A somewhat expensive Christmas present I bought for my best friend 2 years ago still sits in the garage.

A close friend of mine called wanting support and advice while telling me about having recently cheated on a spouse.

Another close friend of mine wrote to say he missed me as I him and didn’t compare the situation to anything painful as he has in the past.

I got an exquisite handwritten letter from France from a French girl I shamed into learning to type but never taught anything else.

I mapped my F keys with my .emacs file lately. I watched another episode of “Cowboy Bebop” I’ve already seen 10 times. I played “Syphon Filter…” I worked on a video I may never send anywhere. I walked on the beach and was very clever about knowing which birds were which. I ordered a new knife online. I saw a movie. I carefully avoided thinking about anything hurtful. I spent the better part of the evening doing stupid grammar tricks like:

I even bemoaned the fact that this is the closest I’ve come to keeping a journal in 5 years; that I haven’t written a letter in exactly as long.

I wanted to write something here called “Happy New Year.” The significance of 2002. Fuck you.

To get a true appreciation for just how many and how complicated your muscles are, it takes seeing someone skinned alive.

It’s worth it though.

It’s one of those nights where I don’t mind a bit. I don’t mind a thing.

I made a mistake. And in the face of the quarter million, plus, plus, plus, plus, hey! plus, dollars I’ve saved the demi-grateful corporation I work for, I don’t mind telling you: I’m sorry about the mistake. I don’t think they’d take back my shoe, but I’m sorry all the same. For 15 minutes of inconvenience to many employees, I am humbled, contrite and embarrassed.

In the face of it all, though, I don’t mind telling you, I might’ve made a mistake but at least I’m not fat and I have a really pretty wife and one or two best friends who won’t turn over a missed phone call. I’ve actually got enough going to throw that fucking shoe back in their know-nothing faces. But I wouldn’t, because I really am sorry.

That’s pretty good, don’t you think?

I’ve always known the cost of lies. It’s been 17 years since the first time my emotions were dragged through Hell’s sewer pipes by a woman’s lies. I’ve had time to think it through. It only took the first year, it’s so simple.

A single lie can invalidate everything good that came out of a period in your life. One lie means everything else might have been lies too. Everything.

But that’s nothing. 17 years and I’ve only just realized tonight, 10 minutes ago. Giving up a few happy years of memories is doable. Done. The trouble with lies is they kill your ability to be sincere, earnest, open.

The trouble with that is what it then takes to make yourself feel or be felt sincere for even a second. All the rest I figured out the first year.

Oh, yeah, and fuck the Japanese Pilots who tried to participate in the ceremonies in Hawaii for Pearl Harbor Day.

Maybe I do have some sincerity left in me.

“Where were you when you heard on September 11^th?”

That’s what people will ask. They won’t include the year. Not in our lifetimes. I wrote something about Kennedy getting popped, some years ago already. Where I was when. Not even in utero. Barely an itch in pants. Never to care one way but the other.

On September 11^th, on the West Coast, I was stepping out of the shower and my significant other said.

I replied, “No it didn’t.” I called her a liar to her face. That’s how sure I was it didn’t happen. This is the United States of America.

I went downstairs and got to see it on teevee over and over. I guess it did happen. I only thought it was impossible because it’s unreasonable that anyone or group so completely backwards could ever have the resources to do it. But petroleum makes those rich who would else never own more than they could rob from the next camp of slave and camel thieves. Viva le dieu. The same god of Christ, the god of Revelations 2:23, “I will kill her children…”

I wanted to join the CIA to kill. Their résumé submissions were up two-thirds though and I hate being a copy cat. I wanted to move to Israel to kill Palestinians. I know how. I wear leather and eat meat, it wouldn’t be hard. Or, better, by Biblical example, Palestinian children. Nip it in the bud, as they say.

I wrote an essay, a year before I applauded the dying of the Kennedys, about the murder of children never having any justification. I tried to hold onto that. Tried, I’m still.

I have friends who are upset about the killing of Afghanis. Those innocent Afghanis. The ones who, though never having attacked New York City, made sure women were uneducated property, the unfaithful received a public bullet in the back of the head, and the locals who didn’t subscribe were poisoned-raped-fatherless-sonless.

I have friends who believe in live and let live. These same friends said, “Whoah! What’s that about?” when I celebrated the death of a US President and damned the government cops for killing kids in Waco. Friends never short on emotion, never long on history, nor IQ.

I remember having friends, but I seem to get angry.

“Sleep is for pussies,” is a remarkably strange thing to say, don’t you agree? It’s either nonsensical: Do they really sleep more than one would expect? Or unduly critical: Why are you suggesting the female sexual organ isn’t alert and ready for action 24x7?

Because of this I can’t believe I used to to say it so much. I was young then and I worked a graveyard shift at the University of New Mexico. Saying it was a good way to make sure I had company for my shift. Chris or James would want to go to bed at 3am instead of working till 6 and I would say with a hostile tone, “Sleep is for pussies.” And I would get their company. Chris was my best friend in the dorms and James was a really nice guy.

I didn’t sleep much last night and can’t again tonight so you see why this all might occur to me right now.

I can’t really excuse my behavior on age. I know 19 year old boys say terrible things but it’s their responsibility! It was my responsibility and I failed everyone. I failed those women especially with my habitual use of that phrase. It doesn’t matter that I haven’t said it since.

I’m so tired tonight that I’m especially embarrassed. My emotions are haywire. I’m out of whiskey too so I just have to feel them. I read in a book today that men cry an average of 1.5 times a month. Women average 5 times. Probably all that harsh language directed up their skirts doesn’t help.

James would tell me not to feel bad. James was a Christian. I never saw him fight so I don’t know if he was a pussy.

Barnaby’s name is not Jones. It’s not something I can repeat because, perhaps finally, the Law is there. And though I hate Barnaby I don’t hate him enough to let the cops find him. I do hate him enough to call him Barnaby Jones because I know how much he hates that. It’s easy to hate when someone makes stupid remarks about your name.

I hate Barnaby because I want to tell him about the skinny twat from back east that told me to get my story straight. I want to tell him about all the phony accents in the world not changing the fact that the limey tart is only kept on because the company wants to retain her husband and if they fire her, he might quit. I want to tell him about the chunky zit mottled girl in Seattle’s Best Coffee that said to me, “You don’t look like an Ashley,” when I got my coffee from her. I didn’t say, “You don’t look like a cunt. See how wrong we both were.”

I want to tell him that. I want to tell him that I was able to show restraint. I want to tell him that and perhaps get drunk and get into a fight with him so I won’t have to be restrained. I know he can take a punch or a kick or a quart of gin while I refuse to let him out of a small mountain resort swimming pool.

But I can’t tell him. Not because he’s dead, which is an interesting idea, but because he refuses to adopt a reliable ISP and I have no way to email him right now so we can laugh about the heftier cunt from back east who some years ago remarked to everyone who would listen that we were bisexual because neither of us would fuck her.