Life is not one bit fair. I wish you wouldn’t disagree so quickly. I can prove it.

Apple stems and girls named Wendy. That’s practically an axiom.

Will used to intimidate me when we were kids. Not on account of any menacing behavior, mind you. He was just so smart, and so good looking, and so good at everything. His brother John was even better at everything. So with John I skipped the intimidation part and went to hating him. Now he’s flying or instructing in YF-22s or something b/c he went Top Gun from his pilot class and got to pick his assignment. Prick! How could he embarrass us all that way?

Will could juggle, throw knives, ride a 10 foot tall unicycle backwards with one foot, DM, build bombs and cannons, fix motorcycles, manufacture morning stars, and ski as well as I could. He used to beat my ass at chess all the time too.

I would’ve tried to hate him but he taught me to ride a unicycle and throw knives and he’d juggle and do inverted aerial ski maneuvers with me. What could I do?

Will’s mom ran the best Anglo restaurant in Taos. Cort’s dad cooked some award winning chile there as head chef, back in the day, I believe. Will got free food there. That was when New Mexico was the only place in the US you could get Blue Sky sodas. Got a restaurant meal everyday and a Blue Sky with it. How unfair is that? My old man is a doctor so I didn’t get free meals at a nice restaurant. I needed meals! I never needed a doctor once as a kid. I carried the same goddamn sack lunch for like 8 years. Lipton Instant Cream of Chicken soup and a sandwich.

It gets worse. By the time Will was in college he’d racked up something like $100,000 in medical bills from various sports related injuries. You can see how happy we both would’ve been to switch situations.

The last time we played chess I beat him. It wasn’t even remotely the last opportunity we had to play. I just refused to ever play him again.

I think that it’s appropriate “we” talk about what it takes to be an “asshole” online.

When writing, working, or “speaking” to your audience online, it’s important to “always” remember that you have the “power” and the right to “express” yourself.

And another thing. Mexican is a nationality, not a race. I wish you’d fucking get that “straight.”

At 14 we were acting out some pretty horrible stuff in RPGs. It was okay if you were playing Chaotic Evil; but that got old and I think there was a strong gravitational pull toward Lawful Neutral after all. Most of our best characters ended up there while most of the CE ones never got much past 5^th level before they were boring, stuck, or dead.

One of the most memorable time wasters was throwing gold coins to peasants and enjoying the spectacle as they tore each other to pieces fighting for them. Man, what fun! What a great way to experience something dangerous and awful that could never happen in real life.

Today in Saint Petersburg, Florida some crazy bastard threw $10,000 to the peasants at a mall. At least twelve got hurt tearing into each other and six went to the hospital.

If I’d only known that being rich could have such great perks I would’ve worked harder all these years.

Almost exactly five years ago I was writing apologies for Amazon.com 10-12 hours a day. Each week I was doing about 300 high quality ones for the real problems and up to 2,000 completely canned for those that were either PEBKAC or marketing related.

At that time it was the best job I could ever imagine having. Though the systems were spotty and some parts of it were a savage grind, the staff and atmosphere were fantastic; truly. It’s why the subject still comes up. I really miss those days and so does most everyone who was there then. Few of them are there anymore.

One man wrote a polite request to have book recommendation mail for his wife cease. I remember it as reading, “You can cancel the mail. My wife passed away on Tuesday.”

She died on Tuesday. I read somewhere that that’s the day the most people die. I don’t know if it’s true but it should be. Tuesdays are just depressing. You know the ones I mean. When it’s windy and all.

I looked up her account to see about discontinuing her book recommendations. She had only ever bought one book from Amazon.com. It was a Hemlock Society publication; a suicide manual. She bought a book to help her kill herself, comfortably, and she, presumably, did so on Tuesday. We sent her recommendation mail on that Wednesday. Since she’d only purchased the one book, it was the basis for our software to suggest further reading.

That her husband wrote calmly and politely is a testament to human dignity in the face of the some tacky fucking bullshit.

The guy who runs the software group at Amazon responsible for repeatedly sending gay porn to naïve wives of the closeted and pregnancy book recommendations to women who had their miscarriages and moved on to not being pregnant a year or two earlier, well, he’s highly regarded there for being a contributor to Amazon.com’s success. His wife was a pushy, unpleasant, dimwit though, so I always sort of had my doubts.

I’ve got another one of those obscene points to make. Turned off the brain or you would’ve noticed already. Accept whatever you hear or you would be considering it without being told.

Last year, today, I told you to let it go. I wasn’t explicit enough. I’ll be your perspective you myopic bastard.

April 19^th, 1995, with a year of planning, little money, and less help, Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people—men, women, and a daycare center of children—in misguided response to the deaths of 25 children and 50 adults at Waco, TX at the hands of the incompetent and brutish FBI and ATF on the same day in 1993. McVeigh was wrong to do it and he paid with his life. The government agencies were wrong to do what they did; none of them personally paid anything worth mentioning. You already know what they ended up making the capital of OK pay.

In 2001, on this same day, 19 useless wastes of human tissue, mostly Saudis—with lots of help, years of planning, and the cash resources of one of the richest families in the world—killed right around 3,000 people in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, DC.

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?