This brought back memories of the D.A.R.E. officer coming to my elementary classroom to give us the "don't do drugs" speech. At the end of the speech with feigning hesitation he'd pull out the drug briefcase to the cheers of the kids, like a band holding out their best song for the encore.
"This here is methamphetamine, aka crystal meth or speed. If you see a man running down the street with the strength of a bear, there's a good chance he's high on this. It's very bad. You don't want to get near this--it'll make your heart explode."
I did not get the briefcase in my DARE education. What I did get is a cop telling me that my parents having a glass of wine with dinner or a cigarette after work was just as bad a them using cocaine, and that you could OD and die on weed. All drugs are equally bad.
A few years later when my friends were smoking weed and laughed at my concerns, and I realized I’d been lied to, I pretty much did everything under the sun.
An actual education would have let me make better choices about my recreational drug use as a young person.
The realization that almost all illegal drugs (heroin, meth, a handful like that that feel too good—probably exceptions) aren’t really in some much worse category than alcohol and nicotine, and that some are surely less-bad, even, was quite a revelation. Must be a shared experience for a lot of the DARE generation.
We didn't get the briefcase either. But one officer did bring his K9. Which then tried to bite my classmate during the "come up here and pet it" session.
>> What I did get is a cop telling me that my parents having a glass of wine with dinner or a cigarette after work was just as bad a them using cocaine
That cop came to my school too. On a bicycle. He also told us that 50% of us would die in any car accident over 50mph. It was really hard to not laugh at him given the number of us who participated in the local streetracing scene. In a room full of students in jackets and ties, he stood there spouting lies in his spandex bike shorts.
In high school around 1976 we got a talk by the swim team coach, telling us the horrors of various drugs, going into his wide personal experience with them and why we shouldn't follow his example. He told us that if we ever had any questions he was there for us, and gave us all his personal phone number.
So me and some buddies got a hold of some peyote and were more than a little afraid of it. We probably would have tossed it but we had a better idea. We called Coach and asked his advice. He gave us detailed preparation instructions. We followed them and got a bit sick, but not altered. Maybe it wasn't even peyote.
I'm not sure that this approach was just more nuanced than "just say no" or closer to "just do it".
Did the proposed preparation entail heating? Might have described a process that destroyed most of the mescaline to spare you the experience, which can be quite frightening and/or debilitating.
I've never come across someone that does more preparation than drying, so to me it seems suspicious to suggest anything else. Mescaline is water soluble so one can make infusions, but it takes a fair bit of plant material to get dosed so there isn't much practical use in doing so.
In Brazil, in the 90's there was a campaign called "Drogas nem morto" (drugs not even dead). I heard about a guy who used a t-shirt of the campaign to sell drugs.
We had the county sheriff come to an assembly, show us pictures of a local "drug den" they had busted, bring out a body bag and tell us "it breaks my heart when I pick up a body bag and the weight shifts to one end, because that means there's a kid in it", and conclude with "If you ever touch drugs you'll end up living here until I drag you out in a bag".
I had the briefcase experience (except it was a portable glass display case with every drug under the sun). Looked like a bunch of candy to me as a kid. I think they even had a fake version placed next to the real thing?
One thing they did that has stuck with me though was this plastic bag contraption with some material inside to represent the human lungs. There was a hole at the top which the DARE officer placed a lit cigarette, then began (somehow) pumping air from the hole down into the lung material. I remember watching the material quickly go from white to brown and tarry. By the time the cigarette was out, she looked us all in the eyes and said "this is what smoking does to your lungs"
I've probably said this in other posts, but the best "don't do drugs" education my child got was living in a city. It's one thing to hear about drugs, it's another to watch your dad call 911 for a man collapsed with a needle still in his arm in a subway headhouse doorway.
This seems to be the overwhelming majority sentiment of the Internet or at least of what gets upvoted, but I think DARE at least worked on me. I wanna say it was probably 2nd grade, which would have been 1987 or 1988, and I don't remember the briefcase, but I do remember a plastic lung. It filled up and blackened with tar after only a few puffs from a cigarette and I remember being so viscerally disgusted and disturbed by that, I resolved to never smoke and I never did, in spite of a lot of peer pressure. I was largely friends with goths and art kids and nearly all of my friends smoked, some as early as 4th grade, but I never did.
Do you feel the same way about sex ed? In other words, is exposing children to sexual education actually encouraging them to have premarital or unsafe sex?
DARE is the equivalent of telling kids that if they have sex, they will get an STD and ruin their life forever with a painful, annoying, lifelong illness.
I'd argue DARE is more akin to abstinence only sex ed than an actual sex ed curriculum. Or at least my DARE experience was much closer to a Mr. Mackey "Drugs are bad, m'kay" than a measured instruction of various drugs and the kinds of harms they posed.
The problem with DARE is that the message was "all drugs will kill you and your family if you so much as look in their direction, call the cops anytime you see anyone who looks even a bit drugged out".
Then some kids try some pot and discover that DARE was full of shit and they disregard the entire message or even rebel against it. Education programs are counterproductive when they are loaded with misinformation.
The rootcause is the hyper competitiveness od us society. There are only winners and loosees, and loosers do drugs.. So every economic downturn people do what they were told, if success does not happen and self destruct to keep life bearable.
It's pretty funny in a sad way to me that this article talks about how little we know about human behavior and struggling to find answers about why the kids had a backfire effect.
I remember these programs, and I remember how they made me and my friends feel. But nobody asked us, lol.
I'd even try to tell people I thought, but instead of listening to us, we were admonished.
The problem is that these programs are full of bull shit, bad information, bad science, and lies designed to scare.
Kids pick up on this quickly, and you now have lost all trust with this cohort, permanently.
It's the exact same reason abstinence only education fails.
Humans want to feel good, that's okay, we also don't want to die or ruin our lives (assuming we aren't living in a hell). Basic facts here.
Indeed. People want "reproducible" campaigns, but that necessitates being entirely one-way. As soon as you start having a real connection with other humans it's non-reproducible.
Show them a Quentin Tarantino film? ...or any film for that matter where the main characters seem so "cool, unfazed and untouchable". To a young (mostly male) mind, that's the ultimate goal; to be in charge. For most beginning smokers, it's not about the inhalation of tobacco, but the subversive "screw the rules, those don't apply to me" façade. This might sound obvious but, if we want 7th graders not to glorify smoking, we quit glorifying it in our media. Make the stupid guy in the movie the one that's dumb enough to smoke. Make everyone laugh at him every time he tries to look cool.
This has been tried before. In Waterworld, the bad guys are literally called the "Smokers" and smoking is a big part of their culture. It's so over the top it seems more like a parody of anti-smoking campaigns. I doubt it ever convinced anybody not to smoke, and I think any similar attempt is doomed to fail in the same way. Kids are good at detecting when you're trying to manipulate them, and it doesn't matter if you have good intentions.
Kids want to do what they see, if they see people smoke, they want to smoke. If mommy and daddy drink coffee in the morning, it doesn't matter that it tastes like ass, a literal 3-year-old will just by sheer force of will drink that bitter nectar just to feel like they belong.
Makes me wonder if over-protecting children from negative feelings backfires. Pulp Fiction was a risk-free and simple way to make vivid the risks of heroin.
The ultimate thing that convinced me not to smoke was watching my uncle die of lung cancer, and being unable to quit the thing that was killing him.
I'm somewhat relieved that tobacco references are considered "adult" now in entertainment. The amount of smoking I saw in movies and TV (and around my uncle) normalized it for me, even though I knew how unhealthy it was.
For my high school cohort the video interview of the person still smoking after having had a laryngectomy really drove home the powerlessness of addiction.
Rather than uncool, just kill them. In british historical drama there is an old standard that any character that coughs will soon die. If the butler even sniffles, they are doomed. So make smoking the new coughing. The kids will then associated smoking with death, living in fear every time their favorite characters go anywhere near cigarettes.
As a non-smoker, I’ve never felt like I needed a cigarette more than when the credits rolled on Requiem. Certainly scared me off of harder drugs, though.
It is remarkable how dramatically smoking was intentionally removed from even period movies, and in some cases edited out of old content.
Perhaps silence works better than negative mention? There's a real problem with anti-war or anti-violence media accidentally making it look cool, similarly with biographies of "troubled star" types detailing their drug uses.
> This might sound obvious but, if we want 7th graders not to glorify smoking, we quit glorifying it in our media
There was quite obviously a concerted effort to remove smoking from movies and shows. It's been going on for more than a decade. It's quite abrupt, go back far enough and everyone smokes, especially the cool guys and gals. Then fast forward and almost nobody smokes, not even the villains. Ads for smoking are gone from my country's TV and cigarette packs by law must display horrifying photos of emaciated cancer patients.
Media is part of it, but seeing the real life adults in your life smoke influences you a lot. It’s not necessarily about emulating people you admire, it’s about adopting a signifier of adulthood.
Smoking by most teenagers is easy to solve: Make all cigarettes hot pink with garish other colors in ugly, ugly patterns. Teenagers don't like looking conspicuously ridiculous.
Friend: Do you have anything that doesn't taste like middle school girl lip gloss?
Gas station attendant: *chuckles* No, sorry.
Friend: Fine, cherry-berry then.
The fundamental problem is that drugs are fun and the bad effects are offset by years or even decades.
Also the fact that vast majority of people who do drugs never realize the bad effects from it. They do it in moderation, use them responsibly, and stop without much thought. It's the hockey stick at the edge of the chart where all the destructive narrative comes from.
And they are usually addictive. Almost every person I know who smokes says they derive little pleasure they once did, but are addicted to nicotine and can’t stop. And as a non-smoker, it doesn’t look fun, but I trust it was at one point in their life - I guess.
Right, I was a smoker for many years, the but the actual conversion rate of "drug users" to "drug addicts" is surprisingly low. The overwhelming majority of people who smoke their first cigarette will not die a smoking related death. And cigarettes are probably the most extreme example.
How many people who try cocaine end up being the poster case for DARE? It's virtually no one. The risk analysis for having fun with drugs is totally lopsided. Society is fighting to keep 100% from using drugs in order to protect the 5% who will have their lives ruined.
The main reason that it's hard to change people is that they resist manipulation. This is hard to see if you only consider well-meaning attempts to change people, which you might not consider manipulation because that word has a negative connotation.
No. My background: I've done marketing for 15 years, have read every book on persuasion and have been called an expert.
The reason for this is that the most important element of persuasion is Ethos, or your perceived character. This is much more important than Logos (logical appeal) or Pathos (emotional appeal).
Suits have no credibility to teenagers so they cannot be persuasive. Cool kids have a ton of credibility and thus are very persuasive.
Absolutely this. You cannot get a person to change an opinion, a belief, a tendency, by tackling it head on. It’s almost like we have an autonomous immune response to information which challenges our preconceptions or preferences.
I have found, repeatedly, that the way to get people to change is to make them think it was their idea. So you manipulate them, but in such a fashion that they do not realise they are being manipulated. For instance, I got my kid sister to quit smoking by taking up smoking and encouraging her to smoke more and more until she smelt like an ashtray and had a wallet as light as a feather - and then she decided that this was stupid, and quit. I then claimed to take inspiration from her and followed suit.
Of course, this doesn’t work en masse without essentially going into conspiratorial psyops on the population, but on an individual or small group basis, people can be given a set of precepts and ideas that lead them to an almost inevitable conclusion - and because it was their idea, it’s precious. You can then really cement it by trying to get them to drop the idea, and convince them that the thing that you wanted them to think is wrong.
No one is trying to change these people's behaviors. They are feeding them what they already want; reinforcing negative behaviors. That has always been very easy.
The relationship to today's political theatre is related to this discussion by comparing it to how easy it was to get everyone to smoke in the 1950's
> The main reason that it's hard to change people is that they resist manipulation.
This seems flat out wrong to me given how extremely difficult it is for most people to change themselves. I guess on some level you could argue that people are "manipulating" themselves, but that seems a bit silly to me given how you are using the word manipulation.
It's hard to change people because humans are actually great at multiple forms of homeostasis. All research I've read has said that people's personalities are basically solidified from early childhood (i.e. age 5-6).
Not at all. The fact that it's hard to change yourself is itself part of the resistance against manipulation. It's a second layer of defense. Even if someone is able to manipulate your explicit beliefs, they still aren't able to manipulate your behaviour.
> You can have a PhD and good intentions. You can have money and buy-in. You can do a bunch of reasonable things to prevent a problem that everyone agrees is bad.
Imagine what they could do if they had a PhD and bad intentions...
But let's say, first they do have good intentions. However, even then, if these people devoted their lives to their cause, they promoted programs, wrote countless powerpoint slides, even books. And now some other research comes out and says "well it looks like that other stuff was actually hurting kids". How many of the PhDs with good intentions, will acknowledge that and effectively throw away their life's work?
> Some famous CEOs were mean to their employees and got good results, so I should do that too, which is convenient because I am a jerk.
That's exactly what one of the leadership team did in a company I worked at. They tried to emulate Steve Jobs. And out of brilliance, dedication to perfection, design, hiring the best people, all possible qualities they could have tried to emulated, they emulated being an asshole, hoping the company would become the next Apple at some point.
Question: Do people who vape spend more or less money than people who smoke? I have some vapers that work for me and they talk about vape like wine people debating grapes. They seem willing to pay insane amounts of money for their hourly fix.
So I wonder whether "big tobacco" sees every smokers as potential vaper. Both are nicotine addicts. Perhaps the demonization of smoking will improve sales in the vape business, the alternative "legal" way to sell the drugs.
Vapers spend a lot less. As a pack-a-day smoker I was spending $7-10 a day on cigarettes. Before I quit altogether, I was spending $20-30 a month on nicotine salts, $20 a month on cartridges, and $100 once a year or two for mods and batteries. Since I was working from home I was vaping constantly, so I didn’t reduce nicotine consumption despite the cost reduction. I could buy a brand new mod every month and it’d still be cheaper.
I’m sure there are whales that spend on vaping like some stoners spend thousands on Mothership glass, but they pale in comparison to the millions of multipack-a-day smokers that are worth thousands a year in profit. I assume that’s why Juul was pushed so hard by cigarette companies, the economics of Juul pods are much closer to cigarettes than the stuff sold in vape shops.
If they're buying disposable vapes, then it's likely on par with cigarettes in terms of price. That industry has been working hard on getting disposable vapes that last long enough and contain as much nicotine as possible. In my area it's next to impossible to find any disposables that contain less than 50mg (5%) nicotine, which is downright criminal.
If they're going custom then the upfront cost will be a lot more, but e-juice is super cheap. Have to replace the coils every now and then as well unless it's a refillable pod system. You can also choose whether you get freebase vs nicotine salts and how much nicotine the juice contains.
I personally believe disposable vapes are dangerous and can get a newcomer as addicted to nicotine as a pack-a-day smoker in a matter of weeks. And for smokers, it won't give you a pathway to taper off your nicotine intake.
"In my area it's next to impossible to find any disposables that contain less than 50mg (5%) nicotine, which is downright criminal."
What do you mean by this? Why would you buy less than 50 mg at a time?
I use snus, and I'd guess it's several mgs per pouch, and I buy something like 200-250 pouches at a time because I'm not a heavy 'snusare' so one roll at roughly 30 bucks lasts more than a month. 50 mg would be, what, like two-three packs of cigarettes?
They can spend orders of magnitude less, or about the same depending on how they do it. Mixing your own fluid is stupidly cheap - a weeks spending for a pack-a-day smoker will cover at least a year of vaping like that. If they build their own coils, it's also very cheap - nearly a life's supply of wire can be had for one or two packs. On the other hand, if you buy disposable vapes or cartridges, you can easily spend more than a smoker, if you buy disposable coils and premixed fluid it probably comes about the same or slightly cheaper. If you have a huge collection of vapes and buy all kinds of different attachments and coil heads you are going to be spending a lot of money.
Cigarettes are very expensive and there is no way to really get around it, except esoteric approaches like rolling your own cigs, which doesn't even save that much anyway (especially factoring in time).
Vapes on the other hand can range from expensive to cheap as dirt. When I vaped I was spending probably $10/mo to replace a pack a day habit. I made my own flavorless juice and used a $50 tank/mod system.
In high school, I had to "raise" a bag of flour for a week with a girl that I was dating as part of an assignment. One night on the phone, I asked if she had any fantasies, and she immediately told me about how often she thought about being pregnant and doing everyday things- going to school, cleaning, going shopping, going to the doctor, etc.
It wasn't the type of fantasy I was expecting at the time, but I did eventually figure out the message a year or two after we broke up.
> One night on the phone, I asked if she had any fantasies, and she immediately told me about how often she thought about being pregnant and doing everyday things- going to school, cleaning, going shopping, going to the doctor, etc.
Readit News
"This here is methamphetamine, aka crystal meth or speed. If you see a man running down the street with the strength of a bear, there's a good chance he's high on this. It's very bad. You don't want to get near this--it'll make your heart explode."
It's a wonder that didn't work.
A few years later when my friends were smoking weed and laughed at my concerns, and I realized I’d been lied to, I pretty much did everything under the sun.
An actual education would have let me make better choices about my recreational drug use as a young person.
Dead Comment
That cop came to my school too. On a bicycle. He also told us that 50% of us would die in any car accident over 50mph. It was really hard to not laugh at him given the number of us who participated in the local streetracing scene. In a room full of students in jackets and ties, he stood there spouting lies in his spandex bike shorts.
So me and some buddies got a hold of some peyote and were more than a little afraid of it. We probably would have tossed it but we had a better idea. We called Coach and asked his advice. He gave us detailed preparation instructions. We followed them and got a bit sick, but not altered. Maybe it wasn't even peyote.
I'm not sure that this approach was just more nuanced than "just say no" or closer to "just do it".
I've never come across someone that does more preparation than drying, so to me it seems suspicious to suggest anything else. Mescaline is water soluble so one can make infusions, but it takes a fair bit of plant material to get dosed so there isn't much practical use in doing so.
Drugs Are Really Enjoyable/Excellent
I don't do dares. (joke)
One thing they did that has stuck with me though was this plastic bag contraption with some material inside to represent the human lungs. There was a hole at the top which the DARE officer placed a lit cigarette, then began (somehow) pumping air from the hole down into the lung material. I remember watching the material quickly go from white to brown and tarry. By the time the cigarette was out, she looked us all in the eyes and said "this is what smoking does to your lungs"
Interpret outcomes from that as you will.
Then some kids try some pot and discover that DARE was full of shit and they disregard the entire message or even rebel against it. Education programs are counterproductive when they are loaded with misinformation.
I remember these programs, and I remember how they made me and my friends feel. But nobody asked us, lol.
I'd even try to tell people I thought, but instead of listening to us, we were admonished.
The problem is that these programs are full of bull shit, bad information, bad science, and lies designed to scare.
Kids pick up on this quickly, and you now have lost all trust with this cohort, permanently.
It's the exact same reason abstinence only education fails.
Humans want to feel good, that's okay, we also don't want to die or ruin our lives (assuming we aren't living in a hell). Basic facts here.
Whatcha drinking daddy?
A beer! Want to try it?
YUCK!!!!
This removes the rebellion portion from drinking to a degree.
As the author of the post says in a reply to a comment:
> ' This is a common outcome for programs like this: "It doesn't work, but the adults like it!" '
Mia's OD scene in Pulp Fiction definitely scared me away from drugs
even though I wasn't supposed to be old enough to see it >_>
Makes me wonder if over-protecting children from negative feelings backfires. Pulp Fiction was a risk-free and simple way to make vivid the risks of heroin.
I'm somewhat relieved that tobacco references are considered "adult" now in entertainment. The amount of smoking I saw in movies and TV (and around my uncle) normalized it for me, even though I knew how unhealthy it was.
That reminds me of the classic short-film subversion of this trope: The Man Who Has a Cough and it's Just a Cough and He's Fine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtQNULEudss&t=67s
Deleted Comment
Perhaps silence works better than negative mention? There's a real problem with anti-war or anti-violence media accidentally making it look cool, similarly with biographies of "troubled star" types detailing their drug uses.
There was quite obviously a concerted effort to remove smoking from movies and shows. It's been going on for more than a decade. It's quite abrupt, go back far enough and everyone smokes, especially the cool guys and gals. Then fast forward and almost nobody smokes, not even the villains. Ads for smoking are gone from my country's TV and cigarette packs by law must display horrifying photos of emaciated cancer patients.
https://www.advocate.com/news/daily-news/2010/02/25/anti-smo...
But that one is not bad either :)
A bunch of actors smoking never did anything for me.
Also the fact that vast majority of people who do drugs never realize the bad effects from it. They do it in moderation, use them responsibly, and stop without much thought. It's the hockey stick at the edge of the chart where all the destructive narrative comes from.
How many people who try cocaine end up being the poster case for DARE? It's virtually no one. The risk analysis for having fun with drugs is totally lopsided. Society is fighting to keep 100% from using drugs in order to protect the 5% who will have their lives ruined.
https://youtu.be/_rBPwu2uS-w?si=hR0J-eqBBUOjVtvd
The reason for this is that the most important element of persuasion is Ethos, or your perceived character. This is much more important than Logos (logical appeal) or Pathos (emotional appeal).
Suits have no credibility to teenagers so they cannot be persuasive. Cool kids have a ton of credibility and thus are very persuasive.
I have found, repeatedly, that the way to get people to change is to make them think it was their idea. So you manipulate them, but in such a fashion that they do not realise they are being manipulated. For instance, I got my kid sister to quit smoking by taking up smoking and encouraging her to smoke more and more until she smelt like an ashtray and had a wallet as light as a feather - and then she decided that this was stupid, and quit. I then claimed to take inspiration from her and followed suit.
Of course, this doesn’t work en masse without essentially going into conspiratorial psyops on the population, but on an individual or small group basis, people can be given a set of precepts and ideas that lead them to an almost inevitable conclusion - and because it was their idea, it’s precious. You can then really cement it by trying to get them to drop the idea, and convince them that the thing that you wanted them to think is wrong.
Contrary creatures, we.
I find myself constantly wondering how people can be so gullible as to buy the drivel they're being fed.
No one is trying to change these people's behaviors. They are feeding them what they already want; reinforcing negative behaviors. That has always been very easy.
The relationship to today's political theatre is related to this discussion by comparing it to how easy it was to get everyone to smoke in the 1950's
This seems flat out wrong to me given how extremely difficult it is for most people to change themselves. I guess on some level you could argue that people are "manipulating" themselves, but that seems a bit silly to me given how you are using the word manipulation.
It's hard to change people because humans are actually great at multiple forms of homeostasis. All research I've read has said that people's personalities are basically solidified from early childhood (i.e. age 5-6).
Imagine what they could do if they had a PhD and bad intentions...
But let's say, first they do have good intentions. However, even then, if these people devoted their lives to their cause, they promoted programs, wrote countless powerpoint slides, even books. And now some other research comes out and says "well it looks like that other stuff was actually hurting kids". How many of the PhDs with good intentions, will acknowledge that and effectively throw away their life's work?
> Some famous CEOs were mean to their employees and got good results, so I should do that too, which is convenient because I am a jerk.
That's exactly what one of the leadership team did in a company I worked at. They tried to emulate Steve Jobs. And out of brilliance, dedication to perfection, design, hiring the best people, all possible qualities they could have tried to emulated, they emulated being an asshole, hoping the company would become the next Apple at some point.
So I wonder whether "big tobacco" sees every smokers as potential vaper. Both are nicotine addicts. Perhaps the demonization of smoking will improve sales in the vape business, the alternative "legal" way to sell the drugs.
I’m sure there are whales that spend on vaping like some stoners spend thousands on Mothership glass, but they pale in comparison to the millions of multipack-a-day smokers that are worth thousands a year in profit. I assume that’s why Juul was pushed so hard by cigarette companies, the economics of Juul pods are much closer to cigarettes than the stuff sold in vape shops.
Or is the addiction tied to both the method of consumption and not only the effect (why i drink coffee and not take caffeine pills i guess)
If they're going custom then the upfront cost will be a lot more, but e-juice is super cheap. Have to replace the coils every now and then as well unless it's a refillable pod system. You can also choose whether you get freebase vs nicotine salts and how much nicotine the juice contains.
I personally believe disposable vapes are dangerous and can get a newcomer as addicted to nicotine as a pack-a-day smoker in a matter of weeks. And for smokers, it won't give you a pathway to taper off your nicotine intake.
What do you mean by this? Why would you buy less than 50 mg at a time?
I use snus, and I'd guess it's several mgs per pouch, and I buy something like 200-250 pouches at a time because I'm not a heavy 'snusare' so one roll at roughly 30 bucks lasts more than a month. 50 mg would be, what, like two-three packs of cigarettes?
Vapes on the other hand can range from expensive to cheap as dirt. When I vaped I was spending probably $10/mo to replace a pack a day habit. I made my own flavorless juice and used a $50 tank/mod system.
It wasn't the type of fantasy I was expecting at the time, but I did eventually figure out the message a year or two after we broke up.
Unfathomably based.