I changed jobs at ******.*** not so long ago. Now I’m doing straight design and almost no programming. Doing design again after all these years seemed like a dream come true. I am an ad designer. I design advertisements. But that is way too generous. I don’t design much. I execute. I do what I’m told, how, when, and why.

I do exercise quite a bit of my own professional style where allowed though. This is almost exclusively when it comes to kerning. There has rarely been better kerning seen on the web! A dream come true — that’s for sure!

So, yesterday I found the dreaded email. The one that was inevitable from the moment I unpacked my new desk. I was asked to design… I don’t know if I can even say it in public. There’s no proof right now that I did it. Why commit it to Google’s elephantine caches?

I have to get it off my chest though. It was a request for an X10 advertisement. That X10. The Anti-Christ of the Internet. The horror that spawned a million-billion pop-up-your-unders. The one that Ruined It All.

I should have quit on the spot. Instead I went to their pathetic website for a long look at what they were after. Then I carefully evaluated the relative content of my soul, estimated I had enough to spare, and I did it. I made them another ad.

It’s not a great story, I admit. I wanted to write something else. I wanted to write about the worst thing in the world aside from X10. The thing worse than X10 is someone who takes comfort in the loss of another’s dreams. It can only be because it justifies one’s own meanly buried dead. Beware that comfort. You see I don’t want to quit to write my first novel. I want to quit to write my fourth. I don’t want to quit to take painting lessons. I want to quit to get back to where I left off. I don’t want to quit to write poems. I want to quit to write another 1,000 poems. I don’t want to quit to write a screenplay. I want to quit to finish my next 2 and finish a set of 30 teleplays. I don’t want to quit to learn guitar. I want to quit to write another 300 songs and add trumpet to the instruments I can play. I want to write another 50 short stories. I want to design another 40 fonts. I want to write letters to my friends all around the world. I want to identify a new species of spider. I want to add another 1,000 terms to my dictionary so I can publish it. I want to get back into real fighting shape and maybe learn a new martial art. I want to fill another 3 filing cabinets with notes and journals. And I want to be able to do it all the way I used to do — in the space of a few months — not in the acrid years it’s taking via these dot-com issued coffee-spoonfuls of free time awash in vaudevillian office politik.

It doesn’t make us brothers that you think I’m losing my dreams like you did. It just makes me angry and you’ll have to be the judge of what it makes you.

A 13 year-old shot herself in the head with a 9mm pistol yesterday in front of her friends after giving her favored possessions to them in the school parking lot.

A girl I was very close with at about that age (and maybe kept me from giving away my jumbo maroon peery, steel bone pin, and Zeppelin on vinyl) told me in dream last night: “I would [remember] but how do you contain the wound?”

The song on the MP3 player is “In the Light.” Which I sang, when we were 15 on a school bus, to a certain girl who cooked me Adobo and who cheated on her husband recently and told me about it to ease something.

In Korea after nearly a year of teaching English and many months of close calls with Tim it finally got ugly. The foreign country work experience is fantastic for learning about people quickly b/c it so closely emulates a life raft. You’ll think I’m wrong again, and you’ll regret it in a couple years, but the only way to truly know someone is to see them in an emergency. That’s the classical naked portrait.

I’m not talking about Europe as a foreign country [sic, sick, sieg!]. No European has ever done anything that I was unable to understand. Europeans and their bastard step-children, the Canadians, love to think they are unlike United Statesians. Many love self-delusion. Who am I to wake anyone up?

Many times my Korean friends, employers and co-workers did things which I still can’t understand. Bizarrely delivered hard-core racism, taking things personally that have nothing whatsoever to do with the person in question, lying about things neither worth lying about nor possible to lie about in any permanent way, naïveté in full blown 40 year-olds to the Nth. Now that’s the foreign sea I’m talking about that threw all us North Americans together in a little satellite city of Seoul, ROK on a life raft called the Kuk Je Language Institute.

I never took the time to find out what exactly made him Tim. He was a native Californian. That’s usually a pretty bad start. I think he was also an only child. Another hand on the forehead of sidereal motion. He lived with his mother till he was well into his 30s. He probably only went to Korea b/c he couldn’t get work in the US and perhaps b/c of having been burned on catalog orders as a teen he wanted to collect a shiny new mail order bride in person to make sure the picture and the pieces-count were exactly as advertised.

Tim is a social retard. I don’t say, “was.” It’s unfathomable that he will ever not be. Conversations with him could be good and even enjoyable. They could be uncomfortable or pointless. Watching him speak with others tended to be uncomfortable.

One afternoon gathered around a sik-sa break for kim-bop, and probably duhk, we tangled. For some reason, he thought that making a joke at my expense in front of a crowd would work out for him. Unfortunately he couldn’t tell the difference b/t fun and a real barb. Or maybe he meant it as a barb, but he really is a nice guy so I have to assume it was an accident. But after 11 months on a life raft I wasn’t having it.

I replied — upped the ante considerably and made sure there was no room for reply other than to throw down, as the kids say. The English fluent portion of the room laughed and shifted from foot to foot uneasily. Tim was unable to throw down, while I was able and heading into Willing Country. The Koreans so wanted to stay out of Western business that I knew there would be the most cursory of police intervention afterwards and no consequences but bruised knuckles whatsoever.

Tim paused, looked down at the table, and reflected on his wounds for awhile. A few minutes later he asked me if I would step into the hall. At last!

In the hall he only wanted to talk. To set me straight. He insisted that I not speak to him that way, and so on. I told him that not only was he not going to tell me what to do ever again but he needed to not start things he wasn’t there to finish. He was shaking and fixing to cry but didn’t. I had the best adrenaline rush since the last time someone swung a 2x4 at my head (oh, that one’s for a book or after more time has passed).

During the next week Tim went to everyone at the school from the Korean manager to the newest Canadian teacher and asked in essence, “Do you like me or Ashley better? Do you have any problems with me?” Everyone said, “Uh, no.”

I didn’t know about this till later. No one told me though 10 of them could have. More life raft behavior.

Tim was a pretty good teacher. He worked hard and was conscientious. And his awareness of it was the root of his next play. He went to the Headmaster and said, “It’s Ashley or me. Fire him or I am quitting and going back to the US.”

The problem with the play was two-fold.

A) No one is comfortable giving honest feedback to someone they are uncomfortable with, obviously. Most teachers at the school had complained about Tim. No one was about to tell him that. No one was going to say, “I like Ashley pretty well, man. You actually creep me out sometimes.”

B) He was a good teacher and I was mean to him so he assumed that made him a better teacher than I am. Every teacher at the school was using curricula and lessons I wrote. When I left, the school bought it all for several hundred dollars. I was the most requested kids’ teacher b/c I was the closest to Korean, a hard-ass who loves kids. The kids loved me, and my classes learned faster than most of the others. I was teaching up to 52 hours of classes a week (and doing 10 more hours of lesson preparation) and Tim was doing 20-ish of classes so that he had time to be thorough and do a good job. I taught all the Korean public school teachers in a town of 100,000 by an invitation only appointment. I was invited back the next year b/c I was able to be thorough and do a good job on a ridiculously hectic schedule.

The short of that is, I was not only a better teacher, I was at least twice as valuable to the school as a revenue generator. Plus, I didn’t creep people out. I never insulted chopsticks or made fun of han-boks. I fit in.

So when Tim sat at the Headmaster’s desk and gave his ultimatum, the response was, “Well, if it’s Ashley or you that’s leaving, Tim… It’s you.”

True to his word. He was gone in two weeks. I respect that part. I wasn’t planning on ever telling this story as non-fiction.

I work at the most successful Internet retail company in the world now. Multi-billion dollar successful. I don’t know what it is about my situation that makes me still not want to type the name but I don’t want to. Maybe after Christmas, NASDAQ willing.

Anyway, there are a lot of Tims at my workplace and a lot more around the world. Like the Tim in this story, some of you are basically nice guys who just don’t understand that no one particularly likes you. You creep people out and they’re not about to tell you. They do talk about it when you’re not there. Just b/c your mother and your once-upon-a-time-girl said you were funny doesn’t make you so. And the guy in the office that you think is mean, or not as valuable as you are to the company, is busting his ass to make the place work while you’re coasting on some meager talent and the goodwill of the management.

I don’t know if you’re gonna be crying today, or fuming, or thinking what’s the big deal, or looking cross-eyed at that Sikh b/c you’re stupid and think he’s Islamic or maybe you just miss Indira Gandhi. I don’t know. I don’t know what I’ll be doing either. I do know a few things though.

The monetary estimates of the damage in NYC last September come in at about seven billion dollars, or much higher depending on who you believe. I think the low end is more likely. It’s still a pile of money that would make a nice mulch for the entire state of California. It’s $7,000,000,000 dollars in Arabic numerals. It looks much bigger that way, don’t you think?

As of this writing, 2,801 persons are certified dead plus another few hundred at the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania. More than 3,000 for the final body count but not much more.

Pretty bad. We watched human beings jumping out of windows 90 stories in the sky rather than burn to death or feel the floors go out from under them for a gut-sickening zero-gravity nightmare fall when the towers collapsed. Any of us that aren’t contemptible cried. We did foolish things like insisting on donating blood when the blood banks were already full. We all stopped hating New York and realized we had only been jealous all along. We were most all very, very nice to each other for a long time.

On September 11^th last year, 1,205 persons died from smoking. Another 300 or so from drinking. Another 128 in car wrecks and another 50 or so in gun deaths. It only adds up to about 1,500 but on September 12^th, it happened again. On September 13^th, it repeated. On September 14^th, another 1,500 people died. By the end of the year 150,000 or so gone. By the end of this year another half million more.

Enron and WorldCom were caught doing bad things this year. They were bad things to the tune of many, many billions of dollars. At least $10,000,000,000 and maybe more than $15,000,000,000. There were a few deaths involved; suicide here and there from lost pensions and careers.

The deaths and costs from the wars of the last 100 years pale the day. If you’re under 40 you probably don’t know much about WWII. If you’re under 80 you don’t know much about WWI. There were more before. There were some between. More are coming.

I’m not sure how to say what I mean. September 11^th, 2001 was bad. I don’t mean to lessen the deaths or the loss. I can’t. In the end though, all that happened was a lot of property damage which was much smaller than what our corporate leaders have done to us lately, and loss of life that is not as great as what we do to ourselves every other day all year, every year.

It was bad and worth crying over and worth killing over and worth most of the rest. As bad as it was, it was only a drop in the bucket against the strength and longevity of this nation.

Thierry Meyssan is a French author. Meyssan wrote a book. I don’t know what to say. I know I tried to not write anything about it b/c even bad publicity is publicity. Still it’s nine days till the anniversary and I need to write something now, not then. This should be sorted out before it interferes with any important reflection.

His book discusses theories that certain unknowable hyper-conservative parts of the US government shot a rocket into the Pentagon last year and also highjacked some planes which mostly ended up in New York the same day, as you may remember. In short, September 11^th was a US conspiracy.

Now I’m mostly curious. Why is this guy still alive?

If he’s right, the weight of the US government should have fallen on him before he even got the pile of merde to his publisher. Since the French government and cops were absolutely cooperative during the post-9/11 investigation, they obviously would not have stopped it or even got in the way.

So maybe he’s not right. Now I’m still curious. Why is this guy still alive? Answers must include: he doesn’t live in the tri-state area, his home address is not easy to find, and no one in North America is taking him too seriously.

The thing is, I’ve written essays praising the assassination of the Kennedys and damning the government cops that seem so prone to killing US citizens. If there were the smallest stitch of truth, the faintest whiff of coffee, to this conspiracy theory then I’d have it up and running. I wouldn’t even be trying to make money off it. This place is called Sedition·com for a reason.

Now I’m really curious — how directly can one call for another’s murder without being responsible? Held responsible, I mean. Hamlet had no idea what the question was b/c suicide is a question that answers itself. To be: you are. Not to be: doesn’t fucking matter to you anymore.

I know I can’t write, “Kill this French fuckwad!” Besides being artless, that would be too much. That’s close to the edge of complete responsibility. The only thing that might make it moreso would be adding my annual income and offering it in cashier’s check by return post to the sender of his head. What would the international air postage on his head be, I wonder?

I might allude to him being dangerous, so very dangerous that his existence threatens us all. That might be subtle enough. Problem with that angle of course is it’s not true so I can’t write it.

So, I’m stuck. I can’t use untrue twisted psychology to make the case for his erasure b/c I’d be trading against your trust of me. I’ve never lied to you. I can’t outright ask for murder. I’d get in trouble and worse still, I might get you in trouble. And I can’t afford the plane tickets, bribes, and time off from work it would take to make it happen in person. Stuck.

I couldn’t remember the cat’s name when I started to write this. Or the title of the book. I searched Google for “French fuckwad,” sure that it would bring him up. He didn’t come up. Maybe I am stuck, but at least now and ever after if you search for “French fuckwad” you will find “Mme Thierry Meyssan.” It’s not much but I’m fairly sure Sedition·com will last longer than this French fuckwad’s notoriety.

I called his sister a whore and we more or less stopped being friends that day. It hurt his feelings quite badly, I think. I miss him a lot sometimes. It was 10 years ago.

He tried to reconnect not so long ago but I’m hard to reconnect with and there was always the lurking question: is your sister a whore or was I just an asshole for saying it?

She was fucking all kinds of guys while she was dating, supposedly steady, our friend and sometimes drummer, Chuck the hockey player. Chuck was a drummer, which I think I mentioned. He was quite good at both. I have another story about him being a drummer and me being sad about not being in a band. Our current story only involves him being a nice guy who didn’t deserve his steady to be out fucking Luc Longley.

I guess that’s why the story will be suddenly interesting to sports fans. That rust-colored scarecrow is somewhat famous now. I wonder if I’ll get a letter from an NBA lawyer.

One night I met Luc and a friend of his; another college basketball player but not a very good one because I can’t remember his name and I’m sure you never heard it. It started with an R, though. Robinson, maybe.

I was a security aide on my campus, which we discussed before. One night I was called up to a girls’ dorm to evict a couple boys who had overstayed the curfew. It was Longley and his retard friend R-something-or-other.

I suppose I could get another one of those legal threat letters for calling the kid a retard. But I don’t think it’ll be on NBA stationery so it’s not too scary, and I’ll stand behind the retard label. Here’s why.

When I very politely asked him and Luc to leave, R-for-retard gets like he’s gonna get up and swing. All oral, like tall white boys get when they never got knocked down for their lunch money as kids.

Now, R’tardo was out for part of the season due to a knee injury. I knew this. I also knew that was exactly where I was gonna kick him if he stood up too quickly. Man! I thought. This kid is *never* gonna play ball again. How perfect is that? I was probably smiling about it. That calmed him down I guess. He got more cooperative when it looked like I was a little too interested in his lunch money.

To be fair, Luc was a perfect gentleman. Excepting when he fucked Chuck’s girlfriend who was Jeremy’s sister and also a redhead. That really wasn’t so cool.

All in all, it was much cooler than that whore constantly encouraging my girlfriend to cheat on and dump me.

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.