Mind the gap

When the contractor you hired to rebuild your bathroom from the studs out after a completely disgusting sewer backup all but destroyed your basement five years ago got his certification out of a gumball machine and the baseboards soon warp away from the walls like a trump from reality and now you have to tape the walls and hope your leftover white painters’ caulk matches the baseboard paint and that you have enough to fill the gaping chasms but the cement-griege wall color you picked still awesomely makes the bathroom look like a European Zen spa so at least there’s that.

I canceled my trip to the pain clinic last week because my headache pain was (and still is!) virtually gone

I decided to keep my ophthalmologist appointment today though because 1) I’m waaaaay overdue for an eye appointment anyway and 2) it took forever to get on the schedule and 3) ophthalmologist is fun to spell. Ophthalmologist! See?

So I’m here and artfully masking the signs for the ladies’ bathroom in my selfie and moments away from getting to tell people that I’m dilated to meet them.

Ophthalmologist!

Notes on an unexpectedly long visit to New York:

• The bustling, clueless-tourist crowds are exciting and almost amusing for exactly five days. Add two more against your will and they become murderously intolerable.
• You cannot go ten feet on any New York sidewalk without walking through a crowd of marijuana smoke.
• No matter what they’re wearing, New Yorkers just dress cooler than the rest of us. Even when they look ridiculous, they OWN IT.
• Hot, athletic men with perfect lats and well-broken-in T-shirts walk alarmingly fast in Hell’s Kitchen and make it frustratingly difficult to keep up with them and fulfill your creepy-old-stalker obligations.
• THE. ARCHITECTURE.
• I would drive myself to abject bankruptcy if I lived in such a vibrant world overflowing with theater, art, music and museums. But especially theater.
• tiny. bathrooms.
• I’m not much of a foodie and I’m trying to avoid fast food, and there just aren’t enough plain-old, boring diners to suit my proletarian needs.
• Apparently the cabbies are contractually obligated to yell FUCK YOU! at pedestrians and other drivers. But in a sexy Brooklyn accent.
• I love hearing and seeing the melting pot of languages and clothing and cultural indicators that you walk through every ten feet (between the marijuana clouds) everywhere you go.
• People lose their humanity and become mere obstacles on the narrow sidewalks. Nobody looks up to say hi or even meet your eyes. It is what it is, but if I moved there and didn’t know a soul it would make me feel profoundly lonely.
• Thankfully I do know someone there. I’ve known my friend Chris probably since kindergarten, and he and his husband and their futon graciously saved me the cost of a hotel when my flights got canceled.
• THE. ARCHITECTURE.

LITANY OF COMPLAINTS:

• Canada apparently burned down the White House while I was asleep
• The Fake News media totally fake-newsily didn’t even cover it
• “Feisty Cherry” Diet Coke
• Antonín Dvořák’s New World Symphony is on the radio right now and I’m trapped because I love hearing the muted ti-ti-ti-tum-tum violin motifs in the third movement and I don’t want to leave the room and miss them
• Not even for a quick run to the bathroom
• Which will happen the moment the entire ti-ti-ti-tum-tum exposition has finished
• Trust me on this
• Because damn, we have a loud toilet
• Autocorrect automatically put the accent in Antonín just now but I had to add all the diacritics to Dvořák myself
• Plus it nonchalantly changed automatically to automagically
• Seriously, autocorrect?
• I’M the only one allowed to make up stupid words on my blog
• Forrealsly
• If autocorrect is going to keep this up, we might as well thank Canada for burning down the White House, disband the last coherent fragments of our country and convert our phone keyboards to Cyrillic right now
• Settings > General > Language & Region > iPhone Language > Russian
• до свидания

White. Pure. Floating.

When you finally find your most prized possession in a storage box and hang it in its rightful place as the pièce de résistance in your luxurious, not-unlike-a-delicately-bergamot-scented-indulgently-deluxe-spa bathroom.

Flashback Friday: Celery in the Bathroom Edition

I loved what I did with that long-ago bathroom. The paint color was called “celery,” so it provided built-in roughage in case you needed it during your bathroom visit. But we all know that at 49 years and 20-too-many pounds, I’m not posting this picture to talk about long-ago bathroom paint colors. I’m posting it as a PSA warning against using white grout in a small room with heavy humidity. It is a BITCH to keep it looking pristine and white. And scraping it out and replacing it with more white grout is both another bitch AND a trump-stupid idea.

You’re welcome.

The radiation cupboard

1. Giving Tree Theater has the mega-coolest bathrooms in the history of all bathrooms in all theaters on all planets past, present and future.
2. Buzz-wham!
3. I go there to comb industrial-size drums of gel in my hair before each show.
4. Because I'm a Mad Man!
5. I freaking ROCKED my 'do tonight.
6. Buzz-wham!
7. Which is good because a LOT of people are going to see my hair tonight.
8. Because we're SOLD OUT, Britiches!
9. And it's only the second performance of our run.
10. BOOYAH!

Barbie Dream Bordello® bathroom accessories!

Fun fact: I once spent 375 years taping off and stenciling silvery-white Deco stripes on the walls and very high ceiling of my bathroom. And since the ceiling was so high I also hung a crystal-beaded Barbie Dream Bordello® chandelier from it. The effect was ... gay. But at least my shoulders ended up hurting so much I couldn't even put my hands in the air like I didn't care

My nephew leaves for college today

So I'm offering him some parting, favorite-uncle advice on here even though he's probably not what you'd call a devoted member of the Read Uncle Jake's Blog Every Single Day Club.

1. Lie low for a while. Get your bearings. Meet lots of people. Learn how to find the positive in every new person and every new situation.
2. Develop these habits now because you'll use them over and over on every new adventure your life takes you on.
3. Make it a priority to find the quietest corner of the quietest library on campus so you'll know exactly where to take yourself when you need to concentrate.
4. Also make it a priority to find any and all private bathrooms on campus.
5. Because sometimes all you'll want more than anything in the world is to poop in peace.
6. Peanut butter and jelly is always a perfectly acceptable meal.
7. Creamy, not chunky.
8. We're not savages.
9. Do your homework as soon as you get home from classes every day.
10. There is no dread-filled panic as profoundly deep as the one you will feel at 11:07 pm on a Tuesday when you realize your paper on Information Age existentialism didn't write itself while you binged on Friends reruns all evening.
11. Never schedule classes before 9:00 am. After you graduate you'll spend the rest of your life getting up at 6:00 to trudge off to work until you die. So enjoy your last waning years where you can still get away with sleeping in.
12. Plus you'll leave yourself an emergency catch-up-on-your-homework cushion each morning if you didn't do your homework when you got home the day before.
13. Like I told you to.
14. "Despacito" is not allowed to be your song-of-the-summer-before-college memory for the rest of your life. Pick something less commercial and more personal.
15. NOW. Before it's too late.
16. Because -- like your prom theme -- it will come up in conversation more often than you'd expect.
17. You will eventually think that your roommate is weird.
18. He will eventually think the same about you.
19. Always remember that the true fact is he is actually way weirder than you.
20. He will probably snore.
21. Or fart when he thinks he can get away with it.
22. So will you.
23. This is called bonding.
24. Febreeze.
25. Roommate bro dates are not a bad thing.
26. You're gonna be living on top of each other anyway, so you might as well be friends in the outside world too.
27. No homo.
28. Call your parents.
29. Often.
30. And text them.
31. And call them.
32. And your sister.
33. And your grandparents.
34. ESPECIALLY your grandparents.
35. You can keep communicating with me just by trading inappropriate memes.
36. I still care about you and how you're doing in school, but I can get all that information from your mother. I really just want more inappropriate memes.
37. Get at least two college jobs: one related to your major so you can have meaningful experience on your résumé when you graduate and one in the dorm cafeteria -- it has short shifts, it's an easy way to make petty cash and you're going to be in the cafeteria around that time anyway.
38. But don't broadcast this strategy on social media because the other kids will see it and try to get those jobs before you do.
39. It's an ugly, cutthroat world out there.
40. Always make sure your backpack is fully zipped when you're traveling between classes. I helplessly watched an expensive chemistry textbook plummet into a rushing river as I was crossing the bridge above it in The Great Poorly Zipped Backpack Disaster of 1987.
41. I was out like 50 bucks and half a semester's worth of lecture notes.
42. Plus I already sucked at chemistry. So this was a pretty epic setback.
43. ALWAYS. ZIP. YOUR. BACKPACK.
44. Get a credit card. Use it only to buy stuff you know you have the money to pay for. Pay it off in full and on time each month. Without fail.
45. This will show the banks you're responsible with your money (and don't think they don't talk to each other) and it will help you build a good credit rating.
46. Good credit can eventually get you more buying power when you're an adult, easier approvals when you rent your first apartment, more options when you buy insurance, and lower interest rates on your car loans and mortgages.
47. Always. Pay. Your. Credit. Card. Bills. In. Full. And. On. Time.
48. You're a good kid. You're actually an awesome kid. Our whole family is so proud of you and who you are and everything you have the potential to become that we probably not-so-secretly burst into tears sometimes just thinking about you.
49. You're gonna do great things. You're also gonna do mistakey things and maybe even catastrophically stupid things. But never forget that you can come to any or all of us if you get into trouble or you need help or even if you're just lonely and you're kind of hoping one of us will drop everything and drive four hours just to see you and take you to dinner. Because we will. And we hope you know we will, without question. We will always have your back.
50. Inappropriate memes.

Flush with excitement

One of the small pleasures of two-leg flights going home to smaller markets like Cedar Rapids is the higher probability that you'll run into people you may know when you get to your final-leg airport gate, which is usually tucked away charmingly in a bubbling drainage ditch behind a haphazard pile of desiccated cows six miles of hardscrabble terrain from the last functioning airport bathroom. And when you change your flight at the last minute, you often get the very back seat on your tiny puddle-jumper-to-smaller-market plane. Right next to the lavatory.

My final score for this flight is 0% people I know and 100% very back seat right next to the lavatory.

My painful distended abdomen and I can't wait to get home.

I swear I didn't plan this

The double-batman thing I mean. I totally planned the flex-gratuitously-for-the-camera-after-hiding-in-the-bathroom-because-the-gym-was-too-crowded-with-hot-straight-guys-I-don't-want-to-think-I'm-weird-for-taking-a-flexy-mirror-selfie thing. 

Yeah. That one's totally on me.

Random things

Just after I got on my bus yesterday morning, it sideswiped a parked car. The sideswiping happened on my side of the bus, too. But I was on my way to only my fourth personal training session, so I’m pretty sure the bus wasn’t off-kilter because of my massive musculature. Though you never can tell. I was worried I’d be late for my trainer (OK, I was worried about the poor owner of the car too … but to be brutally honest I was more worried about being late for my trainer) but I’d left the house with a 15-minute cushion so I figured we’d be OK as the driver waited for whatever CTA officials are dispatched to deal with sideswiped cars at 6:00 am on a Tuesday. Fortunately, the officials came quickly, and they instructed the driver to get right on Lake Shore Drive (four blocks early!) and get all of us passengers to our downtown destinations. So I was at the gym in plenty of time for a brutal attack on my chest and back.

Because I’m done with my trainer by 8:00 and I have a very short walk to my office, I’m usually the first one to get to work on my training days. One unanticipated benefit: I’m the first to use our bathrooms. Which means I get to pee in the blue water the cleaning staff leaves in the urinals overnight. The early bird really does get the worm!

Speaking of our work urinals, some mouth-breathing cretin has penned a crude drawing of what I assume is supposed to be male genitalia (or else it’s a very disfigured hand) on one of the tiles over our leftmost urinal. Our company shares the bathroom with three other companies on our floor, and the bathroom gets lots of traffic—except, of course, on Tuesday and Thursday mornings when I get to make some frothy “blue + yellow = green” magic in blissful solitude—so I don’t know when anyone would have found the privacy to actually write on the walls without being noticed. (It’s not as though the building management had the basic humanity to install partitions between our urinals or anything.) More disturbing still is the fact that some adult male in an adult office building in big-city Chicago would feel compelled to draw a penis on a bathroom wall. As though he were in a truck stop. Or a grade school. Or a Ted Haggard tent revival.

In other big-disfigured-penis news, Alaska Senator Ted “Bridge to Homophobia” Stevens has been charged with seven counts of felony corruption. And Dubya is leaving what’s left of our country with the highest dollar deficit ever recorded. And Scrabulous has been forcibly removed from Facebook, along with all records of my 30 wins and 20 losses and my 90-something-point score for actinium. Which is so devastating to me, I can’t even find the strength to bring this post full-circle and close it on a pee joke.

Purging in the bathroom

Moving in together has lots of benefits: on-demand hugs, built-in dinner dates even on weeknights, someone to hold you too close, a sudden acute awareness of how often you fart (which is perhaps more a self-conscious revelation than a benefit) and a whole new world of bathroom products.

When you first pool your bathroom products, it's kind of exciting. How often in your life does your hair have the opportunity to smell like a different tropical fruit every day for a week? Only when you move in together, that's when.

But the choices can overwhelm you faster than stupid at a Huckabee rally. And all those bottles, tubes and dispensers can take over your bathroom pretty quickly. Especially if you're gay men with a compulsion to moisturize. And despite your most valiant bergamot-scented efforts, you won't deplete your inventory to more manageable levels for at least a year. Emphasis on at least.

Since I'm on the topic … and since it's always fun to sneak through people's medicine cabinets … and since I've already taken and uploaded these pictures … I thought I'd take a moment show you our private world o’ cleanliness. Especially now that we've lived together long enough that we can finally close our cabinet doors.

Here's what I face every morning in my fog of shower steam and impending dementia: a bewildering array of self-tanners, wrinkle preventers, band-aids, bulk quantities of antiperspirant and enough sinus medicine to fire up a profitable meth lab. Plus a his ’n’ his set of barely used Nair for Men, which I don't recommend spreading on your skin unless you're looking to play a Law & Order burn victim. The fiancé doesn't seem to have much trouble with it, though. But then again he's immune to my farts, so how could a rub-on chemical burn slow him down? And stop looking for incriminating prescriptions. They're not there. We're kinda boring on the Rx front. Besides, I hid the RU-486 before I took this picture.

Here's the little window ledge in our shower. It sits in front of the frosted window that I still am not completely convinced is preventing everyone in our courtyard from seeing first-hand just how often I wash my butt. Funny story: After I took this picture, I asked the fiancé how often he uses that oppressively florid Dove body wash that's been sitting there since we moved in a year ago. "What oppressively florid Dove body wash?" he asked me. Which should tell you a lot about the scintillating conversations we have when we're not doing fun things like shampooing our thick, luxurious hair. In any case, neither of us knows where the oppressively floral Dove body wash came from, and we can't think of any visitors in the year we've been in our condo who haven't used the shower in the guest bathroom. It's a mystery! Wrapped in an effluvium of flora! Packaged in a tacky blue container! I hate to waste things—even things I don't particularly like—but we were both tired of the faint smell of funeral home that wafted through our shower every time we moved that bottle to get to the stuff behind it. So let's just say the dumpster behind our building now smells refreshingly of jasmine and bougainvillea.

I hated this cheap little apothecary cabinet from the moment we moved in. Then I realized it was the perfect place to display all the little sample bottles of stuff we've acquired but never used because they were hidden in boxes and bags under our sinks and we kept forgetting we had them. Another plus: When I stocked the cabinet I got to revel in my everything-must-face-forward-and-be-grouped-by-brand OCD so all the visitors to our bathroom could see what shameless brand whores we are (key words: H2O+, Bliss, hotel freebies). And it's actually working ("it" being the part about our bergamot-scented efforts to deplete our inventory from paragraph three, not the dubious efforts to impress imaginary bathroom guests from paragraph seven). We are slowly working our way through all those bottles and tubes and dispensers of goo. And we've never looked younger, felt smoother, and smelled more like salad and rainforests in our lives.

I left the house at 7:30 this morning

Since then, I've had a 45-minute bus ride, a 45-minute client meeting, an all-company meeting, two trips to our crowded kitchen for free doughnuts (Little-known fact: Free doughnuts are the lifeblood of the advertising industry. No free doughnuts, no advertising.) and probably seven smaller meetings with various members of my staff.

I finally found a moment to run to the bathroom just after noon. And as I walked up to the urinal, I discovered that my fly was already down.

Sigh.

But! I'm not gonna let a couple hundred Chicagoans admiring my superhero underpants get in the way of passing along my favorite seasonal humor:

What day of the year is a command to move ahead?
MARCH FORTH! HA!

You haven't lived until ...

... you've sung the National Anthem as an out ’n’ proud gay man in front of 40,000 screaming baseball fans. This was the fourth National Anthem at the Cubs for the Chicago Gay Men's Chorus, and our performance this year was even better than the first three because 1) the brand-new seating that cantilevers over the the entrance we always use (labeled "Gate Q," which I mention here for no particular reason) created a nice shady place for us to wait until we were marched onto the field, 2) our artistic director fleshed out his already rockin' arrangement of the National Anthem with some lush new harmonies and some soaring vocal fireworks at the end and 3) our last few notes were drowned out by a roaring MILITARY FLYOVER that sent everyone in the stadium into a patriotic frenzy of screaming, cheering and voter registration renewing. (Unfortunately, there was no patriotic frenzy of televising us, so as far as you know, this whole post is one elaborate lie.)

... you've been personally picketed by Fred "Gay Buttsex" Phelps and his gang of we're-not-gay gay-buttsex-obsessed witnesses for Christ. A sad little contingent of Fred's peeps dragged their discount fashions and their sparkly, rainbow-festooned God Hates Fags signs all the way to the big city to convert the Cubs fans to their cute little religion on Saturday. But the Cubs security detail walled them off on some obscure street corner, so we didn't get a chance to cross paths with their cocksuckery ministry. The CGMC artistic director read part of the group's barely-English ("the abominable, ao (sic) called Chicago Gay Men's Chorus") press release out loud at rehearsal Sunday night. Its third-grader logic and its Ann Coulter vocabulary tempered its underlying hatred for us, but its declaration that we are "appropriately known as Chicago's Anal-Copulating Caterwaulers" drew some whoops and cheers. But not in the way Fred probably hoped—though most likely in the way Fred secretly fantasizes when he's alone with his Jergens and his fishnets.

...you've changed clothes in the Wrigley Field men's room. Matthew and I were not interested in watching the game in our black-and-white monkey suits, so we brought a change of clothes into the stadium with us after we sang. We figured the bathrooms on the ground floor—the fabled trough rooms lined with men peeing elbow-to-elbow in a tribute to urination efficiency—would be a weird place for two guys whose outfits announced to the whole stadium "Hey! We're gay! We just sang for you! In matching outfits!" to strip down to our name-brand underpants. So we climbed to the top tier where we figured the bathrooms would be 1) less populated and 2) less covered in pee. We had to sweet-talk a guard who wasn't about to let us up without top-tier tickets (alliteration runs rampant!), but she agreed that the steerage bathrooms weren't the place for two half-naked gay singers and she scooted us up to the fancy bathrooms so we could complete our transformation in relative privacy. But even the floors in the first-class loo still seemed like they were covered in pee.

... as a person who officially couldn't care less, you've pleaded with an 8-year-old to enjoy watching the Cubs kick butt. My brother-in-law is a Dodgers fan. So my nephew has decided he has to be a Dodgers fan as well. But his little 8-year-old world is still pretty black-and-white, which means he'd be committing a patriarchal betrayal on the magnitude of Greek tragedy if he—just for a moment—made some outward sign of happiness, approval or even basic organic function in the face of the Cubs' 9-5 whopping of the Pirates on Saturday. So sullen he sat (alliteration runs rampant!) while his Cubs-neutral uncle very conspicuously jumped up and cheered and clapped and sang about Cracker Jack for three hours next to him.

...you've killed a man with your bare hands. Or so I hear.

...you've spent a weekend playing provider for the most important people in your world. My folks, my sister, and my niece and nephew came to Chicago to hear me sing and to hang out with Justin and me for the weekend. (My brother-in-law stayed home to tile and grout their new kitchen floor, which sounds like it could be a total Cubs-hating cop-out, but having just finished my own kitchen renovation I totally understand his need to stay on schedule and his burning desire to get the damn thing done.) And when my family wasn't enjoying their day at Wrigley Field on our dime, they were eating our food and sitting on our furniture and using our towels and sleeping safely and soundly in our beds ... and I just can't think of a more satisfying feeling than having everyone I love under our care for a whole weekend.

... you've watched your niece and nephew play happily with your fiancé (and vice versa). I'm getting everything I've ever wanted out of my relationship with Justin: a best friend, a happy home, a life of endless giggles and snuggles and Law & Order reruns ... and now the realization of all my extended-family domestic fantasies. Just as his family and his nieces have embraced me as one of their own, my family and my niece and nephew see him as a part of us. Amid all the meals and conversations and jokes we shared this weekend, we even got a bonus round: Justin's family stopped by so the adults could all meet each other and the kids could all play together and if I hadn't been so busy putting fruit garnishes on dessert options, I might have thought about how happy I was and burst into tears right there in front of everyone. Thank goodness my hand-sliced strawberry fans kept my runaway emotions in check.

Public Service Announcement

You work in a small office. It has a small bathroom featuring two tiny stalls situated freakishly close to each other.

You head to the bathroom to visit one of the stalls. You find there’s already someone occupying the other stall.

Q: What do you do?

A: You LEAVE. You go sit uncomfortably at your desk for 10 minutes so the first guy can do his business in peace. Once he’s gone and the air has cleared, you head back to do your business. And should a third guy enter the bathroom while you’re in the stall, he should leave you alone and wait his turn as well.

I’m glad we had this little talk.

Embarrassing moment #6

I’m walking to the bathroom at work. I turn down the hallway where the bathrooms are, and I encounter a female colleague coming toward me from the women’s bathroom.

And I suddenly realize that I’ve already started unzipping my fly.

Inner sanctumoniousness

Last July, after taking three years to pick a color, I finally painted my bathroom, transforming it from a nightmare in beige to a fiesta of … um … darker beige, acutally. But I think it looks hella-cool, and it no doubt has tripled* the value of my condo.

*Or not.

I took pictures right away to post here and share with all of you, but I got distracted by … um … the way Ann Coulter looks like a third-world drag queen. (Really! Someone please feed that poor hungry man some cock—no wonder he's always so irrational and angry.) Anyway, I'm finally making amends and posting bathroom pix here and now, for your early 2005 weekend enjoyment:


Funny how a darker wall color can transform the look of a cheap mirror from ghetto to fabulous. Really. When my walls were off-white, this scabby old mirror looked like Ann Coulter something you'd find next to the condom machine in a truck-stop bathroom. And now the darker wall color suddenly gives it a deep, rich luster*.

*Saving me the cost and effort of replacing it.

And check out the bas-relief medallions I have hanging next to the mirror. They represent the four seasons, and because I'm too pathetic to have real, actual hobbies I rotate them so the current season is always on top. True story! In this picture, see, "summer" is on the top, followed (naturally) by "fall," "winter" and then "spring." Whenever you're in my bathroom, you always know what season it is AND which seasons come next, just by reading down. Except for right now. Because I haven't changed the medallions since I took this picture. In July. (That would be "summer," for those of you having trouble with the math.)


How much do I love this stencil? Let me count the ways: 1) It looks funky, retro, modern and tribal all at once, with a dash of Keith Haring flavor thrown in as if to say Hey, I'm kinda gay here! 2) The pattern has no discernible beginning or end, so I didn't have to measure and center and fudge and worry about balance and how it wrapped around the corners. Things like that keep me up at night. 3) The stencil pattern, paints and brushes cost less than five bucks. 4) The whole stencil process took like 30 minutes. 5) It's the finishing touch that makes my bathroom look like a high-end day spa. If you squint real hard.


In addition to hating my bathroom walls, I also REALLY hated the sink. The sink bowl is a mousy-blah light gray with a utilitarian round shape designed to complement the décor in any prison or livestock housing facility. But it was in good condition, and replacing it was more work than I cared to take on. So I simply replaced the faucet with a curvaceous piece of hardware that was a bitch to install—though it gives the sink's roundness a sense of holistic purpose and elevates my whole bathroom experience to something approaching cosmic meaning. (And if you look closely, you can see that I took this picture with my shirt off.)


These fabulous little candle shelves were made by my spectacularly handy ex, Jeff. I'd seen shelves like these on the Queer Eye episode where the hunky little monkey boy with the bad breath was afraid to walk down the runway with his purse-designing wife. I'd looked all over for similar shelves, but they were nowhere to be found. So Jeff came to the rescue, making a bunch of them from scratch for me. He totally rocks.


A view of the finished product. The slogan on the Fairy Soap sign asks "Have you a little fairy in your home?" I bought it because I think cleanliness is the most important virtue (right after voting for my bloginess), and I live to preach the gospel of soap to the unwashed masses. Too bad the people who need it most—like that bitch Ann Coulter—are banned from my bathroom and will never get to see it. (Hey, a man's gotta poop—and with people like him her in the room, all holes clamp shut in instinctive self-preservation.)