That’s one more kid, that’ll never go to school /
Never get to fall in love, never get to be cool Neil Young

These passages from Matthew are familiar to you.

5:17 Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill.

5:18 For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.

It should be enough just to print them. They are clear enough. Because it’s never clear enough for you, in particular, we continue.

Jesus said, just now, you heard him! that he was not born to a woman to change ANYTHING of the law or the prophets. Not a JOT. Not the smallest part. Not one word laid down by the prophets; not even a comma. Jesus came to change nothing set forth by the prophets and their laws.

Now please go read the Pentateuch; the first five books of the bible. If you are not following all the advice therein, you are disobeying Jesus. If you are not therefore practicing Jewish law, you are disobeying Jesus’ direct instructions. If you are not sacrificing sheep to your LORD, you cannot go to heaven. Jesus said so.

If you have a tattoo, you cannot go to heaven. If you are unclean, you may not get to heaven. If you were not circumcised on your eighth day, you have made GOD angry. If your mother didn’t have a lamb, two turtles, or two young pigeons for sacrifice when you were born, YOUR MOTHER has angered the LORD and she is unclean like a creeping thing, and it’s not just local gossip.

If you know of someone who has committed adultery and you did not make sure that she or he was put to death, you will not go to heaven. GOD told MOSES, and JESUS said the PROPHETS are boss. Not one jot to be changed.

It goes on for a few hundred more pages like that. I believe love, and hatred for queers, comes up somewhere in it. Have you even read the fucking thing?

I remember you said what good Christians all the best Presidents have been. Here are some of them you might have missed:

The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion. George Washington, Treaty of Tripoli, 1796

Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law. Thomas Jefferson, February 10, 1814

The Bible is not my book and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long complicated statements of Christian dogma.” Abraham Lincoln

Bobby Fischer is probably not as well known to young Americans as the movie which used his name, “Searching for Bobby Fischer.” The movie was released in 1993, the year after he was driven from the US for violating economic sanctions by playing chess in Yugoslavia. He can’t come back for tax problems.

He’s little more than a movie title today because when Fischer emerged as the world’s, and perhaps history’s, best chess player many of us were more focused on keeping up with Sesame Street’s 4^th season than international chess.

Chess is more complicated than is obvious at first blush. This is the reason it’s taken nearly a century of computing science to build a machine or system that can play chess better than a chess master. If you figure the number of moves possible in a chess game, you come up with more moves than there are atoms in the universe.

To play this game well requires a special focus and intelligence. To be the world master at this game requires, perhaps, a singular intellect. The ability to foresee millions of moves, to classify and categorize groups and strategies so that those nearly infinite possible paths can be contained by the finite neurons in a human skull.

Bobby Fischer has, debateably, the greatest raw intellect a human has turned up with so far. So far to the edge that none of us could hope to match him, not with training and practice to the end of our lives, not with it from birth. You couldn’t beat him. Never.

Fischer gave an interview to a Philippine radio station on September 11^th. Text of the interview appears in the March 2002 issue of “Harper’s.” The excerpts below are his response to the World Trade Center falling and another 180+ Americans dying in the Pentagon.

I was happy… …Yes, I applaud the act… …Fuck the US. I wanna see the US wiped out.

Hmmm… Interesting opening move.

When I won the World Championship in 1972, the US had an image of, you know, a football country, a baseball country, but nobody thought of it as an intellectual country. I turned all that around single-handedly, right?

Right. Electricity, the telephone, the phonograph, moving pictures, electric light, democracy, a real free market, the civil rights movement, women’s suffrage, the perfection of the automobile and thousands of other inventions…

The splitting of the atom, satellite communications, astronomy, the identification of the double helix (shared with our European cousin), hundreds of medical advances…

I know you were busy playing chess at the time and might have missed it but the first interplanetary space craft was sent past Venus 10 years before your world championship and it was American.

We also visited the moon without your help, Bobby. The only persons in the world who didn’t see the US as the intellectual power of the world after the 1950s were you and the French.

Coincidentally, 1972 marked the public debut of the ARPAnet, Bobby. The proto-Internet, hecho en Estados Unidos de América.

…our whole foreign policy has been wrong for the last several hundred years…

No mean feat. We’ve only had a nation for two hundred.

American Indians who lived there for who knows how many tens of thousands of years. They kept the land crystal clean. It was a beautiful country when the white man came.

Who knows how many tens of thousands of years…? Anthropologists and archaeologists and anyone else who is able to read, I suppose. In case you can’t read, Bobby, maybe someone will read this aloud to you: the answer is, “1 or 2,” One or two “tens of thousands of years.”

Crystal clean? Anyone who knows Chaco Canyon or the Anasazi or the history of large mammals in North America knows that this is not true. Native Americans, being human beings, were exactly as destructive as their level of technology permitted. They managed to drive camels, horses, giant sloths and dozens of other large mammals to extinction quite well without gunpowder.

Incidentally, I know you haven’t seen it in 10 years but it’s still a beautiful country.

I’m hoping for a [scenario] where the [US] will be taken over by the military, to close down all the synagogues, arrest all the Jews, execute hundreds of thousands of Jewish ringleaders, and you know, apologize to the Arabs by killing off all the Jews over there in that bandit state, you know, Israel.

Whoah! Bobby, bubala! This is all so familiar....

You shun science. You love nationalist generalizations. You want to see a military regime replace a democratic republic. Your history contains exponential errors. You have no knowledge of anything ever published which is contrary to your opinion. You attach international significance to your performance in a game. And you have a paranoid fear of Jews, perhaps related to the likelihood you have Yiddish roots in your family.

Now I’ve got it! You’re white trash. How someone with your IQ crawled out of such a creepy-ass-bilge-puddle of the gene pool is beyond me.

How you ended up the way you are is no mystery. Intelligence and value as a human being have never had a direct relationship. Humans gravitate the lowest level their natural gifts allow. The exceptions prove the rule. Beautiful women tend to end up stupid for the same reason intelligent men end up assholes. You can get away with it.

Bobby, fuck you and the horse you opened with.

I miss Korea tonight so much. I know it’s just the CD that’s playing that was always playing as I was preparing lesson plans or was on the bus to Seoul or whatever.

No matter how much I hate you for not returning the wallet you found, I miss Korea. Maybe more for that.

A country where 8 of 10 individuals return a lost wallet… sure Singapore was 9 of 10 but they don’t celebrate Children’s Day like it was Christmas every year and they hang you for heroin even if you’re an American heroin dealer.

She said, “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”

Courage can be confused with a shortage of self-respect by those who so utterly lack the latter that the need to claim the former becomes genuine. And perhaps party conversation shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s willingness to commit moral seppuku, but courage cannot.

At least her grammar was good. You really shouldn’t overlook that.

I dreamed that a woman in armor sent two children in same to kill me with swords. I also had a sword. She had cast it trying to kill me.

I did not kill the children. And though their swordplay was better than mine, I did not die. I used my size and initiative to overpower them. I beat them with the flat of my sword till they capitulated.

Then three robbers tried to take my money and perhaps life. Surprisingly there was no loss of agility or strength and the 10 years since I’ve been much of a marital artist evaporated. I beat them easily, though one escaped. I dragged the conscious remaining one to the bathroom where I proceeded to torture him by holding his face in the water filled sink while pummelling his head and neck. I was careful to make sure he stayed awake for the water.

I had other dreams.

Years ago, visiting again lately. Climbing a tortuous mountain. Slipping. Maintaining. Realizing the dust and dirt crumbling beneath my hands isn’t dust or dirt exactly. Pulling desiccated arms and halves of skulls loose. It’s a pile of long dead humans I climb. Reaching the top. It’s too long lain. It disintegrates beneath my weight. Dropping into it.

Rivers. Monstrosities of all animals that have lived.

An eternal hunt of me where the family is supplying the assassins with tips and I have a box of 40 kinds of bullets, none of which fits the revolver I have.

At six. Beating a naked body. Black and white. Then fire, and screams the horses around the house don’t allow for anything but burning.

Oh, don’t get me Started!

Permanent night time repertoire. That’s what Tom called it.

Why tell you? I used to write 500-1,000 words a day on an off day. 10,000 to 15,000 on a better one.

I’ve heard a good writer sells out everyone they know eventually. I haven’t been a good writer for a long time.

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.