe; because I sure as hell can’t. I was doing an oil change on my truck the first time I span it. Never have I taken so long to do that work but I constantly found myself staring off into space, literally frightened by the sounds erupting in my ears. The band has never been able to top London, but that’s OK. It’s one of the beautiful aspects of music—it’s permanent and will be there forever when you need it.
Trials // This Ruined World – When I joined AMG and worked side-by-side with Dr. Fisting, we hit it off. I love the guy and consider him a close friend (though he might not feel the same). When I found out that he started a band called Trials, I had to check it out. With two decent albums under his belt, 2014 saw the release of Trials’ best—and final—album, This Ruined World. I was hooked. And to imagine that without knowing about this band or this person, I might never have experienced his work in Bear Mace and the (to me, at least) incredible Black Sites. Though I don’t return to Trials often, mostly because I can’t pull myself away from Fisting‘s current work, I have a special place in my heart for This Ruined World. It introduced me to a fantastic musician and a good friend.
I wish I had written …
Origin – Omnipresent Review. When you join the crew, the hope is that you get to write that review for a big band. Those bands you grew up with, that released something at that point in your life, or which have such popularity that every other site overrates them. But, at AMG, you kinda have to earn that. Unless it’s, somehow, a popular dungeon synth group; you can just have that. So, when my most-anticipated album of 2014 dropped, I wanted it. But, there wasn’t a chance in hell I would get my hands on Origin’s Omnipresent. I bet you didn’t know I liked tech death, much less Origin. But, I do. I just know there are other, more qualified writers to cover that material. Thankfully, our wise and wonderful Kronos scored it correctly and wrote a fantastic review that describes it perfectly. Since then, I haven’t been as enamored with their material (mostly because this place has turned me into a hateful prick), but that album holds up and still gets many a spin.
I wish I could do over …
Resumed – Alienation Review. I remember when the review for Resumed’s Alienations was published. It was Thanksgiving 2014 and I was already six sheets to the wind when I realized what I was reading: the first double review in AMG history. It wasn’t a record that merited a double but Steel fucked up and double-booked it, thereby unintentionally beginning a trend. Though I couldn’t believe I wasted my time on this thing6 and subjected myself to uncalled-for ridicule, it started one of our most popular segments. Hell, it even led to our Unsigned Band Rodeö pieces. So, for better or worse (and by worse, I mean that year’s burned turkey), we can thank this worthless piece for contributing to AMG lore.
I wish more people had read …
Thine – The Dead City Blueprint [Things You Might Have Missed 2014]. In the process of writing the review for The Deathtrip’s stellar 2014 release, Deep Drone Master, Metal Archives led me to a release we never received. In walks Thine, a progressive rock outfit led by the same person who convinced Aldrahn to come back from retirement to front Deep Drone Master, not to mention drummer Dan Mullins, who returned for My Dying Bride’s newest release. Representing my first ever Things You Might Have Missed piece, I continue to return to this band’s swansong release: it’s beautiful and engaging, and is everything I ever wanted from an album of this caliber. My unpopularity as a n00b, combined with the new year beginning and everyone moving on to January releases, meant no one seemed to care. But I cared. I care so much, in fact, that I’m dropping Thine’s name again, in the hope that Bandcamp credits will be put to good use. You’re welcome.
Dr. Fisting
AMG and me
As a reader of the site’s earliest incarnation, the first thing that stood out to me was that AMG’s writers were clearly educated. Even back then, the reviews were extremely well-written. I don’t mean just in terms of spelling and grammar, but being able to express ideas coherently. If you’ve ever visited any other metal-related sites, you know that these qualities are rare. More importantly, AMG was clearly an independent operation, with no reliance on ad revenue or cozy relationships with record labels. This meant the site was free to post brutally honest reviews, which occasionally resulted in battles against the metal media’s narrative and even the fans themselves. I always enjoyed when some huge band would put out a half-assed album that got rave reviews everywhere else, and then the AMG writeup would take a well-deserved shit on it.
When I started writing for the site a couple of years later, I did my best to uphold those standards. Eventually, as my life and priorities changed, I chose to step back from reviewing to focus on other things. But it was an honor to ride with these guys for as long as I did. I got to review some fantastic records, talk shit about some terrible ones, and make some friends that I am still in contact with to this day.
AMG gave to me …
Pain of Salvation // Road Salt Pt. 1 – I don’t remember if I discovered this record from reading the site or from The Angry One Himself sending it to me (“here, you’ll like this”), but Road Salt Pt. 1 was a complete game-changer. At a time when I was completely bored of “modern metal” and its trappings, I related strongly to PoS’s new direction, in which chug riffs and rapping were replaced by analog ’70s tones and memorable songs. This record was in heavy rotation in the Fisting household, and became a significant influence on my own music.
Satan // Life Sentence – Having missed out on Satan’s original run, I was unaware of their comeback album until the AMG review heaped praise upon it. Lucky for me it did because Life Sentence is full of intelligent lyrics, clever riffs, and memorable hooks. The band has since made three more records, all of which have been varying degrees of excellent. More importantly, discovering Life Sentence sent me on a path to revisit the band’s earlier works, including the highly influential Court in the Act.
Anacrusis // Screams and Whispers – Anacrusis is another band I was completely oblivious to during their lifespan, but discovered much later via Grymm‘s excellent retrospective writeup. This album is incredibly ambitious for its time (1993), pushing thrash metal into new and more introspective territory. There are hints of industrial influence, occasional goth-y keyboards, and some very angular guitar work, even by 1990s standards. This is a classic record from metal’s lost years, and more people should hear it.
I wish I had written …
King’s X – Three Sides of One Review. Not to suggest that Huck didn’t do a fantastic job on the review, because he absolutely nailed it, but King’s X has held a special place in my cold black heart for many years. I should’ve been there for this. There is no good reason why I didn’t do this review (or the related Angry Metal Primer) other than my own laziness and poor time management. Life gets in the way sometimes. I wish I could do over … I regret nothing.
I wish more people had read …
Various reviews of Voivod and Failure albums. As several readers noticed, I made it a personal mission to preach the virtues of Voivod and Failure. I consider both bands to be absolutely brilliant and worthy of greater attention (particularly Failure, whom I suspect most AMG readers are unfamiliar with). I don’t know how many people read those reviews, but whatever that number is, it needed to be more.
#2024 #AMGTurns15 #AmonAmarth #Anacrusis #BlogPost #BlogPosts #Failure #HallAflame #KingsX #MorsPrincipiumEst #Origin #PainOfSalvation #Resumed #Satan #Thine #Trials #Voices #Voivod #WhiteWizzard
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The Book Lives Three Times: How Seneca Got Reading Wrong by Getting It Right
You finish writing a book and the manuscript sits there, cooling on the screen like bread pulled from an oven. It is done. It is no longer yours. This is the part no one tells you about authorship: the moment the final sentence locks into place, the book begins its first death, because it has stopped being a living negotiation between you and the language and has become, instead, a fixed object. A thing. The writer’s relationship to the finished text is not unlike the relationship a parent has to an adult child who has just walked out the front door with a suitcase. You made this. You cannot unmake it. You are, from this point forward, irrelevant to its survival.
Something strange surfaces in that departure. While you were writing, the book had a voice, and the voice was yours. I mean the silent one, the one that has nothing to do with ordering coffee or arguing with the insurance company, the interior narrator that reads your own thoughts back to you and lives in the cavity between your ears. It has no sound but is louder than anything in the room. Every sentence you wrote was tested against that voice. You heard the book before you read it. The prose rhythm, the paragraph pacing, the places where a sentence needed to land hard or dissolve into the next thought, all of it was conducted by a voice that has no waveform and no frequency but is, for the writer, the most real sound in the world. When the book is finished, that voice goes quiet. The conductor steps off the podium. What remains on the page is the score, but the performance that produced it is already gone.
Then someone picks up the book and reads it in silence, and a different voice appears.
This is the life of the book that is easiest to overlook, because it happens inside the reader’s skull and leaves no evidence. A person sits with your text and their inner voice takes possession of it, and that voice cannot be yours. The reader’s internal narrator carries its own cadence and speed, colored by decades of that person’s accumulated experience with language. Where you heard a sentence as clipped and staccato, the reader may hear it as languid. Where you intended a pause, the reader may barrel through. The reader is performing the text in the only theater that matters, and the performance is entirely their own. Two people can read the same novel in the same afternoon in the same room and hear completely different books, because the voice in one head is never the voice in another. Silent reading is a private staging of the text, unrehearsed, undirected, and unrepeatable.
This is the second life of the book: the one where it exists as pure text and the reader becomes, without knowing it, both audience and performer. The writer is absent. The writer’s voice is gone. What replaces it is whatever voice the reader has cultivated across a lifetime of reading, one that speeds up when the prose is familiar and slows when it is strange, that whispers through some passages and declaims through others, and that the reader has never once thought to question because it has been there since they first learned to decode symbols on a page. This is a genuine performance, as real as any staged production, and it happens billions of times a day in absolute silence.
Then something else happens. Someone else reads the book aloud.
I have listened to narrators perform my work, and the experience is dislocating in ways I did not anticipate. A narrator translates and performs simultaneously, but what a narrator actually does runs deeper than either word suggests. A narrator re-authors the text in real time, filtering every sentence through a different nervous system and a whole separate body of accumulated memory, lungs that breathe in places where you, the writer, never paused. The commas you placed with surgical precision become suggestions. The rhythms you hammered into the prose get bent, sometimes broken, sometimes improved, by a voice that carries its own gravitational field. What emerges from the narrator’s mouth is a separate book that happens to share your words.
The part that haunts you comes afterward: the narrator’s voice replaces yours. Once you have heard your book performed by another person, you cannot unhear it. You go back to the text and try to read it in your own inner voice, the one that built the thing sentence by sentence, and the narrator is already there, squatting in your skull, delivering lines with inflections you never intended. Your book has been colonized. The voice you lived with for months or years of drafting has been overwritten by a voice that arrived after the work was done and claimed it with the confidence of someone who has always lived there. I say this without resentment, only as a witness to the irreversibility of certain experiences. You cannot un-know a melody once it has been attached to lyrics you wrote in silence.
For the listener, the colonization is even more complete, because the listener never had the writer’s voice to begin with. The listener’s first encounter with the text arrives through the narrator’s body and breath, through decisions about emphasis and tempo and the thousand micro-choices that constitute a spoken performance. The narrator’s voice becomes the voice of the book, permanently, the way a film score becomes inseparable from the images it accompanies. Ask anyone who has listened to a well-narrated audiobook to then read the same text in print, and they will tell you: the narrator is still there, still speaking inside their head, overlaying the reader’s own internal voice with a ghost performance that refuses to vacate.
This is the third life of the book: the one where it enters the listener through a voice the writer did not choose and could not have predicted, and becomes something neither the writer nor the narrator intended.
People ask me why I do not narrate my own books. I narrate the Human Meme podcast, so the question is reasonable: if you already sit in front of a microphone and talk for a living, why hand the book to a stranger? I did narrate one, The Wound Remains Faithful, and the experience taught me something about the economics of creative time that I have not forgotten. A book that took months to write takes roughly six hours of studio time to perform as audio. Six hours of recording, plus editing, plus the physical recovery that sustained vocal performance demands. When I look at a free day and ask myself whether I want to spend it re-performing a book I have already written or writing an entirely new one, the new book wins every time. The podcast is different. The podcast is composed in the speaking. The voice and the writing happen simultaneously, and the performance is the first draft. A book has already been performed once, silently, in the writing, and asking me to perform it again aloud is asking me to walk a trail I have already walked when there is an uncut forest next to it.
But the deeper reason is theatrical, and it connects to everything I have been arguing in this essay. If I narrate my own book, the three lives collapse into two. My voice in the writing and my voice in the narration are too close to each other. The gap between them, the productive gap where the book gets re-authored by a second intelligence, closes. The book becomes a one-man show, and much of my life has already been a one-man show: writing, editing, publishing, designing, promoting, all of it carried by one pair of hands. The audiobook is the place where I can finally open the door and let someone else onto the stage. There is a generosity in that, and a relief, and also a creative dividend, because what comes back from the narrator is always more interesting than what I would have produced alone. A second mind in the room changes the room. I know this from decades of directing actors. The playwright who insists on playing every part has misunderstood the purpose of theater.
Seneca understood something about this multiplication, though he never had to endure the experience of hearing a Roman actor perform his prose in a recording studio. In De Brevitate Vitae, he argues that the philosopher lives longest among all people, because through reading, one annexes every preceding age to one’s own. We can, he writes, dispute with Socrates, doubt with Carneades, find peace with Epicurus, and overcome human nature with the Stoics. The years that came before us are not lost. They are available, and through concentrated study, they become ours. A single life becomes many lives. The calendar is a liar.
But Seneca was also suspicious of exactly the kind of expansive reading his own argument seems to invite. In his second letter to Lucilius, he reverses field with the confidence of a man who has caught himself in a contradiction and decided to own it. Do not read everything, he warns. Do not flit from book to book the way a restless traveler moves from city to city, arriving everywhere and settling nowhere. Linger with a few great thinkers. Digest them. Let their ideas become part of your tissue. The person who reads everything absorbs nothing. The person who reads deeply absorbs the author whole.
Seneca’s two positions only appear to contradict each other. Together they form a single, stranger argument: the multiplication of lives he describes in De Brevitate Vitae depends on depth, never on volume. You do not live Socrates’ life by skimming the dialogues. You live it by sitting inside a single passage until Socrates’ way of thinking becomes indistinguishable from your own. The annexation of another life requires the same commitment you would bring to an actual relationship. You have to show up. You have to stay.
Now extend this to the listener, and extend it further to the writer who came up through the theater.
I am a playwright. I have spent decades thinking about what happens when language leaves the page and enters a body that is not the author’s body. In the theater, this transaction is visible. You sit in a darkened house and watch actors inhabit your words in real time, and the text becomes dimensional in a way that no private reading can replicate, because the actor’s physical presence adds information that the page cannot carry: gesture, stance, the way a pause lands differently when an actual human being is standing in an actual room holding the silence. Live theater is synchronous. The audience and the performer share the same moment. The electricity of that shared present tense is what makes theater irreplaceable, and it is also what limits it. A room, bodies, everyone in the same place at the same time.
An audiobook is the redacted version of that staged play.
“Redacted” in the sense of concentrated, the way a reduction in cooking intensifies a flavor by removing the water. An audiobook strips away the visual dimension of performance, the set, the lights, the blocking, the costumes, and leaves only the voice. And the voice, it turns out, is where most of the meaning lived all along. This is something the old radio dramatists understood instinctively: when you remove the visual, the listener’s imagination does not shut down. It accelerates. The listener becomes scenic designer, casting director, and lighting technician in a single act of involuntary creation, building a visual world around the voice that is more personal, more fitted to the listener’s own psyche, than anything a stage crew could construct.
When I write a book now, I hear it as a playwright hears a script. The prose is dialogue spoken by a narrator who does not yet have a name or a face, and the stage is the inside of a stranger’s head. The performance will not happen in a theater on West 44th Street in front of four hundred people at 8:00 on a Thursday evening. It will happen in a car on Interstate 80, or in a kitchen at 6:00 in the morning, or in a hospital waiting room at a time the listener would rather not remember. The audience has been scattered across time zones and years, each person encountering the performance alone, at a moment determined by the private circumstances of their own life rather than by a curtain time. This is asynchronous theater. The playwright writes for a stage that exists everywhere and nowhere, and the result is a more intimate form of drama, because the performance happens inside the listener rather than in front of them.
The old radio plays understood this intimacy. When Orson Welles broadcast The War of the Worlds in 1938, the panic it caused demonstrated something important about the isolated voice. A voice entering the ear without visual accompaniment occupies a different neurological category than a voice attached to a body on a stage. The brain processes an isolated voice as closer and more authoritative, for the simple reason that there is nothing else competing for attention. The listener cannot glance at the set and remember that this is fiction. The listener has only the voice, and the voice is inside them, and the distance between “hearing a performance” and “experiencing an event” collapses to nothing.
This is what thrills me about the audiobook as a form. It is theater without walls. It is a play that runs continuously, starting and stopping at the listener’s discretion, performed for an audience of one in a venue that exists nowhere and everywhere. The book I wrote in silence, hearing it in the voice that lives between my ears, has traveled through the narrator’s larynx and into the listener’s private theater, and at each stage it has been remade by a different human intelligence. The text is the constant. The voice, the pacing, the meaning, all change with each body the book passes through.
Seneca would have approved of this, I think, with one caveat. He would have insisted that the listener not move on too quickly. Stay with this book. Let it work on you. Do not queue up the next title the moment the final chapter ends. The modern compulsion to consume, to track reading goals and annual book counts and to-be-read piles measured in linear feet, is the restless tourism Seneca warned Lucilius against. You do not multiply your life by multiplying your inputs. You multiply your life by refusing to leave a text until it has become part of you, until you can think in its rhythms without trying, until the author’s concerns have become your concerns and you can no longer remember a time when they were not.
The book lives three times. Once in the writing, where the author’s silent voice conducts every sentence. Once in the reading, where a stranger’s inner voice performs the text in a private theater no one else will ever enter. And once in the listening, where a narrator’s physical voice colonizes both the author’s memory and the listener’s imagination, creating something none of them intended and none of them can fully control.
Three lives. Three genuine performances. And the price of admission to any of them is the willingness to stay.
#audiobook #book #listener #narrator #performance #playwright #Podcast #producer #publishing #reader #seneca #tech #watcher #write #writing -
ok here we go
#Scripts.com Bee-Movie By-Jerry-Seinfeld NARRATOR: (Black-screen-with-text;-The-sound-of-buzzing-bees-can-be-heard) According-to-all-known-laws of-aviation #: there-is-no-way-a-bee should-be-able-to-fly. -: Its-wings-are-too-small-to-get its-fat-little-body-off-the-ground. -: The-bee #of-course #flies-anyway -: because-bees-don't-care what-humans-think-is-impossible. BARRY-BENSON: (Barry-is-picking-out-a-shirt) Yellow #black.-Yellow #black. Yellow #black.-Yellow #black. -: Ooh #black-and-yellow! Let's-shake-it-up-a-little. JANET-BENSON: Barry!-Breakfast-is-ready! BARRY: Coming! -: Hang-on-a-second. (Barry-uses-his-antenna-like-a-phone) -: Hello? ADAM-FLAYMAN: (Through-phone) --Barry? BARRY: --Adam? ADAM: --Can-you-believe-this-is-happening? BARRY: --I-can't.-I'll-pick-you-up. (Barry-flies-down-the-stairs) -: MARTIN-BENSON: Looking-sharp. JANET: Use-the-stairs.-Your-father paid-good-money-for-those. BARRY: Sorry.-I'm-excited. MARTIN: Here's-the-graduate. We're-very-proud-of-you #son. -: A-perfect-report-card #all-B's. JANET: Very-proud. (Rubs-Barry's-hair) BARRY= Ma!-I-got-a-thing-going-here. JANET: --You-got-lint-on-your-fuzz. BARRY: --Ow!-That's-me! JANET: --Wave-to-us!-We'll-be-in-row-118 #000. --Bye! (Barry-flies-out-the-door) JANET: Barry #I-told-you #stop-flying-in-the-house! (Barry-drives-through-the-hive #and-is-waved-at-by-Adam-who-is-reading-a newspaper) BARRY== --Hey #Adam. ADAM: --Hey #Barry. (Adam-gets-in-Barry's-car) -: --Is-that-fuzz-gel? BARRY: --A-little.-Special-day #graduation. ADAM: Never-thought-I'd-make-it. (Barry-pulls-away-from-the-house-and-continues-driving) BARRY: Three-days-grade-school #three-days-high-school... ADAM: Those-were-awkward. BARRY: Three-days-college.-I'm-glad-I-took a-day-and-hitchhiked-around-the-hive. ADAM== You-did-come-back-different. (Barry-and-Adam-pass-by-Artie #who-is-jogging) ARTIE: --Hi #Barry! BARRY: --Artie #growing-a-mustache?-Looks-good. ADAM: --Hear-about-Frankie? BARRY: --Yeah. ADAM== --You-going-to-the-funeral? BARRY: --No #I'm-not-going-to-his-funeral. -: Everybody-knows #sting-someone #you-die. -: Don't-waste-it-on-a-squirrel. Such-a-hothead. ADAM: I-guess-he-could-have just-gotten-out-of-the-way. (The-car-does-a-barrel-roll-on-the-loop-shaped-bridge-and-lands-on-the highway) -: I-love-this-incorporating an-amusement-park-into-our-regular-day. BARRY: I-guess-that's-why-they-say-we-don't-need-vacations. (Barry-parallel-parks-the-car-and-together-they-fly-over-the-graduating students) Boy #quite-a-bit-of-pomp... under-the-circumstances. (Barry-and-Adam-sit-down-and-put-on-their-hats) -: --Well #Adam #today-we-are-men. ADAM: --We-are! BARRY= --Bee-men. =ADAM= --Amen! BARRY-AND-ADAM: Hallelujah! (Barry-and-Adam-both-have-a-happy-spasm) ANNOUNCER: Students #faculty #distinguished-bees #: please-welcome-Dean-Buzzwell. DEAN-BUZZWELL: Welcome #New-Hive-Oity graduating-class-of... -: ...9: -: That-concludes-our-ceremonies. -: And-begins-your-career at-Honex-Industries! ADAM: Will-we-pick-our-job-today? (Adam-and-Barry-get-into-a-tour-bus) BARRY= I-heard-it's-just-orientation. (Tour-buses-rise-out-of-the-ground-and-the-students-are-automatically loaded-into-the-buses) TOUR-GUIDE: Heads-up!-Here-we-go. ANNOUNCER: Keep-your-hands-and-antennas inside-the-tram-at-all-times. BARRY: --Wonder-what-it'll-be-like? ADAM: --A-little-scary. TOUR-GUIDE== Welcome-to-Honex #a-division-of-Honesco -: and-a-part-of-the-Hexagon-Group. Barry: This-is-it! BARRY-AND-ADAM: Wow. BARRY: Wow. (The-bus-drives-down-a-road-an-on-either-side-are-the-Bee's-massive complicated-Honey-making-machines) TOUR-GUIDE: We-know-that-you #as-a-bee #have-worked-your-whole-life -: to-get-to-the-point-where-you can-work-for-your-whole-life. -: Honey-begins-when-our-valiant-Pollen Jocks-bring-the-nectar-to-the-hive. -: Our-top-secret-formula -: is-automatically-color-corrected #scent-adjusted-and-bubble-contoured -: into-this-soothing-sweet-syrup -: with-its-distinctive golden-glow-you-know-as... EVERYONE-ON-BUS: Honey! (The-guide-has-been-collecting-honey-into-a-bottle-and-she-throws-it-into the-crowd-on-the-bus-and-it-is-caught-by-a-girl-in-the-back) ADAM: --That-girl-was-hot. BARRY: --She's-my-cousin! ADAM== --She-is? BARRY: --Yes #we're-all-cousins. ADAM: --Right.-You're-right. TOUR-GUIDE: --At-Honex #we-constantly-strive -: to-improve-every-aspect of-bee-existence. -: These-bees-are-stress-testing a-new-helmet-technology. (The-bus-passes-by-a-Bee-wearing-a-helmet-who-is-being-smashed-into-the ground-with-fly-swatters #newspapers-and-boots.-He-lifts-a-thumbs-up-but you-can-hear-him-groan) -: ADAM== --What-do-you-think-he-makes? BARRY: --Not-enough. TOUR-GUIDE: Here-we-have-our-latest-advancement #the-Krelman. (They-pass-by-a-turning-wheel-with-Bees-standing-on-pegs #who-are-each wearing-a-finger-shaped-hat) Barry: --Wow #What-does-that-do? TOUR-GUIDE: --Catches-that-little-strand-of-honey -: that-hangs-after-you-pour-it. Saves-us-millions. ADAM: (Intrigued) Can-anyone-work-on-the-Krelman? TOUR-GUIDE: Of-course.-Most-bee-jobs-are small-ones. But-bees-know-that-every-small-job #if-it's-done-well #means-a-lot. -: But-choose-carefully -: because-you'll-stay-in-the-job you-pick-for-the-rest-of-your-life. (Everyone-claps-except-for-Barry) BARRY: The-same-job-the-rest-of-your-life? I-didn't-know-that. ADAM: What's-the-difference? TOUR-GUIDE: You'll-be-happy-to-know-that-bees #as-a-species #haven't-had-one-day-off -: in-27-million-years. BARRY: (Upset) So-you'll-just-work-us-to-death? -: We'll-sure-try. (Everyone-on-the-bus-laughs-except-Barry.-Barry-and-Adam-are-walking-back home-together) ADAM: Wow!-That-blew-my-mind! BARRY: 'What's-the-difference?' How-can-you-say-that? -: One-job-forever? That's-an-insane-choice-to-have-to-make. ADAM: I'm-relieved.-Now-we-only-have to-make-one-decision-in-life. BARRY: But #Adam #how-could-they never-have-told-us-that? ADAM: Why-would-you-question-anything? We're-bees. -: We're-the-most-perfectly functioning-society-on-Earth. BARRY: You-ever-think-maybe-things work-a-little-too-well-here? ADAM: Like-what?-Give-me-one-example. (Barry-and-Adam-stop-walking-and-it-is-revealed-to-the-audience-that hundreds-of-cars-are-speeding-by-and-narrowly-missing-them-in-perfect unison) BARRY: I-don't-know.-But-you-know what-I'm-talking-about. ANNOUNCER: Please-clear-the-gate. Royal-Nectar-Force-on-approach. BARRY: Wait-a-second.-Check-it-out. (The-Pollen-jocks-fly-in #circle-around-and-landing-in-line) -: --Hey #those-are-Pollen-Jocks! ADAM: --Wow. -: I've-never-seen-them-this-close. BARRY: They-know-what-it's-like outside-the-hive. ADAM: Yeah #but-some-don't-come-back. GIRL-BEES: --Hey #Jocks! --Hi #Jocks! (The-Pollen-Jocks-hook-up-their-backpacks-to-machines-that-pump-the-nectar to-trucks #which-drive-away) LOU-LO-DUVA: You-guys-did-great! -: You're-monsters! You're-sky-freaks! I-love-it! (Punching-the-Pollen-Jocks-in-joy) I-love-it! ADAM: --I-wonder-where-they-were. BARRY: --I-don't-know. -: Their-day's-not-planned. -: Outside-the-hive #flying-who-knows where #doing-who-knows-what. -: You-can't-just-decide-to-be-a-Pollen Jock.-You-have-to-be-bred-for-that. ADAM== Right. (Barry-and-Adam-are-covered-in-some-pollen-that-floated-off-of-the-Pollen Jocks) BARRY: Look-at-that.-That's-more-pollen than-you-and-I-will-see-in-a-lifetime. ADAM: It's-just-a-status-symbol. Bees-make-too-much-of-it. BARRY: Perhaps.-Unless-you're-wearing-it and-the-ladies-see-you-wearing-it. (Barry-waves-at-2-girls-standing-a-little-away-from-them) ADAM== Those-ladies? Aren't-they-our-cousins-too? BARRY: Distant.-Distant. POLLEN-JOCK-#1: Look-at-these-two. POLLEN-JOCK-#2: --Couple-of-Hive-Harrys. POLLEN-JOCK-#1: --Let's-have-fun-with-them. GIRL-BEE-#1: It-must-be-dangerous being-a-Pollen-Jock. BARRY: Yeah.-Once-a-bear-pinned-me against-a-mushroom! -: He-had-a-paw-on-my-throat #and-with-the-other #he-was-slapping-me! (Slaps-Adam-with-his-hand-to-represent-his-scenario) GIRL-BEE-#2: --Oh #my! BARRY: --I-never-thought-I'd-knock-him-out. GIRL-BEE-#1: (Looking-at-Adam) What-were-you-doing-during-this? ADAM: Obviously-I-was-trying-to-alert-the-authorities. BARRY: I-can-autograph-that. (The-pollen-jocks-walk-up-to-Barry-and-Adam #they-pretend-that-Barry-and Adam-really-are-pollen-jocks.) POLLEN-JOCK-#1: A-little-gusty-out-there-today #wasn't-it #comrades? BARRY: Yeah.-Gusty. POLLEN-JOCK-#1: We're-hitting-a-sunflower-patch six-miles-from-here-tomorrow. BARRY: --Six-miles #huh? ADAM: --Barry! POLLEN-JOCK-#2: A-puddle-jump-for-us #but-maybe-you're-not-up-for-it. BARRY: --Maybe-I-am. ADAM: --You-are-not! POLLEN-JOCK-#1: We're-going-0900-at-J-Gate. -: What-do-you-think #buzzy-boy? Are-you-bee-enough? BARRY: I-might-be.-It-all-depends on-what-0900-means. (The-scene-cuts-to-Barry-looking-out-on-the-hive-city-from-his-balcony-at night) MARTIN: Hey #Honex! BARRY: Dad #you-surprised-me. MARTIN: You-decide-what-you're-interested-in? BARRY: --Well #there's-a-lot-of-choices. --But-you-only-get-one. -: Do-you-ever-get-bored doing-the-same-job-every-day? MARTIN: Son #let-me-tell-you-about-stirring. -: You-grab-that-stick #and-you-just move-it-around #and-you-stir-it-around. -: You-get-yourself-into-a-rhythm. It's-a-beautiful-thing. BARRY: You-know #Dad #the-more-I-think-about-it #: maybe-the-honey-field just-isn't-right-for-me. MARTIN: You-were-thinking-of-what #making-balloon-animals? -: That's-a-bad-job for-a-guy-with-a-stinger. -: Janet #your-son's-not-sure he-wants-to-go-into-honey! JANET: --Barry #you-are-so-funny-sometimes. BARRY: --I'm-not-trying-to-be-funny. MARTIN: You're-not-funny!-You're-going into-honey.-Our-son #the-stirrer! JANET: --You're-gonna-be-a-stirrer? BARRY: --No-one's-listening-to-me! MARTIN: Wait-till-you-see-the-sticks-I-have. BARRY: I-could-say-anything-right-now. I'm-gonna-get-an-ant-tattoo! (Barry's-parents-don't-listen-to-him-and-continue-to-ramble-on) MARTIN: Let's-open-some-honey-and-celebrate! BARRY: Maybe-I'll-pierce-my-thorax. Shave-my-antennae. -: Shack-up-with-a-grasshopper.-Get a-gold-tooth-and-call-everybody-'dawg'! JANET: I'm-so-proud. (The-scene-cuts-to-Barry-and-Adam-waiting-in-line-to-get-a-job) ADAM: --We're-starting-work-today! BARRY: --Today's-the-day. ADAM: Come-on!-All-the-good-jobs will-be-gone. BARRY: Yeah #right. JOB-LISTER: Pollen-counting #stunt-bee #pouring #stirrer #front-desk #hair-removal... BEE-IN-FRONT-OF-LINE: --Is-it-still-available? JOB-LISTER: --Hang-on.-Two-left! -: One-of-them's-yours!-Congratulations! Step-to-the-side. ADAM: --What'd-you-get? BEE-IN-FRONT-OF-LINE: --Picking-crud-out.-Stellar! (He-walks-away) ADAM: Wow! JOB-LISTER: Couple-of-newbies? ADAM: Yes #sir!-Our-first-day!-We-are-ready! JOB-LISTER: Make-your-choice. (Adam-and-Barry-look-up-at-the-job-board.-There-are-hundreds-of-constantly changing-panels-that-contain-available-or-unavailable-jobs.-It-looks-very confusing) ADAM: --You-want-to-go-first? BARRY: --No #you-go. ADAM: Oh #my.-What's-available? JOB-LISTER: Restroom-attendant's-open #not-for-the-reason-you-think. ADAM: --Any-chance-of-getting-the-Krelman? JOB-LISTER: --Sure #you're-on. (Puts-the-Krelman-finger-hat-on-Adam's-head) (Suddenly-the-sign-for-Krelman-closes-out) -: I'm-sorry #the-Krelman-just-closed-out. (Takes-Adam's-hat-off) Wax-monkey's-always-open. ADAM: The-Krelman-opened-up-again. -: What-happened? JOB-LISTER: A-bee-died.-Makes-an-opening.-See? He's-dead.-Another-dead-one. -: Deady.-Deadified.-Two-more-dead. -: Dead-from-the-neck-up. Dead-from-the-neck-down.-That's-life! ADAM: Oh #this-is-so-hard! (Barry-remembers-what-the-Pollen-Jock-offered-him-and-he-flies-off) Heating #cooling #stunt-bee #pourer #stirrer #: humming #inspector-number-seven #lint-coordinator #stripe-supervisor #: mite-wrangler.-Barry #what do-you-think-I-should...-Barry? (Adam-turns-around-and-sees-Barry-flying-away) -: Barry! POLLEN-JOCK: All-right #we've-got-the-sunflower-patch in-quadrant-nine... ADAM: (Through-phone) What-happened-to-you? Where-are-you? BARRY: --I'm-going-out. ADAM: --Out?-Out-where? BARRY: --Out-there. ADAM: --Oh #no! BARRY: I-have-to #before-I-go to-work-for-the-rest-of-my-life. ADAM: You're-gonna-die!-You're-crazy! (Barry-hangs-up) Hello? POLLEN-JOCK-#2: Another-call-coming-in. -: If-anyone's-feeling-brave #there's-a-Korean-deli-on-83rd -: that-gets-their-roses-today. BARRY: Hey #guys. POLLEN-JOCK-#1-== --Look-at-that. POLLEN-JOCK-#2: --Isn't-that-the-kid-we-saw-yesterday? LOU-LO-DUVA: Hold-it #son #flight-deck's-restricted. POLLEN-JOCK-#1: It's-OK #Lou.-We're-gonna-take-him-up. (Puts-hand-on-Barry's-shoulder) LOU-LO-DUVA: (To-Barry)-Really?-Feeling-lucky #are-you? BEE-WITH-CLIPBOARD: (To-Barry)-Sign-here #here.-Just-initial-that. -: --Thank-you. LOU-LO-DUVA: --OK. -: You-got-a-rain-advisory-today #: and-as-you-all-know #bees-cannot-fly-in-rain. -: So-be-careful.-As-always #watch-your-brooms #: hockey-sticks #dogs #birds #bears-and-bats. -: Also #I-got-a-couple-of-reports of-root-beer-being-poured-on-us. -: Murphy's-in-a-home-because-of-it #babbling-like-a-cicada! BARRY: --That's-awful. LOU-LO-DUVA: (Still-talking-through-megaphone) --And-a-reminder-for-you-rookies #: bee-law-number-one #absolutely-no-talking-to-humans! -: All-right #launch-positions! POLLEN-JOCKS: (The-Pollen-Jocks-run-into-formation) -: Buzz #buzz #buzz #buzz!-Buzz #buzz #buzz #buzz!-Buzz #buzz #buzz #buzz! LOU-LU-DUVA: Black-and-yellow! POLLEN-JOCKS: Hello! POLLEN-JOCK-#1: (To-Barry)You-ready-for-this #hot-shot? BARRY: Yeah.-Yeah #bring-it-on. POLLEN-JOCK's: Wind #check. -: --Antennae #check. --Nectar-pack #check. -: --Wings #check. --Stinger #check. BARRY: Scared-out-of-my-shorts #check. LOU-LO-DUVA: OK #ladies #: let's-move-it-out! -: Pound-those-petunias #you-striped-stem-suckers! -: All-of-you #drain-those-flowers! (The-pollen-jocks-fly-out-of-the-hive) BARRY: Wow!-I'm-out! -: I-can't-believe-I'm-out! -: So-blue. -: I-feel-so-fast-and-free! -: Box-kite! (Barry-flies-through-the-kite) -: Wow! -: Flowers! (A-pollen-jock-puts-on-some-high-tech-goggles-that-shows-flowers-similar-to heat-sink-goggles.) POLLEN-JOCK: This-is-Blue-Leader. We-have-roses-visual. -: Bring-it-around-30-degrees-and-hold. -: Roses! POLLEN-JOCK-#1: 30-degrees #roger.-Bringing-it-around. -: Stand-to-the-side #kid. It's-got-a-bit-of-a-kick. (The-pollen-jock-fires-a-high-tech-gun-at-the-flower #shooting-tubes-that suck-up-the-nectar-from-the-flower-and-collects-it-into-a-pouch-on-the-gun) BARRY: That-is-one-nectar-collector! POLLEN-JOCK-#1== --Ever-see-pollination-up-close? BARRY: --No #sir. POLLEN-JOCK-#1: (Barry-and-the-Pollen-jock-fly-over-the-field #the-pollen-jock-sprinkles pollen-as-he-goes) -: I-pick-up-some-pollen-here #sprinkle-it over-here.-Maybe-a-dash-over-there #: a-pinch-on-that-one. See-that?-It's-a-little-bit-of-magic. BARRY: That's-amazing.-Why-do-we-do-that? POLLEN-JOCK-#1: That's-pollen-power.-More-pollen #more flowers #more-nectar #more-honey-for-us. BARRY: Cool. POLLEN-JOCK-#1: I'm-picking-up-a-lot-of-bright-yellow. could-be-daisies.-Don't-we-need-those? POLLEN-JOCK-#2: Copy-that-visual. -: Wait.-One-of-these-flowers seems-to-be-on-the-move. POLLEN-JOCK-#1: Say-again?-You're-reporting a-moving-flower? POLLEN-JOCK-#2: Affirmative. (The-Pollen-jocks-land-near-the-'flowers'-which #to-the-audience-are obviously-just-tennis-balls) KEN: (In-the-distance)-That-was-on-the-line! POLLEN-JOCK-#1: This-is-the-coolest.-What-is-it? POLLEN-JOCK-#2: I-don't-know #but-I'm-loving-this-color. -: It-smells-good. Not-like-a-flower #but-I-like-it. POLLEN-JOCK-#1: Yeah #fuzzy. (Sticks-his-hand-on-the-ball-but-it-gets-stuck) POLLEN-JOCK-#3== Chemical-y. (The-pollen-jock-finally-gets-his-hand-free-from-the-tennis-ball) POLLEN-JOCK-#1: Careful #guys.-It's-a-little-grabby. (The-pollen-jocks-turn-around-and-see-Barry-lying-his-entire-body-on-top-of one-of-the-tennis-balls) POLLEN-JOCK-#2: My-sweet-lord-of-bees! POLLEN-JOCK-#3: Candy-brain #get-off-there! POLLEN-JOCK-#1: (Pointing-upwards) Problem! (A-human-hand-reaches-down-and-grabs-the-tennis-ball-that-Barry-is-stuck to) BARRY: --Guys! POLLEN-JOCK-#2: --This-could-be-bad. POLLEN-JOCK-#3: Affirmative. (Vanessa-Bloome-starts-bouncing-the-tennis-ball #not-knowing-Barry-is-stick to-it) BARRY== Very-close. -: Gonna-hurt. -: Mama's-little-boy. (Barry-is-being-hit-back-and-forth-by-two-humans-playing-tennis.-He-is still-stuck-to-the-ball) POLLEN-JOCK-#1: You-are-way-out-of-position #rookie! KEN: Coming-in-at-you-like-a-MISSILE! (Barry-flies-past-the-pollen-jocks #still-stuck-to-the-ball) BARRY: (In-slow-motion) Help-me! POLLEN-JOCK-#2: I-don't-think-these-are-flowers. POLLEN-JOCK-#3: --Should-we-tell-him? POLLEN-JOCK-#1: --I-think-he-knows. BARRY: What-is-this?! KEN: Match-point! -: You-can-start-packing-up #honey #because-you're-about-to-EAT-IT! (A-pollen-jock-coughs-which-confused-Ken-and-he-hits-the-ball-the-wrong-way with-Barry-stuck-to-it-and-it-goes-flying-into-the-city) BARRY: Yowser! (Barry-bounces-around-town-and-gets-stuck-in-the-engine-of-a-car.-He-flies into-the-air-conditioner-and-sees-a-bug-that-was-frozen-in-there) BARRY: Ew #gross. (The-man-driving-the-car-turns-on-the-air-conditioner-which-blows-Barry into-the-car) GIRL-IN-CAR: There's-a-bee-in-the-car! -: --Do-something! DAD-DRIVING-CAR: --I'm-driving! BABY-GIRL: (Waving-at-Barry) --Hi #bee. (Barry-smiles-and-waves-at-the-baby-girl) GUY-IN-BACK-OF-CAR: --He's-back-here! -: He's-going-to-sting-me! GIRL-IN-CAR: Nobody-move.-If-you-don't-move #he-won't-sting-you.-Freeze! (Barry-freezes-as-well #hovering-in-the-middle-of-the-car) -: GRANDMA-IN-CAR== He-blinked! (The-grandma-whips-out-some-bee-spray-and-sprays-everywhere-in-the-car #climbing-into-the-front-seat #still-trying-to-spray-Barry) GIRL-IN-CAR: Spray-him #Granny! DAD-DRIVING-THE-CAR: What-are-you-doing?! (Barry-escapes-the-car-through-the-air-conditioner-and-is-flying-high-above the-ground #safe.) BARRY: Wow...-the-tension-level out-here-is-unbelievable. (Barry-sees-that-storm-clouds-are-gathering-and-he-can-see-rain-clouds moving-into-this-direction) -: I-gotta-get-home. -: Can't-fly-in-rain. -: Can't-fly-in-rain. (A-rain-drop-hits-Barry-and-one-of-his-wings-is-damaged) -: Can't-fly-in-rain. (A-second-rain-drop-hits-Barry-again-and-he-spirals-downwards) Mayday!-Mayday!-Bee-going-down! (WW2-plane-sound-effects-are-played-as-he-plummets #and-he-crash-lands-on-a plant-inside-an-apartment-near-the-window) VANESSA-BLOOME: Ken #could-you-close the-window-please? KEN== Hey #check-out-my-new-resume. I-made-it-into-a-fold-out-brochure. -: You-see? (Folds-brochure-resume-out) Folds-out. (Ken-closes-the-window #trapping-Barry-inside) BARRY: Oh #no.-More-humans.-I-don't-need-this. (Barry-tries-to-fly-away-but-smashes-into-the-window-and-falls-again) -: What-was-that? (Barry-keeps-trying-to-fly-out-the-window-but-he-keeps-being-knocked-back because-the-window-is-closed) Maybe-this-time.-This-time.-This-time. This-time!-This-time!-This... -: Drapes! (Barry-taps-the-glass.-He-doesn't-understand-what-it-is) That-is-diabolical. KEN: It's-fantastic.-It's-got-all-my-special skills #even-my-top-ten-favorite-movies. ANDY: What's-number-one?-Star-Wars? KEN: Nah #I-don't-go-for-that... (Ken-makes-finger-guns-and-makes-'pew-pew-pew'-sounds-and-then-stops) -: ...kind-of-stuff. BARRY: No-wonder-we-shouldn't-talk-to-them. They're-out-of-their-minds. KEN: When-I-leave-a-job-interview #they're flabbergasted #can't-believe-what-I-say. BARRY: (Looking-at-the-light-on-the-ceiling) There's-the-sun.-Maybe-that's-a-way-out. (Starts-flying-towards-the-lightbulb) -: I-don't-remember-the-sun having-a-big-75-on-it. (Barry-hits-the-lightbulb-and-falls-into-the-dip-on-the-table-that-the humans-are-sitting-at) KEN: I-predicted-global-warming. -: I-could-feel-it-getting-hotter. At-first-I-thought-it-was-just-me. (Andy-dips-a-chip-into-the-bowl-and-scoops-up-some-dip-with-Barry-on-it-and is-about-to-put-it-in-his-mouth) -: Wait!-Stop!-Bee! (Andy-drops-the-chip-with-Barry-in-fear-and-backs-away.-All-the-humans freak-out) -: Stand-back.-These-are-winter-boots. (Ken-has-winter-boots-on-his-hands-and-he-is-about-to-smash-the-bee-but Vanessa-saves-him-last-second) VANESSA: Wait! -: Don't-kill-him! (Vanessa-puts-Barry-in-a-glass-to-protect-him) KEN: You-know-I'm-allergic-to-them! This-thing-could-kill-me! VANESSA: Why-does-his-life-have less-value-than-yours? KEN: Why-does-his-life-have-any-less-value than-mine?-Is-that-your-statement? VANESSA: I'm-just-saying-all-life-has-value.-You don't-know-what-he's-capable-of-feeling. (Vanessa-picks-up-Ken's-brochure-and-puts-it-under-the-glass-so-she-can carry-Barry-back-to-the-window.-Barry-looks-at-Vanessa-in-amazement) KEN: My-brochure! VANESSA: There-you-go #little-guy. (Vanessa-opens-the-window-and-lets-Barry-out-but-Barry-stays-back-and-is still-shocked-that-a-human-saved-his-life) KEN: I'm-not-scared-of-him. It's-an-allergic-thing. VANESSA: Put-that-on-your-resume-brochure. KEN: My-whole-face-could-puff-up. ANDY: Make-it-one-of-your-special-skills. KEN: Knocking-someone-out is-also-a-special-skill. (Ken-walks-to-the-door) Right.-Bye #Vanessa.-Thanks. -: --Vanessa #next-week?-Yogurt-night? VANESSA: --Sure #Ken.-You-know #whatever. -: (Vanessa-tries-to-close-door) KEN== --You-could-put-carob-chips-on-there. VANESSA: --Bye. (Closes-door-but-Ken-opens-it-again) KEN: --Supposed-to-be-less-calories. VANESSA: --Bye. (Closes-door) (Fast-forward-to-the-next-day #Barry-is-still-inside-the-house.-He-flies into-the-kitchen-where-Vanessa-is-doing-dishes) BARRY== (Talking-to-himself) I-gotta-say-something. -: She-saved-my-life. I-gotta-say-something. -: All-right #here-it-goes. (Turns-back) Nah. -: What-would-I-say? -: I-could-really-get-in-trouble. -: It's-a-bee-law. You're-not-supposed-to-talk-to-a-human. -: I-can't-believe-I'm-doing-this. -: I've-got-to. (Barry-disguises-himself-as-a-character-on-a-food-can-as-Vanessa-walks-by again) -: Oh #I-can't-do-it.-Come-on! -: No.-Yes.-No. -: Do-it.-I-can't. -: How-should-I-start-it? (Barry-strikes-a-pose-and-wiggles-his-eyebrows) 'You-like-jazz?' No #that's-no-good. (Vanessa-is-about-to-walk-past-Barry) Here-she-comes!-Speak #you-fool! -: ...Hi! (Vanessa-gasps-and-drops-the-dishes-in-fright-and-notices-Barry-on-the counter) -: I'm-sorry. VANESSA: --You're-talking. BARRY: --Yes #I-know. VANESSA: (Pointing-at-Barry) You're-talking! BARRY: I'm-so-sorry. VANESSA: No #it's-OK.-It's-fine. I-know-I'm-dreaming. -: But-I-don't-recall-going-to-bed. BARRY: Well #I'm-sure-this is-very-disconcerting. VANESSA: This-is-a-bit-of-a-surprise-to-me. I-mean #you're-a-bee! BARRY: I-am.-And-I'm-not-supposed to-be-doing-this #(Pointing-to-the-living-room-where-Ken-tried-to-kill-him-last-night) but-they-were-all-trying-to-kill-me. -: And-if-it-wasn't-for-you... -: I-had-to-thank-you. It's-just-how-I-was-raised. (Vanessa-stabs-her-hand-with-a-fork-to-test-whether-she's-dreaming-or-not) -: That-was-a-little-weird. VANESSA: --I'm-talking-with-a-bee. BARRY: --Yeah. VANESSA: I'm-talking-to-a-bee. And-the-bee-is-talking-to-me! BARRY: I-just-want-to-say-I'm-grateful. I'll-leave-now. (Barry-turns-to-leave) VANESSA: --Wait!-How-did-you-learn-to-do-that? BARRY: (Flying-back) --What? VANESSA: The-talking...thing. BARRY: Same-way-you-did #I-guess. 'Mama #Dada #honey.'-You-pick-it-up. VANESSA: --That's-very-funny. BARRY: --Yeah. -: Bees-are-funny.-If-we-didn't-laugh #we'd-cry-with-what-we-have-to-deal-with. -: Anyway... VANESSA: Can-I... -: ...get-you-something? BARRY: --Like-what? VANESSA: I-don't-know.-I-mean... I-don't-know.-Coffee? BARRY: I-don't-want-to-put-you-out. VANESSA: It's-no-trouble.-It-takes-two-minutes. -: --It's-just-coffee. BARRY: --I-hate-to-impose. (Vanessa-starts-making-coffee) VANESSA: --Don't-be-ridiculous! BARRY: --Actually #I-would-love-a-cup. VANESSA: Hey #you-want-rum-cake? BARRY: --I-shouldn't. VANESSA: --Have-some. BARRY: --No #I-can't. VANESSA: --Come-on! BARRY: I'm-trying-to-lose-a-couple-micrograms. VANESSA: --Where? BARRY: --These-stripes-don't-help. VANESSA: You-look-great! BARRY: I-don't-know-if-you-know anything-about-fashion. -: Are-you-all-right? VANESSA: (Pouring-coffee-on-the-floor-and-missing-the-cup-completely) No. (Flash-forward-in-time.-Barry-and-Vanessa-are-sitting-together-at-a-table on-top-of-the-apartment-building-drinking-coffee) -: BARRY== He's-making-the-tie-in-the-cab as-they're-flying-up-Madison. -: He-finally-gets-there. -: He-runs-up-the-steps-into-the-church. The-wedding-is-on. -: And-he-says #'Watermelon? I-thought-you-said-Guatemalan. -: Why-would-I-marry-a-watermelon?' (Barry-laughs-but-Vanessa-looks-confused) VANESSA: Is-that-a-bee-joke? BARRY: That's-the-kind-of-stuff-we-do. VANESSA: Yeah #different. -: So #what-are-you-gonna-do #Barry? (Barry-stands-on-top-of-a-sugar-cube-floating-in-his-coffee-and-paddles-it around-with-a-straw-like-it's-a-gondola) BARRY: About-work?-I-don't-know. -: I-want-to-do-my-part-for-the-hive #but-I-can't-do-it-the-way-they-want. VANESSA: I-know-how-you-feel. BARRY: --You-do? VANESSA: --Sure. -: My-parents-wanted-me-to-be-a-lawyer-or a-doctor #but-I-wanted-to-be-a-florist. BARRY: --Really? VANESSA: --My-only-interest-is-flowers. BARRY: Our-new-queen-was-just-elected with-that-same-campaign-slogan. -: Anyway #if-you-look... (Barry-points-to-a-tree-in-the-middle-of-Central-Park) -: There's-my-hive-right-there.-See-it? VANESSA: You're-in-Sheep-Meadow! BARRY: Yes!-I'm-right-off-the-Turtle-Pond! VANESSA: No-way!-I-know-that-area. I-lost-a-toe-ring-there-once. BARRY: --Why-do-girls-put-rings-on-their-toes? VANESSA: --Why-not? BARRY: --It's-like-putting-a-hat-on-your-knee. VANESSA: --Maybe-I'll-try-that. (A-custodian-installing-a-lightbulb-looks-over-at-them-but-to-his perspective-it-looks-like-Vanessa-is-talking-to-a-cup-of-coffee-on-the table) CUSTODIAN: --You-all-right #ma'am? VANESSA: --Oh #yeah.-Fine. -: Just-having-two-cups-of-coffee! BARRY: Anyway #this-has-been-great. Thanks-for-the-coffee. VANESSA== Yeah #it's-no-trouble. BARRY: Sorry-I-couldn't-finish-it.-If-I-did #I'd-be-up-the-rest-of-my-life. (Barry-points-towards-the-rum-cake) -: Can-I-take-a-piece-of-this-with-me? VANESSA: Sure!-Here #have-a-crumb. (Vanessa-hands-Barry-a-crumb-but-it-is-still-pretty-big-for-Barry) BARRY: --Thanks! VANESSA: --Yeah. BARRY: All-right.-Well #then... I-guess-I'll-see-you-around. -: Or-not. VANESSA: OK #Barry... BARRY: And-thank-you so-much-again...-for-before. VANESSA: Oh #that?-That-was-nothing. BARRY: Well #not-nothing #but...-Anyway... (Vanessa-and-Barry-hold-hands #but-Vanessa-has-to-hold-out-a-finger-because her-hands-is-to-big-and-Barry-holds-that) (The-custodian-looks-over-again-and-it-appears-Vanessa-is-laughing-at-her coffee-again.-The-lightbulb-that-he-was-screwing-in-sparks-and-he-falls-off the-ladder) (Fast-forward-in-time-and-we-see-two-Bee-Scientists-testing-out-a-parachute in-a-Honex-wind-tunnel) BEE-SCIENTIST-#1: This-can't-possibly-work. BEE-SCIENTIST-#2: He's-all-set-to-go. We-may-as-well-try-it. -: OK #Dave #pull-the-chute. (Dave-pulls-the-chute-and-the-wind-slams-him-against-the-wall-and-he-falls on-his-face.The-camera-pans-over-and-we-see-Barry-and-Adam-walking together) ADAM: --Sounds-amazing. BARRY: --It-was-amazing! -: It-was-the-scariest #happiest-moment-of-my-life. ADAM: Humans!-I-can't-believe you-were-with-humans! -: Giant #scary-humans! What-were-they-like? BARRY: Huge-and-crazy.-They-talk-crazy. -: They-eat-crazy-giant-things. They-drive-crazy. ADAM: --Do-they-try-and-kill-you #like-on-TV? BARRY: --Some-of-them.-But-some-of-them-don't. ADAM: --How'd-you-get-back? BARRY: --Poodle. ADAM: You-did-it #and-I'm-glad.-You-saw whatever-you-wanted-to-see. -: You-had-your-'experience.'-Now-you can-pick-out-your-job-and-be-normal. BARRY: --Well... ADAM: --Well? BARRY: Well #I-met-someone. ADAM: You-did?-Was-she-Bee-ish? -: --A-wasp?!-Your-parents-will-kill-you! BARRY: --No #no #no #not-a-wasp. ADAM: --Spider? BARRY: --I'm-not-attracted-to-spiders. -: I-know #for-everyone-else #it's-the-hottest-thing #with-the-eight-legs-and-all. -: I-can't-get-by-that-face. ADAM: So-who-is-she? BARRY: She's...-human. ADAM: No #no.-That's-a-bee-law. You-wouldn't-break-a-bee-law. BARRY: --Her-name's-Vanessa. (Adam-puts-his-head-in-his-hands) ADAM: --Oh #boy. BARRY== She's-so-nice.-And-she's-a-florist! ADAM: Oh #no!-You're-dating-a-human-florist! BARRY: We're-not-dating. ADAM: You're-flying-outside-the-hive #talking to-humans-that-attack-our-homes -: with-power-washers-and-M-80s! That's-one-eighth-a-stick-of-dynamite! BARRY: She-saved-my-life! And-she-understands-me. ADAM: This-is-over! BARRY: Eat-this. (Barry-gives-Adam-a-piece-of-the-crumb-that-he-got-from-Vanessa.-Adam-eats it) ADAM: (Adam's-tone-changes) This-is-not-over!-What-was-that? BARRY: --They-call-it-a-crumb. ADAM: --It-was-so-stingin'-stripey! BARRY: And-that's-not-what-they-eat. That's-what-falls-off-what-they-eat! -: --You-know-what-a-Cinnabon-is? ADAM: --No. (Adam-opens-a-door-behind-him-and-he-pulls-Barry-in) BARRY: It's-bread-and-cinnamon-and-frosting. ADAM: Be-quiet! BARRY: They-heat-it-up... ADAM: Sit-down! (Adam-forces-Barry-to-sit-down) BARRY: (Still-rambling-about-Cinnabons) ...really-hot! (Adam-grabs-Barry-by-the-shoulders) ADAM: --Listen-to-me! -: We-are-not-them!-We're-us. There's-us-and-there's-them! BARRY== Yes #but-who-can-deny the-heart-that-is-yearning? ADAM: There's-no-yearning. Stop-yearning.-Listen-to-me! -: You-have-got-to-start-thinking-bee #my-friend.-Thinking-bee! BARRY: --Thinking-bee. WORKER-BEE: --Thinking-bee. WORKER-BEES-AND-ADAM: Thinking-bee!-Thinking-bee! Thinking-bee!-Thinking-bee! (Flash-forward-in-time;-Barry-is-laying-on-a-raft-in-a-pool-full-of-honey. He-is-wearing-sunglasses) JANET: There-he-is.-He's-in-the-pool. MARTIN: You-know-what-your-problem-is #Barry? (Barry-pulls-down-his-sunglasses-and-he-looks-annoyed) BARRY: (Sarcastic) I-gotta-start-thinking-bee? JANET: How-much-longer-will-this-go-on? MARTIN: It's-been-three-days! Why-aren't-you-working? (Puts-sunglasses-back-on) BARRY: I've-got-a-lot-of-big-life-decisions to-think-about. MARTIN: What-life?-You-have-no-life! You-have-no-job.-You're-barely-a-bee! JANET: Would-it-kill-you to-make-a-little-honey? (Barry-rolls-off-the-raft-and-sinks-into-the-honey-pool) -: Barry #come-out. Your-father's-talking-to-you. -: Martin #would-you-talk-to-him? MARTIN: Barry #I'm-talking-to-you! (Barry-keeps-sinking-into-the-honey-until-he-is-suddenly-in-Central-Park having-a-picnic-with-Vanessa) (Barry-has-a-cup-of-honey-and-he-clinks-his-glass-with-Vanessas.-Suddenly-a mosquito-lands-on-Vanessa-and-she-slaps-it #killing-it.-They-both-gasp-but then-burst-out-laughing) VANESSA: You-coming? (The-camera-pans-over-and-Vanessa-is-climbing-into-a-small-yellow-airplane) BARRY: Got-everything? VANESSA: All-set! BARRY: Go-ahead.-I'll-catch-up. (Vanessa-lifts-off-and-flies-ahead) VANESSA: Don't-be-too-long. (Barry-catches-up-with-Vanessa-and-he-sticks-out-his-arms-like-ana-irplane. He-rolls-from-side-to-side #and-Vanessa-copies-him-with-the-airplane) VANESSA: Watch-this! (Barry-stays-back-and-watches-as-Vanessa-draws-a-heart-in-the-air-using pink-smoke-from-the-plane #but-on-the-last-loop-the-loop-she-suddenly crashes-into-a-mountain-and-the-plane-explodes.-The-destroyed-plane-falls into-some-rocks-and-explodes-a-second-time) BARRY: Vanessa! (As-Barry-is-yelling-his-mouth-fills-with-honey-and-he-wakes-up #discovering-that-he-was-just-day-dreaming.-He-slowly-sinks-back-into-the honey-pool) MARTIN: --We're-still-here. JANET: --I-told-you-not-to-yell-at-him. -: He-doesn't-respond-to-yelling! MARTIN: --Then-why-yell-at-me? JANET: --Because-you-don't-listen! MARTIN: I'm-not-listening-to-this. BARRY: Sorry #I've-gotta-go. MARTIN: --Where-are-you-going? BARRY: --I'm-meeting-a-friend. JANET: A-girl?-Is-this-why-you-can't-decide? BARRY: Bye. (Barry-flies-out-the-door-and-Martin-shakes-his-head) -: JANET== I-just-hope-she's-Bee-ish. (Fast-forward-in-time-and-Barry-is-sitting-on-Vanessa's-shoulder-and-she-is closing-up-her-shop) BARRY: They-have-a-huge-parade of-flowers-every-year-in-Pasadena? VANESSA: To-be-in-the-Tournament-of-Roses #that's-every-florist's-dream! -: Up-on-a-float #surrounded by-flowers #crowds-cheering. BARRY: A-tournament.-Do-the-roses compete-in-athletic-events? VANESSA: No.-All-right #I've-got-one. How-come-you-don't-fly-everywhere? BARRY: It's-exhausting.-Why-don't-you run-everywhere?-It's-faster. VANESSA: Yeah #OK #I-see #I-see. All-right #your-turn. BARRY: TiVo.-You-can-just-freeze-live-TV? That's-insane! VANESSA: You-don't-have-that? BARRY: We-have-Hivo #but-it's-a-disease. It's-a-horrible #horrible-disease. VANESSA: Oh #my. (A-human-walks-by-and-Barry-narrowly-avoids-him) PASSERBY: Dumb-bees! VANESSA: You-must-want-to-sting-all-those-jerks. BARRY: We-try-not-to-sting. It's-usually-fatal-for-us. VANESSA: So-you-have-to-watch-your-temper (They-walk-into-a-store) BARRY: Very-carefully. You-kick-a-wall #take-a-walk #: write-an-angry-letter-and-throw-it-out. Work-through-it-like-any-emotion: -: Anger #jealousy #lust. (Suddenly-an-employee(Hector)-hits-Barry-off-of-Vanessa's-shoulder.-Hector thinks-he's-saving-Vanessa) VANESSA: (To-Barry) Oh #my-goodness!-Are-you-OK? (Barry-is-getting-up-off-the-floor) BARRY: Yeah. VANESSA: (To-Hector) --What-is-wrong-with-you?! HECTOR: (Confused) --It's-a-bug. VANESSA: He's-not-bothering-anybody. Get-out-of-here #you-creep! (Vanessa-hits-Hector-across-the-face-with-the-magazine-he-had-and-then-hits him-in-the-head.-Hector-backs-away-covering-his-head) Barry: What-was-that?-A-Pic-'N'-Save-circular? (Vanessa-sets-Barry-back-on-her-shoulder) VANESSA: Yeah #it-was.-How-did-you-know? BARRY: It-felt-like-about-10-pages. Seventy-five-is-pretty-much-our-limit. VANESSA: You've-really-got-that down-to-a-science. BARRY: --Oh #we-have-to.-I-lost-a-cousin-to-Italian-Vogue. VANESSA: --I'll-bet. (Barry-looks-to-his-right-and-notices-there-is-honey-for-sale-in-the-aisle) BARRY: What-in-the-name of-Mighty-Hercules-is-this? (Barry-looks-at-all-the-brands-of-honey #shocked) How-did-this-get-here? Cute-Bee #Golden-Blossom #: Ray-Liotta-Private-Select? (Barry-puts-his-hands-up-and-slowly-turns-around #a-look-of-disgust-on-his face) VANESSA: --Is-he-that-actor? BARRY: --I-never-heard-of-him. -: --Why-is-this-here? VANESSA: --For-people.-We-eat-it. BARRY: You-don't-have enough-food-of-your-own?! (Hector-looks-back-and-notices-that-Vanessa-is-talking-to-Barry) VANESSA: --Well #yes. BARRY: --How-do-you-get-it? VANESSA: --Bees-make-it. BARRY: --I-know-who-makes-it! -: And-it's-hard-to-make-it! -: There's-heating #cooling #stirring. You-need-a-whole-Krelman-thing! VANESSA: --It's-organic. BARRY: --It's-our-ganic! VANESSA: It's-just-honey #Barry. BARRY: Just-what?! -: Bees-don't-know-about-this! This-is-stealing!-A-lot-of-stealing! -: You've-taken-our-homes #schools #hospitals!-This-is-all-we-have! -: And-it's-on-sale?! I'm-getting-to-the-bottom-of-this. -: I'm-getting-to-the-bottom of-all-of-this! (Flash-forward-in-time;-Barry-paints-his-face-with-black-strikes-like-a soldier-and-sneaks-into-the-storage-section-of-the-store) (Two-men #including-Hector #are-loading-boxes-into-some-trucks) -: SUPERMARKET-EMPLOYEE== Hey #Hector. -: --You-almost-done? HECTOR: --Almost. (Barry-takes-a-step-to-peak-around-the-corner) (Whispering) He-is-here.-I-sense-it. -: Well #I-guess-I'll-go-home-now (Hector-pretends-to-walk-away-by-walking-in-place-and-speaking-loudly) -: and-just-leave-this-nice-honey-out #with-no-one-around. BARRY: You're-busted #box-boy! HECTOR: I-knew-I-heard-something! So-you-can-talk! BARRY: I-can-talk. And-now-you'll-start-talking! -: Where-you-getting-the-sweet-stuff? Who's-your-supplier? HECTOR: I-don't-understand. I-thought-we-were-friends. -: The-last-thing-we-want to-do-is-upset-bees! (Hector-takes-a-thumbtack-out-of-the-board-behind-him-and-sword-fights Barry.-Barry-is-using-his-stinger-like-a-sword) -: You're-too-late!-It's-ours-now! BARRY: You #sir #have-crossed the-wrong-sword! HECTOR: You #sir #will-be-lunch for-my-iguana #Ignacio! (Barry-hits-the-thumbtack-out-of-Hectors-hand-and-Hector-surrenders) Barry: Where-is-the-honey-coming-from? -: Tell-me-where! HECTOR: (Pointing-to-leaving-truck) Honey-Farms!-It-comes-from-Honey-Farms! (Barry-chases-after-the-truck-but-it-is-getting-away.-He-flies-onto-a bicyclists'-backpack-and-he-catches-up-to-the-truck) CAR-DRIVER: (To-bicyclist) Crazy-person! (Barry-flies-off-and-lands-on-the-windshield-of-the-Honey-farms-truck. Barry-looks-around-and-sees-dead-bugs-splattered-everywhere) BARRY: What-horrible-thing-has-happened-here? -: These-faces #they-never-knew what-hit-them.-And-now -: they're-on-the-road-to-nowhere! (Barry-hears-a-sudden-whisper) (Barry-looks-up-and-sees-Mooseblood #a-mosquito-playing-dead) MOOSEBLOOD: Just-keep-still. BARRY: What?-You're-not-dead? MOOSEBLOOD: Do-I-look-dead?-They-will-wipe-anything that-moves.-Where-you-headed? BARRY: To-Honey-Farms. I-am-onto-something-huge-here. MOOSEBLOOD: I'm-going-to-Alaska.-Moose-blood #crazy-stuff.-Blows-your-head-off! ANOTHER-BUG-PLAYING-DEAD: I'm-going-to-Tacoma. (Barry-looks-at-another-bug) BARRY: --And-you? MOOSEBLOOD: --He-really-is-dead. BARRY: All-right. (Another-bug-hits-the-windshield-and-the-drivers-notice.-They-activate-the windshield-wipers) MOOSEBLOOD== Uh-oh! (The-windshield-wipers-are-slowly-sliding-over-the-dead-bugs-and-wiping them-off) BARRY: --What-is-that?! MOOSEBLOOD: --Oh #no! -: --A-wiper!-Triple-blade! BARRY: --Triple-blade? MOOSEBLOOD: Jump-on!-It's-your-only-chance #bee! (Mooseblood-and-Barry-grab-onto-the-wiper-and-they-hold-on-as-it-wipes-the windshield) Why-does-everything-have to-be-so-doggone-clean?! -: How-much-do-you-people-need-to-see?! (Bangs-on-windshield) -: Open-your-eyes! Stick-your-head-out-the-window! RADIO-IN-TRUCK: From-NPR-News-in-Washington #I'm-Carl-Kasell. MOOSEBLOOD: But-don't-kill-no-more-bugs! (Mooseblood-and-Barry-are-washed-off-by-the-wipr-fluid) MOOSEBLOOD: --Bee! BARRY: --Moose-blood-guy!! (Barry-starts-screaming-as-he-hangs-onto-the-antenna) (Suddenly-it-is-revealed-that-a-water-bug-is-also-hanging-on-the-antenna. There-is-a-pause-and-then-Barry-and-the-water-bug-both-start-screaming) TRUCK-DRIVER: --You-hear-something? GUY-IN-TRUCK: --Like-what? TRUCK-DRIVER: Like-tiny-screaming. GUY-IN-TRUCK: Turn-off-the-radio. (The-antenna-starts-to-lower-until-it-gets-to-low-and-sinks-into-the-truck. The-water-bug-flies-off-and-Barry-is-forced-to-let-go-and-he-is-blown-away. He-luckily-lands-inside-a-horn-on-top-of-the-truck-where-he-finds Mooseblood #who-was-blown-into-the-same-place) MOOSEBLOOD: Whassup #bee-boy? BARRY: Hey #Blood. (Fast-forward-in-time-and-we-see-that-Barry-is-deep-in-conversation-with Mooseblood.-They-have-been-sitting-in-this-truck-for-a-while) BARRY: ...Just-a-row-of-honey-jars #as-far-as-the-eye-could-see. MOOSEBLOOD: Wow! BARRY: I-assume-wherever-this-truck-goes is-where-they're-getting-it. -: I-mean #that-honey's-ours. MOOSEBLOOD: --Bees-hang-tight. BARRY: --We're-all-jammed-in. -: It's-a-close-community. MOOSEBLOOD: Not-us #man.-We-on-our-own. Every-mosquito-on-his-own. BARRY: --What-if-you-get-in-trouble? MOOSEBLOOD: --You-a-mosquito #you-in-trouble. -: Nobody-likes-us.-They-just-smack. See-a-mosquito #smack #smack! BARRY: At-least-you're-out-in-the-world. You-must-meet-girls. MOOSEBLOOD: Mosquito-girls-try-to-trade-up #get-with-a-moth #dragonfly. -: Mosquito-girl-don't-want-no-mosquito. (An-ambulance-passes-by-and-it-has-a-blood-donation-sign-on-it) You-got-to-be-kidding-me! -: Mooseblood's-about-to-leave the-building!-So-long #bee! (Mooseblood-leaves-and-flies-onto-the-window-of-the-ambulance-where-there are-other-mosquito's-hanging-out) -: --Hey #guys! OTHER-MOSQUITO: --Mooseblood! MOOSEBLOOD: I-knew-I'd-catch-y'all-down-here. Did-you-bring-your-crazy-straw? (The-truck-goes-out-of-view-and-Barry-notices-that-the-truck-he's-on-is pulling-into-a-camp-of-some-sort) TRUCK-DRIVER: We-throw-it-in-jars #slap-a-label-on-it #and-it's-pretty-much-pure-profit. (Barry-flies-out) BARRY: What-is-this-place? BEEKEEPER-1#: A-bee's-got-a-brain the-size-of-a-pinhead. BEEKEEPER-#2: They-are-pinheads! -: Pinhead. -: --Check-out-the-new-smoker. BEEKEEPER-#1: --Oh #sweet.-That's-the-one-you-want. -: The-Thomas-3000! BARRY: Smoker? BEEKEEPER-#1: Ninety-puffs-a-minute #semi-automatic. Twice-the-nicotine #all-the-tar. -: A-couple-breaths-of-this knocks-them-right-out. BEEKEEPER-#2: They-make-the-honey #and-we-make-the-money. BARRY: 'They-make-the-honey #and-we-make-the-money'? (The-Beekeeper-sprays-hundreds-of-cheap-miniature-apartments-with-the smoker.-The-bees-are-fainting-or-passing-out) Oh #my! -: What's-going-on?-Are-you-OK? (Barry-flies-into-one-of-the-apartment-and-helps-a-Bee-couple-get-off-the ground.-They-are-coughing-and-its-hard-for-them-to-stand) BEE-IN-APARTMENT: Yeah.-It-doesn't-last-too-long. BARRY: Do-you-know-you're in-a-fake-hive-with-fake-walls? BEE-IN-APPARTMENT: Our-queen-was-moved-here. We-had-no-choice. (The-apartment-room-is-completely-empty-except-for-a-photo-on-the-wall-of the-'queen'-who-is-obviously-a-man-in-women's-clothes) BARRY: This-is-your-queen? That's-a-man-in-women's-clothes! -: That's-a-drag-queen! -: What-is-this? (Barry-flies-out-and-he-discovers-that-there-are-hundreds-of-these structures #each-housing-thousands-of-Bees) Oh #no! -: There's-hundreds-of-them! (Barry-takes-out-his-camera-and-takes-pictures-of-these-Bee-work-camps.-The beekeepers-look-very-evil-in-these-depictions) Bee-honey. -: Our-honey-is-being-brazenly-stolen on-a-massive-scale! -: This-is-worse-than-anything-bears have-done!-I-intend-to-do-something. (Flash-forward-in-time-and-Barry-is-showing-these-pictures-to-his-parents) JANET: Oh #Barry #stop. MARTIN: Who-told-you-humans-are-taking our-honey?-That's-a-rumor. BARRY: Do-these-look-like-rumors? (Holds-up-the-pictures) UNCLE-CARL: That's-a-conspiracy-theory. These-are-obviously-doctored-photos. JANET: How-did-you-get-mixed-up-in-this? ADAM: He's-been-talking-to-humans. JANET: --What? MARTIN: --Talking-to-humans?! ADAM: He-has-a-human-girlfriend. And-they-make-out! JANET: Make-out?-Barry! BARRY: We-do-not. ADAM: --You-wish-you-could. MARTIN: --Whose-side-are-you-on? BARRY: The-bees! UNCLE-CARL: (He-has-been-sitting-in-the-back-of-the-room-this-entire-time) I-dated-a-cricket-once-in-San-Antonio. Those-crazy-legs-kept-me-up-all-night. JANET: Barry #this-is-what-you-want to-do-with-your-life? BARRY: I-want-to-do-it-for-all-our-lives. Nobody-works-harder-than-bees! -: Dad #I-remember-you coming-home-so-overworked -: your-hands-were-still-stirring. You-couldn't-stop. JANET: I-remember-that. BARRY: What-right-do-they-have-to-our-honey? -: We-live-on-two-cups-a-year.-They-put-it in-lip-balm-for-no-reason-whatsoever! ADAM: Even-if-it's-true #what-can-one-bee-do? BARRY: Sting-them-where-it-really-hurts. MARTIN: In-the-face!-The-eye! -: --That-would-hurt. BARRY: --No. MARTIN: Up-the-nose?-That's-a-killer. BARRY: There's-only-one-place-you-can-sting the-humans #one-place-where-it-matters. (Flash-forward-a-bit-in-time-and-we-are-watching-the-Bee-News) BEE-NEWS-NARRATOR: Hive-at-Five #the-hive's-only full-hour-action-news-source. BEE-PROTESTOR: No-more-bee-beards! BEE-NEWS-NARRATOR: With-Bob-Bumble-at-the-anchor-desk. -: Weather-with-Storm-Stinger. -: Sports-with-Buzz-Larvi. -: And-Jeanette-Chung. BOB-BUMBLE: --Good-evening.-I'm-Bob-Bumble. JEANETTE-CHUNG: --And-I'm-Jeanette-Chung. BOB-BUMBLE: A-tri-county-bee #Barry-Benson #: intends-to-sue-the-human-race for-stealing-our-honey #: packaging-it-and-profiting from-it-illegally! JEANETTE-CHUNG: Tomorrow-night-on-Bee-Larry-King #: we'll-have-three-former-queens-here-in our-studio #discussing-their-new-book #: Classy-Ladies #out-this-week-on-Hexagon. (The-scene-changes-to-an-interview-on-the-news-with-Bee-version-of-Larry King-and-Barry) BEE-LARRY-KING: Tonight-we're-talking-to-Barry-Benson. -: Did-you-ever-think #'I'm-a-kid from-the-hive.-I-can't-do-this'? BARRY: Bees-have-never-been-afraid to-change-the-world. -: What-about-Bee-Columbus? Bee-Gandhi?-Bejesus? BEE-LARRY-KING: Where-I'm-from #we'd-never-sue-humans. -: We-were-thinking of-stickball-or-candy-stores. BARRY: How-old-are-you? BEE-LARRY-KING: The-bee-community is-supporting-you-in-this-case #: which-will-be-the-trial of-the-bee-century. BARRY: You-know #they-have-a-Larry-King in-the-human-world-too. BEE-LARRY-KING: It's-a-common-name.-Next-week... BARRY: He-looks-like-you-and-has-a-show and-suspenders-and-colored-dots... BEE-LARRY-KING: Next-week... BARRY: Glasses #quotes-on-the-bottom-from-the guest-even-though-you-just-heard-'em. BEE-LARRY-KING: Bear-Week-next-week! They're-scary #hairy-and-here #live. (Bee-Larry-King-gets-annoyed-and-flies-away-offscreen) BARRY: Always-leans-forward #pointy-shoulders #squinty-eyes #very-Jewish. (Flash-forward-in-time.-We-see-Vanessa-enter-and-Ken-enters-behind-her. They-are-arguing) KEN: In-tennis #you-attack at-the-point-of-weakness! VANESSA: It-was-my-grandmother #Ken.-She's-81. KEN== Honey #her-backhand's-a-joke! I'm-not-gonna-take-advantage-of-that? BARRY: (To-Ken) Quiet #please. Actual-work-going-on-here. KEN: (Pointing-at-Barry) --Is-that-that-same-bee? VANESSA: --Yes #it-is! -: I'm-helping-him-sue-the-human-race. BARRY: --Hello. KEN: --Hello #bee. VANESSA: This-is-Ken. BARRY: (Recalling-the-'Winter-Boots'-incident-earlier) Yeah #I-remember-you.-Timberland #size ten-and-a-half.-Vibram-sole #I-believe. KEN: (To-Vanessa) Why-does-he-talk-again? VANESSA: Listen #you-better-go 'cause-we're-really-busy-working. KEN: But-it's-our-yogurt-night! VANESSA: (Holding-door-open-for-Ken) Bye-bye. KEN: (Yelling) Why-is-yogurt-night-so-difficult?! (Ken-leaves-and-Vanessa-walks-over-to-Barry.-His-workplace-is-a-mess) VANESSA: You-poor-thing. You-two-have-been-at-this-for-hours! BARRY: Yes #and-Adam-here has-been-a-huge-help. ADAM: --Frosting... --How-many-sugars? -==BARRY== Just-one.-I-try-not to-use-the-competition. -: So-why-are-you-helping-me? VANESSA: Bees-have-good-qualities. -: And-it-takes-my-mind-off-the-shop. -: Instead-of-flowers #people are-giving-balloon-bouquets-now. BARRY: Those-are-great #if-you're-three. VANESSA: And-artificial-flowers. BARRY: --Oh #those-just-get-me-psychotic! VANESSA: --Yeah #me-too. -: BARRY: Bent-stingers #pointless-pollination. ADAM: Bees-must-hate-those-fake-things! -: Nothing-worse than-a-daffodil-that's-had-work-done. -: Maybe-this-could-make-up for-it-a-little-bit. VANESSA: --This-lawsuit's-a-pretty-big-deal. BARRY: --I-guess. ADAM: You-sure-you-want-to-go-through-with-it? BARRY: Am-I-sure?-When-I'm-done-with the-humans #they-won't-be-able -: to-say #'Honey #I'm-home #' without-paying-a-royalty! (Flash-forward-in-time-and-we-are-watching-the-human-news.-The-camera-shows a-crowd-outside-a-courthouse) NEWS-REPORTER: It's-an-incredible-scene here-in-downtown-Manhattan #: where-the-world-anxiously-waits #because-for-the-first-time-in-history #: we-will-hear-for-ourselves if-a-honeybee-can-actually-speak. (We-are-no-longer-watching-through-a-news-camera) ADAM: What-have-we-gotten-into-here #Barry? BARRY: It's-pretty-big #isn't-it? ADAM== (Looking-at-the-hundreds-of-people-around-the-courthouse) I-can't-believe-how-many-humans don't-work-during-the-day. BARRY: You-think-billion-dollar-multinational food-companies-have-good-lawyers? SECURITY-GUARD: Everybody-needs-to-stay behind-the-barricade. (A-limousine-drives-up-and-a-fat-man #Layton-Montgomery #a-honey-industry owner-gets-out-and-walks-past-Barry) ADAM: --What's-the-matter? BARRY: --I-don't-know #I-just-got-a-chill. (Fast-forward-in-time-and-everyone-is-in-the-court) MONTGOMERY: Well #if-it-isn't-the-bee-team. (To-Honey-Industry-lawyers) You-boys-work-on-this? MAN: All-rise!-The-Honorable Judge-Bumbleton-presiding. JUDGE-BUMBLETON: All-right.-Case-number-4475 #: Superior-Court-of-New-York #Barry-Bee-Benson-v.-the-Honey-Industry -: is-now-in-session. -: Mr.-Montgomery #you're-representing the-five-food-companies-collectively? MONTGOMERY: A-privilege. JUDGE-BUMBLETON: Mr.-Benson...-you're-representing all-the-bees-of-the-world? (Everyone-looks-closely #they-are-waiting-to-see-if-a-Bee-can-really-talk) (Barry-makes-several-buzzing-sounds-to-sound-like-a-Bee) BARRY: I'm-kidding.-Yes #Your-Honor #we're-ready-to-proceed. JUDGE-BUMBLBETON: Mr.-Montgomery #your-opening-statement #please. MONTGOMERY: Ladies-and-gentlemen-of-the-jury #: my-grandmother-was-a-simple-woman. -: Born-on-a-farm #she-believed it-was-man's-divine-right -: to-benefit-from-the-bounty of-nature-God-put-before-us. -: If-we-lived-in-the-topsy-turvy-world Mr.-Benson-imagines #: just-think-of-what-would-it-mean. -: I-would-have-to-negotiate with-the-silkworm -: for-the-elastic-in-my-britches! -: Talking-bee! (Montgomery-walks-over-and-looks-closely-at-Barry) -: How-do-we-know-this-isn't-some-sort-of -: holographic-motion-picture-capture Hollywood-wizardry? -: They-could-be-using-laser-beams! -: Robotics!-Ventriloquism! Cloning!-For-all-we-know #: he-could-be-on-steroids! JUDGE-BUMBLETON: Mr.-Benson? BARRY: Ladies-and-gentlemen #there's-no-trickery-here. -: I'm-just-an-ordinary-bee. Honey's-pretty-important-to-me. -: It's-important-to-all-bees. We-invented-it! -: We-make-it.-And-we-protect-it with-our-lives. -: Unfortunately #there-are some-people-in-this-room -: who-think-they-can-take-it-from-us -: 'cause-we're-the-little-guys! I'm-hoping-that #after-this-is-all-over #: you'll-see-how #by-taking-our-honey #you-not-only-take-everything-we-have -: but-everything-we-are! JANET== (To-Martin) I-wish-he'd-dress-like-that all-the-time.-So-nice! JUDGE-BUMBLETON: Call-your-first-witness. BARRY: So #Mr.-Klauss-Vanderhayden of-Honey-Farms #big-company-you-have. KLAUSS-VANDERHAYDEN: I-suppose-so. BARRY: I-see-you-also-own Honeyburton-and-Honron! KLAUSS: Yes #they-provide-beekeepers for-our-farms. BARRY: Beekeeper.-I-find-that to-be-a-very-disturbing-term. -: I-don't-imagine-you-employ any-bee-free-ers #do-you? KLAUSS: (Quietly) --No. BARRY: --I-couldn't-hear-you. KLAUSS: --No. BARRY: --No. -: Because-you-don't-free-bees. You-keep-bees.-Not-only-that #: it-seems-you-thought-a-bear-would-be an-appropriate-image-for-a-jar-of-honey. KLAUSS: They're-very-lovable-creatures. -: Yogi-Bear #Fozzie-Bear #Build-A-Bear. BARRY: You-mean-like-this? (The-bear-from-Over-The-Hedge-barges-in-through-the-back-door-and-it-is roaring-and-standing-on-its-hind-legs.-It-is-thrashing-its-claws-and-people are-screaming.-It-is-being-held-back-by-a-guard-who-has-the-bear-on-a chain) -: (Pointing-to-the-roaring-bear) Bears-kill-bees! -: How'd-you-like-his-head-crashing through-your-living-room?! -: Biting-into-your-couch! Spitting-out-your-throw-pillows! JUDGE-BUMBLETON: OK #that's-enough.-Take-him-away. (The-bear-stops-roaring-and-thrashing-and-walks-out) BARRY: So #Mr.-Sting #thank-you-for-being-here. Your-name-intrigues-me. -: --Where-have-I-heard-it-before? MR.-STING: --I-was-with-a-band-called-The-Police. BARRY: But-you've-never-been a-police-officer #have-you? STING: No #I-haven't. BARRY: No #you-haven't.-And-so-here we-have-yet-another-example -: of-bee-culture-casually stolen-by-a-human -: for-nothing-more-than a-prance-about-stage-name. STING: Oh #please. BARRY: Have-you-ever-been-stung #Mr.-Sting? -: Because-I'm-feeling a-little-stung #Sting. -: Or-should-I-say...-Mr.-Gordon-M.-Sumner! MONTGOMERY: That's-not-his-real-name?!-You-idiots! BARRY: Mr.-Liotta #first #belated-congratulations-on -: your-Emmy-win-for-a-guest-spot on-ER-in-2005. RAY-LIOTTA: Thank-you.-Thank-you. BARRY: I-see-from-your-resume that-you're-devilishly-handsome -: with-a-churning-inner-turmoil that's-ready-to-blow. RAY-LIOTTA: I-enjoy-what-I-do.-Is-that-a-crime? BARRY: Not-yet-it-isn't.-But-is-this what-it's-come-to-for-you? -: Exploiting-tiny #helpless-bees so-you-don't -: have-to-rehearse your-part-and-learn-your-lines #sir? RAY-LIOTTA: Watch-it #Benson! I-could-blow-right-now! BARRY: This-isn't-a-goodfella. This-is-a-badfella! (Ray-Liotta-looses-it-and-tries-to-grab-Barry) RAY-LIOTTA: Why-doesn't-someone-just-step-on this-creep #and-we-can-all-go-home?! JUDGE-BUMBLETON: --Order-in-this-court! RAY-LIOTTA: --You're-all-thinking-it! (Judge-Bumbleton-starts-banging-her-gavel) JUDGE-BUMBLETON: Order!-Order #I-say! RAY-LIOTTA: --Say-it! MAN: --Mr.-Liotta #please-sit-down! (We-see-a-montage-of-magazines-which-feature-the-court-case) (Flash-forward-in-time-and-Barry-is-back-home-with-Vanessa) BARRY: I-think-it-was-awfully-nice of-that-bear-to-pitch-in-like-that. VANESSA: I-think-the-jury's-on-our-side. BARRY: Are-we-doing-everything-right #you-know #legally? VANESSA: I'm-a-florist. BARRY: Right.-Well #here's-to-a-great-team. VANESSA: To-a-great-team! (Ken-walks-in-from-work.-He-sees-Barry-and-he-looks-upset-when-he-sees Barry-clinking-his-glass-with-Vanessa) KEN: Well #hello. VANESSA: --Oh #Ken! BARRY: --Hello! VANESSA: I-didn't-think-you-were-coming. -: No #I-was-just-late. I-tried-to-call #but... (Ken-holds-up-his-phone-and-flips-it-open.-The-phone-has-no-charge) ...the-battery... VANESSA: I-didn't-want-all-this-to-go-to-waste #so-I-called-Barry.-Luckily #he-was-free. KEN: Oh #that-was-lucky. (Ken-sits-down-at-the-table-across-from-Barry-and-Vanessa-leaves-the-room) VANESSA: There's-a-little-left. I-could-heat-it-up. KEN: (Not-taking-his-eyes-off-Barry) Yeah #heat-it-up #sure #whatever. BARRY: So-I-hear-you're-quite-a-tennis-player. -: I'm-not-much-for-the-game-myself. The-ball's-a-little-grabby. KEN: That's-where-I-usually-sit. Right... (Points-to-where-Barry-is-sitting) there. VANESSA: (Calling-from-other-room) Ken #Barry-was-looking-at-your-resume #: and-he-agreed-with-me-that-eating-with chopsticks-isn't-really-a-special-skill. KEN: (To-Barry) You-think-I-don't-see-what-you're-doing? BARRY: I-know-how-hard-it-is-to-find the-right-job.-We-have-that-in-common. KEN: Do-we? BARRY: Bees-have-100-percent-employment #but-we-do-jobs-like-taking-the-crud-out. KEN: (Menacingly) That's-just-what I-was-thinking-about-doing. (Ken-reaches-for-a-fork-on-the-table-but-knocks-if-on-the-floor.-He-goes-to pick-it-up) VANESSA: Ken #I-let-Barry-borrow-your-razor for-his-fuzz.-I-hope-that-was-all-right. (Ken-quickly-rises-back-up-after-hearing-this-but-hits-his-head-on-the table-and-yells) BARRY: I'm-going-to-drain-the-old-stinger. KEN: Yeah #you-do-that. (Barry-flies-past-Ken-to-get-to-the-bathroom-and-Ken-freaks-out #splashing some-of-the-wine-he-was-using-to-cool-his-head-in-his-eyes.-He-yells-in anger) (Barry-looks-at-the-magazines-featuring-his-victories-in-court) BARRY: Look-at-that. (Barry-flies-into-the-bathroom) (He-puts-his-hand-on-his-head-but-this-makes-hurts-him-and-makes-him-even madder.-He-yells-again) (Barry-is-washing-his-hands-in-the-sink-but-then-Ken-walks-in) KEN: You-know #you-know-I've-just-about-had-it (Closes-bathroom-door-behind-him) with-your-little-mind-games. (Ken-is-menacingly-rolling-up-a-magazine) BARRY: (Backing-away) --What's-that? KEN: --Italian-Vogue. BARRY: Mamma-mia #that's-a-lot-of-pages. KEN: It's-a-lot-of-ads. BARRY: Remember-what-Van-said #why-is your-life-more-valuable-than-mine? KEN: That's-funny #I-just-can't-seem-to-recall-that! (Ken-smashes-everything-off-the-sink-with-the-magazine-and-Barry-narrowly escapes) (Ken-follows-Barry-around-and-tries-to-hit-him-with-the-magazine-but-he keeps-missing) (Ken-gets-a-spray-bottle) -: I-think-something-stinks-in-here! BARRY: (Enjoying-the-spray) I-love-the-smell-of-flowers. (Ken-holds-a-lighter-in-front-of-the-spray-bottle) KEN: How-do-you-like-the-smell-of-flames?! BARRY: Not-as-much. (Ken-fires-his-make-shift-flamethrower-but-misses-Barry #burning-the bathroom.-He-torches-the-whole-room-but-looses-his-footing-and-falls-into the-bathtub.-After-getting-hit-in-the-head-by-falling-objects-3-times-he picks-up-the-shower-head #revealing-a-Water-bug-hiding-under-it) WATER-BUG: Water-bug!-Not-taking-sides! (Barry-gets-up-out-of-a-pile-of-bathroom-supplies-and-he-is-wearing-a chapstick-hat) BARRY: Ken #I'm-wearing-a-Chapstick-hat! This-is-pathetic! (Ken-switches-the-shower-head-to-lethal) KEN: I've-got-issues! (Ken-sprays-Barry-with-the-shower-head-and-he-crash-lands-into-the-toilet) (Ken-menacingly-looks-down-into-the-toilet-at-Barry) Well #well #well #a-royal-flush! BARRY: --You're-bluffing. KEN: --Am-I? (flushes-toilet) (Barry-grabs-a-chapstick-from-the-toilet-seat-and-uses-it-to-surf-in-the flushing-toilet) BARRY: Surf's-up #dude! (Barry-flies-out-of-the-toilet-on-the-chapstick-and-sprays-Ken's-face-with the-toilet-water) -: EW #Poo-water! BARRY: That-bowl-is-gnarly. KEN: (Aiming-a-toilet-cleaner-at-Barry) Except-for-those-dirty-yellow-rings! (Barry-cowers-and-covers-his-head-and-Vanessa-runs-in-and-takes-the-toilet cleaner-from-Ken-just-before-he-hits-Barry) VANESSA: Kenneth!-What-are-you-doing?! KEN== (Leaning-towards-Barry) You-know #I-don't-even-like-honey! I-don't-eat-it! VANESSA: We-need-to-talk! (Vanessa-pulls-Ken-out-of-the-bathroom) -: He's-just-a-little-bee! -: And-he-happens-to-be the-nicest-bee-I've-met-in-a-long-time! KEN: Long-time?-What-are-you-talking-about?! Are-there-other-bugs-in-your-life? VANESSA: No #but-there-are-other-things-bugging me-in-life.-And-you're-one-of-them! KEN: Fine!-Talking-bees #no-yogurt-night... -: My-nerves-are-fried-from-riding on-this-emotional-roller-coaster! VANESSA: Goodbye #Ken. (Ken-huffs-and-walks-out-and-slams-the-door.-But-suddenly-he-walks-back-in and-stares-at-Barry) -: And-for-your-information #I-prefer-sugar-free #artificial sweeteners-MADE-BY-MAN! (Ken-leaves-again-and-Vanessa-leans-in-towards-Barry) VANESSA: I'm-sorry-about-all-that. (Ken-walks-back-in-again) KEN: I-know-it's-got an-aftertaste!-I-LIKE-IT! (Ken-leaves-for-the-last-time) VANESSA: I-always-felt-there-was-some-kind of-barrier-between-Ken-and-me. -: I-couldn't-overcome-it. Oh #well. -: Are-you-OK-for-the-trial? BARRY: I-believe-Mr.-Montgomery is-about-out-of-ideas. (Flash-forward-in-time-and-Barry #Adam #and-Vanessa-are-back-in-court) MONTGOMERY-- We-would-like-to-call Mr.-Barry-Benson-Bee-to-the-stand. ADAM: Good-idea!-You-can-really-see-why-he's considered-one-of-the-best-lawyers... (Barry-stares-at-Adam) ...Yeah. LAWYER: Layton #you've gotta-weave-some-magic with-this-jury #or-it's-gonna-be-all-over. MONTGOMERY: Don't-worry.-The-only-thing-I-have to-do-to-turn-this-jury-around -: is-to-remind-them of-what-they-don't-like-about-bees. (To-lawyer) --You-got-the-tweezers? LAWYER: --Are-you-allergic? MONTGOMERY: Only-to-losing #son.-Only-to-losing. -: Mr.-Benson-Bee #I'll-ask-you what-I-think-we'd-all-like-to-know. -: What-exactly-is-your-relationship (Points-to-Vanessa) -: to-that-woman? BARRY: We're-friends. MONTGOMERY: --Good-friends? BARRY: --Yes. MONTGOMERY: How-good?-Do-you-live-together? ADAM: Wait-a-minute... -: MONTGOMERY: Are-you-her-little... -: ...bedbug? (Adam's-stinger-starts-vibrating.-He-is-agitated) I've-seen-a-bee-documentary-or-two. From-what-I-understand #: doesn't-your-queen-give-birth to-all-the-bee-children? BARRY: --Yeah #but... MONTGOMERY: (Pointing-at-Janet-and-Martin) --So-those-aren't-your-real-parents! JANET: --Oh #Barry... BARRY: --Yes #they-are! ADAM: Hold-me-back! (Vanessa-tries-to-hold-Adam-back.-He-wants-to-sting-Montgomery) MONTGOMERY: You're-an-illegitimate-bee #aren't-you #Benson? ADAM: He's-denouncing-bees! MONTGOMERY: Don't-y'all-date-your-cousins? (Montgomery-leans-over-on-the-jury-stand-and-stares-at-Adam) VANESSA: --Objection! (Vanessa-raises-her-hand-to-object-but-Adam-gets-free.-He-flies-straight-at Montgomery) =ADAM: --I'm-going-to-pincushion-this-guy! BARRY: Adam #don't!-It's-what-he-wants! (Adam-stings-Montgomery-in-the-butt-and-he-starts-thrashing-around) MONTGOMERY: Oh #I'm-hit!! -: Oh #lordy #I-am-hit! JUDGE-BUMBLETON: (Banging-gavel) Order!-Order! MONTGOMERY: (Overreacting) The-venom!-The-venom is-coursing-through-my-veins! -: I-have-been-felled by-a-winged-beast-of-destruction! -: You-see?-You-can't-treat-them like-equals!-They're-striped-savages! -: Stinging's-the-only-thing they-know!-It's-their-way! BARRY: --Adam #stay-with-me. ADAM: --I-can't-feel-my-legs. MONTGOMERY: (Overreacting-and-throwing-his-body-around-the-room) What-angel-of-mercy will-come-forward-to-suck-the-poison -: from-my-heaving-buttocks? JUDGE-BUMLBETON: I-will-have-order-in-this-court.-Order! -: Order #please! (Flash-forward-in-time-and-we-see-a-human-news-reporter) NEWS-REPORTER: The-case-of-the-honeybees versus-the-human-race -: took-a-pointed-turn-against-the-bees -: yesterday-when-one-of-their-legal team-stung-Layton-T.-Montgomery. (Adam-is-laying-in-a-hospital-bed-and-Barry-flies-in-to-see-him) BARRY: --Hey #buddy. ADAM: --Hey. BARRY: --Is-there-much-pain? ADAM: --Yeah. -: I... -: I-blew-the-whole-case #didn't-I? BARRY: It-doesn't-matter.-What-matters-is you're-alive.-You-could-have-died. ADAM: I'd-be-better-off-dead.-Look-at-me. (A-small-plastic-sword-is-replaced-as-Adam's-stinger) They-got-it-from-the-cafeteria downstairs #in-a-tuna-sandwich. -: Look #there's a-little-celery-still-on-it. (Flicks-off-the-celery-and-sighs) BARRY: What-was-it-like-to-sting-someone? ADAM: I-can't-explain-it.-It-was-all... -: All-adrenaline-and-then... and-then-ecstasy! BARRY: ...All-right. ADAM: You-think-it-was-all-a-trap? BARRY: Of-course.-I'm-sorry. I-flew-us-right-into-this. -: What-were-we-thinking?-Look-at-us.-We're just-a-couple-of-bugs-in-this-world. ADAM: What-will-the-humans-do-to-us if-they-win? BARRY: I-don't-know. ADAM: I-hear-they-put-the-roaches-in-motels. That-doesn't-sound-so-bad. BARRY: Adam #they-check-in #but-they-don't-check-out! ADAM: Oh #my. (Coughs) Could-you-get-a-nurse to-close-that-window? BARRY: --Why? ADAM: --The-smoke. (We-can-see-that-two-humans-are-smoking-cigarettes-outside) -: Bees-don't-smoke. BARRY: Right.-Bees-don't-smoke. -: Bees-don't-smoke! But-some-bees-are-smoking. -: That's-it!-That's-our-case! ADAM: It-is?-It's-not-over? BARRY: Get-dressed.-I've-gotta-go-somewhere. -: Get-back-to-the-court-and-stall. Stall-any-way-you-can. (Flash-forward-in-time-and-Adam-is-making-a-paper-boat-in-the-courtroom) ADAM: And-assuming-you've-done-step-29-correctly #you're-ready-for-the-tub! (We-see-that-the-jury-have-each-made-their-own-paper-boats-after-being taught-how-by-Adam.-They-all-look-confused) JUDGE-BUMBLETON: Mr.-Flayman. ADAM: Yes?-Yes #Your-Honor! JUDGE-BUMBLETON: Where-is-the-rest-of-your-team? ADAM: (Continues-stalling) Well #Your-Honor #it's-interesting. -: Bees-are-trained-to-fly-haphazardly #: and-as-a-result #we-don't-make-very-good-time. -: I-actually-heard-a-funny-story-about... MONTGOMERY: Your-Honor #haven't-these-ridiculous-bugs -: taken-up-enough of-this-court's-valuable-time? -: How-much-longer-will-we-allow these-absurd-shenanigans-to-go-on? -: They-have-presented-no-compelling evidence-to-support-their-charges -: against-my-clients #who-run-legitimate-businesses. -: I-move-for-a-complete-dismissal of-this-entire-case! JUDGE-BUMBLETON: Mr.-Flayman #I'm-afraid-I'm-going -: to-have-to-consider Mr.-Montgomery's-motion. ADAM: But-you-can't!-We-have-a-terrific-case. MONTGOMERY: Where-is-your-proof? Where-is-the-evidence? -: Show-me-the-smoking-gun! BARRY: (Barry-flies-in-through-the-door) Hold-it #Your-Honor! You-want-a-smoking-gun? -: Here-is-your-smoking-gun. (Vanessa-walks-in-holding-a-bee-smoker.-She-sets-it-down-on-the-Judge's podium) JUDGE-BUMBLETON: What-is-that? BARRY: It's-a-bee-smoker! MONTGOMERY: (Picks-up-smoker) What #this? This-harmless-little-contraption? -: This-couldn't-hurt-a-fly #let-alone-a-bee. (Montgomery-accidentally-fires-it-at-the-bees-in-the-crowd-and-they-faint and-cough) (Dozens-of-reporters-start-taking-pictures-of-the-suffering-bees) BARRY: Look-at-what-has-happened -: to-bees-who-have-never-been-asked #'Smoking-or-non?' -: Is-this-what-nature-intended-for-us? -: To-be-forcibly-addicted to-smoke-machines -: and-man-made-wooden-slat-work-camps? -: Living-out-our-lives-as-honey-slaves to-the-white-man? (Barry-points-to-the-honey-industry-owners.-One-of-them-is-an-African American-so-he-awkwardly-separates-himself-from-the-others) LAWYER: --What-are-we-gonna-do? --He's-playing-the-species-card. BARRY: Ladies-and-gentlemen #please #free-these-bees! ADAM-AND-VANESSA: Free-the-bees!-Free-the-bees! BEES-IN-CROWD: Free-the-bees! HUMAN-JURY: Free-the-bees!-Free-the-bees! JUDGE-BUMBLETON: The-court-finds-in-favor-of-the-bees! BARRY: Vanessa #we-won! VANESSA: I-knew-you-could-do-it!-High-five! (Vanessa-hits-Barry-hard-because-her-hand-is-too-big) -: Sorry. BARRY: (Overjoyed) I'm-OK!-You-know-what-this-means? -: All-the-honey will-finally-belong-to-the-bees. -: Now-we-won't-have to-work-so-hard-all-the-time. MONTGOMERY: This-is-an-unholy-perversion of-the-balance-of-nature #Benson. -: You'll-regret-this. (Montgomery-leaves-and-Barry-goes-outside-the-courtroom.-Several-reporters start-asking-Barry-questions) REPORTER-1#: Barry #how-much-honey-is-out-there? BARRY: All-right.-One-at-a-time. REPORTER-2#: Barry #who-are-you-wearing? BARRY: My-sweater-is-Ralph-Lauren #and-I-have-no-pants. (Barry-flies-outside-with-the-paparazzi-and-Adam-and-Vanessa-stay-back) ADAM: (To-Vanessa) --What-if-Montgomery's-right? Vanessa: --What-do-you-mean? ADAM: We've-been-living-the-bee-way a-long-time #27-million-years. (Flash-forward-in-time-and-Barry-is-talking-to-a-man) BUSINESS-MAN: Congratulations-on-your-victory. What-will-you-demand-as-a-settlement? BARRY: First #we'll-demand-a-complete-shutdown of-all-bee-work-camps. (As-Barry-is-talking-we-see-a-montage-of-men-putting-'closed'-tape-over-the work-camps-and-freeing-the-bees-in-the-crappy-apartments) Then-we-want-back-the-honey that-was-ours-to-begin-with #: every-last-drop. (Men-in-suits-are-pushing-all-the-honey-of-the-aisle-and-into-carts) We-demand-an-end-to-the-glorification of-the-bear-as-anything-more (We-see-a-statue-of-a-bear-shaped-honey-container-being-pulled-down-by bees) than-a-filthy #smelly #bad-breath-stink-machine. -: We're-all-aware of-what-they-do-in-the-woods. (We-see-Winnie-the-Pooh-sharing-his-honey-with-Piglet-in-the-cross-hairs-of a-high-tech-sniper-rifle) BARRY: (Looking-through-binoculars) Wait-for-my-signal. -: Take-him-out. (Winnie-gets-hit-by-a-tranquilizer-dart-and-dramatically-falls-off-the-log he-was-standing-on #his-tongue-hanging-out.-Piglet-looks-at-Pooh-in-fear and-the-Sniper-takes-the-honey.) SNIPER: He'll-have-nausea for-a-few-hours #then-he'll-be-fine. (Flash-forward-in-time) BARRY: And-we-will-no-longer-tolerate bee-negative-nicknames... (Mr.-Sting-is-sitting-at-home-until-he-is-taken-out-of-his-house-by-the-men in-suits) STING: But-it's-just-a-prance-about-stage-name! BARRY: ...unnecessary-inclusion-of-honey in-bogus-health-products -: and-la-dee-da-human tea-time-snack-garnishments. (An-old-lady-is-mixing-honey-into-her-tea-but-suddenly-men-in-suits-smash her-face-down-on-the-table-and-take-the-honey) OLD-LADY: Can't-breathe. (A-honey-truck-pulls-up-to-Barry's-hive) WORKER: Bring-it-in #boys! -: Hold-it-right-there!-Good. -: Tap-it. (Tons-of-honey-is-being-pumped-into-the-hive's-storage) BEE-WORKER-1#: (Honey-overflows-from-the-cup) Mr.-Buzzwell #we-just-passed-three-cups #and-there's-gallons-more-coming! -: --I-think-we-need-to-shut-down! =BEE-WORKER-#2= --Shut-down?-We've-never-shut-down. -: Shut-down-honey-production! DEAN-BUZZWELL: Stop-making-honey! (The-bees-all-leave-their-stations.-Two-bees-run-into-a-room-and-they-put the-keys-into-a-machine) Turn-your-key #sir! (Two-worker-bees-dramatically-turn-their-keys #which-opens-the-button-which they-press #shutting-down-the-honey-making-machines.-This-is-the-first-time this-has-ever-happened) BEE: ...What-do-we-do-now? (Flash-forward-in-time-and-a-Bee-is-about-to-jump-into-a-pool-full-of honey) Cannonball! (The-bee-gets-stuck-in-the-honey-and-we-get-a-short-montage-of-Bees-leaving work) (We-see-the-Pollen-Jocks-flying-but-one-of-them-gets-a-call-on-his-antenna) LOU-LU-DUVA: (Through-'phone') We're-shutting-honey-production! -: Mission-abort. POLLEN-JOCK-#1: Aborting-pollination-and-nectar-detail. Returning-to-base. (The-Pollen-Jocks-fly-back-to-the-hive) (We-get-a-time-lapse-of-Central-Park-slowly-wilting-away-as-the-bees-all relax) BARRY: Adam #you-wouldn't-believe how-much-honey-was-out-there. ADAM: Oh #yeah? BARRY: What's-going-on?-Where-is-everybody? (The-entire-street-is-deserted) -: --Are-they-out-celebrating? ADAM: --They're-home. -: They-don't-know-what-to-do. Laying-out #sleeping-in. -: I-heard-your-Uncle-Carl-was-on-his-way to-San-Antonio-with-a-cricket. BARRY: At-least-we-got-our-honey-back. ADAM: Sometimes-I-think #so-what-if-humans liked-our-honey?-Who-wouldn't? -: It's-the-greatest-thing-in-the-world! I-was-excited-to-be-part-of-making-it. -: This-was-my-new-desk.-This-was-my new-job.-I-wanted-to-do-it-really-well. -: And-now... -: Now-I-can't. (Flash-forward-in-time-and-Barry-is-talking-to-Vanessa) BARRY: I-don't-understand why-they're-not-happy. -: I-thought-their-lives-would-be-better! -: They're-doing-nothing.-It's-amazing. Honey-really-changes-people. VANESSA: You-don't-have-any-idea what's-going-on #do-you? BARRY: --What-did-you-want-to-show-me? (Vanessa-takes-Barry-to-the-rooftop-where-they-first-had-coffee-and-points to-her-store) VANESSA: --This. (Points-at-her-flowers.-They-are-all-grey-and-wilting) BARRY: What-happened-here? VANESSA: That-is-not-the-half-of-it. (Small-flash-forward-in-time-and-Vanessa-and-Barry-are-on-the-roof-of-her store-and-she-points-to-Central-Park) (We-see-that-Central-Park-is-no-longer-green-and-colorful #rather-it-is grey #brown #and-dead-like.-It-is-very-depressing-to-look-at) BARRY: Oh #no.-Oh #my. -: They're-all-wilting. VANESSA: Doesn't-look-very-good #does-it? BARRY: No. VANESSA: And-whose-fault-do-you-think-that-is? BARRY: You-know #I'm-gonna-guess-bees. VANESSA== (Staring-at-Barry) Bees? BARRY: Specifically #me. -: I-didn't-think-bees-not-needing-to-make honey-would-affect-all-these-things. VANESSA: It's-not-just-flowers. Fruits #vegetables #they-all-need-bees. BARRY: That's-our-whole-SAT-test-right-there. VANESSA: Take-away-produce #that-affects the-entire-animal-kingdom. -: And-then #of-course... BARRY: The-human-species? -: So-if-there's-no-more-pollination #: it-could-all-just-go-south-here #couldn't-it? VANESSA: I-know-this-is-also-partly-my-fault. BARRY: How-about-a-suicide-pact? VANESSA: How-do-we-do-it? BARRY: --I'll-sting-you #you-step-on-me. VANESSA: --That-just-kills-you-twice. BARRY: Right #right. VANESSA: Listen #Barry... sorry #but-I-gotta-get-going. (Vanessa-leaves) BARRY: (To-himself) I-had-to-open-my-mouth-and-talk. -: Vanessa? -: Vanessa?-Why-are-you-leaving? Where-are-you-going? (Vanessa-is-getting-into-a-taxi) VANESSA: To-the-final-Tournament-of-Roses-parade in-Pasadena. -: They've-moved-it-to-this-weekend because-all-the-flowers-are-dying. -: It's-the-last-chance I'll-ever-have-to-see-it. BARRY: Vanessa #I-just-wanna-say-I'm-sorry. I-never-meant-it-to-turn-out-like-this. VANESSA: I-know.-Me-neither. (The-taxi-starts-to-drive-away) BARRY: Tournament-of-Roses. Roses-can't-do-sports. -: Wait-a-minute.-Roses.-Roses? -: Roses! -: Vanessa! (Barry-flies-after-the-Taxi) VANESSA: Roses?! -: Barry? (Barry-is-flying-outside-the-window-of-the-taxi) BARRY: --Roses-are-flowers! VANESSA: --Yes #they-are. BARRY: Flowers #bees #pollen! VANESSA: I-know. That's-why-this-is-the-last-parade. BARRY: Maybe-not. Could-you-ask-him-to-slow-down? VANESSA: Could-you-slow-down? (The-taxi-driver-screeches-to-a-stop-and-Barry-keeps-flying-forward) -: Barry! (Barry-flies-back-to-the-window) BARRY: OK #I-made-a-huge-mistake. This-is-a-total-disaster #all-my-fault. VANESSA: Yes #it-kind-of-is. BARRY: I've-ruined-the-planet. I-wanted-to-help-you -: with-the-flower-shop. I've-made-it-worse. VANESSA: Actually #it's-completely-closed-down. BARRY: I-thought-maybe-you-were-remodeling. -: But-I-have-another-idea #and-it's greater-than-my-previous-ideas-combined. VANESSA: I-don't-want-to-hear-it! BARRY: All-right #they-have-the-roses #the-roses-have-the-pollen. -: I-know-every-bee #plant and-flower-bud-in-this-park. -: All-we-gotta-do-is-get-what-they've-got back-here-with-what-we've-got. -: --Bees. VANESSA: --Park. BARRY: --Pollen! VANESSA: --Flowers. BARRY: --Re-pollination! VANESSA: --Across-the-nation! -: Tournament-of-Roses #Pasadena #California. -: They've-got-nothing but-flowers #floats-and-cotton-candy. -: Security-will-be-tight. BARRY: I-have-an-idea. (Flash-forward-in-time.-Vanessa-is-about-to-board-a-plane-which-has-all-the Roses-on-board. VANESSA: Vanessa-Bloome #FTD. (Holds-out-badge) -: Official-floral-business.-It's-real. SECURITY-GUARD: Sorry #ma'am.-Nice-brooch. =VANESSA== Thank-you.-It-was-a-gift. (Barry-is-revealed-to-be-hiding-inside-the-brooch) (Flash-back-in-time-and-Barry-and-Vanessa-are-discussing-their-plan) BARRY: Once-inside #we-just-pick-the-right-float. VANESSA: How-about-The-Princess-and-the-Pea? -: I-could-be-the-princess #and-you-could-be-the-pea! BARRY: Yes #I-got-it. -: --Where-should-I-sit? GUARD: --What-are-you? BARRY: --I-believe-I'm-the-pea. GUARD: --The-pea? VANESSA: It-goes-under-the-mattresses. GUARD: --Not-in-this-fairy-tale #sweetheart. --I'm-getting-the-marshal. VANESSA: You-do-that! This-whole-parade-is-a-fiasco! -: Let's-see-what-this-baby'll-do. (Vanessa-drives-the-float-through-traffic) GUARD: Hey #what-are-you-doing?! BARRY== Then-all-we-do is-blend-in-with-traffic... -: ...without-arousing-suspicion. -: Once-at-the-airport #there's-no-stopping-us. (Flash-forward-in-time-and-Barry-and-Vanessa-are-about-to-get-on-a-plane) SECURITY-GUARD: Stop!-Security. -: --You-and-your-insect-pack-your-float? VANESSA: --Yes. SECURITY-GUARD: Has-it-been in-your-possession-the-entire-time? VANESSA: --Yes. SECURITY-GUARD: Would-you-remove-your-shoes? (To-Barry) --Remove-your-stinger. BARRY: --It's-part-of-me. SECURITY-GUARD: I-know.-Just-having-some-fun. Enjoy-your-flight. (Barry-plotting-with-Vanessa) BARRY: Then-if-we're-lucky #we'll-have just-enough-pollen-to-do-the-job. (Flash-forward-in-time-and-Barry-and-Vanessa-are-flying-on-the-plane) Can-you-believe-how-lucky-we-are?-We have-just-enough-pollen-to-do-the-job! VANESSA: I-think-this-is-gonna-work. BARRY: It's-got-to-work. CAPTAIN-SCOTT: (On-intercom) Attention #passengers #this-is-Captain-Scott. -: We-have-a-bit-of-bad-weather in-New-York. -: It-looks-like-we'll-experience a-couple-hours-delay. VANESSA: Barry #these-are-cut-flowers with-no-water.-They'll-never-make-it. BARRY: I-gotta-get-up-there and-talk-to-them. VANESSA== Be-careful. (Barry-flies-right-outside-the-cockpit-door) BARRY: Can-I-get-help with-the-Sky-Mall-magazine? I'd-like-to-order-the-talking inflatable-nose-and-ear-hair-trimmer. (The-flight-attendant-opens-the-door-and-walks-out-and-Barry-flies-into-the cockpit-unseen) BARRY: Captain #I'm-in-a-real-situation. CAPTAIN-SCOTT: --What'd-you-say #Hal? CO-PILOT-HAL: --Nothing. (Scott-notices-Barry-and-freaks-out) CAPTAIN-SCOTT: Bee! BARRY: No #no #no #Don't-freak-out!-My-entire-species... (Captain-Scott-gets-out-of-his-seat-and-tries-to-suck-Barry-into-a-handheld vacuum) HAL: (To-Scott) What-are-you-doing? (Barry-lands-on-Hals-hair-but-Scott-sees-him.-He-tries-to-suck-up-Barry-but instead-he-sucks-up-Hals-toupee) CAPTAIN-SCOTT: Uh-oh. BARRY: --Wait-a-minute!-I'm-an-attorney! HAL: (Hal-doesn't-know-Barry-is-on-his-head) --Who's-an-attorney? CAPTAIN-SCOTT: Don't-move. (Scott-hits-Hal-in-the-face-with-the-vacuum-in-an-attempt-to-hit-Barry.-Hal is-knocked-out-and-he-falls-on-the-life-raft-button-which-launches-an infalatable-boat-into-Scott #who-gets-knocked-out-and-falls-to-the-floor. They-are-both-uncounscious.) BARRY: (To-himself) Oh #Barry. BARRY: (On-intercom #with-a-Southern-accent) Good-afternoon #passengers. This-is-your-captain. -: Would-a-Miss-Vanessa-Bloome-in-24B please-report-to-the-cockpit? (Vanessa-looks-confused) (Normal-accent) ...And-please-hurry! (Vanessa-opens-the-door-and-sees-the-life-raft-and-the-uncounscious-pilots) VANESSA: What-happened-here? BARRY: I-tried-to-talk-to-them #but then-there-was-a-DustBuster #a-toupee #a-life-raft-exploded. -: Now-one's-bald #one's-in-a-boat #and-they're-both-unconscious! VANESSA: ...Is-that-another-bee-joke? BARRY: --No! -: No-one's-flying-the-plane! BUD-DITCHWATER: (Through-radio-on-plane) This-is-JFK-control-tower #Flight-356. What's-your-status? VANESSA: This-is-Vanessa-Bloome. I'm-a-florist-from-New-York. BUD: Where's-the-pilot? VANESSA: He's-unconscious #and-so-is-the-copilot. BUD: Not-good.-Does-anyone-onboard have-flight-experience? BARRY: As-a-matter-of-fact #there-is. BUD: --Who's-that? BARRY: --Barry-Benson. BUD: From-the-honey-trial?!-Oh #great. BARRY: Vanessa #this-is-nothing-more than-a-big-metal-bee. -: It's-got-giant-wings #huge-engines. VANESSA: I-can't-fly-a-plane. BARRY: --Why-not?-Isn't-John-Travolta-a-pilot? VANESSA: --Yes. BARRY: How-hard-could-it-be? (Vanessa-sits-down-and-flies-for-a-little-bit-but-we-see-lightning-clouds outside-the-window) VANESSA: Wait #Barry! We're-headed-into-some-lightning. (An-ominous-lightning-storm-looms-in-front-of-the-plane) (We-are-now-watching-the-Bee-News) BOB-BUMBLE: This-is-Bob-Bumble.-We-have-some late-breaking-news-from-JFK-Airport #: where-a-suspenseful-scene is-developing. -: Barry-Benson #fresh-from-his-legal-victory... ADAM: That's-Barry! BOB-BUMBLE: ...is-attempting-to-land-a-plane #loaded-with-people #flowers -: and-an-incapacitated-flight-crew. JANET #MARTIN #UNCLE-CAR-AND-ADAM: Flowers?! (The-scene-switches-to-the-human-news) REPORTER: (Talking-with-Bob-Bumble) We-have-a-storm-in-the-area and-two-individuals-at-the-controls -: with-absolutely-no-flight-experience. BOB-BUMBLE: Just-a-minute. There's-a-bee-on-that-plane. BUD: I'm-quite-familiar-with-Mr.-Benson and-his-no-account-compadres. -: They've-done-enough-damage. REPORTER: But-isn't-he-your-only-hope? BUD: Technically #a-bee shouldn't-be-able-to-fly-at-all. -: Their-wings-are-too-small... BARRY: (Through-radio) Haven't-we-heard-this-a-million-times? -: 'The-surface-area-of-the-wings and-body-mass-make-no-sense.'... BOB-BUMBLE: --Get-this-on-the-air! BEE: --Got-it. BEE-NEWS-CREW: --Stand-by. BEE-NEWS-CREW: --We're-going-live! BARRY: (Through-radio-on-TV) ...The-way-we-work-may-be-a-mystery-to-you. -: Making-honey-takes-a-lot-of-bees doing-a-lot-of-small-jobs. -: But-let-me-tell-you-about-a-small-job. -: If-you-do-it-well #it-makes-a-big-difference. -: More-than-we-realized. To-us #to-everyone. -: That's-why-I-want-to-get-bees back-to-working-together. -: That's-the-bee-way! We're-not-made-of-Jell-O. -: We-get-behind-a-fellow. -: --Black-and-yellow! BEES: --Hello! (The-scene-switches-and-Barry-is-teaching-Vanessa-how-to-fly) BARRY: Left #right #down #hover. VANESSA: --Hover? BARRY: --Forget-hover. VANESSA: This-isn't-so-hard. (Pretending-to-honk-the-horn) Beep-beep!-Beep-beep! (A-Lightning-bolt-hits-the-plane-and-autopilot-turns-off) Barry #what-happened?! BARRY: Wait #I-think-we-were on-autopilot-the-whole-time. VANESSA: --That-may-have-been-helping-me. BARRY: --And-now-we're-not! VANESSA: So-it-turns-out-I-cannot-fly-a-plane. (The-plane-plummets-but-we-see-Lou-Lu-Duva-and-the-Pollen-Jocks #along-with multiple-other-bees-flying-towards-the-plane) Lou-Lu-DUva: All-of-you #let's-get behind-this-fellow!-Move-it-out! -: Move-out! (The-scene-switches-back-to-Vanessa-and-Barry-in-the-plane) BARRY: Our-only-chance-is-if-I-do-what-I'd-do #you-copy-me-with-the-wings-of-the-plane! (Barry-sticks-out-his-arms-like-an-airplane-and-flys-in-front-of-Vanessa's face) VANESSA: Don't-have-to-yell. BARRY: I'm-not-yelling! We're-in-a-lot-of-trouble. VANESSA: It's-very-hard-to-concentrate with-that-panicky-tone-in-your-voice! BARRY: It's-not-a-tone.-I'm-panicking! VANESSA: I-can't-do-this! (Barry-slaps-Vanessa) BARRY: Vanessa #pull-yourself-together. You-have-to-snap-out-of-it! VANESSA: (Slaps-Barry) You-snap-out-of-it. BARRY: (Slaps-Vanessa) -: You-snap-out-of-it. VANESSA: --You-snap-out-of-it! BARRY: --You-snap-out-of-it! (We-see-that-all-the-Pollen-Jocks-are-flying-under-the-plane) VANESSA: --You-snap-out-of-it! BARRY: --You-snap-out-of-it! VANESSA: --You-snap-out-of-it! BARRY: --You-snap-out-of-it! VANESSA: --Hold-it! BARRY: --Why?-Come-on #it's-my-turn. VANESSA: How-is-the-plane-flying? (The-plane-is-now-safely-flying) VANESSA: I-don't-know. (Barry's-antennae-rings-like-a-phone.-Barry-picks-up) BARRY: Hello? LOU-LU-DUVA: (Through-'phone') Benson #got-any-flowers for-a-happy-occasion-in-there? (All-of-the-Pollen-Jocks-are-carrying-the-plane) BARRY: The-Pollen-Jocks! -: They-do-get-behind-a-fellow. LOU-LU-DUVA: --Black-and-yellow. POLLEN-JOCKS: --Hello. LOU-LU-DUVA: All-right #let's-drop-this-tin-can on-the-blacktop. BARRY: Where?-I-can't-see-anything.-Can-you? VANESSA: No #nothing.-It's-all-cloudy. -: Come-on.-You-got-to-think-bee #Barry. BARRY: --Thinking-bee. --Thinking-bee. (On-the-runway-there-are-millions-of-bees-laying-on-their-backs) BEES: Thinking-bee! Thinking-bee!-Thinking-bee! BARRY: Wait-a-minute. I-think-I'm-feeling-something. VANESSA: --What? BARRY: --I-don't-know.-It's-strong #pulling-me. -: Like-a-27-million-year-old-instinct. -: Bring-the-nose-down. BEES: Thinking-bee! Thinking-bee!-Thinking-bee! CONTROL-TOWER-OPERATOR: --What-in-the-world-is-on-the-tarmac? BUD: --Get-some-lights-on-that! (It-is-revealed-that-all-the-bees-are-organized-into-a-giant-pulsating flower-formation) BEES: Thinking-bee! Thinking-bee!-Thinking-bee! BARRY: --Vanessa #aim-for-the-flower. VANESSA: --OK. BARRY: Out-the-engines.-We're-going-in on-bee-power.-Ready #boys? LOU-LU-DUVA: Affirmative! BARRY: Good.-Good.-Easy #now.-That's-it. -: Land-on-that-flower! -: Ready?-Full-reverse! -: Spin-it-around! (The-plane's-nose-is-pointed-at-a-flower-painted-on-a-nearby-plane) --Not-that-flower!-The-other-one! VANESSA: --Which-one? BARRY: --That-flower. (The-plane-is-now-pointed-at-a-fat-guy-in-a-flowered-shirt.-He-freaks-out and-tries-to-take-a-picture-of-the-plane) VANESSA: --I'm-aiming-at-the-flower! BARRY: That's-a-fat-guy-in-a-flowered-shirt. I-mean-the-giant-pulsating-flower made-of-millions-of-bees! (The-plane-hovers-over-the-bee-flower) -: Pull-forward.-Nose-down.-Tail-up. -: Rotate-around-it. VANESSA: --This-is-insane #Barry! BARRY: --This's-the-only-way-I-know-how-to-fly. BUD: Am-I-koo-koo-kachoo #or-is-this-plane flying-in-an-insect-like-pattern? (The-plane-is-unrealistically-hovering-and-spinning-over-the-bee-flower) BARRY: Get-your-nose-in-there.-Don't-be-afraid. Smell-it.-Full-reverse! -: Just-drop-it.-Be-a-part-of-it. -: Aim-for-the-center! -: Now-drop-it-in!-Drop-it-in #woman! -: Come-on #already. (The-bees-scatter-and-the-plane-safely-lands) VANESSA: Barry #we-did-it! You-taught-me-how-to-fly! BARRY: --Yes! (Vanessa-is-about-to-high-five-Barry) No-high-five! VANESSA: --Right. ADAM: Barry #it-worked! Did-you-see-the-giant-flower? BARRY: What-giant-flower?-Where?-Of-course I-saw-the-flower!-That-was-genius! ADAM: --Thank-you. BARRY: --But-we're-not-done-yet. -: Listen #everyone! -: This-runway-is-covered with-the-last-pollen -: from-the-last-flowers available-anywhere-on-Earth. -: That-means-this-is-our-last-chance. -: We're-the-only-ones-who-make-honey #pollinate-flowers-and-dress-like-this. -: If-we're-gonna-survive-as-a-species #this-is-our-moment!-What-do-you-say? -: Are-we-going-to-be-bees #or-just Museum-of-Natural-History-keychains? BEES: We're-bees! BEE-WHO-LIKES-KEYCHAINS: Keychain! BARRY: Then-follow-me!-Except-Keychain. POLLEN-JOCK-#1: Hold-on #Barry.-Here. -: You've-earned-this. BARRY: Yeah! -: I'm-a-Pollen-Jock!-And-it's-a-perfect fit.-All-I-gotta-do-are-the-sleeves. (The-Pollen-Jocks-throw-Barry-a-nectar-collecting-gun.-Barry-catches-it) Oh #yeah. JANET: That's-our-Barry. (Barry-and-the-Pollen-Jocks-get-pollen-from-the-flowers-on-the-plane) (Flash-forward-in-time-and-the-Pollen-Jocks-are-flying-over-NYC) -: (Barry-pollinates-the-flowers-in-Vanessa's-shop-and-then-heads-to-Central Park) BOY-IN-PARK: Mom!-The-bees-are-back! ADAM: (Putting-on-his-Krelman-hat) If-anybody-needs to-make-a-call #now's-the-time. -: I-got-a-feeling-we'll-be working-late-tonight! (The-bee-honey-factories-are-back-up-and-running) (Meanwhile-at-Vanessa's-shop) VANESSA: (To-customer) Here's-your-change.-Have-a-great afternoon!-Can-I-help-who's-next? -: Would-you-like-some-honey-with-that? It-is-bee-approved.-Don't-forget-these. (There-is-a-room-in-the-shop-where-Barry-does-legal-work-for-other-animals. He-is-currently-talking-with-a-Cow) COW: Milk #cream #cheese #it's-all-me. And-I-don't-see-a-nickel! -: Sometimes-I-just-feel like-a-piece-of-meat! BARRY: I-had-no-idea. VANESSA: Barry #I'm-sorry. Have-you-got-a-moment? BARRY: Would-you-excuse-me? My-mosquito-associate-will-help-you. MOOSEBLOOD: Sorry-I'm-late. COW: He's-a-lawyer-too? MOOSEBLOOD: Ma'am #I-was-already-a-blood-sucking-parasite. All-I-needed-was-a-briefcase. VANESSA: Have-a-great-afternoon! -: Barry #I-just-got-this-huge-tulip-order #and-I-can't-get-them-anywhere. BARRY: No-problem #Vannie. Just-leave-it-to-me. VANESSA: You're-a-lifesaver #Barry. Can-I-help-who's-next? BARRY: All-right #scramble #jocks! It's-time-to-fly. VANESSA: Thank-you #Barry! (Ken-walks-by-on-the-sidewalk-and-sees-the-'bee-approved-honey'-in Vanessa's-shop) KEN: That-bee-is-living-my-life!! ANDY: Let-it-go #Kenny. KEN: --When-will-this-nightmare-end?! ANDY: --Let-it-all-go. BARRY: --Beautiful-day-to-fly. POLLEN-JOCK: --Sure-is. BARRY: Between-you-and-me #I-was-dying-to-get-out-of-that-office. (Barry-recreates-the-scene-near-the-beginning-of-the-movie-where-he-flies through-the-box-kite.-The-movie-fades-to-black-and-the-credits-being) [--after-credits;-No-scene-can-be-seen-but-the-characters-can-be-heard talking-over-the-credits--] You-have-got to-start-thinking-bee #my-friend! -: --Thinking-bee! --Me? BARRY: (Talking-over-singer) Hold-it.-Let's-just-stop for-a-second.-Hold-it. -: I'm-sorry.-I'm-sorry #everyone. Can-we-stop-here? SINGER: Oh #BarryBARRY: I'm-not-making-a-major-life-decision during-a-production-number! SINGER: All-right.-Take-ten #everybody. Wrap-it-up #guys. BARRY: I-had-virtually-no-rehearsal-for-that.#scriptscombeemoviebyjerryseinfeldnarratorblackscreenwithtextthesoundofbuzzingbeescanbeheardaccordingtoallknownlawsofaviation #thereisnowayabeeshouldbeabletoflyitswingsaretoosmalltogetitsfatlittlebodyoffthegroundthebee #ofcourse #fliesanywaybecausebeesdontcarewhathumansthinkisimpossiblebarrybensonbarryispickingoutashirtyellow #blackyellow #blackooh -
My brain has been misfiring for a couple of days due to (I think) illness. Might have picked up a bug at the latest Repair Cafe I volunteered at last Saturday. Not looking for sympathy; it's not particularly bad as far as viruses go.
But my misfiring brain has spat out a couple of ideas. One was: "Solder & Sip", for people who are more technical than artistic and who aren't into the Paint & Sip thing. Socializing with fellow appreciators of tech stuff, good - not sure about the combination of alcohol and hot soldering irons, though.
It wouldn't have to be actual soldering. Maybe you want to do robotics or wrenching or something.
Brain out.
#SolderAndSip #PaintAndSip #alcohol #tech #socialize #electronics #hobby #wat
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Study Finds Signs of “Functional Limb Weakness” in Patients Not Reporting Actual Limb Weakness
By David Tuller, DrPH
A recently published study about functional neurological disorder (FND) has reported some perplexing data. Of almost 300 patients diagnosed with Long Covid, 100 were identified as demonstrating one or more “positive signs” for “functional limb weakness,” a form of FND. Yet only 14 of those 100 patients reported experiencing limb weakness in the first place; the other 84 did not.
Hm. What does it mean to identify positive signs of functional limb weakness in the absence of reported limb weakness? Who knows? Certainly the investigators themselves make no credible attempt to explain this conundrum.
The study—“Contemporary positive signs of functional limb weakness in post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2: an exploratory analysis of their utility in diagnosis and follow-up”–was published in June by BMJ Neurology Open, a major joural. It is retrospective, with data drawn from the medical records of Long Covid patients who attended a neurology clinic in Tokyo, Japan, from 2021 to 2014. At the clinic, they received comprehensive neurological exams, including testing for positive signs for functional limb weakness. (According to current practice, FND diagnoses require affirmative clinical indications, often referred to as “positive signs” or “rule-in signs,” such as intact reflexes in a limb said to be weak or paralyzed, that are purportedly incompatible with known pathophysiological processes.)
During the exams, the neurologists tested for functional limb weakness using six different signs, described in detail in a supplementary file. Apparently, the discrepancy between the number of patients found to have these positive signs and the much smaller number who actually reported limb weakness during these exams did not raise any particular concerns among the investigators.
Instead, they seem to have assumed that positive signs for functional limb weakness in people with Long COVID indicate cases of FND–even in the absence of evidence that patients are experiencing the relevant symptom. The investigators then suggest that these alleged cases of FND are likely implicated in generating and/or perpetuating Long Covid symptoms like fatigue and headache. “Some of the most common neurological symptoms of long COVID may be caused by FND,” they conclude.
Given that five in six of those with positive signs of functional limb weakness did not report limb weakness, this line of argument is kind of bonkers. The most urgent question arising from this study is: Do these signs mean anything at all? (Several of the signs have long been used in neurology; a couple of them were much more recently identified. As I have previously discussed, the evidence for the overall accuracy of these various signs is shaky.)
I suppose it is possible that some patients in the study might not have been that specific and might have referred to limb weakness as “fatigue.” But it seems highly unlikely this would have occurred in 84 out of 100 cases. After all, these patients underwent comprehensive neurological exams that included tests for functional limb weakness. Presumably, the neurologists conducting these exams asked questions that would have, or should have, elicited an accurate accounting of a distinctive symptom like limb weakness.
FND is the current name for the psychiatric condition formerly called conversion disorder, in which psychological distress was said to have been “converted” into physical symptoms. Experts in the FND field assert categorically that is a “brain network” disorder, but that is a theory, not a fact. The reality is that the etiology and pathophysiological processes causing the symptoms remain unknown. What is clear is that people with FND suffer from extremely distressing and disabling symptoms that resist easy explanation. Those with the condition are ill-served by research that fails to abide by basic rules of scientific reasoning.
My UC Berkeley colleague, infectious disease physician and professor emeritus John Swartzberg, shared my low opinion of this piece of work. That this deeply flawed paper passed through a BMJ journal’s peer review process, he said, was “very disappointing.”
The paper is marred by sentences like this: “Assuming that patients with positive signs had FND, the prevalence of FND coexisting with long COVID is likely to not depend on which variant of COVID patients were infected with but solely on the number of patients infected with COVID-19, as observed in this study.” Since those with positive signs of functional limb weakness were much more likely not to have reported any limb weakness than to have reported it, the assumption that “patients with positive signs had FND” is hard to justify. And any further claims built on that unjustifiable assumption cannot be taken seriously.
And there are passages in which, given the uninterpretable results on the positive signs, the argument reads like a parody:
“In summary, our study showed that long COVID, accompanied by positive signs, is not rare and that this phenomenon indicates the possibility of the coexistence of long COVID and FND. Therefore, some patients with long COVID may present with symptoms of FND. If positive signs are observed in long COVID patients, they are a useful indicator of the coexistence of FND in those with long COVID.”
The paper is a house of cards built on unwarranted assertions and pirouettes of logic. (I’ve addressed a core concern in this post but not the only one.) In any event, BMJ journals have not distinguished themselves when it comes to ME/CFS and Long COVID. This latest problematic publication is not remotely surprising.
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Can anyone recommend a good vet in the Mandaluyong/Rockwell area? I’ve been to Biyaya as they are pretty close, but the doctors there are not that friendly and my cats got fleas the last time they were there.
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@my_actual_brain
You can think of it that way:
if it were safer,
more people would ride #bikes.Or you could say,
we need more more mooooore people on bikes!
So much more that they can't take us for granted anymore.
And then things will finally change for the better.
More than just band-aid solutions.Hope that things get better. 🙏
Or accept it and live with it. 🤷♀️
Change will happen anyway.
Gotta have faith. 😉#QuezonCity #PasigCity #Philippines #ActiveMobility
https://tribune.net.ph/2023/07/28/qc-pasig-launch-new-initiatives/
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Alekhines Gun’s, ClarkKent’s and Owlswald’s Top Ten(ish) of 2025 By Steel Druhm
Alekhines Gun
It’s genuinely surreal to be writing this article. This Gun found his whole life flipped upside down literally on New Year’s Eve, in a new town, a new state, unemployed, and with nothing to do but review. By God’s grace, I’ve managed to find an actual career in my new town, walking into a new industry with nothing on my resume but exuberance and enthusiasm.1 This blog, with its incredible set of writers who inspire me daily, and readership who prove endearing and exasperating in equal measure, has been a rare moment of consistency in a year filled with professional and personal uncertainty. I didn’t get to listen to nearly as many albums as I’d hoped to, thanks to this being such a transitional year for my life, and perhaps in years to come, I’ll look back on this list in annoyance. But for the moment, it stands as a monument of achievement; of personal growth and practical accomplishment, and I’m immensely grateful to every reader and commenter for being along with me on this journey.
My thanks to The Angry One for giving me a second chance in my n00b days when it became clear I didn’t understand the assignment; I hope you don’t regret your choice too much.2 Thanks to the main AMG staff for being so friendly and welcoming, especially Mystikus Hugebeard, Dear Hollow, Twelve, and Kenstrosity. My eternal fealty to Steel for enduring what I imagine was an unbearable amount of stupid questions and formatting issues as I got my sea legs under me, and continue to see how much I have yet to grow as a writer.
And lastly, all my love and an Eternal Hails to my Freezer Freak brethren – Tyme, Killjoy, Owlswald, and Clark Kent. You guys were the best n00b class a guy could ask to come up with, and it has been such a privilege to have been formally writing alongside the four of you this year and call you friends as well as colleagues. Cheers to many more.
#Ish: Phobocosm // Gateway – Late release or no, it only took one listen to know this was something I needed in my life. Unrelenting in its atmosphere and with a tone like being devoured by vampire bats, Gateway doesn’t want for a plethora of oppressive moments and maintains its bleakness with admirable consistency. With interludes that function more like proper instrumentals between the more heavy cuts, Phobocosm rotate between blunt force trauma and existential despair in equal measure, flattening brain marrow with kaiju-sized stomptastic riffs only to throw you haplessly into depressive and gloom-drenched melodies the next. The rare kind of death metal peak for a rainy day, open up the gate and let it take you on a journey you might not come back from.
#10: Ancient Death // Ego Dissolution – Ancient Death is a testimony to why you should always read our foul filter excavations. Boasting a styling of, dare I say, classier old school deathisms with a healthy dollop of melody and chuggathons for days, Ego Dissolution is a mighty slab indeed. Kenstrosity quite correctly heaped praise on this release for its rare tonal fusion of Death and The Chasm, and beyond that, it has excellently implemented clean vocals, subtle synth work to bolster doomier moments, and riffs which transition from bludgeoning to esoteric in a heartbeat. Solos are peak, as all good death requires, atmospheres are coated in muck and mire without being underproduced, and even the instrumental stands out as a solid step in the journey on offer. Ego Dissolution deserves better than being a footnote in the annals of filter history, representing a highbrow slab of quality in mood-setting while still offering up violence at every turn.
#9: Teitanblood // From the Visceral Abyss – These void-worshipers have crafted an album that straddles the line of black, death, and war metal so flawlessly that every trip to their abyss leaves me exhausted and battered, but utterly enthralled. A flawless fusion of riff and atmosphere in equal measure, every ingredient from the militant drumming to the cacophonous vocals is a means to an end, and whether you’re in it more for the former or the latter is entirely irrelevant. Few albums manage to transcend being a collection of tracks into being a completed whole body of work so smoothly, and From the Visceral Abyss does so with blackened bile pouring through pounding through its poisoned veins. Disconcerting in its antagonism yet enthralling in the exactness of its vision, Teitanblood remains an auditory scrying mirror into the deepest pits that we were never meant to gaze upon.
#8: Imperial Triumphant // Goldstar – Goldstar is exactly what I had hoped for after the excessively out-there of their previous release: A more riff-centric album, which only just scales down the weird to let the approachability shine through like bait on the unsuspecting listener. To be sure, the alien Gorguts and Voivodisms remain, but this album takes a flavor similar to Alphaville3 and it builds its progressivism on the bones of licks and riffs which don’t take twenty listens to decipher before their foundation is made clear. Virtuoso musicianship remains at a peak, but as the tagline “Nine Class ‘A’ Songs” suggests, Imperial Triumphant have opted less to overwhelm the listener as much as flex on them, with fantastic results. A great introduction if you’re new to the band, and an enthralling listen for the jazz enthusiast and avant-garde black metal fan alike.
#7: Kalaveraztekah // Nikan Axkan – I underrated this a bit during the initial rodeo. While my complaints about the treble-heavy lack of bottom end remain, this is a masterfully composed record which continues to reveal new moments of wonder with each spin. Riffs designed to evoke thematic atmosphere and crush skulls in equal measure abound (“Nikan Axkan”) while remembering to summon the native beauty of the Aztec backdrop (“Yowaltekuhtli”) with skill. Lurching into Morbid Angel flirtations laced with delightful indigenous beats one minute and having haunting clean vocals drenched with horror and ritualism the next, this album is a whirlwind of a listen, a journey through primal soundscapes and human history meshed with technical prowess and grace. Hopefully someone picks them up soon, as they are well deserving of a bigger spotlight, and if you missed our rodeo on this release (shame on you) then you owe it to yourself to give it a listen.
#6: Labryinthus Stellarum // Rift in Reality – When I was very young, trancecore was one of the first “heavy” sounds I cut my teeth on, and consequently, my earballs feel right at home in these rifts. Impossibly catchy without being so simple as to offend my intelligence, and featuring electronics that have as much diversity and life in them as any guitar tone, Rift in Reality is a testimony that you can make techno and metal work on albums not named The Key. The blackened production stands in sharp contrast to the piercing, cosmic-echo cleanliness of the electronics, which are always spearheading the melodies but never at the cost of the full band’s heft and power. Spreading their songwriting wings a bit from the last release in more intricate melodies, a smattering of breakdowns, and heavier use of cleans has afforded Labryinthus Stellarum more personality than gimmickries, and I can’t wait to see where they go from here.
#5: Oskoreien // Hollow Fangs – It’s been a decent year for the more raw elements of black metal, but these fangs poisoned all who stood in their way. Somehow catchy in its simplicity yet not devoid of moving melodies, Hollow Fangs isn’t as much an innovation of the thing as much as the thing done at peak quality and skill. The cold tones reinforce the melancholy on display in the chord progressions, while the occasional leads sound more introspective than meandering despite their lack of raw noodlage. While I agree with the spirit of Owlswald‘s criticisms, I cannot deny that I continue to be drawn to this record despite its warts. Hollow Fangs has managed to set itself apart this year while not doing much out of the ordinary, containing that X factor that finds me reaching out to it over and over again.
#4: Blut Aus Nord // Ethereal Horizons – Like all good Blut Aus Nord albums, I had to let this album come to me, but once it did, it shows no signs of letting up. Somehow sidestepping the melodic trappings of the Memoria Vetusta series into something far more hypnotic yet no less deep in scope, Ethereal Horizons places all its stock on triumphant hypnosis. With nods to several chapters towards the band’s era in composition and production alike, the French kings use the building blocks of their dissonant works and claustrophobic atmospheres to construct something liberating and uplifting, with even the momentary bouts of darkness more atmospheric than truly grueling. I suspect we will find Ethereal Horizons to be an important stepping stone for the next chapter of blackened adventure. For now, adjust expectations away from whatever sequel you were hoping for in their litany of journeys and accept the new horizons showing just past the dawn.
#3: Cryptopsy // An Insatiable Violence – I was an admitted latecomer to the Cryptopsy brand, stumbling upon their excellent Book of Suffering EPs some years ago. Consequently, I’ve been a staunch defender of their modern era even as I dove backward into the classics and peculiarities. An Insatiable Violence smacks with a validation of all my affections, keeping the technical might while continuing to grow in groovy, melodic directions. True, I should have been a tad harder on the production of the drum tones than I was in my initial review, but tough tiddlywinks. From the sky-piercing beauty of the solo in the opening track “The Nimis Adoration” to the bookending body blow of “Malignant Needs,” this album remains a quality offering of the most elite of brutal death. Succinct in length but with twice the riff-to-minute factor, Cryptopsy stands supreme at the top of the more violent end of the musical spectrum this year.
#2: Messa // The Spin – While part of me deeply misses the droning elements and slightly crustier tone of Belfry, there’s no denying the spiritual journey this album takes me on with each listen. The embodiment of a grower, what begins as a somewhat underwhelming (compared to previous efforts) listen slowly unfurls itself to be an excellently realized, meticulously composed release. Look no further than album highlight “The Dress” for riffs that border more on twangy than “crushing” and yet pack the spirit of the doomiest doom in each measure. Vocalist Sara continues to up her harmonization game with double and triple-tracked melodies that reach right into my soul. Though The Spin is relatively light in guitar tone, each listen reveals a weight and power hidden from track to track, and the fantastic album closer “Thicker Blood” instinctively has me reaching out to replay the album as soon as it ends. Truly gorgeous.
#1: Aran Angmar // Ordo Diabolicum – Since plucking this record at random with no prior knowledge or expectations from the pit, Aran Angmar has stuck with me through professional and personal challenges and victories, tragedies and triumphs, in a manner befitting the greatest of Greek black metal. The harmonized leads in “Chariots of Fire” still dwell rent-free in my head, and the wailing clean vocals of the kickoff track “Dungeons of the Damned” still get my blood pumping every time. Excellent for cleaning your impossibly filthy house, working on a long overdue job project, or slaughtering your enemies by the hundreds in equal measure, Ordo Diabolicum is the sound of perseverance rewarded, of effort given and blood shed for a higher purpose, and actually witnessing the payoff with your own eyes. Sidestepping the tropes of evil for something so supremely triumphant is a move that has paid big dividends for this outfit, and while blackened to its core, few soundtracks have encouraged me to keep on keepin’ on like this has. A monstrous record to declare war on whatever oppresses you.
Honorable Mentions:
- Mutagenic Host // The Diseased Machine – Designed to reduce one’s gluteus maximus into a shape far more concave, this is a youthful release wise beyond its years in bringing the pain and infecting all in its wake.
- Qrixkuor // The Womb of the World – Bringing in an actual symphonic performance has somehow rendered this cavernous sound even more daunting. At once engaging and uncomfortable, this is an album for those who find beauty in the most repulsive of darkened shrines.
ClarkKent
When I first discovered the Angry Metal Guy blog back in 2021,4 it was during a period of transition in my life, as COVID spurred a career transition out of teaching and, eventually, into data analytics. At the time, my metal tastes were limited to more well-known acts like Metallica and Iron Maiden, with forays into Opeth, Enslaved, and Ayreon. Boy, did this blog expand my horizon. Between taking online classes and staying home with my two kids, I devoured AMG reviews and dove into the vast ocean of metal acts that both the writers and commenters introduced me to. And then, when Angry Metal Guy put out the casting call later that year, I was out of a job and always wanted to be a writer, so I thought, Why not? Little did I know this decision would see me stored in a freezer for four long years. Thankfully, when I thawed out last year, it was with four great guys who all kept each other sane during our n00bship: Alekhines Gun, Tyme, Killjoy, and Owlswald. I’m happy to have had their camaraderie and friendship, and I’m stoked that all five of us were demoted to staff writers. I am also grateful to Steel Druhm and Angry Metal Guy for bringing me aboard, despite my horrid taste, and to Dolphin Whisperer and Maddog for their helpful tips and feedback on my drafts. As Steel would say, you guys were gentle, yet brutal, and in the best possible way. With 2025 proving a stressful year, largely due to increasing work demands, listening to promos and writing reviews has proven a helpful outlet. I’m looking forward to an awesome 2026.
#ish. Bloodletter // Leave the Light Behind — While staying true to their melothrash sound, Bloodletter continues to improve in their songwriting year after year. This is easily their best and my favorite thrash record of the year, in a year where not much thrash really stood out to me. The tight songwriting, the energy, and the melodic leads are all top-notch, and this one stands up even after repeated spins.
#10. Wings of Steel // Winds of Time — This was one of my favorite reviews to write in 2025. Not just because the album was big and fun, with big bombastic numbers like the opening song “Winds of Time,” or tight and speedy cuts like “Saints and Sinners,” or ballads like “Crying,” or my song of the year, “Flight of the Eagle.” It gave me the rare opportunity to write fart jokes and the even rarer chance to “steal” a promo from Steel. So many throwback classic metal bands sound like they belong in that older time, but Wings of Steel sound timeless—they could belong in the new and the then all at the same time.
#9. Besna // Krásno — While I’m not typically drawn to post-metal, Besna’s Krásno proves an exception. The harsh guitar tones and vocals provide an alluring contrast with the catchy melodic tremolos. Despite its brief length, this is a surprisingly progressive album. Each song reveals a beauty to Besna’s songwriting and musicianship, and that album art is gorgeous, to boot. I love everything Besna does here, and this proved to be just the beginning of what was a strong start to 2025.
#8. Green Carnation // A Dark Poem Part I: The Shores of Melancholia — I’m glad Doc Grier introduced Green Carnation to me when Leaves of Yesteryear topped his 2020 list. I love this band, and this record is no exception. It has six tracks of pure earworm and ends up being one of the catchiest albums of the year. These guys know how to write songs that make you feel good and want to dance and sing along to. What’s more exciting is that this is the first of a planned trilogy, so hopefully that means we don’t have to wait long for the next one.
#7. Phantom Spell // Heather and Hearth — Heather and Hearth is like a time machine, one taking you back to ’70s era prog. Man, it’s a lot of fun. It’s catchy and bright—a shining beacon amidst a horde of brutal, violent metal. This is packed to the gills with hooks, from spry riffs to feel-good synths to memorable choruses. Metal rarely puts a smile on your face without sounding like cheesy power metal à la Fellowship, but Phantom Spell does it here. Apparently, this kind of bright and cheery metal was just what I needed this year, and it proved a nice summer balm.
#6. Atlantic // Timeworn — When I first listened to this earlier in the year, I just assumed it was the work of an established, well-known band. So it was a surprise to learn Timeworn was actually the debut from a relative newcomer in Callan Hoy. Something about 2025 has drawn me towards these uplifting albums that burst with good feelings and catchy melodies. For the 34 minutes I spend with this, I just get lost in the currents of the tremolos and blast beats and, at least for a moment, live in a world of calm and bliss.
#5. In the Woods… // Otra — This sort of melodic, catchy metal is my kryptonite. In the Woods… plays the kind of songs that get lodged in my brain, and I start whistling them while doing my grocery shopping, drawing funny looks. I’d never heard of these guys until Grier’s review earlier this year, and now I’m thinking maybe I should dive into their back catalog. More worryingly, this is the second album on my list that Grier gave a glowing review for. That means either he actually has good taste, or my taste is just as bad as his.
#4. Oromet // The Sinking Isle — If I had a time machine, I’d go back and rate this one a little higher. This isn’t a “marathon” like some of Bell Witch’s records, nor a piece of crushing funeral doom, nor one that makes extensive use of silence. It is introspective, full of surprises, and melodic. It also came at a period in my life when work was particularly stressful. Playing this helped provide me with some solace and calm as I took in the beautiful compositions. These guys have a bright future ahead of them.
#3. Deafheaven // Lonely People with Power — After the misstep that was Infinite Granite, it’s nice to see Deafheaven back to form. I was ready to write them off, but thanks to Doom_et_Al’s impassioned words, I excitedly dove in. I’m glad I did. I now know their form of shoegaze-y black metal is divisive among metal fans (I was clueless about this fact when I first discovered them), but I don’t care, and I still love it. It’s just so easy to get lost in those lush guitar tones and harsh rasps. It’s tough to pick out any one tune as a standout because it’s the experience of the record as a whole that is so rewarding.
#2. In Mourning // The Immortal — This is a remarkable piece of melodic progressive death. I hadn’t heard of In Mourning until Kenstrosity and the other AMG staffers started talking them up ahead of this release. It seems I’ve really missed out and need to fix that. The Immortal is just about perfect. From song craft to musical performances, these guys nail it. From the beautiful guitar tones to the excellent combo of clean and harsh vox to the memorable melodies, The Immortal is an emotional tour de force that grows more majestic with each spin.
#1. Tómarúm // Beyond Obsidian Euphoria — When I first moved away from more mainstream metal acts, it was progressive death bands like Tómarúm that drew me in. Opeth, Between the Buried and Me, Enslaved, and Ayreon opened up my ears to the reward of listening to songs that reveal new layers and depth with repeated listening. Each year, one or two prog death records climb high in my rankings, and this year that mantle belongs to Tómarúm. This record is massive, and the more time I spend with it, the more depths I plumb, and I find that it contains never-ending riches. There are just so many surprises—the technicality, the speed, the melodies—even some flutes! As great as the debut was, these guys have only gotten better and have earned a spot as one of my current favorites in the genre, along with Iotunn and Dvne. This is the kind of album I love to get lost in—it’s pure bliss.
Honorable Mentions
- Empyrean Sanctum // Detachment from Reality — This passion project from Justin Kellerman may not have impressed my Rodeo-mates as much as me, but I strongly connected with it due to dynamic songwriting and inspired performances.
- Skaldr // Samsr — This was initially a lot higher on my list, but it didn’t hold up as well as it did back in January. Still, it’s a remarkable bit of melodic black metal and good enough to rank as among the best of 2025.
- Aephenamer // Utopie — Melodic and symphonic metal with superb songwriting? Sign me up. This latest from Aephenamer is just so dynamic and fun, and it’s another great effort from a reliably high-quality group. The last couple of songs are absolute beauties.
- An Abstract Illusion // The Sleeping City — This may not be as strong as their older stuff, but it’s still incredibly moving. The introduction of synths charts a new direction for the band, but they make it work with some gorgeous atmospherics.
Songs o’ the Year
1. Wings of Steel — “Flight of the Eagle” 2. Lord of the Lost — “One of Us Will Be Next” 3. In the Woods — “Let Me Sing” 4. Hanging Garden — “Morgan’s Trail” 5. Fer de Lance — “Fires on the Mountainside” 6. Tómarúm — “Shed this Erroneous Skin” 7. Green Carnation — “In Your Paradise” 8. Structure — “Will I Deserve It?” 9. Atlantic — “Voyages” 10. In Mourning — “Staghorn” 11. Dolven — “You’ve Chosen”
Owlswald
I’ve finally made it to the end of my first year on staff, culminating with my inaugural list. This time last year, I was deep in the throes of my n00bdom and watched from the dark confines of the dungeon as many of my Freezer Crew brethren shared their initial staff lists. And as stoked as I was for my mates, I couldn’t help but feel a bit jealous that I was still toiling with cleanup detail as an unnamed shadow. But the wheel of ascent turns for us all. After a few more months surviving on table scraps and standing water, our Managing Ape unlocked my cage, releasing me at last into the aviary and the promised start of my pledged service bound labor.
Though my escape from the rookery took longer, that extended time was not without its merits. Reviewing is a skill that must be honed like any other, and although metal—and music generally—has been an essential part of my life since I was young, it has admittedly taken longer for me to truly articulate the “why.” Anyone can declare an album “good” or “bad,” but developing and communicating the rationale is an entirely different discipline. A discipline that I believe I have improved over my first year as a writer here, and one that I look forward to developing further with more time in the seat.
My thanks go out, first and foremost, to Steel and AMG Himself for granting me the opportunity to contribute to this very special, longstanding community and for the monumental trust they have placed in me. Specifically, the trust that I wouldn’t utterly trash the place—a faith I’ve done my best to test (More on one attempt below). I must also thank my fellow writers—both old and new, including those now in the annals of AMG—who I’ve read for years and whose work continues to inspire me. And last, but certainly not least, I thank all of you who read, comment and visit the site regularly. The reality that my thoughts command even a sliver of your precious time remains utterly surreal. For that connection, I am truly honored.
Taking this good energy and running with it, let’s get to the list!
#ish. Harvested // Dysthymia – I wouldn’t have believed you if you’d told me at the start of the year that my first list would be kicked off by an unsigned band. But here we are, and Harvested’s self-released debut, Dysthymia, deserves the honor because it fucking rules. Operating in the sweet spot between Decapitated and Cattle Decapitation, the album boasts one of the best guitar tones of the year. These Canadians flaunt a songwriting maturity that many veteran groups twice their age still haven’t found—a sound that is as bone-crushingly heavy as it is technically brutal. I have been spinning Dysthymia regularly since its release, and highlight tracks like “Unending Madness” and “Gathered and Deluded” make primo Heavy Moves Heavy additions.
#10. Jade // Mysteries of a Flowery Dream – Some albums demand the right conditions and the listener’s utmost attention to enjoy fully, and Jade’s Mysteries of a Flowery Dream is such a record. Though it took a while for their sophomore effort to envelop me in its dark, murky, and oscillating guise, I’m glad I remained patient because the payoff was huge. This Barcelonian quartet has created a sensory-rich listening experience that is as immersive as it is complex and dynamic, featuring superb songwriting intertwined with recurrent themes and soaring leads that ensure the album’s 43 minutes feel unified and purposeful. Achieving this level of cohesive, complex dynamism is a feat that is incredibly hard to execute well, which makes Mysteries of a Flowery Dream all the more impressive.
#9. Pillars of Cacophony // Paralipomena – Each year, one tech-death record usually carves out a spot on my list. Last year, Apogean’s Cyberstrictive set an incredibly high bar, taking album of the year honors with its near-perfect blend of hook-laden guitar maneuvers and groove-focused rhythms. While tech-death won’t be repeating as champion in 2025, Pillars of Cacophony are nonetheless representing the genre in a major way with Paralipomena. The album showcases multi-instrumentalist Dominik’s talents in crafting unsettling, unpredictable soundscapes filled with propulsive fretwork, dissonant phrases, and kinetic rhythmic patterns. Drawing directly from Dominik’s own research as a bioscientist, Paralipomena coils science with the aural might of death metal to create a record that is as conceptually authentic as it is musically captivating.
#8. King Witch // III – Doom—and more specifically stoner—has always been hit-or-miss to these ears. But on III, Scotland’s King Witch grabbed the best parts of the genre and compressed them into a Seattle-made mold of hard rock and grunge that immediately won me over. The album is the culmination of the group’s artistic evolution, combining the strong songwriting of their debut with the dynamic shifts of their follow-up. Guitarist Jamie Gilchrist and bassist Rory Lee assemble a sophisticated foundation of earthmoving, genre-bending riffs that perfectly augment the star power of vocalist Laura Donnelly, whose Chris Cornell-like range and Janis Joplin grit give the material undeniable power and command. The result is a sound that elevates III far beyond typical doom boundaries into one of the year’s best records.
#7. Agriculture // The Spiritual Sound – I initially missed Agriculture’s self-titled debut and follow-up EP, so The Spiritual Sound was my first introduction to this Californian black metal outfit. But after months of having this record on constant rotation—and seeing their live show—I can confidently conclude they are one of the most innovative and unique black metal groups operating right now. Self-dubbed as “ecstatic black metal,” Agriculture shatters convention by challenging the dark extremity of the genre with a patchwork of math rock, shoegaze, noise, and folk influences. Powered by Leah Levinson’s manic, shifting vocals and inventive guitar work from Dan Meyer and Richard Chowenhill, The Spiritual Sound is a genre-defying record that is both unpredictable and intensely authentic.
#6. Cryptopsy // An Insatiable Violence – Outside of my admiration for fellow drummer extraordinaire Flo Mounier, I have to admit that I had more or less forgotten about Cryptopsy after 2012’s self-titled album. Thanks to my fellow Freezer Crew brother Alekhines Gun, I gave them another go, and An Insatiable Violence hit me like a ton of bricks, forcing me to quickly figure out how to start begging these Canadians for forgiveness. From Matt McGachy’s unique, manic screams to Mounier’s pummeling gravity blasts and double-bass to Christian Donaldson’s “waltz-rooted chuggathons” and fret noises, every aspect of An Insatiable Violence is crystal clear, full of groove and hits like a fucking tank. Needless to say, I won’t be making the same mistake twice, and these death metal legends now have my full attention again.
#5. …and Oceans // The Regeneration Itinerary – Being a longtime fan of these multifarious Finns, I rejoiced when they returned from an extended hiatus in 2020 with Cosmic World Mother. Yet, as strong as that album—and follow-up As in Gardens, So in Tombs—was, it didn’t have the same symphonic and eclectic oomph as The Dynamic Gallery of Thoughts or The Symmetry of I – The Circle of O. Much to my pleasure, The Regeneration Itinerary is a riveting return to form for …and Oceans, returning to their symphonic, frenetic and blackened sound of yore while maintaining the incisiveness of their modern form. This album is peppered with their classic trademarks, and “Prophetical Mercury Implement” is the best song the group has written in decades. After taking a couple of albums to get their groove back, The Regeneration Itinerary is evidence that …and Oceans has found it again.
#4. Messa // The Spin – Messa’s fourth full-length marks the second doom record on my list (and the second led by a badass frontwoman). On The Spin, Messa continues to evolve their progressive identity, imbuing their sound with flavors of 80’s dark post-punk and gothic rock that evoke the haunting architecture of early Killing Joke. While Sara’s vocals may not possess the same boisterous power as Laura Donnelly’s, her spellbinding presence and seductive delivery make The Spin simply irresistible. Guitarist Alberto complements Sara’s bewitching and buttery croons with sparkling arpeggios and overdriven solos steeped heavily in the classic occult groups of the ’70s. It’s clear Messa is operating on a completely different level than their peers, and I can’t get enough of The Spin.
#3. Buried Realm // The Dormant Darkness – You always remember your first. Buried Realm’s The Dormant Darkness was my first full review on staff, a record that I am forever grateful Twelve decided to waive his seniority over and allow my newly-clipped wings to review because it ended up surprising the hell out of me. Josh Dummer’s technical melodeath project came out firing on all cylinders with its third album, upping the virtuosity with a slew of new guests. It is full of highlights, memorable hooks, and technically impressive solos and is a non-stop blast. In fact, I loved The Dormant Darkness so much that I committed the cardinal sin of breaking the score counter immediately—an action that can quickly get one thrown into the woodchipper of despair. Luckily, I am still here to tell the tale, and now I have my love of The Dormant Darkness to show for it.
#2. Tómarúm // Beyond Obsidian Euphoria – If there was ever a year for me to look for a #1A/#1B scenario, this would have been it, as I floundered back and forth between this album and my #1 pick. Chalk it up to indecision or whatever you must, but ultimately, one can’t go wrong with either in this instance. In short, Tómarúm’s Beyond Obsidian Euphoria is long-form progressive death metal greatness. Razor-sharp technicality, sparkling melodicism, and excellent songwriting form a weighty spirit that counterbalances crushing heft with airy refrains that move and flow seamlessly across its rewarding 70-minute runtime. There isn’t much more I can say here that Sponge-fren Ken‘s aptly penned review didn’t capture already, outside of stating that Tómarúm‘s opus is as close to perfect in both structure and execution as one can get. To put it simply, it’s a triumph.
#1. In Mourning // The Immortal – Speaking of perfection, In Mourning have achieved such a standard with their latest melodeath offering, The Immortal. After our Almighty Overlord listened to The Immortal following the flurry of votes the record received for August’s Record O’ the Month, he responded with a few choice words that captured my thoughts about the album succinctly: “Damn…” he said. “They nailed this. Well, that’s easy.” But I think that is even an understatement for how incredibly awesome this album is, and, doing one better, I don’t think many have grasped it yet, either. With their seventh album, these Swedes have found the perfect combination of their patented Opethian death metal chuggery, sadboi melodies, and creative dynamism, resulting in a sound rich in emotional depth with more digestible hooks than one can handle. I’m talking hooks—both riffs and vocal melodies—that dig deep into your psyche and never let go. They connect on a different level—a telltale sign we’re dealing with a classic. A decade from now, when In Mourning has hopefully amassed an even deeper discography, should the question arise—”What is the most essential melodeath album of the last ten years?”—I’m willing to bet The Immortal will be the resounding answer.
Honorable Mentions
- Mutagenic Host // The Diseased Machine – I miss Edge of Sanity with a passion, but Mutagenic Host’s The Diseased Machine is helping stem my longing—at least temporarily. These newcomers kicked off 2025 with an absolutely filthy dose of death metal that hasn’t stopped invading my playlist.
- Abigail Williams // A Void Within Existence – While 2019’s Walk Beyond the Dark was one hell of a record, A Void Within Existence may very well surpass it. Drummer Mike Heller codifies the attack, as Ken Sorceron and company unleash an all-out assault of crushing weight and unrelenting groove.
- Bianca // Bianca – Despite its late arrival hindering its consideration for a higher ranking, these Italians clearly have something special brewing with their self-titled debut. An enchanting mix of ethereality and chilling blackened soundscapes that is worth hearing immediately.
- Ambush // Evil in All Dimensions – Heavy metal group Ambush lived up to their name when they absolutely ambushed my ears and eyes with their nostalgic blend of 80’s Maiden, Priest, and Helloween, replete with their oh-so-tight fashion. Vocalist Oskar Jacobsson is poised to be the genre’s next colossal talent. Remember—you heard it here first.
- Fallujah // Xenotaph – Following the heavily criticized 2019 effort, Undying Light, it took six years for these tech-death masters to regroup and recalibrate. But Fallujah delivered a massive surprise with Xenotaph, easily one of their strongest—and best sounding—records to date. Here’s to hoping this reinvigorated momentum holds true.
Song o’ the Year
Ambush // “Bending the Steel” – This surprise pick eventually knocked …and Oceans’ “Prophetical Mercury Implement” from the top spot. It’s a brilliant piece of songwriting that would have immediately launched this act to superstardom had it only been released four decades earlier. 100% nostalgia and cold, hard steel.
#AndOceans #2025 #AbigailWilliams #Aephenamer #Agriculture #AlekhinesGunS #Ambush #AnAbstractIllusion #AncientDeath #AranAngmar #Atlantic #Besna #Bianca #BlogLists #Bloodletter #BlutAusNord #BuriedRealm #ClarkKentSAndOwlswaldSTopTenIshOf2025 #Cryptopsy #Deafheaven #EmpyreanSanctum #Fallujah #GreenCarnation #Harvested #ImperialTriumphant #InMourning #InTheWoods #Jade #Kalaveraztekah #KingWitch #LabryinthusStellarum #Lists #Messa #MutagenicHost #Oromet #Oskoreien #PhantomSpell #Phobocosm #PillarsOfCacophony #Skaldr #Teitanblood #Tómarúm #WingsOfSteel -
The Cognitive Bargain Has Ended: A Generation Born Without Comparative Advantage
The claim circulating in policy papers, venture capital essays, and parental anxiety threads runs like this: no child born this year will grow up to be smarter than artificial intelligence. The line gets used as a slogan, which is the first sign it deserves examination. Slogans that move easily through dinner parties usually carry hidden machinery. The machinery here is a definition of intelligence narrow enough to fit on a benchmark and broad enough to terrify a parent. Both functions are intentional, and both deserve to be unbundled before the consequences can be argued honestly.
A six-year-old can pour milk without spilling, recognize her grandmother by the sound of her walk on the stairs, and read her father’s mood from a quarter-second facial flicker before he speaks. No current AI does these reliably, which is why the warehouse, the construction site, and the elder-care ward continue to employ humans at rising wages while law firms cut their summer associate classes. What machines do well, with present technology, is symbol manipulation at scale: text, code, formal reasoning, pattern completion across enormous corpora of written human output. The honest version of the claim is narrower than the slogan and still consequential. No child born this year will outperform machines at symbol manipulation, retrieval, or formal reasoning across most of the tasks that currently pay a salary in an office. The slogan compresses that into a panic, which is bad rhetoric and bad policy, and the underlying observation remains true. What follows from the observation is the actual subject of the analysis below.
The Credentialed Class Loses Its Logic
The first casualty is the credentialed professional class, roughly the top 20 percent of American earners by household income. This stratum organized itself across the twentieth century around cognitive screening. The SAT in 1926, refined through the GI Bill expansion. The LSAT in 1948. The MCAT in its modern multiple-choice form in 1962. The USMLE consolidated in 1992. Each gate selected for a particular form of paid cognition: rapid pattern recognition under time pressure, short-term retention of densely structured information, formal reasoning across domain-specific symbol systems. The gates were effective because the cognitive work they screened for was scarce, expensive to develop, and economically valuable.
Three conditions held the system together. Scarcity was the first: only humans could perform the cognitive work, and only some humans, after long training. Expense was the second: the training cost time and money and required institutional infrastructure no individual could replicate. Value was the third: the market rewarded the work because nothing cheaper could produce equivalent output. All three conditions are now eroding simultaneously. A subscription that costs less than a Manhattan dinner produces legal memos, differential diagnoses, and tax planning at a level competent enough to embarrass the junior tier of every paid profession.
Embarrassment falls short of replacement. The senior partner still signs the brief. The attending physician still admits the patient. The accounting principal still files the return. What has collapsed is the economic logic of the apprentice tier, the rung at which young people once learned the trade by performing the work that AI now performs faster and at a thousandth of the cost. Without the apprentice tier, the senior tier has no successors, and the senior tier itself ages out within twenty years. The professions are not being replaced. They are being denied a generation, which is the same outcome on a longer clock.
The lawyer keeps courtroom presence, client relationship, and signature liability. For the doctor, what survives is touch, witness, legal accountability, and judgment under stakes. The architect’s irreducible work happens in the kitchen, in conversation with the homeowner about how the family actually lives. Three of those four functions are not why medical school costs $300,000. The training, the credentialing, the expensive cognitive certification, was effective because it produced the rare commodity. When the commodity is no longer rare, the price of training cannot hold. Either tuition collapses, which would gut the universities that have leveraged themselves on that revenue, or graduates default on debt for credentials that no longer command premium wages. Both outcomes are visible in early data. Neither has yet been admitted by the institutions whose survival depends on denying it.
The same compression is hitting working-class employment, particularly in transportation, customer service, and routine clerical work, and the human stakes there are larger in absolute terms. The reason this analysis concentrates on the credentialed class is that this class produced and sustained the public sphere through which the broader transition will be argued, named, and contested. When that class loses its grip on its own coherence, the conversation about every other displacement becomes harder to organize.
The Parental Project Loses Its Currency
The second consequence is psychological and reaches beyond economics into the structure of family life. American parenting in the educated class has run for at least three generations on a transmission model. Cultivate the child’s mind, secure the child’s place. The cultivation produced status, the status produced security, and the bargain held because each generation could roughly verify the prior one’s judgment. A father who tutored his daughter in algebra in 1995 watched her, twelve years later, take a meeting with someone who had been tutored similarly by similarly anxious parents. The investment paid out in a recognizable currency.
The currency has been redenominated without warning. A father in 2026 watches his daughter receive better tutoring, free, from a machine that has read every algebra textbook ever written and never tires. The democratization is real and worth celebrating. The disappearance of his comparative advantage is also real, and both arrive on the same Tuesday. He had counted on that advantage. Greed had nothing to do with it. The entire architecture of middle-class American parenting had encoded the cognitive premium as the path, and he was a competent parent walking the path his own parents had walked. The consolation that “my child will think for a living” has lost its meaning. What replaces it has not arrived. The vacuum is producing the parental anxiety that fills bookstores, podcast feeds, and pediatric psychiatry waiting rooms, and producing it faster than the helping professions can absorb the demand.
The School System Confronts Its Cover Story
The third consequence runs through the school itself. American schooling has carried at least four functions through the twentieth century: childcare for working parents, social formation, cognitive training, and credentialing for the labor market. The cognitive training and credentialing functions are the two AI most directly displaces, and they happen to be the two schools advertise in their mission statements as the reason for existing. Childcare and social formation remain, untouched and irreplaceable, and no school district raises a tax levy on those grounds.
The honest reckoning is one administrators are not yet willing to give. We run schools mostly to keep parents working and to teach children how to negotiate the social geometry of a room full of other children. The cognitive content has always been somewhat ornamental, a respectable cover story for an institution whose deeper functions were custodial and socializing. AI is forcing the cover story to retire. At least a decade of denial will follow. Curriculum committees will add “AI literacy” units that are structurally indistinguishable from the typing classes of 1985, the computer lab visits of 1995, and the laptop initiatives of 2010, each of which functioned as institutional reassurance rather than pedagogical substance. After the denial, a slow and reluctant rewriting of mission statements will move toward something more honest about what schools actually do, which is gather children safely while their parents earn a living and teach them to sit in rooms with people they did not choose. Both functions are valuable. Neither justifies the per-pupil expenditure of the current system, and the public will eventually discover that the math no longer works.
The Political Bargain Loses Its Foundation
The fourth consequence is political and may be the most important one in the medium term. Technocratic liberal democracy, the regime under which most readers of this essay have lived their entire lives, rested on a quiet bargain. Experts would govern the complicated parts. Voters would govern the simple parts. The experts held position because they knew more than the voters, and the voters tolerated the experts because the system, on average, delivered rising material conditions. The bargain frayed before AI arrived, evident in the populist movements of the past fifteen years, but AI removes the bargain’s foundation outright. If a machine knows more than the expert and the voter alike, the expert has no remaining claim that distinguishes her from any other citizen. She becomes one more citizen with opinions. The voice of trained competence has gone elsewhere, into the model and the dataset, where no human can claim it as her own.
Two political responses follow, and both are visible in the present. The populist response decides that if no human is more qualified than any other, then will, identity, and tribal allegiance settle the question. This is the shape of politics in much of Europe, the Americas, and parts of Asia at the moment of writing, and the authoritarian movements within that response are gaining institutional ground rather than losing it. The technocratic response in a new key hands the decisions to the machine itself, which is the direction parts of finance, military targeting, and judicial sentencing are already moving. The first response sustains the form of democracy while emptying its substance. The second response abandons even the form. Neither response preserves democratic self-rule as the founding generations understood it, and there is no third response visibly forming. The honest political forecast is that what we have called liberal democracy will continue to use its old vocabulary while operating on different machinery, and the gap between the vocabulary and the machinery will widen until the vocabulary collapses, probably within a generation. Whether the collapse opens onto a new democratic form or onto its successor is the open question of the next twenty years.
The Cultural Layer Has Absorbed Shocks Like This Before
The fifth consequence is cultural and harder to predict, because culture has absorbed previous shocks of this kind. Photography arrived in 1839 and was widely expected to end painting. Painting survived by abandoning the territory photography claimed and inventing impressionism, then cubism, then abstraction. Recorded music arrived around 1900 and was expected to end live performance. Live performance survived by becoming an experience economy where presence, not fidelity, was the product. Chess engines surpassed human grandmasters in the late 1990s and were expected to kill the game. Online chess is now larger than at any point in its history, with more humans playing more games against more opponents than the pre-engine era could imagine.
The pattern across these examples is consistent. Mechanical reproduction shifts the value of the human version from product to presence. A handmade chair is no longer a better chair than a factory chair, and it costs ten times more, because the value lives in the maker’s hand and the buyer’s relationship to it. Live theatre does not compete with film on visual spectacle and does not need to, because the live audience pays for the breath in the room. Human writing, if AI writing becomes competent and ubiquitous, will likely become a luxury good signaling effort, time, and personal stake. The author’s life will count for more, and the work without an author behind it will lose value as it becomes plentiful. Whether that economy supports as many writers as the previous one is a separate question, and the answer is no. The professional middle of the writing trade, the working journalist, the staff editor, the workmanlike novelist, will thin out. The top will hold and the amateur base will expand. The middle was always the most vulnerable layer in any cultural economy, and AI accelerates a contraction that began with the collapse of newspaper revenue around 2007.
The Counter-Case Worth Holding
A counter-case deserves to be kept in view, because the foregoing analysis can slide into a fatalism the evidence does not support. Intelligence, as humans have meant the word for most of recorded history, has always carried more than symbol manipulation. The fuller meaning includes desire, mortality, embodiment, the capacity to lose, the capacity to refuse. A chess engine plays better chess than any human and cares about nothing. A writing engine produces fluent prose and risks no humiliation when the prose fails. The child born this year will live in a body that ages, will love people who die, will choose between options under genuine uncertainty about her own future, will know what it is to be afraid without being shut down for it. All of that registers as full-weight human activity, equal in importance to whatever the machine produces. The category is different from symbol manipulation, and the question of which category we will continue to honor with the word intelligence is a political question more than a technical one. The answer will be settled by what the courts protect, what the schools teach, what the markets pay for, and what the surviving institutions of self-government decide to defend.
The Hardest Truth
The hardest truth, the one this site has been documenting across a decade of work on institutional collapse, is that societies do not adjust gracefully to shifts of this size. Institutions built on one logic do not refactor themselves when the logic changes. They hollow out, keep their letterhead, draw their salaries, and lose their function while everyone with standing to name the loss benefits from its concealment. The American university, the credentialing professions, the editorial gatekeepers of the legacy press, the expert commentariat on broadcast television, each is running on borrowed legitimacy at this moment. None of these institutions will announce its own obsolescence. Each will continue to charge tuition, bill hours, issue credentials, and accept underwriting for some years past practical relevance, then collapse when a critical mass of clients notices they have been paying for what is now free.
The collapse will look like the late stages of American public broadcasting documented in the third volume of the Institutional Autopsy trilogy: a long, dignified fade that no one with authority is willing to name in real time, followed by a sudden insolvency event that surprises no one in retrospect. The next fifteen years will involve a generation-long restructuring of who has standing to speak, who deserves to be paid, and what humans are for once the symbol work has been outsourced. Some of that restructuring will be fair. Much of it will be brutal. Almost none of it will be planned, because the institutions in best position to plan are also the institutions with most to lose by acknowledging the situation.
What Is Left for the Child
The children in question will inherit the result without having known the previous arrangement. They will not mourn what they never had. That is the only mercy on offer, and it is offered only to them. The rest of us, who knew the cognitive bargain when it functioned and built our lives on its assumptions, will spend the remainder of our working lives attending its funeral while pretending it is still in business. The pretense will be socially mandatory, professionally protective, and personally corrosive.
The honest response is to name what is happening, refuse the pretense, and locate value where it is actually moving, which is into presence, judgment, embodiment, and the kind of human authorship that machines cannot fake because they have no stake in the result. The child born this year, if she is lucky, will grow up in a world that has finished the funeral and started building the next thing. The question is whether her parents and grandparents can endure the funeral with enough dignity to leave her something to build on.
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