Writers are wallflowers. A sweeping generalization, and one that can’t possibly describe all writers, but in my limited experience the more extroverted exceptions to this rule know that they are exceptions.

We don’t quite sit right with life, filled with what Martha Graham called the “queer divine dissatisfaction,” which compels us to spend an inordinate number of hours each week either creating things for little or no pay, or feeling like crap because we haven’t done so. And since it makes my skin crawl to speak for other people, I’m going to stop. For now.

My little run-in last week with the porn industry, after a few more days of reflection, seems to fit a familiar pattern, one it took me well into my 30’s to discern. Although I’m hardwired to lurk on the edges of life, taking it all in, I’ve always had the conflicting desire to stop observing and just experience life. An internal battle between wallflower and prom queen, if you will.

Underneath, or within these two desires was another one, which seems obviously related to growing up as a scrawny little gay dude. I wanted to prove myself as a man. What this has to do with prom queens, I don’t know. I’m sort of making this up as I go along, people.

These motives pulled me in a few directions over the years:

1. Theater actor. Someone who walks around on a stage pretending to be someone else while other people watch. And applaud. In this job I pretended to be, depending on the role, more naive, more salacious, and more heterosexual than I really am. You get to be other people, without serious consequence, which explains why a lot of introverts take on this job. I have a feeling Meryl Streep is the type who needs a little alone time every day. And she still gets to be Margaret Thatcher. Let’s be clear: by pretending to be other people I felt more like a participant in life, but the urge to prove my manhood wasn’t assuaged by joining the drama club.

2. UPS Unloader, one summer in college. I heard somewhere that in the world of manual labor, this job was considered the toughest. From 10 pm until 2 am at breakneck speed I unloaded boxes from semitrailers onto a very fast conveyor belt. I came home each morning ravenous, covered in dust and dried sweat and bruises, like a guy in a Chevy truck commercial. Apparently I still did not prove what I wanted to prove (see #3)

3. Bicycle messenger. In Minnesota. In the winter.

4. Bartender. Shortly after moving to San Francisco at the age of 27, I stumbled into a South of Market leather-ish bar and watched with hunger and envy the shirtless bartenders sling drinks. Just standing there I could feel some of my Midwestern good-boy aura, which I was desperate to shed, rub off. I figured that getting hired at this particular bar would prove that I was hot in the way I wanted to be hot. I got hired, and though the external validation never sucked, I discovered that flirting for a few seconds with a long line of customers on a packed Saturday night depended upon an entirely different skill set than listening to two or three alcoholics complain for six hours on a Tuesday afternoon.

5. The boyfriend (now husband) of an International Mr. Leather. I will let your imagination fill in the details here, but let me state the obvious: this is a relationship, not a job. Still, attaching myself to a man with that kind of title, who has no qualms being the center of attention, seemed partly motivated by the same desires as above. Fortunately for me, after those desires faded a little, I found myself falling for the actual man.

6. D League Gay Softball Player. Hitting a ball with a stick in front of a bunch of people.

7. Blogger. The perfect job for the guy who wants to narrate his observations from the sidelines while courting attention. And I suppose over ten years I’ve proven something here, but it probably wasn’t my manhood.

8. Potential Porn Actor. You can see the pattern by now. And frankly I’m tired of talking about it, which means you probably got tired of it two weeks ago.

It took me a long time to understand that proving my manhood through external indicators like jobs doesn’t address the internal desire, which lingers long after you’ve punched the clock. I often forget this.

As for wanting to experience, and not just observe, the thing we call life…

I never believe people who say they have no regrets. (And if you leave a comment saying you’ve never once wanted to be a prom queen, even for a minute, no one else will believe you, either) I’m full of regrets. I’m a greedy man. I want to live, if only for a few minutes, and without consequence, every possible story. I want every road not taken.

But having regrets isn’t the same as being unhappy. I like my life, and the dude I’ve turned out to be. After seven years of writing a memoir, though, I keep thinking about the possibilities of fiction, where you can make shit up, and live more lives than the one you’ve been given.

Writing about gay porn is (excuse the pun, but I can’t help myself) harder than it looks. I landed the gig, writing scene recaps for a local studio, through my husband, who regularly cuts the heads of several hundred men and who often comes home bearing free tickets, baked goods, and the occasional job lead.

I don’t know what they do with the recaps. Probably use them in online marketing, to tell potential customers exactly who does what to whom in their flicks, though I’ve never asked and I’ve never checked their site for confirmation. Some of my writing I don’t feel a need to revisit.

It’s a challenging job due to the repetitive nature of porn scenes (“Insert Tab A into Actor B. Rinse and repeat.”) and because there are only so many words for parts of the male anatomy that are both:

1. Hot
2. Not silly

Think about it. You can come up with several dozen slang words for penis, yes, but how many of them don’t make you giggle? Porn depends upon, as the writer John Gardner once said about fiction, “a vivid and continuous dream.” Giggling breaks the dream, and deflates the mood.

While writing my first-ever recap, I turned to my copy of the Oxford Writer’s Thesaurus, which had cost me $30 and which (despite its contributions from writers I love like David Foster Wallace) I’d barely cracked. I paged through the “P’s” only to find no entry for “Penis.”

Cowards.

Over time I’ve settled on a small but trusted stable of terms that don’t make me break out in hives (tool, cock, shaft, piece, meat, etc.). I watch each film (movie? title? whatever) twice, taking notes then revising. Some actors appear in more than one film, and like every viewer I have my favorites. As you might imagine, I find it more challenging to write about the ones who don’t do it for me.

One of the guys that I don’t mind repeatedly watching in action goes to my gym, and we frequently end up in side-by-side squat racks on leg days. Like most local gays I am completely capable of affecting a jaded air of can’t-swing-a-dead-cat when it comes to porn stars. And yet.

I’ve written three recaps starring this guy, spending at least six hours in his virtual company, and though I’m well aware of how this will sound to you, more than once I’ve nodded at him as we paced back and forth between sets, expecting him to recognize me.

He regards me long enough to no doubt lump me in with other slack-jawed, secretly envious porn fans, until I finally break eye contact to salvage my pride. “But no,” I’ve actually thought to myself, “Dude, I’m different.  You and I – we’re in the same industry.”

Thankfully I’ve kept this line to myself.

I suppose it’s a regular event for all celebrities – some stranger tugging on their sleeve and whispering, “I feel like I know you.” But, well, I sort of do know him. Or rather a narrow version of the man in the next squat rack, well-lit and well-framed, engaged in very specific activities. I don’t know what he looks like when he wakes up in the morning, or when he visits his parents, or when he thinks nobody’s watching.

I recently came across a photo of him in the earliest days of his career, before he’d discovered facial hair and anabolic steroids, and it looked like the photo of an entirely different person, and now whenever I see him I am conscious of these bits of knowledge in my head and of the imbalance, since he knows nothing about me.

This month marks ten years of DOGPOET, a project I’ve sustained mostly through stubbornness. Once or twice a week some stranger will come up to me at the gym, or at a party, or at Café Flore, and mention this blog, and I find myself on the other side of that imbalance, and I usually blush because, for the moment at least, I feel naked. Sometimes I wonder about the people who don’t come up to me,  strangers wandering around out there who know little bits of my life. But then, why else did I start a blog?

That’s how it is for all of us. I glance across the gym at guys whose names I don’t know, but whose bed linens I’ve seen in their cruising site profile pics. I don’t know what that guy does for a living, but I know he’s circumcised. I know this other guy’s opinion on Sarah Palin from a comment he left on my friend’s Facebook post. I know that guy just got dumped by his boyfriend, and that other guy listens to an awful lot of Florence and the Machine.

We’re all walking around with small stray bits of knowledge of strangers with whom we’ve never even shared a meal. We’re all briefly naked, now and then, revealing carefully chosen parts of our lives. But no, that’s wrong. Nakedness implies a full reveal, and what we offer the world, online at least, are edited frames spliced from our lives, well-lit, and well-framed.

The online world’s been good to me, mostly, but I’d like to keep it in perspective. In the new year I hope to have a little less Facebook, and a little more flesh-and-blood. The hour-long face-to-face chats over dinner, or coffee, where the knowledge we accumulate is more evenly-balanced, and usually more revealing.

A couple of weeks ago I lost my mind. A long unraveling – I trace it back about a year, when my personal finances collapsed in a single day, and I went from a fairly comfortable existence to trolling the Craig’s List job ads on an increasingly desperate mission to pay my rent. The coming days would be familiar to anyone looking for work during a recession: the endless resumes and cover letters sent into a black void, the gradual lowering of expectations, the mounting dread.

Finally a law firm offered me a temp job, each of my three interviewers pointing out helpfully that I was clearly overqualified, to which I replied, “I’m not above anything.” Words I sometimes regretted over the coming months (most often while elbow-deep in dirty dishes) but which I never took back.

The temp job led to a permanent, if low-paying, part-time position three months later. At the same time I found another low-paying part-time position managing content and social media for a small company. In between I wrote low-paying movie recaps for a porn company. Between the three jobs I had a little hope that I’d be ok.

But none of the jobs qualifed me for benefits. I was paying several hundred dollars a month for health insurance (which I was lucky to have), and any day I took off was a day without pay. The Manly Fireplug and I had a couple of weddings to pay for, and we wanted to live together. We’d managed to get through five years in separate places, but the back-and-forth was wearing on me. San Francisco, a beautiful city of cruel real estate, wasn’t making it easy. To live together, I’d need to make more money.

I felt increasingly fractured, working on so many projects that I was doing none of them well. Working as much, or more, than everyone else I knew, but seemingly making far less. An acquaintance on Facebook (I assume he had health insurance) posted a rant about the “socialism” of “Obamacare” (I really, really do not understand gay Republicans). My car broke down, and the mechanic said it would take $1300 to fix. I parked it outside the Fireplug’s house and tried to save up the money. Each week I’d meet with the three separate guys I was mentoring in their sobriety, but I’d show up distracted and grumpy and short of patience. The thirty pages of revision between me and the end of my book felt insurmountable. Then my laptop died.

I felt trapped. I argued with the Fireplug more often than I’d like to admit. I was angry and put-upon, and embarrassed by my struggle to accept my circumstances, which were, I had to admit, mostly of my own making. Because a long time ago I’d decided to be a writer.

What this meant, to me at least, was a matter of focus. I could go the career route, finding a comfortable salaried position with room to grow, but risk ending up one of the countless people I knew who wanted to be a writer, but who never wrote. Or I could write, and for the time being,  sacrifice the money and security of a career. There are people who manage to do both. So far I haven’t been one of them. About a month ago I almost switched sides, interviewing three times for a position with a start-up that would have paid me more than twice the amount I’d ever earned in one year.

A week after the third interview, I emailed my contact at the start-up and asked for an update. “Oops!” she said. “Oh my God, we’ve been so busy. I forgot to tell you. We decided to go in a different direction. Best of luck!”

My point here isn’t that I had it worse than a lot of Americans. Only that I wasn’t handling “it” well. My short fuse shortened some more, and all I wanted, from the Fireplug, from my friends, from my co-workers, was to be left alone. Finally, a couple of weeks ago, the Fireplug asked me to help him with some minor chore.  I responded with childish exasperation. We had words. My volume grew, and then it happened. I just lost it. A year’s worth of bitterness and anger and resentment came out of me, through my lungs. I’ll leave out the details, but trust me, for a good five minutes I was insane. I scared both of us. And the neighbors.

Cue regret and embarrassment. And a lot of silent reflection.

Then, last week, my supervisor calls me into her office and offers me a full-time job, with benefits. My little behind-the-scenes campaign of dropping hints to co-workers about interviewing for jobs with benefits seemed to have worked. The partners wanted me to stay.

I’m not sure if I can articulate the relief I felt. It was – it is – immense. I immediately went back to my desk and ran a few calculations. With paid health insurance, and another day a week in pay, suddenly everything seemed possible. The car repairs. A savings account with more than four dollars. Best of all, a home together with my husband.

My mood lightened. My lungs no longer felt tight. “It’s good to see you smiling again,” the Fireplug told me. Last night I drove my car back from the garage, and when I greeted the Fireplug, just home from work, I could actually see him. His handsome face. All the worries and grudges I’d been carrying around, which I’d let hang in the air between us, had fallen away.

I wish I could say that I’d achieved this transformation through some kind of spiritual shift. But no. What had saved me was simply money.

My mother would have been sixty-four today. Her birthday, as you might expect, sometimes prompts a bit of soul-searching, usually about time and priorities and this short thing we call life. I’ll be holding on to all of my jobs, at least for now. The relief about money seems to have whipped off the blinders I’d been wearing, and a few days of reflection have made it clear that I had a bigger part in my year-long stress. I hadn’t exactly made the most of my fractured time. So a personal inventory, just in time for New Year’s resolutions, on how I spend my hours and days is in order. It’s time to get more done.

Butchie is a judo target and t-shirt model for the Manly Fireplug’s barbershop, though he’s been guarding its basement now for several months. Just so we’re clear: he’s in the basement. I know he’s in the basement. Yet every time I go down to the basement he scares the crap out of me.

Butchie stoically presided over last night’s frenzied literary reading preparations, as I dusted off the folding chairs, iced the drinks, and searched for that damn corkscrew. An hour later, after the folding-chair-up-the-basement-steps bucket brigade (thank you volunteers and Fireplug!) I ducked outside to try and air out my damp shirt. I sweat a lot before every barbershop reading.

So I expect the sweat. But I didn’t expect the tears. Last night at the podium, in front of the capacity crowd, I got choked up reading a chapter about my father from the end of my book. Last year, at the Queer Arts Festival reading, I got choked up reading a chapter about my mom’s first girlfriend.

Both times took me by surprise, and embarrassed me. I find myself aspiring to a particular writerly image, the dude who reads, say, at the 92nd Street Y in New York, and sells just enough books to stay – with the help of the requisite side jobs – just above poverty.

That dude writes literature, which requires emotional distance from the subject matter. His work isn’t a barely-digested therapy session thrown on the page.

An emotional distance I thought I’d acquired. By now I’ve written nineteen drafts of my book, and have read through each draft at least ten, but more often twenty or thirty times, tweaking the stray word. I must have read the chapter on my mother’s first girlfriend, and the chapter on my father, at least fifty times each.

So the tears felt like the mark of an amateur, or worse, some kind of performance trick I was pulling on the audience. A schtick.

I used to be the kind of kid that others called sensitive. Code word for homo, maybe, but I’ll admit that I was ruled by my feelings.

In recent years I’ve tried to lean a little more often on my thoughts, if only to reach for a bit of balance, and to become a better writer. And in some cases my lack of emotion began to surprise me.

During those dreary few months when the Fireplug and I split up, for example, I seemed to only feel cold disappointment. I never cried.

But then one day I’m driving to work, listening to a Death Cab for Cutie album I’ve just downloaded, and the sad opening piano chords of their song, “Brothers on a Hotel Bed” throws a hook into the depths of me, and reels up tears. Tons of them. I spend the next few weeks driving around the city with that song on repeat, endangering countless San Franciscans with my blurred-vision driving.

Last week, as the Fireplug and I drove down to Palm Springs, listening to my iPod, up pops that song, and up come the tears. Again. Tons of them.

“Oh G-god,” I said. “I’m sorry, I f…forgot it was on this p…playlist!”

After we’d got back together I’d told him all about the song, so he knew what I meant.

“That’s okay,” he said, grabbing my hand.

“I don’t know why it still m-m-makes me cry. It’s st-st-stupid!”

“It’s not stupid,” he said. “We almost lost this.”

He was right, and really, the only stupid thing is to pretend like you’re someone you’re not. To jam yourself inside an image of a writer that doesn’t fit. We can’t all be Butchie.

So yeah, I cry, and maybe the only thing that’s changed since I was a kid is that I let my tears surprise me. I was embarrassed at first, last night, but then I got over it. Time’s wasting. I’ve got two last chapters to get right, and if I’m lucky, a slew of future readings at which I can freely bawl my eyes out.

I spent seven heavenly days crashing at a friend’s house (thanks Fred!) in Palm Springs with the Manly Fireplug. Sort of a combination honeymoon/sabbatical where I worked on my book – writing six hours a day – took a dip in the pool, then an evening with the hubby. World Gym, dinner, then a cigar in the hot tub. In this case sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. At least at first. It was a honeymoon, after all.

And a very hard honeymoon to leave for the real world again. Since then I’ve been back to the three jobs, interviewing for others, and trying to get the last 3% of the book finished so that I can send it off to a few agents.

If you’re in San Francisco and free tomorrow night, I’ll be reading at the Fireplug’s shop as part of Litquake. Decided I’ll share the What-Happened-When-My-Dad-Found-My-Blog chapter (new material in case you’ve heard me read other sections). Hurt feelings, D.C. snipers, a Banana Republic sales boy with a lopsided mullet, and much more…

A Little Off the Top, and Over the Top
Tuesday, October 11th
Doors open at 8:30 pm; show starts at 9:00 pm
free; $5-$10 suggested donation
Joe’s Barbershop
2150 Market St (between Church and Sanchez)

The other day I stood in the living room, punching buttons on the dvd remote control as my roommate wandered through. Together we watched as the big flat-screen TV filled with quick-edited shots of naked men – accompanied by the requisite throbbing pulse of a tribal soundtrack – engage each other in activities you’d never find on prime time television.

“You should keep a journal,” my roommate said. “To chronicle your life.”

“I hope you don’t mind,” I said. “But I can’t get this #%#$ review copy to work on my Playstation.” Nor would it work on either of my two laptops. I grunted and punched at the stupid buttons, my eyes bleary after a full day at the law firm, now faced with an absurdly short deadline for my second job, writing a series of 300-word scene recaps for a local gay porn company.

I don’t know what they do with the recaps. Throw them up on their website, I would imagine, giving prospective buyers a glimpse at who does what to whom in each particular movie. Which may sound like fun to some of you, but honestly, there are only so many words for certain parts of a man’s anatomy that are hot without sounding silly.

My roommate wandered off to his bedroom as I settled onto the couch with my laptop, trying to forget about the four newsletter articles due soon for my third job, a marketing-and-social-media gig. I began typing:  Shay Michaels and Lance Navarro swap spit in a dim-lit dungeon…

“How’s it feel being married now to the Manly Fireplug?” people kept asking me.

“Who?” I said.

Somewhere between job one and job two, as the Fireplug buzz-cut the evening barbershop crowd, I’d stumble outside with our three dogs, on three leashes, pulling at three speeds, wagging their tails and weaving in and out of each other’s paths in what I swore was a canine conspiracy of entanglement. As they pulled me along I calculated costs of weddings, health insurance, and real estate.

Who am I? What am I doing? How could I be working so many hours and making so little money? Yes, I had three jobs at a time when many had none. Still, I’m human, which is to say that within each hour of each day I’d dizzily swing between the poles of gratitude and self-pity.

At night in bed the Fireplug would wrap his meaty forearm around me and I’d try to slow my pulse, pondering Steve Jobs.

The man who’d just stepped down from Apple had been bouncing all over the news cycle echo chamber, and I’d clicked on a link and read a commencement speech he’d made, six years back, at Stanford University.

At first his words had moved me, words outlining the kind of philosophy you’d expect to hear at such ceremonies:

 Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.

I believed in his words, and I felt lucky that I’d known for a very long time what it is that I love to do, even if I had yet to make a living from it.

But yesterday at the law firm I fielded a call from my car mechanic, who gave me, in an apologetic tone, some fairly bad news. And when I hung up I found myself blinking back tears.

I was not proud of this. I’m not proud of it now. But I felt tired and defeated and pissed at Steve Jobs, who’d exhorted a crowd of impressionable youth to live each day as if it were their last, and Joseph “Follow Your Bliss” Campbell, and every figure of inspiration whose quotes leave out the compromises we must make, one foot in bliss, one foot in life.

Which is not to say that I could give up what I love, with a 98% finished memoir that gets exponentially more wrenching to write with each page, and which has all but convinced me to turn next to fiction, where you can just make shit up, a 98% finished book waiting, like my new husband, for the scraps of between-job attention I can muster.

And I need the Steve Jobs and the Joseph Campbells and the Anna Quindlens of the world to remind me that it’s all possible.

Just as I need to know that I’m not alone in my one-foot-there, one-foot-not: that there are folks like Seymour Krim, who once wrote about “those who have yet to find the professional skin to fit the riot in their souls.”

I need to remember that life falls somewhere between dreams and compromises. That there are worse things than being tethered to competing claims on my time, pulled along in three different directions, at three different speeds.

Happy Birthday to Joe’s Barberhop!

I’m proud of you mister for making more than a business; you’ve built a neighborhood institution.

And thanks to all of the customers who’ve come through the doors in the last seven years. Because of you, we might someday get to buy a little real estate in San Francisco.

Hey, a guy can dream.

In a lovely, rose-tinted alternate universe, I spent the few weeks since my last post lying on a beach in Fiji with the Manly Fireplug, a blissfully unplugged honeymoon.  I’ve never been to Fiji, and I don’t even know if it’s a nice place to go these days, but the poet in me liked the alliteration of Fiji and Fireplug.

But in real life the honeymoon had to wait, and after ten days going from Philly to the Catskills back to Philly then to Brooklyn and Manhattan before returning to Philly on our extended wedding/ Fireplug family reunion tour, we actually had to, you know, work for a living.

I’m writing this on company time, having picked up another weekday of office work, which now puts me somewhere around 50 hours a week between my various jobs. When your health insurance eats up a quarter of your salary, you do what you can.

So a long-winded, carefully-composed narrative of our wedding won’t be forthcoming today.  Besides, this is the internet; who has the attention span for narratives? How about a couple of pics instead…

Since the Fireplug had something like 12 or 13 family members making the trip from Philly to Brooklyn bright and early the morning of the ceremony, the Fireplug’s mom decided to rent an entire bus. What showed up was a stretch limo – the kind with an interior neon ceiling that changed colors, with tiny artificial stars shimmering overhead. I could almost pretend like we were kicking off a Saturday night trip to our junior prom, but really it was Wednesday morning,  and we were heading up the Pennsylvania turnpike.

The driver had some trouble navigating the limo through the narrow streets of Brooklyn Heights, and we arrived at the promenade with only a few minutes to spare. The wedding photographer snapped this as I emerged from the limo, fretting:

There’s a few other photos here. (Thanks again to Jonathan Gati for the great shots.) Various friends and family converged on our location but I continued to fret. The judge was late. No judge, no wedding. There’s a reason I shy away from event planning. I fret.

But the judge arrived with seconds to spare.

I believe our ceremony lasted about six minutes. It included the exchange of vows we’d written together, which I later posted here.

I made it about two words in before this happened to me:

Yeah, I totally cried. Sue me.

My friend Norman Brannon snapped this photo. That’s the Fireplug’s mother beside him; his best man, Joel; and his niece, the flower girl I mentioned in that other post. Beside me stands my father, my best man that day.

I don’t remember what we were laughing at. In fact, I can’t be certain the ceremony lasted six minutes, because a fierce case of tunnel vision overtook me. Beneath the promenade ran the East River, and beyond that stretched the skyline of Manhattan. Somewhere in there stood the Brooklyn Bridge. I saw none of it.

I only remember one thing from the ceremony.  The thing I tried to focus on during our vows. This face:

And I’ll think I’ll just leave it at that.

Today I marry my friend.

I promise to tell you “I love you” every day.

I will encourage you in your work and dreams.

I will celebrate with you our joys and stand beside you during our hardships.

I will remember your favorite things and surround you with them.

I will cherish the strengths and imperfections that make you Joe.

I will fight for you, care for you, and protect you.

I will never give up on you.

I will give you the room to be your own man.

I will cultivate honesty, compassion, generosity, and a sense of humor.

Together we will build a home where friends and family are loved and celebrated.

We will be companions in this life.

One of the things I know I’ll always find at my future mother-in-law’s house outside Philly is pictured at left. Also, scrapple for breakfast. Don’t ask what it is, just eat it. It’s good.

The Manly Fireplug‘s sister recounted for us how she asked her 7-year-old daughter if she’d like to be the flower girl at a wedding. The girl, who loves Cinderella and pink and the Little Mermaid, jumped up and down and said “YES!” Then, “Wait, who’s getting married?”

“Uncle Joey.”

“UNCLE JOEY’S GETTING MARRIED!!” Her eyes got wide and she jumped some more. “To who?”

“To Mike.”

The girl stopped jumping. “Mike?!?”

“Yes, Mike.”

The girl looked doubtful. “How does that work?”

“Well,” her mother said, “Sometimes boys like girls, like me and your daddy. And sometimes boys like other boys. And sometimes girls like other girls. The only thing that matters is that you love someone. That’s all that matters.”

The girl was quiet as she considered this. “Does Mike like dogs? Because Uncle Joey likes dogs.”

“Yes, honey, I think Mike likes dogs.”

“He better.”