For some reason, I’m currently touring round for old commercials, and came across these anti-drug ads from a few years back.

I’d forgotten all about them.

Because I quoted him yesterday, Rjurik Davidson sent me this to pimp:

Writing for Change: Overland Master Class for Progressive Writers

The Overland Master Class for Progressive Writers is aimed at writers exploring political ideas in their fiction: investigations of race, gender, sexuality, class, etc.

The master class will feature special sessions with acclaimed writers Cate Kennedy, Tony Birch and Lucy Sussex, as well as peer-critiqued workshop time. The workshop will be held in Melbourne from July 10-12, 2009.

Applications should include a one-page cover letter, a CV, and a completed story to be workshopped, no longer than 7500 words. Applications should be sent to Overland Associate Editor Rjurik Davidson c/o Overland magazine VU – Footscray Park, PO Box 14428 Melbourne, Vic 8001 by June 5, 2009.

Successful applicants will need to confirm their place by paying $70 by 1 July.

All stories will be considered for publication in Overland magazine.

Link.

I just read this on Rjurik Davidson’s blog:

I received an email yesterday, promoting a particular book (Kasey Edward’s Thirty Something and Over It, if you’re interested), which contained the following happy statistics:

- 98 per cent of people are unhappy in their jobs
- 26 per cent of women at the cusp of the most senior levels of management don’t want the promotion.
- One in 15 under-35s have already dropped out of paid work to pursue ‘self-improvement’, and half plan to do so in the near future
- Dr. Carson-Webb, who specializes in life-cycle dilemmas, said nearly 20 percent of her clients are facing a thirtysomething crisis, or thrisis, suffering from anxiety, depression and burnout.
- Larry Wentworth, a licensed clinical social worker who has his own psychotherapy practice in Chattanooga, said a thrisis is very different than a mid-life crisis. Rather than looking back on their lives and acting out with affairs, new sports cars and toupees, disenchanted thirty-somethings are looking ahead and worried about what will happen with the rest of their life.
- Gladeana McMahon, co-director of the Centre for Stress Management, knows the phenomenon only too well. “I work with a lot of highly successful, driven people,” she says. “By their mid-thirties, a lot of them are tired. They’re sick of life and they wonder what it’s all about. They start questioning their values and what they’re doing.”

How inspiring.

On the weekend, I went and saw Watchmen, a film that I decided suffered from both paying too much attention to the comic and deviating too much.

If you haven’t heard about the film, Watchmen, it’s the latest film by Zack Snyder, who gave us the truly awful 300 and the surprisingly enjoyable remake of Dawn of the Dead. Watchmen, the film version of the graphic novel of the same title, concerns itself with six superheroes in a post superhero world, and the deconstruction of their origins and motivations. The film, to a degree, aims to be the same, and while I enjoyed the graphic novel a lot when I read it, I have to be honest and admit that I neither hated it nor loved it as a film. At times it felt silly, but mostly, I was bored for the longest while, pausing only to rouse myself when the poorest choices of music were given to play in the film’s soundtrack. The best example of this was Hallelujah while Dan and Laurie had sex on a owl ship. I’m not sure who thought that a facial shot of Malin Akerman as she came and with Hallelujah screamed by Leonard Cohen out was a good idea, but clearly I wasn’t at the meeting, and clearly no other voice of reason was either.

In many ways, I thought the fault of the film was in using David Gibbons’ panels too directly to guide it. in the graphic novel, Gibbons’ art works well–he is, honestly, an excellent artist–but there seems to be an issue when using a comic panels as the base for films, and that is that it results in still, passive images on the screen. A similar issue took place in Sin City, a truly awful film based off Frank Miller’s comics, which are of various levels of success. However, whether you’re a fan of the original texts or not, there is, I find, a craftsmanship that is linked to graphic storytelling by the artists (and writer, who in Watchmen’s case is Alan Moore), and the panels and use of voice overs are designed to take advantage of the way that you read these texts. It might sound a bit shaky when I explain this, but I’ll try my best: in sequential art, the idea is to create the illusion of movement between the panels. Each panel itself is static, but what the best of its illustrators do is arrange them so that movement and life is implied within the gaps, and then connected by the reader’s imagination. It has more akin to it with the way that the internal images within a reader’s brain works when he or she is reading a novel. At least, this is my take on how it works–maybe somewhere along the line some people will have different theories. Film, however, does not require this stimulation of the imagination to fill in the gaps. It’s alive. It fills in the gaps itself. It has different requirements from the audience when they are watching it (the audience, for example, is not meant to pay attention to the music–it is suppose to aid the emotional context of a particular scene, but not draw attention to itself and break the scene, or so I argue). It seems to me, however, that when panels are lifted directly from a comic page and filmed, they emerge static and dull and Watchmen’s great failing, I believe, is that for nearly all of its time on the screen, it is a static and dull film.

With bad music.

I can’t express that last part enough, it seems.

My other fault with the film was actually the end, wherein the plot was restructured to take out the giant squid (aka, alien invasion). When I heard about this before going to the film, I was pretty cool with it. It’s a big book, shit’ll have to be chopped out, I told myself. However, the fix for it… it was just a little stupid and here, I’ll admit, I couldn’t stop thinking about the September 11th attacks, so maybe I was just pushed in the wrong direction by my head. But, as was seen by that attack, no amount of damage done to America would actually result in world peace, and I actually found it kind of laughable that such a concept could even be filmed these days. It seemed more accurate to me that, if the plan was believed, the Russians would laugh at the Americans, and then nuke the fuck out of them to teach them a lesson for having a god-like blue being that they used as a threat for all those years.

But, y’know, maybe I was just being too cynical at this point.

I began writing ‘Octavia E. Butler’ thinking that I could make the majority if it last as an extended conversation, wherein the character stands in a room and tells what has befallen him or her. Generally speaking, I’m not a fan of the form, and to be honest, that was the attraction to me.

One of the things I really enjoy as a writer is playing with forms, and discovering the ways you can twist things, to see what kind of results you get, and how much mileage that they’ll give you. In the larger scale of things, I might have to admit that it is exactly this that attracts me to writing short fiction, since while I enjoy it, it has never had the same space in my head that novels do. Some writers I know are the other way, and that’s cool–it’s not a judgement kind of thing–but I’ve always been a fan of space. Give me some length, give me some room, and I’m happy enough (though there are times when the constraints are also good–some times having a word length constraint, or a narrative constraint, works more to your favour than not). But back on short fiction, I notice that these days, the pieces I get into are the ones that allow me to try something that I haven’t done structurally before, the ones that fit the story idea best. Taking the story I’m working on at the moment–which may or may not be titled as people please–I’ve had it in my head for years, since Butler herself died. I was doing some of the early Dead American stories then, and I thought she would make an interesting POV, and also because I had admired her so. Also, by then I had by then done two white males, Johnny Cash and John Wayne, and I had said all about I needed to say there. Indeed, I thought Butler herself made a good foil for Wayne and the piece that had him in it. Somewhere along the line, Katrina imagery got connected in my head.

It sat there, however, unable to shift forward until I had a firmer idea of what I wanted to do structurally. It was always going to be something that was narrated, and I toyed with the idea of doing it in the form of a transcript, then, briefly, as a spoken word piece that would actually be performed. Of course, reality got in the way there. I’m not the best performer when it comes to reading work–I do a lot better when I don’t have a text to go from–and, perhaps more importantly, I don’t have the equipment to make it work, much less find a way to get it to people. As with the brief moment when I considered writing a radio play (don’t we all?), I had to put that idea aside, and admit that it might take a little more disposable income and time than I have right now. Eventually, I came to that idea of narrating in a room, but as of last week, I realised that it wasn’t working, and some five thousand words into a draft, I’ve gone back and started rewriting everything to a different form. There is still that sense of being talked too, but it’s different now, and I’ve taken up addressing the reader with ‘you’, which is sure to win over people, being as anything that touches second person has people jump for joy and tell you it is awesome. either way, the change still allows for the story to keep its intertextuality, and even to engage in a low form of fictiocriticism, and that’s the important part here.

I am aware, actually, that as I write this, no one will have any idea what the fuck I’m on about, not really. I’ve no desire to share with you the ugly drafts, the words in progress, as they are called, and without them, I guess it really just looks like I’m muttering to myself publicly about things that matter to me.

Dick jokes later, I promise.

After last week, I have spent some time thinking about the work that I did a few years ago when I wrote A Year in the City. What went a long with it was a whole chunk of theory and I got thinking about that for a laugh, I’d drop a bit of it here on the blog, and people could read it if they had such an inclination. I picked up a small chapter about whiteness, primarily, and you’ll have to excuse me if some of the terms aren’t explained as well as they could be there, as they were bought in earlier (the Mongrel City is one of them). Also, I just copied and pasted from the document with it in, so you’ll also have to forgive the footnotes that go nowhere.

Otherwise, enjoy:

The Blanc Citizen in the Blanc City.

Writing about Sydney has meant that I have been writing about a city that is, first and foremost, a white city. Built upon invaded land by the British, it was created to serve a penal colony for the outcasts of British society, and was named after a white British man in an act that Tim Flannery dismisses as “political brown-nosing,” as the man “was an incompetent bureaucrat, unequal to the most ordinary duties of his office.”i In addition to this history, the city has, as Tamara Winikoff writes, been “designed on a British colonial model until the advent of international modernism in the twentieth century with its cultural source in urban America.”ii Sydney, therefore, has been formed by whiteness in name and design, through its population and culture is, not surprisingly, predominantly white. To be Australian, as Toni Morrison notes with the word American, means to be white.iii The racial implications are deep within the word, removing any perceived need for a prefix or suffix. When an immigrant individual is referred to as Australian, however, a second word is added, such as “Asian” in Asian-Australian. The conflict of non-white people with whiteness is present at all times in the word. I have seen it expressed the most in the students that I teach in creative writing. In the course that I have taught in for the past four years, there has been a task where the students are asked to write about their experience with whiteness, or being white. Each year I have had Asian students, and each year, at least one of them, will describe him or herself, as a banana: yellow on the outside, white on the inside. Yellow to convey the skin colour inherited from their Asian genes, white to convey the Australian culture that they have been brought up in and feel part of. It is a culture that they feel disconnected from because of its whiteness. It is a conflict that ends with the Australian-born individual adding the word “Asian” in front, using hyphens much in the way that minority people use hyphens to describe themselves in America.iv The result of this hyphening is to reinforce the white association of the word “Australian” and to sustain the cultural weightlessness of whiteness. To be just Australian recalls the French word “blanc”, which means both “white” and “blank”. To be Australian is to be like a blank page: complete, but altered instantly when another colour is applied to it, its so-called purity and completeness lost, and replaced with an entirely different page that is part Australian, and part something else.

The connection of whiteness to a cultural emptiness is not an idea found only in Australia. The lack of cultural weight in whiteness is characteristic of all Western countries and arises, as Richard Dyer notes, because of the portrayal of “white people [as] just people.”v This cultural blankness was my first concern when writing about the Mongrel City, because, just as representing minority people such as Asians and Indigenous people was important to me, it was equally important to represent whiteness. Dyer elaborates upon this problem:

Whites are everywhere in representation. Yet precisely because of this and their placing as norm they seem not to be represented to themselves as whites but as people who are variously gendered, classed, sexualized and abled. At the level of racial representation, in other words, whites are not of a certain race, they’re just the human race.vi

In the perfect world, I would be able to write about all races as if they were “just” human. However, since the Mongrel city is built out of the interaction of race and culture, and because I cannot remove the meanings associated with non-white individuals, my choice has been to create a weight for whiteness in A Year in the City and to make it a similar weight to being non-white, in the hope that non-white people will, in the end, be viewed as people who can also be identified by jobs, sexuality, gender, and traits other than race. However, my intention is also to bring attention to the fact that there is not a level playing-field and to the difference in how “the Other” is portrayed in the media.
This is an ethical issue related to my position as a white author, and the position of power I occupy in this space. I run the risk, however good my intentions are, of creating a form of “Orientalism”. Edward Said wrote that “Orientalism” was “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.”vii It could be argued, then, that from my position of power, I am creating only a new white authoritative portrayal of minorities, which results in a representation that is both incorrect and damaging. Domineering, white power portrayals are everywhere in existence. In relation to Indigenous culture, Tony Birch writes that the portrayal of Koori culture in tourism has resulted in it being viewed as “a product that can be altered and represented in an acceptable form, as a commodity, but [one] that has little or no intrinsic value.”viii Lost is the complexity, range, and diversity of the culture as it is turned into “a superficial appropriation of the Indigenous culture.”ix

Here, the despair that Henri Lefebvre discussed when trying to write about the lived experience in the city returns. It is a despair about being a white author who wants to represent the lived experience of a minority. How to correctly and ethically represent becomes the question, and there is no easy answer. The safe response, as authors who are older, who are younger, and who have published more and less that I, have suggested, is to not write about minorities. By this, I imagine, they do not mean to have a cast that consists of straight, white characters who are predominantly male but, rather, that I should not have non-straight, non-white, non-male characters as my protagonists. It is fine if a female minority character is a love interest, if a black character is that of a wise man or woman, or the gay character helps the straight male protagonist meet women. It is a choice that I cannot help but ridicule in my fellow authors, because it is safe. It is easy. It does not take risks. It does not open the author to failure. In my own belief as an author, that good writing comes out of taking risks, out of challenging your limitations, your knowledge, and your safety. What is more, when other white authors inform me that they will not write about minorities, they contribute, through their inaction, to the already existing stereotypic representations of minorities which have been created, in relation to the media, to draw in viewers, and sell newspapers. Nevertheless, it is also true, as I have mentioned, that the white author, writing from his/her position of power, can also be creating a new form of “Orientalism”, and this is also unacceptable. As Jackie Huggins writes, she “detest[s] the imposition that anyone who is non-Aboriginal can define my Aboriginality for me and my race.”x The continuing domination of minority people by mainstream representations is destructive and this is where the despair arises from, for how does the white author then sit down to write minority characters?

I do not have a formula for success. I doubt there is one. In A Year in the City I want to represent a multicultural city, because that is my experience, and if I were to allow the despair over representation to control my writing, it would become a form of paralysis and result in silence. I would not, then, be writing a multicultural city—I would be writing a monoculture city, where my silence was a contribution to the already existing stereotypes surrounding minority portrayals. My way of navigating this despair, then, has been to approach the portrayals of characters through the portrayal of whiteness.

There is a blankness in the quality of whiteness that is found readily in the fiction of white, Western authors. Here, whiteness as a description of race is rarely used. This lack of description is an example of white people not recognising their own racial weight and demonstrates the freedom in being white that Dyer mentioned. It is common to find whiteness noted from the point of view of a character who is not white, and who recognises their own race because it is juxtaposed with the dominant white culture. In ZZ Packer’s story “Brownies”, a Brownie Troop decide to “kick the asses of each and every girl in Brownie Troop 909.”xi They were targeted because, as the narrator explains, the other girls were white: “Their complexions a blend of ice cream: strawberry and vanilla.”xii Though the narrator does not describe the girls as black in the story, the weight of their skin colour can be felt from the beginning. The title “Brownies” no longer means a group of girls who have joined a youth social group, but rather it conveys the skin colour of the girls. In this context, “Brownies” is not a pleasant word, and has connotations of dirtiness and ugliness, which Packer uses to make a comment on how she views the black girls’ racism. It is also used to explain how the black girls see themselves in relation to the white girls. The narrator notes how the long, straight hair of the white girls was, alone, “reason for envy and hatred.”xiii Most telling about the race of the characters is that the girls are noticing the whiteness of the other girls. The simple act of noticing is a weight that identifies non-whiteness in the narrative. This awareness is not only limited to non-white characters being defined against white characters, but also in the fact that non-white characters are aware of the race in other non-white characters.

At the end of Packer’s story, when the Brownie Troop have confronted the white girls and failed to entice them into a fight because the white girls are mentally disabled, Packer examines the cause of their antagonism. To do this, she has the narrator speak about the day white Mennonites painted the porch for her father for free. When asked why her father would want his porch painted, the narrator repeats his words:

“He said,” I began, only then understanding the words as they uncoiled from my mouth, “it was the only time he’d have a white man on his knees doing something for a black man for free.”xiv

Here a black character is aware of his blackness. His blackness is, in fact, his motivation, and the motivation for the girls. This racial motivation can be found in a white character. It is not difficult to imagine a group of white brownies picking on a group of black brownies for the same reasons as in Packer’s story. However, it is difficult to imagine a white author creating a white character that said, “It was the only time I’d see a black man on his knees for a white man.” It is politically incorrect, yes, but the attitude does exist and is expressed, but when it is, such an awareness of whiteness in the white character of his/her race would not be so knowingly expressed and identified as a motivation as it is at the end of Packer’s “Brownies”.

Whiteness, however, is not entirely weightless. It does manifest itself in stories about white characters, but its cause is often from a cross-cultural experience. This can occur when an object or custom that is traditionally associated with the non-white character is encountered and this causes, in the white character, an awareness of whiteness. An example of this can be found in Mandy Sayer’s short story “Scarlet”. The story is a reworking of Little Red Riding Hood, set on the streets of Kings Cross. In it, Scarlet, who occupies the narrative position of Red Riding Hood, is the daughter of a drug dealing and drug-using mother. One night when her mother has passed out, she receives a call from her transvestite grandfather, also a drug user and desperate for a hit, and she agrees to take him the drugs. To do so, she must go through the Cross, and it is here that Scarlet encounters whiteness:

She could smell stale urine as she passed the railway station. A white man lay in the entranceway, his limbs wrapped around a long didgeridoo, as if it were a lover. Scarlet had often seen him there, coaxing howls and moans from the hollow piece of wood for small change. One day she’d noticed he’d darkened his skin with make-up, and figured he was trying to pass as an Aboriginal in order to increase his tips. Now he was asleep, a big wet patch rising through the crotch of his jeans.
“What’s the S stand for?” asked a drunk outside the Capital Hotel. “Sexy?” He threw his cigarette down and shot her a lewd grin.xv

Whiteness is noticeable because of the didgeridoo, which is part of Aboriginal culture. At the end of the section, however, the drunk is not described racially; nor are the two firemen who tip “their helmets”xvi to Scarlet as she passes later. The reader understands that all three, like the man with the didgeridoo, are white. It is only when whiteness is placed next to an item associated with another culture, that the character’s whiteness has a weight. The question, however, is why? The description contributes to the sense of desperation that Sayer uses to characterise the Cross. The white man who “blacked-up” his skin to be Aboriginal is ethically dubious, but there is more happening within this moment. Without the whiteness of the character noted in the description, Sayer’s figure sitting with a didgeridoo would be read as an Aboriginal man, representative of Aboriginal people in the Cross. His whiteness, however, is suddenly visible. He is the only character in the story to be described as “white”, the only character for whom being white is significant, but this is because he is trying to pass for a non-white individual. At this moment, whiteness has weight.
For the rest of the story, however, whiteness is unnoticed. It is a world that has been created from a white world image.xvii Thus, whiteness is unnoticed, forgotten, no longer a descriptive act. This is something that I am guilty of myself as recently as 2004, when the novelette, “The Dreaming City” was published (it was written, however, in 2003). “The Dreaming City” is a different version of the opening chapter “The Dreaming City, Part One”, and offers an alternate history of Australia that is mixed with real historical events. In the opening section of story, however, I describe Mark Twain as a “small, grey haired man”xviii with no description of his whiteness. Shortly after, however, I refer to Pemulwy as “the scarred, black skinned Eora warrior.”xix Developing an awareness of this in my own writing as well as the writing around me, has been the first step in creating the Mongrel City in A Year in the City. This has resulted in the decision to give whiteness a mongrel weight in the narrative, to explore the relationship of whites to multicultural Australia, the relationship of whites to a colonial history of terror, and to their own white power.

“By changing the name to Syfy, which remains phonetically identical, the new brand broadens perceptions and embraces a wider range of current and future imagination-based entertainment beyond just the traditional sci-fi genre, including fantasy, supernatural, paranormal, reality, mystery, action and adventure. It also positions the brand for future growth by creating an ownable trademark that can travel easily with consumers across new media and nonlinear digital platforms, new international channels and extend into new business ventures.

…

Syfy—unlike the generic entertainment category “sci-fi”—firmly establishes a uniquely ownable trademark that is portable across all nonlinear digital platforms and beyond, from Hulu to iTunes. Syfy also creates an umbrella brand name that can extend into new adjacent businesses under the Syfy Ventures banner, including Syfy Games, Syfy Films and Syfy Kids.”

Heh.

The best thing, however, is the outrage in the comments.

You cannot have your speeding fine reviewed if you were caught in a school zone.

Please note, as a fantasy and science fiction writer, I spend a lot of my time writing things that are really Other–intelligent wolves and giant talking stag-headed ponies, for example. Also angels (fallen and otherwise), hyperintelligent supercolloids, virtual winged dinosaurs, and other stuff. So I keep thinking, well, if I can write something that doesn’t even have the same senses I do, how hard can it be to write a Jewish former Army Captain from St. Louis?

I’ve been reading RaceFail ‘09, the huge, sprawling, occasionally venomous debate on race in speculative fiction. The above quote from author Elizabeth E. Bear is one of my favourites, simply because it manages to be so insulting, and so revealing all at once. There’s a few out there, so don’t let yourself get limited.

Anyhow, I honestly don’t have much to say on the whole thing. Some of it I agree with. Some of it I don’t. A lot of it I’ve seen before, both sadly and positively. Mostly, I just wanted to link these two posts about the subject here and here, which provide a huge amount of links, and which you can follow if you’ve the time and inclincation. I haven’t read everything–it is reportedly two months of blogging on the subject, and it’ll take me some time if I persist–but there seems to be a lot on whiteness, and there’s some drama from named folk, and a few links that are now protected or deleted, if that kind of thing gets you moving.

I have to admit, though, that I really do wish that it hadn’t been called RaceFail. Coming into it late, it gave me the impression of a discussion about race that had failed to get anywhere which, even after all the hurt egos and bumps and slaps and screams, is not the case.

For reasons I can not yet explain, I wanted to buy SPAM.

It began a while back, during my grocery trips. In one of the latter isles, there were two shelves of SPAM, markedly different to anything else on the row because of its dark blue can and, of course, the word SPAM pointing out to you as if it had been cloned and put into a bad horror film. You know the kind: small village, freaky children, axes to the back. Just swap out children and put cans of SPAM in it and you’ve got a flick. Anyhow, to tell you the truth, it looked as if no one actually bought the SPAM, since the shelves had a rather unchanging look to them. Still, the first couple of times I noticed–I can be horribly absent minded and easily distracted, so it took me some time to notice that there was SPAM–I found it funny how it never changed; but after the humour there was, as I went back, a strange pull, magnetic, really, to the cans, and it came with the desire to buy one. Still, for the longest time, I figured I didn’t need to buy it, though the can was certainly starting to look inviting. Hypnotic, even. Blue. It was very blue. When was the last time I’d bought a blue can of meat? But I’d had SPAM before. It was an awful meat like product in a can that was kept in fallout shelters and eaten after you had eaten all the people in the shelter with you, and perhaps your limbs.

Still.

It’d been a while and that can was very blue.

Another week would pass, and the cans were there, still, silent, and blue.

Seriously, though, I said as I stood in front of it, had I eaten it? Could I remember the taste? Was there a taste? It wouldn’t end up like devon, would it?

(As a kid I’d had a bad experience on a school camp with devon. I can’t eat it still. My friends, who were on that camp with me, can’t eat devon either. In fact, for all I know, the manufacturing of devon had to stop due to that one camp, which destroyed such an awful lunch meat for a generation.)

Either way, I did what we all know I was going to do, and bought it.

I had half expected the can to be covered in dust when I pulled it out, but it wasn’t. It lacked–somewhat curiously–a used by date, but I had gone as far to pick it up, so all I had to do now was pay for it, and take it home. Despite myself, I did this, and when I mentioned it to my friends, they stared at me. SPAM, they would say, as if I had dropped the final bit of culture I had left. Undeterred, I tried to convince others to eat some, in fact, but I was threatened, ignored, and once told about something called Squirrel Puke. Obviously, I was on my own when it came to the meat like product in a can. Fair enough. I didn’t need them anyhow. In fact, I discovered that there were a lot of SPAM related recipes out there, and I was tempted to go wild with it, but I figured that I’d do it the way you’re supposed too and eat it as it came out of the can. That, incidentally, was as a solid rectangle of pink meat that did not look particularly appetising.

Indeed, it was not.

It was quite awful, actually.

SPAM, I decided, was not meant to be eaten raw. Unless you were lost in the desert, perhaps, and you had to hunt wildlife to get buy, and after you’d killed the vultures all that was left was cans of SPAM, then you’d take it, rip off the lid, and pull out that chunk of meat like product.

Still, I was adamant, so I fried up the pan, and threw it down.

Cooked, SPAM tastes a little like sausages and bacon mixed together, and isn’t that bad, I decided. At least, until I had the after taste of it in my mouth for a day and no amount of brushing could quite get rid of it…