There was this girl who lived in the same college dorm I did. It was Hokona. She was on the girls’ side, as you might have guessed.

The girls’ side was the origin of Hokona’s nickname, “Whore-corner.” I worked in all the dorms though and I can assure you that the Santa Clara girls were the ones that were keeping college STD stats solid for the state. Hokona girls were the ones worth blowing midterms for because you’d get to bomb your finals for them too.

This girl was raven haired. Maybe a year or two younger than I was. I think she was Chicana but she was one of those girls who wasn’t mestizo enough to tell for sure.

I might have known her name once. If I did it was from asking around. She was so pretty, I never quite managed to ask her; her name and many things. We talked once. Once was all I could manage. She was so pretty and my crush made me boylike and foolish. It was difficult to understand her when we did talk.

Her smile was arresting. Her beautiful hair was longish and often up but sometimes loose on the back edge of her wheelchair. Her wheelchair was completely automatic because she needed it to be. She had some crude motor control over her arms and neck. Just enough to spur the chair to action with the joystick and to raise her head and smile and look away to the side. Christ! Had that smile been shown upon the Devil he might well have reconciled with his cousins in a daze of optimism.

She had a crush on me too I think but I didn’t know what to do about it then. I wonder if she still can smile that way.

I have a theory. We don’t pay enough attention to the oldies. That’s my theory. As always, I am prepared to back it up; like a Webelos in an earth mover.

I hear a far away voice on the telephone line
tell me what you think will tear us apart
said how about 4,000 miles and 21 years
do you think that’s enough for a start?

I’m up to 15,000 and holding
passing time just minding the view
but this seatbelt is tight and exposing
putting pressure on my big love for you

my big love for you
my big love for you
my big, my big, my big

Ah, Percy, truer words have never been spoken.

One of the worst nights of my life was spent in Hong Kong.

Probably you have already formed an idea of what it must have been; been like. It is natural to hear personal details in your mind when someone else utters trite phrases about himself. Trite things have no weight, only connotations. “Worst night of my life,” carries that. Doesn’t carry real information.

I hadn’t a drink. I wasn’t sick. I wasn’t getting dumped nor was breaking up with anyone. I hadn’t lost money. I hadn’t lost a job. I didn’t get beat up.

If the worst night you ever spent was just puking or crying or even bleeding then you couldn’t understand. There’s little point in the details. It’s written down elsewhere, more or less anyway, for the day when there comes a point.

Nothing bad happened to me. It was just one of those times when something bad did happen and I was caught out as the only adult. Again.

Your regular?

Found two red-tailed hawk feathers in the yard. That’s just the kind of yard we have. Pat would really like that. She’d say something cool about it. She’d cock her head to the side and say something so cool and I’d pretend I didn’t think she was that cool but she’d know she was. I’d call her Diné to make fun of her but she’d know all I meant was the world was at her feet since her grandma’s teeth and all.

Two girls thought I was worth smiling at and quickly looking away from while still smiling. My wife on my arm and all. You heard me right. What? We didn’t cover the wife? Well, for goodness sakes! Let’s get right down to the price of eggs. …Who’s kidding whom? There isn’t that kind of money available now that the Caliphs and Maharajas are on a peacetime budget.

I guess when friends and family die there is a tug at your coat. The more and closer the stronger. That tug is not exactly unwelcome when you’ve been sidling up where there’s no balance to be had all those years. And those dreams.

I realized “Forty Six & 2.” I beat him to those words 8 years: “In My Shadow.” Either an amazing footnote or a useless boast. What else am I?

More realizations. They could have, should have, called the cops on me when I drew that knife on Trent. I’ll never know if I have murder in me because I always stop when the chance comes up. My last chance to be tried as a juvenile, slim though it was, lost to whatever latent love I had for what the coke hadn’t erased in him. And to Cort sanely talking him into leaving the room. We talked since on account of some meddling kids. He seems quite a person again. I hadn’t considered that then. Luckily, Liz and Co. considered it in my case while having difficulty looking up the number for the police. You’re not Generation X if you could dial “911” in high-school. Or maybe it was just more juvenile self-preservation. They couldn’t turn me in for violence because they risked being caught for the drugs. Silly teenagers!

I wanted to write more. To describe an apology to a French girl without admitting hate is ever wrong when it’s pointed at that which destroys. You told me many times hate is a bad thing and you were never more unhealthy or more stupid. Hate of injustice, hate of slavery, hate of ignorance, hate of the dust of a small town on your shoes. Even hate of the distance and the lack of words by carrier across purple mountain majesties, sargaço roses, and so on.

At least there is no evil in the world. I am painting again and I know some of you aren’t useless. Some of you might even eventually justify not being dead instead of Adam.

There is a headline that Reuters is running on a story right now that goes: “Vanity Fair Sees Chelsea Transformed to Sex Symbol.”

I don’t have any trouble believing this at all. Working for the bookstore with the largest selection in the world I learned first hand what a tremendous demand there is for zoophilia in America and abroad.

This is a picture from Christmas six months before Star Wars came out. My grandmother is the lady, obviously. The kids are me, my sister, and my cousins. The night I almost got my dad to hit me in the face was the night in ’86 I called her, “Old.” She wasn’t then; never was.

My grandfather on the other side is dying right now. We have more in common than cynicism and the persisting desire to call the denizens of Deutschland, “Jerries.”

One of my best friends from high school, Adam(b), is also dying of cancer this week. I know because my best friend of 13 years who I haven’t spoken to in a couple more told me. She didn’t miss the sweet chance to get a couple digs in either.

Adam is only 32, I think, and that’s all he’ll ever be. We haven’t talked in years and maybe we never would have again. We spent most days together a long time ago. We never once had a fight. He is that nice.

I’m not going home to see either one before they die. I didn’t go home when my grandmother was dying. I love them all.

I don’t want to jump in just because someone called, “Jump in!” But I did want to ask you if you ever used the bathroom at school in the six years you were in high school and junior high?

So, I’m asking.

Halle Berry, did you ever use the bathroom at school in the six years you were in high school and junior high?

I never did. I was an Anglo (what you’d call “white” I guess, though I never said it was okay to call me that) kid in Northern New Mexico before the great New-York-Hollywood land grab happened in Santa Fe and Taos. It’s funny that $1,000 a month rent is totally incompatible with $5.25/hr wages — forcing local kids, who didn’t have living grandparents to move in with, to move away. And as I wasn’t born that pretty and my mom was unable to front for me to move to Chicago to be a model, I was stuck there getting called, “Fucking honkey,” having knives drawn on me, being humiliated by the girlfriends of vatos I was terrified of, and getting surreptitiously punched when walking in a crowd.

I was too scared to use the fucking bathroom for 6 years because I didn’t want get caught alone in there by the gang of pachucos in my class and get beat or killed. One of the kids who gave me a good kidney punch in gym class is serving murder time at the second worst state pen in the country. Another one is dead because another kid he used to pick on shot him and his twin brother during a graduation party.

So I guess I was born lucky. I mean compared to you. It must be hard being held back the way you have been. Why, you’d probably be the President instead of just a millionaire moviestar by now if only everyone got treated equally. Crying fucking shame how backwards this country is and surely the Anglo is to blame. Lord knows the Hollywood-New-York fuckwads that drove me out of my hometown have hands as clean as Pilate.

I know you think you were a vessel of truth that night, but six years I didn’t get to piss between 8am and 4pm, Monday through Friday.

I want to tell you about something that happened yesterday. It actually happened well over 10 years ago, which I mention purely so that the sycophants fawning at the feet of the false idol Historical Accuracy can have a holiday in keeping the time lines straight. But it did happen yesterday.

Why we do certain things… That’s not fair. I have no idea why you do anything you do. I do know why she did what she did, and why she was the way she was, and I don’t think it was for show, though it was a good one.

Renate, Barnaby, and I were sitting in front of the Hokona dormitory yesterday afternoon on the University of New Mexico. Barnaby was playing with a stick. Not just any stick. This is what, in locale parlance, was called a chingao-equalizer. Barnaby and I called it an arnis stick. You’d call it a stick or a 7/8" oak dowel if you hadn’t been high for most of your shop classes.

Barnaby liked Renate first. So he got to ask her out first. Fair is fair. But she said no. I am a good friend but I’m not a good enough friend to not ask her out after that.

So that’s where we were.

After some daylight passed, Barnaby said to her, “I’ll give you $10 if you take this [indicating the stick] and go hit my roommate in the face. He’s asleep. The door’s unlocked”

She said, “Okay,” the same way she said everything — like she was auditioning for the part of Dominique Francon in the unauthorized 2021 remake of “The Fountainhead,” and knew she was the only girl alive who could play the part. Not just a million miles away, but a million gene sequences further.

He handed her the stick. I, being the kind of naturalist who refuses to interfere, didn’t try to stop him. She got up and walked toward his room and his sleeping roommate.

I shook my head at him. He never thought she would. He was only goading her. Trying to get fingernails in to pry back enough to see. Call her perpetual bluff.

She came back two minutes later. She sat down. She didn’t give the stick back. She didn’t ask for her $10.

Barnaby said, “Did you do it? You didn’t do it.”

She: “The door was locked.”

“Horseshit! I just left it unlocked.” And he got up and stormed off to his room to check.

He came back quickly and said, “It was locked… Here’s the keys.”

“No,” I said and didn’t let him give them to her.

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.