nothing to speak of

"I had no pain, nothing to speak of, and then 'bam, I had a mouth cancer diagnosis'," he says.

The sight of actual human bodies gathered way up there only drew more attention to the otherwise uniform emptiness of the apartment façades — no laundry over the banisters, no plants, no weird window treatments, no tiny sparkle of television sets filtering through curtains, nothing to speak of whatever lives are bustling about next to the giant Nordstrom with the big ground-floor bathroom where I empty my DivaCup after fingering the 30%-off titles at Barnes & Noble.

“Horror. There’s nothing to speak of, especially in the center,” 76-year-old Lyubov Chudnyk said of Lyman, the town she has lived in for 42 years.

“Now, our generation, what have we done? What do we have? We have nothing to speak of,” he said.

And of course, we’re talking about a single, fully-exposed screen that you’ll be folding in half, with nothing to speak of on the other side of the phone.