Roll call

• Red-tailed hawk
• Black-capped chickadee
• Winter wren
• Cedar waxwings
• Green heron
• Mallard

Episode 1.

• The three things your therapist and you agreed you were to work on in private.
• A gleam in your eye the Concerta® could not erase.
• Ambiguous marital status.
• His shoulder where you cut the photo in half.
• Your soul, the overripe color of an ’80s pop album.
• A painful effort to select photographs with an algebra of weight, tan, sobriety, and cleavage.
• Your irony, double negative, is pure defensive reverse-psychology.
• Four dear girl friends whom you have slated to become dangerous adversaries.
• The sacrificial lack of effort that has left you alone every morning since forgiving him wasn’t enough to make him stay another day.
• Scripted traumas based on true history you use as a catalyst for desire.
• “Interest in friendship” a plea to take it easy in the face of obvious and instant acquiescence to anything the most hardcore Eastern European pornography might recommend.
• Scars that were etched deep in bone long before the Accutane® could smooth the surface.
• Someone who’s eager to show off after healing from some reasonably priced elective surgery.
• A ride with no lines.
• An easy meal.

Christ is the unfathomable source that keeps every atom from literally exploding!!!

What!?! Jesus is electromagnetism? Why wasn’t I told sooner? I’ve worshiped EM since I was 10 but I was under the impression Science was a false idol.

The Great Snatch!!!

Now, see, this right here is where they need to take it. “The Rapture” is so 17th c. If you want kids to take an interest, call it “The Great Snatch.” Got my attention. Maybe even saved my soul. I was on the way to Suicide Girls but forgot all about it. No devil girls can tempt me now. Who wouldn’t want to be taken up in the great holy snatch?

Would you believe 144,000 Billy Grahams???

No? Would you believe 777 altar boys with air guns?

How about a rabbi with a bris knife?

My, my, my. There do seem to be a lot of C-cups and pursed lips headed for the Kingdom with skirts raised.

He’ll charm the whole world into worshipping him!!!

But He’ll turn out to be bad news for everybody!!!

And the punch-line sort of speaks for itself without a hint, I’m sure, of conscious irony on the part of the author, Mr Hal Lindsey.

For all the soon to be mothers trying to freeze moments in time and the copy clerks of the world you will seek out like fresh sap on prehistoric tree limbs I’d like to provide something gratis that I came by dearly.

The paper on which sonograms are typically “printed” is just like regular old-fashioned fax paper. It is heat sensitive, thermal paper, and will turn completely, thoroughly, irretrievably black if exposed to high temperatures.

Yesterday the AP reported: “Madonna Says Daughter Asked if She Was Gay.”

Madge’s 9 year-old girl informed mom that there had been some talk. Madge was apparently confused by the question and wanted to know why in the world people were saying she was gay.

It seems that some irresponsible, unscrupulous gossip-mongers in an attempt to smear the good name of the devoutly religious children’s book author have been alleging that kissing Britney Spears at the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards was tantamount to coming out.

Well, it’s not and I have no idea how anyone could possibly get a mixed message about Madonna’s sexual orientation.

It’s important that something be clarified. Somehow this is repeatedly, relentlessly, occluded. Perhaps by the blind inertia of ignorance and bureaucracy but as a close friend of mine—who’s about to be relegated to the role of Hollywood shill—once said–

While I’ll admit that anyone can make a mistake once, to go on making the same lethal errors century after century seems to me nothing short of deliberate. V

The federal government of the United States of America not only had the power to stop the September 11^th, 2001 attacks, they had all the information necessary to do so. The FBI was tracking several of the key terrorists and knew where they were and let them go. The CIA knew for more than a decade that Osama Bin Laden’s circle was planning to use commercial airliners as weapons. Ten dollar locks on cockpit doors could have prevented the whole thing if they’d bothered to suggest it to the airlines. Conscientious flight schools had even reported incidents of terrorists trying to fledge with them to the government cops.

All the information was there. All the power necessary to stop it was there; at many different levels. It was merely bureaucratic incompetence and American over-confidence in the status quo that allowed the day to unfold.

No new powers were necessary. It could have been stopped as is. No wire taps, secret arrests, hidden records, or beat downs would have given the cops enough because they had plenty already. More would have been superfluous. Is.

89 Senators—cowardly shit balls, but I repeat myself—voted to reenact a slightly weaker version of the heinous Patriot Act, presumably a great comfort to all the patriots out there.

I’m gonna go out on a limb here. With a couple dozen new sub agencies, a crazy-ass reporting structure devoid of a clear chain of command, and a diluvian amount of new “intelligence,” in the form of your email and telephone calls, to sift through for meaningful information… The red tape has grown in on itself like pneumonia on HIV. I think the chances of a successful terrorist attack are about 10 times higher today than they were in August of 2001.

I think you’re all about 10 times less safe today.

The great thing is it’ll take 20 years to prove me right or wrong because with just two foreign terrorist attacks in the US in 230 years, ten times more terrorism would mean about one attack every decade with civilian casualties of around 100 dead a year. Jesus, God help us. They’re mowing us down! They’re killing almost a third as many Americans as skiing! Please someone protect us!!!

Go team.

Roll call

• Bushtits
• Great blue heron
• Anna’s hummingbird
• Northern red-shafted flicker
• Red-bellied sapsucker
• Hermit thrush
• Varied thrush
• Band-tailed pigeon

For any aspiring—or even evapotranspiring—avifan out there with a digital SLR, eager to take on the world of birds I can offer one key piece of advice to stellar—not Steller, ho-ho-ho—photography–

Don’t take your pictures through a filthy kitchen window.

Back in the day when we were doing majenta in print in ’Burque we had a core readership of about 100. We always sold every issue of printings of 250 or more. Sacha wanted to persuade me that it should be free. We priced the first issue at 25¢ even though it cost more than that to produce just in paper costs. So, the quarter wasn’t about making money, it was about forcing a subconscious realization that this was a thing of value. A thing to be wanted. Not a thing to be handed on the street; discarded, at best picked up again to scribble a phone number.

As small as it was we had some minor macro-amphibian micro-environment stardom. We had two unsolicited out of state reviews and one from the local press; almost entirely positive. The late sometimes great R.P. Dickey called the local one a “love letter.”

Barnaby got the hot coffee-house skirts that I solicited for poetry.

Todd and Orion made me feel famous and there were words and beers shared that any of the old bastards like Hemingway and Bukowski would have found well-worn.

Neil, on more than one occasion, was introduced to strangers or friends of friends to a response of, “Oh, my God! You’re the guy!” He offended and impressed people by mere reputation. Colored me green.

Even I, though. In Taos after a year’s hiatus and right before the final issue I ran into Christian Mayer and his belle and upon introduction she said, “Oh, no way. You’re the one who made those?!” She was a crossword fanatic and had actually completed the ridiculously twisted, jocular, and incoherent crossword puzzles I wrote for the ’zine.

Today, this lovely website—plaited in whatever crappy gamma and anti-aliasing the bulk-sale PC you use at work provides—allows me to reach, depending on what parts of the site you slice and whether or not it’s a school vacation, between 500 and 9,000 readers daily.

Well over 2 million page views in the trailing 12 months with 1.3 million of them being definitely human and not web robots. That’s not a lot compared to say IMDb.com, where I used to work, which gets more than that on the very worst day of the year but then again I only have about 1,700 pages on Sedition proper and they have just a bit over 10 million, so going on ratio, I’m actually kicking their asses 2:1.

Now, with an annual readership 500 times bigger than the entire lifespan of An Elektrum Press’s print history I’m still not satisfied. Yet I continue to be unwilling to do what it would take to be successful.

The personal and group websites that are wildly successful—250,000+ views per day—almost all suck or are, at best, interesting about 1/4 of the time and really good 3 times a year. They’re pandering, breezy, shallow nonsense like Daily Kos, soap operas with the memorable plot arcs long since vanished like Luke and Laura Dooce, or one-upsmanship cluster-fucks like the website formerly known as Slashdot.

Though there are clinkers on Sedition·com, taken as a corpus, it’s better than any of that other content. So I say. My credentials against the obvious bias. Tennyson and Nickelback suck. Yeats and Clutch are boss.

So why will I never be popular?

Let’s consult the dictionary: eclectic, spastic, inconsistent, esoteric, combative, infrequent, discontiguous, blue, and irreligious. Add creeping sarcasm into a Gunning-Fog which gambols from 4 to 20 and you’ve got a recipe for disaster in search of a market. A site without a target audience, just targets.

I have offended everyone at some point. If you think I haven’t offended you, you either haven’t read enough or you’re in the one percentile union of about six normally disjunct sets and you are generous with your doubt benefits.

This isn’t the kind of stuff that one blithely forwards to forty friends. Any reader who stays for more than one paragraph would never do that anyway.

Yeah, before you chime in that my critically acclaimed stability might qualify me for special publicity stunts, I am aware there are shortcuts to fame but I ask you: who is Sirhan Sirhan? No? Mark David Chapman? No? Andrew Kehoe?

You see, that kind of fame doesn’t stick and I don’t even want the fame. I want $50 a day, US. That’s just $18K/year and it’s not much but it’s enough to pay 60% of my bills and mortgage. If I had 60% more time I could get around to whittling down that fabled 1% I haven’t managed to alienate.

Where’s that confounded punchline?

Oh, my God.

I just lost my job because I blogged about it. But I got a book deal because I’m so good at imagining things. Things like other people’s ideas but with extra boobs and blood! Bonnie Hammer approved!

Here’re some cute baby porcupines. Hedgehogs? Whatever. They’re cyoooot! Just look at their little red noses!!!

Did you know that the browser you’re using right now has 15 new security problems!? I sure didn’t. Good thing I found out and warned you.

What’s in the news today? It looks like those nasty Republicans running the government are being evil again. Oh, boy, George. Oh, I made a pun in the midst of a staggering political insight!

Speaking of insta-has-beens, I had so much chubby-girl sex with a Carrie Underwood lookalike in the back of a Camero this weekend that I think I’ll have to type the words “cock,” “pussy,” and “how to be a porn star on a hand-held budget.” Can’t touch this!

You know what they say. You can’t be too blunt.

I thought they meant you can’t be too blunt. Can’t be too blunt?

Initiative! I take out my +3 Mace of Shattering Illusion™ and swing away like I actually found Signs to be enjoyable.

Oh, all right. Glass houses and all. The above is redundant and less well put than an excerpt from my latest romance novel.

Me: You mean that to become popular I have to write something every day whether or not it’s good or has a point?

My Editor: Yes.

Me: You know I’ve already got more than 3,000 fucking pages of original content online right?

My Editor: Oh, dear. Right there is part of what’s holding you back. It’s the swearing. It alienates a certain demographic.

Me: Yeah, which demographic?

My Editor: Let’s see… gays and unmarried women over 32.

Me: How does misogyny and homophobia play?

My Editor: Let’s see… pretty well. Top sellers actually.

Me: Even to gays and unmarried women over 32?

My Editor: The numbers don’t lie.