turns out i haven’t updated my intro post since *checks notes* 2023… huh. well. some shit’s changed since then, so i guess it’s time.
name: stranger danger is still alive and well and lurking in my subconscious every waking moment i am on the internet, but i think it might be okay if y'all called me by my actual name. so, hi! i'm jess. or you can keep calling me space. either way.
pronouns: she/they
age: 34 (fuuuuuuuuuck)
occupation: recent college graduate (!?!) and soon-to-be grad student, future librarian (yeah so the mfa programs didn't pan out)
ye olde fandom mainstays: star wars, star trek, tolkien, jane austen, rivers of london, pre-endgame marvel cinematic universe, harry potter, supernatural, sherlock holmes (acd canon, rdj movies, bbc!lock) (and probably a bunch of other shit i’m forgetting) (strikethroughs indicate fandoms i’m no longer active in (for various reasons) but content of which you may find in my blog archives)
current fandom interests: the pitt
what i post: i have several sideblogs, but i don't use them. so this blog is a catch-all blog, a commonplace book on the internet, if you will. mostly i just reblog, though i do like to ramble in the tags. (although because this is the #pissonthepoor website, i sometimes find myself involuntarily taking up the mantle of fact-checker.) there is no coherent theme to my blog in any sense, i just reblog whatever shiny thing catches my attention--i was a magpie in another life, i'm sure of it.
re: tags, i do try to tag for things, but am not always as consistent as i’d like to be. that said, and i'm gently holding your hand while saying this as lovingly as possible: if you need things (particularly some sort of trigger) tagged in a more consistent manner for your own safety i'd suggest you skip following this blog. i cannot promise consistency to internet strangers when i cannot even manage to be consistent for myself.
however, here are a list of tags that i do use when i can manage to be consistent with tagging, for your browsing and/or blocking convenience:
#the pitt
#football himbos (ted lasso)
#space himbos (star wars)
#superhimbos (comics and related cinematic universes )
#pirate himbos (our flag means death)
#to boldly go (star trek)
#rivers of london
#sad gay road trips (the hobbit, lotr)
#ficcage of interest (other tumblrinas' fics that i've reblogged)
any jane austen posts are usually tagged by work (e.g. #pride and prejudice) or, if about austen herself or her writing #jane austen
#space talk (the tag for if and when i ever actually post something about myself, like now)
i also post a moderate amount about issues relating to u.s. politics since i’m unfortunately one of the idiots that lives here. you can block the tag #uspol (and #ukpol, #europol) if you’re not interested in political posts.
"Oh," Jack said, once he'd peeled back the brown paper wrapping. "Well, it's, uh. It's woollen. Got good thermal resistance. Thanks, Robby."
Jack's ma had raised him to be specific and prompt in his thanks for any gift received, but the unforeseen flaw with that life advice, Jack now realised, was that you had to be able to tell what the gift was.
"Yeah?" Robby looked shockingly bashful for a grown-ass man whom Jack had seen just this past shift float a transvenous pacer as deft and as calm as you like, with all the authority in his voice that came from years of experience. What a difference a couple of hours and sitting down with a cup of coffee in Jack's kitchen could make. "I mean, if you don't like it that's fine, I know I still have a lot to learn. But I thought that yarn was a good blue, it'd go with those cargo pants you wear all the time."
"It's a sock," Jack said, as realisation hit. He looked down at the woollen lump in his hands. He didn't know much about knitting, but he'd had as much general sock experience as the average person for the first 32 years of his life and he didn't think that socks generally had these, well, proportions. His heel didn't protrude that much; his foot had the standard factory-install number of toes. But this, apparently, was a sock. A sock with an incredible number of dropped stitches for something made by a man so good at suturing that Jack wouldn't bet against him being able to do so a perfect running suture on a wound with his eyes closed.
"The woman at the yarn store said that most people start with making squares because they're easier." Robby sounded faintly bemused, scratched at his cheek. "But I thought, sure, but then what would I do with a bunch of wool squares?"
"So you made me a sock," Jack said. Its appearance and the fact that it looked like it existed in several dimensions beyond the usual three aside, the sock was incredibly soft. It didn't feel at all like it was made from the kind of cheap acrylic stuff that his niece sometimes used, along with an abundance of glitter and glue sticks, in her grade-school crafting projects. Jack didn't think this was bargain bin stuff.
"My therapist told me I needed a hobby," Robby said with a shrug, and it was a testament to how much work he'd been putting in over the past few months that he could now say my therapist without looking like just the shape of the words on his tongue was going to make him puke. "Didn't say it couldn't be a useful hobby."
Of course, there was still lots of work to be done.
"You made me a sock," Jack realised.
Robby flushed. "I wasn't trying to be pointed, or a dick, or... Just, making that one took me a solid month so I thought I'd get feedback from you before I started the second one."
"Feedback?" Jack placed the lumpy quasi-sock down on the kitchen table in front of him, smoothed it out as much as he could with careful hands. He thought about how Robby had worked on this for weeks and weeks, for him. He cleared his throat. He said, "My, uh, my therapist has also been encouraging me to find alternative hobbies that aren't—"
"Being fucking shot at in the defence of a bunch of cut-price TVs?"
They were not having this argument again, so Jack said, "Only the thing is, I don't think I need a hobby right now. I think what I need is… Well."
"What?"
"Pete says that I'm possibly very service-oriented and my sense of duty is maybe a bit over-developed—"
Robby snorted.
"—so he gave me some homework to do on like, doing something because I want to for me." Jack paused and wiped his suddenly sweaty palms on his thighs. "And, and it took me a few weeks but I realised that TEMS, all of that, I wasn't doing it because I was bored. I was doing it because I was lonely."
People knew what to do with grief better than they did when it came to loneliness. They'd bring you a casserole and tell you how sorry they were the week after a drunk ran a red light and killed your wife, but there was no script to follow for so you've never lived alone in your whole life before but boom, you've got a three-bedroom ranch all to yourself, the perfect size for the kids you'll never have now. His sister told him he had a standing invitation to come visit them in Oklahoma City for the holidays, but there was no one around that Jack felt would ever offer him the same thing for seven on any random Tuesday. Except—
"But you should know first," Jack said, "this isn't because I'm lonely in general. It's also not because of the sock, although it's not not because of the sock, it's about you and me, and—"
Robby squinted at him. "Jack."
"Fine, okay, whatever, fuck words," Jack said, and he stood, leaned across the kitchen table, and he kissed Robby. His best friend, his confidant, the voice he could orient by in the darkness, and it was weird to kiss someone with a beard but it was hot, too, turned Jack on even before Robby made that little noise in the back of his throat and kissed him back and oh, oh shit, Jack had fucking genius ideas that—
Robby pulled back, eyes heavy-lidded, and said, "Really?"
"Yes, really," Jack said, teetering on the edge of the rest of his life, "yes, you, totally."
Robby reached up and cradled Jack's cheek in one hand and such a simple gesture shouldn't make Jack's eyes sting, but it did. "Bedroom?"
Jack nodded fervently but said, "One condition."
"I'm listening," Robby said, but given that he was already standing, fisting Jack's t-shirt in one hand and towing him out of the kitchen, Jack was fairly sure the agreement here was a mere formality.
"All the socks come off first," Jack said, and Robby laughed, bright and delighted, and walked faster.
some people like to get mad at disability benefits because they think its unfair people who dont work get a payout from the government while they have to work 50 hours at the human suffering factory every week. but if you tell them "yeah that sucks i think you should also get a universal allowance and not have to work 50 hours at the human suffering factory every week" thats apparently the wrong answer.
I think people who get mad at disability benefits should try filling out the disability forms with the understanding if you do it wrong, you could die.
That isn't me being dramatic. A lot of people do die - or become homeless, or their illnesses spiral out of control because they can't afford basic necessities like food. Those things also happen in the years long wait to see if you MIGHT get approved for benefits.
I also think nobody should have to work 50 hours at the human suffering factory, but I need these people to understand that that's not being caused by the disabled people who are scraping by below the poverty line.
"I know I'm normally pretty good about keeping up with the current lingo and whatnot," Jack said, "but you lost me on this one, buddy."
Shen shook his head. "Not a reference. Not a joke. I'm serious."
Jack frowned, because Shen did look like he was being serious—but then again, Shen often looked his most serious when he was also at his silliest. "Sorry, man, I'm just not seeing what the punchline is here."
"There isn't one," said Shen, with what Jack would later realise was an incredible degree of self-control. He pulled his backpack out of his locker, slung it over his shoulder, and as he walked over to the ambulance bay exit with Jack at his side, he nodded over to the stairwell doorway, where Esme was busy mopping up what looked like a steady patter of water drops. To Jack's eye, it looked like the trail you'd leave behind you, cursing, as you hustled a leaking trash bag outside before the bottom totally fell out of it.
"See?" Shen said. "He went that way, up to the roof. Probably a good idea for someone to check it out, yeah? See you tomorrow." He slapped Jack on the shoulder in a friendly sort of way and walked out the door.
Jack gaped after him for a moment, then turned to look at Dana. She was juggling two separate landline phones and had a harried look at her face. "Don't look at me," she said, "I can't explain it, and shit's all fucked up at the Blood Bank. You're on your own, Abbot."
"Is this some kind of mass psychosis event? Or, I don't know, comedy improv?"
"Don't I wish," Dana said. "It's just a Friday. Go get your guy, I—yeah, yes, I'm still holding. Why wouldn't I be?"
Jack slogged his way up the stairs and pushed his way through the fire door and onto the roof half convinced that he was going to be met by a snickering Javadi and Santos, filming the startled look on his face for some social media gotcha—but no, the only other person up there was Robby, and Shen had been telling the truth.
Hovering about two feet over Robby's head was a small but perfectly formed thunderstorm: roiling clouds of a dark blue grey, intermittently letting out tiny bolts of lightning and cracks of thunder, but always, continually, raining. The actual weather—the main weather? what the fuck was his life like, Jack thought vaguely—was fine and clear, the day ahead promising to be a nice spring one, but Robby was soaked through. His hair was plastered to his scalp, his green hoodie was so wet it was almost black where it stretched across his hunched shoulders, and his hands, shoved into his pockets, were probably helping to hold his sodden pants onto his hips. Around his feet was a slowly spreading pool of water.
"What," Jack said, "the fuck."
"I'm fine, Jack," Robby said without turning around.
"Fine? You've got your own microclimate! What in the…" Jack approached slowly, cautiously, because maybe this all still was some kind of elaborate prank, some kind of smoke and mirrors illusion that would fall apart as soon as Jack got close enough but no, no, it was real. "What happened?"
Robby shrugged, looked at Jack out of the corner of his eye. "Don't know."
"You don't know why you developed your own fucking weather system?"
"To be fair," Robby said, in a voice that sounded as sodden as the rest of him but that was clearly striving for fine, "not sure what the differential diagnosis is for this one is. You want to go check a copy of Harrison's?"
"Oh, we're going to be sassy about this one, brother? Because I'm not sure we should be sassy about this one." Jack stepped in between Robby and the railing, right into his eye-line, and the fucker just looked down at the ground. As if Jack hadn't earned the right to look him in the eye at this point, ten years and counting. "Have you tried—"
"Yup," Robby said. His beard was soaked; beads of water trembled on the ends of his lashes, the tip of his nose. "Everything. Tried running from it, tried putting up an umbrella, tried crouching underneath the hand dryers in the restroom. Nothing worked. It keeps following me, and I can't…"
"Does it… Let me see." Jack stretched up on tip-toe, put a hand out beneath the cloud. It looked like some of the great big storm systems Jack had seen during those three ill-fated months he'd spent stationed on a base in the Great Plains—just as ominous, but impossibly smaller. Raindrops fell onto his palm, real raindrops, water trickling warm down his wrist. Huh. A miniature lightning bolt zapped his thumb, no more painful than getting a static shock during winter, but as Jack watched, the cloud grew just a bit less grey. Double huh.
Jack took a step closer to investigate. What would happen if he… And yeah, yup, the cloud shrunk ever so slightly; the rumbling it emitted grew just a bit softer.
"Hrm," Jack said, and lowered his hand.
"Hrm?"
"Yup. Hrm."
"This is your diagnostic process, as a senior PTMC attending? Hrm?" Robby said with a wrinkle of his nose, and maybe it was telling that a bitching Robby seemed like a positive sign, but Jack would take whatever he could get.
Jack planted his hands on his hips. "Yeah, a hrm. And I'm going to do you one better now."
"Enlighten me," Robby said. He was shivering faintly now, teeth chattering, and if Jack's hunch worked out, he was going to have to take him right downstairs to check him over for hypothermia.
"First you should know that this is going to hurt me a lot more than it's going to hurt you," Jack said.
"We really have to work on your bedside manner," Robby said, "the Press-Ganey scores are—"
The extremely rare occurrence of Robby marshalling Press-Ganey scores was cut short by Jack wrapping his arms around Robby and hugging him close. Hugging someone who was soaked to the skin wasn't the most pleasurable experience that Jack had ever had—he could feel the wet soaking through the front of his scrubs—but it was Robby, so it was okay. Who gave a shit.
"What are—"
"Shh," Jack said, and squeezed him tighter, and remembered the last time he'd hugged Robby, properly hugged him, the first time he'd walked through the Pitt's door after that stupid, stupid fucking motorcycle trip, and he shuddered, and rested his head briefly against Robby's shoulder.
"Jack," Robby said softly, and Jack lifted his head and looked up and saw that the cloud overhead was shrinking, was dissipating,
"Look at that for a diagnostic process," Jack said, satisfied, because he fucking loved being right, and when Robby said, "What are you even talking about?", Jack tugged him closer and kissed him, and kissed him, and overhead the sun came out.
For @changingthingslikeleaves, who requested 'Robby/Jack, surprise.'
It took Jack until his third year at PTMC, when Lena brought in a pretty damn spectacular berry sheet cake for Adamson's seventieth, for him to realise that he hadn't a clue when Robby's birthday was. He'd known the guy three years, and he didn't think he'd ever heard a whisper about it. And sure, once you got to their age, not everyone was so fussed about birthdays, or cared to mix the personal with the professional. It wasn't as if Jack himself trumpeted his, or did much for it these days—though when Tanya was alive she'd always treated him to a nice dinner out during his birthday week, at some place where the cocktails were good and the desserts were decadent.
But colleagues still mentioned stuff in passing, like Dana's resigned tutting over being born on April 1 (How do you think I'm so good at knowing when someone's acting the fool, huh?) or when the new hire, Princess, crowed over the two coveted tickets her sister had given her to some long sold-out concert (Right up in front too, where I can flirt with the roadies!).
And it hadn't always been the case, but Jack and Robby hung out outside of work these days. They were past just colleagues. Jack was pretty sure that they'd even progressed beyond work friends to being friend friends. They grabbed beers at McConnell's, they traded off watching games at one another's places, they'd gone to listen to a few bands at that new PittFest thing that seemed to have been successful enough to turn into an annual event. Robby had even volunteered to help Jack when he decided on a whim to repaint his living room, and had navigated the hell that was a suburban hardware store on a weekend morning with him. That was real friends, Jack thought; that was buddies.
But in all the days—weeks—months—that they'd been friends, never once had Robby said, yeah, finishing up early today for my birthday. Or, grabbing some drinks with friends this weekend for my birthday, you want to come with? Or, yeah, that's why being a leap year birthday kid sucked. Never even dropped a hint as to what season his birthday fell in.
Jack leaned against one of the work terminals, and ate his slice of Adamson's birthday cake, and considered this. It was of course possible that Robby had said something and Jack had just forgotten it, but he didn't think so. Robby had always been a bit of an attention-grabber for Jack, even back when he'd first arrived and Robby had made it silently, painfully clear that he thought that anyone who didn't come up through the ranks here had to prove their worth. Jack remembered all the things he learned about Robby.
Plus, while Jack didn't know Janey super well, she seemed nice. Last Thanksgiving—his first without Tanya—she and Robby had insisted that Jack join them and her family for dinner. She'd been in her element cooking, baking, making sure everyone's glass was topped up; when he'd thanked her at the end of the evening, she'd assured him that she loved hosting people, the more the merrier. If Robby wanted a slap-up meal or a festive cake, Janey seemed capable of providing either. And at this point, Jack was pretty sure that if Janey was throwing any kind of birthday dinners for Robby that he'd be invited.
But no dinners, no parties, no cakes. No Robby taking the same weekend off three years in a row, which would at least give you a probability to work with.
Chances were good, Jack thought as he dropped his now-empty plate into the trash, that Robby was one of those people who wasn't just unfussed about his birthday, he very much didn't do birthdays. And Jack could allow that there were good reasons for someone to Not Do birthdays—maybe celebrating birthdays went against your religion; maybe when you were a kid a birthday clown had slaughtered your entire family in front of your eyes; you could never know someone else's struggle—Jack had the suspicion that Robby had no overt reason to gloss over his own birthday other than his fundamental, stubborn Robbyness. Robby clearly felt that he had to be the kind of person who Didn't Do Birthdays.
And fuck that, Jack thought. Life was short. Why let stubbornness get in the way of delicious baked goods?
Jack ambled down the back hallway to Adamson's office, and found him sitting at his desk and frowning at something on his computer screen. Next to him was a half-eaten paper plate of cake, and the small party hat that Lena had made him wear while everyone warbled their way through 'Happy Birthday.' Jack rapped gently on the door frame, and when Adamson looked up, said, "Many happy returns. You want me to sing 'Hail to the Chief' or something?"
"I thought only good things were supposed to happen to me today," Adamson said dryly, looking at Jack over the tops of his glasses.
"Ouch," Jack said, and pressed the heel of his hand to his chest. "Touché. Question: when is Robby's birthday?"
If Adamson found it strange that one of his attendings would stop by his office an hour into the shift to ask when another attendings' birthday was, he didn't pass comment on it. "June 4."
Five days from today.
"Cool," Jack said, and got back to work.
A younger Jack would have schemed about throwing Robby some kind of surprise party: one with cake and booze and a kick-ass playlist. A much younger Jack would have thrown him one with cake and booze and a stripper, because boobs were awesome and because much younger Jack had been a little asshole who thought that making it through basic training meant that no one else could tell him shit. The Jack of 2019 understood that a full-on party was not the way to go with Michael Robinavitch, plus or minus anyone's boobs. His instincts suggested something else.
Robby's birthday fell on a Tuesday. He wasn't rostered to work, and so Jack gambled that around about nine, he'd find Robby doing his fine-weather, day-off usual: sitting out on his porch with a cup of coffee, lingering in the quiet with Jake gone to school and Janey at the office. And at 9:05, Jack rocked up to find that his gamble had paid off. There was Robby, long legs folded up to let him perch in one of the Adirondack chairs, his bedhead all wild and a thick paperback in his lap.
"What are you doing here?" Robby said, brow furrowed, when he caught sight of Jack. "Is everything okay, is—"
"Bzzt," Jack said, sitting down in the chair opposite Robby's and set the bag he was carrying down on the table between them. "Give me a sec, got to get something set up. Close your eyes."
"What?"
"Robby."
"Fine," Robby said, sounding like he did not think this was fine.
Jack emptied the bag of the box, the candles, the lighter, the napkins, the knife and forks, the plates. He arranged them; he unboxed the cake. There were four candles, and now he set one in precise alignment on each corner of the cake, which he'd custom-ordered from that really good bakery over in Lawrenceville. Not a sheet cake large enough to feed multitudes, the way Lena's had, but just the right size to be savoured by Robby himself and containing flavours that Jack knew Robby loved: honey and apricot and hazelnut.
He lit the candles, shoved the lighter into his jeans pocket, and said, "Okay, eyes open. Surprise, birthday boy."
Robby, clearly startled, looked from the cake to Jack and back to the cake. "How did you know that…"
Pleased, Jack tilted his chin up and murmured, "I have my ways."
"It's a cake," Robby said, sounding way too bewildered. You'd swear his parents had never bought him one back in the day.
"Yeah, it's a cake," Jack said, "because it's your birthday."
"But I'm not… but it's not…" There was a flush over the high points of Robby's cheekbones.
"Nah," Jack said, "let's not finish either of those sentences. Happy birthday, brother, blow out your candles, make a wish."
Robby did; and they shared the cake, which was fucking delicious; and sat there shooting the shit and drinking some more coffee until Jack's night shift well and truly caught up with him and he had to head home to bed; and somehow there on that porch, on that morning, a custom was formed. It would last through the pandemic, and Robby's break-up with Janey, and Robby becoming Chief, and every other high and low bout of sheer fucking weirdness in their lives: on Robby's birthday, Jack would show up with cake.
Sometimes it was in the morning, sometimes it was in the evening, and once it was at two in the afternoon, sitting on the low wall next to the ambulance bay with the reek of blood and antiseptic in their nostrils. But Jack always showed up, with cake and with no other acknowledgement of the day beyond, "Happy birthday, brother, blow out your candles, make a wish."
So maybe it shouldn't have been too much of a surprise when on one of those days, Robby made his wish and ate his cake and then sat there for a moment staring down at his hands before saying, "You, uh, you want to know what I wished for?"
Jack finished the last bite of his own piece and said, "Lay it on me."
"I wished for… What I want is…" Robby huffed out a sigh, rubbed at the nape of his neck, said, "Fuck me, why is this so hard?"
"Why is what?"
"I just… c'mere," Robby said, and sighed again, and pulled Jack closer, and Jack didn't know what the fuck Robby was yapping about—everything about their first kiss was easy; everything about it was honey on Jack's tongue.
Hi Siria! For the prompt you asked, Rabbot and curtain fic, maybe? I need some fluff, they deserve it XD
"This is why I have trust issues, Michael," Jack said.
"No, it's not," Robby said.
"No, it's not," Jack agreed, because if the worst thing that had ever happened to him in his life was that the movers' truck that was to take their combined worldly possessions to their new house had crapped out on Penn Avenue, his would have been a very different life. He'd probably still have two feet, for starters. "But it's deeply fucking frustrating."
"That," Robby said with the sigh of a man whose day job required a lot of people managing, "I will grant you."
The moving company sent an email that apologised profusely for the inconvenience, promised that their stuff would be delivered by tomorrow afternoon for sure, and offered them $50 off their next move.
"Are you kidding me?" Jack said, as if a mere hypothetical fifty bucks wasn't a slap in the face—as if he wasn't convinced that he was one-and-done on both this house and this man.
"This is ridiculous," Robby said, and picked up his phone and spent five crisply-worded minutes on the phone with the moving company's manager. By the end of it, they had another apology, a promise that their stuff would be delivered by tomorrow morning at the latest, $250 knocked off their bill and a $50 e-gift voucher for one of the good local pizzerias.
"That's dinner covered for tonight," Robby said as he stuck his phone back in his pocket.
"That," Jack breathed, "was fucking hot," and sure, he'd already planned to say a final farewell to the condo with one last blowjob, but now he was extra motivated to make sure that Robby's knees wobbled where he was braced against the wall in the hallway.
Robby's BDE conversation hadn't solved all their problems, of course. They'd packed Robby's car with a few boxes containing things they'd need right away in the new place, and that they didn't want to have to hunt through the main mass of stuff for. Only there were things that they couldn't fit into the back of a sensible hybrid, or that they hadn't factored on vanishing into the limbo of "the moving truck is going to break down and back up traffic on a major artery through central Pittsburgh for a couple of hours", which was how after they wolfed down their pizza, Jack found himself wandering beneath the fluorescent lights of a big box store.
"I took a vow," Jack said, mournful, "I promised myself I wouldn't set foot in a hardware store for at least six months," on account of how much time they'd spent going back and forth to one of these places getting moving supplies over the past two weeks. He'd started seeing 'Aisle K - Storage and Moving' in his sleep.
"Well," Robby said, looking at the list he'd scribbled down on the back of a menu from the pizzeria, "where else are we going to get these things at this hour? Oh shit, we forgot about curtains. How are you going to sleep without them?"
"I could manage," Jack said, although even he could hear the dubious note in his voice. Sleep came easier these days with Robby beside him than it had in years, but a good set of blackout curtains were part of the equation. "Or maybe we could tack up a sheet over the window or…"
"A single sheet's not going to make much difference in the height of summer," Robby said, "and we are—oh, shit. Shit and motherfuck."
"What?"
"What are we going to sleep on? Bed frame's in the truck, mattress is in the truck."
Jack's jaw dropped. "Fuck, we never factored that in."
"All those lists," Robby said, rubbing at the nape of his neck, "and still—"
Jack jerked a thumb over his shoulder back in the direction of the bedroom furniture department. "Blow-up mattress, I guess? If we got one of the ones with an electric pump, it won't take so long to do."
There was a moment's silence as they contemplated the prospect of spending a whole night like that: two fully-grown men with fifty-something spines on a slowly deflating blow-up mattress.
"Or," Robby said, "or, hear me out, we check into a hotel for the night," and it was quite possible that Jack was in love with a genius.
He took Robby by the hand and said, very sincerely, "Take me to the nearest mid-price hotel room or lose me forever," and Robby threw his head back and laughed and said, "Honey, show me the way home."
