1. When Jesus says he will kill children in Revelation 2:23, whose children is he talking about?

2. Why did God kill all the non-Jewish first-born children in Egypt?

3. What do you think God’s reaction would have been if Abraham had refused to slaughter his son Isaac when God asked him to do so?

4. What kind of fruit did Eve damn mankind by eating? (Trick question! Hint: it wasn’t an apple.)

5. How many sons do you think Mary had (Acts 1:14, John 2:12)?

6. There are hundreds of jobs today that didn’t exist 2,000 years ago. Do you think Jesus would be a carpenter today? How would you rate the likelihood of the following alternatives: cabbie, janitor, programmer, plumber, sanitation engineer, telemarketer? What would it be like if Jesus worked in your office?

7. The New Testament glosses Jesus’ young adult years without any real description. Do you think Jesus ever had a girl-friend? Would you have liked to date Jesus? What kind of difficulties might arise from dating the son of God?

1. Do you truly deserve whatever educational credentials you hold (from a highschool diploma on up to degrees and certifications)?

2. Have you ever lied because someone else asked you to do so?

3. If you could pick one celebrity to erase from existence, so he or she was never even born, who would it be and why?

4. Has anyone ever threatened to kill you, fully meaning it? If so, did he or she attempt it? Elaborate.

I admit it. I’m evil. Or right. Whatever. I can never keep the distinction.

Test-tube babies

Not test-tube baby

My thesis is: One should never take an IQ test.

My supporting points are as follows.

1) They are culturally biased. After all, in some societies a diagonally bisected square doesn’t make two isosceles triangles but a diagram of the social dichotomy wherein the three unified sides of the upper-class hold down the empty ray of the under-privileged.

2) One never thinks that one will have a low or even average IQ. So if you find out that you have a low or average IQ, you will probably be disappointed and perhaps lose an edge of confidence that would otherwise serve you well. No matter how stupid you are, confidence is a good trait. Plenty of marginal minds have made excellent businessmen and world leaders and they couldn’t have if they’d know they had IQs of 92. Confidence, honesty, and a work ethic go farther than 200 IQ points any given weekday.

3) If you find out you have a high IQ, say 130 which some say is genius level, well mostly Mensa says that, others say 140, but their aim is a bit low, don’t you agree? One gets the distinct the impression the organization’s founders had a little trouble doing harmonic means without paper. Let’s call it 150 or better still, 160! Anyway, if you find out you have a high IQ, you are not any better off. Sure you’re smarter, but that doesn’t teach you anything, it just makes it easier to learn. When things come easily, one gets lazy, overconfident, smug, and superior. Which leads to fallibility, arrogance, stagnation, emotional regression, friendlessness, drinking, foul language, insomnia, trying to act clever when you have no material and no one to pick on, the use of pretentious abbreviations, &c.

It’s a no win situation. So, in conclusion, never take an IQ test and by no means ever admit to having done it if you already have.

My training class lasted one month. During which we were temp-to-hires. Presumably if we made the cut, we’d be permanent at-will employees.

How I was hired by a 7-foot goofy Swede, un-hired by a bald prick who didn’t like my cover-letter, and re-hired because a gay programmer knew a painter friend of mine is another story. This is a story about being supportive.

Amazon.com was growing frantically at the time. The Spring of 1998. Faster than any corporation in history, by internal accounting. Nowhere else in the world could you or will you likely ever find a customer service department with as many holders of PhDs and Masters degrees, Bachelors minimum, and, What have you done lately?

Just so we’re clear, and I can’t go into it yet, but that degree of excellence was then, 1998.

We each had 30 days to show merit or get back on the job hunter-gatherer trail.

I did my first computer program when I was 10. This might seem normal today but I’m not 25 and when I was 10 there was probably only one personal computer in the contiguous 25,000 square miles where I lived. So I figured I’d be the star pupil of the class. Not really. Third at best, I’d say. Summer, Melinda, Jesse, Robin all bested me plenty of times in class exercises.

After a couple weeks we got up to speed on Unix and the tools therein to serve Amazon’s hoard of customers we got desks and supervisors. Time to see how well we’d float.

The girl I was seated by, K, didn’t type well. Well, she didn’t type. I do 70wpm hung-over and 90wpm from prepared copy and that was a B+ for the class. K couldn’t type… I don’t even think 10wpm. The Unix wasn’t sinking in for her either. This was the first time she’d ever been around computers, let alone raw, system level terminal windows into computers.

She was upset that she wasn’t doing well.

I’ve been teaching since I was 15 and the first red-belt in the studio. So, I tried to help her with tips. It was all coming pretty easily so I spent the extra time giving her mnemonics or sensible reasons for counter-intuitive commands and procedures.

She had one or two kids and needed the money. Really needed the work.

I made other acquaintances on the floor. Seniority and self-propagated training through experience were super important so it was inevitable. I’m an inveterate question asker. I learned quickly that trainees were pretty much ushered in. They needed the help badly and 4 weeks wasn’t really enough to tell anyway if you’d be good at the job or not. I myself was worried about getting canned for reasons broached above in the stay-tuned-for-episode. So I was grateful to learn that I was probably in. That we pretty much all were.

K was worried that day. I was so eager to share my good mood and be supportive that I said, “Don’t worry. You’ll get hired. You have to be a real retard not to get hired.” She felt much better.

When the cut came down a week later, hers was the only head that rolled. We were at our desks right after she found out. Gathering her stuff to go, she turned to me with tears streaming down her face and reminded me of how supportive I’d been, “But you said…”

I think you need to know something a bit more about writers than you do now. Good writers sell out everyone they know eventually.

Screaming in the kitchen about who did what to whom, an iron pan goes out the patio window. Your writer-lover may appear to be in the moment, to really feel the epithets being roared, but in fact is thinking only of how delicious the scene will read. Subconsciously doing the calculus to know if antes can safely enough continue toward their limit. Being struck might cement the story with the credibility that only a police report and sticky red can.

A highschool semi-sweetheart of mine got a real book deal with a real book publisher. I found out about it after reading some of our more modern correspondence, as you know, got me wondering what the last 5 years had been to her.

It’s a book she’s worked doggedly on. Back when we were corresponding — and she thought me mad — she was after it in the way that you need to be. I can only respect that. You should buy the book when you can; she’s a terrific writer and it’s important material. It’s called Assembling My Father — A Daughter’s Detective Story. He killed himself when she was 5, I believe.

It’s been awhile since I’ve been in the moment and I’ve been terribly worried that I myself would go so far as to put a straw in my lovely hammerless S&W .357 so as to decorate the blank pages with anything at all just so they would stop saying I had nothing else left to record. Worried that I’d lost it.

I know now I haven’t because when I saw the extremely happy news that a friend had a book on Houghton Mifflin’s Autumn aught-four list, my first thought was of the subject matter life had laid at her feet. I thought aloud, “Some people have all the luck.”

I had dreams last night that I liked very much. Angels and Samurai—Seraphim and Ninja. “…How long has it been since we’ve eaten together? Had rice and mice…”

I’ve been watching more executions on teevee. Today it was the Chinese. I looked away, knowing full well what I was about to see, and then some part of me made me look. Was it pain or pleasure? Where does knowledge fall in that canyon? What drove me to need to see that row of people on their knees shot in the backs of the heads; bilging rivers of their lives out of their mouths as they fell? Of the two ways humans murder I’m not sure which I find more disturbing but this kind is more frightening. Because it is so casual that it could be lurking anywhere. A passionate murder is seen coming; usually even participated in. An execution like this is not seen coming. A border shifts somewhere and suddenly you are undesirable.

…Ah, I was supposed to be manufacturing something besides small talk. What is it I can say?

The desire for a girl without skin. The desire for an evil that is so natural it doesn’t seem it. To be submerged into a lacking. A cardinal lack of pain. With an automatic return ticket lest the drug be overpowering. Would you trade albatrosses? I think not. Even our secret pains make us special.

Some historians recently re-analyzed the battle of the Little Bighorn, usually known as Custer’s Last Stand. They decided to go about it from a forensic angle with a focus on ballistic analysis. This makes the most sense of any possible approach of course b/c the main evidence, even when it happened in 1872, is bullets and shells.

It’s long been painted as a brave and hard-fought battle. Only lost b/c of the overwhelming numbers of Sioux involved.

Back up: it’s the 1870s. The Civil War is just over. The Government is all but bankrupt. Lincoln’s dead, replaced by an impeachable puppet and a genocidal incompetent in turn. The California gold rush is not such a rush anymore. Manifest destiny as a term is already 30 years old. The children who grew up with it know it as truth. Debate is dead and buried. Imperialism without seas blocking is somehow more palatable, righteous.

The US government of the day made treaty after treaty with the Natives. They had to be continually remade b/c white America spent all its money killing each other over the economics of slavery and was growing westward where more gold kept turning up in the craptastic lands the Indians were relegated to starving in. No one batted an eyelash at giving the Black Hills to the Indians b/c they were so desolate and apparently worthless.

In 1874, one of those treaties was broken again by a survey party entering the Black Hills under George A. Custer. This violation into the Sioux lands would not have amounted to anything if the party hadn’t discovered gold lying around like spilled popcorn. But they did.

Now it was just a race to circumvent the treaty in question completely. It didn’t take long.

Ugly, brutal, illegal, immoral. Everything about it was wrong but the American people and their duly appointed representatives wanted it. It was patriotic, for the Fatherland.

In the Dakota hillside the ballistics show, quite clearly, that the battle was short, decisive, and one-sided. The Sioux were completely in charge from the jump. They out-generalled the General easily. They slaughtered the soldiers like dogs while said jaundiced canids ran about like decapitated barnery.

The shells of individual soldiers show they abandoned any discipline early in the battle and gathered together in a frantic ball on a hilltop, like so many terrified mackerel hiding their heads in each other’s asses, hoping nothing, just fighting to be the last to die. They were easily destroyed. Those who saw the end coming early ran from the hill and were caught in the nearby ravine and literally butchered.

The Sioux believe that enmity survives into the next life. To cripple their antagonists in the next world they would do a great deal of postmortem rearrangement to fallen soldiers. Decapitation, severed limbs, disembowelment, you know, Justice.

Custer had a “wife” among the Cheyenne and much contact with all the tribes. The legend about Custer goes that he had personally promised the tribes not to attack. It is probably apocryphal but they say when Custer fell at Little Bighorn his body was the one that was not butchered. The women however punctured his eardrums with a bone sewing awl. They hoped that this might help him to hear better in the next world so he would remember his promises.

When I heard how it really happened, that it wasn’t just a win for the Sioux and Cheyenne but a humbling, emasculating, fair-and-square military slaughter of US soldiers, I was ecstatic.

If I’d expressed this opinion at the time of the events, I might have been put to death or at very least fined 5 years pay and put in prison for a deuce, the standard fair for sedition of the day.

Soon after I changed jobs for the last time at the ’Zon my new manager walked up to my desk and the first thing out of his mouth, in a quiet self-deprecating tone, was, “I’m an asshole.”

Though unsure of the context, I replied as any good Samaritan would: “That’s not true.”

It was before I knew him well, and I had no business interfering with such an important epiphany.

I have lapsed into the sloppiest style of essay. Practiced by most everyone who writes for the New York Times and of course one Ms-scratching-all-the-way-down Coulter. I have neglected that all points, no matter how reasonable or obvious, have rebuttals and they must be addressed for one to be right as well as maintain the appearance of being in the right.

While firmly against genocide I must admit to a healthy emotional enjoyment for the mainstay of it: the macheté. I’d have to look up the figures to be sure but I think I’m within reason to say that the most common method of genocide after forced starvation and Zyklon B is the macheté. It makes sense when you think about it. All three methods are extremely cost effective. Guns, bombs, and even bullets aren’t cheap. Several million in Africa in the last 20 years alone were chopped down. Hell, there was a period of just a few weeks where 100,000 men, women, and children in Rwanda were hacked to pieces.

I just spent an hour in the rain clearing a half acre of creekside of invasive species. I did it with a macheté, mostly right handed but I’m quite good with the left too. Swinging the whole time, leaving the fallen blackberry and knotweed where it landed. Rarely have I so enjoyed physical labor. Wrists aching. Boots soaking from within and without. Brow steaming in mild spring weather. Feels fantastic.

A common theme in literature and film is that it is actually difficult to kill someone with one’s hands. As opposed to one’s fingers, the American method, with a joystick and a dizzying array of death-dealing buttons. I think it might be hard to kill someone who bravely, calmly, without anger looks you in the eyes while you raise your arm to swing your blade for the first of several necessary blows to the neck. But come on! That means murder is difficult once in 10,000 strokes. Within the predatory mammal nothing incites ire, and the urge to strike, more quickly than begging and frenzied scraping for escape.

Genocide must be the easiest thing in the world. I recommend finding a still, beautiful center of self-respect to at least make yourself a few degrees harder to chop down.

I used my drop slip yesterday. When my contractually obligated silence
expires in a few months I may have some stories to tell about
Amazon.com’s vaunted service.

Hope things are great now that you’re a dad, just like me. Here’s some money even though you and your wife each make more than I did at your age. I especially hope that the boundless dread and anger I gave you for your 11^th birthday is coming in handy now that you have a child in your arms! Bet you didn’t think it would all come back to you with such facility after 10 years of peace. :) It’s like a bicycle!

I have had the same job for exactly five years. That’s not true, strictly. I have been employed at the same company for five years where I have held 6 jobs and a coven’s dozen hats. I never had the same job in my life for more than a year and a half before this and I’ve never been fired from a job.

Five years ago a clean sheet of paper couldn’t stare me down and make me embarrassed that my name had to go on a thing before I was allowed to leave the fucking room.

From: such-and-such <so-and-so@monkeys-r-us.org>

Date: Fri May 23, 2003 18:30:48 US/Pacific

To: “Guy, That” <you-know-the-one@corporate-america.com>

Subject: Re: RE:

commie!?!?!? why i turned my own grandmother in to the mccarthy re-review committee just days ago for having a suspiciously toned cadillac and not supporting our troops with baked goods.

should see you at least once next week. maybe twice. three times a lady.

i half made up my mind last night to quit. but i think i’d like to see one more christmas at the ’zon and see what it might mean to me fiscally.

i miss being amusing more often. veri doesn’t get my Fractured Take™ on the hizbollah style of child rearing. she simply refuses to keep her ordnance ship-shape.

oh, dear. just when i decided to come back i start writing email that could get me canned again. or caned. singapore is very nice this time of year when the temperature and humidity stay in perfect tandem in the mid 90s. much like unscrupulous securities agents and the republican party. ouch!

i haven’t even had coffee for two days.