Someone broke in the other night. Middle of the night. Mysteriously, I didn’t fumble getting my Hi-Power out of the gunsafe.

The silhouette in the hall advanced on me. I said, “Don’t move,” and aimed. He took a step, still 15 feet away. I fired a shot into the wall to the right of his head. He froze.

I said, “I will kill you.”

He said, “Oh, I believe you,” but he started walking toward me again.

You may feel as cheated as a viewer of the ’85 season of “Dallas” to learn that it was just a dream. It was just a dream.

Even so. I wouldn’t kill him. Strange man in house. Dog gone or gone quiet. Baby sleeping 20 feet away, I hope. Knowing, whether this is a dream or not, you’d better kill this man if you care for your family and your own life.

Couldn’t do it.

Three times had the chance and motivation to kill someone here in Kashia. Twice had the desire.

Couldn’t.

Wouldn’t.

Couldn’t. Wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Wouldn’t I like to know which it really has been.

In the Fall of 1986, I think, I was in the Candyman in Santa Fe or maybe it was some shop in ’Burque. Anyway, a fellow noticed whatever teen affectation of Zeppelin I had managed to incorporate into my dress and asked me if I knew much about Robert Plant songs.

“Yes I do,” I said.

“The lyric is, ’She’s so professional.' I can’t find the song or album anywhere.”

“I know every word Robert Plant ever wrote,” I said, “and he never wrote or sang that.”

The man was crestfallen. He’d only heard it once perhaps but he was in love with the song. He had been so sure it was Robert Plant. But my surety trumped his. He could tell. He knew that I knew every word Robert wrote. And he knew he’d never find the song now that he didn’t even know who wrote it.

An hour later, driving back to Taos, I realized it was a line from Easily Lead, off Robert’s most recent release, “Shaken ’N’ Stirred.” The only song, off a difficult album, which I never found a taste for but knew the lyrics, in the remaining year or two before the Age of the Track Skip Button, nonetheless.

I wake up at night sometimes. Wrong. No business being wrong about it. No way to apologize to that man to tell him how I suffered these 16 years of being wrong. Wrong. I can’t take it anymore.

So I post this. This plea. In the hope that perhaps he will find this page and write to me. So I can grovel. So I can apologize for my tragic hubris. Tell him that I’ve been in pain whenever the exchange comes to mind. That I was wrong.

And maybe most importantly to tell him what I should have said to him that Autumn day, “How could you possibly like that song? It’s the worst piece of crap Plant ever put to tape.”

I couldn’t verify the quote but someone is quoting Noam Chomsky as saying, “Violence is to dictatorship as propaganda is to democracy.” It sounds enough like him that I don’t feel we need to dig up the radio program, whatnot, it came from. It sounds exactly like his type of reasoning. More of the brilliance that is MIT and modern philosophy.

Only the biggest asshole in the world could possibly attempt to equate dragging you out of your bed at 3am to beat, starve, and electrocute you for months culminated by shooting you in the face, with telling you that you aren’t happy if you don’t have an SUV and a color TV.

Fuck!

[Ed: a fact finding reader verified the gist but reports the real quote is worded differently: “Propaganda is to democracy what violence is to totalitarianism.”]

North Korea vs US. In games of chicken the psycho wins. It’s that simple. Whoever is crazier will win or, best case, both get hurt badly.

Why 9/11? William such-and-such Clinton, in the hopes of a Peace prize so his miserable tenure might amount to something in the history books (Cleveland who?), tries to break up a bar fight between Israel and Palestine. But they really wanted to fight. America gets a big fat shiner for getting between them.

A kid who used to thrash me at chess can’t, as an adult, seem to count to 255 and the world is paying for it this week.

I should probably seek legal counsel over the recent million dollar flap that I shouldn’t talk about but I told them not to do it and they insisted on doing it and now they’re getting sued. Listen to me. That’s my advice. I’m wrong now and then but you’re wrong every damn day.

There are 18 registered sex offenders in my zip code.

1. Do you feel bad when you disobey God? Why or why not?

2. The Bible says, “If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.” (Leviticus 20:13) Do you know anyone who is gay? Do you think they are detestable? Do you think they should die?

3. The New Testament says, “also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet. … Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death… (Romans 2:27-32) Do you still think gays are worthy of death? Would you forgive them? Should Jesus?

4. If Jesus was really a man, why didn’t he carry the burden of original sin?

5. Deuteronomy 22:28-29: “If a man find a damsel that is a virgin, which is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found; then the man that lay with her shall give unto the damsel’s father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife; because he hath humbled her, he may not put her away all his days.” For the girls: Do you feel humbled after being raped? For the guys: Do you think marriage is too severe a punishment for rape?

6. When the Bible suggests, “You must kill those who worship another god,” (Exodus 22:20), do you have more sympathy for Islamic extremists and their tactics?

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…”