Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Romulus and Remus

Life is a big pasture full of sheep. The flock stays together, with the wool pulled over their eyes. The shepherd leads them where he pleases. But, the shepherd and the wolf are enemies. The sheep is happy with what he is given.

The wolf takes what he wants. There is the old saying, "a wolf in sheep's clothing". That wolf is the top dog until he meets a real wolf. The wolf in sheep's clothing is the laughingstock of the other wolves. He is a cross-dresser, and a pervert. The real wolf's thirst for blood cannot be quenched, and his gonads are like bowling balls. He is a wolf in wolf's clothing, and he leaves the sheep as a tattered, sanguine quilt of wool and entrails for the shepherd to clean up.

This is my life, and yours brother, even if you are too stupid to realize it.

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Everybody raise a glass!

I thought of glass as I read the paper today. Online of course. Apparently there's still debate about whether glass is a solid or a liquid.

People can be so caught up in theory, when the truth is staring them right in the face. Just ask them what's really real, and they don't have a clue. Caught up in books, booze, or a glass menagerie of lies.

Real life poses many situations where, if you open your eyes, the debate ends. Of the many things I've done with my hands, one of them provides the perfect example to illustrate my point.

I used to be a mason. Not the capitol Mason that begins with "Free" that is nothing of the sort. My calloused hands laid brick. Sweat and dirt building up a thick residue on my arms, washed away at the end of the day, but never truly gone. I worked with Bruce. Bruce stunk like booze in the morning but always sweated it all out by 11 am. Bruce was the perfect man for the job, but you could tell the job wasn't perfect for him. He was always forgetting something, whether it was a shower in the morning, or his past sins after work, cleared away with a cold pint and a shot of Jack. Bruce isn't the story though.

Brucey and I were building a chimney for this rich fuck. Real prick of a guy. He was greasy and wore a wifebeater and a toothpick out of the left half of his sneering mouth. Nouveau Riche hailing from Howard Beach. I could tell he was going to be trouble. I had a good read on him. He watched Bruce and I the whole time and gave us instructions. I finally had to tell him that if he knew so much, he should build the goddamn thing himself. He didn't like that too much, and repercussions were imminent. I could feel the guy was going to stiff me, so I devised a plan.

Halfway up the chimney, I built in a plate of glass across the floe. Bruce didn't get it. Bruce told me I was paranoid. He was scared the glass would get us in trouble. Ironic, but Bruce was a good man.

Time came where the chimney was done, and the man had to pay. We didn't go half in on the job. We really built the man a nice chimney. You set yourself to something, you might as well do it the proper way. Me and Bruce took pride in our work. The man opens up his wallet, and says, "I don't have the change right now, I'll pay you later." I would've been happier with myself, but I wasn't paid. So I told him "Sure thing, man, just don't use the chimney until you fork it over."

Three hours later that Howard Beach guy calls me up in a real frenzy. Smoke and the stink of deceit are now filling his house. What a guy. I go back and ask for the money. He opens up his wallet and the change was there all along. I smiled to myself. Bruce would be drinking well tonight. I climbed up onto the roof, and dropped a brick down that chimney, shattering the glass and the man's "I'm smarter than you" persona. The smoke billowed up, and I'd like to think the deceit left too, but I bet that guy is still the same. Bruce never changed either.

None-the-less, glass is solid.

Sunday, July 27, 2008

The Carnival (when the rush comes)

I love carnivals. The buzz, and the excitement of it all. The creepy carnies in their filthy get-ups trying to swindle little kids out of their last nickel. The rigged carnival games. Throwing blunted darts at under-full water balloons, or baseballs at wooden milk bottles. The best game was always the one where you'd line up shoulder to shoulder with all the other kids and shoot a water gun into a clown's open mouth, inflating a balloon above the clown's head until it popped.

I was great at that game. I still am.

I went to confession after Sunday mass. The church is hard up for money these days. Kids are too busy being promiscuous little miscreants to respect the Lord. And men have moved on, worshiping charlatans and whores. I won't write here about what sins I disclosed to Father Baker, but I did give him $100 to help the church and to hold his mouth open so I could piss into it, like the clown game.

What a rush.

Saturday, July 26, 2008

The Man of La Mancha

A wizened man once told me, "I bought a basket. I put a box of bags in the basket. I put baking soda in the bags." His voice was frail, but his words were strong.

I changed my phone number today because of the heavy-breathing pervert who keeps calling and asking for sexual favors. We live in a disgusting society.

In this foul era, I remember the parable of the basket, and hold fast.

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Film Industry

I've bounced around through a lot of jobs and met a lot of people. Some of them are still my good friends. Some turned out to be enemies.

Clarence had been fired from the machine shop. It'd been a couple of weeks and I continued to work there with Kenny and the other guys. We spent our days fixing machines, slopping on thick layers of caustic grease on to their moving parts and making dirty jokes. Kenny was a good guy, a survivalist, with a passion for guns and women. He also had a hard head and wouldn't roll over for anybody.

We were having a pretty typical day. Fix some heavy machines, work on the hydraulic press, CNC mill some new small parts that needed replacing. I was putting anti-seize on a handful of bolts when Clarence showed up.

It was five minutes after closing, so Clarence was probably back to pick up his last paycheck. He got fired in a huff when the boss found his perverted stash of bestial pornography. This job is dangerous enough without sick fucks like that and I can't say that I was sad to see him go.

I looked at Clarence as he walked in and then went back to work. I looked away just in time to miss seeing Clarence take a chrome revolver out of the brown paper lunch sack that he had with him.

Before Kenny and I could react he had the pistol trained on us and demanded for us to get down on the floor. Clarence shut and bolted the machine shop door. Kenny and I exchanged looks of fear, silently trying to figure out what was coming next.

Clarence was a small man, with a weasel's face and cantankerous demeanor. He weighed 140 lbs and sported a tattered lumberjack's coat over loose coveralls. Most importantly, though, he had a gun.

"Strip," Clarence shouted. He backed up across the machine shop, with his gun still aimed at the two of us. I added a few filthy, oily handprints to my coveralls trying to take them off. One rule of dealing with the man with the gun is to try to not make him more angry than he already is. If you can cause a lull in the action you might be able to talk him out of it.

They say when you're in a life and death situation that your life flashes before your eyes. It didn't. The embarrassing realization that I was going to die naked with Kenny in the machine shop overwhelmed any contrived nostalgia that I might have had.

The worst of my suspicions was confirmed. Clarence didn't want revenge. He wanted to have his way with us and then suicide in this greasy pit. He had already stripped out of his outfit and his disgusting figure looked like a mountain of mash potatoes adorned with a hot dog flagpole. He crept forward, being sure to use the gun to submit us to his will.

Our genuflect position made us vulnerable. He tried to force Kenny to do something revolting, grabbing his head with one hand and waving the gun. Kenny struggled to not be humiliated.

I grabbed Clarence's gun. I jammed it into his bare ass and Kenny fell away as I fired round after round into Clarence's degenerate body.

The exit wounds left Clarence's penis looking like an overripe banana peeled by a cotton gin.

Kenny and I don't talk about it.

Monday, July 21, 2008

The Reasonable Mind of the Rational Man

Since the dawn of time, there have been men. These men used their rational mind to make the decisions that allowed rational men like me and you to exist unto this day. And so they reasoned, and were reasonable. Sometimes they did things like kill each other, but only because that seemed like a good idea at the time.

Ergo, to what can we deem the title of a good idea? Well, a good idea is had by a rational man, acting reasonably. Reasonably is to be conceptualized by "for a reason". And he came up with the reason to act because he felt like solving the problem. He felt like it.

Do feelings legitimize truths? No. Truths are true whether or not we feel like they are.

What is reason? My feelings. And what do I feel? I feel what is right. Because I am a reasonable person, who acts rationally. And my rationality is behind the reason. And that is what I feel.

But do we always feel rightly? Any fool can tell you that of course we do not.

Readers, this is why our reason is essentially no reason. Because our reason is a feeling, and our feelings are based on falsehoods. Dignity is one such falsehood. Dignity is definined as The quality or state of being worthy of esteem or respect. But who determines who is worthy? The self. And the self is no judge of one's own value. He is merely a pawn in the game of the government and society.

But if we allow social constructs such as society and the government to judge us, we can have no dignity. And so our imagination allows us to pretend to reason, using our feelings to further the government and being unable to judge ourselves in the light of a world without humans, where nature could remain red, in tooth and claw. And we could still fuck each other man's wife in a pile of blissfully crooning women, rip each other apart with mighty scimitars, and worship the false idols of money, drugs and sex.

I wrote this before my wife had a miscarriage. Before she gave birth to our son, Mortimer. She went into labor on the toilet, and my son's birth was perverted into a pathetic, amorphous glob of blood and cells being dumped into the bowl's cold porcelain embrace. She didn't cry, and sometimes when I drink out of a whiskey bottle I think of breaking it over her head and shaving my genitals with the bloody glass afterward.

Sunday, July 20, 2008

Always Coca-Cola?

My last post may not be easy to understand. Think of a coke can. Now think of a coke can without any coke. I drank the coke from what was formerly a coke can. You call it an empty coke can. Is there coke in it? Does it hold anything? It has ceased to be coke. It has ceased to be can. I am more of a coke can than it is. There is only commodity left where the coke can was. You throw it away. I pick it up.

Once you cease to define things in their former, negative terms, and begin to define things in their current forms, you see a more real reality.

The woman isn’t tight enough.

Disorder makes me happy enough. That’s how I used to live, that’s what I used to believe. I burned through women like tires in a tire fire burning until I found my singular woman, leaving them scattered like yogurt on the ground. I burned through her, too. Life was a waste of half empty bottles. The kind you find rats scurrying over in an alley, or broken as beach glass washed up, run over by waves again and again, worn down and pounded into the sand until I was misshapen and no longer opaque. Nothing was clear. She found me more than anything, as I lived life through beer goggles, unable to discern right from wrong, whore from angel. Sometimes they were the same. I used to lie in bed, rolling over, and thinking the titular woman was tight enough. That disorder made me happy. I was vaginated in a haze of beer and smoke. She left and I knew she left. But I didn’t know she left until after she was gone. Such were the times that truths were truths, but not until after when they revealed that they were falsities and only then could be seen as truths.

I awoke one morning to realize that these truths were true only after seeing that they were false, seeing that she left and missing her, the different woman I never saw. The reasoned life I never lived, the disorder that made me happy enough until I realized the falseness of itself. The falseness of its truth. Everything is upside-down until you realize its upside down. From that point on it is right side up. Sometimes you have to stop looking for the truth of things and realize the truth for the lie that it is.

I choose to walk through life not afraid to call truths lies. I see them for what they are. Happy enough isn’t happy. This woman is tight enough doesn’t mean she’s tight. Living a happy life means living a reasoned life. Living a reasoned life, means seeing things as they are. Right now I see the world “government” crumbling and everyone around me are in denial. Oil is skyrocketing, the housing market is crashing, nobody is prepared, and seeing this makes me happy.

The Pleonastic Theory of Governments and Life's Garrulousness

Anything that cannot be explained in one sentence is based on deception and lies. Like the sentence before this one, about explanations. And this one, about the government.

Thursday, July 17, 2008

The Mountain

I found this story in one of my notebooks.

Once upon a time there was a mountain. On the mountain there was a house. A hermit's house. And the hermit lived there for a long time. Even though he was old, he enjoyed the pleasures of life. He drank wine. He baked cakes. He did play-by-mail chess.

The old man didn't have a telephone or any modern conveniences. But he didn't need them, because he knew a dark secret. He was a wizard. Not just a magician like Barack Obama, but an actual sorcerer, in total mastery of the magicks of space and time.

He used the magick to make something into nothing. Nothing into something. And sometimes, he would create phantasmal hands to masturbate himself.

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

The Lasagna

I love lasagna. I made this lasagna recipe today. It took me closer to three hours counting the prep time and even longer if you count purchasing all this stuff, but it was worth it. I made two trays and I'm going to drink a few liters of grape soda and eat as much lasagna as I can.

While I was cooking I looked out my window and saw a snake in my yard. Imagine that! A snake, in Maine. I'm not sure if there are poisonous snakes here, but I'm not taking any chances.

An old fisherman's trick that we used to use to repel snakes is to defecate in flower pots, and space them out evenly around the perimeter of the property. I've got a bunch of flower pots downstairs and this lasagna should be the very thing I need to fill them up.

I've got a business to protect.

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Plareen

I got a good deal on a Wiffleball set today. I am going to take the day off and play wiffle teeball on my lawn.

Imagine the ball, flying in all its wiffliness. Carried by the wind, doing the will of the batsman. The mighty eagle has fallen, and the wiffle ball has risen in its place.

Sunday, July 13, 2008

Business

After I smelt and weld the scrap metal, I trade it to guys around the way. For other metals. For parts. For hot dogs. I sell it to the dope heads and the pushers of the world. To the priests and whores of it all. To anybody with a worthless dollar and a shitty dream.

Like Jackie. Jackie was a stoned gem of a guy. He'd come by my garage on weekends to buy out whatever I had ready. Usually in the afternoon, but mostly just whenever he'd had enough time to huff some toluene out of a filthy rag and smoke a poorly rolled joint. His hands shook, and I'd never seen him eat. But he had cash, and when he didn't, he had other stuff. Ammunition. Gasoline. Whores. Business was booming.

He'd bring his girlfriend over for a fuck when the metals were on the way up. She was too good looking to be with a guy like him, but I didn't know what was going on behind the scenes. I didn't want to know. I would put her up on the hood of my blue '75 Mercedes and fuck her brains out. Jackie would sit in a dilapidated lazy boy recliner in the corner of my garage and watch, breathing in and out of his rag. When I was finished, Jackie was passed out, and I smoked a Marlboro. Sometimes I smoked a second one.

He'd come to soon enough, pack up his car with whatever he was there to get, and leave with a wave and a smile. The last time I saw Jackie he was fumbling with his car cigarette lighter trying to get a joint to light.

I saw her again. And we made the old Merc's shocks squeak like the rusty box spring on your high school sweetheart's bed.

Back then. When men were men. Back when Jack Daniel's was Viagra and old men's broken dicks weren't everybody's problem. Business was booming.

Friday, July 11, 2008

Pavlov's Dogs

We are all sheep and I can prove it. Watch:

AAAACCCHHHHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

You just said "God Bless You!" and I tricked you into saying it. I resolved long ago to no longer adhere to these foolish consistencies. You see, we have been trained to mindlessly say "God Bless You" after a sneeze. We have been brainwashed. Do you really need a blessing when you sneeze? What is a sneeze? You are merely proliferating the idea that the soul is leaving the body with that discharge. You are confounding ignorance.

Who ever questioned this? There are many theories regarding the origination of this brainwashing, but one thing is clear: 1) we are trained from birth to say it. 2) We are coercively forced into an innate belief in "God".

This is what I'm talking about when I look all around me and see sheep and feel bad. Everybody does these things without questioning them. Meanwhile Matthew Lesko makes millions questioning everything. People say "God Bless You" and its meaningless. When people sneeze now, I say "God Fuck You". It forces them to think. I am changing the world, one sneeze at a time. I will not be one of the flock. I will not believe in the false economy, nor the bubonic plague.

ACHOO!
GOD FUCK YOU!

To walk along the edge of a straight razor and survive...

That is my dream.

Nobody gets it. It's tough believing the truth, but once I opened my eyes, I couldn't stop. People don't see the eminent demise encompassing our false beliefs. I'm writing under a new pseudonym for new perspective. People are afraid to assume other personalities. I am not. It's something I'm experimenting with to gain fuller consciousness. I am playing my own devils activate. Everybody fears questioning their beliefs, but I do it as another person. I do it as William of Occam. When you look around you, and you see that you believe one thing, and everyone believes something else, sometimes you can have doubts. But when I look at myself using Occam's razor, I understand that the simplest explanation for how strong my beliefs are is that I am right. If everybody else understood this, they'd agree.

I'm living in a tent in my backyard now. The basement is full. I know many of my readers wonder what I do all day. The truth is, I visit junkyards for scrap metal. Junkyards are the last bastion of the True Free Market, and the only thing I can endorse for economic activity. Any other exchange is Statist. I know at junkyards everything is off the books, so my transaction doesn't go to support coercive force. I have five old radiators in my basement now, the metal is going to be worth tons.
I picked up a dandy today. Afterwards I walked to Wal-Mart and bought an industrial blow torch so I can do some smelting. I've figured that I can make $5000 off the radiators after smelting the metal, and according to my calculations I'll have enough scrap left over to make a bust of my hero The Mad Monk.

I am certain I am he reincarnated. I am the same man, denouncing the same myths of this flawed economy. Just like with Joseph, history will absolve me. I feel pity for the nonbelievers.

On the clock

For years, I worked refining iron. My job was to take the pig iron to the cupola furnace to separate out the slag. It was always really hot in the refinery. You'd sweat through your clothes. The protective clothing was constricting. My OSHA working mask was sticking to my face.

I got to thinking about this broad that I had seen on the walk to work. She was about 5'9", a hundred and twenty-ish pounds, probably about 10 of that was pure tit. The slight drizzle had dampened her top as she walked to the bus stop. She was carrying a bag. I figured she had probably just left her boyfriend.

She wanted it. I thought about all the things I'd do to her, her moans filling the refinery. Her soaked from the rain, me drenched from the heat. The clanking of the metal, the sizzling of the iron in the furnaces.

And then I heard a scream. I snapped out of it. I wondered how long I had been thinking about that. What a great way to fuck up my day. My miserable prick coworker had taken it upon himself to leap into the molten slag. "At least commit suicide off the clock," I thought.

There's a common misconception that people have from movies and TV that if you jump into a pool of molten metal you eventually sink below the surface as if you jumped into some kind of swimming pool. I guess he had it too. Because what actually happens is much more horrible, louder, and smells awfully of a burning ham hock. A man-sized burning ham hock. A body floats in water because water is about as dense as a body. Iron, molten or not, is so much more dense than a person. A body helplessly writhes, unable to stand, unable to put out the fire, frying like a 200 lb piece of bacon. A piece of bacon that screams, for what seems like an entire shift, before the last bit of fucking stupid consciousness leaves his body.

The day now over, I punched out and wondered about the girl at the bus stop and when I'd see her again.

Thursday, July 10, 2008

The Past

I haven't always been such a beneficent person. Before I retired, I lived a life in a tumult of anger. After bouncing around through society's institutions, I came to see the error of my ways. Now I am awoken and I can never go back to sleep.

But early on, I was in it for the quick buck. I ran with the wrong crowd. My ideals got all twisted up in a neighborhood more full of piss and vinegar than of knowledge. Boy, I thought I knew then.

I knew how to make money using my hands and an upside-down smile. Me and the local guys started a card game for degenerates to piss away their electric bill money on. I collected the vigorish debts.

Most of the time people paid right on the spot. Other times we'd track them down. Not like Unsolved Mysteries or anything like that. More like a knock on the door asking for the money. Nobody was out to get hurt. These guys had families and didn't want their bad habits to follow them home. Sometimes it was more than just a bad habit that could follow you home. Eventually you were the bad habit. You did the following. And you could follow someone further than home.

The stories were always the same. He'd been in debt for weeks. He meant to pay but he couldn't. He'd have it if you just gave him another day. A day turns into two days. Word gets around that you're a fool. And then one night you'd cave in his fucking skull with a claw hammer.

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Visions

I don't see, I foresee. I am a visionary in my field. Think of me as an alarm clock sent from beyond to bring about the new awakening. Past prophets have been too concerned with personal profits to truly benefit mankind. You, of course, know by now that just as all profits are falsehoods foisted upon us by the government, that so too are all past prophets. I remembered this because the chaotic strands that order reality put a black lady in my bed this morning.

The one true king is here to keep you protected from yourself. But there is sorcery afoot, preventing the truth from reaching TV. The mass media is dominated by these sorcerers and all of their reports are elaborate lies staged by the world media conglomerates and the shadow government. This is the time in which a visionary like me can thrive by sifting the diamonds from the feces, the great minds from the deceptive automatons sent to stop us.

For years the government has been snatching up land across the United States. In fact, the shadow government owns 30% of the land in the United States. Why should they be allowed a monopoly over the citizenry to use these areas to deal death with their murderous machines and practice their sorcery, animating once lifeless mechanical bodies into fearsome automatons now indistinguishable from an ordinary man but for their brutal intentions and their purple internal "organs" formed of fulminated gold.

It is at this crucial moment that we today as believers must ask ourselves, is Barack Obama acting in the best interests of the true Americans like you and me? Or, is he a sinister magician using his powers to shrink the penises of the many and adding their length to those of the few shadow governors? Fear for the best my readers, but prepare for the worst.

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Cinema Verite

As many of you know, I am retired. I am retired from a life of working as a government puppet and a slave to wages. Money is worthless anyway, and the instruments of currency are known by all to be falsehoods. My retirement has been a bountiful one, because I have the true knowledge that making money to spend it only keeps down mankind and lets the government destroy our ability.

I live in a world after employment, where there is no money and there is no work. If we work, our hands do the work of devils. We are jackals pillaging the coffers of our fellow men, for whom there is no retirement. They will never be able to retire unless they wake up, and I am watching the sands of time slip through the wasp waist of the hourglass, robbing men of their futures and women of their virginity.

In these unchaste times we can only struggle to document the coming end. Our fate is inevitable and the nonbelievers merely deny their destiny. Kismet will not wait for the average person to wake up, and by the time they do, their eternal sleep will already have come.

Be safe my brothers.

Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Devils

"You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies."

John 8:44

Devils surround us, readers. As they close in, we must work on the best solution to send them back from whence they came. Even our fathers are devils and from their loins we leaped into a devil's world.

I am a speculator, and a supragenius. And with my great power comes great responsibility: the responsibility to spread the word against the devils. The devils do plot, my friends. They plot to unhinge the world economy. They plot to dominate the singular consciousness. They plot to bend the wills of men to their wills, to heat up coat hangers on stoves and to stick them underneath our toenails. Our pain is their bliss.

They are the cheerleaders, the jackals, the crisis profiteers. They ignore the real crises and promote their own, ever the profligates. Act wisely, restore the value of gold back to its true 1920 value of $21/oz before the one world government cannot be stopped.

Just imagine a cake. It is a good looking cake, but a sinister secret hides within. The cake has feces baked into it. If we could separate the cake from the feces, we would have perfectly good cake (and feces). But the truth is that the cake and the feces are inexorably one, and to separate them mitigates the very possibility that the cake and the feces are formed from the same ephemeral aether that allow us to make the decision in the first place.

This is my mission.


Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Explanation!!!!!

I want to tell you about an important piece of punctuation that is almost never used for its true purpose. The explanation point.

Because I am a smarter than average, and because I know how to separate the truth from the lies, I want to open everyone's eyes about this fantastic piece of the English language. Let's imagine an apprentice mechanic learning from a master mechanic. The apprentice will need lots of tutoring and practical experience before he becomes a master. But how can the master impart the necessary knowledge on the apprentice?

The master can tell him what to do, but nobody likes being told what to do. Not even yours truly. So he must take a different route. He must explain what to do. And the key to any explanation is the explanation point!

If you are smart I know this explanation has helped a lot!!!!

Divided We Stand, United We Fall

I started today on the right foot, which is the left foot. After a few rousing rounds of the hokey pokey, I got down to the real business of today. I ate 5 hot dogs and took a bite out of a yellow onion, taking my best crow hop and pitching the remainder of the onion into the basement wall like an underground Cy Young. The onion exploded into a smashed set of concentric cellulose layers. Immediately afterward, I reached into the freezer to put a heaping scoop of crushed ice down my pants, like I do every day at this time. There are tons of wives' tale type remedies out there for cut onions burning the eyes, but if you have the knowledge that I have, you know that 1-2 cups of crushed ice applied directly to the groin cures this condition immediately.

I also wanted to thank the readership for making this blog what is is. The message is getting out there! We're also up to about 100 unique views per day, meaning that hundreds of people have taken off their rosy colored glasses, left behind their ivory towers and let slip the dogs of war against the one world government. The sound track of sizzling hot dogs is our victory march, and we shall not relent until every last man, every last woman, and every child is freed from the grasp of the governments that seek to break their will and crush their reproductive organs.

We shall stand divided against the government and their mind control schemes (link). If we present the united front, we are but a bunch of sheep, easily corraled and shorn of our beliefs. If you'll excuse me, I am going to roll myself up in a coracle fishing net and sleep in the cabinets under the hot plate.