Last night I had a dream about Sophie, the girl who lived two houses down from me when we were kids.
In the dream, I was 8 years old again, and the doorbell rang. I was back at my old house, where my bedroom window was right next to where the front porch stood, so I could see who was at the door before anyone else.
I raised the blinds, and there she was: her jet-black hair pulled back, the dark eyes, the pointy nose and the delicate cheeks.
She asked me if I wanted to play and I said, "Yes!" and I ran outside with a basketball under my arm and we played one-on-one until our parents called us in for dinner.
Then I woke up.
*/*
Where are you now, Sophie? Did you get knocked up by some vato from the neighborhood? Did you get married, gain 50 lbs, and get a job as a nurse? Did you get addicted to crack or speed or heroin? Did you become a whore? Did you join a convent or accept Jesus Christ as your Savior?
Where are you?
What I wouldn't give to know where you are.
Sometimes I see women on the street, in magazines, in movies, as extras on television, in passing cars, and I think they are you.
Sometimes I go online, on sites like Friendster or My Space, and I look for you. Sometimes I Google your name.
Once, I found a name that could've been yours, in the phone book. I called and left a message. I never heard back, and when I called the number again a month later the line had been disconnected.
I wonder if you have ever thought of me once in all of the years since we last saw each other.
The last time I did set eyes on you, time had changed the both of us. I was 16, with long matted hair and a surly attitude. You had your hair piled high and you were wearing make-up and a tank top and shorts that showed off your body. I remember that I couldn't handle the fact that you were no longer a tomboy. I remember that you were becoming promiscuous, and that all the guys were after you.
Last I heard of you, my cousin Johnny told me that he saw you at Magic Mountain, in line for Viper. He said you were acting a fool.
I have this idealized image of you in my mind, but all I want is to see what became of you.
I don't care if it doesn't compare to the image that is burned into my consciousness. I just want to know if you still exist. Occasionally, I wonder if you ever existed at all, because your absence from my life has been so complete.
Maybe I imagined you all these years. Maybe I made you up.
No, it was real. Too real.
Sophie, wherever you are, hear my plea, absorb it into your soul... I am looking for you. I want to find you. I'm not afraid of what I'll find. I promise I won't be mad at you.
I promise.
You've been gone far too long. I don't want to pick up where we left off. I just want a chance to tell you what you meant to me.
That's all.
*/*
This is my major malfunction, people. I don't think I'll ever be happy until I resolve this. After years of sorting through the various traumas and neuroses of my life, it all boils down to finding her.
I know she's out of my life, but I have a feeling that, if I can make peace with this, then it will be easier to make peace with other issues that I have.
I could hire a P.I. or pay one of those People Finder sites, but I'm too lazy, and besides-- what if she changed her name? What if she doesn't want to be found? What if she just doesn't want to see me?
What if she's dead?
What if?
I wish I knew where to start. I know her family moved to Oregon, but she stayed on here. That means she has roots here. That means she has a reason to not leave L.A.
I'm going to try and find her by year's end.
Wish me luck.
Thursday, March 31, 2005
Wednesday, March 30, 2005
MIRRORS
In the plaza of the Galleria where my office is situated, everything is covered with a reflective surface. There are lots of glass doors, plenty of windows, and even some of the steelworks have shiny, embossed sheens where you can clearly make yourself out enough to fix your hair or adjust your shirt.
It is a world full of mirrors.
Today, I am using it as a metaphor for the narcissistic society that we live in. Even as I try not to gaze upon myself in the mirrors, I am still prone to it by virtue of wearing dark, reflective sunglasses.
I noticed today that I use the mirrors to look at other people. Yes, I do tend to look a little longer at myself when I catch a glimpse of me, but then I fix my attention on someone else in the mirror frame. It is my way of looking at people without looking at them directly.
If I see a hot girl (and with the 24-hour gym located next to the movie theater, there are more than a fair share of those), I can look at her through the mirrors without feeling like a dirty old man. However, once I am aware of my lechery, I look away.
And that is the big difference, I think, between my narcissism and the narcissism of others: I am acutely aware of my self-absorption. And it bothers me sometimes, to be so vain, to be so solipsistic.
Can I say the same for others?
*/*
Yesterday was Eve's birthday. She is now 28. She and I have been keeping our distance but we are on somewhat friendly terms. I called her before I went to work and left a message on her answering machine.
She didn't call me on my birthday, and as much as I wanted to get her back for that, I decided not to stoop so low.
I had plans with Elle and the band, and I had plans with Paulie at The Garage. But by the end of my work shift yesterday, I decided to revolt. I went home, straight from the office, without calling anyone, lest I get roped into stopping by the studio or The Garage against my will.
Sometimes I feel like I give and give of myself and get nothing in return. I am a bass player who is paying money out instead of getting money for his work. I am an aspiring animator who is working alongside people who don't want it as badly as I do.
That's the story of my life-- no one ever wants it as badly as I do. They all have things to fall back on, but all I have is the love of creating. And that is no consolation during moments like these, when I want to move on to the next level and everyone else cannot see the hurry.
I went home and called Elle, explaining my situation. She told me that it was okay because the session had been canceled anyway. So, in other words, if I'd kept my end of the bargain, I would've ended up going out to the studio for no reason. This only made me feel vindicated in my decision to flake out.
Paulie called me up, because even if there was nothing to do he still wants me to hang around. That's because he hates half of the people he has to deal with at The Garage, and he knows that I am not there to leech off of him or waste his time. But I had to explain to him that I wasn't feeling it, and he understood.
I converted a bunch of Kinks songs to CD, as well as some more 45s and a few 12" singles. Around a quarter to 9, I called Eve on her cel phone. I got the voice mail, but I didn't leave a message. I don't know why I called her a second time.
She called me back an hour later, drunk as hell and ranting. Her old-ass computer was about to die-- it kept telling her "FAILURE IS IMMINENT"... Then, she talked about how she had two auditions coming up that would pay her handsomely. Then, she went on about how she's getting old, and how hard work is, and all that. I barely got a word in edgewise.
She said, "I appreciate you calling me on my birthday, even if I had to call you back to hear from you." I said nothing. She had seen my number on her cel phone, and I had not left a message. She was driving home from going out with her co-workers and had not heard my answering machine message yet.
She kept on talking, making no sense. We talked about inconsequential fluff. Feeling like I was just there for her to vent on, I finally got the courage to ask her if she wanted to do anything with me for her birthday.
She said, "No, I'm trying to let this one pass. It's not important. My parents are dragging me out to do stuff, so I have to do that. But no, I don't want to do anything for my birthday."
This pissed me off. Why did it anger me? Because it's the main problem between us-- she thinks she is being humble and modest, but really she is punishing me for my narcissism... by being narcissistic herself.
You see, when she got mad at me in January for not giving her due credit on the animation, I had no idea that she was feeling that way, and she let it simmer and stew inside of her until she decided to not call me on my birthday. And in a way, this is the inverse of that moment-- she has no idea how angry she makes me by dismissing my wish to at least take her out for her birthday. It makes me want to get her back, by cutting off her N-supply, by doing something to make her feel as bad as she makes me feel...
We're both narcissists, trying to make the other bow down. We're not happy if we cannot use the other to mirror our precious self-images. Whether it is Eve telling me she'd rather not celebrate her birthday with me, or whether it is me telling her not to lend me $100 to pay my gas bill, neither of us can give up on our preconceived notions of who we are. And we end up hurting each other because of it.
I went to bed last night quite angry. The only consolation was the mix CD I'd made, of songs that I had on vinyl.
*/*
On a seemingly unrelated note:
No matter whether you think O.J. Simpson is guilty or not, everyone must admit that the late Johnnie Cochran was a hell of a lawyer. His closing statement at the end of that trial will go down in history and is probably being studied in law schools all over the country.
I liked Johnnie Cochran. He was a great lawyer. There was a time in my life when I wanted to be a lawyer, and for all of my love of arguing, I think I would've been pretty good at it. However, I knew it wasn't easy work, and so I decided to pass on it. But I always respect a good lawyer, even if the rest of the world feels ambivalent about their role in society.
I was just like you once-- I believed O.J. was guilty at first. Given the circumstances, it looked pretty cut-and-dried. O.J. ran from the law, had a history of abusing his ex, and looked like he was capable of double murder.
I always wondered why O.J. didn't plead guilty and use as his defense the "crime of passion" ploy. It would've reduced his sentence to involuntary manslaughter if his lawyers could prove he acted impulsively, and he would've done five to ten years tops. I felt that his plea of "Absolutely, positively, 100% not guilty" was kind of ballsy. He was straight-out denying any liability or guilt.
A couple of things changed my mind:
1. The glove didn't fit. That was the pivotal moment for me. I even tried to reason with some of my black friends, who were on O.J.'s side, that he could've held his hand in a certain way as to make it seem like the glove didn't fit, but ultimately I had to concede the point. The fact is, the prosecution was saying this was his glove, and it didn't fit on his hand. That is what is known as reasonable doubt.
2. Mark Fuhrman taking the fifth. All you non-L.A. motherfuckers don't even know how corrupt the LAPD is. You read about Rampart, you read about Rodney King, but you don't really know about it until you live here and deal with the jakes firsthand. They are a racist gang with badges, and they brainwash their own to keep the Code Of Silence intact. It was no surprise to hear Mark Fuhrman's voice on that tape, saying "nigger" this and "nigger" that. I hadn't heard that much use of the N-word since N.W.A.'s Efil4zaggin album first came out. And I remember the day of testimony when F. Lee Bailey asked Mark Fuhrman if he'd ever used the N-word. I knew it was a trap, and I was intrigued by the tactic. It was good lawyering, the kind of stuff the prosecution should've been doing.
Let's face it: if Chris Darden and Marcia Clark had been O.J.'s attorneys, he'd be in jail right now.
3. The closing statement. A spectacular example of courtoom rhetoric. Cochran pulled out all the stops: he used humor, subtle outrage, and appealed to the common sense of the jury. Isn't it funny how juries who hand out unfavorable verdicts are always accused of being "dumb"? It happened recently with the Robert Blake trial, where the D.A. (of all people) called the jury 'stupid'. This offended the jury, of course, because they are not privy to the spectacle and media circuses that everyone else is treated to, and they cannot be expected to make the same decisions as the Court Of Public Opinion.
Cochran blazed his name into the history books with the famous line, "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit". I actually stood up and applauded when that line came out of his mouth. It was stunning, masterful, brilliant. I compared him to Clarence Darrow, and all of my friends were amazed that I had been won over by his speech. They all looked at me and said, "Yeah, but O.J.'s still going to jail," and I said, "Don't count on it now."
A bit of trivia: Cochran was not O.J.'s first choice. The first lawyer Simpson consulted was Howard Weitzman, another high-profile L.A. attorney. Simpson didn't like what Weitzman had to say, so he sought out Robert Shapiro, who brought Cochran in along with Alan Dershowitz, F. Lee Bailey, Barry Scheck and Robert Kardashian-- the "Dream Team". After about a month, Cochran was running the show, and I think it's because Cochran understood the racial implications of the case. He knew that America wanted to lynch another nigger in the old-fashioned sense, but not with a rope-- this time they wanted it on camera. And Cochran, who has had experience with African-American clients being railroaded by The System, wasn't going to go down without a fight.
Yeah, say what you want about the ensuing civil trial and settlement, but I still spell Amerikkka with three K's. And that's the reason why people still smart over that verdict to this day: they wanted to see a nigger hang by his neck, and they didn't get their wish. This one had too much money and too much clout. And after years-- no, decades-- of African-Americans getting strung up to tree branches while their white assailants walked away scot-free, it's only karma that O.J. Simpson was acquitted.
No one wants to admit that. This country needs to take a good, long look at itself before it passes judgement on Simpson, who did what anyone else in his position would've done. Don't tell me that anyone else would've just turned themselves in-- that's a bunch of bullshit and you know it. Even if you consider yourself not racist and tolerant and all that, if you believe that O.J. was guilty then you were hoping that he would get his just desserts.
People are mad and say that O.J. got off because he had money. So? If he didn't have any money, he would've been awarded a Public Defender, and he would be in jail right now. Is that any better? Is that somehow more fair than the alternative? All I know is, O.J. is broke right now, but he is free, and in America, any black man will tell you it is better to be free and broke than rich and in jail.
What this trial taught me was that the maxim "innocent until proven guilty" is a wise one to live by. I didn't presume his innocence before the trial, and I can admit that now. Before the trial began, I just wanted to be on the winning side. Ironically, I ended up on the winning side anyway, by looking at the facts of the case.
Only time will tell if it was a just verdict. I have a feeling that the real story behind The Trial Of The Century, like the JFK assassination, will be a labrynthine maze of astonishing audacity and corruption, when the full details finally reach the surface. Don't sit there and act like you know the deal, because you don't. None of us do. I bet you even O.J. doesn't know. And fortunately for O.J., Cochran didn't seem to care either way-- he just wanted to do his job and get his client off the hook.
R.I.P. Johnnie Cochran, the man who got Geronimo Pratt off the hook for a crime he didn't commit, among other things. Like William Kuntsler, the man who defended the dudes who tried to blow up the WTC in the early 1990's, he felt that everyone deserves representation in this country, no matter what we feel the price for justice should be. Whether or not he was in it for the cash or the fame or the notoriety of the cases, Cochran was The Best at what he did, and you can't hate on him for that.
After all, it's what this country is supposed to be about: being The Best at what you do...
It is a world full of mirrors.
Today, I am using it as a metaphor for the narcissistic society that we live in. Even as I try not to gaze upon myself in the mirrors, I am still prone to it by virtue of wearing dark, reflective sunglasses.
I noticed today that I use the mirrors to look at other people. Yes, I do tend to look a little longer at myself when I catch a glimpse of me, but then I fix my attention on someone else in the mirror frame. It is my way of looking at people without looking at them directly.
If I see a hot girl (and with the 24-hour gym located next to the movie theater, there are more than a fair share of those), I can look at her through the mirrors without feeling like a dirty old man. However, once I am aware of my lechery, I look away.
And that is the big difference, I think, between my narcissism and the narcissism of others: I am acutely aware of my self-absorption. And it bothers me sometimes, to be so vain, to be so solipsistic.
Can I say the same for others?
*/*
Yesterday was Eve's birthday. She is now 28. She and I have been keeping our distance but we are on somewhat friendly terms. I called her before I went to work and left a message on her answering machine.
She didn't call me on my birthday, and as much as I wanted to get her back for that, I decided not to stoop so low.
I had plans with Elle and the band, and I had plans with Paulie at The Garage. But by the end of my work shift yesterday, I decided to revolt. I went home, straight from the office, without calling anyone, lest I get roped into stopping by the studio or The Garage against my will.
Sometimes I feel like I give and give of myself and get nothing in return. I am a bass player who is paying money out instead of getting money for his work. I am an aspiring animator who is working alongside people who don't want it as badly as I do.
That's the story of my life-- no one ever wants it as badly as I do. They all have things to fall back on, but all I have is the love of creating. And that is no consolation during moments like these, when I want to move on to the next level and everyone else cannot see the hurry.
I went home and called Elle, explaining my situation. She told me that it was okay because the session had been canceled anyway. So, in other words, if I'd kept my end of the bargain, I would've ended up going out to the studio for no reason. This only made me feel vindicated in my decision to flake out.
Paulie called me up, because even if there was nothing to do he still wants me to hang around. That's because he hates half of the people he has to deal with at The Garage, and he knows that I am not there to leech off of him or waste his time. But I had to explain to him that I wasn't feeling it, and he understood.
I converted a bunch of Kinks songs to CD, as well as some more 45s and a few 12" singles. Around a quarter to 9, I called Eve on her cel phone. I got the voice mail, but I didn't leave a message. I don't know why I called her a second time.
She called me back an hour later, drunk as hell and ranting. Her old-ass computer was about to die-- it kept telling her "FAILURE IS IMMINENT"... Then, she talked about how she had two auditions coming up that would pay her handsomely. Then, she went on about how she's getting old, and how hard work is, and all that. I barely got a word in edgewise.
She said, "I appreciate you calling me on my birthday, even if I had to call you back to hear from you." I said nothing. She had seen my number on her cel phone, and I had not left a message. She was driving home from going out with her co-workers and had not heard my answering machine message yet.
She kept on talking, making no sense. We talked about inconsequential fluff. Feeling like I was just there for her to vent on, I finally got the courage to ask her if she wanted to do anything with me for her birthday.
She said, "No, I'm trying to let this one pass. It's not important. My parents are dragging me out to do stuff, so I have to do that. But no, I don't want to do anything for my birthday."
This pissed me off. Why did it anger me? Because it's the main problem between us-- she thinks she is being humble and modest, but really she is punishing me for my narcissism... by being narcissistic herself.
You see, when she got mad at me in January for not giving her due credit on the animation, I had no idea that she was feeling that way, and she let it simmer and stew inside of her until she decided to not call me on my birthday. And in a way, this is the inverse of that moment-- she has no idea how angry she makes me by dismissing my wish to at least take her out for her birthday. It makes me want to get her back, by cutting off her N-supply, by doing something to make her feel as bad as she makes me feel...
We're both narcissists, trying to make the other bow down. We're not happy if we cannot use the other to mirror our precious self-images. Whether it is Eve telling me she'd rather not celebrate her birthday with me, or whether it is me telling her not to lend me $100 to pay my gas bill, neither of us can give up on our preconceived notions of who we are. And we end up hurting each other because of it.
I went to bed last night quite angry. The only consolation was the mix CD I'd made, of songs that I had on vinyl.
*/*
On a seemingly unrelated note:
No matter whether you think O.J. Simpson is guilty or not, everyone must admit that the late Johnnie Cochran was a hell of a lawyer. His closing statement at the end of that trial will go down in history and is probably being studied in law schools all over the country.
I liked Johnnie Cochran. He was a great lawyer. There was a time in my life when I wanted to be a lawyer, and for all of my love of arguing, I think I would've been pretty good at it. However, I knew it wasn't easy work, and so I decided to pass on it. But I always respect a good lawyer, even if the rest of the world feels ambivalent about their role in society.
I was just like you once-- I believed O.J. was guilty at first. Given the circumstances, it looked pretty cut-and-dried. O.J. ran from the law, had a history of abusing his ex, and looked like he was capable of double murder.
I always wondered why O.J. didn't plead guilty and use as his defense the "crime of passion" ploy. It would've reduced his sentence to involuntary manslaughter if his lawyers could prove he acted impulsively, and he would've done five to ten years tops. I felt that his plea of "Absolutely, positively, 100% not guilty" was kind of ballsy. He was straight-out denying any liability or guilt.
A couple of things changed my mind:
1. The glove didn't fit. That was the pivotal moment for me. I even tried to reason with some of my black friends, who were on O.J.'s side, that he could've held his hand in a certain way as to make it seem like the glove didn't fit, but ultimately I had to concede the point. The fact is, the prosecution was saying this was his glove, and it didn't fit on his hand. That is what is known as reasonable doubt.
2. Mark Fuhrman taking the fifth. All you non-L.A. motherfuckers don't even know how corrupt the LAPD is. You read about Rampart, you read about Rodney King, but you don't really know about it until you live here and deal with the jakes firsthand. They are a racist gang with badges, and they brainwash their own to keep the Code Of Silence intact. It was no surprise to hear Mark Fuhrman's voice on that tape, saying "nigger" this and "nigger" that. I hadn't heard that much use of the N-word since N.W.A.'s Efil4zaggin album first came out. And I remember the day of testimony when F. Lee Bailey asked Mark Fuhrman if he'd ever used the N-word. I knew it was a trap, and I was intrigued by the tactic. It was good lawyering, the kind of stuff the prosecution should've been doing.
Let's face it: if Chris Darden and Marcia Clark had been O.J.'s attorneys, he'd be in jail right now.
3. The closing statement. A spectacular example of courtoom rhetoric. Cochran pulled out all the stops: he used humor, subtle outrage, and appealed to the common sense of the jury. Isn't it funny how juries who hand out unfavorable verdicts are always accused of being "dumb"? It happened recently with the Robert Blake trial, where the D.A. (of all people) called the jury 'stupid'. This offended the jury, of course, because they are not privy to the spectacle and media circuses that everyone else is treated to, and they cannot be expected to make the same decisions as the Court Of Public Opinion.
Cochran blazed his name into the history books with the famous line, "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit". I actually stood up and applauded when that line came out of his mouth. It was stunning, masterful, brilliant. I compared him to Clarence Darrow, and all of my friends were amazed that I had been won over by his speech. They all looked at me and said, "Yeah, but O.J.'s still going to jail," and I said, "Don't count on it now."
A bit of trivia: Cochran was not O.J.'s first choice. The first lawyer Simpson consulted was Howard Weitzman, another high-profile L.A. attorney. Simpson didn't like what Weitzman had to say, so he sought out Robert Shapiro, who brought Cochran in along with Alan Dershowitz, F. Lee Bailey, Barry Scheck and Robert Kardashian-- the "Dream Team". After about a month, Cochran was running the show, and I think it's because Cochran understood the racial implications of the case. He knew that America wanted to lynch another nigger in the old-fashioned sense, but not with a rope-- this time they wanted it on camera. And Cochran, who has had experience with African-American clients being railroaded by The System, wasn't going to go down without a fight.
Yeah, say what you want about the ensuing civil trial and settlement, but I still spell Amerikkka with three K's. And that's the reason why people still smart over that verdict to this day: they wanted to see a nigger hang by his neck, and they didn't get their wish. This one had too much money and too much clout. And after years-- no, decades-- of African-Americans getting strung up to tree branches while their white assailants walked away scot-free, it's only karma that O.J. Simpson was acquitted.
No one wants to admit that. This country needs to take a good, long look at itself before it passes judgement on Simpson, who did what anyone else in his position would've done. Don't tell me that anyone else would've just turned themselves in-- that's a bunch of bullshit and you know it. Even if you consider yourself not racist and tolerant and all that, if you believe that O.J. was guilty then you were hoping that he would get his just desserts.
People are mad and say that O.J. got off because he had money. So? If he didn't have any money, he would've been awarded a Public Defender, and he would be in jail right now. Is that any better? Is that somehow more fair than the alternative? All I know is, O.J. is broke right now, but he is free, and in America, any black man will tell you it is better to be free and broke than rich and in jail.
What this trial taught me was that the maxim "innocent until proven guilty" is a wise one to live by. I didn't presume his innocence before the trial, and I can admit that now. Before the trial began, I just wanted to be on the winning side. Ironically, I ended up on the winning side anyway, by looking at the facts of the case.
Only time will tell if it was a just verdict. I have a feeling that the real story behind The Trial Of The Century, like the JFK assassination, will be a labrynthine maze of astonishing audacity and corruption, when the full details finally reach the surface. Don't sit there and act like you know the deal, because you don't. None of us do. I bet you even O.J. doesn't know. And fortunately for O.J., Cochran didn't seem to care either way-- he just wanted to do his job and get his client off the hook.
R.I.P. Johnnie Cochran, the man who got Geronimo Pratt off the hook for a crime he didn't commit, among other things. Like William Kuntsler, the man who defended the dudes who tried to blow up the WTC in the early 1990's, he felt that everyone deserves representation in this country, no matter what we feel the price for justice should be. Whether or not he was in it for the cash or the fame or the notoriety of the cases, Cochran was The Best at what he did, and you can't hate on him for that.
After all, it's what this country is supposed to be about: being The Best at what you do...
Tuesday, March 29, 2005
VINYL
I decided to start converting my LPs to my hard drive.
For the past decade I have neglected my vinyl records, because I had a shitty record player, the all-in-one type that came attached to a double-cassette player and a cheesy tuner. Those players suck. They sound like caca. They damage your records when you play them. Over the years, if I remembered to do so, I would buy a CD copy of any album I owned on vinyl, but I own a lot of records-- there isn't enough time to go out and re-stock my collection.
Last year, The Gypsy sold me a Technics turntable for 50 bones. Now this is a real turntable-- direct drive, automated needle, high fidelity sound... Not only did I instantly hook it up to my receiver, but I actually started buying vinyl again. You see, a few blocks away from my humble abode is a record shop called Atomic Records, and they rule. Of course, the really good stuff is horribly overpriced, but luckily I own most of that stuff already.
I selected six songs from my collection to commit to the computer, as a test run. It will take up a lot of space on my drive after a while, so I want to make sure I can get the songs to sound the way I want them to sound. Then, when I have burned them to CD, I can convert each song to MP3 and delete the WAV files.
The six songs were:
Patti Smith, "Because The Night", "Gloria" and "Rock & Roll Nigger"...
ELO, "New World Rising" and Blondie, "11:59"-- both on 45...
Prince, "I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man" from Sign O' The Times.
These songs have been swimming in my head lately, and they deserve to be on CD so I can rock them in my ride.
Driving around with the six songs burned onto a CD, I couldn't believe how great they sounded. Snaps, crackles and pops aside, these records sound better than CDs-- which is not to disparage the digital format. These records were mixed with vinyl in mind, so the respective engineers no doubt crafted the mixes to expand dynamically when played on a quality turntable.
I find that records recorded with a digital playback format in mind are mixed to expand dynamically in a CD player, and they sound good because of that deliberate choice to play to digital's strengths. For example, all rap records made after 1995 sound awesome on CD, due to the heavy reliance on digital technology used in making the records.
But when you've got a record like Fun Boy Three's debut on vinyl, the CD version might sound good... but the vinyl sounds better.
I can tune out the scratches and the pops, provided that they are not deep in the groove. If it is ambient and barely noticeable, I can ignore it. In fact, there is a familiarity in hearing the soft crackling, like an old friend is sitting in my room with me, eating potato chips. It makes me feel good, it brings me back to sunless days spent inside my room, poring over album jackets and sleeves, analyzing lyrics, marvelling at the artwork and reading the extensive liner notes, watching the black circle spin like the passage of time, in a spiral, 'pataphysically repeating over itself, like a witch's incantation or a warlock's recital...
Some of my records are worth a lot of money. Others are worthless, as works of art or as collectibles. Some of them are warped beyond repair, while others are in pristine condition. I even own a few albums that-- believe it or not-- have never been opened!
Half of the records I currently own I received from a woman I met about twelve years ago. I was 19, she was 42. She lived in a studio apartment on the 14th floor of a high rise on Ocean Boulevard in Santa Monica. The story of how I met her is a long, humorous one that I'll cut for time: she was a friend of Paulie's whom I started a phone relationship with, and soon I was over at her place, having a May-December romance and being instructed in the ways of pleasure.
After each session (that's all I could really call them), she would send me home with as many books and records as I could carry in my arms. I asked her why she was giving it all up, and she would tell me that she wanted to "start over again"... I told her she could fetch big dollars for her collectibles, and she didn't care.
She was a depressed woman, who had lived fast and hard in her youth. She was a faded beauty, who found her grip on reality slipping as her looks succumbed to the ravages of time, alcohol, and sex. She confided to me that she'd had three abortions in her life, and that she didn't mind them at the time but now she regretted them. She told me I reminded her of the Cuban lover she'd had when she was 25, a man who impregnated her accidentally. Of course, his child was one of the aborts, and she told me that she wished she had never done that, because she knew the child would have been beautiful...
These sentiments scared me. All I was looking for was a good time, not boozy recollections of a woman past her prime. I wanted to have sympathy, but what she wanted was a second chance, and I couldn't give that to her even if I tried.
I broke it off, and she called me for three straight months non-stop, until Paulie and I finally moved out of North Hollywood and into Sherman Oaks.
She was a writer, and I wonder if she ever got that non-fiction book about Los Angeles finished. Alas, I wouldn't know if she did, because she said she was going to write it pseudonymously. I wonder if she's still there, in that rent-controlled studio space on the 14th floor, overlooking the beach and the ocean, the waves of the Pacific...
Because of her, I own ten Bob Dylan records (the classic ones), five Roxy Music albums, a slew of New Wave titles, an original mono pressing of Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys, countless 45s, and quite a number of books on any number of topics, including some poetry volumes and photograph anthologies.
I bought vinyl before and after her, but I still recall which ones were hers. They are the ones that are nearly perfect in their packaging; the titles are the ones that I lusted after for years before I met her.
She gave them to me, even though I refused. I'm glad that she insisted, because otherwise I might have forgotten about that short chapter in my life. Playing some of these vinyl records reminds me of her. She taught me a lot of things in the bedroom. She made me feel like a sex object for the first time in my life, and it wasn't a bad thing. It increased my poor self-esteem, it gave me perspective... and it made me sad.
How many women will end up like her, drinking wine out of ceramic bowls because they are too tired to go out and buy wine glasses? How many women like her will latch onto a young man like myself so desperately that it sends them running in a beeline out of their abode? How many women will wind up relying on their sexual prowess to compensate for the loss of their external beauty?
I sat in my apartment and smoked a cigarette, and thought about her as I was converting the Patti Smith songs-- those were her albums also. She gave me an education, in music, poetry, sex, and life. Koo koo kachoo, Mrs. Robinson...
Knowing how my life is, I will probably run into her again sometime in the near future. I hope she found a reason to keep going on, because Lord knows I wasn't the reason at all. I would've destroyed her, with my narcissism, with my insolent youth, with my arrogance and detachment...
In my mind, she is vinyl-- she was in vogue for a long time, and then she became obsolete, and she became devalued. And, like vinyl, I still thought she sounded great, even if she didn't believe it herself.
I think the next song to bounce to my hard drive will be "Maggie May" by Rod Stewart.
Long live vinyl. Vinyl forever and ever.
For the past decade I have neglected my vinyl records, because I had a shitty record player, the all-in-one type that came attached to a double-cassette player and a cheesy tuner. Those players suck. They sound like caca. They damage your records when you play them. Over the years, if I remembered to do so, I would buy a CD copy of any album I owned on vinyl, but I own a lot of records-- there isn't enough time to go out and re-stock my collection.
Last year, The Gypsy sold me a Technics turntable for 50 bones. Now this is a real turntable-- direct drive, automated needle, high fidelity sound... Not only did I instantly hook it up to my receiver, but I actually started buying vinyl again. You see, a few blocks away from my humble abode is a record shop called Atomic Records, and they rule. Of course, the really good stuff is horribly overpriced, but luckily I own most of that stuff already.
I selected six songs from my collection to commit to the computer, as a test run. It will take up a lot of space on my drive after a while, so I want to make sure I can get the songs to sound the way I want them to sound. Then, when I have burned them to CD, I can convert each song to MP3 and delete the WAV files.
The six songs were:
Patti Smith, "Because The Night", "Gloria" and "Rock & Roll Nigger"...
ELO, "New World Rising" and Blondie, "11:59"-- both on 45...
Prince, "I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man" from Sign O' The Times.
These songs have been swimming in my head lately, and they deserve to be on CD so I can rock them in my ride.
Driving around with the six songs burned onto a CD, I couldn't believe how great they sounded. Snaps, crackles and pops aside, these records sound better than CDs-- which is not to disparage the digital format. These records were mixed with vinyl in mind, so the respective engineers no doubt crafted the mixes to expand dynamically when played on a quality turntable.
I find that records recorded with a digital playback format in mind are mixed to expand dynamically in a CD player, and they sound good because of that deliberate choice to play to digital's strengths. For example, all rap records made after 1995 sound awesome on CD, due to the heavy reliance on digital technology used in making the records.
But when you've got a record like Fun Boy Three's debut on vinyl, the CD version might sound good... but the vinyl sounds better.
I can tune out the scratches and the pops, provided that they are not deep in the groove. If it is ambient and barely noticeable, I can ignore it. In fact, there is a familiarity in hearing the soft crackling, like an old friend is sitting in my room with me, eating potato chips. It makes me feel good, it brings me back to sunless days spent inside my room, poring over album jackets and sleeves, analyzing lyrics, marvelling at the artwork and reading the extensive liner notes, watching the black circle spin like the passage of time, in a spiral, 'pataphysically repeating over itself, like a witch's incantation or a warlock's recital...
Some of my records are worth a lot of money. Others are worthless, as works of art or as collectibles. Some of them are warped beyond repair, while others are in pristine condition. I even own a few albums that-- believe it or not-- have never been opened!
Half of the records I currently own I received from a woman I met about twelve years ago. I was 19, she was 42. She lived in a studio apartment on the 14th floor of a high rise on Ocean Boulevard in Santa Monica. The story of how I met her is a long, humorous one that I'll cut for time: she was a friend of Paulie's whom I started a phone relationship with, and soon I was over at her place, having a May-December romance and being instructed in the ways of pleasure.
After each session (that's all I could really call them), she would send me home with as many books and records as I could carry in my arms. I asked her why she was giving it all up, and she would tell me that she wanted to "start over again"... I told her she could fetch big dollars for her collectibles, and she didn't care.
She was a depressed woman, who had lived fast and hard in her youth. She was a faded beauty, who found her grip on reality slipping as her looks succumbed to the ravages of time, alcohol, and sex. She confided to me that she'd had three abortions in her life, and that she didn't mind them at the time but now she regretted them. She told me I reminded her of the Cuban lover she'd had when she was 25, a man who impregnated her accidentally. Of course, his child was one of the aborts, and she told me that she wished she had never done that, because she knew the child would have been beautiful...
These sentiments scared me. All I was looking for was a good time, not boozy recollections of a woman past her prime. I wanted to have sympathy, but what she wanted was a second chance, and I couldn't give that to her even if I tried.
I broke it off, and she called me for three straight months non-stop, until Paulie and I finally moved out of North Hollywood and into Sherman Oaks.
She was a writer, and I wonder if she ever got that non-fiction book about Los Angeles finished. Alas, I wouldn't know if she did, because she said she was going to write it pseudonymously. I wonder if she's still there, in that rent-controlled studio space on the 14th floor, overlooking the beach and the ocean, the waves of the Pacific...
Because of her, I own ten Bob Dylan records (the classic ones), five Roxy Music albums, a slew of New Wave titles, an original mono pressing of Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys, countless 45s, and quite a number of books on any number of topics, including some poetry volumes and photograph anthologies.
I bought vinyl before and after her, but I still recall which ones were hers. They are the ones that are nearly perfect in their packaging; the titles are the ones that I lusted after for years before I met her.
She gave them to me, even though I refused. I'm glad that she insisted, because otherwise I might have forgotten about that short chapter in my life. Playing some of these vinyl records reminds me of her. She taught me a lot of things in the bedroom. She made me feel like a sex object for the first time in my life, and it wasn't a bad thing. It increased my poor self-esteem, it gave me perspective... and it made me sad.
How many women will end up like her, drinking wine out of ceramic bowls because they are too tired to go out and buy wine glasses? How many women like her will latch onto a young man like myself so desperately that it sends them running in a beeline out of their abode? How many women will wind up relying on their sexual prowess to compensate for the loss of their external beauty?
I sat in my apartment and smoked a cigarette, and thought about her as I was converting the Patti Smith songs-- those were her albums also. She gave me an education, in music, poetry, sex, and life. Koo koo kachoo, Mrs. Robinson...
Knowing how my life is, I will probably run into her again sometime in the near future. I hope she found a reason to keep going on, because Lord knows I wasn't the reason at all. I would've destroyed her, with my narcissism, with my insolent youth, with my arrogance and detachment...
In my mind, she is vinyl-- she was in vogue for a long time, and then she became obsolete, and she became devalued. And, like vinyl, I still thought she sounded great, even if she didn't believe it herself.
I think the next song to bounce to my hard drive will be "Maggie May" by Rod Stewart.
Long live vinyl. Vinyl forever and ever.
Monday, March 28, 2005
WHAT'S IT GONNA BE, BABE?
Hey
What's it gonna be baby?
Do U want him?
Or do U want me?
CAUSE I WANT U!
Said I want U
Tell me, babe-- Do U want me?
I gotta know, I gotta know
Do U want me?
BABY BABY BABY-- Listen 2 me
Said I may not know where I'm goin' babe
I said I may not know what I need
One thing, one thing's 4 certain
I KNOW WHAT I WANT, YEAH!
and if it please U baby-- please U, baby
I'M BEGGIN' YOU DOWN ON MY KNEES!!
I WANT U!!!
Yes I do
BABY BABY BABY BABY I WANT U!!!!
Yes I do...
(OW-WA!)
What's it gonna be baby?
Do U want him?
Or do U want me?
CAUSE I WANT U!
Said I want U
Tell me, babe-- Do U want me?
I gotta know, I gotta know
Do U want me?
BABY BABY BABY-- Listen 2 me
Said I may not know where I'm goin' babe
I said I may not know what I need
One thing, one thing's 4 certain
I KNOW WHAT I WANT, YEAH!
and if it please U baby-- please U, baby
I'M BEGGIN' YOU DOWN ON MY KNEES!!
I WANT U!!!
Yes I do
BABY BABY BABY BABY I WANT U!!!!
Yes I do...
(OW-WA!)
Friday, March 25, 2005
"MULTI-MODE PROGRAMMING" (chapter two, work in progress)
SORRY I DIDN'T HAVE THIS READY LAST WEEK-- WORK GOT BUSY.
It took Robert one week to digest the entirety of Daniel Lazarus' novel, My Former Life As A Godless Heathen. He was a bit surprised that he actually enjoyed reading it. It wasn't a good book because it was well-written, in his humble opinion-- it was a good book because Lazarus had an interesting life story.
Daniel Lazarus was born to Communist parents who resided in New York. He was raised to believe in the Communist ideology that his parents, both Russian Jewish immigrants, had carried with them from their homeland. They were card-carrying members of the American Communist party, and young Daniel was a budding Socialist with dreams of overthrowing the Establishment.
He was affiliated, for some time, with the Black Panther Party in Oakland, CA during the late 1960's. Robert found it hard to believe that the short, balding Jewish man who was hosting the Mark Rayburn show all last week had been friends with the likes of Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton. That section of the book was Robert's favorite part, mostly because he always thought the Black Panthers were cool. The photos that accompanied the book showed Lazarus, long-bearded and bespectacled, chilling at the crash pads of leftist luminaries of all stripes.
He had more sympathy for Lazarus after reading his story. Yes, the man was an egotistical blowhard, but he had also seen and witnessed things that Robert could only dream of being involved with, and of course Robert could see how a New York Jew could be disenfranchised with a militant group like the Panthers, who eventually turned on Lazarus and other movement sympathizers who happened to be white.
Robert put the book down and began to roll up a joint. His cat, a black Abyssinian named Narcissus, sat and watched him as he licked the paper and twisted it tight. The cat's green and yellow eyes were merely vertical slits, staring at its master's activity. As soon as Robert was ready to smoke it, the cat (oblivious to everything else) jumped up on his lap and curled itself into a ball, which made Robert laugh out loud.
"Narcy," Robert said to his cat, pronouncing the pet name so that it sounded like Marcy, "get down and let me smoke."
As Robert puffed on the joint, his mind began to naturally wander, and he began to think about how he wasn't too far removed from the likes of a Daniel Lazarus. There was once a time when Robert lived his life in a certain way, and looking back on that time he could see the aimlessness much clearer now.
When he was younger and fresh out of high school, Robert was going nowhere fast: he elected not to go to college; he decided that hanging out with his friends was more important than trying to hold down a job; he broke up with the one girl who had ever made him happy on a continuous basis, all because of his irresponsibility...
Then, his father passed away, which caused Robert to reflect deeply upon his own life. He had never known his mother, and now that his father was gone he had no one to watch out for him, no one to guard him or warn him about what was coming next. James, Robert's father, hadn't been much of a parental influence, but he still filled a void in Robert's life, and when he was gone, Robert resolved to take control of his life and stop goofing off.
When Robert applied for the radio gig, he had no job experience and no background education. He lied and said he was a student getting ready to go back in the fall, and that he would only be working part-time. After getting the job, he announced to his boss that he wasn't going to go back to school. Oddly enough, his boss was delighted to hear it-- they needed a full-timer, and Robert was picking up the radio trade very quickly. He went from passing out mail to editing commercial copy within a matter of months.
Landing this job made Robert get his act together. He stopped hanging out with his friends, who all went their own separate ways once their social circle began to crumble. He stayed in touch with them over the years, but reunions were few and far between. And besides, out of all of the friends, there was only one that he ever cared to speak to again.
Fabian Rourke.
They grew up together, went to some of the same schools, had similar interests and got along famously. Fabian Rourke was the brother that Robert never had, a loyal friend and an honest person who didn't know what it was to tell a lie. They complemented each other extremely well: Robert was good-looking, confident, smart but not too smart, funny and charismatic; Fabian was a budding genius with no social skills but armed with a lacerating sense of morality and an eloquent speaking style that made everyone stand up and take notice.
The two boys needed each other-- Fabian made Robert look smart, and Robert was the person who introduced Fabian to the world outside of his room at his parent's house in Wholesome, California.
By the time Robert had broken up with Rachel, a mutual friend of Fabian's and the one girl who made him consistently happy, Fabian had done a 180 degree turn from his nerdy, condescending persona. The last time Robert saw Fabian in the flesh, he was talking about moving out of Wholesome to attend UCLA, changing his name to "Jimmy Drawers", and publishing a novel.
Robert wished him luck, and that was the last time he heard from Fabian. He admired how people like Fabian Rourke and Daniel Lazarus were able to just pick up and move on, leaving their former lives behind. They possessed a knack for reinvention that Robert wished he himself possessed.
He thought about Fabian, as the marijuana smoke swirled in inkblot clouds above his head, rays of light gleaning through the Venetian blinds, igniting the motes and iotas and dust morsels as they freefell, pelting the jacket of the Lazarus book gently, like feathers cradling their way down to touch earth.
He wondered what Fabian was doing at this very moment. Last he'd read about "Jimmy Drawers", he was managing a boy band known as N-Supply, traveling around the country on small-scale tours. He looked at the picture he clipped from the magazine article: Fabian was wearing contact lenses, not the oversized welding-glasses that he used to wear all the time. It was funny to see Fabian's face without glasses. Robert had a hard time trying not to see them there. It was as if they'd left such an indentation on his face, from years of wearing them, that even with them off they still looked like they were on.
Fabian's hair was short and neat. It resembled the way Robert used to style his hair... the way Robert still styled his hair! And as he looked at the photo some more, he noticed that Fabian was wearing the same kinds of clothes that Robert used to wear, right down to specific brand names and talismans and jewelry.
This didn't bother Robert at all, because Fabian once admitted to Robert that he was everything he'd ever wanted to be. Robert remembered the moment well, because for a short second he thought Fabian was going to tell him that he was in love with him.
"Robert," Fabian has asked, on a dark night, walking through the streets of Wholesome after curfew, "I want to tell you something."
"What is it, Fabian?" Robert feared the worst.
"I've always wanted to be you."
Robert thought he heard him differently. "Did you just say you wanted to be with me?"
Fabian bursted out laughing. "Uhhh, no. That's not what I said."
Relieved, Robert began to relax a bit. "Sorry, bro. I heard you wrong. Go on, continue."
"I've always wanted to be you, and I just wanted to tell you so that you don't get mad at me if I ever do anything to... you know, copy you. I hate it when people copy me, you know? But people never ever copy me-- they copy off of me, like on a test or something. They want my brain, but they never want who I am. But you, Robert... you like me because of who I am. And I just wanted to tell you that I like you for who you are too. But in my case, you are something that I wish I could be. And I just want to tell you that, so that you'll understand in the future..."
"What's there to understand, Fabian? You're my friend. We're brothers. If you copy me, I'll take it as a compliment."
"Good," Fabian said, smiling, almost crying. "I'm glad you understand. I've tried to tell other people this, but they all thought I was getting homo on them. Know what I mean?"
Robert winced. "Yeah, I think so..."
"Thanks, Robert, for letting me copy you."
"You're welcome, man."
Robert reminisced and smoked and then he was finally high enough to unwind. He put a CD in the player-- it was The Ramones' Road To Ruin. "I Wanna Be Sedated" started to jump out of the surround-sound speakers.
Robert had a ritual that he liked to indulge whenever he was alone, at home, with his marijuana, with his sound system, with his computer and the books he collected from the discard bin of the Rayburn office. He likened it to a trance, and it helped him to focus on certain aspects of his work with sound editing.
He'd read about sound frequencies and discovered the varying levels: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Theta. Delta and Theta ran the gamut from 0 Hertz (as low as one cycle) to 7 Hertz; Alpha covered the range of 8 to 12 Hertz; Beta covered the 13 to 30 Hertz range; Gamma covered 30 and beyond...
Alpha was Robert's primary obsession-- it is associated with relaxation mostly with eyes closed, day dreaming, and deep self-introspection. Sometime in the 1960's it was revealed that the key psychoactive ingredient in cannabis (THC) induced the Alpha state in humans. Scientist discovered it was the chemical THC that caused a euphoric feeling by being a substitute for the brain's natural pleasure chemicals (endorphins).
Robbert had become fascinated with Alpha wheh he'd read that women reported being moved to orgasm upon receiving frequencies slightly above the Alpha range. Although he had not been able to conclusively confirm this himself, he figured it was probably true and theorized that all sound frequencies can cause various reactions in the biochemical makeup of the human body, especially in the brain.
Sometimes Robert indulged in hallucinogenic "trips", and under the influence of such a drug he was an occasional witness to such phenomenon as "seeing" music. He invited a friend over to his place once, a musician who played acoustic guitar, and asked the muscian to play as they both tripped on psilocybin mushrooms. Both of them had reported seeing rainbow-colored "notes" emanating from the nylon strings of the guitar as they were strummed.
Robert had read about the electrical impulses in the brain, how certain barbituates like phenobarbital helped rein in overactive electrical brain impulses that cauzed seizures. Robert reasoned that sound frequencies, like certain drugs, could probably induce or control electrical brain impulses, depending on what was the intended or desired effect.
He stood in the center of his living room, dancing to The Ramones, reciting the lyrics to the songs. In his mind, images of fractal chaos generated endlessly upon themselves, causing him to lose equilibrium, to lose a sense of time and space, ever contracting and expanding.
The "trance" gave him insights into his own pathology and the world around him. It was a strange coping mechanism for him, to help him lose himself, his sense of ego, his sense of identity. Only when his mind was free from distraction could he focus on his inner-mind explorations.
On a hunch, he swung around to the bookcase and picked out a book at random. It was one of many conspiracy tomes that he'd picked from the Rayburn "Free Books" box. The title was a reference to mind control and the notorious program known as MK-ULTRA. He flipped open a page arbitrarily and read what was there to read*:
MULTI-MODE PROGRAMMING
K. Sullivan said that she was used to sexually service both males and females in the Beta mode, and to do assassination, bodyguarding and intrusions in hostage situations in the Delta mode.
And what is Alpha, Beta, Delta and Theta programming?
"Alpha was the basis for all the other programs," she continued. "It seems to be where a lot of information was stored in my memory, in my mind, that was used by programmers to develop the other programs. It's where some of my more generic alter states were also stored. Beta was the sexual servicing part of me. They also sometimes called the alter state 'Barbie'.
Survivors Cathy O'Brien and Brice Taylor were also subjected to Beta, or sex-slave, programming. They, like actress Marilyn Monroe, were called "presidential models", mind-controlled slaves for the use of high-level politicians.
According to [Fritz] Springmeier's book, "...in 1981, the New World Order made training films for their novice programmers. [Project] Monarch slave Cathy O'Brien was used to make the film "How To Divide a Personality" and "How To Create a Sex Slave". Two Huntsville porn photographers were used to help NASA create these training films."
Sullivan recalled: "I was used both as a child and as an adult in those alter states, and I had more than one. In those alter states I would not resist. I had no anger. I was an absolute sexual slave and I would do whatever I was told to do."
Delta programming is military-assassin programming that has trickled into popular consciousness through movies like "La Femme Nikita", its American remake, "Point of No Return", and "The Long Kiss Goodnight". Regarding the Delta programming, Sullivan said: "...it was when I was used to do hits, kills, and also bodyguarding and hostage extraction. I had a great number of alter personalities that had specialised training and had different modes to do different things."
Why was the training kept separate for different alters? "Part of it was so I wouldn't recall too much at any one time - if I did start to remember," she said. "And also because they hand-pick each part out for a certain type of situation. If you had a part coming out that was very loyal to people that that part was bodyguarding, you don't want that part going off and killing somebody. And you don't want a part that's specifically programmed to kill coming out and feeling sorry for the target. So you have to keep the emotions and the motives separate as well. And so that's why they had to have different parts."
Sullivan's description of Theta programming seems to correlate with the development and use of so-called extrasensory powers and extraphysical abilities.
"Theta was where they used - I don't like the word 'psychic' because I think it's been so misused - thought energy," she said. "I just knew it as magnetic-type energy from the individual to do a number of different things that they were experimenting with, including long-distance mind connection with other people - even in other countries. I guess you would call it 'remote viewing' - where I could see what a person was doing in another state in a room or something like that.
"It was both actual programming and experimentation. Because what they did - they kept it encapsulated in several parts of me, several altered states. It was a lot of training, a lot of experimentation."
Theta programming also implies the use of thought energy to kill someone at a distance.
"A lot of times I ran across other victims with Theta programming," Sullivan said in a recent CKLN radio interview. "One of the movie and book themes they used extensively was "Dune", by Frank Herbert. It won't be too hard to figure because what they taught us was that we could cause things to happen to other people. It was to build up rage inside. It would come out in a form of pure energy that would hit them... They had talked about people imploding internally in their digestive organs. I don't know because I can't see what goes on inside another body, but I do know that it does work."
The calculated admixture of doing good and evil seems to be a hallmark of the Illuminati methodology. It's as if they recognise, at a spiritual level, that all the horrible karma they create can be balanced by generous philanthropic gestures; for example, giving a billion dollars to the United Nations, or other feats of extraordinary compassion.
"Also, they tried to use me for hands-on healing because I had a grandmother who was a healer from Sweden," said Sullivan. "So they were trying - that was me and several other survivors I talked to since - to use them in that mode also. And hands-on healing means that you would focus electromagnetic energy into the other person's body."
What caught Robert's attention was the Greek alphabetical naming of the brain states described in the book, the same as the names ascribed to the levels of sound frequency. As he put the book down, he looked up at the TV, which was turned on with the sound down. This was one of Robert's favorite things to do: watch TV with the sound down, while another sound source was playing in the background. It helped him to make Jungian associations that he would not be able to make on his own.
On the TV, there was an ad for a TV show on the USA Network, based upon the premise of a female assassin who works for the CIA. Robert smiled.
He thought the actress was very attractive, and intended to try and watch the show when he could find the time.
Suddenly, Robert could tell that someone was at his front door, making noise. He thought at first that it may have been Narcissus, but when he saw his lazy cat reclined on the floor next to his feet, he decided to check out the peephole.
He saw the mailman walking away from his front porch.
Robert opened the door, wisps of pot smoke flowing out freely. He grabbed the mail and sorted it. Most of it was junk, and there was one utility bill in the mix.
He saw a letter addressed to him from one "J. Drawers". He opened it excitedly.
The letter was dated July 30th, 1998, and it read:
Dear Robert,
Man, how long has it been?
I'm doing real good. Life on the road is hectic sometimes but so worth it. My current job as a road manager has me booking gigs, hotel rooms for the talent, and handling per diem money. I meet a lot of people and have a gang of stories to tell you. One day it's all getting written down. Speaking of which, this is the first thing I've had time to write in a long time. I haven't given up on being a novelist, but with all the money I'm making and al the jobs I have going on right now, there just isn't enough time.
I talked with Kelly Paper not too long ago, and she told me you are working in radio. When I heard this, I decided to write you a letter, because you seem to have changed your phone number in the years since we last spoke.
Basically, I have a job offer for you, and if you are working with audio it will be right up your alley. We need an engineer for part of the current tour I'm on with N-Supply. The regular engineer is going to be taking a vacation soon, and we want to have a back-up on hand.
I have taken the liberty of express mailing this to you, and if you can do the job for me I promise the pay will be worth any time you have to take off of work. We won't be hitting the road until August, so you have plenty of time to contact me and tell me what your decision is. But even if you cannot take me up on this job offer, I hope you and I can at least get together and talk and hang out. It's been too long, old friend, and I haven't forgotten you.
Call me when you can,
Fabian Rourke (aka "Jimmy Drawers")
A phone number was listed at the bottom of the stationary.
What do you fuckin' know? Robert thought to himself. Fabian Rourke is back on the scene. And he's been talking with Kelly...
Kelly was Robert's "fuck-buddy" shortly after his breakup with Rachel. When he discovered that Rachel had run off with his friend Brian, Robert felt that it was only fair that he fuck one of Rachel's friends. Of course, the relationship went nowhere, and although he and Kelly left on good terms, he was ambivalent about seeing or hearing from her again.
Robert decided to sleep on it, and call Fabian in the morning. It made him feel good that Fabian had made it out of Wholesome and had not forgotten about the people who were his friends back when he was a nobody.
Robert didn't have any dreams that night. Whenever he smoked pot, he could not remember his dreams the next morning, for the life of him.
CHAPTER THREE COMES THIS FRIDAY...
*= Excerpt from Mind Control Slavery and the New World Order by Uri Dowbenko, 1998
It took Robert one week to digest the entirety of Daniel Lazarus' novel, My Former Life As A Godless Heathen. He was a bit surprised that he actually enjoyed reading it. It wasn't a good book because it was well-written, in his humble opinion-- it was a good book because Lazarus had an interesting life story.
Daniel Lazarus was born to Communist parents who resided in New York. He was raised to believe in the Communist ideology that his parents, both Russian Jewish immigrants, had carried with them from their homeland. They were card-carrying members of the American Communist party, and young Daniel was a budding Socialist with dreams of overthrowing the Establishment.
He was affiliated, for some time, with the Black Panther Party in Oakland, CA during the late 1960's. Robert found it hard to believe that the short, balding Jewish man who was hosting the Mark Rayburn show all last week had been friends with the likes of Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton. That section of the book was Robert's favorite part, mostly because he always thought the Black Panthers were cool. The photos that accompanied the book showed Lazarus, long-bearded and bespectacled, chilling at the crash pads of leftist luminaries of all stripes.
He had more sympathy for Lazarus after reading his story. Yes, the man was an egotistical blowhard, but he had also seen and witnessed things that Robert could only dream of being involved with, and of course Robert could see how a New York Jew could be disenfranchised with a militant group like the Panthers, who eventually turned on Lazarus and other movement sympathizers who happened to be white.
Robert put the book down and began to roll up a joint. His cat, a black Abyssinian named Narcissus, sat and watched him as he licked the paper and twisted it tight. The cat's green and yellow eyes were merely vertical slits, staring at its master's activity. As soon as Robert was ready to smoke it, the cat (oblivious to everything else) jumped up on his lap and curled itself into a ball, which made Robert laugh out loud.
"Narcy," Robert said to his cat, pronouncing the pet name so that it sounded like Marcy, "get down and let me smoke."
As Robert puffed on the joint, his mind began to naturally wander, and he began to think about how he wasn't too far removed from the likes of a Daniel Lazarus. There was once a time when Robert lived his life in a certain way, and looking back on that time he could see the aimlessness much clearer now.
When he was younger and fresh out of high school, Robert was going nowhere fast: he elected not to go to college; he decided that hanging out with his friends was more important than trying to hold down a job; he broke up with the one girl who had ever made him happy on a continuous basis, all because of his irresponsibility...
Then, his father passed away, which caused Robert to reflect deeply upon his own life. He had never known his mother, and now that his father was gone he had no one to watch out for him, no one to guard him or warn him about what was coming next. James, Robert's father, hadn't been much of a parental influence, but he still filled a void in Robert's life, and when he was gone, Robert resolved to take control of his life and stop goofing off.
When Robert applied for the radio gig, he had no job experience and no background education. He lied and said he was a student getting ready to go back in the fall, and that he would only be working part-time. After getting the job, he announced to his boss that he wasn't going to go back to school. Oddly enough, his boss was delighted to hear it-- they needed a full-timer, and Robert was picking up the radio trade very quickly. He went from passing out mail to editing commercial copy within a matter of months.
Landing this job made Robert get his act together. He stopped hanging out with his friends, who all went their own separate ways once their social circle began to crumble. He stayed in touch with them over the years, but reunions were few and far between. And besides, out of all of the friends, there was only one that he ever cared to speak to again.
Fabian Rourke.
They grew up together, went to some of the same schools, had similar interests and got along famously. Fabian Rourke was the brother that Robert never had, a loyal friend and an honest person who didn't know what it was to tell a lie. They complemented each other extremely well: Robert was good-looking, confident, smart but not too smart, funny and charismatic; Fabian was a budding genius with no social skills but armed with a lacerating sense of morality and an eloquent speaking style that made everyone stand up and take notice.
The two boys needed each other-- Fabian made Robert look smart, and Robert was the person who introduced Fabian to the world outside of his room at his parent's house in Wholesome, California.
By the time Robert had broken up with Rachel, a mutual friend of Fabian's and the one girl who made him consistently happy, Fabian had done a 180 degree turn from his nerdy, condescending persona. The last time Robert saw Fabian in the flesh, he was talking about moving out of Wholesome to attend UCLA, changing his name to "Jimmy Drawers", and publishing a novel.
Robert wished him luck, and that was the last time he heard from Fabian. He admired how people like Fabian Rourke and Daniel Lazarus were able to just pick up and move on, leaving their former lives behind. They possessed a knack for reinvention that Robert wished he himself possessed.
He thought about Fabian, as the marijuana smoke swirled in inkblot clouds above his head, rays of light gleaning through the Venetian blinds, igniting the motes and iotas and dust morsels as they freefell, pelting the jacket of the Lazarus book gently, like feathers cradling their way down to touch earth.
He wondered what Fabian was doing at this very moment. Last he'd read about "Jimmy Drawers", he was managing a boy band known as N-Supply, traveling around the country on small-scale tours. He looked at the picture he clipped from the magazine article: Fabian was wearing contact lenses, not the oversized welding-glasses that he used to wear all the time. It was funny to see Fabian's face without glasses. Robert had a hard time trying not to see them there. It was as if they'd left such an indentation on his face, from years of wearing them, that even with them off they still looked like they were on.
Fabian's hair was short and neat. It resembled the way Robert used to style his hair... the way Robert still styled his hair! And as he looked at the photo some more, he noticed that Fabian was wearing the same kinds of clothes that Robert used to wear, right down to specific brand names and talismans and jewelry.
This didn't bother Robert at all, because Fabian once admitted to Robert that he was everything he'd ever wanted to be. Robert remembered the moment well, because for a short second he thought Fabian was going to tell him that he was in love with him.
"Robert," Fabian has asked, on a dark night, walking through the streets of Wholesome after curfew, "I want to tell you something."
"What is it, Fabian?" Robert feared the worst.
"I've always wanted to be you."
Robert thought he heard him differently. "Did you just say you wanted to be with me?"
Fabian bursted out laughing. "Uhhh, no. That's not what I said."
Relieved, Robert began to relax a bit. "Sorry, bro. I heard you wrong. Go on, continue."
"I've always wanted to be you, and I just wanted to tell you so that you don't get mad at me if I ever do anything to... you know, copy you. I hate it when people copy me, you know? But people never ever copy me-- they copy off of me, like on a test or something. They want my brain, but they never want who I am. But you, Robert... you like me because of who I am. And I just wanted to tell you that I like you for who you are too. But in my case, you are something that I wish I could be. And I just want to tell you that, so that you'll understand in the future..."
"What's there to understand, Fabian? You're my friend. We're brothers. If you copy me, I'll take it as a compliment."
"Good," Fabian said, smiling, almost crying. "I'm glad you understand. I've tried to tell other people this, but they all thought I was getting homo on them. Know what I mean?"
Robert winced. "Yeah, I think so..."
"Thanks, Robert, for letting me copy you."
"You're welcome, man."
Robert reminisced and smoked and then he was finally high enough to unwind. He put a CD in the player-- it was The Ramones' Road To Ruin. "I Wanna Be Sedated" started to jump out of the surround-sound speakers.
Robert had a ritual that he liked to indulge whenever he was alone, at home, with his marijuana, with his sound system, with his computer and the books he collected from the discard bin of the Rayburn office. He likened it to a trance, and it helped him to focus on certain aspects of his work with sound editing.
He'd read about sound frequencies and discovered the varying levels: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Theta. Delta and Theta ran the gamut from 0 Hertz (as low as one cycle) to 7 Hertz; Alpha covered the range of 8 to 12 Hertz; Beta covered the 13 to 30 Hertz range; Gamma covered 30 and beyond...
Alpha was Robert's primary obsession-- it is associated with relaxation mostly with eyes closed, day dreaming, and deep self-introspection. Sometime in the 1960's it was revealed that the key psychoactive ingredient in cannabis (THC) induced the Alpha state in humans. Scientist discovered it was the chemical THC that caused a euphoric feeling by being a substitute for the brain's natural pleasure chemicals (endorphins).
Robbert had become fascinated with Alpha wheh he'd read that women reported being moved to orgasm upon receiving frequencies slightly above the Alpha range. Although he had not been able to conclusively confirm this himself, he figured it was probably true and theorized that all sound frequencies can cause various reactions in the biochemical makeup of the human body, especially in the brain.
Sometimes Robert indulged in hallucinogenic "trips", and under the influence of such a drug he was an occasional witness to such phenomenon as "seeing" music. He invited a friend over to his place once, a musician who played acoustic guitar, and asked the muscian to play as they both tripped on psilocybin mushrooms. Both of them had reported seeing rainbow-colored "notes" emanating from the nylon strings of the guitar as they were strummed.
Robert had read about the electrical impulses in the brain, how certain barbituates like phenobarbital helped rein in overactive electrical brain impulses that cauzed seizures. Robert reasoned that sound frequencies, like certain drugs, could probably induce or control electrical brain impulses, depending on what was the intended or desired effect.
He stood in the center of his living room, dancing to The Ramones, reciting the lyrics to the songs. In his mind, images of fractal chaos generated endlessly upon themselves, causing him to lose equilibrium, to lose a sense of time and space, ever contracting and expanding.
The "trance" gave him insights into his own pathology and the world around him. It was a strange coping mechanism for him, to help him lose himself, his sense of ego, his sense of identity. Only when his mind was free from distraction could he focus on his inner-mind explorations.
On a hunch, he swung around to the bookcase and picked out a book at random. It was one of many conspiracy tomes that he'd picked from the Rayburn "Free Books" box. The title was a reference to mind control and the notorious program known as MK-ULTRA. He flipped open a page arbitrarily and read what was there to read*:
MULTI-MODE PROGRAMMING
K. Sullivan said that she was used to sexually service both males and females in the Beta mode, and to do assassination, bodyguarding and intrusions in hostage situations in the Delta mode.
And what is Alpha, Beta, Delta and Theta programming?
"Alpha was the basis for all the other programs," she continued. "It seems to be where a lot of information was stored in my memory, in my mind, that was used by programmers to develop the other programs. It's where some of my more generic alter states were also stored. Beta was the sexual servicing part of me. They also sometimes called the alter state 'Barbie'.
Survivors Cathy O'Brien and Brice Taylor were also subjected to Beta, or sex-slave, programming. They, like actress Marilyn Monroe, were called "presidential models", mind-controlled slaves for the use of high-level politicians.
According to [Fritz] Springmeier's book, "...in 1981, the New World Order made training films for their novice programmers. [Project] Monarch slave Cathy O'Brien was used to make the film "How To Divide a Personality" and "How To Create a Sex Slave". Two Huntsville porn photographers were used to help NASA create these training films."
Sullivan recalled: "I was used both as a child and as an adult in those alter states, and I had more than one. In those alter states I would not resist. I had no anger. I was an absolute sexual slave and I would do whatever I was told to do."
Delta programming is military-assassin programming that has trickled into popular consciousness through movies like "La Femme Nikita", its American remake, "Point of No Return", and "The Long Kiss Goodnight". Regarding the Delta programming, Sullivan said: "...it was when I was used to do hits, kills, and also bodyguarding and hostage extraction. I had a great number of alter personalities that had specialised training and had different modes to do different things."
Why was the training kept separate for different alters? "Part of it was so I wouldn't recall too much at any one time - if I did start to remember," she said. "And also because they hand-pick each part out for a certain type of situation. If you had a part coming out that was very loyal to people that that part was bodyguarding, you don't want that part going off and killing somebody. And you don't want a part that's specifically programmed to kill coming out and feeling sorry for the target. So you have to keep the emotions and the motives separate as well. And so that's why they had to have different parts."
Sullivan's description of Theta programming seems to correlate with the development and use of so-called extrasensory powers and extraphysical abilities.
"Theta was where they used - I don't like the word 'psychic' because I think it's been so misused - thought energy," she said. "I just knew it as magnetic-type energy from the individual to do a number of different things that they were experimenting with, including long-distance mind connection with other people - even in other countries. I guess you would call it 'remote viewing' - where I could see what a person was doing in another state in a room or something like that.
"It was both actual programming and experimentation. Because what they did - they kept it encapsulated in several parts of me, several altered states. It was a lot of training, a lot of experimentation."
Theta programming also implies the use of thought energy to kill someone at a distance.
"A lot of times I ran across other victims with Theta programming," Sullivan said in a recent CKLN radio interview. "One of the movie and book themes they used extensively was "Dune", by Frank Herbert. It won't be too hard to figure because what they taught us was that we could cause things to happen to other people. It was to build up rage inside. It would come out in a form of pure energy that would hit them... They had talked about people imploding internally in their digestive organs. I don't know because I can't see what goes on inside another body, but I do know that it does work."
The calculated admixture of doing good and evil seems to be a hallmark of the Illuminati methodology. It's as if they recognise, at a spiritual level, that all the horrible karma they create can be balanced by generous philanthropic gestures; for example, giving a billion dollars to the United Nations, or other feats of extraordinary compassion.
"Also, they tried to use me for hands-on healing because I had a grandmother who was a healer from Sweden," said Sullivan. "So they were trying - that was me and several other survivors I talked to since - to use them in that mode also. And hands-on healing means that you would focus electromagnetic energy into the other person's body."
What caught Robert's attention was the Greek alphabetical naming of the brain states described in the book, the same as the names ascribed to the levels of sound frequency. As he put the book down, he looked up at the TV, which was turned on with the sound down. This was one of Robert's favorite things to do: watch TV with the sound down, while another sound source was playing in the background. It helped him to make Jungian associations that he would not be able to make on his own.
On the TV, there was an ad for a TV show on the USA Network, based upon the premise of a female assassin who works for the CIA. Robert smiled.
He thought the actress was very attractive, and intended to try and watch the show when he could find the time.
Suddenly, Robert could tell that someone was at his front door, making noise. He thought at first that it may have been Narcissus, but when he saw his lazy cat reclined on the floor next to his feet, he decided to check out the peephole.
He saw the mailman walking away from his front porch.
Robert opened the door, wisps of pot smoke flowing out freely. He grabbed the mail and sorted it. Most of it was junk, and there was one utility bill in the mix.
He saw a letter addressed to him from one "J. Drawers". He opened it excitedly.
The letter was dated July 30th, 1998, and it read:
Dear Robert,
Man, how long has it been?
I'm doing real good. Life on the road is hectic sometimes but so worth it. My current job as a road manager has me booking gigs, hotel rooms for the talent, and handling per diem money. I meet a lot of people and have a gang of stories to tell you. One day it's all getting written down. Speaking of which, this is the first thing I've had time to write in a long time. I haven't given up on being a novelist, but with all the money I'm making and al the jobs I have going on right now, there just isn't enough time.
I talked with Kelly Paper not too long ago, and she told me you are working in radio. When I heard this, I decided to write you a letter, because you seem to have changed your phone number in the years since we last spoke.
Basically, I have a job offer for you, and if you are working with audio it will be right up your alley. We need an engineer for part of the current tour I'm on with N-Supply. The regular engineer is going to be taking a vacation soon, and we want to have a back-up on hand.
I have taken the liberty of express mailing this to you, and if you can do the job for me I promise the pay will be worth any time you have to take off of work. We won't be hitting the road until August, so you have plenty of time to contact me and tell me what your decision is. But even if you cannot take me up on this job offer, I hope you and I can at least get together and talk and hang out. It's been too long, old friend, and I haven't forgotten you.
Call me when you can,
Fabian Rourke (aka "Jimmy Drawers")
A phone number was listed at the bottom of the stationary.
What do you fuckin' know? Robert thought to himself. Fabian Rourke is back on the scene. And he's been talking with Kelly...
Kelly was Robert's "fuck-buddy" shortly after his breakup with Rachel. When he discovered that Rachel had run off with his friend Brian, Robert felt that it was only fair that he fuck one of Rachel's friends. Of course, the relationship went nowhere, and although he and Kelly left on good terms, he was ambivalent about seeing or hearing from her again.
Robert decided to sleep on it, and call Fabian in the morning. It made him feel good that Fabian had made it out of Wholesome and had not forgotten about the people who were his friends back when he was a nobody.
Robert didn't have any dreams that night. Whenever he smoked pot, he could not remember his dreams the next morning, for the life of him.
CHAPTER THREE COMES THIS FRIDAY...
*= Excerpt from Mind Control Slavery and the New World Order by Uri Dowbenko, 1998
Thursday, March 24, 2005
THE FROG AND THE SCORPION
I am learning about Narcissism.
The Narcissism List has shown me an enormous resource archive of information related to Narcissism.
It is a serious personality disorder, as serious as histrionic or bi-polar disorder. However, I have to be careful-- I don't want to deny that I have Narcissistic tendencies, and I also don't want to embrace symptoms that I do not possess.
For example, my Narcissism is mainly passive. I think it is referred to as Inverted Narcissism, but it explains why the Internet has been such an instrument for my unbridled rage. The Internet is the ideal locale for Narcissists, because it involves the formation of a False Self. Narcissists invent False Selves in their pursuit of attention, or "narcissistic supply".
Also, I have a tendency to seek out other Narcissists, which qualifies me as not only an Inverted Narcissist but a Codependent Narcissist. This was the most amazing revelation, because I have never really pondered the notion that the people I make friends with are the same as me. Narcissists tend to see themselves as unique, but if they seek out other Narcissists, it reinforces a sense of being "right"-- if I have a problem with someone, I have other Narcissists around me to indulge me in supply. Likewise, they also seek me out because I supply them with the same attention, but in the exchange both Narcissists equally feel that they have gotten something out of the other, and not the other way around.
I was loathe to think that I surround myself with likeminded Narcissists, but that's because, in the List, they warn that Narcissists tend to blame others for their shortcomings and project their flaws onto others constantly. I want to know more about this disorder but I don't want to misdiagnose myself.
It explains, though, why I have such difficulty cultivating long-term love relationships: I tend to gravitate towards female Narcissists. We spend our time together bumping heads over who is more special. Amy Coates was the most extreme example-- she could not possibly fathom that she had met someone just as vain as her, if not more. Eve is another Narcissist, who has expressed her disbelief time and time again over my self-absorption and lack of empathy.
I don't mean to blame them, because I am just like them. Rather, I simply recognize that I actively pursue relationships with fellow Narcissists... perhaps to make myself feel better about myself and my awareness of the problem?
Finally, my father was (and still is) a Grade-A Counterdependent Narcissist. This has rubbed off not only on me but on my younger brother. My father is the type of person who, when prompted to recall what you just said to him, will probably not be able to quote you. That's because he was busy thinking of the next thing he was going to say, as opposed to truly listening.
I think that growing up with such a pronounced Narcissistic influence in my life has actually helped me to be more aware of my own condition. I strive to not be like him, and I find that most of my personal frustrations stem from my acting in a manner not unlike my father's childish, self-centered demands.
It's not curable, by the way. Narcissists don't change, because it's the base of their identity, their personality's make-up. There's that old anecdote about the Scorpion riding on the Frog's back to cross the lake: the Frog is reluctant but reasons that, if stung by the Scorpion, the both of them will drown, and the Scorpion, wanting to preserve himself, would not dare to sting the Frog. So the Frog gives the Scorpion a ride... and he stings him anyway.
As they both sink into the water, the Frog asks the Scorpion why he stung him, and the Scorpion replies, "Because I'm a fucking Scorpion, you dumb motherfucker... that's what I do!"
On the plus side: the Narcissism List acknowledges that Narcissists can contribute positively to society, even if their personalities are, at the root, anti-social. If their energies can be channeled into helping civilization make progress, then their efforts are welcomed and warranted... provided, of course, that the narcissistic supply is kept flowing.
I thought I knew everything there was to know about it, and I find that I don't know anything. This feeds my ego in some perverse way. It is just the way that I am.
Tomorrow, I will post my second chapter in my weekly online novel. Have a nice evening, all.
The Narcissism List has shown me an enormous resource archive of information related to Narcissism.
It is a serious personality disorder, as serious as histrionic or bi-polar disorder. However, I have to be careful-- I don't want to deny that I have Narcissistic tendencies, and I also don't want to embrace symptoms that I do not possess.
For example, my Narcissism is mainly passive. I think it is referred to as Inverted Narcissism, but it explains why the Internet has been such an instrument for my unbridled rage. The Internet is the ideal locale for Narcissists, because it involves the formation of a False Self. Narcissists invent False Selves in their pursuit of attention, or "narcissistic supply".
Also, I have a tendency to seek out other Narcissists, which qualifies me as not only an Inverted Narcissist but a Codependent Narcissist. This was the most amazing revelation, because I have never really pondered the notion that the people I make friends with are the same as me. Narcissists tend to see themselves as unique, but if they seek out other Narcissists, it reinforces a sense of being "right"-- if I have a problem with someone, I have other Narcissists around me to indulge me in supply. Likewise, they also seek me out because I supply them with the same attention, but in the exchange both Narcissists equally feel that they have gotten something out of the other, and not the other way around.
I was loathe to think that I surround myself with likeminded Narcissists, but that's because, in the List, they warn that Narcissists tend to blame others for their shortcomings and project their flaws onto others constantly. I want to know more about this disorder but I don't want to misdiagnose myself.
It explains, though, why I have such difficulty cultivating long-term love relationships: I tend to gravitate towards female Narcissists. We spend our time together bumping heads over who is more special. Amy Coates was the most extreme example-- she could not possibly fathom that she had met someone just as vain as her, if not more. Eve is another Narcissist, who has expressed her disbelief time and time again over my self-absorption and lack of empathy.
I don't mean to blame them, because I am just like them. Rather, I simply recognize that I actively pursue relationships with fellow Narcissists... perhaps to make myself feel better about myself and my awareness of the problem?
Finally, my father was (and still is) a Grade-A Counterdependent Narcissist. This has rubbed off not only on me but on my younger brother. My father is the type of person who, when prompted to recall what you just said to him, will probably not be able to quote you. That's because he was busy thinking of the next thing he was going to say, as opposed to truly listening.
I think that growing up with such a pronounced Narcissistic influence in my life has actually helped me to be more aware of my own condition. I strive to not be like him, and I find that most of my personal frustrations stem from my acting in a manner not unlike my father's childish, self-centered demands.
It's not curable, by the way. Narcissists don't change, because it's the base of their identity, their personality's make-up. There's that old anecdote about the Scorpion riding on the Frog's back to cross the lake: the Frog is reluctant but reasons that, if stung by the Scorpion, the both of them will drown, and the Scorpion, wanting to preserve himself, would not dare to sting the Frog. So the Frog gives the Scorpion a ride... and he stings him anyway.
As they both sink into the water, the Frog asks the Scorpion why he stung him, and the Scorpion replies, "Because I'm a fucking Scorpion, you dumb motherfucker... that's what I do!"
On the plus side: the Narcissism List acknowledges that Narcissists can contribute positively to society, even if their personalities are, at the root, anti-social. If their energies can be channeled into helping civilization make progress, then their efforts are welcomed and warranted... provided, of course, that the narcissistic supply is kept flowing.
I thought I knew everything there was to know about it, and I find that I don't know anything. This feeds my ego in some perverse way. It is just the way that I am.
Tomorrow, I will post my second chapter in my weekly online novel. Have a nice evening, all.
ON THE HEAD
Eve asked me, months ago, why I love to be hated. She had noticed aloud that a lot of people hate me for no reason, and she also noticed that I laughed when she mentioned that fact.
I recall that I came up with some flippant remark as an answer. But the question popped into my mind as I was having a cigarette on my break..
Why do you love to be hated?
I came back inside and went online, typing "pathological need to be hated" into a search engine. Many things came up, but this was the first one I clicked on, and reading it was scary-- I almost wondered if I had authored it a long time ago and maybe someone had reappropriated it online...
Such is the way of the Narcissist. (scroll down after you click)
He really hit it on the head. A bit over the top, but right on the head.
I recall that I came up with some flippant remark as an answer. But the question popped into my mind as I was having a cigarette on my break..
Why do you love to be hated?
I came back inside and went online, typing "pathological need to be hated" into a search engine. Many things came up, but this was the first one I clicked on, and reading it was scary-- I almost wondered if I had authored it a long time ago and maybe someone had reappropriated it online...
Such is the way of the Narcissist. (scroll down after you click)
He really hit it on the head. A bit over the top, but right on the head.
EYES
She came into my office with pictures of her two kids. She wanted to see what I thought, she wanted to see the look on my face as I browsed through minor details of her life, the small trivia that composes the bulk of our existences.
Her oldest daughter, all of ten years old, is the spitting image of her, a miniature version, the face, the oblong eyes, the blissful Mona Lisa expression, a serene variation on the Faraway Look In The Eye...
The younger girl, a toddler, giggles with dimpled babyface cheeks and shares the eyes, the almond-shaped, seemingly all-knowing stare, and when I point this out she blushes and laughs, for it seems like she longs to share this with others but cannot find anyone who will pay even the remotest amount of attention.
She told me she wanted to set up a game that we could play, when she is bored and done with her duties but forced to stick around while she waits for her carpool to finish up. She sits in my office and watches me move the mouse and cut and paste and burn and click and drop.
I am good at conversation, I treat it like the finest of arts, and I can do my chores while asking her questions, expressing interest, picking her brain and trying to find out more, treating her like an enigmatic puzzle that I am compelled to solve, prying politely and making small punctuation points in my speech...
She has a longing in her eyes, an ache to be understood, appreciated, heard... it is the longing of all women, to be loved and also admired, to be needed and considered, to have a reason for hanging out way too long, a purpose for the heavy sighs and the deep breaths...
Girls like me because I listen. They like me because I will not try to solve their problems for them. I let them vent, I cast no judgement, because I know that even if I offer my advice, my opinion, they'd rather have someone hear them out than have someone fix their flaws. I offer up a pure love, one rooted in compassion and sympathy, not desire or lust or even a sense of entitlement...
I only want to help. How can I help?
By being me, by being concerned with what someone else needs as opposed to what I want.
Today the weather is grey, and the temperature is cool, but there is blinding sunshine inside my mind, to temper the sorrow that overlooks tomorrow's horizon, from sunrise to sunset...
Her oldest daughter, all of ten years old, is the spitting image of her, a miniature version, the face, the oblong eyes, the blissful Mona Lisa expression, a serene variation on the Faraway Look In The Eye...
The younger girl, a toddler, giggles with dimpled babyface cheeks and shares the eyes, the almond-shaped, seemingly all-knowing stare, and when I point this out she blushes and laughs, for it seems like she longs to share this with others but cannot find anyone who will pay even the remotest amount of attention.
She told me she wanted to set up a game that we could play, when she is bored and done with her duties but forced to stick around while she waits for her carpool to finish up. She sits in my office and watches me move the mouse and cut and paste and burn and click and drop.
I am good at conversation, I treat it like the finest of arts, and I can do my chores while asking her questions, expressing interest, picking her brain and trying to find out more, treating her like an enigmatic puzzle that I am compelled to solve, prying politely and making small punctuation points in my speech...
She has a longing in her eyes, an ache to be understood, appreciated, heard... it is the longing of all women, to be loved and also admired, to be needed and considered, to have a reason for hanging out way too long, a purpose for the heavy sighs and the deep breaths...
Girls like me because I listen. They like me because I will not try to solve their problems for them. I let them vent, I cast no judgement, because I know that even if I offer my advice, my opinion, they'd rather have someone hear them out than have someone fix their flaws. I offer up a pure love, one rooted in compassion and sympathy, not desire or lust or even a sense of entitlement...
I only want to help. How can I help?
By being me, by being concerned with what someone else needs as opposed to what I want.
Today the weather is grey, and the temperature is cool, but there is blinding sunshine inside my mind, to temper the sorrow that overlooks tomorrow's horizon, from sunrise to sunset...
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
DARK EASTER
The news and current events and recent incidents in my life have me in a peaceful state of soul but macabre state of mind.
Is that even possible, to be at peace in spirit and also to be wallowing in the black recesses of the brain?
Yes, say I.
I'm not thrashing about in the back of my psyche-- I'm content to let my mind wander into awful, horrific possibilities. I'm not in any pain-- rather, I'm numb.
I keep hearing about this Terri Schiavo, and how a bunch of people who don't even know her want to prop her up and parade her around, like it was the third movie in the highly lucrative Weekend At Bernie's franchise. And I'm totally shocked that, given the simpering glad-handedness that this country seems to be embracing, the courts haven't given in, despite President George W. Nixon trying his darnedest to interfere with the very sanctimonies that he has earlier tried to defend.
I hate to say it, but I hope they let her husband, who has suffered through all of this, smother her with a pillow, like The Chief did to MacMurphy in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. Not because I'm a cold-hearted sadist, but because she has been dead all of this time and nothing will bring her back.
If these idiots who are protesting and duct-taping their mouths with the word LIFE scrawled across it are so fucking fond of this poor vegetable, then why don't they pool their church-tithing money together and erect some sort of statue? It'll last longer, and maybe they can capture the dazed, soulless stare on Shiavo's face in bronze, for all posterity... that is, if they really give a fuck about her in the first place.
On a darker note...
Every time I hear about school shootings, I end up sympathizing (at first) with the shooter. Yes, it sucks, it's sick, and it's wrong. But the reason why I identify with the shooters, and not the victims, is because I was this close to being a school shooter myself. The only things that spared my fate were (1) not having the balls to get a gun, and (2) the fact that some girls thought I was cute.
However, I loathed myself enough to wish death and mayhem upon my classmates at one time.
It was relatively easy for me to get access to a gun when I was a kid. I grew up in the 'hood, where obtaining weapons was easier than getting liquor or drugs. Thankfully, I never went down that route.
Reading up on the details of the shootings in Minnesota, I thought of (uh-oh, say those who feel it coming) some song lyrics.
There's a song by a band whose names rhymes with Dove, recorded in the '60's, and the lyrics never made much sense to me, despite my fondness for the tune in question. It's called "Live And Let Live" and the person who wrote the song explained the lyrics like this:
"We were in the studio. I passed out, slobbered on my pants, and woke up. It had crystallized. I wrote about it."
That's all he offered in the way of a dissertation.
The lyrics go like this (please bear with me):
Oh the snot has caked against my pants
It has turned into crystal
There's a bluebird sitting on a branch
I guess I'll take my pistol
I've got it in my hand
Because he's on my land
And so the story ended
Do you know it oh so well
But should you need, I'll tell you
The end end end end end end end end
And...
So far, nothing relevant to the topic I've chosen, right? Read on:
Yes I see you sitting on the couch
I recognize your artillery
I have seen you many times before
Once when I was an Indian
And I was on my land
Why can't you understand?
The shooter was a Native-American, and the shootings were on a reservation. I imagined that the shooter, after killing his policeman grandfather and taking the car and the guns, was thinking these types of things in his mind.
I guess I'll take my pistol
I've got it in my hand
Because he's on my land
Why can't you understand?
The shooter admired Nazism, but he also was proud of being a Native-American. The kid was plain confused. Just look at his picture in the papers-- does that look like the face of a killer?
Evidently, yes.
Of course, my initial sympathy turns to contempt, as I realize that not everyone in this kid's position has to do what he did. The title of the song "Live And Let Live" should've been this kid's motto, but instead he chose to embrace destruction.
He made a choice, and even if he was deemed too young to make choices, he made one anyway. It was a really really bad choice.
More lyrics from that song:
Served my time
Served it well
You made my soul
a cell
Write the rules
In the sky
Then ask your leaders
Why?
No good in asking our leaders "why", because they have no answers. They'd rather start wars and try to pass legislation to let drooling invalids linger on. They'd rather tell gay couples what they can or cannot do with their lives while insisting that states have the rights to pass the laws they want to pass.
They write the rules in the sky, while they stand on someone else's land, and they wonder why a young Indian boy with his soul in a cell has taken his pistol in hand, with snot caked on his pants as he wakes from a delirious dream...
Yes, it's a stretch, connecting Bummer Of Love sentiments with mass murder, but I am only following my guts here.
I cannot divorce myself from my bleak impulses. Yesterday, after "taking out the trash", I went to a friend's blog and read someone's comment that was directed to me. It was in reference to a movie about the Old West starring the heartthrob star of Pirates Of The Carribbean. The commenter called me out by name and ranted about how they hated movies about Indians calling the Western settlers by a certain epithet.
Notice the Native-American connotations...
Of course, I responded in an evil manner... then I tried to post again and apologize for my sentiments. My apology sounded less than sincere. I was suspecting that the poster was none other than my "pal", the one whose picture is posted on the old blog URL.
I try and I try, but the evil is inside of me. It's inside of all of us, to varying degrees. It was inside the mind of a teenage boy who acted upon it. It is in the minds of the world leaders who appoint people like Paul Wolfowitz to head the World Bank. And the millions who support our leaders as they bomb women and children into oblivion? They support evil indirectly. The blood is not on their hands, because if it were then maybe they'd think twice about blowing the cradle of civilization back to Kingdom Come.
No, those who voted for President George W. Nixon can sleep at nights, knowing that they don't have to witness the horror of military occupation, children being mowed down by transportation vehicles who cannot afford to stop lest they discover that the child running towards their truck is carrying a bomb, homes being raided in a search for "weapons of mass destruction" that have never turned up...
I grew up in a city where the cops wouldn't come into the housing projects because the gangsters who lived there would shoot out the lights and snipe the pigs one by one-- they had to send the CRASH unit into the Pacoima projects instead.
I grew up in a town where I saw people beaten to a pulp almost weekly in front of the bar next to my grandfather's house; where girls gave up the pussy for crack and junkies aching for a fix went up in flames in the backseat of a car; where my uncle died of a stab wound in front of his own house, after the paramedics took an hour and a half to get to him...
I feel like I grew up in a war zone. It has tainted me.
I have come to conclude that this nation is the real weapon of mass destruction. We are the destroyers, the "stupid fucking white men" (among other colors) who rape and pillage the earth time and time again.
This will all pass, to be sure, but it leaves me with little hope.
Luckily, I believe in hope. Luckily, I'm a naive dreamer who sees the silver lining in the dark cloud. In fact, that aphoristic cloud is symbolic of my very nature: darkness surrounded by a sheen of light. They co-exist, and they resemble a sort-of Marxist contradiction where two opposites cannot thrive without the other.
The temptation to give into negativity wouldn't be such a burden if it weren't for the fact that, sometimes, we humans get satisfaction out of being cruel, mean, and hostile. One minute I can be loving and giving, and the next minute I want to make someone pay for perceived slights.
All that must change. In the past, I used humor to balance my hate and anger, but I guess I haven't been very humorous lately. Fortunately, my old friend J, whom I love more than life and who has known me since we were both toothless second-graders, told me to watch Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back for some perspective on my recent blog woes. There was one scene in particular that she wanted me to watch, and sure enough it made me burst into uncontrollable laughter, the kind of laughter that I often employ in self-defense, against the horrors of The Modern Age.
All I got to say is: "ALL YOU MOTHERFUCKERS ARE GONNA PAY! YOU ARE THE ONES WHO ARE THE BALL-LICKERS!!"
Thanks, J. That movie made me chuckle. I'm gonna watch it again tonight.
Maybe Easter won't be so dark after all. Hell, maybe I'll even rent The Passion Of The Christ and take some of Bill's Window Pane acid to pass the time.
Is that even possible, to be at peace in spirit and also to be wallowing in the black recesses of the brain?
Yes, say I.
I'm not thrashing about in the back of my psyche-- I'm content to let my mind wander into awful, horrific possibilities. I'm not in any pain-- rather, I'm numb.
I keep hearing about this Terri Schiavo, and how a bunch of people who don't even know her want to prop her up and parade her around, like it was the third movie in the highly lucrative Weekend At Bernie's franchise. And I'm totally shocked that, given the simpering glad-handedness that this country seems to be embracing, the courts haven't given in, despite President George W. Nixon trying his darnedest to interfere with the very sanctimonies that he has earlier tried to defend.
I hate to say it, but I hope they let her husband, who has suffered through all of this, smother her with a pillow, like The Chief did to MacMurphy in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. Not because I'm a cold-hearted sadist, but because she has been dead all of this time and nothing will bring her back.
If these idiots who are protesting and duct-taping their mouths with the word LIFE scrawled across it are so fucking fond of this poor vegetable, then why don't they pool their church-tithing money together and erect some sort of statue? It'll last longer, and maybe they can capture the dazed, soulless stare on Shiavo's face in bronze, for all posterity... that is, if they really give a fuck about her in the first place.
On a darker note...
Every time I hear about school shootings, I end up sympathizing (at first) with the shooter. Yes, it sucks, it's sick, and it's wrong. But the reason why I identify with the shooters, and not the victims, is because I was this close to being a school shooter myself. The only things that spared my fate were (1) not having the balls to get a gun, and (2) the fact that some girls thought I was cute.
However, I loathed myself enough to wish death and mayhem upon my classmates at one time.
It was relatively easy for me to get access to a gun when I was a kid. I grew up in the 'hood, where obtaining weapons was easier than getting liquor or drugs. Thankfully, I never went down that route.
Reading up on the details of the shootings in Minnesota, I thought of (uh-oh, say those who feel it coming) some song lyrics.
There's a song by a band whose names rhymes with Dove, recorded in the '60's, and the lyrics never made much sense to me, despite my fondness for the tune in question. It's called "Live And Let Live" and the person who wrote the song explained the lyrics like this:
"We were in the studio. I passed out, slobbered on my pants, and woke up. It had crystallized. I wrote about it."
That's all he offered in the way of a dissertation.
The lyrics go like this (please bear with me):
Oh the snot has caked against my pants
It has turned into crystal
There's a bluebird sitting on a branch
I guess I'll take my pistol
I've got it in my hand
Because he's on my land
And so the story ended
Do you know it oh so well
But should you need, I'll tell you
The end end end end end end end end
And...
So far, nothing relevant to the topic I've chosen, right? Read on:
Yes I see you sitting on the couch
I recognize your artillery
I have seen you many times before
Once when I was an Indian
And I was on my land
Why can't you understand?
The shooter was a Native-American, and the shootings were on a reservation. I imagined that the shooter, after killing his policeman grandfather and taking the car and the guns, was thinking these types of things in his mind.
I guess I'll take my pistol
I've got it in my hand
Because he's on my land
Why can't you understand?
The shooter admired Nazism, but he also was proud of being a Native-American. The kid was plain confused. Just look at his picture in the papers-- does that look like the face of a killer?
Evidently, yes.
Of course, my initial sympathy turns to contempt, as I realize that not everyone in this kid's position has to do what he did. The title of the song "Live And Let Live" should've been this kid's motto, but instead he chose to embrace destruction.
He made a choice, and even if he was deemed too young to make choices, he made one anyway. It was a really really bad choice.
More lyrics from that song:
Served my time
Served it well
You made my soul
a cell
Write the rules
In the sky
Then ask your leaders
Why?
No good in asking our leaders "why", because they have no answers. They'd rather start wars and try to pass legislation to let drooling invalids linger on. They'd rather tell gay couples what they can or cannot do with their lives while insisting that states have the rights to pass the laws they want to pass.
They write the rules in the sky, while they stand on someone else's land, and they wonder why a young Indian boy with his soul in a cell has taken his pistol in hand, with snot caked on his pants as he wakes from a delirious dream...
Yes, it's a stretch, connecting Bummer Of Love sentiments with mass murder, but I am only following my guts here.
I cannot divorce myself from my bleak impulses. Yesterday, after "taking out the trash", I went to a friend's blog and read someone's comment that was directed to me. It was in reference to a movie about the Old West starring the heartthrob star of Pirates Of The Carribbean. The commenter called me out by name and ranted about how they hated movies about Indians calling the Western settlers by a certain epithet.
Notice the Native-American connotations...
Of course, I responded in an evil manner... then I tried to post again and apologize for my sentiments. My apology sounded less than sincere. I was suspecting that the poster was none other than my "pal", the one whose picture is posted on the old blog URL.
I try and I try, but the evil is inside of me. It's inside of all of us, to varying degrees. It was inside the mind of a teenage boy who acted upon it. It is in the minds of the world leaders who appoint people like Paul Wolfowitz to head the World Bank. And the millions who support our leaders as they bomb women and children into oblivion? They support evil indirectly. The blood is not on their hands, because if it were then maybe they'd think twice about blowing the cradle of civilization back to Kingdom Come.
No, those who voted for President George W. Nixon can sleep at nights, knowing that they don't have to witness the horror of military occupation, children being mowed down by transportation vehicles who cannot afford to stop lest they discover that the child running towards their truck is carrying a bomb, homes being raided in a search for "weapons of mass destruction" that have never turned up...
I grew up in a city where the cops wouldn't come into the housing projects because the gangsters who lived there would shoot out the lights and snipe the pigs one by one-- they had to send the CRASH unit into the Pacoima projects instead.
I grew up in a town where I saw people beaten to a pulp almost weekly in front of the bar next to my grandfather's house; where girls gave up the pussy for crack and junkies aching for a fix went up in flames in the backseat of a car; where my uncle died of a stab wound in front of his own house, after the paramedics took an hour and a half to get to him...
I feel like I grew up in a war zone. It has tainted me.
I have come to conclude that this nation is the real weapon of mass destruction. We are the destroyers, the "stupid fucking white men" (among other colors) who rape and pillage the earth time and time again.
This will all pass, to be sure, but it leaves me with little hope.
Luckily, I believe in hope. Luckily, I'm a naive dreamer who sees the silver lining in the dark cloud. In fact, that aphoristic cloud is symbolic of my very nature: darkness surrounded by a sheen of light. They co-exist, and they resemble a sort-of Marxist contradiction where two opposites cannot thrive without the other.
The temptation to give into negativity wouldn't be such a burden if it weren't for the fact that, sometimes, we humans get satisfaction out of being cruel, mean, and hostile. One minute I can be loving and giving, and the next minute I want to make someone pay for perceived slights.
All that must change. In the past, I used humor to balance my hate and anger, but I guess I haven't been very humorous lately. Fortunately, my old friend J, whom I love more than life and who has known me since we were both toothless second-graders, told me to watch Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back for some perspective on my recent blog woes. There was one scene in particular that she wanted me to watch, and sure enough it made me burst into uncontrollable laughter, the kind of laughter that I often employ in self-defense, against the horrors of The Modern Age.
All I got to say is: "ALL YOU MOTHERFUCKERS ARE GONNA PAY! YOU ARE THE ONES WHO ARE THE BALL-LICKERS!!"
Thanks, J. That movie made me chuckle. I'm gonna watch it again tonight.
Maybe Easter won't be so dark after all. Hell, maybe I'll even rent The Passion Of The Christ and take some of Bill's Window Pane acid to pass the time.
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
WITH THE FIRST OF SPRING...
...there comes renewal.
So, what have I learned?
First of all, I have learned that karma is a bitch. The irony that I had an abusive stalker on my hands is not lost on me; I know that I've been a pest to many people online in the past, and it was my turn to feel the heat. Most likely, this asshole won't give up, and will keep looking for me. But for now, things are quite chill.
Second of all, I've learned that I just have too much time on my hands here at work. They like me here, and lately I've been stepping up and doing some actual work. It makes the time go by faster. And, it makes me less inclined to start fights online with strangers.
Third of all, I've come to see that a lot of my anger and rage is misdirected. When I started blogging at the end of 2002, I was about to be laid-off and my prospects were lookng dim. Writing was a way for me to navigate through the horror of being jobless and homeless. I was at the library every day, spending half an hour on job hunting and a full hour on blogging.
The name of my blog back then was the name of this blog right now. I changed it to the name you've all come to know and, er, love shortly afterwards. I guess I've come full circle, no?
I had to make some changes, to prevent The Dickhead from trying to Google or find this blog. I will spend much time going back into the Archives and changing things around, so as not to come up in a search. I think I've been pretty thorough, but we'll see. If the Comments start filling up at an unnatural rate, I'll know that it's time to split once again.
I got over the whole notion of "running away" from this challenge long ago. I should run away more often, actually-- it's better for my health. Not that I am afraid of anything-- rather, I should be afraid of things more, because I am constantly teetering between bravery and stupidity. I tread that fine line and then I wonder why I get into the situations that I do.
I am mellowing out, and life is good. Yesterday was a reminder that I started this beef, and I had to end it once and for all. Some may take issue with what I've left on the old blog, but as much as I want to make a clean break, I also cannot deny my need for dramatic closure.
It's like The Karate Kid: When Mr. Miyagi tells Daniel LaRusso that he did his best in the climactic tournament, Daniel tells Mr. Miyagi that he will never find balance if he knows that he didn't at least try to comeback from his injury at the hands of the dreaded Cobra Kai karate troupe. "Every time I see those guys, I'm going to know that they got the best of me," he said, as Mr. Miyagi slapped his hands together and started rubbing...
I know I don't need to fight or prove anything, but at the same time I cannot back down from certain challenges. It's very male of me, I know, but then again... I am a man.
Besides, it's not like this whole deal was going to go the distance. Dude was just as much at fault as I was, but he just wouldn't let it go. However, he doesn't want to meet me face-to-face, and I know this. So, this is just how it's going to have to be from now on.
So, what have I learned?
I've learned that I have a lot to learn.
I'm sorry if y'all saw the ugly side, but it could always be uglier, and I'm stopping it right here before it gets to that phase.
Anyway, I gotta tend to the duties. I might blog later, but I think I'll wait until tomorrow, when I have a real opportunity to start with a "clean slate".
PEACE
So, what have I learned?
First of all, I have learned that karma is a bitch. The irony that I had an abusive stalker on my hands is not lost on me; I know that I've been a pest to many people online in the past, and it was my turn to feel the heat. Most likely, this asshole won't give up, and will keep looking for me. But for now, things are quite chill.
Second of all, I've learned that I just have too much time on my hands here at work. They like me here, and lately I've been stepping up and doing some actual work. It makes the time go by faster. And, it makes me less inclined to start fights online with strangers.
Third of all, I've come to see that a lot of my anger and rage is misdirected. When I started blogging at the end of 2002, I was about to be laid-off and my prospects were lookng dim. Writing was a way for me to navigate through the horror of being jobless and homeless. I was at the library every day, spending half an hour on job hunting and a full hour on blogging.
The name of my blog back then was the name of this blog right now. I changed it to the name you've all come to know and, er, love shortly afterwards. I guess I've come full circle, no?
I had to make some changes, to prevent The Dickhead from trying to Google or find this blog. I will spend much time going back into the Archives and changing things around, so as not to come up in a search. I think I've been pretty thorough, but we'll see. If the Comments start filling up at an unnatural rate, I'll know that it's time to split once again.
I got over the whole notion of "running away" from this challenge long ago. I should run away more often, actually-- it's better for my health. Not that I am afraid of anything-- rather, I should be afraid of things more, because I am constantly teetering between bravery and stupidity. I tread that fine line and then I wonder why I get into the situations that I do.
I am mellowing out, and life is good. Yesterday was a reminder that I started this beef, and I had to end it once and for all. Some may take issue with what I've left on the old blog, but as much as I want to make a clean break, I also cannot deny my need for dramatic closure.
It's like The Karate Kid: When Mr. Miyagi tells Daniel LaRusso that he did his best in the climactic tournament, Daniel tells Mr. Miyagi that he will never find balance if he knows that he didn't at least try to comeback from his injury at the hands of the dreaded Cobra Kai karate troupe. "Every time I see those guys, I'm going to know that they got the best of me," he said, as Mr. Miyagi slapped his hands together and started rubbing...
I know I don't need to fight or prove anything, but at the same time I cannot back down from certain challenges. It's very male of me, I know, but then again... I am a man.
Besides, it's not like this whole deal was going to go the distance. Dude was just as much at fault as I was, but he just wouldn't let it go. However, he doesn't want to meet me face-to-face, and I know this. So, this is just how it's going to have to be from now on.
So, what have I learned?
I've learned that I have a lot to learn.
I'm sorry if y'all saw the ugly side, but it could always be uglier, and I'm stopping it right here before it gets to that phase.
Anyway, I gotta tend to the duties. I might blog later, but I think I'll wait until tomorrow, when I have a real opportunity to start with a "clean slate".
PEACE
Monday, March 21, 2005
DAMAGE CONTROL
Okay, enough is enough!
I can't believe I actually have to take time out of my busy schedule to sift throguh all of this BS!
Tyrone-- while I admire your efforts to defend me, you're not helping any by egging this loser on. I don't want to end up like you, without a job. I'm changing the password and revoking your blog priveleges for a spell. Thanks for calling me, though-- I wouldn't have found out about it until it was too late.
L-- same to you, kid. This loser is a waste of time. I haven't done anything to him and he keeps coming back at me. I hope you and Ty don't decide to take this into your own hands, because it's not worth it.
G______-- I sent an e-mail to my bosses, warning them of your plans. But I have to wonder aloud, since I have the opportunity to do so: what is your major malfunction?
You claim to make all this money and have such a great life. Why, then, are you attempting to go after someone like me? Sounds to me like you are just a broke loser with too much time on his hands.
You say the photo that Ty posted is not you. If it's not you, then why get upset? Besides, Ty tells me he found the photo online-- that means it's already been in the public domain for years. Just like when I posted your info online on CL last year: if it's not your real information then what do you care? This leads me to believe that you ARE named S____ E_______, and you DO look like a redheaded stepchild.
Sorry, I just had to add that one, considering how much effort you put into slandering me.
Doesn't it ever dawn on you that you are spending all this time on a total stranger? Doesn't it dawn on you that you make yourself look like an idiot every time you post? The people who like my blog only post comments every once in a while-- you post like 20 in one hour! Get a life, dude...
Speaking of which: I'm leaving the comments up, because I want my bosses to see that it's YOU, and not me, who's starting beef this time. I haven't been to CL in all the this time, and what I post on my blog when I'm elsewhere is of no concern to my bosses, who think you are unstable and potentially dangerous. Once they see that picture of you, though, they will realize (like me) that you are a redheaded clown.
I can't tell Ty and L what to do, so if they are planning on going to CL to rake your name through the mud, you have no one to blame but yourself, S____. You said it yourself on this blog a few weeks back: "Don't f*** with strangers"... well, if you're messsing with Tyrone and L., then you messed with the wrong strangers. I can't call them off if they decide to go ahead with something. I don't approve of what they did here, but then again you haven't exactly let it go either.
I mean, how much of an inferiority complex do you have? I gave up on you a long time ago, S____, but you keep on coming with it. Why? What are you going to 'win' in this battle? Is there some kind of King Of The Internet title that I never heard of? For a guy who writes reviews of Star Wars books, maybe that's the best thing you can hope for-- to "win" a battle online, where everyone is making up stuff.
Finally, I hope you learn something valuable from this, S____ E_______. I hope you learn that everything has consequences. For me, the consequence was that I put my co-workers in danger by battling with a orange-haired glasses-wearing nerd like you on the 'Net. And for you, the consequences are that you pissed off my friends and family, and as much as I tell them to refrain from their schemes, they don't listen to me. And now that they have that photo of you, I wish you the best of luck.
I'm washing my hands of this as of right now. And just to show that I'm a good sport, I'll take down that ugly ass picture of you that Tyrone posted.
I can't believe I actually have to take time out of my busy schedule to sift throguh all of this BS!
Tyrone-- while I admire your efforts to defend me, you're not helping any by egging this loser on. I don't want to end up like you, without a job. I'm changing the password and revoking your blog priveleges for a spell. Thanks for calling me, though-- I wouldn't have found out about it until it was too late.
L-- same to you, kid. This loser is a waste of time. I haven't done anything to him and he keeps coming back at me. I hope you and Ty don't decide to take this into your own hands, because it's not worth it.
G______-- I sent an e-mail to my bosses, warning them of your plans. But I have to wonder aloud, since I have the opportunity to do so: what is your major malfunction?
You claim to make all this money and have such a great life. Why, then, are you attempting to go after someone like me? Sounds to me like you are just a broke loser with too much time on his hands.
You say the photo that Ty posted is not you. If it's not you, then why get upset? Besides, Ty tells me he found the photo online-- that means it's already been in the public domain for years. Just like when I posted your info online on CL last year: if it's not your real information then what do you care? This leads me to believe that you ARE named S____ E_______, and you DO look like a redheaded stepchild.
Sorry, I just had to add that one, considering how much effort you put into slandering me.
Doesn't it ever dawn on you that you are spending all this time on a total stranger? Doesn't it dawn on you that you make yourself look like an idiot every time you post? The people who like my blog only post comments every once in a while-- you post like 20 in one hour! Get a life, dude...
Speaking of which: I'm leaving the comments up, because I want my bosses to see that it's YOU, and not me, who's starting beef this time. I haven't been to CL in all the this time, and what I post on my blog when I'm elsewhere is of no concern to my bosses, who think you are unstable and potentially dangerous. Once they see that picture of you, though, they will realize (like me) that you are a redheaded clown.
I can't tell Ty and L what to do, so if they are planning on going to CL to rake your name through the mud, you have no one to blame but yourself, S____. You said it yourself on this blog a few weeks back: "Don't f*** with strangers"... well, if you're messsing with Tyrone and L., then you messed with the wrong strangers. I can't call them off if they decide to go ahead with something. I don't approve of what they did here, but then again you haven't exactly let it go either.
I mean, how much of an inferiority complex do you have? I gave up on you a long time ago, S____, but you keep on coming with it. Why? What are you going to 'win' in this battle? Is there some kind of King Of The Internet title that I never heard of? For a guy who writes reviews of Star Wars books, maybe that's the best thing you can hope for-- to "win" a battle online, where everyone is making up stuff.
Finally, I hope you learn something valuable from this, S____ E_______. I hope you learn that everything has consequences. For me, the consequence was that I put my co-workers in danger by battling with a orange-haired glasses-wearing nerd like you on the 'Net. And for you, the consequences are that you pissed off my friends and family, and as much as I tell them to refrain from their schemes, they don't listen to me. And now that they have that photo of you, I wish you the best of luck.
I'm washing my hands of this as of right now. And just to show that I'm a good sport, I'll take down that ugly ass picture of you that Tyrone posted.
A CONVERSATION WITH THE DARK SIDE OF MY SOUL
This weekend, I took some time out to thank God.
Say what?
You heard me.
James, you're not... you're not a Christian, are you?
Fuck no.
Then, why are you thanking God?
Because who else can I thank? My family? They all believe in God, way more than I ever will. They go to church every Sunday, read the Bible once a week, and pray before every meal. Any thanks I give to my family goes to God by proxy.
Wait a minute, back up here-- why are you thanking God in the first place?
I woke up Sunday morning and realized that, all throughout my life, I have been placed in harm's way by many factors (myself, the actions of others, bureaucracy, etc) and every time I have managed to come out of it with something I can use, something that helped me later on down the line. And lately, things have been good for me: getting the car, working on creative projects, enjoying my work, living in this quiet part of the city... I also have my health, my friends, and my family supporting me and making me feel welcome. And who do I have to thank for that? Me? No way, I'm my own worst enemy.
So you are thanking God? That's pathetic.
Why not? I spend more time cursing God than thanking God. I figure it this way: I owe God some thanks, for all the times I told God that he/she/it doesn't exist, for all the moments when I turned my back on what God wanted me to do, for all the occasions where I was sure that there is no God...
You sound like a fool.
I am. What else is new? I was a fool when I told God to shove it, and I'm a fool to thank God for everything I have. No matter what I do, I'm a fool, and I'm happy to be a fool, if it means being me and not you.
What do you have against me, James?
I don't have anything against you. You are my darkest impulses, you represent all that is bleak and hopeless... and yet I know that is the role you must play. I don't begrudge you for doing your job. But don't you see how little it matters what you think of me? If I cared about looking foolish, I would give up on art and settle for a good-paying, soul-sucking job that left me feeling empty and vacant by day's end. But do you realize how happy I've been ever since I got laid off from the old company? I mean, the first five months were an all-time low, but I rebounded, and it all got better because I refused to lay down and let it all wash over me. And now, I'm very happy.
But that happiness will not last. And why are you thanking God anyway? You should be thanking yourself.
Because I always thank myself. I have no problem giving myself credit for things I've done. Shit, I give myself credit for things I haven't done. I'm a narcissist, this is my nature. I figure, this time I'll give someone or something else the credit for the bliss I have achieved. Granted, my life isn't perfect, but it is managable and tolerable and I am not upset with my station in the world.
So, why thank God? Why not Allah, or Buddha, or Satan? Why not Zeus? Why God?
God is all of those things. God is everything we humans were never meant to figure out. John Lennon once sang, "God is a concept by which we measure our pain." Alfred Jarry once said, "God is the tangential point between zero and infinity." Whatever we theorize about God-- that he exists, that he does not exist, that he is dead, that he is a sadist, that he is a monster, that we can or cannot know his ways, that he is a man or a woman, that he is asexual, that God is perfect --we are far from the mark always. It's a useless preoccupation to ponder the secrets of God.
If it's useless to ponder God's secrets, then what are you doing with this blog?
Participating in a useless exercise. Not everything we do in our lives must be riddled with meaning.
So, you consider giving praise to God meaningless?
Yes.
Yes?
Yes.
I don't understand you at all, James.
Don't try. You and your prejudices against religion will only make you go nuts over it. I have said before that I am not religious, because religion has nothing to do with our relationship to what is known as God. I also said before that I am not irreligious either, because I see zealotry and bias in the agnostic/atheistic community that rivals and sometimes surpasses the hate that so-called Christian groups espouse.
So where do you stand?
I stand wherever my feet happen to be planted at the time. And right now, my feet are standing on the ground that God created. And when things in my life change, so does the ground beneath me. And right now, the ground beneath me is fine and sturdy. And all I'm doing is realizing that, in the past when my life has been this stable, I never ever say to God, "Thank you."
When's the last time you blasphemed against God?
Last month, during the heavy rains. Read my last entry for En Mass titled EVERYONE'S WORST NIGHTMAREto find out what caused me to curse God.
And the last time you thanked him?
At the end of last year, when I was hanging out with Eve and Bro Man. I had a good feeling, and it compelled me to thank God for re-establishing my ties with Eve.
It would really make you feel good to know that God really exists, wouldn't it?
Well, yeah... think about it. If there is a God, then he'd be the coolest thing ever. He could make anything happen. He could create or destroy something with the snap of his fingers. He could perform the best magic tricks ever. But the problem is, everyone is afraid of him. And I can't understand that. The rest of the world hates and fears him. Even the ones who claim they follow him do so out of fear of retribution. Luckily, I got over all of that years ago. Now, I see my relationship with God as something that only he and I are in on. I can say whatever I want to him, and he can do whatever he wants to do to me.
So you have no fears of being struck down by lightning?
Take a look at the Bible sometime. Look at the people God was friends with: King David, a man who sent his friend Uriah out to the front lines of battle so that he could fuck his wife Bathsheba; Moses, a dude who grew up thinking he was Egyptian, only to go on to lead the tribe of Israel our of slavery... and to be denied entrance into the Promised Land because he lost his cool one day in the desert; Paul, formerly known as Saul The Christian-hating Roman, who was blinded and converted to Christianity and spent the rest of his days writing angry letters to any church that would read them...
Your point is?
These people are NOT saints. Some of them were pure scum, to be sure. Therefore, God doesn't seem to be a picky entity. He doesn't love me or hate me-- he has to respect the fact that I don't kiss his ass, but he also wishes that I'd give him a little credit just once in a while.
Do you talk to God?
All the time.
What do you say to God?
I usually tell him the latest jokes that I've heard.
And what does he tell you?
He doesn't "tell" me anything. Instead, he inspires me. He will reveal a beautiful sunny day to me as I'm driving, or he'll illuminate one note in a song that I like, or he'll cast the light on a woman in such a way that I see into her soul and discover what it is that she feels.
You're crazy.
What else is new? Tell me something I don't already know.
I hate to rain on your parade, James, but there is no God. He is an invention of men, used to control other men, and religion is outdated-- it has no relevance.
I agree with you.
You're just saying that to spite me.
Yes, that's true. That's why I'm agreeing with you-- to spite you.
That's not very Christan of you.
And it's not very un-Christian of you to be telling me how to live my life, is it? And as for being Christian.. fuck being a Christian! What about being who I am?
(noticeable silence)
I thought so. Do me a favor, Dark Side of the Soul: next time you want to make me feel bad for feeling good, come prepared with some ammo. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go outside and smoke a cigarette and lust after nubile young ladies with my sinful eyes... and God is going to know what I'm doing, and I'm the one who will deal with the repercussions, if there are any. Got it?
Got it.
I knew you'd understand. Care to join me?
I thought you'd never ask.
Say what?
You heard me.
James, you're not... you're not a Christian, are you?
Fuck no.
Then, why are you thanking God?
Because who else can I thank? My family? They all believe in God, way more than I ever will. They go to church every Sunday, read the Bible once a week, and pray before every meal. Any thanks I give to my family goes to God by proxy.
Wait a minute, back up here-- why are you thanking God in the first place?
I woke up Sunday morning and realized that, all throughout my life, I have been placed in harm's way by many factors (myself, the actions of others, bureaucracy, etc) and every time I have managed to come out of it with something I can use, something that helped me later on down the line. And lately, things have been good for me: getting the car, working on creative projects, enjoying my work, living in this quiet part of the city... I also have my health, my friends, and my family supporting me and making me feel welcome. And who do I have to thank for that? Me? No way, I'm my own worst enemy.
So you are thanking God? That's pathetic.
Why not? I spend more time cursing God than thanking God. I figure it this way: I owe God some thanks, for all the times I told God that he/she/it doesn't exist, for all the moments when I turned my back on what God wanted me to do, for all the occasions where I was sure that there is no God...
You sound like a fool.
I am. What else is new? I was a fool when I told God to shove it, and I'm a fool to thank God for everything I have. No matter what I do, I'm a fool, and I'm happy to be a fool, if it means being me and not you.
What do you have against me, James?
I don't have anything against you. You are my darkest impulses, you represent all that is bleak and hopeless... and yet I know that is the role you must play. I don't begrudge you for doing your job. But don't you see how little it matters what you think of me? If I cared about looking foolish, I would give up on art and settle for a good-paying, soul-sucking job that left me feeling empty and vacant by day's end. But do you realize how happy I've been ever since I got laid off from the old company? I mean, the first five months were an all-time low, but I rebounded, and it all got better because I refused to lay down and let it all wash over me. And now, I'm very happy.
But that happiness will not last. And why are you thanking God anyway? You should be thanking yourself.
Because I always thank myself. I have no problem giving myself credit for things I've done. Shit, I give myself credit for things I haven't done. I'm a narcissist, this is my nature. I figure, this time I'll give someone or something else the credit for the bliss I have achieved. Granted, my life isn't perfect, but it is managable and tolerable and I am not upset with my station in the world.
So, why thank God? Why not Allah, or Buddha, or Satan? Why not Zeus? Why God?
God is all of those things. God is everything we humans were never meant to figure out. John Lennon once sang, "God is a concept by which we measure our pain." Alfred Jarry once said, "God is the tangential point between zero and infinity." Whatever we theorize about God-- that he exists, that he does not exist, that he is dead, that he is a sadist, that he is a monster, that we can or cannot know his ways, that he is a man or a woman, that he is asexual, that God is perfect --we are far from the mark always. It's a useless preoccupation to ponder the secrets of God.
If it's useless to ponder God's secrets, then what are you doing with this blog?
Participating in a useless exercise. Not everything we do in our lives must be riddled with meaning.
So, you consider giving praise to God meaningless?
Yes.
Yes?
Yes.
I don't understand you at all, James.
Don't try. You and your prejudices against religion will only make you go nuts over it. I have said before that I am not religious, because religion has nothing to do with our relationship to what is known as God. I also said before that I am not irreligious either, because I see zealotry and bias in the agnostic/atheistic community that rivals and sometimes surpasses the hate that so-called Christian groups espouse.
So where do you stand?
I stand wherever my feet happen to be planted at the time. And right now, my feet are standing on the ground that God created. And when things in my life change, so does the ground beneath me. And right now, the ground beneath me is fine and sturdy. And all I'm doing is realizing that, in the past when my life has been this stable, I never ever say to God, "Thank you."
When's the last time you blasphemed against God?
Last month, during the heavy rains. Read my last entry for En Mass titled EVERYONE'S WORST NIGHTMAREto find out what caused me to curse God.
And the last time you thanked him?
At the end of last year, when I was hanging out with Eve and Bro Man. I had a good feeling, and it compelled me to thank God for re-establishing my ties with Eve.
It would really make you feel good to know that God really exists, wouldn't it?
Well, yeah... think about it. If there is a God, then he'd be the coolest thing ever. He could make anything happen. He could create or destroy something with the snap of his fingers. He could perform the best magic tricks ever. But the problem is, everyone is afraid of him. And I can't understand that. The rest of the world hates and fears him. Even the ones who claim they follow him do so out of fear of retribution. Luckily, I got over all of that years ago. Now, I see my relationship with God as something that only he and I are in on. I can say whatever I want to him, and he can do whatever he wants to do to me.
So you have no fears of being struck down by lightning?
Take a look at the Bible sometime. Look at the people God was friends with: King David, a man who sent his friend Uriah out to the front lines of battle so that he could fuck his wife Bathsheba; Moses, a dude who grew up thinking he was Egyptian, only to go on to lead the tribe of Israel our of slavery... and to be denied entrance into the Promised Land because he lost his cool one day in the desert; Paul, formerly known as Saul The Christian-hating Roman, who was blinded and converted to Christianity and spent the rest of his days writing angry letters to any church that would read them...
Your point is?
These people are NOT saints. Some of them were pure scum, to be sure. Therefore, God doesn't seem to be a picky entity. He doesn't love me or hate me-- he has to respect the fact that I don't kiss his ass, but he also wishes that I'd give him a little credit just once in a while.
Do you talk to God?
All the time.
What do you say to God?
I usually tell him the latest jokes that I've heard.
And what does he tell you?
He doesn't "tell" me anything. Instead, he inspires me. He will reveal a beautiful sunny day to me as I'm driving, or he'll illuminate one note in a song that I like, or he'll cast the light on a woman in such a way that I see into her soul and discover what it is that she feels.
You're crazy.
What else is new? Tell me something I don't already know.
I hate to rain on your parade, James, but there is no God. He is an invention of men, used to control other men, and religion is outdated-- it has no relevance.
I agree with you.
You're just saying that to spite me.
Yes, that's true. That's why I'm agreeing with you-- to spite you.
That's not very Christan of you.
And it's not very un-Christian of you to be telling me how to live my life, is it? And as for being Christian.. fuck being a Christian! What about being who I am?
(noticeable silence)
I thought so. Do me a favor, Dark Side of the Soul: next time you want to make me feel bad for feeling good, come prepared with some ammo. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go outside and smoke a cigarette and lust after nubile young ladies with my sinful eyes... and God is going to know what I'm doing, and I'm the one who will deal with the repercussions, if there are any. Got it?
Got it.
I knew you'd understand. Care to join me?
I thought you'd never ask.
Friday, March 18, 2005
"THE BOARDWALK BARKER" (chapter one, work in progress)
I'M STARTING AN ONLINE NOVEL. THIS IS CHAPTER ONE, "The Boardwalk Barker". THE NOVEL IS UNTITLED AS OF YET, AND I HAVE NO IDEA WHERE IT IS GOING.
Robert River sat down on his couch after a long but eventful day at work. As a sound engineer, he often needed at least one solid hour to "shake the audio out of his hair", as he liked to put it.
It wasn't so much the content that bothered him, the right-wing conservative lip service paid by every radio host who has a reputation and an agenda; no, it was more a matter of the actual frequencies each sound occupied in his inner ear after eight hours of multiple audio feeds being routed every which way. Even for a seasoned pro as himself, Robert sometimes got lost amid the channels, all of them turned on with volumes set at specific levels so that all the programming blended into one frenzied slushball of sonic sludge.
This week there was a guest host filling in for the usual right-wing political personality that Robert had come to kind of admire, in a sick and non-partisan way. Mark Rayburn knew that his chief engineer was "an unwashed pinko liberal Commie sympathizer"-- that was Rayburn's favorite way of teasing Robert whenever they had meetings concerning the show --but he respected Robert's work ethic, his knowledge of the studio craft, and his ability to keep cool under pressure. In live radio, things go terribly wrong at the turn of a moment, and Robert had passed the trial-by-fire phase with flying colors.
There was the time the ISDN unit dropped in the middle of a remote feed. Robert was back at the studio, monitoring the show from the control booth, while another, less-experienced engineer was at the remote site. Even when separated by a distance of 50 miles, Robert was able to tell the apprentice engineer, over the telephone, how to reconnect the ISDN to the receiving line. Luckily, the line had dropped during a commercial break, and by the time the break was done, the show was back up on the air, and no one in the audience knew any better.
That didn't stop Mark Rayburn from acknowledging Robert's technical prowess over the air. "I'd like to thank my engineer Robert River, who just saved us from pure embarrassment during the break. We owe you big, kid. Thanks again!"
So Robert took a liking to Rayburn, simply based on the man's mutual respect for him. And when Robert's friends scoffed at him for working for such a pillar of the Republican community, Robert took it with a grain of salt, adding:
"Hey, man, it's only entertainment!"
This week in particular, Rayburn was on vacation, and the guest host was none other than Daniel Lazarus, a former counsel to the Black Panther Party and self-described "card-carrying liberal" who changed horses midstream sometime in the '80's, embracing the conservative right and its ethos. Lazarus now spent his every waking moment trying to puncture the same political apparatus that he'd once had a hand in constructing.
Robert was less enamored of the guest host, because he couldn't invoke his motto of "just entertainment" to explain a man like Daniel Lazarus. The man seemed friendly enough, but there was an off-putting quality to Lazarus that Robert couldn't put his finger on for the life of him. Whereas Rayburn was self-effacing and blunt, Lazarus came off as glib, smug, the type of person who only cares about being on the winning side, regardless of principles.
All through the week, Lazarus was kind and polite to Robert, but it didn't make Robert feel any better. Whereas Rayburn was at least a human being beneath his rabid bulldog on-air veneer, Lazarus left him cold, almost inhuman. Robert didn't like it, and every day after work that week he felt like he was dirty, soiled by the bigotry and biases of someone who realized they didn't fit in with their chosen crowd and decided to see how the other half lived.
The other half seemed to be doing fine. Daniel Lazarus was married to a trophy wife, wrote books and toured the lecture circuit. He was well-respected amongst the right-wing politicos and talking media heads. Among the religious right, people saw Lazarus in the same way they view a recent convert: the story leading up to the "redemption and salvation" was more important than the values of a man who only admits he is wrong once so that he can continue thinking himself "right" in the future.
In Robert's mind, Mark Rayburn stood for something; Daniel Lazarus only stood for himself.
The final blow was when the show had ended on Friday. Lazarus' wife, dutiful and passive, stood waiting as he gathered his affects. Robert went to shake Lazarus' hand and wish him well.
"It was nice working with you, Mr. Lazarus," Robert said.
"Thanks, kid." That's what everyone called Robert: "kid". He looked like he was barely 18. It burned Robert up inside every time he heard it from someone.
Daniel Lazarus decided to ask the "kid" a question.
"Robert, would you like a copy of my latest book?"
"Excuse me?" Robert didn't quite grasp what Lazarus had asked him.
"I'm giving away promotional copies of my latest book, My Former Life As A Godless Heathen. Do you want one?"
"Sure, why not?"
Robert read books like crazy. It was well-known around the radio network that the twenty-something Robert was a "gutter intellectual", a low-rent version of Matt Damon's character in the movie Good Will Hunting: didn't go to college, didn't have a degree in engineering, and yet knew more about the world and current events than anyone else.
Robert often took offense to this view of him, because he surmised it for what it really was-- a convenient label to slap on him for those who judge other people based upon their resumes. Robert's teeth would grit together whenever he overheard someone say, "My, that Robert... so smart, for someone who didn't go to college... had he gone to graduate school he could be running this company by now... what a pity..."
However, he sometimes enjoyed being an underpaid employee who knew everything about his job (and everyone else's, for that matter). There was an underdog currency to his position. He was the one that tended to be underestimated by his superiors, with their degrees framed on the walls of their offices, meaningless pieces of textured paper that signified nothing except the willingness to jump through flaming hoops on cue.
Not everyone who went to college was incompetent, in Robert's mind, but he also knew that a certificate stating that someone completed four years of college did not mean that the person was especially smart or knowledgable about anything outside of the normal realms of experience. He stopped counting the number of times he'd saved his bosses hides for mistakes that not even the rawest rookie would make.
Because of his sober dedication to a job well-done, Robert's reputation for being a reader enhanced his overall standing in the company. And his reputation often foreshadowed him-- people knew him first and foremost as a serious intellect, unafraid to pad his opinions with tasty facts gleaned from the news.
In fact, it was his bold and argumentative style that landed him the Rayburn gig in the first place. The whole thing was a lark-- the regular engineer at the time needed a back-up, and Robert was easy to train. He learned the mixing board and the method of operations within one week. But no one was sure if putting outspoken Robert "Lefty" River in the same room with GOP stalwart Mark Rayburn would be a good idea.
As predicted, the two started to clash immediately, arguing back and forth over then-President Clinton's policies. But, a strange thing happened during the exchange: Robert and Mark found common ground, in regards to the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
"Yeah, I voted for Clinton in 1992," Robert said to Mark, while cueing up a pretaped promo on the reel-to-reel. "But I voted Green this last time, because if you ask me Clinton is not that far away from your own political stance, Mr. Rayburn."
"You can call me Mark," Rayburn said, which stunned his producer and her assistant. It took them six months each to get on a first-name basis with Mark Rayburn.
"Okay, Mark," Robert continued. "The reason why I say that is because the fallout from the Telecommunications Act, much like the fallout from the repealing of the Fairness Doctrine--"
"How old are you again, Robert?" Mark interjected.
"25, sir."
"My God-- A young man your age, so up to date with what's going on... I bet you if I asked any other person your age about things like the Fairness Doctrine and the Telecommunications Act, they'd draw a blank. Hell, my own son is almost your age, and he has no interest in any of that stuff, try as hard as I might to get him to look into it."
Robert snickered. He knew Rayburn's son personally. They would occassionally party at Robert's apartment in Sherman Oaks. If Rayburn only knew how much he and his son had in common.
"Well," Robert replied, "radio has always been a passion in my life. A minor passion, true, but it pays the bills. I like the work. And when I like the work, I do the math and the research."
After landing the engineering gig permanently, after the regular guy left the post to pursue another career, Robert's stock went up. People took notice. Maybe this diamond in the rough was ready to play ball after all, or so went the reasoning of the company heads.
So Robert found himself agreeing to accept a book from Daniel Lazarus reluctantly. It wasn't like Robert wouldn't read the book-- on the contrary, Robert would probably ingest it in a heartbeat. He liked reading up on what "the other side" had to say-- he called it "boning up on your enemies". And Robert was known to go through the box of books that Rayburn received almost daily, from fans of the show and maybe some haters who wanted to blow Rayburn's mind somehow.
Anything that Rayburn or his staff didn't have time to go through was thrown in the box. A sign above the box read "FREE BOOKS-- TAKE 'EM!" and as far as anyone knew, Robert was the only person in the entire company to take them up on the offer on a weekly basis. He had so many books from the Rayburn show's offices that he had to buy another bookcase at home to accomodate them.
As Daniel handed Robert a copy of his book, he asked Robert, "Would you like it autographed?"
Robert bristled at the chutzpah, but kept composed. "That would be nice," he said.
The inscription read:
To Robert,
Keep on fighting the good fight.
Freedom must be preserved at all costs.
Yours Truly,
Daniel Lazarus
Robert shook his head and headed home. But before he got home, he witnessed something very peculiar on the street outside of the radio network's offices.
As he walked out onto the busy boulevard, he saw a van parked in front of the adjacent bank. The van's side door was opened, and a disheveled-looking man with glasses sat down on the curb, blaring a portable AM radio. He was busy scrawling words onto a whiteboard that was mounted to the interior of the van door. Strewn on the outisde of the van were pieces of white cardboard taped together lengthwise and covered with handwritten messages.
The slogans were printed big and bold enough to read without effort:
ALL PRESIDENTS ARE CROOKS
THE POLITICAL CRIME FAMILY
WHO REALLY RUNS THE UNITED STATES?
Underneath each slogan was a continuous paragraph of text, fleshing out the theses in more detail.
Robrt laughed at the display. It reminded him of the booths in Venice Beach, where the crazies and wackos would say anything to get your attention. He stopped to watch what this guy was doing, hoping that maybe the disheveled man would put on some sort of show, not unlike the boardwalk barkers in Venice.
Then, he noticed something, with those finely-tuned ears of his. He noticed something familiar about the audio emanating from the man's AM radio. It sounded like he was listening to the voice of... Mark Rayburn.
This jarred him for two reasons. One, Robert momentarily forgot about the fact that, after the live portion of the show was done, a re-feed of a past show was pumped out to fill in the time slot. Since Rayburn was on vacation all week and Lazarus had been in the host's chair, Robert lost his bearings for an instant.
Two, if this disheveled man was listening to Mark Rayburn's show and making a public spectacle of himself by disparaging politicans on the street, then that meant he was targeting Rayburn for something.
As much as he could understand the man's desire to speak out against what he believed was wrong, Robert also felt that, as the engineer on the show, he should do something about this before it turns into an ugly incident. If this man was after Rayburn, for whatever reason, it could extend to him personally... and Robert wasn't going to be having any of that.
Robert opted to talk to the man first, to measure if there was a threat or not.
"Hey, man... what's with the colorful signs?"
"Nice to meet you, sir," the man said, extending a hand to Robert. "The name's Kennedy. John Kennedy."
Robert almost laughed in the man's face, but instead turned it into a wry joke. "Funny, you don't sound like you have a Boston accent..."
"Yeah, and I'm pretty healthy-looking, for a corpse, eh?" Kennedy guffawed, and then said, "I get it all the time. But my name really is John Kennedy. John H. Kennedy."
"No relation to the famous Kennedys?"
"Not by a long shot, bro."
"Well, judging by your signs, maybe it's not that long of a shot."
"If you knew what I knew about the Kennedys, kid, you might not think that they are too long of a shot from the Mark Rayburns of the world."
"What have you got against Mark Rayburn?"
"I tried to call into his show once, and the prick just yelled at me and hung up on me. He doesn't fight fair. He just yells at people and tells them to shut up, and then he hangs up on them. That's not civil discourse. That's just being an unfair asshole. So here I am, bringing it to him. I know he broadcasts out of this building."
"You realize that his people might call the cops on you if they know you're out here?"
"Let 'em call," Kennedy said, fire in his eyes. "I don't care. Anything to bring attention to what these freaks are doing to this country. If it makes the news, then a night in jail is worth it. I live in this van-- a night in County is like a room at the Ramada Inn for me."
"Are you a Democrat, Mr. Kennedy?"
"Hell no, they're just as bad," Kennedy said. "I haven't voted in decades. You can't change the agenda that these-- these elitists have by voting. It's a meaningless ritual now. Do you know that almost every significant election in the 20th Century has been rigged in one way or another?"
"Is that a fact?"
"Read up on it, kid. I ain't lying."
"I'm not saying you're lying. But is it possible that you're mistaken?"
Kennedy stopped and looked at Robert. Then he smiled, showing that his yellow teeth had been weathered and almost grinded down to nothing. "If I'm mistaken, kid, then it wouldn't be the first time. But... if I'm right, then this world is fucked. Hell in a hand basket, you know? I hope, for your sake and mine, that I'm dead wrong."
Then, as if Robert had never been there in the first place, John H. Kennedy began to rant and rave in front of the small crowd that was by now gathering in front of his van, parked outside of the bank. Kennedy was going on about political and global conspiracies, the kinds of things that Robert liked to read about because they were so far-fetched and improbable.
The names were there: Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Haig, Kissinger, Greenpsan, Rockefeller, Rothschild, Vanderbilt, Hearst, Hunt, Heinz, all the stock characters whose valuable family surnames pop up incessantly in the netherworld of conspiracy fiction.
Robert checked it out for a while, then he became bored and grabbed the first bus out of there.
He got home, sat on his couch, shook the audio out of his hair, and tried to unwind. But he felt like he would turn on the news and discover that John H. Kennedy went on a rampage and killed a bunch of people with a semi-automatic rifle and if only they had known he was there they could have stopped the carnage...
He thought Kennedy was harmless and cool, but he didn't want anything on his conscience. He wasn't a radical teenager anymore-- he was an adult, with bills to pay and a job to do.
Robert picked up the phone and called his work.
"Sandy? Hi, it's Robert. I'm just calling to let you know-- when I left work today, I saw a guy outside of the building who was demonstrating, I guess, against Mark Rayburn. Well, he didn't say he was going to do anything... he was a caller on the show, and Mark hung up on him. Yeah, I know, tell me about it. Anyway, I don't think he would hurt a fly, but you might wanna... oh, okay, well... man, that was fast. So it's already taken care of? Okay. Well, hey, no problem, anytime. See ya Monday. Bye."
The police had already asked Mr. Kennedy to move his van away from the location, according to Sandra, the producer for Mark Rayburn's radio show. If Robert had stayed around for 15 minutes longer, he coud've seen it all go down himself.
Robert turned on the TV and opened up the book that Daniel Lazarus had given him. He had no plans for the evening, so he decided to start reading. He had other books in his bag that he'd taken from the box at work, so if Lazarus' prose was anything like his personality, at least Robert had other things to capture his attention.
CHAPTER TWO COMES NEXT FRIDAY! HAVE A NICE WEEKEND, FOLKS!!
Robert River sat down on his couch after a long but eventful day at work. As a sound engineer, he often needed at least one solid hour to "shake the audio out of his hair", as he liked to put it.
It wasn't so much the content that bothered him, the right-wing conservative lip service paid by every radio host who has a reputation and an agenda; no, it was more a matter of the actual frequencies each sound occupied in his inner ear after eight hours of multiple audio feeds being routed every which way. Even for a seasoned pro as himself, Robert sometimes got lost amid the channels, all of them turned on with volumes set at specific levels so that all the programming blended into one frenzied slushball of sonic sludge.
This week there was a guest host filling in for the usual right-wing political personality that Robert had come to kind of admire, in a sick and non-partisan way. Mark Rayburn knew that his chief engineer was "an unwashed pinko liberal Commie sympathizer"-- that was Rayburn's favorite way of teasing Robert whenever they had meetings concerning the show --but he respected Robert's work ethic, his knowledge of the studio craft, and his ability to keep cool under pressure. In live radio, things go terribly wrong at the turn of a moment, and Robert had passed the trial-by-fire phase with flying colors.
There was the time the ISDN unit dropped in the middle of a remote feed. Robert was back at the studio, monitoring the show from the control booth, while another, less-experienced engineer was at the remote site. Even when separated by a distance of 50 miles, Robert was able to tell the apprentice engineer, over the telephone, how to reconnect the ISDN to the receiving line. Luckily, the line had dropped during a commercial break, and by the time the break was done, the show was back up on the air, and no one in the audience knew any better.
That didn't stop Mark Rayburn from acknowledging Robert's technical prowess over the air. "I'd like to thank my engineer Robert River, who just saved us from pure embarrassment during the break. We owe you big, kid. Thanks again!"
So Robert took a liking to Rayburn, simply based on the man's mutual respect for him. And when Robert's friends scoffed at him for working for such a pillar of the Republican community, Robert took it with a grain of salt, adding:
"Hey, man, it's only entertainment!"
This week in particular, Rayburn was on vacation, and the guest host was none other than Daniel Lazarus, a former counsel to the Black Panther Party and self-described "card-carrying liberal" who changed horses midstream sometime in the '80's, embracing the conservative right and its ethos. Lazarus now spent his every waking moment trying to puncture the same political apparatus that he'd once had a hand in constructing.
Robert was less enamored of the guest host, because he couldn't invoke his motto of "just entertainment" to explain a man like Daniel Lazarus. The man seemed friendly enough, but there was an off-putting quality to Lazarus that Robert couldn't put his finger on for the life of him. Whereas Rayburn was self-effacing and blunt, Lazarus came off as glib, smug, the type of person who only cares about being on the winning side, regardless of principles.
All through the week, Lazarus was kind and polite to Robert, but it didn't make Robert feel any better. Whereas Rayburn was at least a human being beneath his rabid bulldog on-air veneer, Lazarus left him cold, almost inhuman. Robert didn't like it, and every day after work that week he felt like he was dirty, soiled by the bigotry and biases of someone who realized they didn't fit in with their chosen crowd and decided to see how the other half lived.
The other half seemed to be doing fine. Daniel Lazarus was married to a trophy wife, wrote books and toured the lecture circuit. He was well-respected amongst the right-wing politicos and talking media heads. Among the religious right, people saw Lazarus in the same way they view a recent convert: the story leading up to the "redemption and salvation" was more important than the values of a man who only admits he is wrong once so that he can continue thinking himself "right" in the future.
In Robert's mind, Mark Rayburn stood for something; Daniel Lazarus only stood for himself.
The final blow was when the show had ended on Friday. Lazarus' wife, dutiful and passive, stood waiting as he gathered his affects. Robert went to shake Lazarus' hand and wish him well.
"It was nice working with you, Mr. Lazarus," Robert said.
"Thanks, kid." That's what everyone called Robert: "kid". He looked like he was barely 18. It burned Robert up inside every time he heard it from someone.
Daniel Lazarus decided to ask the "kid" a question.
"Robert, would you like a copy of my latest book?"
"Excuse me?" Robert didn't quite grasp what Lazarus had asked him.
"I'm giving away promotional copies of my latest book, My Former Life As A Godless Heathen. Do you want one?"
"Sure, why not?"
Robert read books like crazy. It was well-known around the radio network that the twenty-something Robert was a "gutter intellectual", a low-rent version of Matt Damon's character in the movie Good Will Hunting: didn't go to college, didn't have a degree in engineering, and yet knew more about the world and current events than anyone else.
Robert often took offense to this view of him, because he surmised it for what it really was-- a convenient label to slap on him for those who judge other people based upon their resumes. Robert's teeth would grit together whenever he overheard someone say, "My, that Robert... so smart, for someone who didn't go to college... had he gone to graduate school he could be running this company by now... what a pity..."
However, he sometimes enjoyed being an underpaid employee who knew everything about his job (and everyone else's, for that matter). There was an underdog currency to his position. He was the one that tended to be underestimated by his superiors, with their degrees framed on the walls of their offices, meaningless pieces of textured paper that signified nothing except the willingness to jump through flaming hoops on cue.
Not everyone who went to college was incompetent, in Robert's mind, but he also knew that a certificate stating that someone completed four years of college did not mean that the person was especially smart or knowledgable about anything outside of the normal realms of experience. He stopped counting the number of times he'd saved his bosses hides for mistakes that not even the rawest rookie would make.
Because of his sober dedication to a job well-done, Robert's reputation for being a reader enhanced his overall standing in the company. And his reputation often foreshadowed him-- people knew him first and foremost as a serious intellect, unafraid to pad his opinions with tasty facts gleaned from the news.
In fact, it was his bold and argumentative style that landed him the Rayburn gig in the first place. The whole thing was a lark-- the regular engineer at the time needed a back-up, and Robert was easy to train. He learned the mixing board and the method of operations within one week. But no one was sure if putting outspoken Robert "Lefty" River in the same room with GOP stalwart Mark Rayburn would be a good idea.
As predicted, the two started to clash immediately, arguing back and forth over then-President Clinton's policies. But, a strange thing happened during the exchange: Robert and Mark found common ground, in regards to the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
"Yeah, I voted for Clinton in 1992," Robert said to Mark, while cueing up a pretaped promo on the reel-to-reel. "But I voted Green this last time, because if you ask me Clinton is not that far away from your own political stance, Mr. Rayburn."
"You can call me Mark," Rayburn said, which stunned his producer and her assistant. It took them six months each to get on a first-name basis with Mark Rayburn.
"Okay, Mark," Robert continued. "The reason why I say that is because the fallout from the Telecommunications Act, much like the fallout from the repealing of the Fairness Doctrine--"
"How old are you again, Robert?" Mark interjected.
"25, sir."
"My God-- A young man your age, so up to date with what's going on... I bet you if I asked any other person your age about things like the Fairness Doctrine and the Telecommunications Act, they'd draw a blank. Hell, my own son is almost your age, and he has no interest in any of that stuff, try as hard as I might to get him to look into it."
Robert snickered. He knew Rayburn's son personally. They would occassionally party at Robert's apartment in Sherman Oaks. If Rayburn only knew how much he and his son had in common.
"Well," Robert replied, "radio has always been a passion in my life. A minor passion, true, but it pays the bills. I like the work. And when I like the work, I do the math and the research."
After landing the engineering gig permanently, after the regular guy left the post to pursue another career, Robert's stock went up. People took notice. Maybe this diamond in the rough was ready to play ball after all, or so went the reasoning of the company heads.
So Robert found himself agreeing to accept a book from Daniel Lazarus reluctantly. It wasn't like Robert wouldn't read the book-- on the contrary, Robert would probably ingest it in a heartbeat. He liked reading up on what "the other side" had to say-- he called it "boning up on your enemies". And Robert was known to go through the box of books that Rayburn received almost daily, from fans of the show and maybe some haters who wanted to blow Rayburn's mind somehow.
Anything that Rayburn or his staff didn't have time to go through was thrown in the box. A sign above the box read "FREE BOOKS-- TAKE 'EM!" and as far as anyone knew, Robert was the only person in the entire company to take them up on the offer on a weekly basis. He had so many books from the Rayburn show's offices that he had to buy another bookcase at home to accomodate them.
As Daniel handed Robert a copy of his book, he asked Robert, "Would you like it autographed?"
Robert bristled at the chutzpah, but kept composed. "That would be nice," he said.
The inscription read:
To Robert,
Keep on fighting the good fight.
Freedom must be preserved at all costs.
Yours Truly,
Daniel Lazarus
Robert shook his head and headed home. But before he got home, he witnessed something very peculiar on the street outside of the radio network's offices.
As he walked out onto the busy boulevard, he saw a van parked in front of the adjacent bank. The van's side door was opened, and a disheveled-looking man with glasses sat down on the curb, blaring a portable AM radio. He was busy scrawling words onto a whiteboard that was mounted to the interior of the van door. Strewn on the outisde of the van were pieces of white cardboard taped together lengthwise and covered with handwritten messages.
The slogans were printed big and bold enough to read without effort:
ALL PRESIDENTS ARE CROOKS
THE POLITICAL CRIME FAMILY
WHO REALLY RUNS THE UNITED STATES?
Underneath each slogan was a continuous paragraph of text, fleshing out the theses in more detail.
Robrt laughed at the display. It reminded him of the booths in Venice Beach, where the crazies and wackos would say anything to get your attention. He stopped to watch what this guy was doing, hoping that maybe the disheveled man would put on some sort of show, not unlike the boardwalk barkers in Venice.
Then, he noticed something, with those finely-tuned ears of his. He noticed something familiar about the audio emanating from the man's AM radio. It sounded like he was listening to the voice of... Mark Rayburn.
This jarred him for two reasons. One, Robert momentarily forgot about the fact that, after the live portion of the show was done, a re-feed of a past show was pumped out to fill in the time slot. Since Rayburn was on vacation all week and Lazarus had been in the host's chair, Robert lost his bearings for an instant.
Two, if this disheveled man was listening to Mark Rayburn's show and making a public spectacle of himself by disparaging politicans on the street, then that meant he was targeting Rayburn for something.
As much as he could understand the man's desire to speak out against what he believed was wrong, Robert also felt that, as the engineer on the show, he should do something about this before it turns into an ugly incident. If this man was after Rayburn, for whatever reason, it could extend to him personally... and Robert wasn't going to be having any of that.
Robert opted to talk to the man first, to measure if there was a threat or not.
"Hey, man... what's with the colorful signs?"
"Nice to meet you, sir," the man said, extending a hand to Robert. "The name's Kennedy. John Kennedy."
Robert almost laughed in the man's face, but instead turned it into a wry joke. "Funny, you don't sound like you have a Boston accent..."
"Yeah, and I'm pretty healthy-looking, for a corpse, eh?" Kennedy guffawed, and then said, "I get it all the time. But my name really is John Kennedy. John H. Kennedy."
"No relation to the famous Kennedys?"
"Not by a long shot, bro."
"Well, judging by your signs, maybe it's not that long of a shot."
"If you knew what I knew about the Kennedys, kid, you might not think that they are too long of a shot from the Mark Rayburns of the world."
"What have you got against Mark Rayburn?"
"I tried to call into his show once, and the prick just yelled at me and hung up on me. He doesn't fight fair. He just yells at people and tells them to shut up, and then he hangs up on them. That's not civil discourse. That's just being an unfair asshole. So here I am, bringing it to him. I know he broadcasts out of this building."
"You realize that his people might call the cops on you if they know you're out here?"
"Let 'em call," Kennedy said, fire in his eyes. "I don't care. Anything to bring attention to what these freaks are doing to this country. If it makes the news, then a night in jail is worth it. I live in this van-- a night in County is like a room at the Ramada Inn for me."
"Are you a Democrat, Mr. Kennedy?"
"Hell no, they're just as bad," Kennedy said. "I haven't voted in decades. You can't change the agenda that these-- these elitists have by voting. It's a meaningless ritual now. Do you know that almost every significant election in the 20th Century has been rigged in one way or another?"
"Is that a fact?"
"Read up on it, kid. I ain't lying."
"I'm not saying you're lying. But is it possible that you're mistaken?"
Kennedy stopped and looked at Robert. Then he smiled, showing that his yellow teeth had been weathered and almost grinded down to nothing. "If I'm mistaken, kid, then it wouldn't be the first time. But... if I'm right, then this world is fucked. Hell in a hand basket, you know? I hope, for your sake and mine, that I'm dead wrong."
Then, as if Robert had never been there in the first place, John H. Kennedy began to rant and rave in front of the small crowd that was by now gathering in front of his van, parked outside of the bank. Kennedy was going on about political and global conspiracies, the kinds of things that Robert liked to read about because they were so far-fetched and improbable.
The names were there: Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Haig, Kissinger, Greenpsan, Rockefeller, Rothschild, Vanderbilt, Hearst, Hunt, Heinz, all the stock characters whose valuable family surnames pop up incessantly in the netherworld of conspiracy fiction.
Robert checked it out for a while, then he became bored and grabbed the first bus out of there.
He got home, sat on his couch, shook the audio out of his hair, and tried to unwind. But he felt like he would turn on the news and discover that John H. Kennedy went on a rampage and killed a bunch of people with a semi-automatic rifle and if only they had known he was there they could have stopped the carnage...
He thought Kennedy was harmless and cool, but he didn't want anything on his conscience. He wasn't a radical teenager anymore-- he was an adult, with bills to pay and a job to do.
Robert picked up the phone and called his work.
"Sandy? Hi, it's Robert. I'm just calling to let you know-- when I left work today, I saw a guy outside of the building who was demonstrating, I guess, against Mark Rayburn. Well, he didn't say he was going to do anything... he was a caller on the show, and Mark hung up on him. Yeah, I know, tell me about it. Anyway, I don't think he would hurt a fly, but you might wanna... oh, okay, well... man, that was fast. So it's already taken care of? Okay. Well, hey, no problem, anytime. See ya Monday. Bye."
The police had already asked Mr. Kennedy to move his van away from the location, according to Sandra, the producer for Mark Rayburn's radio show. If Robert had stayed around for 15 minutes longer, he coud've seen it all go down himself.
Robert turned on the TV and opened up the book that Daniel Lazarus had given him. He had no plans for the evening, so he decided to start reading. He had other books in his bag that he'd taken from the box at work, so if Lazarus' prose was anything like his personality, at least Robert had other things to capture his attention.
CHAPTER TWO COMES NEXT FRIDAY! HAVE A NICE WEEKEND, FOLKS!!
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