That is my new reason for being. Angry. Being angry. I’m so mad, I can’t compose grammatical sentences.

2STF/1/4: is Apple Computer’s way of telling me that I’m fucked, burnt, that this is over, and I’m in the way. You see how mad I am? I’m plagiarizing!

You haven’t heard any news here of local nature hikes, reasons not to write about your politics while you own firearms and wish to renew your carry permit, or even anything fun about celebrities or trilobites — all because of 2STF/1/4:. All because of that buggy 10.2.8 update bringing 2STF/1/4: into my life.

When you come across it and Google brings you here looking for help at least you’ll know someone shared your pain. The local computer shop charged me $103 to tell me most of the programming work and email from the previous four months was gone along with the hard drive it lived upon. That was nice of them, don’t you agree?

“A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” is one one of my favorite stories. If you haven’t read it, you should. Besides “The Light of the World” and “The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macobmer,” it’s the best he wrote.

Please, seriously, I’m begging, read the stories and not any of their online summaries. I just read one on Britannica.com and I can’t believe anyone could be paid to be such a chronic retard. What’s really confusing is how anyone can say he loved the stories or thought they were important while so clearly misunderstanding them.

We were watching the sunset water and a couple hundred starlings flitting about in front of the water in front of the place we used to live in downtown Seattle. Beautiful evening. Nice birds, hundreds of them in rolling waves.

A robust, older gentleman struck up a conversation with us. He watched the lightening sky often. I imagine most every night. He told us when and how the birds would leave. When the last light was just about to go. Joked with the Midwestern couple nearby about the lack of boat horns back home.

Verity was curious about his hat. So he let me wear it for her. He told her many nice prognostications and about how he came to get the hat while in Australia.

He was going back to New York in the Fall to be on the Today Show because he’d been in Dallas during his news days covering the Kennedy assassination and it’s been 40 years. Once he said it, it was obvious he’d been a newsman in the day. His voice was beautiful, even, and reassuring.

It was the most delightful conversation I’ve had out and about in years till that rotten miserable son-of-a-bitch security guy came over and asked him what was in his bottle.

Greetings shareholders.

Next week marks the fifth anniversary of Sedition·com. The front desk phone has been ringing off the hook. All the major periodicals want quotes about our success in these neo-antediluvian days.

Milestones in the trailing 12 months:

• 1,000,000th page view.
• 300,000th visitor.
• No one on staff got drawn down on, arrested, or had to visit the free clinic.
• Record amount of nearly grammatical hate mail from Christians and French Canadians.

These kinds of statistics are only meaningful when explained fully, though. This nation in love with numbers but completely unwilling to dig into them and see what they might mean.

Of those million page views, many, maybe even a simple majority, are not from human visitors but web robots and search engine crawlers. So I can only say Sedition·com has been read 1,000,000 times if I’m a liar or a moron. You start to see the marketing value of being a moron.

Being honest makes you look worse on the surface. The clean living revenge is that anyone who lives on the surface will never be able to achieve much, excepting in Hollywood, politics, education, the American workplace, the arts, and journalism. Oh.

Searches

Let’s dive into a sampling of top searches, with links to where they brought visitors, for Sedition·com. In brackets below is the result rank, taken now, of each query for the search engine the visitor used to get here.

average IQ · People are taking my advice too late, I fear. And they come looking for a simple answer to a simple question which is not on that page. This one neither. [#37 out of 528,000 results on Google™]

test tube babies · In the spirit of factual accounting I will be a bit more direct today. If nature is telling you not to have a child of your own, there is probably a reason. If you would rather have your own biological child even though she or he has a much higher than normal chance of health problems, you are a bad parent, ready risk your child’s health and quality of life for your own vanity. Shame. The world is full of babies that need parents already. I feel bad being the one to tell all the test-tube grown children out there that they have bad parents but better they find out from a friend. [#10 out of 119,000 results on Google™]

Bambi Francisco · Surfers of the financial pages have seen her rather sexy 67 pixel headshot. They want to see more or read more of her financial analysis. They find neither here. [#6 out of 74,800 results on Google™]

mother fucker · Ah, now we are getting somewhere! And here we see the kind of immortality a decently formatted webpage can bring. [#5 out of 173,000 results on Google™]

nymphomaniac · More surfers looking for pornography or insight into American culture. Again finding neither Ann Coulter naked nor a reasonable explanation of how it’s possible that the same man who made “Schindler’s List” also directed “Hook.” [#20 out of 113,000 results on Google™]

“Rape DVDS” · Now, we’re getting to the meat of the data. We’re learning about our fellow human beings. On any given day you can look at our referring searches page and see fairly naked racism, sexism, and other questing for general ugliness. Why does this site come so highly recommended for these things? Direct, unapologetic, and ironic writing. All qualities wasted for our largely transient viewership. [#1 on MSN search]

My Lai · So it’s not a total wash. This is encouraging. People are taking the time to learn something important. Unfortunately, most of them miss the point. [#20 out of 40,700 results on Google™]

stripper music · What? This is a top search? The world is crazy, that’s all that explains this. [#7 out of 210,000 results on Google™]

“who is john galt” · I knew we’d get to a point where things would get sunny! [#4 out of 7,630 results on Google™]

thierry meyssan · Well, backwash was inevitable. A couple Québecois wrote to correct my French in the title. Either there is no humor in Québec or the gag was too subtle for their post-continental sensibilities. [#9 out of 11,900 results on Google™]

suicide note · There are 5,990,000 pages found in a Google™ search for suicide. 5,040,000 for happiness. See how valuable statistics are! People end up at Sedition·com looking for help on a wide array of topics. Stiff neck was one of the most popular searches a few months ago. Once again, those looking for help or information find neither. [#18 out of 1,090,000 results on Google™]

Discussion

There is an interesting correlation in the general ugliness of search data with the points of origin of the searches.

A popular search theme with users in Egypt and the UAE is the moms fuck sons, including the variants, mother and son fucking and me and my brother like to fuck my young sister.

Not to say that North Americans and Aussies don’t search for these things too. But it isn’t all they search for. Besides, it’s fun to make sweeping statements about countries based on the actions of a few individuals or even just one. It’s how George II has come to raise foreign opinion of the US in just three short years. Oh, if we can only repeal the 22nd Amendment in time!

Research on zoophilia is quite important to Iranians currently and this time it’s not a Chelsea Clinton dig. Puerto Ricans have questions about the bible. Pakistanis seem concerned with monkey fuckers. Australians want to know the answer to the extremely important topic how much blood humans have. Bulgarians wish to know more about jew mother fucker whereas Latvians and Lithuans are content with vanilla mother fuckers.

Germans search for poo and homophobic a bit more than I wish they would. But one particular Deutschlander took it too far with sperm brutal sphincter. I’m glad I’ve never had to publicly argue the con for evil being hereditary.

Canadians ask a lot of questions; an excellent trait. They seem a bit overly concerned with American topics — like the lovely and wretched Ann Coulter — for a culture so completely set on having a border with an overlook.

The US searches are all over the map. If I had to pick one that was a bit too common for comfort, it would be Chelsea nude. You go through life thinking you have a fair grasp of reality and then…

There was one one recently. I guess we’ve become too entangled to avoid going all the way again. Perhaps it was real research for an important piece of writing or something. I hope it was. The query was: how to conduct a clothes hanger abortion. It wasn’t even the first time it’s turned up. The “how to” part…I’d like to say it was from one of the Iron Age countries we’ve been ribbing. Let’s just say it wasn’t.

Conclusion

What have we learned from all this information?

1. Visitors who use a search engine to get here never find anything they want or need.
2. Page views and visits from everyone but human beings have increased dramatically.
3. Sedition·com is less marketable than ever.
4. The world is a vile, desperate, and humorless place.
5. Sixteen half-assed punchlines don’t add up to one good one.

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.”