October 2014

UW TunnelsDid you know there are over 7 miles of interconnecting tunnels that run underneath the University of Washington?

They are dark, narrow, and hot. Over 110 degrees hot. 

If you brush against the pipes, your skin will melt. I saw it happen.

High school students were brought there and hazed in the year 1999. I was there.

It all started when my friends Daniel, Aaron and I, enrolled in an off-campus class in our Junior year of high school.  It was a network technologies class. 2 hours a day.

The class was held in the bottom of a high school for dropouts or expelled kids who needed a second chance.

The school was in the bad part of town.

Once, I walked out the front door and was pushed back inside by an officer in full SWAT gear.

Someone crashed a car into the house across the street. They ran upstairs and took someone hostage. We all watched as it unfolded, our faces glued to the windows.

The school was rough, but we learned a lot about routers, modems, switches, and basically how to set up and maintain computers on a network in a corporate environment.

We ended up wiring that entire broken down school, drilled holes in floors and walls, ran CAT5 cable, terminated wires, set up modems and routers, and configured computers. In 1999 it was a unique skill to have, and we were proud.

As the year came to an end, our teacher let us know that she had a summer job offer for the students. Daniel, Aaron and I decided to interview.

The interview was interesting. They didn’t give much detail about the job.But they did say we would be installing and terminating cable, setting up modems and routers, and maybe configuring computers.

Sounded right up our alley. 

Oh, and then they mentioned the pay. $12.09 an hour. That was more than I had ever made. The highest I had been paid per hour before that was $5.35.

All 3 of us were excited.

Our first job was on the campus of the University of Washington. That sounded great. Established. Credible. Academic. We were pumped.We showed up at the job site and did some quick introductions. There were 4 other people on the team. If you added us, it was 7 total.

The two guys that stand out in my mind were Joshau and DJ Dougy Fresh.

Joshau was a beast of a human, about 6 foot 5 inches tall, and 250 pounds of solid muscle. He drove a huge white truck with neon orange racing stripes. And yes his name was Joshau, not Joshua. He said his mom accidentally switched the “u” and the “a” on his birth certificate and never changed it out of pride.

DJ Dougy Fresh, was a goofy, shaggy, curly-haired, skinny-guy in his late twenties. He always looked down at his feet, bounced around, and never stood still. Whenever he stepped outside a smoke was instantly lit and between his lips.

The two other guys I hardly remember, they seemed like generic expendable goons in a movie, just extras in the cast to beef up the environment.

“So where do we start?” Aaron asked.

Chuckling. Joshau said, “You’ll see, follow us.”

Fully expecting to walk through the prestigious and beautiful hallways of the University of Washington, and end up in a classroom somewhere, we were disoriented and confused as we began to walk inside a parking garage, then  downstairs. Then down more stairs, and more… Eventually we opened a door.

And we saw it. 

A huge roll of thick black wire, taller than Joshau, on a wooden spindle, just staring at us.

Without talking, DJ Dougy Fresh bent down near the massive roll of wire and opened up a latch on the floor.

The latch opened up to a dark abyss. He dropped down inside. Disappearing.

Joshau said, “get in boys!”

Daniel looked at me, shrugged, and dropped down too.

I didn’t want to be last, so I tried not to think too much, mustered up some courage, and dropped down myself.A wave of heat blasted me in the face, and throughout my entire body, I immediately felt all the sweat glands in my body wake up and start churning.

I thought, “It must be 120 degrees in here!”

Once my brain recovered from the shock of the heat, my eyes started adjusting to the light.

A long straight tunnel expanded further than I could see in either direction. On the left there were thick metal pipes stacked on each other. To the right there were stacks of wires held up by metal trays.

There wasn’t enough room to put my arms out to the side without hitting my elbows against the wires and pipes.

Joshau yelled, “Whatever you do, DON’T TOUCH THE PIPES.” 

He pointed at his face with both fingers, swished his mouth around a few times, then spit onto the pipes. With a sharp hiss, the spit instantly evaporated into steam and floated to the top of the tunnel.

We nodded in bewilderment. No touching the pipes.

As we walked, Joshau yelled, “There’s 7 miles of interconnecting tunnels just like this under the University, and they want us to wire them up with fiber optic cables.”

He kept walking, “That means we’re taking wires from the top, and running them through the tunnels to the end points. It’s going to take team work, and it won’t be easy, but we can do it.”

Joshau banged on a swinging metal door, “You see these gates? These gates show up about every quarter mile, if they close on you then you’re stuck inside. We tie them off with rope to keep them open. So don’t mess with the rope. Only I have the key. Don’t let these close on you.”

My head was reeling trying to take in all of this, what did we get ourselves into?

We started pulling the cable from the spindle and would hand it off to the next person at set intervals. Maybe 200 yards apart.

Once everyone was at their spot, pulling the cable became kind of like a one-way game of tug of war.Each time you grabbed the cable to pull, it would jitter, stutter, bounce around, and sometimes completely get locked up.

The 110 degree heat and the constant jittery-pulling induced drenching-sweat beyond anything I’d ever experienced.

It was the type of sweat that started out as thousands of perfectly formed beads. Eventually it became a salty sheen that would build up, sting your eyes, and puddle around you.That pool of sweat didn’t last too long as it soon evaporated from the intense heat.

Quickly we found out one of the perks of the job. Every hour there was a mandatory break due to health regulations.

We would use our cable as navigation and climb back up top. Often a very long walk. Sometimes a mile.

A blast of cold air would welcome us, accompanied by literally a truck load of Gatorade bottles. We would guzzle them down, pant, wipe our brows, chat for about 15 minutes, and then go back down below again.

I had never drank so much Gatorade in my life.

Weirdly no one ever needed to pee. It went straight out our sweat pores.

The third time we went above for a Gatorade break, we noticed that our friend Aaron wasn’t looking so great.I figured it was probably normal, as I’m sure I looked like hell too. I sure felt like it. Daniel didn’t look too great either.But something seemed a little off with Aaron, even for this situation. We just shrugged it off. We were doing our best to cope with the strange situation we had found ourselves in.

When we went back down again, we picked up our same stations and started pulling once again.

It felt hotter this time. Probably the contrast. 

We kept pulling. Stutter, jitter, jumpy cable.

Then it totally stopped. Hard. Then went slack, smooth. Something was up.

I could hear a voice yelling at the top of their lungs from far down the tunnel, then another voice picked it up and repeated. Then another.

“STOP PULLING! GO UP TOP!”

Once I heard it, I found myself yelling it down the line too, “STOP PULLING! GO UP TOP!”

Up top we all huddled together, not drinking Gatorade this time, wondering what was up. In a few minutes DJ Dougy Fresh climbed up from the tunnels.

He walked over to us and said, “Heat exhaustion. Your buddy Aaron yacked all over the place. Almost fainted too.”

Daniel and I looked at each other in shock.

DJ Dougy Fresh continued, “I think he’s OK, but they’re going to keep an eye on him. I don’t think we can let him back down in the tunnels.”

And it turns out we wouldn’t see Aaron in the tunnels again…It was a bit discouraging to not have Aaron as part of our team any longer, but after a couple weeks Daniel and I slowly got used to the rhythm, the heat, and the narrow tunnels.

I even started recognizing parts of the tunnels, whereas before the whole place seemed like a repeating never-ending maze. It was fun to explore the hidden depths of the university hardly anyone knew existed.

But what wasn’t fun, and what I did not expect, was the hazing.

At first everyone was pretty nice to Daniel Aaron and myself, but shortly after Aaron was out of the tunnels, the game began to change.It started slow.

First, they would ask us to go up top to find something like a left handed wrench for one of the guys.

Of course, a left handed wrench doesn’t exist. They knew that. We knew that.

But when we couldn’t find the imaginary tool, it was a perfect excuse to be punished with the gruntiest of grunt work.

Next they had us lug a heavy bags full of tools around with us “just in case.” The bags were difficult to maneuver in the narrow tunnels and the heat made them even heavier. Of course, we never ended up needing what was in those bags.

They just wanted to watch us sweat and squirm.

Next was the longest running “gag.” If we did anything that was even slightly “wrong”, talked back, or showed any sign of disrespect, disobedience, or for any other reason… They would all start chanting “Nooooo Gatowaaaddee!” In a mocking baby-talk tone.

Sometimes “Nooooooo Gatowaaaaaaddeee!” would be chanted in a group. Other times you’d hear it echo from a quarter mile down the tunnel and then be repeated on down the line.

And, as the chant implied, you would no longer get your Gatorade on that break.

I learned very quickly to know my role and not attract any unneeded attention. This helped me avoid bad situations, but Daniel on the other hand is a loud-mouth and doesn’t take crap from people. I respect that about him. But this cost him many Gatorades and I found myself sneaking him some when I could.

Daniel’s hard hardheadedness and strong spirit drove the guys on the site to pull out the big guns to try and break him.

While we were walking through one of the hottest segments of the tunnels Daniel was in the back of the line. DJ Dougy Fresh told Daniel to go back and grab something they dropped about 100 yards back.

As Daniel walked back through the tunnel, I saw Joshau shut the nearby gate and snicker. When Daniel came back, he got close enough to see the gate was closed and he said “Hey guys, can you open the gate for me?”

“Sure” said Joshau, and looked for his keys to unlock the gate.

“Wait, I can’t find my keys. Hold on.” He bumbled.

“Man, looks like I must have dropped ’em. You might want to go back in there and try and find them, I’m not sure where they are. Really sorry man. I’ll wait here.”

Daniel looked a bit shocked, trying to figure out if this was serious or another “joke”.

We all knew that this could be bad. There was only one set of keys, and to get another set would be tricky. Especially because hardly anyone on the UW campus even knew about these tunnels, let alone where to get a spare key.

Daniel went back to try and find the key. I told him I’d wait for him and look for the key on my side.

The other guys went up top to “see if the key was up there”.

It was already late in the day, and we were about to head home. Not only was Daniel trapped, but potentially the whole team was held up from going home.

5, 10, 15, 20, then 30 minutes went by. Tired and sweaty both Daniel and I frantically searched for the missing key, knowing that we would likely not find it.

A guy from the team came down. I thought, “Great! Good news! He probably found the key, or has a spare.”

Instead, he let us know that the office that has the spare key is closed for the day, and we won’t be able to get another key until tomorrow morning.

Looks like Daniel would have to spend the night in the scorching hot tunnels with no relief.

Panic set in. What were we going to do? What would we tell our parents? Would Daniel survive? Should I stay with him?

It felt like hours passed. Daniel was scared. I was scared. I told Daniel I’d be right back. I was going up top to see what was happening.These guys were just hanging out, waiting, chatting, they didn’t seem worried at all, they seemed pretty happy.

I asked what the plan was. They shrugged their shoulders, then looked around at each other.

DJ Dougy Fresh said “Time?”

Joshau said, “Time.”

Joshau walked towards the entrance to the tunnels. I followed him back to where Daniel was locked.

I watched as he did a not-so-sly move of dropping the keys on the ground. He then pretended to look around and said, “Here they are! How could you guys not see these?”

He unlocked the door and let Daniel out.

Daniel didn’t say much, nor did I, and nor did the rest of the team. We didn’t talk about that incident, that day or after.

But something changed.

Daniel’s spirit didn’t break, and I think DJ Dougy Fresh and Joshau knew they went too far.

Somehow that torturous act had a normalizing effect and we became on the same level together. It was a strange mix of resentment and mutual respect after that point.

Work was strange for about a week, people were quiet, but slowly after we became a tight team. Everyone got Gatorade.

We even created some unorthodox methods for pulling the cable quicker. And we finished the job ahead of schedule.

After each successful cable pull Joshau would yell and jump at the top of his lungs, “We kicked that cable’s ass!”

I learned a lot from that experience. Sometimes I think that I shouldn’t have put up with their crap, that I should have stood up for myself, that I should have quit.

But another part of me is glad I did put up with it, that I did navigate that insane physical and social landscape, that I was able to maintain my friendship with Daniel, and become accepted as part of the team even in that environment.

  • I learned that even if something is super scary and intimidating, you can usually do it if you just put your head down and power through.
  • I learned that age difference is often irrelevant. We were 17 year old kids working with people in their early 30’s and by the end it hardly mattered.
  • I learned that if you do work that no one else wants to do, you can get paid a lot more than anyone else.
  • I learned to know my role and respect those with more experience, expertise and knowledge than myself.
  • I learned that there really are entire hidden worlds right under your feet. Secrets are real.
  • I learned that hazing can help a team bond, but there is a line that should not be crossed. Finding that line is difficult and dangerous.

I can’t say I was sad to leave those tunnels, but they’ll always have a place in my heart.

And so will Joshau and DJ Dougy Fresh.

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About 9 years ago I created a software program called OK-Cal. It was a nutrition tracking software.

At the time, here’s what set OK-Cal apart from the competition:

  1. You could tell OK-Cal your body weight goals, and OK-Cal would help you reach them. OK-Cal would give you feedback on your food choices, it would show you if your foods were helping or hurting your progress towards your goals.
  2. You could tell OK-Cal what foods you wanted to eat, hit the “Go” button, and OK-Call would tell you how much you could eat of each food and still hit your goals. There are videos somewhere online showing how to hit your goals with potato chips, ice cream and protein powder or some other horrific combination. I forget, and I don’t want to look it up, because thinking about it hurts my heart.

You see I sunk over $15,000 cash into developing and promoting OK-Cal.

And I totally blew it.

Although it still hurts to think about, I believe this failure helped me in a lot of ways. It pushed me to learn much more about nutrition, and about creating and promoting products. I’ll share some of those insights with you.

I’ll also share with you one of my insights to what makes a project successful or totally blow up.

I want to share with you why I think I failed, in hopes that my mistakes may help you.

Since the year 2000 I have been borderline obsessed with nutrition and fitness and in 2007

OK-Cal was my first big venture, and I saved up a good chunk of change for a 24 year old, and invested it into trying to help out the nutrition world, and help to help myself by creating and selling a cool product.

I had big dreams about OK-Cal selling tens of thousands of copies and I poured my heart and soul into creating it.

I graduated college with an MIS degree (Management Information Systems.) And yes, I learned to code, in multiple languages. But none of the knowledge I learned in college directly applied to the real world. So I needed help with developing the software.

I had saved up about $15,000 cash. And I needed to develop a piece of software, a website, and all the marketing.

I didn’t know how to get started with the development, so I started hunting around online for website companies who also could create “cloud hosted” web apps.

I had some long conversations with a couple of companies, and it shocked me to hear both of them quote me at about $150,000. And that obviously didn’t include any marketing materials or advertising. That was already 10x over my budget.

That killed my buzz fast.

Briefly I thought of ways to finance the deal. I started coming up with a business plan, wrote one up, and quickly realized how useless that was going to be. Bottom line, I didn’t want to risk $150,000 on this project, and I didn’t even know how I’d get that money anyhow.

So, for a few months the project went on hold, until I found out about an interesting website called Elance. On Elance you could put up a project description and people would bid on the project from all around the world.

That sounded awesome, and I’d heard of people having success on Elance. So I put up my project and got about 20 bids. Most of them seemed pretty weird, broken English, some sounded like they were cut and paste responses. But almost everyone was bidding closer to the $8,000 range. Which simultaneously made me super happy, and suspicious. Especially because I was thinking, how could someone charge $150,000 and another only $8,000?

Eventually through talking with some bidders on Elance, I settled on a small company of a few people in Ukraine who agreed to develop the software for what I thought was a reasonable price.

These guys wanted to develop it as a downloadable desktop software. And thinking back on it…

I don’t think that was the best idea.

I didn’t know, but at the time phone apps were about to start exploding, and I was taking a big step back into the past with a desktop download that didn’t work on a phone. But I digress…

It was really tough to make the software, because while these guys could code the software, they needed very specific plans on the design.

If they were construction workers, and I was the architect, I still needed to create a very specific blueprint for them to follow. That wasn’t easy.

That included showing them what the user interface should look and behave like. The color scheme, the logo, all the graphics. Little icons, buttons, displays. Everything.

And that’s not all, I needed to get a database of foods, how many calories they had per ounce, gram, or approximate size (like “one medium banana”).

I also spent long nights trying to figure out an algorithm for reverse engineering how to make your chosen foods for the day hit your calorie, protein, carbohydrate and fat goals. I am not a math whiz so that took a ton of trial and error.

I also thought that it would help people even more if I wrote a book about nutrition and weight loss. So I got to work writing a book. For some reason I thought it would be pretty easy write.

But boy was I wrong.

I wanted to explain how to lose weight while eating your favorite foods, and came up with a system called “Wing It Weight Loss”. It wasn’t a huge book, but it ended up being just about 100 pages.

While the software was being created, and while I was writing the book, and creating technical documents for the software team, I was also getting a website and marketing plan built.

I hired a website designer to build out a custom website. Working with the website designer wasn’t easy, but it was super simple compared to the real work.

Because once I got my fancy looking website I realized it didn’t look fancy at all with no content on the screen. A web designer does not create content for you, just the overall look, feel, and infrastructure. And that looks extremely empty, and is totally useless without content written. The website needed words, and lots of them. Helpful content, something that told visitors what the website was about, what they could get from visiting, and how they can get it.

Creating a cohesive content strategy is extremely difficult. Because a large percent of your content needs to be geared towards telling what the value of the website is. Your content shouldn’t just be all over the place.

Basically, you need to define your marketing message and hammer that home. It is not easy to define the value of your product, and communicate that clearly, and effectively to your audience. Especially an audience who has never heard of you before. And especially in a highly skeptical market like weight loss, nutrition, or fitness in general.

I got to work on that and quickly realized I was in over my head. I knew I could do a decent job, but with all the time and money I had invested, I didn’t want to risk it. I knew that if you are super close to your own project, that can also skew your ability to see your product like a customer, and it can be best to hire an outside person to help you generate some marketing materials and ideas. Plus I was already overwhelmed. Did I mention I was also working a 9-5 job at the time?

So I hired a copywriter to create a sales page for the OK-Cal product. If you’re not familiar with the term “copywriter” it might sound like a legal term, like you are copywriting a book, or a piece of intellectual property. But in marketing, a “copywriter” is someone who writes “copy” and “copy” is basically slang for “sales in print.”

Essentially a copywriter is someone who writes sales material for products or services. They come up with a compelling angle around your product then tell the story, describe the benefits and features, and explain the offer.

That process is much more difficult than it sounds to get it right. If you get copywriting wrong, it can make a great product look bad and therefore get no sales. But if done right, it can be the thing that makes your business profitable.

I knew this, and also knew it can literally take hundreds of hours if you are not experienced. And even the most experienced copywriters can easily take months writing an effective sales message. Why? Because most of the work is done in researching the market and the product, and discovering what the market really wants, how to speak with them, what your product does differently than all the others, and how to position that to stand out in an obvious and compelling way.

And they need to do it in an interesting way that gets people’s emotions going as well. And you have to do all of this while being totally truthful about the product or service.

It’s a daunting task.

Some of the best copywriters will charge $50,000 or more for one letter, and they will usually want a percent of the total sales of your product as well. And truthfully, these people are usually worth the money.

But I didn’t have that money, and I didn’t have the time to write my own. So I went to a copywriting coach, who had students. Those students took on projects for a discount and charged about $1,500 for a letter. I decided that was my best option and I let them write my sales letter.

In the meantime, OK-Cal was finally finished, the book was done, and I was happy with the results. It wasn’t perfect, I knew it, but what product is? It worked well enough to get people the results they wanted, I felt confident in that, so it was close to time to launch this product.

Now I needed to get all the back end payment processing and product delivery in place. So I researched and hooked all that up.

Now I needed traffic.

I already burned through a bunch of cash developing this product and the supporting website, and sales materials. So I didn’t feel like I had a ton left for paid ads. Especially before I saw if it was really working or not.

So I decided to go the “free” traffic generation route. I signed up on a bunch of forums, and started posting there, with a link to my website in the bottom of my posts. And I also wrote articles to put on article directories, and other people’s blogs.

Honestly, the forum posting strategy worked, but I ended up feeling like a fraud, I didn’t like the feeling that I was posting just to get people to come back to my website. I probably shouldn’t have felt that way, but it felt forced, and not authentic, and it made me feel uncomfortable.

The article posting strategy also worked. And happily, I started to get sales. That was pretty cool! I would just sit around and another sale would come into my account without me directly doing anything. I was totally living the dream.

The sales were slowly trickling in, not anything life changing. But it inspired me enough to play with paid ads on Google. I learned all I could about Google AdWords and created some ads. Set my budget and let them run.

Shortly after, I realized that I was burning through cash with very little to show for it. If I kept this up I’d be bankrupt, and fast. So I stopped the ads and researched more about what I needed to do to make them work.

Eventually I decided to be more targeted in my ads, show to a smaller audience, and also give away a free gift in exchange for their email address. Then I would follow up with them with free and helpful information that also reminded them I have a product for sale.

That worked much better, and I was starting to get the hang of it. But it was around that time that a rash of fake blogs popped up that were all selling some magical “Acai Berry” diet.

The Acai Berry diet ads were a scam, and Google was unable to stop them. So Google eventually shut down all ads related to weight loss in their system. That meant I could no longer advertise for my product the way I wanted to.

But before everyone’s ads got shut down I did build up a decent sized email list of just over 1,000 people. My sales started going up exponentially. Nothing life changing but I had a decent amount of customers by that time.

As customers started using OK-Cal and reading the book, they became excited. And hopeful.

And this is what I didn’t anticipate…

They pinned those hopes on *me*.

I started to get emails that would pour out their heart and souls to me, exposing their struggles, their emotional battles, and their hopes and dreams for the future. They would ask “What should I do? Can you help me? ”

And I kind of freaked out.

OK… I really freaked out.

I didn’t sign up for this. I created a book and a piece of software specifically so I could solve people’s problems without ever talking to them in person, or over email. I didn’t want to interact with people, I wanted a set-it-and-forget-it passive-income model.

Instead I had people emailing me desperate for help. Some of these people seemed very emotional, and broken, and I felt really bad for them. But here I was, a 26 year old kid, burnt out from launching this product, not really thinking I’d need to interact with people. And truthfully I didn’t think I had what it took to really help them. And now I felt like I was not only NOT helping them, but I was letting them down.

I stopped responding to emails. But I still read them.

And it just sent me into a spiral of questioning myself, questioning if I should even be doing this. Questioning this product.

I thought that if the product actually worked, then people shouldn’t be asking questions, they shouldn’t be having problems, it should just do its thing and people should get results.

I felt like a fraud, I felt insecure with my product, I felt like I needed to go run and hide.

What I *now* realize is that no matter how good your product is, people will often want more. And that is exactly why many people offer coaching services, and one-on-one consultations. They offer seminars, and other things to help people expand their knowledge base. I didn’t understand that.

These people probably would have benefited from coaching, and that was a perfect opportunity to offer it to them. But… I was confused, insecure, and burnt out.

I got so freaked out that I pulled the product. I took it off the market. I stopped promoting it.

Man… that was so dumb. Now that I’m writing this out, I realize even more how dumb that was. But I did it. I pulled the product. It was gone. And I was defeated.

Classical self-sabotage. Scared of success.

I let myself-defeat sink in for a few months, and eventually put the product back up, but I made it free. And I didn’t promote it anymore. Just left it for the graveyard of failed products on the internet.

I put up an email capture in front of the product so if people wanted it they would end up on my email list, so at least I could contact them later if I ever wanted to. But… without promotion, hardly anyone came to the site anymore.  And truthfully, that’s what I wanted.

I also felt better somehow having it be free, because that meant that I didn’t need to respond to anyone’s pleas for help. It somehow absolved me of guilt and let me hide from responsibility.

All this self-doubt ended up translating to other areas of my life, I started questioning my entire approach to nutrition and started looking elsewhere.

That search caused me to go down many dysfunctional nutritional paths. Low carb, high fat, gluten-free, sugar-free, and more.

It was a long detour in my nutritional history, but now I’m glad I did it, because I found out ten times more about nutrition than I even did at the time I created OK-Cal.

What’s really strange though, is that the ideas in the book, and in OK-Cal I think are still very nutritionally sound, and I still agree with almost everything I said back then. I just have a much better understanding of why, and I also understand more details that can make an even better impact on health.

I also started studying voraciously about marketing and sales. I don’t know if I would have kept studying if OK-Cal were more of a success. Maybe I would have, but somehow the process of creating OK-Cal showed me the big picture of marketing and sales and how all the pieces have fit together.

I’ve been able to leverage this failure into a learning opportunity and have a few more actually successful online business since. Although I have had many more failures along the way.

One thing that I have finally come to terms with though, is this: OK-Cal failed because of my own insecurities. Not because of the product.

I’m starting to think more and more that success and failure is largely determined by your mindset, your emotional health, and being able to face the hidden vampires that are eating parts of your soul. Maybe the only way to vanquish those vampires is to uncover them, look them in the eye, and expose them to the light so they can dissolve into dust. And set you free.

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