Books, Minds, and Umbrellas Only Work When They're

Books, minds, and umbrellas only work when they’re open.

Also by the Author

The Heresy Series By The Sword Friends Like These The Kettle Black After The Flesh The Camel’s Back

The Icarus Trilogy In Shining Armor A Mind Diseased Thy Neighbor’s Wife

Comedy Adventure Saga of the Beverage Men The Prince of Foxes Navarre

Memoirs of a Swine St. Lucy’s Eyes Just Plain Trouble This Little Piggy A Bad Husband No Good Deed An Empty fist

Nonfiction Variety Is the Spice A Thousand Words

Alexander Ferrar

NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.” Kind of like that free music you downloaded. Prick.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coinci- dental. Should any resemblance seem apparent between the characters or events portrayed in this book and those of any persons living or dead, then you are a member of the guilty parties described, and steps have been taken to incriminate you in the event of the author’s murder.

THE HERO MINDSET

ISBN:

Published by Bunbury First edition: September 2019

Cover art by Alexander Ferrar

A Note on the Text

The text of this book was set in Hoosegow Linotype, a font created by the renegade typesetters known as the Black Hand, as a way of protest- ing the evil committed by the Church against Gutenberg. Note the sharp angularity and arrogant curlicues that characterize their style. Interesting bit of trivia: the Black Hand were the ones responsible for the practice of making S’s look a lot like F’s in early prints, such as “Ye Olde Black- fmith” and “Officef of the Magiftratef of the Ftate of Maffechuffettf,” as a way of knowing who in a crowd of strangers was sympathetic to their cause and weeding out the ignorant. A member of the clandestine cog- noscenti would, while reading, smile to himself and say nothing, whilst an enemy of the cause would say “By Jove, what nonfenfe is thif?!”

www.alexferrar.com

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” ―George Bernard Shaw

This book is dedicated to all the other unreasonable people out there.

Perhaps what I have to tell you will be hard to believe. It will fly in the face of many narratives we have been programmed by society to accept without question. I died in 2002, and came back to life. Because I had heard so much about near-death experiences with a light at the end of a tunnel, I had the opportunity to be analytical while it was happening, and can describe it to you now. There was a pulsing darkness around me, with a dim light coming from below. I reached out and felt the walls of a tunnel, smooth and yielding; and my body that should have been strong was weak and puny. I was not ready to go toward that light yet. I had not been fully developed. I had heard people tell me about the comforting darkness, and that when they were being pushed inexorably toward the light, it felt cold, and they didn’t want to go. I can relate. The warmth that enveloped me was very familiar and the light was repellent. There was a ropelike cord sticking out of my belly. I followed it with my eyes, back into the darkness. Without knowing why, I grabbed it in my tiny hands, twisting myself around to face the other way. Hand over hand, I tried to climb it like a rope back out of the tunnel to my previous life, but there was nowhere to go, no room to move. While I knew the life I would go back to would not be the best possible one, I was determined to give it another shot. It was too much of a gamble to give it up and continue. First, all I knew was that my new life would be as a mammal, and what little I could see of my new body had not formed enough to give a clue what kind. With the rudimentary hands, I might’ve been a monkey or a tree sloth, or if I became a human, I might be unwanted. The thought of waiting there, with no idea for how long, only to be born and left somewhere to die, filled me

1 with terror. I was completely at the mercy of someone I didn’t know. Some of you will scoff and roll your eyes, but that is what I thought at the time. Like I said, this may be hard for you to believe. Looking back on my previous life, I remembered what I’d said as a child when they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I had said, in all seriousness, a hero. That plan had gotten sidetracked after moving to the US when I was eight. I instead became a brat, then a troubled youth, then a schmuck, and finally, a villain. Realizing that, I had to go back and make amends. I prayed desperately, knowing that there was someone to pray to, not necessarily the God that we are taught to believe in, but I will call it God, because it’s easier. I appealed to that God, and it answered. Perhaps this will anger you because it contradicts the beliefs passed down by your religious leaders and parents, but in all fairness, how can they know for sure if they haven’t gone through what I did? How is a belief a good argument against what I saw with my own eyes? There was no loud, booming voice. It was rather the feeling of knowledge pouring into my tiny mind. I connected with God, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to describe it to you now. First of all, God is not He or She because It can and will never be limited by either. To suggest that It would have one gender or the other means there must be an equal and opposite gender somewhere, and if there is room enough for two beings, there must be something larger to contain them both, and what could be outside of that? The conceit in claiming God created us in His image must be done away with. We created “God” in our image. The jealous Old Testament tyrant with a hit-or-miss system of divine retribution is far from the truth. The real god is everything and everywhere. God never came down to Earth because that very act suggests It wasn’t there already. That presupposes opposi- tion, and there can be none.

I’ll get into that later. Let me say, for the moment, that I am Catholic, because out of all of the religions on this planet, the best one in my opinion is that of Jesus, because no other motivates its followers to do good just for Goodness’s sake. Look up “Caritas” and you will find that the first responders to almost any disaster are Catholics devoted to helping victims all over the world. They exist everywhere, and do what they do not for any material gain. Then, there are the clergy who, with the obvious exception of predators I will cover later, devote their entire lives to the service of God, which means essential- ly, the service of their neighbors. Then there are the people on missions who travel to other countries to build homes, install running water for entire villages, and heal the sick, and do it all for no profit whatsoever. That is not found anywhere else, at least on this planet, to the degree that it’s done by the Church. That said, there is something inconvenient about my experience. It turns out that, of all religions, Buddhism comes the closest to reality. Before I explain how, I’d like to first assure you that I’m not about to debunk your religion, or lack there- of. I knew in that moment that religion is, at its essence, a good thing, because it gives people direction in their lives and makes them feel better about death. Unless you have experienced it as I have, you cannot know what death is like, which is scary. If we choose to believe in Heaven we’ll be comforted. If there is an authority figure that will judge your actions and send you either to Heaven or Hell (neither of which exist) then you will be theoretically less likely to rape and steal and kill your neighbor. Of course, that does happen in the name of God in many instances, but that is because of truly evil people who wear the mask of religion. Evil existed long before good. The worship of devils is an ancient practice, and just because it is not out in the open does not mean that it has ended. Baudelaire said “The best of the devil’s tricks was persuading the world he didn’t exist.” While I maintain there is no Devil, there are definitely people who

3 believe in one, and worse, worship him. The “Devil” is more of a metaphor for our nature, our urge to dominate others, which is necessary in the wild, but must be resisted if we wish to live in civilization. The very foundation of civilization depends upon cooperation, lest we fall to ruin and end up back in the wild. It’s happened many times before, and our ancestors’ struggle out of it will have been in vain if we backslide. That bestial, predatory, amoral behavior must be restrained out of respect for the rule of law and consideration for others. This is where Jesus comes in. Whether He existed or not is irrelevant. He came into being, as an actual man or as an ideal, specifically to fight devil worshippers. He embodies the standard to which we all must live if we are to continue coexisting. The alternative can be seen on every news channel. Now I’d like to tell you about the nature of the universe. Remember your science class in high school? Atoms, and their protons, electrons, and neutrons? An atom can be envisioned as a football field, with a tiny pea in the very center. That pea is the nucleus, and three types of subatomic particles orbit it, in varying sizes and at vast distances from one another. Now picture our solar system. Huge, with a tiny sun right in the middle, and planets orbiting it. Electrons―like Earth― zipping around the nucleus, with a positive charge. Lightning. Electricity. Life. Us. We exist upon a tiny subatomic particle, making up an atom, making up a molecule, making up a cell, making up something so mind-bogglingly huge it’ll drive you insane to imagine it. Even now, when I dream of what I saw, the sense of insignificance makes me vomit myself awake. And each of us is made up of infinite universes? I think so, because I did not get a chance to see what contains all this, or if there is a limit to it, and what exists outside. I believe that it goes on forever, both ways, larger and larger, and smaller and smaller. This is why the notion of Heaven and Hell makes me shake my head. Suns are formed and extinguished; planets are born to revolve in their orbit; flora and fauna live, strive, and

4 perish on many of them; and on the insignificant speck of dust that is our planet in particular, our kind, who are grossly outnumbered by so many other forms of life (insects, fish, plants) that live and die oblivious to our existence, believe all this was created for us. Not only that, but out of all these creatures, we alone have our lives mapped out for us by destiny, while all others exist following the laws of nature. I learned this, and many other things, in that moment of connection to God. The nature of reincarnation is what I’d like to describe now. In Buddhism, there is a sort of ladder you climb. If you were good in your last life, you get to go up a rung, if you were bad, you take a step down. So the circumstances of your next life depend on your actions in this one. Luckily, that isn’t really the case. If it had been, my next life might have me born into an abusive family, or a poverty-stricken one with no opportunities available later on, or maybe I’d have a disability, or any number of things. There is no control over which body you will inhabit next, which is why racism and sexism are so unfair. If karma truly did exist, a person who hated others for the color of their skin, or gender, would come back as someone of that persuasion, but it does not. (The idea of karma was invented as an excuse for people to avoid taking vengeance, and to discourage them from it.) In reality, it is not whether you are good or bad, but how aware you become, that affects your future. If, throughout your life, you continue to treat people with no consideration, if you continue to see your car window as a garbage can, if you urinate on toilet seats and never clean it up, if you vandalize, if you steal and kill and rape, that is what will prevent you from advancing. It is the willful ignorance of the beast that makes him or her continue to return as just another beast, and it is the pursuit of enlightenment that leads to better lives. You must become self-aware and considerate of others. That is the crux of Jesus’ teaching, and the easy way to get

5 people to follow in his footsteps is to describe a more easily imagined system of reward or consequence―Heaven and Hell. Since we have collectively learned enough about the world to suspect that those two places do not exist, there has been a swing toward a more secular way of life, resulting in the chaos we see today. As we have seen many times throughout history, the pendulum swings, and we are due for another Bonfire of the Vanities, followed by forced austerity. I hope to prevent it with this book. If the momentum of the return swing can be slowed, we might be able to stop somewhere in the middle. Now, in case you are reading this and thinking that, if you kill yourself and risk a reshuffling of the deck as a way to solve your problems, I suggest you try something first. Go out into nature. Find a quiet place, far away from any semblance of civilization and don’t take anything with you. No food, no cigarettes, and definitely not your phone. Just find a quiet place and sit there for a while. I guarantee you, you’ll be bored out of your skull after a few minutes. Then imagine that that is your life, all day, every day. You will have to forage for food, find shelter when it rains, often fighting whatever is already there for your spot. You’ll also have hundreds of other creatures fighting you to the death, every day, because they are hungry and you are food. This is the fulltime job of not dying. On top of that, your chances of finding companionship, especially a mate, are a lot slimmer. Now, do you still think your life sucks? Still want to complain? Because that is what life is like for everything else on this planet, and many others. If you’re reading this, then you’ve got it good, and better than anyone else in history. Take advantage of all the privileges you have that birds and insects and even a large number of people don’t have, and go do something with yourself. If you still want to claim you’re suffering because of whichever trendy injustice, like your professor won’t address you by the new pronoun you’ve invented, try this: go down to

6 the old folks’ home and tell a Holocaust survivor that you’re oppressed. Sure, your life could be better. We’ll get to that. While I could easily have wandered off to some other part of this magnificent universe, I felt an attachment to so many people from my twenty-four years in this incarnation. I wanted to come back and do what I could for them, and right all of the wrongs I had done that resulted in my incarceration and death. I suppose I also had an attachment to my body. I would be able to help people, which brings me to what Buddhists call bodhisattva. That’s somebody who’s on their last rung before ascending to Nirvana, someone who is just one step away from being reabsorbed by the universe, who stays behind so that they can try and point other people in the right direction. Please don’t think I am trying to pass myself off as a prophet or a demigod, or anything like that. I still make mistakes like any person would. I was just extremely lucky to return with the memory of the knowledge I’d gained. I also took the scenic route on my way back to my body, learning as much as I could about the world before returning to live in it. Taking the long way home, so to speak. I saw the entire world from a different perspective, the way you have to look to the side of something to see it in the dark, and what I saw was troubling. After my recovery, I began to study the three things I was already somewhat good at, knowing I had to become someone remarkable before anyone would listen to what I had to say. If I didn’t, I’d just be another crackpot who’d bumped his head. It would take an enormous amount of work and discipline, but I was as determined as only a resurrected man can be. I then began to write novels, with what I wanted to teach disguised as lurid subject matter. That way the people I wanted to reach would inadvertently learn something, because they are not the type to read informative nonfiction. A lot of what you will read in this book has been printed elsewhere, though in small rations, mixed in with fast-paced fiction.

So, this is what I have to say, and I hope it serves you well. We are about to enter another dark age, and I may not be the one to stop it, but I can surely pave the way for whoever is coming after me.

I suppose I ought to tell you a little about me. I feel that if I am honest from the beginning, critics will derive no pleasure from exposing my past. I will have beaten them to it. Before you ask what my agenda is or credentials are, I’ll go ahead and tell you that I have made just about every mistake a human being can make, and still managed to come out ahead. Who can be more qualified to tell you what you may be doing wrong than someone who has done it before? I will accept the dating advice of an elderly ladies’ man long before I will that of a virgin priest. The experience matters. So, here goes. In a way, ever since my first year in Florida, I had always wished there was something wrong with me. Something that folks could look at me and pity me for, but there was a little more to it than that. I wanted to be able to get away with doing half as much as everybody else but getting twice as much praise. They’d beam at me, inspired, and talk about how brave I was. But, there’s nothing wrong with me. So, I started inventing things. I’ve got these terrible, terrible headaches. What? What’s that? I’m sorry, I can’t hear you. I think I’m going deaf. I have a learning disability. I have these terrible, terrible nightmares. Hold me. But nobody bought it, ever. No matter what I tried, people didn’t care. Worse, once I heard them laughing at me when they thought I was gone. I’d left and realized I had forgotten something, and went back to get it. I stood just outside the door and listened to them talking about me, and I knew for the first time just what people thought about me. Perhaps there was something wrong with me, after all. I know I hadn’t done it on purpose. I actually think everyone who ever got a trophy for participating grows up like this. Wanting credit for doing things that everybody else just does. Always wanting to be the center of attention. Wanting to be

9 relevant. Those “reality shows” don’t help. People are all the time hogging the limelight, making a big deal about overcoming their “fear.” It happens in my restaurant all the time, when NGOs bring the volunteer kids to my place for their last dinner in Antigua. The coordinators try to talk about what those kids learned during their two weeks here, and what they can do to help the plight of the poverty-stricken even after they’re back home, and there’s always some Debbie or Allison that wants to talk for an hour about how she overcame her anxiety. Clap clap clap clap clap. Well, turns out, that didn’t fly for boys, at least not when I was growing up. Nowadays, sure, let’s all give Kevin a big hug because he can admit out loud that he’d rather be a girl. But for me, not an ounce of sympathy could they spare for me with my migraines and my learning disability. So, I began my search for Manhood. To paraphrase Chelsea Fagan, I think I had assumed some kind of Adult Pixie Dust—looking like glitter in a tasteful, neutral color palette—would be sprinkled over me in my sleep at some point in my late twenties or early thirties, to magically teach me how to do things like negotiate a salary or fix a broken-down car. I’d thought these things would just manifest in Future Alex, and Present Alex wouldn’t have to deal with it. Because my father never really became a man, he was not qualified to teach manhood to me. In my desperation to find out about it, I read books and talked to people, and watched the news, and realized some horrifying things. I learned that we’ve been programmed, since birth, to fail. Look at how badly Western civilization is failing. Look at how many men have midlife crises, how many marriages result in divorce and screwed-up children who grew up to perpetuate the cycle, and how democratic society as a whole is corrupted and self-destructive. That’s what led me to realize that many of these people, myself included, had never entered adulthood. Sure, we aged past twenty-one, but without a clearly-defined

10 rite of passage, that doesn’t amount to much. Think about it. The Spartans had their agoge, and we have summer camp. The Chambri, the “crocodile people” in Papua New Guinea undergo ritual scarring in their adolescence, and plenty of other barbaric cultures have similar ordeals that mark the passage of a boy into manhood. What do we have? Senior prom and college fraternity hazing ceremonies. Those aren’t initiations. They’re photo album memories to be remembered fondly or laughed over later while drinking beer in the dorm. The result is obvious. And then what do we have to further prevent the transi- tion? Gender confusion with men being taught femininity and the “men’s movement” that allows wimps to cry together, as if masculine/feminine got confused with dominant/submissive. Also, the girls I pulled, we never lasted more than a few weeks, because they were always just girls, not women. They’re always so charming at first, and each one was the one until they all turned out to be just another girl who got too many hugs. Yunno what I mean? She was told her whole life that she was special just for being her, and so she grew up believing it. I’m Amy and I’m awesome cuz my Daddy says so. Without being very special at all. Just being rather average, but expecting praise for it. The gender roles are very confused in the US. While I’m not trying to be a sexist at all, I know that as a man it is expected of me to provide and protect. Men that can’t do those two things tend not to get women. But the more girls get farther and farther away from their gender responsibilities, the longer they stay girls instead of becoming women. Maybe I’m wrong. But the girls I dated wanted me to pay for dinner, but wouldn’t make me breakfast. Come to think of it, they all seemed to suffer from the delusion I mentioned early on, of wanting to be praised for less. It seemed all they brought to the table was a fork. I see online dating profiles where women who are not especially beautiful say they can’t cook and won’t clean. Then, the same women

11 post memes on their Facebook wondering where all the good men have gone? In 2019, the US Women’s Soccer team displayed some of the worst sportsmanship I’ve ever seen, and feminists took to social media in praise of it. If a man were to say what Megan Rapinoe said, no one would celebrate it as “empowering and inspirational,” a “battle cry for women nationwide.” Praise of boorish behavior is rampant toxic femininity, undoing a century of civil rights activism. It’s not that men are intimidated by “strong women,” or “can’t handle them.” It’s more like rude people are insufferable regardless of their gender and we’d just rather not know them. Rudeness does not make you “strong.” Everyone who quotes Marilyn Monroe on Facebook is but laying the foundation for future avoidance of responsibility: “If you can’t handle me at my worst, you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best,” is just a way of making excuses for being at your worst more often. Women, for thousands of years, used to be tending their babies and twirling flax and feeding fires, actually doing something worth doing, but now they’re automatically entitled to diamond rings, held doors, free dinners on every date, and if not Prince Charming, at least Santa Claus. I hear women complain about the “patriarchy,” and “male privilege,” but how many women marry just to clean up in the divorce later? The deck is invariably stacked against the men. How many women accept dates with men they have no intention of even kissing, just for the free meal? The Society for Personality and Social Psychology said, in June of 2019, a third of them. How many women are violent toward men because they know he won’t hit back, or if he does, the world will side with her and against him? Far, far too many. Women traditionally held the real power because they did the truly important things. They were the ones who prepared the meals their families ate, and cared for the home, and raised the children. Honestly, what can be more important than that?

If you choose to sacrifice the time you have left to some firm, or go off to die in a war somewhere, rather than create new human beings and give them guidance, fine, knock yourself out. What I’m saying is, expect to miss out on other things. I have had masculine women ask me why they can’t get a real man to look at them twice, and fruity beta males ask why they can’t get hot girls. It’s simple. There’s a polarity that must be observed. A tough, rugged man almost always wants a very feminine woman. If you’re a less manly man you’ll consistently get androgynous women, and vice versa. I explained this to one mannish woman in particular, who had come to me for help. When I told her she needed to wear women’s clothes, she said “But these are women’s clothes! These are girl’s jeans! This is a unisex t-shirt, but how can you say these aren’t girl’s jeans?” She was completely missing the point. It was a t-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. Her hair was long, but pulled back in a ponytail, and she never wore makeup. “But I’m not comfortable in dresses, makeup and heels.” “Then you have to accept never having the man you want. Because that is what he’s looking for, and the world will not change what it wants to suit you.” “But this is who I am, and I’m not going to change who I am just to please somebody else! They have to like me just for being me!” “Good luck with that.” I also see liberated women imitating men’s worst traits like unprovoked aggression and machismo, and sensitive men acting like princesses with their daintiness and easily bruised egos. And I see very confused people stuck in between. So, I started looking into what makes someone a man instead of just a guy, because to be quite honest, I was in the same boat. The only difference was that I knew it. Anti-bullying movements are evening the playing field. I thought about how I would have loved it if bullying was illegal when I was a child. When I was growing up in the Bahamas,

13 they beat me up because my skin was white, and in the States, they beat me up because I was nerdy. It would’ve been great if someone came to bat for me then. But, I had to admit I would never be who I became if they had. I wouldn’t’ve pushed myself to be the best at everything. Not if I had been accepted the way I was. It was a hard pill to swallow, but I realized everything I held against the world for my whole life, all I had suffered, I deserved, for being weak. Somehow, I had never put two and two together until that moment in the womb of my next mother. I knew girls tested guys all the time, even if they didn’t realize it, because of how much they have at stake. They are evolutionarily hard-wired to get emotional and act crazy all of a sudden, out of the blue, to see how their man responds. If he just blows her off or (God forbid) puts her in her place, she’ll calm down and be satisfied that he is a strong man. She can’t allow herself to fall for a weak guy, who isn’t in command. I find it ironic that there are many women now, testing men to see if they are worthy, when they themselves are not. Men test each other, too. Sometimes it’s just friends, teas- ing one another, to see if it is taken personally, and other times they are trying to get a rise out a rival. If that person loses their cool, it demonstrates to everyone that he is easily controlled and undeserving of respect. If they aren’t kicked out of the group, they remain only as a type of litmus paper for the others to constantly test their acidity. And children test each other, viciously. If they spot weakness, they’ll pounce on it as a group and drive it out, even if they weren’t part of the drama. They’ll come running over from the other side of the playground, like sharks smelling blood, and gang up mercilessly on whomever doesn’t belong. So, that was the reason I was bullied. I was an outsider, who, when tested, responded badly by defending myself, instead of attacking. The kids did what they were programmed by Nature to do.

If you don’t believe children are naturally evil, and have to be taught cruelty, answer me this. What child ever had to be taught to steal another child’s toys, and then lie about it? What child had to be shown how to hit another? They say you aren’t born a racist, it is something you learn from your parents. But that’s untrue. I think it is acceptance you have to be taught. The black children who beat me up for being white convinced me of that. We’re all monkeys, like Jane Goodall’s chimps, killing the nearby tribe because they are different. Let me explain. People all over the world have committed genocide at one time or another; the Nazis and the Jews, Japan and the rape of Nanking, the Turkish annihilation of Armeni- ans, the US and the Indians. Sure, we say Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao and Hitler killed millions of people, but let’s be honest. They told people to do the killing, and it was done with enthusiasm. Look at terrorists, who claim to be fighting the oppression of their people by so-and-so. Do they target people in power, who order the oppression or the soldiers who carry it out? No. They target innocent people who have nothing to do with it— people “guilty” only of calling God by a different name, or by being able to afford a better life. Killing them doesn’t avenge injustice or harm those who caused it in any way. So, maybe, fighting oppression isn’t the real reason for terrorism. That is just their excuse for murder. I believe it’s because no one really wants equality. They just want their turn to oppress. At the end of Stalin’s speeches, it is said that the audience would applaud for fifteen to twenty minutes, and the first to stop would be arrested and imprisoned, even executed. What a horrible man was Stalin, yes? But what a worse man was the soldier who did the arresting or pulled the trigger. He could’ve aimed his gun instead at the tyrant and shot him down from his podium, saving his country from years of terror. Maybe he would in turn be shot by loyal soldiers, but I am willing to bet that he could have parted the crowd and ascended the steps, kicking the body away from that podium, and declare himself

15 new tsar of Russia to genuine applause. But he didn’t. And be honest. Would you, when the time comes? It seems people, no matter how “peaceful,” give in easily to violence if occasion allows and it’s justified by a larger group. Look at the US right now. Both sides of that political circus amassing armies of angry young people, all fighting over nonsense. And it’s not unique to us, either. Jane Goodall was reluctant to publish it, but her beloved chimps disproved the lie of the Noble Beast by tearing other tribes to pieces at first sight. It seems to be the most natural thing to do, and lies just beneath the surface if not held in check by religions that promote restraint. It’s so tempting to give in to mass hysteria and just kill whoever’s not like you and your group. Thank God we have a semblance of civilization that prevents it, to a certain extent. Since the other kids did not kill me, I adapted. I grew into someone who could rise above the rest of them. I evolved. That’s when I realized why some people are hell-bent on doing away with the pecking order. Making parents helicopter over their kids to keep them safe, innocent and ignorant for as long as possible. Even accusing parents who prepare their kids for real life of committing child abuse. The reason for it is, if we allow the weak their place among the strong, the tribe will become weak, and once they’re disarmed, far easier to enslave. A bunch of smartphone-addicted Eloi. We common people are the livestock of the elite. We are kept complacent, and even though the advent of the internet has helped us to understand that we are indeed being screwed by the upper 1%, a certain fatalism has been programmed into us to accept it. I think fluoridated water is part of that, to cal- cify our pineal glands and make us believe that we’re power- less to do anything about it. I’ll explain why a little bit later. First, I’ll have to back up a moment to clarify some things like the mention of the Baha- mas and having a restaurant.

III

My grandfather owned the electric company of our island, Abaco, and my father worked for him. When the government chose to nationalize all of the utility companies, they “bought” them from the foreign owners, like us. What they were doing was making a show of negotiating, putting all of the money in escrow, making the deal on Friday afternoon when the banks were about to close, and then cheating the owners. They took possession of the businesses over the weekend, then took the money back. The check would bounce on Monday, but what could you do? They’re the government. They screwed a lot of people out of their life’s work. I suppose they thought nobody talked to each other on the island, and they could keep doing it over and over, but my grandfather heard about it and beat them at their own game. He drove a hard bargain and got that check as high as he could. The government didn’t care, because they didn’t plan to honor the check anyway. But he had a friend at the bank who kept it open for a few minutes. The would-be swindlers waited until five o’ clock to hand over the check, my father excused himself to go to the bathroom, jumped out of the window and hopped in his car, high-tailed it to the bank and got the money. Then, they got on a plane to Florida, where they’d moved us beforehand so we wouldn’t get kidnapped or killed. We moved to Palm Beach, where I apparently should have been held back a year in school. My grades in the Bahamas were good, but now the math was too advanced for me. I just couldn’t grasp it, and the further we got, the less I understood. I also couldn’t cope with the ridicule of my classmates. If I had swallowed the shame of going back to third grade, not only would I have been caught up with everyone else, I’d be a little bit bigger than all the other kids, not smaller. I’d’ve been a little bit ahead of the game instead of far behind, and I

17 would have grown up that way, instead of as an underdog. But I just tried to keep my head down and not let on that I was so lost. Yeah, dumb idea, I know, but I saw how little the teacher cared about whether we understood the things we read aloud in groups, so it made sense that I could skate by on math. We’d be reading aloud, and I actually liked reading, so I had read ahead. In this case, it was a story about a dumb but well-meaning friendly monster named Lummox. Hey, we were in fourth grade, what do you expect? But I didn’t know how to pronounce “Lummox,” so I skipped to the glossary in the back. There it was: ləməks—a stupid, clumsy person. I read an explanation why it was pronounced that way, because if a vowel is followed by a single consonant, it has a long vowel sound. If it’s followed by a double consonant, it has a short one. That is why it is tomayto, not tomahto. So, when the girl two turns before me pronounced it Loo- mocks, and the teacher didn’t correct her, the next reader said it that way too. When it was my turn, I said it Lem-mecks, the way the book said to. Man, they pounced on me, all of them, even the teacher. Was I deaf? Did I not hear the way the others had pronounced it? What was wrong with me? “But it’s pronounced Lem-mecks. The book says so.” Teacher heaved a dramatic sigh. “Alex, it doesn’t actually say how to pronounce it, so it’s pretty much left up to you to decide how to say it, and Kithara’s already decided that it’s Loo- mocks, so we’re going to go ahead and say it that way.” “But, back here in the glossary—” The group erupted in scornful laughter. “Omigod, Alex thinks that word is in the glossary!” “But it is,” I said, opening up to it. “It’s right here.” “It’s a proper noun,” the teacher said, while laughing. “It’s not going to be there.” “It is here. Right here.” “Alex, just learn to admit when you’re wrong.” “Yeah, Alex. I say tomayto, you say tomahto.”

“But this is a class,” I insisted. “Where we’re supposed to be learning how to do things the right way, right? So, this is the right way. Let’s take a second to actually look at it.” I got sent to the Office for 1) being disruptive, 2) daring to question the teacher, and 3) obviously having an attitude problem that should be dealt with at home. I started getting bullied that day, and disciplined at home, so yeah, I developed a real attitude problem. Teacher didn’t care, so why should I? My dad started making a point to help me with my homework, and when we got to math, whenever I made a mistake, he would start screaming. Now, maybe other kids can concentrate when their dad screams at them, but I wasn’t that good at it. Instead, I froze up. Then he’d smack me out of the chair to the floor, and spray me with spit as he screamed “If you’re not done with that problem by the time I count Ten, I’ll slap you again until you are! One!” And I would cower on the floor until he got to Five. Sure, you can call me a coward all you want, but it was terrifying. I’d get up finally, shaking like a little bird, pick up my pencil, and wince at the spit hitting my cheek, squinting at blurry numbers until bam! I was on the floor again and the count started over. It happened over and over, for years. He figured I must’ve liked getting hit so much. At least, that’s what he told Mom. Anyway, you might think that to avoid getting hit was motivation enough for me to be a better student, but oddly enough, the opposite happened. What. A. Mystery. Frederick Douglass wrote that it is easier to build strong children than repair broken men. My father didn’t subscribe to that way of thinking. I found out later on that, even if he was proud of me for something, he’d never tell me because he was afraid he’d jinx it and I’d go and do something stupid, to make him regret praising me. I started looking for approval from everyone else, became agreeable, which is a polite way of saying a suck-up. Eventual- ly, my pathological need for approval would lead to drug use,

19 because being a pot head has a very low ability threshold, and new people are always welcome in that community. I stopped paying attention, started hanging out with those dumb kids at the back of the class, started doing what they did instead of studying. They were all thieves, so I became a thief. We spent our time perfecting the arts of shoplifting and picking pockets. I’d steal candy and bring it to school to sell, and kept watching the older kids to see what they considered cool. Their big thing was smoking cigarettes and getting into fights, so that’s what I did. I watched movies to see what Hollywood said cool kids did, and they drank, did drugs, and competed to see who could have the most girlfriends. Since I grew up taking my cues from movies and books, instead of receiving proper guidance, the examples I followed were fictional, based on the perceptions of writers who either did not know better or had their own agenda. I modeled myself after Danny Zucco, the Fonz and Richie Gennaro. I got the leather jacket, had the hair and everything. I tried to be everything an Italian boy “should” be. I suppose I became a bit of a poseur. Or worse, I became a farfanicchio. It was learning that word while studying Italian that a mirror was held up in front of me, and I was shocked and humbled. The word means “little man who puts on airs.” I’ve noticed that, when people try to be something they aren’t, like men pretending to be women, or whites pretending to be black, they often overdo it to the degree that it becomes ridiculous. Look at the white dude standing alone in a club full of black guys, and he’ll be the only one wearing a clock around his neck. In that way, I had tried to make myself into the cool guy, and it was painfully obvious to everyone but me that I was full of shit. And that’s what I heard my whole life. I was nothing. By the way, Ferrar was the name I was born with, but it was not my father’s. My father was born a Schillizzi, and my great grandfather Filippo Schillizzi’s name is on an obelisk in

20 the village of Godrano, in Sicily. I got to go there and see it, long ago. Now, being Sicilian in New York, during the 1950s, wasn’t very fashionable. My father was called Shit-Lizzie by a bully in school, and my grandfather decided changing our name would make life easier for them. There was a popular candy company called Ferrara, and we have relatives with that name, so he chose Ferrar. It would sound more “American”—whatever that means—and they would fit in. My father was so happy that he couldn’t wait to tell everyone at school, especially the bully. Unfortunately, the kid came out immediately with his new nickname: Ferrara Nougat Shit. Well, now that my dad was the Dad, he was the biggest kid on the playground, so it was finally his turn to push around all the smaller kids. Those smaller kids happened to be his kids. I suppose his revenge was sweet, just as mine might someday be if I don’t somehow break the cycle. Dr Gabor Maté said people used to stress since childhood can become addicted to adrenaline and cortisol until the absence of stress causes unease, boredom and meaninglessness. Now, the reason I bring this up, I’ve watched my dad get angry just sitting there, staring off into space. I could read it in his eyes that he was remembering something that happened a hundred and ten years before, and his cortisol would spike just as if it were happening that moment. And I would see it there, plain as the nose on his face, as he relived whatever injustice he had suffered in the past. He’d work himself up into a rage, and then look for someone to take it out on. I know this, because I used to do it, too, and so have both my brothers. I think everyone does to a degree, and that’s why the story of the two wolves made its way around Facebook. If you missed it, I’ll give you the short version. There are two wolves fighting inside all of us. The first is evil, the second is good. Which will win? The one you feed. Until I thought of it this way, I was a slave to the evil wolf.

I would revisit grievances and dwell on them until they con- sumed me, using my anger as motivation, as jet fuel. But now I can see how that not only poisoned me, it poisoned everyone around me, because they felt it coming out of my pores and into the air. They could smell it like a dog smells fear. All these events I mentioned could have been lessons for me to learn, but instead, I chose to be bitter because of them. We’re in control of the way we perceive events, and need to be mindful of our thoughts, every bit as much as we are of the music we listen to or movies we watch. Those thoughts can pollute our minds until we become like my father, or me before I finally woke up. I believe a lot of emotions are actually habits. When we practice the piano, for example, we form neural pathways that get stronger with repetition. Maybe your habitual emotion is self-doubt? Maybe it’s resentment? You might, through repetition be programming yourself to attract the wrong things into your life by fixating on what you don’t want. If you remember being bullied or abused, or only see the evil in people, that is what you will manifest. Whatever we repeat in our subconscious becomes reality. If you practice victimhood, I guarantee you’ll get good at it. You will become a martyr, and your bad energy will ruin all of your relationships. It reminds me of the Myth of Attraction. I’m sure you’ve heard of the so-called law, where if you think positively, then you will attract more positive things in your life. There’s more to it than that, but that’s it in a nutshell. The reality is you see whatever you focus on. The car you decided to buy is everywhere all of a sudden? You think that it’s because you are tuned into the universe with some frequency that others are oblivious to? No, sorry. The truth is, there were millions of that car out there already, but you never noticed them because you weren’t thinking about them. Chances are, you’re driving on autopilot

22 and thinking about something else, and it isn’t until you settle on that specific car that is stands out from all the others. That same way, when you only think about the harm people have done to you in the past, you’ll see only the negative aspects of people around you, and that’ll ruin your life and maybe theirs. Now, I’m not here to just point my finger without offering solutions. I found a way to reverse the negative subconscious programming and improve your life, literally overnight. I mentioned how the movies you watch and the music you listen to can influence you, and I will go into it in depth later. Right now, I would like to remind you of the film Inception. For those of you who may not’ve seen it, Leo DiCaprio gets hired by businessmen to plant subconscious ideas into the minds of their competition while they’re asleep. This gave me an idea. As a child, I used to fall asleep listening to books on tape. But they weren’t the classics, or anything useful. I was a child, so they were children’s books. Every night, I accidentally programmed myself with fairy tales, and through repetition developed a worldview that a genie, fairy godmother, or some form of Deus ex Machina would always come through for me in my time of need. Just like Alladin, I lied and stole and wasted my time at school, certain that I would eventually stumble upon a genie in a lamp who would magically make me rich. It doesn’t even have to be while you sleep. It can be what you program yourself with through sitcoms. The same way I’d become a wastrel, I watched my friends become petty and nit- picky after watching Seinfeld for months. My brother admitted to becoming a self-important pompous ass from watching too much Frasier. An entire generation of kids grew up as Disney princesses, unappreciative of what they have, expecting magic to get them what they want more. Now, part of my message is to use unpleasantness in your past to your advantage. If you grew up in an unhappy family, like mine where you were constantly walking on eggshells, you no doubt became sensitive to micro-expressions, those almost

23 imperceptible flashes that’ll appear on somebody’s face before they hide what they’re thinking. You could sense trouble coming from the way someone was breathing, or the tenseness in their shoulders. Even the way they put the groceries down. There are people who say you need to overcome that sensitivity, learn to not care about what others might be passive- aggressively trying to communicate, but I disagree. I say that should be your talent. You’ve been trained, have a heightened ability bordering on a superpower, to read people’s discomfort and know how to smooth the wrinkle out of their mood. That makes you perfect for customer service. Like a falcon, sensitive people can see the slightest change in the landscape. You could be the one to save an important contract by noticing the client’s displeasure, or help a colleague not get fired because you see an interoffice dynamic that no one else can. You can even feel the pleasure of secretly arranging someone else’s good fortune, like in that film Amelie. The pride of knowing that you did something truly good, and never letting anyone else know. Never taking the credit. The satisfaction of those little acts, and resisting the urge to brag about it, will put you into a higher plane of being. Remember what Gandhi said: “Be the change that you wish to see in the world.” My need for approval produces my greatest work. Being okay with myself produces nothing. I’m not saying you should let people walk all over you. But “make lemonade” out of your past. Don’t let the abuse have been in vain. Use it to your advantage and be indispensable in some way to others. And if you perceive it as too great an obstacle, don’t worry. I have found a way to help you change your mental polarity. My solution to reverse the negativity I’d been programmed with—and also to drown out the ringing in my ears—is to fall asleep to hypnosis therapy on YouTube every night. There are several channels to choose from, but you have to be careful who might be negatively influencing you while you are under.

What I do personally is, find someone who can knock me out right away, download their video, and insert my own affirmations after the first ten minutes. Say whatever you think you need to hear the most, and loop it for eight hours. It helps to undo all the negativity I programmed into my subconscious. I wake up feeling refreshed and motivated, and during the day I am a lot clearer with my decision-making. Give it a shot. For example, there were many things I knew I had to do, but put off for years. The step outside my ice cream shop had eroded over the years and was slippery. All the time, customers lost their footing on the way out and some even fell, dropping their ice cream all over the sidewalk. For years, I said we had to do something, but expected someone else to do it. I also had been saving all of the corks from wine bottles to make a Thanksgiving wreath. I had enough to make it several times over, but every year I said I’d get to it, and never did. It wasn’t that I was lazy, but after a few years of being a slave to routine, I was overwhelmed by any extra chore. Well, I started listening to sleep hypnosis for procrastina- tion in September, right before it would be time to put up the Fall decorations. The very next day, I went down to the hard- ware store, bought two planks of wood, a spool of wire, blew the dust off my toolbox, and made a step and a wreath. It did not take much to make the step, and customers now leave my ice cream shop the way they should—happily instead of with shaken nerves or sore bottoms. The wreath was fun to make, and people commented on it every day until January, when I reluctantly had to take it down. The feeling of finally getting off my butt to do those two things made me feel alive. Taking action is a lot more satisfying than making excuses, and since then, I have done everything I had been putting off. Every night, I listen to either affirmations that undo all the negativity, or my multiplication tables, or audiobooks by Rob- ert Greene like the 48 Laws of Power. The change that came over me was every bit as effective as dying and coming back to life,

25 and it hurt significantly less. I highly recommend it as an easy way to improve and get the most out of the following day. Many people use the convenience of “God’s will” as their excuse. Oh it’s just not God’s will that I succeed. At some point the words “Try, try again,” were replaced by “It isn’t meant to be.” I say the only thing that is meant to be is your death, and everything else that happens to you is your decision. So, try it. You’ll get a lot more out of your life if you put yourself in the driver’s seat, instead of bound and gagged in the trunk.

Before you continue, please understand that we all see the world the way we have been brought up to see it. I grew up in a racist household, and repeated at school some of the things I heard at home. Some of that hatred is apparent in old copies of my first books, which are unfortunately out circulating with no hope of being recalled. If you come across them, I apologize. People change. Let me tell you why it was easy to grow up believing what my father said, though: As I mentioned earlier, I was reared until nine years old in the Bahamas. It is a country with a large black population, and my brothers and I were the only whites in our school. All of our friends were black. My first girlfriend was black. And the first time I heard the word ‘nigger’ was when some black boys called me one. I asked my mother what that word meant, and she told me it was a dirty term referring to people with black blood. That seemed outlandish to me. When they called me a nigger again the next day, I told them that my blood was as red as theirs. They needed proof, apparently. It turned out, for much of my life I would be beaten because of the color of my skin. When we moved to the US shortly thereafter, to South Florida, I was overjoyed that I would finally be among “my own people,” and was wrong yet again. I was outcast for being different there, too. Everywhere I went, I was persecuted for what “my people”—my people indeed; no one in my family tree ever owned slaves, ever, and chances are, neither did yours—did to someone else’s ancestors. I’ll talk about that a bit more, later, because I don’t want to get sidetracked. This part is about a different kind of mindset we grow up with. If you were led to believe that people are inherently good, you’ll be trusting and unprepared for treachery. The violence

27 inherent in all living things will come as a shock to you when you are faced with it. That is why so many people find it hard to understand why they were attacked while, say, jogging alone through their neighborhood at night, with their headphones on. Any wild animal can tell you that was a bad idea. “Oh, but we should be able to do that!” I hear people say. I’m not sure what this Should is based upon, but I assure you that it is way off base. That being said, the reality of the world is disturbing to even the most cynical. For example, if you think that government exists to provide safety for its citizens, as you have been told, then I’m afraid you are in for a surprise. I advise everyone who reads this to question it, as they should all things. By that, I do not mean just disbelieve me for the sake of being contrary. I mean investigate and find out for yourself. Seek out reputable sources and cross-reference everything you are told, by your family, your government, everyone. Some are just repeating the faulty information that was passed down to them by their parents, and some are lying to you, and some are programming you to fail. One way we’re programmed to fail is through the food we eat. If we are fed garbage, and then told to diet improperly, we subject ourselves to all manner of health problems that can evolve into mental health problems. In that way, we’re constant stimulants for the economy. Just look in any gas station. They offer a wide variety of junk food, and right behind the counter, a wide variety of remedies for the digestion problems that inevitably follow, all of which affect our second brain. We are told lies about how fats and carbs are bad for us, and then sold pills to counteract the effects of not ingesting enough fat and carbs. Now, this part will be hard to swallow, but I urge you to look it up and verify everything I have to say. It has to do in part with how easily people will accept a lie, while adamantly refusing to believe a fact. A dog’s mouth, for example, is not cleaner than that of a human. That’s absolutely

28 untrue. But people spout that little pseudo-fact all the time. A dog’s mouth is filthy. But someone made that up long ago, and others just repeat it. People often believe “bro science” from guys in the gym, and accept dating advice from others who secretly want them to not end up with whomever’s courting them. If these wholly unqualified people are to be believed, how easy is it for people we assume to be experts to lie to us? Like with “fact-check” websites promoting lies to advance someone else’s agenda. I’m especially warning you against any website that calls itself the fact-checking authority. You should always find out who pays for that website and in whose interest the “facts” are spun. It’s the easiest thing in the world to condition men to walk around with urine stains in their underwear. Just tell him that if he shakes it more than three times, he’s playing with it. The- se are little tests to see how receptive a population is to utter nonsense. Since it is so readily accepted, people like the ones in power constantly push the boundaries to see how far they can go, before someone calls them on their lies. A Swiss professor once made a wildly inaccurate claim that bumblebees should be incapable of flight, and people say they continue to fly because nobody ever told them. A similar claim was made about the deer botfly, and how it can fly up to 800 mph. I’ve read both of these in books of “facts” that made all the other facts in the books, no matter how accurate, suspect by association. They were accepted as fact because some person with a degree said them, but they are absolutely false. Edward Bernays—arguably one of the most evil geniuses in the history of the world—who was responsible for making cigarette smoking sexy, fluoridating water acceptable, and the economic ruin of Guatemala, told the world that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. We repeat it all the time. Why not? It makes sense, right? But traditionally, people in the US ate light breakfasts and were healthy enough. Certainly not suffering wide-spread obesity, like today.

But why would Bernays say that? Simple. He was paid to, in the 1920s, by the Beech-Nut Packing Company. They came to him complaining about their poor bacon sales. How could they possibly convince the world to eat it? He arranged a news item saying 4,500 doctors urge the eating of a hearty breakfast every day, one that includes bacon and eggs. It was published in major newspapers and magazines all over the country, and bacon sales went through the roof. Big Tobacco asked for his help removing the social stigma against women smoking in public, because they were losing a lot of potential revenue. He organized a publicity stunt during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in which “women would light torches of freedom.” The buzz it created was astounding, and the public anxiously watched the parade, wondering what that could mean. At his signal, debutantes lifted their skirts, pulled packs of cigarettes from their garters, and made a show of lighting up. From then on, smoking has been an act of rebellion, and the deaths it has caused are innumerable. Then, the water. The myth that we all need eight glasses of water a day came from a recommendation in 1945, which said 2.5 liters a day is a “suitable allowance,” and no one bothers to repeat the sentence immediately following, that we get a lot of that water already from the food we eat during the day. There has been absolutely no scientific evidence to support that eight glasses of water a day is beneficial, at least, none that has not been “found” in studies funded by water companies. But ever since Oscar Ewing got the US government to put fluoride in the drinking water in 1950 and had Bernays make it acceptable to the public, people who drink eight daily glasses of it are a lot more complacent, less likely to riot and rebel. An example of a far more serious lie would be the gender- bending going on in the States at this time. It took a few years to prime the audience with gay rights programming, before the unthinkable could become commonplace: the idea of multiple

30 genders in the United States. In his 1922 book Public Opinion the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Walter Lippmann compared us, the masses, to a “great beast” and a “bewildered herd,” incapable of making decisions for itself. We need to be guided by a governing class, and he described the ruling elite as “a specialized class whose interests reach beyond the locality.” This class is composed of experts, specialists and bureaucrats. He wrote that the primary defect of democracy is an imaginary “omnicompetent citizen.” The trampling and roaring “bewildered herd” has its function: to be “the interested spectators of action,” but not participants. Participation is the duty of “the responsible man” which is not the regular citizen. He then discusses the “manufacture of consent,” the manipulation of public opinion to accept the agenda of the elite: “That the manufacture of consent is capable of great re- finements no one, I think, denies. The process by which public opinions arise is certainly no less intricate than it has appeared in these pages, and the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough …as a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power…Under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily in the sinister meaning of the word alone, the old constants of our thinking have become variables. It is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spon- taneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify. It has been demonstrated that we cannot rely upon intuition, conscience, or the accidents of casual opinion if we are to deal with the world beyond our reach.” —Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

This ruling class knows that, in the past, when they tried to force a clearly defined change upon a populace, they were met with protest and riots and revolt. If that populace was slowly desensitized to the change, however against its best interests it might be, they would grudgingly tolerate and then even accept it. First, the entertainment media feature that change in plots of movies and books, then in other forms of art such as music and their accompanying videos, and the news media present it as a solution to whatever problem they have conditioned us to believe exists. We then accept it with indifference. Journalist Christopher Bryson interviewed Bernays about it in 1993, and wrote that “The PR wizard specialized in promoting new ideas and products to the public by stressing a claimed health benefit.” “‘You can get practically any ideas accepted,’ Bernays told me, chuckling. “If doctors are in favor, the public is willing to accept it, because a doctor is an authority to most people, regardless of how much he knows, or doesn’t know…By the law of averages, you can usually find an individual in any field who will be willing to accept new ideas, and the new ideas then infiltrate the others who haven’t accepted it.’” A long time ago, I learned the way to catch wild pigs, and I saw it as a potential way of convincing people to give up their freedom, little by little. What you do is, find out where pigs are and leave some food there. Leave it, and go away. They will all look at it, sniff it, and eat it. Hey, free food, why not? The next day, you leave some more. And the next day, you also put up a bit of fence. They will, at first, be wary of it, but since it won’t do anything, they’ll accept it. The next day, when you leave the food you put up another side of the fence. And when they are used to that, a third side. Before too long they don’t mind that you come up behind them with a gate and shut them in. This also works if you want to change people’s minds. For thousands of years, purple was the color of royalty. A woman is more likely to get picked up by a man wearing pur-

32 ple than any other color. Yet somehow, in only one generation purple became a “gay color.” When I first came to Florida in 1986, as a child, homosexuality was the worst thing in the world. Other kids bullied me because someone had decided I was gay. Then, in the mid-90s, MTV began conditioning us to accept homosexuality with its show the Real World. I predicted the current state of affairs, and was laughed at by my peers. I worked that prediction into the dialogue of one of my novels, By the Sword, written in 2003: “Consider how trendy homosexuality has become since the Nineties. Everywhere we look, we can see two chicks making out. Ooh, that’s so hot, right? Poster sales every Wednes- day, Fall Quarter on every college campus, you can’t miss the two underage-looking girls making out. Bands fronted by two underage-looking girls who dyke-out onstage and in their videos. In PG-13 movies. On primetime network TV. In high school curricula, for Christ’s sake.” “Come on! Two chicks? How can you say that’s not hot?” “You’re missing it, man. First it’s the two girls, until we’re so used to it we don’t even pay attention anymore. Gradually, the bar’s going to be raised until they can get away with selling posters of two naked guys together on campus.” “What? Never!” “Mark my words. The first one makes its appearance and there’ll be an outcry, but all they’ll have to do is shout Double Standard. We’re being maneuvered into place right now. Al- ready they have gay guys on primetime TV, programming us to think they are cutesy and funny and have all the style. See how quickly public opinion has become not only accepting, but even supportive of deviance?” Not even twenty years later, I could be crucified for those words. Homosexuality is not just acceptable, it’s encouraged. I have also changed my mind about it, but not because of all the programming. The majority of my best friends, and two family members are gay, so I’ve become familiar to it and overcame

33 my ignorance. I do have to use it as a strong example, though. It is undeniable that public opinion has done a complete 180. Gradually, what was unthinkable becomes tolerable, then acceptable, then legal, and finally, praised. While that may be a positive thing in this case, it can very easily go the other way. I’ll have to get sidetracked here for a moment. I stumbled upon the idea that vegetarianism causes gender dysphoria while solving the plagues of Egypt. Now bear with me here. There’s a pesticide called Atrazine, very commonly used in the Salinas Valley, where about 85% of the country’s lettuce is grown. It’s called the salad bowl of America. About 50% of all the nation’s produce is grown in California, which uses more pesticide than any other state. Syngenta, the manufacturer of Atrazine hired a biologist at Berkeley named Tyrone Hayes to make sure their product was completely safe. Unfortunately, he found that wherever it was sprayed on crops, male frogs in that area acted like females. When he reported it, Syngenta tried to discredit him so no one would believe anything he said. There was a lawsuit, and they settled, paying him millions. You can look all of this up. He also found the amount of Atrazine causing this sexual abnor- mality was three times less than what he found in our drinking water. Now, what does this have to do with Moses and Egypt? There is a traveling toxic alga called Karenia brevis, that kills fish, and makes people cough up to a whole mile inland when it’s near land. It blooms between a thousand to over a million individual algae per liter of ocean water. And it’s blood red. A huge, stinky, red patch of water that kills fish and makes people choke…like the Nile turning to blood. So, what I’m thinking, this alga killed off the fish that had been living off the eggs of frogs. Those eggs hatched and became tons of baby frogs that went on land to escape it. They overran the place. When they were killed, their bodies attracted flies and lice, which carried diseases, which killed off most of Egypt’s livestock. The flies carried a bacterial infection to cause boils on

34 people. I’m thinking after that, there was probably a sand- storm that lasted three days, and in it, heat met an approach- ing cold front to cause hail and thunder storms. The wind probably blew locusts out of Ethiopia and into Egypt. After the hail melted, locust excrement mixed with the water made all the grain poisonous. Egyptians, back in the day, gave their first-born sons the lion’s share at dinner, so they ate more bad food than anyone else in the family, and died. And that’s that mystery solved. It was the last part that makes me think of the gender dysphoria connection. Meat-eaters don’t seem to be confused about their gender. It’s a sweeping generalization, sure, but who can deny that more vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, seem to be the forerunners in the transgender movement? I think it’s because they eat far more contaminated food than anyone else. And before you argue that gender dysphoria has been around a lot longer than chemicals—which is true— that doesn’t mean it is the only thing that causes it. It is another thing that causes it, to a much greater degree. Since the advent of this pesticide, that number has risen dramatically. It’s not that the world is more liberal and understanding now, so more people feel comfortable enough to admit their delusion. More people are deluded than ever before, because of that chemical. What benefit could there possibly be in that? Quite simply, the world is now overpopulated. Nature has a way of culling herds whenever they grow too large and upset the balance. We are now at the pinnacle of evolution, and medical science has extended the lives of people who normally would never have survived. Due to medical advances, the weak who would have perished early now live to a ripe old age, and worse, reproduce. Gasp. What a horrible thing to say. Well, yes, a bit insensitive. But the real world has no room for sensitivity. The fittest, the quickest to adapt, are the ones who survive. Since there are now so many people on the planet, and the system is severely off balance, artificial methods of culling are

35 being implemented by those who govern us. We’re being actively discouraged from reproducing, for example, through the constant bombardment of propaganda against birth. Who can deny there is a declining birth rate in the US and Western Europe due to the fashionability of homosexuality, abortion, and the growing reluctance of educated women to tie themselves down with kids until much later in life? None of this has happened by accident. Articles on Facebook have become even more obvious, with headlines saying that having a baby will cost you millions of dollars. Since we repeatedly demonstrate—by texting while driving, for example—that we are, on the whole, idiots, those who govern us aren’t particularly bothered by our decision to eliminate ourselves from the gene pool. In fact, it is always in the best interest of the elite to have smaller populations in to rule. It is counter-intuitive, since one might think ruling a larger amount of people means having more power. On the contrary when common people vastly outnumber the elite, they can rise up and seize control, but a smaller society, preferably a society of failures, is far easier to govern. A country of well-informed, strong, and healthy men of fighting age is a disaster waiting to happen. If they breed like rabbits, something has to be done. Take, for example, the Crusades. One of the reasons for the First Crusade was the need to stop the horribly unchival- rous behavior of European knights. It turns out that Gawain and Percival’s honor was fiction, and Pope Urban II’s solution was to send hordes of ironclad bullies off to rape and pillage somewhere else, far away, leaving the peasants behind to carry on doing the work and being meek. This is a reason the US has been involved in so many wars over the years. The success of World War II saved the nation. Millions of lives were lost in that war, and it solved a crisis: the Great Depression. The historian Thomas Sowell, a man I respect and admire, explains it far better than I can in a quick four-minute video on YouTube.

Wars are started by the US, all over the world, for all the traditional reasons, like conquest. Our sons—and now daughters—are shipped off to fight and die elsewhere, solving the unemployment problem. I’ll talk more about this later. Back on topic, there’s another benefit of this conditioning: insisting that multiple genders exists is to stimulate gradually increasing tolerance and eventual acceptance of perversion in the US, with the end result of normalizing pedophilia. I’ll get back to that, too. Transgenderism is the topic at the moment, and I have to weigh in. If you are born male and you want to chop your hoohoodilly off, knock yourself out. Don’t think for one minute though that someone else should pay for it, or that it entitles you to more rights than anyone else. The Miss Universe pageant, for example, is a women’s competition, and all the women have to be somehow exceptional just to compete. Then they have to be better than one another to win the damn thing. A male who chose to become female is not therefore exceptional just to be a “woman.” If he was, all the women would be saying “Well, I’m a woman,” when asked why they deserved to win. Bruce Jenner being named Woman of the Year was a slap in the face of all women, because it proclaimed to the world that men are better than women at everything, including being a woman. If a transgender wins the Miss Anything pageant, it will be every bit as unjust as when they win sporting events. To respond to the media trying to condition us to accept it through yellow journalism, I’ll quote Brooke Knight: “Within a week of the Vogue interview with VS, the Wall Street Journal prints “Victoria’s Secrets: Sex isn’t selling” and articles about the LBrands underperformance blame a lack of inclusiveness and vision for their decline. They’re not talking about how the entirety of retail is on a steep, downward trend. No. With VS, it’s about Plus Size chicks and dudes with missing parts and fabulous hair who feel entitled to have an open invitation to walk one of the most anticipated fashion

37 events of the year. They feel slighted, and the pussy-hat wearing angry throngs of intersectional, fourth-wave feminists are happy to start Change.org petitions to Boycott Victoria’s Se- cret! But let’s be honest, here: Who seriously wants to see these people strutting down a catwalk in lacy underwear and angel wings? The #MeToo movement isn’t about equality for women—it’s about transgenders and other small special interest groups who have co-opted womanhood for their own personal gains. It’s not equality. Is there anything more misogynistic than a man who chops off his parts and then tells women he should share a runway with them? “Retail is dying. Not because sexiness isn’t sexy, but because despite the stock market’s overall positive performance, we have older people who have not retired, holding up jobs for younger people who, in turn, cannot afford the prices of a specialty store, when they can get something comfy and even equitable via Amazon. To blame the performance on inclusivi- ty of transgenders is so completely disingenuous. I don’t know one woman who says “I can’t shop there, they don’t like transgenders on their runways or ads.” I do know plenty of women who say, “I can’t shop there, it’s too expensive for me.” What I object to is the article trying to convince the public to believe that Victoria’s Secret losing business is a direct consequence of its refusing to align itself with the political agenda. The less savvy in the audience might believe it, and thereby be persuaded to get in line out of fear. Fear of losing clients, fear of being socially ostracized, or fear of being on the wrong side of the witch hunt du jour. This is happening more and more often these days, polarizing the public until the very mention of certain issues, in an otherwise polite conversation, makes people go into an immediate full-blown rage. It turns friends and family into enemies, even though they aren’t even directly affected by those issues. They don’t have a dog in the fight but will still go to war over it, because their minds have been made up by someone else. Someone manufacturing their consent.

I recall the news media using outright lies in journalism to convince people, through fear, to bend to their will before. It always seemed to precede millions of people being killed.

Be this guy.

Now, this might seem like I am contradicting myself, but it’s one of the most important things you need to know, not to be negative, but to be aware. We’re told since birth about how “safe” the world is. There are predators all around us, at all times, who wear many masks. If you are a gullible omega male, like I was, you’ll be used up and hung out to dry in no time. That’s why I prepared myself for it happening again, and been glad for having done so twice in the past. The first time, I maced the guy who held a knife to my throat and beat him with the telescoping baton I kept on me until he was at least unconscious, then I ran faster than I think I ever have before. I always regretted not having stayed behind to make sure he was dead, but you can never really know what you’ll do in that situation until it happens. And you can shout at the guy on TV ‘til you’re blue in the face, but he’s never going to do what you think you’d do in his position. And to be honest, you probably won’t either. The second time it happened, I suppose I’ll have to tell a bit of a background story first.

I used to be engaged, to a stripper, of all things. Hey, I was young and stupid. And rich, let’s not forget that. So I had plenty of money that I hadn’t really worked for and so didn’t appreciate, and she was hot and a nymphomaniac. And hot, horny chicks tend not to starve. They tend to find stupid, impressionable young men like, say, me, who believe everything they hear if it’s said by red lips that kiss them often, and in various places, and they move into their houses, drive their cars, and take all their money. Well, this might come as a shock to you out there in Audience-land, but that’s exactly what happened to me. My dad tried to tell me she was using me as a meal ticket,

41 but I thought he was jealous of what I had and he wanted to screw it up for me. He just couldn’t stand to see me with that foxy lady, and tried to rain on my parade. So, I ran away with her. And this might come as a shock to you as well (because it certainly did to me) but my old man was right. All those late-night promises and sweet nothings, and the Yes she gave me through tearful eyes when I showed her the ring didn’t seem to mean anything after all. Who’da thunk it? But hey, what’s done is done. And if any of you read my book Friends Like These you’ll know who that was about. All that about her was true too. Well, a lot of it. Definitely all that stuff about her being a narc and wearing a wire to get her own friends busted for a measly seven hundred dollars a pop. Really, I’m not kidding. I read her diary right before we broke up. Shame I didn’t read it before I lost everything. Here is an example of the kind of night we’d have. That I had any part in it is disturbing to me, looking back on it now, but this was the result of me doing drugs to fit in, and believing the garbage Hollywood peddles that prostitutes and strip- pers are great people if you just get to know them. This was when I had just gotten engaged for the first time, and I took my new fiancée down to Florida to celebrate. I had called Mark, and he told us to be waiting on the third dock of the Sailfish Marina when he passed by at eight. Now, time out while I tell you about Mark. You know all of those divas and demigods who stride past the long lines to a nightclub’s entrance, make kissy-kissy with the bouncer, who enrages all of those standing in line by opening the velvet rope for them and them alone; those who waltz through the doors with a little wave to the girl who charges everyone else twenty bucks; the upper-echelon fops and dandies and chippies? What the hell is it that makes them so special? Who be- stowed upon them the right to look with contempt and con- descension upon people superior to them in all the ways that

42 matter? My buddy Mark, that’s who. At the bottom tier are the doormen. They judge who gets to come in. They choose. It’s not the next people in line, those people waiting their turn. There are actually meetings during the day to discuss who the doormen ought to look out for, and it’s based on these meetings whether you and birds of your feather are worthy of admission. They use fancier language, though. They say they “select patrons” who they feel “will most enhance the ambience within.” They are trained in feeling out vibes from people trying to get in, who’ll cause trouble and who’ll bring in money. On the second tier is the promoter, cultivating the false sense of acceptance into this society that convinces rabble that they are welcome to come in and spend money. They’ll comp you a ticket, introduce you to the doorman who will promptly forget you but pretend he’ll look out for you on a crowded night. Introduce you to the cover charge cashier who will pretend to put your name down on The List. Introduce you to Tony the bartender, who’ll give you a free shot as long as you don’t tell anybody else. Make you feel special. Introduce you to a Heather or a Lisa who’ll encourage you to buy her drinks all night. Motivate you to spend even more money. Get you a table in the VIP, convince you to buy a bottle of Dom. The Lisas and Heathers are paid cuts from the entrance take and the bar tabs, and the promoters hand out passes to people they “feel will bring in good energy” and “personality” and “cash flow.” Then, when those passes are rejected by the cover charge girl for being expired, those clients will call their “friend” and get a busy signal for an hour or so, hoping he’ll come out and rescue them, set the cover charge girl straight, make sure their name is on the list, until they give up and just pay the twenty bucks to get in. Then they’ll spend a fortune just to drink away the wrinkle in their mood and catch up with the rest of the party.

To appease them, the promoter will admit them into the tentative sub-VIP clique, an arena of treacherous, conniving backstabbers who will form temporary alliances to conspire against one another, try to thin the herd and make themselves look better by comparison so they can gain entrance to the real VIP. Aaaaaaand spend more money. And on the tier above that, is Mark. Then, the club itself, where we have the primitive mating ritual. Hundreds of people looking for a mate, choosing one based on colorful plumage and the skill of their mating dance. Finding one, taking them home, and then what? Back to the club. While an animal would stay at the den or the nest, have children and care for them, moving on to the next stage of life —what’s it called? Oh yeah. Adulthood—These people are back at the club, doing the same thing all over again, caught in a perpetual loop. I guess because maybe the searching is all we know these days, and we’re clueless about the having. I see people more and more as the spectators, the non- participants, like the birds that know they won’t make the cut and act like they just can’t be bothered. Me, dance? Nah. Maybe next year. There are those who make continuous circuits of the club so they look like they have people to catch up with somewhere, others who ring the balconies and ignore one another while they watch braver people dance, and the ones who refuse to be seen anywhere other than the dance floor, but they still stand around doing nothing. All they do is get in other people’s way and sneer at them. Then there are the males with neither plumage nor confidence, who try to fake being alphas by picking a fight with a smaller male, so they can show their strength and maybe go home with a lower-value female who’ll settle. The domestic violence relationship at its conception. And me, thinking this not my world.

I was in Mark’s house once, which was really just the guest

44 house on the other side of the pool from the mansion where his parents lived. Mark’s waterbed was so big that it took up most of the floor space, so since there was no other furniture, unless you were standing, you were in the bed. You were in bed with Mark. Anyway, this was back before everybody had cell phones and I was supposed to call my girlfriend at six, but we were in bed—a good four feet away from each other, mind—watching a movie. Then, the doorbell rang. We both got up to answer it, and there was this chick with long curly black hair, in a gown, with a primer-gray Bonneville slouching in the driveway. She looked like she had been on her way to the ball, but her coach had turned back into a pumpkin before she arrived. “Hi!” she said. “Mark?” “Um…yeah?” This happened often with Mark. He had all the luck with girls, but often forgot them immediately after. She told us she was here for their date, and was surprised to see me there. The phone rang in his little house, so he went off to answer it, and I asked what was going on. Something in the way she’d said Date made me think something was wrong. “Well,” she said. “We met online at an escort website and agreed to have sex for a large sum of money.” “You want to pay him a large sum of money?” “No,” she started to say, before realizing I was joking. “Ha ha. Cute. So, here I am, but he never said anything about there being two of you. But, that’s not a problem. We’ll just adjust the price accordingly.” Now, I know prostitution is, and has always been, pretty common, but I say there’s no glory in it and am not interested. Really, if there’s no mutual attraction, what’s the point? It’s just like masturbating only using someone else instead of your hand. I told her that Mark wasn’t into paying for it either, leaving out that he got it for free all the time, so what was the point.

“Well, somebody called me for a date, and I didn’t get all dressed up for nothing.” “I’m afraid you did.” “Well…” “Look, I’m sorry, but I think someone was just playing a trick on all of us, and it’s best if you went home.” See? There I am doing the right thing. Right? So she said Fine, and I closed the door. Mark looked at me like What the hell did you do? while he was still on the phone, and I just waved like Forget about it, go back inside. I tried to climb back onto the bed and crawl to my side when the door bell rang again. Sigh. What now? We both went to the door again, and there she was. “My car won’t start.” Jesus. We looked at that primer-gray Bonneville as if it were no surprise. But, we had to help her get it started so she could go away and never come back. The only problems were, the hood latch had been broken and tied shut with—I couldn’t believe it—a length of chain. Really. It had been looped around and around underneath the hood to keep it from flying open while Roxanne here was driving, by, it turned out, her boyfriend. Yeah, her boyfriend that let her make “dates” with complete strangers online, apparently to make ends meet. Since ol’ Mark had never gotten his hands dirty in his life, and didn’t know how, it fell on me to fiddle around with a screwdriver through the grille and undo the pathetic knot. Then the next problem. The car could not be put in neutral to move it back, to make room for Mark to pull up his car, his robin’s egg blue BMW Z3. The jumper cables just didn’t stretch far enough. Sooooo, we had to use the other battery charger. The one on a dolly in the garage. The one that took an hour. Jesus. What a bunch of twits we were. But we got the car hooked up and felt awkward just standing there, knowing it would be wrong to leave her sitting out in the drive way, but

46 not wanting to invite her in. Mark still had no idea what was going on, and so he thought there was no harm in all three of us going back into the guest house and, yep, you guessed it, getting in bed. There we were, the three of us, lying there watching that stupid movie. Mark was looking at her boobs and then at me, like Why are you still in here? Get lost. And she was looking at me too, like Okay, which one of you is going to start? And I just kept watching the movie, thinking I wasn’t going to go sit outside by the pool and watch the grass grow while my buddy got HIV. It was a very uncomfortable hour for all of us. Fast-forward. We sent her on her disappointed way and met up with our friends, and my girlfriend, at the club. One of the bartenders was so happy to see us. Asked us how our date was. “What?” Mark asked. “Your dumb ass left your email account open at my house, so I used it to sign up for this escort site. I was on it today, booked you an afternoon with ‘Lolita.’ Did she come?” Before I could answer, my girlfriend showed up, asking me why the hell I didn’t call her when I said I would. “It’s a long story, baby.” “I don’t want a long story, Alex. I want the short version, and you better make it good.” “Trust me, hon. You don’t want the short version.” “Tell me the short version right now, or we’re through.” Sigh. “Okay. I couldn’t call you because I was in bed with Mark and a prostitute.” As I’m sure you can imagine, that wasn’t what she considered “making it good.” So, that is the kind of thing that happened when you hung around him. Skip ahead to the night with my fiancée. When he showed up, piloting his dad’s yacht, there were two other dudes and three obviously underage chicks. My girl and I looked at each other, both of us having a bad feeling but

47 mutually deciding to go ahead with it. I mean, teenage girls go on boats and drink beer all the time, right? So, we had to go past Peanut Island to the other marina, where we could tank up the boat a lot cheaper, and then we’re off to Riviera Beach—which isn’t anywhere near a beach and sure as hell ain’t the Riviera. It’s the ghetto, and stupid white kids only ever go there to buy drugs and get ripped off. Aaand that’s where we were going. We got introduced around and my fiancée very skeptically talked to the three giggly girls. Apparently they met Mark and his two new sidekicks at the mall that afternoon, got invited out on the boat, and here they were. Ahh, those crazy teenage summers. We got to the marina, where the already-tipsy girls started laughing about how they were eighteen. I mean, they kept repeating it. Loudly. My fiancée went over to them and advised them to shut the hell up, since there were authority figures all over the place—the dock master, for instance, and his friends, the bicycle cops—and announcing to the world that you’re eighteen with a beer in your hand is a great way to get us all thrown in jail. The two of us just for being there on the boat with them. When they quieted down, my fiancée asked how old they really were. They maintained they were of age, but she wasn’t buying it. There’s just no reason to laugh about being eighteen unless you are seventeen. She kept interrogating them until the most clear-eyed of them fessed up. Sixteen, all three of them. “Okay, you do know what you got yourselves into, right?” They looked at her like she was being a lame old adult, and I laughed because damn, they had her pegged wrong. If you’ve read Memoirs of a Swine, this was Ginger. Everyone who met her knew right off the bat that she was trouble. Well, except me, apparently. But she’d had enough run-ins with the law to see a train wreck waiting to happen, and there was just no way she was going to jail without the pleasure of deserving it. She made that very clear to those three kids.

I suppose I could have gotten off the boat right then, just walked away from all of them and gotten a cab back to where my car was parked. Hopped in and left them all behind me. Yeah, I could’ve. But, then I wouldn’t’ve had all of these books to write. Books y’all better be learning from. I went up on the dock and asked Mark if he knew how old those girls were. He said “They said eighteen,” and shrugged. “But you know they’re not.” “Don’t be a fag, dude.” I frowned, thinking ‘Am I from another planet, or something? Did I crash land here on a mission years ago and bump my head, and get amnesia? Because these are not my people.’ So, we got under way and started drinking. There was time to kill before getting to the park on the edge of the lake, there in Riviera, to meet the guy with the ecstasy. We drank a lot of beer and popped all the Xanax that Ginger’d made me buy her back home, yunno for her “nerves.” Like, sixty pills divided up between the eight of us. I don’t know how we managed. One of Mark’s friends went below with one of the girls. It happens. It was a party. Nobody even noticed. Eventually, the guy came back up and joined us. “You hit that?” Mark’s other friend asked. The guy nodded, making that yes-no tilting of his head. “What’s that mean? You did or you didn’t?” “Well, yeah, and right before I was about to come, she told me to stop. I’m like What? Hold on just a sec.” Ginger and I looked at each other. “So, she’s all like, Stop, or whatever, and I’m like Dude, just hold on, okay? Just gimme a minute. And then she started crying. Dude, man, that was such a buzzkill.” Now we were all looking at each other, as if trying to be sure he’d really just said that, and then debating telepathically who should be the one to break the news to Casanova here. “Um, Travis?” Mark said. “Yeah?”

“You just raped that girl.” Travis frowned, uncomprehending. The other guy nodded. The two teenage girls snapped out of their little drunken Xanax trance and hurried below, and I wondered absently if I could make it to the shore from here. I wasn’t a good swimmer on the best of days, and as impaired as I was, I would probably just thrash around until sharks found me. So, I decided to stay put. I suppose I was thinking about this for awhile, oblivious to the world around me, because next thing I knew, we were at the dock on the other side of the lake. I was sitting up on the bridge under the stars, and beside us was an empty parking lot. One of those parking lots that is so empty, it’s suspicious. And then a lone car came cruuuuising slowly in from the street. So slowly, that it was suspicious. And it parked right smack dab in the middle of the otherwise empty parking lot, instead of next to us, so that Mark and the two guys had to walk a long way across the empty lot to meet whoever was driving. I was watching this thinking ‘This just looks like a drug deal out of a movie. A movie where they all get caught.’ I became dimly aware of a commotion down in the cockpit beneath me, and looked over my shoulder at the three girls. One was crying and the other two had their arms around her. My fiancée came out of the salon and started talking to them. “Listen, sweetie, I know how you’re feeling. Trust me, I’ve been there. If—” “How could you possibly know what she’s feeling?” one of the girls screamed. “I just told you. I’ve been there. Now keep your voice down okay? We’re not outta the woods yet.” “I will not keep my voice down! You can’t tell me—” And that’s when the cop car pulled into the parking lot. “Heads up,” I said quietly. It was probably the Xanax, but I was surprisingly calm. All of this was happening around me, but it was as if I was watching a movie. A movie I didn’t really

50 care about. Which is horribly insensitive, but that’s Xanax for you. I heard my fiancée hiss at them all to be quiet, and there fell over us a silence so thick we could hear the tires rolling on the pavement, all the way over there. The cop pulled right up to that car, parked suspiciously in the middle and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. Mark had walked right into what looked like a trap, with his two idiot friends, and here I was on the boat. High as a kite. “It’s the cops!” one of the girls said. Ginger’s voice wasn’t kind anymore. It was that hard voice I would come to hear often until we broke up, that voice of a violent psychopath about to lose control. “Yes, it’s the cops, and you are an underage girl drinking beer, so you will go to jail tonight if you call them over.” “No we won’t! They’ll call our parents and take us home.” “The hell they will. You will go to jail and so will I because I’m guilty by association. And I haven’t done a goddamn thing wrong.” Apart from give us all Xanax, I chose not to say. “So be it!” the girl hissed back through clenched teeth. Which was, apparently, the wrong thing to say. I looked back up at the parking lot, at the pulsing red and blue lights flashing hypnotically, wishing I could see whatever was happening. I looked up at the star-spattered vault of the sky, thinking ‘How small I am, we all are, out here on our little planet, with all our drama. How quickly things can go wrong.’ It was then that I realized I wasn’t living my life. I was just someone life happened to. I was bound and gagged in the trunk. I looked back down at Ginger and couldn’t find her or the three girls. What the f…? I squinted hard, trying to pierce the darkness, and a splash helped me spot them. One girl surfaced in the water next to the pier, spluttering, and two vague shapes wrestled on the pavement nearby. I looked from them to the cop, thinking there was no way he couldn’t notice that. I sighed. Yep, this wasn’t going to end well.

But then, hell if I know how, Mark and the other three came walking back with the ecstasy, and the cop drove off, and we were all back on the boat again. Ginger had gotten through to the three girls that no one was going to yell to get the cop’s attention, and no one was going to jail that night. Yes, the one girl had said Stop, and he kept going, and yes, that was rape, but she had to take some responsibility for it because damn, what the hell was she thinking? You can’t just spread your legs willingly and then decide to close them. Not in the real world. Sure, you can debate this in a court of law all you want, til you’re blue in the face, but the fact remains, she came onboard a yacht with older guys because she wanted to get laid. She made that decision long before she accepted a beer and went below with the guy. Lesson learned, move on with your life, and don’t ruin anyone else’s. That was the girls’ conversation. The guys’ conversation was a little different. The three of us told Travis he was an idiot, and an asshole, and asked him how could he even keep it up while she was crying? Dumbass couldn’t think of an answer. But again, that’s Xanax for you. I don’t remember much else because I passed out shortly thereafter, and Mark hooked up with my fiancée an hour later. That made it easier for us not to be friends anymore, and it’s one of the many reasons I didn’t marry that bazy critch. So, since my coma—which I will get to later—I’ve looked real hard at my life and situations like this, and sworn never to be in a position where I haven’t been in control. I would never sleepwalk through my life again so things like this happened. I would have to first stop hanging around with idiots like those, because high value men never find themselves in the company of drunk, underage girls on boats at night. Men with the Hero mindset aren’t so desperate for friends that they end up “guilty by association.” So, now you have a little backstory on what kind of a girl Ginger was, and how dumb I was to be with her. Part of the reason for continuing that relationship was my nonexistent

52 self-esteem, and I think another was diet. I only ate one meal a day, and smoked excessively to ward off hunger pangs. I met a lot of other people who lived that way as well, and we will see some of them in the following chapter. We have been hearing a lot lately about how the colon is the second brain, and that maintaining it is essential to not just our physical, but our mental health. That diet does not lead to a healthy colon, and considering how many of us ended up in prison, I don’t think it leads to healthy decisions, either. Well, who knew? Who would imagine that drugs and alco- holism are discouraged for our own good?

I’d ended up in Pearl, Mississippi, of all places. Pearl was where the first of those Columbine-style shootings took place, and I know, they ought to say that Columbine was a Pearl- style shooting, but won’t, because Pearl is, and always will be, just Pearl. Christ, it’s a dump. And I learned there that growing up a rich suburban white kid is something you can’t hide. You can slum it with trash, and try to wash it off of you by covering it with dirt, but they’ll smell it on you. No matter how low you sink, you’ll never fit in, and they will always hate you deep inside, and stab you in the back when convenient. Where we lived first was Ginger’s sister’s place in a crack neighborhood, and our neighbors were the stereotypical folks who collected welfare, then sat around outside all day, drinking they fohties, smoking dat hard, and gossiping. I may have looked down on them back then, but thinking about it now, I realize I was the same. I grew up with the same mentality. I was always trying to earn money as a little kid with this or that little scheme, either making t-shirts or comic books, or putting on magic shows, but my parents discouraged it. They said to just be happy with my allowance, and after puberty I guess it stuck. I grew up always assuming there would be money at the end of the month, income without effort. Deus Ex Machina. Maybe it was because my father couldn’t hold a job, so he had to go work for his father, and when the electric company had been sold, my grandfather kept him on an allowance, too. So he never really learned how to make his own money. When my grandfather died, he left his son in charge of the fortune instead of his wife, so there was never any need to earn a wage and set an example. (I’d love to blame someone else for it, but at the end of the day, it was my own lack of common sense.) Since it was a crack neighborhood, and Ginger had been a

55 crack addict back in the day, she relapsed. When I found out, she tried to convince me that if only I’d try it, once, I would understand what she was going through. My head would shoot up into the clouds and I would be on fire and in love with the world and blah blah blah. Sigh. Okay, so I tried it. Now, I do not like cocaine. I liked it once, the first time, because that was close to pure and I was tripping on acid. But ever since then it made me feel awful because it had been cut with God-knows-what. But you know how it is, when someone breaks it out at a party, starts divvying up lines with a card on a mirror, they become the center of attention. It’s because real coke is the caviar of the drug world, at a thousand dollars an ounce, but probably no one you’ll ever know has done pure cocaine. As soon as it arrives from Colombia it gets six grams of either dextrose or lactose to the ounce, or borax. Dextrose makes it sweet, so it is more obvious, and lactose doesn’t mix well enough, but they are still used because most people you meet don’t know shit. They only want to do coke because of the illusion of wealth and status, which is a big joke because, since it’s obvious they can’t ever have the real stuff, the stuff that is a symbol of wealth and status, they have the great big stamp of Sucker on their foreheads. They get all caught up in the tragic glamour of being cokeheads, and are addicted to, at the end of the day, dextrose and lactose, or borax. That’s the clincher about crack, as well. Everybody who smokes it is chasing the dragon. It starts when you have your first high, and you are sure that your imaginary satiation point is just around the corner. It’s a tantalizing high, always just out of reach. But there is this pent-up nervousness that people confuse with being high, and they think everything will be perfect if they have just one more hit. Then, you run out of crack. And, soon, what semblance of a high you do have starts wearing off. Fast. Your mind races, you’re pulled out of your

56 dream world. You crave the drug more and more, wanting to feel the same way as you think you did on your first high. You go to the dealer and buy the same amount you had the first time, and smoke. Still feels good, but not as good as first time. You go and buy more. Closer, but not quite there. You’re stuck, you don’t know what to do. You want to go back to that little dream world and stay forever, but your body is already developing a tolerance. You panic. You use all your money to buy more and more and more, but still, not the same as that first time. You realize that you have no more money, so you start selling your things, pawning whatever could get you that next bag. Still, nothing compared to what you had on that first, magical time that never really happened. So, you’re broke and own nothing. But you don’t care, all you care about is getting back to the first high. You start stealing, doing “favors,” whatever gets you the money for the attempt. Your life becomes a living hell, all in search of a repeat of the first high. That’s chasing the dragon. I saw that immediately, so I didn’t fall for it. But I watched her succumb and knew that it was what would destroy us. We moved into an apartment clear across town, where I took a stab at being an adult, and I lived through her bipolar fits of rage, where she’d beat the shit out of me while I tried to be brave and not hit her, and try, try to talk some sense into her. We had the cops called on us every now and then by the neighbors, and I totally sympathize with them, I do. They shouldn’t’ve had to listen to that. Or to the make-up sex we’d have the next day. See, she’d been molested for years by her father, and I’ve come to learn that many girls who grow up like that tend to hurt the men who try to love them. This is why I have such a personal vendetta against pedophiles. Often, those kids grow up to become monsters. They give their bodies away freely to people, because it is second nature to them, and then hate the lover for the same reason. Then they break that lover’s heart

57 by giving their body to someone else. Now, why would someone put up with that? People do, all the time, don’t they? It is easy to judge someone in an abusive relationship and call them a fool, but if the parents didn’t do their jobs well, the kids grow up to be like either me or her. If you have kids, think about that before you use them for sex or shatter their confidence. Anyway, that Christmas Eve, we were doing tequila shots, as we were wont to do, and she was all lovey-dovey until the eleventh shot. I had tried to keep count, but hey, we were doing shots―without chasers or training wheels―and I couldn’t count straight either. But I knew I had to stop her at ten, or she’d flip out. And she was just about to go down on me, just about to, when she decided she needed Just. One. More. Well, that last one must’ve been Eleven. Ah, tequila. That foul rotgut Tom Robbins called scorpion honey; savage water of sorcery; Tequila, the buzzard god who copulates in midair with the ascending souls of dying virgins. When the cops came, they separated us and the nice one that took me into the bedroom told me, since it was Christ- mas, he was willing to believe that I’d fallen down the stairs and that’s how I got all those bites and scratches on my face and neck. I thanked him and told him that’s exactly what had happened. Too much eggnog. Merry Christmas, officer. He went back into the other room, and came right back saying “Sorry, champ. She just assaulted my partner, so she’s coming with us.” And I spent that night alone, drinking the rest of the tequila, playing Duke Nukem, and realizing Santa wasn’t going to show up that year. So, while she was in County, she befriended a girl named Tracy. Tracy had gotten herself mixed up with a bad guy in much the same way that I’d gotten mixed up with Ginger, and she had left Las Vegas with him and his partner in crime, this epic idiot named Karen, to drive cross-country in a U-haul full

58 of automatic weapons for delivery in Pennsylvania. They’d been stopped on the highway passing through Rankin County for weaving. The arresting officer had smelled weed, cuffed the three of them, and found the crates of arms in the back of the truck. Ray, the guy, was a tall and rangy badass with a mullet and a goatee, and Karen was blonde and trashy-looking. Tracy was cute, but was only nineteen and more than a little naïve. So, anyway, Tracy demonstrated her loyalty to Ray by claiming responsibility for the weapons. He swore to her that, with his lesser charges, he’d be able to bond out and would come back for her. He got himself and Karen bonded out by this guy named Terry Griffin. If you’ve lived anywhere in Mississippi, and you heard that name, you’d say “Oh, shit.” But since you probably don’t, you probably wouldn’t. I sure didn’t. And Ray forgot all about little Tracy locked up in jail. I first heard about Ray one cold winter afternoon, about two months later. Ginger had been out on bail for a few days, and she had asked me to lend her the car. She told me to trust her, and if she hadn’t, I probably wouldn’t’ve been suspicious. But she did, so I was. She begged and cajoled me, and I was so scared of her losing her temper that I gave her the keys, and she also took a bottle of tequila, some weed she had in her little tin box, and the Xanax she’d had me buy her. I got a call a few hours later, from her, asking me to pretty please, with sugar on top, bail her out of jail. Again. What she’d done was go to meet this guy Ray, get him out of the house where he’d shacked up with a hot and lonely single-mom schoolteacher named―you’ll never believe this― Charlotte Love. I mean, that sounds like bad TV, doesn’t it? What’re the odds that Charlotte Love is going to be hot and alone, looking for a man in a bar to be a father figure for her two boys, and she meets Ray, a swarthy and swaggering arms smuggler from Vegas while he’s out on bail?

That’s what I thought. What’re the odds? But that’s what happened. He’d busted a move on Char- lotte Love, and weaseled his way into her little home, and not only brought Karen, but also four two-bit hoods that he had found somewhere. Marshall was the only one I can remember, because he was the stupidest. So, Ginger picked Ray up at Charlotte’s house and pressured him into drinking tequila, taking some Xanax and smoking a joint with her. Pressured him, you ask? Yeah. She could do that. If you don’t believe me, you don’t get out as much as you think you do. Read Friends Like These and you’ll see. So, then what does she do? The wily Ginger? She drives right on up to Rankin County jail’s front door, gives Ray a kiss on the cheek, and marches right on in. Tells them at the counter that there is a crazy man outside who’s going to come in with guns ablaze, and try and spring his girlfriend. They came out like mad dogs and crash-tackled him to the concrete, beat the shit out of him, and dragged him back into the jail he’d so recently left. They arrested her too, for reasons unclear to me. So, I bailed her out, again. And we went home. And she was going to thank me in the manner that one would expect her to, but at the last moment stopped, put on a serious face and told me that whatever happened between us, no matter what, I should never ever ever get mixed up with Terry Griffin. “Why?” “Just don’t.” So, skip ahead, skip ahead, skip ahead. I found myself broke, car stolen, evicted from the apartment after coming home from work to find the place empty, stripped of every stick of furniture and every poster on the wall. And the wily Ginger gone. I had nothing. And I had no family anymore―at the time―because after I’d run off to be with Ginger, and had second thoughts, I tried to go home one weekend and my older brother told me to get lost, I wasn’t

60 welcome back. And that’s all we need to say about that. I can’t blame him, really. I went to work the next day, at this restaurant that did barbecue and country stuff, and the hostess came to tell me there were some people waiting for me at the door. I asked “Who?” and she said “Some people who want to talk to you.” I went, and it was a guy and two girls, and I recognized the tall, rangy guy with a mullet and goatee from some of the Sunday visits at County when I’d gone to see Ginger. The girls were trash, one blonde and the other brunette and skinny as a rail. Cute, but trashy. They introduced themselves and we went out into the parking lot for a cigarette, where they asked me if I had any idea of where they could find Ginger. I told them if I knew, they’d have to get in line behind me, and explained my situation. Ray shook my hand, telling me that his enemy’s enemy is his friend, and that I was welcome to come and stay with them where they were squatting. Outta the frying pan and into the fire. Happy for a place to sleep and shower, I went into that den of thieves and further adventure. After work, they took me to the house, introduced me around, and I sized up the situation. The Real World, but with criminals. Pulling Charlotte aside, I apologized for being part of the problem she had in her house, yet another verminous bum crashing on her floor, and promised I’d be out of her hair as soon as possible, and that I’d contribute in any way that I could to the household. We then got high and drank a bunch of beer, and plotted our revenge. A mob lawyer I had met (don’t ask―a lot happened during that whole skip-ahead part) told me what to do about Ginger. He said that, since I had a checkbook with both my name and hers on it, and no money in the account, I ought to write as many bad checks as I could and then get outta Dodge. People

61 would come looking for me, and when they didn’t find me, they’d come looking for her. Also, it was the practice of a lot of grocery stores that checks could be written for twenty-five dollars over the total of a purchase, and that money would be given in cash. I went to the four different supermarkets in the area and filled up carts with food for the house, beer for my fellow squatters, cartons of cigarettes, and got my twenty-five dollars. The trunk of Charlotte’s car barely closed when we drove home, and I had a hundred bucks for whatever. We did that a few days in a row, and got away with it, by the grace of God. Thanks again, God, by the way. And sorry. Then, one night, Karen took me to this house, where a skinny guy named Scott seemed to trust me immediately, and after hearing that I was the guy Ginger had used up and spat out, he offered to take me with him on a drug deal to earn a little extra. He said he’d give me a gun and, when we made the exchange, we would double-cross the other guys and kill them, keeping the drugs and the money for ourselves. Uh, gee…thanks. But, um…no, thanks. Then his sister, Shadow, came through the door with a baby in her arms and told us about the shitty day she’d had at work. From what I gleaned, she worked at a strip club as well. These were upstanding citizens I was running with. Anyway, some guy kept pressuring her to charge less than ten bucks for a blowjob. She finally got him to cough up the money, the cheap bastard. Yeah, you won, I thought. She nursed the baby for a bit, and Scott kept staring at me until their father came home. Now, this big ol’ guy was friendly and all, with his long hair, beard, and pajama pants and t-shirt, but there was something about him that made me afraid. I mean genuinely afraid. It wasn’t just a creepy aura about him. He emanated this deep confidence in his ability to commit casual violence and do

62 quick and easy corpse-disposal at a moment’s notice. I was sitting there trying to be invisible, listening to him talk about how he had gotten another one, and the others brightened up and leaned forward a little, ready to hear a good story. He told them he was at Shitkickers, this bar out the way there, doing shots with Duke and them, and there was this migrant worker came in to shoot some pool and have a beer. Dark little fella, looked Mayan, or something. So he picked a fight with him, calling him all kinds of names and shoving him around in front of everybody, and the guy seemed scared to be the only dark guy in there and the target of all this unprovoked abuse, but showed he had a backbone. When he was invited to step outside and settle this, he accepted. The entire bar emptied out into the parking lot to watch the spectacle. There, in front of all those people, and God and the crickets and stars, this guy took his Glock out of the waistband of his pajama bottoms and stuck it in the face of the poor migrant worker. Tole ‘im if he dint git on ‘is knees that minute, his brains’d be all over the winda of the pickup truck behind him n’ there wasn’t nothin’ nobody’d do about it. The Mayan looked at all the people watching, not seeing a trace of pity in anyone’s eyes, and, shaking, got down on his knees. He then had it explained to him what would happen if he didn’t pull down the front of them pajama bottoms and suck off what he found there. By this time, the storyteller was looking right at me, and so was everybody else. Poor li’l non-invisible me. “And I tell ya, boy,” he said. “A man can think all kinds a things about himself, how tough he is, and what he’ll do, and what he’d rather die before doing, but when it comes right down to it, you stick a gun in his ear and make him know you’ll pull the trigger, he’ll realize that suckin’ on a man’s dick ain’t that bad. Maybe he’ll even find out he likes it.” I did that face where you raise your eyebrows and turn the corners of your mouth down, nodding slowly as if thinking it

63 over and going Hmm. Because, really, what the fuck else was I supposed to do? Then, Karen decided to introduce me to him. Thanks, Karen. “Yunno who this one is? He’s the boy that hoe Ginger took for all he’s worth and left him hanging out to dry.” “Really?” this guy said. “I shoulda figgered cuz I seen ‘er in that car I know she dint buy, and knew there was some poor little rich boy off crying somewhere. That’d be you, then. Well, howdy do? I’m Terry Griffin.” I shook his hand and felt very small. “I’m Alex.” “Well, Alex, how you gonna get back at her?” My mouth was so dry I couldn’t talk. “Smart man,” he said. “Keepin’ his mouth shut.” He then explained that he was the bail bondsman bounty- hunter that had gotten Karen and Ray out of County, Ray the both times, and was making sure they didn’t try anything funny while they were out. Ray’d already had it explained to him, and Karen corroborated this, that the minute he even thought about jumping bond and running, Terry would “smell it, and make him perform a homosexual act upon [his] person.” And that badass sumbitch Ray was apparently believing it, and not killing Terry Griffin on general principle just for mentioning it, like one would think. Like I was thinking I’d do. If I had a gun. Which was something I was very terribly conscious of at that moment, the fact that I did not have a gun. What I did have was an extendable baton and bear pepper spray, which felt so heavy in my pockets that my hands, at- tached as they were to arms that had wet noodles for bones, wouldn’t be able to get them out of my jeans in time to use them. And even if I had used them, they would have no effect whatsoever, except to enrage this evil monster that now tow- ered over me, cornering me helpless in a plastic kitchen chair. This was the guy I’d heard about, whose three children sat

64 in that room with me. That’s right, three. And Karen’s not the third one. That baby over there, that Shadow the stripper was suckling, Terry Griffin had that baby with his daughter. And bragged about it. Scott, too, was his catamite son. The three of them all got down together from time to time, and when that baby was old enough, who knows? I put myself somewhere far away in my mind. I went to It- aly, where I had been with my family for the first time the summer before I met Ginger, and ruined my life. I put myself in the Piazza San Marco with all of the tourists letting pigeons land on them. And outside the Palacio Londra near the mon- ument of King Victor Emmanuel, making out with Chantal, that pretty German girl that I’d locked eyes with earlier. I put myself in that antiques shop in Taormina, Sicily, with a drop- dead gorgeous girl who kept interrupting my clumsy Italian to tell me she spoke English, and I insisted that I needed to practice as an excuse to not speak to her. And my dad asked me later why I didn’t ask her out, since it was so obvious she felt the same chemistry I did and wanted me to sweep her off her feet. I put myself in that discotheque I’d ended up in later, after I’d gotten up the courage to go back and find her, and couldn’t. I went to that antiques shop, which was closed, and went around every night spot looking for her, ending up kissing Maritza, the drop-dead gorgeous bartender while she was on break. Falling in love with two girls in one day, and then again a week later in Venice with my waitress. And making out with Chantal instead, because my waitress was taken, and Chantal was on vacation. “Y’all, that there’s the look of a man on a mission,” Terry Griffin said, startling me out of my reverie. Everybody was looking at me again, and I didn’t know why. Griffin was smiling and nodding. “Yep, you see that look in his eye? That boy wants revenge. I like that.” I was glad he’d mistaken whatever he saw on my face for

65 something tough and dangerous. But that’s not what I’m talking about, with the relief that I was armed. I’m getting there, though. Later that night, we went to a trailer park and met Nicole, this tiny little thing that was cute as a button, except for her being in need of a wash. She was fun and bubbly and she made everyone smile. I found out she was Karen’s girlfriend, but she went both ways, and was laughing about insisting that she didn’t to this one guy, her mostly harmless stalker named ―“I shit you not,” she told me―Mike Hunt. “I swear,” she said. “His folks named him Michael Hunt and he goes by Mike, and doesn’t think anything of it. I mean, can you believe that? So, anyway, he’s sweet the way he’s always trying to woo me in his gentle-hearted way, but I’m just not into him, yunno? And so I try to make him think that I’m with Karen and I’m just not into guys at all, so it’s nothing personal, yunno? But he just ain’t buying it.” So, anyway, we score some weed off of one of her trailer- mates, and smoke it there (which makes no sense to me, because if the dealer just sold it to us, why the hell does he get to smoke it with us? That’s like your waiter pulling up a chair and eating half of your steak) and then head off to this place, the Depot, in Jackson. Jackson, Mississippeh! While we’re there, we score some acid, and even though I swore in my college days that I’d never do acid again, my life was pretty much in the toilet, and anything that would get my mind off of that fact was welcome. So, I dropped acid. I don’t recommend that. Not in an unfamiliar place with people you don’t like, and lots of other people you don’t know crowding around you, pushing and shoving. But I was committed to it for between eight and twelve hours, so I tried to make the most of it. We danced and smoked several packs of cigarettes. At some point, Nicky came up and tugged us on our el- bows and shouted at us that Mike Hunt was there looking for

66 her and she needed to hide, and would we please tell him that she wasn’t here and send him away? Then she was gone. So, we went toward the entrance and intercepted a stocky but handsome―in a slow kind of way―guy that Karen introduced as My Cunt. We all tried our damnedest not to laugh, but Christ, we were tripping on acid for God’s sake. It wasn’t our fault. He didn’t take umbrage to us at all, and was perfectly satisfied to hear we were laughing because we were tripping. We laughed a good ten minutes at the absurdity of it. When our fits had subsided at last, we told him that, sorry, Nicole wasn’t there. “Yeah, but I know she’s coming, so can I just wait with you til she gits here?” Karen was about to say No, and since she was such a shitty liar I knew she’d tip him off that she was, indeed, lying, so I stepped in. “You know what we ought to do is all wait for her together by the front door, so that when she comes in, she’ll see us, and she won’t get lost for two hours trying to find us in this crowd.” A gold star for Alex, the man with the plan. That seemed good enough for everyone except Karen, but I shut her up with a look and we started fighting our way to the entrance. I shouted at her when Mike Hunt’s back was turned that she should go tell Nicole where we’d be, and she could still have a good time for a little while and then sneak out through another exit. She agreed that it was a good idea, but for some reason didn’t do her part of it. She was tripping, after all. And even on a good day, she was still Karen. So we got to the entrance and plopped down on this ratty yellow couch they had there. It wasn’t that big, and we were all squished in together, and we just sat and smoked cigarettes for I don’t know how long, when all of a sudden, for no good reason at all, Mike Hunt swiveled around in his seat and laid his legs across my knees. I jumped up and said “Hey!” Mike Hunt also jumped up and said “Hey!” and bumped

67 into a bouncer, who said something that I couldn’t hear. Mike started shouting at him. The bouncer shouted something back. Mike’s face got bright red and a vein stood out sharply on his neck, and the bouncer’s face got even redder, and I don’t know who hit who first, or who grabbed who, rather, because the both of them were on the floor locked in a death grip. The great tide of humanity backed up to give them space, and we watched them roll across the floor toward the front door, then out the front door, and down the sloping, railed walkway that earlier had organized people waiting to get in, putting them in one long line. And we crowded the door and watched them go, me thinking “It’s amazing how quickly these things can happen” while everybody else was asking “What the f…?” Then, I have no idea how, because my back was turned, but the one fight had touched off a chain reaction that led to almost everybody in the club fighting one another. Right there behind us. So, we went outside. From out of nowhere, cops had arrived and told us to get the hell out of their way. I had no problem obeying them, thinking “This is not my world.” While digging out more cigarettes and lighting them for us both, I suppose the situation escalated even more, but I had missed it. Now there was a ton of people out on the railed walkway, shouting at the cops. The cops were saying they’d arrest anyone who was still on that walkway in ten seconds, and all the people assembled there were advising them to go fuck themselves. Which, I suppose, was a reasonable-enough response. Yunno, counter-offers and such. When we were all safely smoking, I noticed Mike Hunt sitting sadly in the back of a squad car parked not too far away. Karen noticed him too, and said “There’s Mike! Let’s go talk to him!” A black cop walking past us on his way toward the club said to stay away from the squad car. Not to even go near it. No problem, I said. Come on, Karen, let’s get Nicky and them and go. We’re tripping, I’m armed, and you’ve got weed in

68 your pocket. She said Sure, and we turned and started walking toward the road, me saying it would be better if we waited over there in plain view so Marshall and Nicky and them-all would see us when they came out, and we’d be well out of the way of drunk people wanting to hit us for no reason and get us arrested, or cops thinking we were somehow involved in this, and come to think of it, we already were involved in it, since it was my knees that Mike Hunt had put his legs on to start this whole mess, when I glanced at Karen and noticed she wasn’t there walking beside me anymore. I turned around and ran back to find her bent over to look in the police car window at Mike, trying to hear what he was saying. What the hell? “Karen!” I shouted. “Get away from there!” The black cop came running back, yelling at me as if I was the one with my nose pressed to the glass. “Didn’t I just tell you not to go near there? You wanna git arrested too?” “Hey, I’m not the one. I’m way over here.” “Git away from there now!” he screamed. Karen made a face of Oh, right, and came back toward the two of us, and the cop told us to stay the fuck away from the cars, looking at me as if I was the one who had ignored him, not her. I had enough of this in the Bahamas. No thanks. “You got it, sir. We were just leaving,” I said. “You better. Or I’ll have your ass in County.” I grabbed Karen by the elbow and walked her toward the main road again, telling her “Jesus Christ, don’t do that, we’re tripping and you’ve got weed! Are you outta yer cotton-pickin’ mind?” when she shook her arm out of my grasp and screamed at me “I am not gonna let some nigger talk to me like that!” Ohhhhh shoot. I threw up my hands helplessly at the thought of us ever getting back to Charlotte Love’s house that night, and before I

69 could open my mouth to tell her what an idiot she was, she was crash-tackled to the pavement by the black cop, who had come flying out of nowhere. I watched in shock as he wrestled with her on the ground until my voice came back to me. “Okay, calm down, she’s had enough.” “You want some of this, too?” he snapped. “No.” “Then shut yo’ mouth, cracka. I’ll arrest da both y’all.” He yanked her arms, one after the other, behind her back. “What’s the charge?” I asked, knowing I shouldn’t’ve, but it pissed me off that he’d suggest it. I hadn’t done anything wrong. Not really. And he’d called me cracker. “Calling me a nigger.” “But one, I didn’t. And two, that’s not a crime.” “Oh yes, it is!” “Really. But you can call me cracker? What law says so?” Ooh, I shouldn’t’ve said that, either. He’d just cuffed Karen’s wrists together and was trying to drag her to her feet, glaring at me saying “Cracker, I can make a charge up and who they goan believe? Me, or yo punk ass?” when the radio on his belt crackled in that drive-thru window voice, telling him something. We stared at each other, me feeling my extendable baton in one pocket of my jeans and my mini-fire-extinguisher-looking can of bear spray in the other. Thinking ‘If he goes for his gun, I’m going for the mace and my stick, and Karen’s going to get a faceful of that spray, but she deserves it, and I’m not going to jail for her.’ I really didn’t want to have to take that step, though. I knew it wouldn’t end up well for me. I was tripping, and knew my judgment would be questionable, at best. The cop hesitated a moment, making sure I felt his eyes burn into me, then dragged Karen back across the parking lot to one of the empty squad cars, throwing her in and running back up into the club to arrest more people. Nicole came up to me then, asking what the hell’d hap-

70 pened, where was Karen? I gestured with a nod toward the police car she was sitting in, looking forlorn and crying, as if it wasn’t her own damn fault. “Holy Christ,” Nicky said. We went over to the squad car, just not as close to it as Karen had gotten to Mike Hunt’s. “What’re we going to do?” I shrugged, drawing on my cigarette, and while exhaling a cloud of smoke said “She’s got the weed.” “Yeah, I know. What’re we going to do?” I tried not to laugh, and we left, walking up to the main road and down it in the general direction of Pearl. At some point, we started holding hands. Later on, back at Charlotte’s house, we told the story to Ray and he told us about other times that she’d done stupid- ass things that he’d had to bail her out of. Then we called all of the jails in the greater Jackson area, looking for Karen and wanting to know her bail. All of them told us they didn’t have anybody by that name. We figured maybe she just hadn’t gotten booked yet, so we waited a while, telling more stories, and tried calling again. Every jail told us they still hadn’t heard of her and wanted to know why we were calling, so we hung up. Then, surprise of all surprises, Karen called, telling us we needed to come pick her up at such-and-such hospital before TJ-frickin-Hooker got back. “What?” “Just hurry up and git here!” Click. So, with Ray driving Charlotte’s car, we found the hospital and asked about Karen, and were told she hadn’t been released yet, just wait there in the waiting room, and we tried to, we did, but man, we just couldn’t. I mean, Christ, we were tripping still. Well, not Ray, but he wasn’t with us. He was out in the car, hiding from authority figures. The smart one. That cold, sterile and unentertaining waiting room was a horrible place, and the receptionist kept looking at us, like she knew. If you’ve ever been on acid, or at least on any drug in a

71 place where you should really not be on drugs, you know what I mean. We could tell that she knew. But, eventually, Karen came out and told us with a big smile that we needed to git somewheres. “What happened?” Nicky asked. “Let’s just go first, okay? Let’s go.” So we went. We got in the car with Ray and she told us all about how she’d faked an asthma attack and managed to work up some kind of froth in her mouth that impressed TJ-frickin- Hooker enough to drive her to the hospital, drop her off, and tell her to wait there until he got back. Like anyone would. Yeah, I’ll just sit tight and wait to go to jail. So, we got back to the house safe and sound.

VII

Terry Griffin had somehow heard about it, and he came by the next day to lecture all of us as we sat around the dining room table. Apparently, he is all buddy-buddy with many of the cops in the area, what with being a bail bondsman and all. Jesus. I don’t doubt you’d think I’m making all this up, but I swear, it’s true. All stereotypes aside. So then, after the lecture was over, a lecture by this guy, of all people, this monster, he turned to me and told me he knew where my car was. Gave us the address, directions, everything, and said if I wrote out a writ of repleven and waited forty days I might get it back. Or, I could go steal it back tonight. Out of the goodness of his heart, he told me all this. Two of those verminous two-bit hoods, Karen, and the skinny chick whose name I couldn’t remember, all volunteered enthusiastically to help me. Ray and the smarter of the four two-bit hoods stayed quiet, staying out of it, but Marshall and Brent were all for it. Marshall said he definitely should go because we didn’t have a key, and he knew how to hot-wire cars. It was decided that Karen would drive Charlotte’s car, and the other three would accompany me as my accomplices and bodyguards. I couldn’t help but think that accomplices tended to become codefendants. Jesus. I was doomed, I thought. But we went, that night. We followed the map that Terry Griffin, cartographer extraordinaire, drew us, and drove for a lonnnng time out into the boonies. Out where there weren’t streetlights for miles around, and the stars spattered the vault of the sky in that way that makes you unable to avoid feeling insignificant. Where you can see Every. Last. One. And know that they are anything but close together, and every one of them is the sun for somebody else, and at least one of the far, far away people for every one of those suns is someone who’s

73 trying to get something back from the bitch who stole it, and looking up at their sky and wondering if there was someone out there thinking the same thing. Or maybe it was just me. Marshall wouldn’t shut up about what we were going to do and how great it was that we were about to do it, and blah blah blah blah blah. Brent wanted to spark up a joint, but I told him No in a voice they’d never heard me use before, that I don’t think I’ve ever heard myself use before. I told him with this strange authority that we needed to be calm and have our wits about us. That this wasn’t some little field trip we were on. Sheesh, they all said, but obeyed. And everyone was quiet until we finally came upon the turn. The left-hand turn into the woods and onto an even darker road. We killed the headlights and followed that darker road another two miles, the longest two miles I think I’ve ever travelled, until we finally spotted lights through the trees up ahead. It was one of the only two houses out there, the home of Ginger’s sister’s boyfriend, and the one next door was that of the boyfriend’s mom. I told them to pull over and wait there until we came back, and not make a sound. No music on the radio, nothing. Mar- shall came with me, and we crept toward the lights streaming through the leaves of the bushes until the driveway was in view, and I cursed under my breath. It was gravel. And anybody who’s ever walked across a gravel driveway knows those little pebbles were the cheapest burglar alarm you could ever have. You couldn’t creep up on a deaf person crossing a gravel driveway. But there was my car, as I lived and breathed. My candy- apple red Camaro that Donna “Ginger” Newton drove out of my apartment’s parking lot one cold cloudy day, that I thought I’d never see again. My car. We placed every step with the greatest care, feeling like kids trying to sneak out of our parents’ house and creaking our

74 way down the stairs. The outside lights were on, and we could see the blue light of people watching TV seeping through the windows. I figured that they would be so absorbed in whatever they were watching that they didn’t hear anything, and they probably were, but that didn’t matter the way those pebbles crunched under our feet. We were finally beside the car, and I touched it lovingly, feeling so many emotions surge through me that I’d been re- pressing. The cold metal made me suddenly face how badly I’d fucked up, running away with that whore and ending up broke and homeless in the armpit of America. How every romantic dinner I’d cooked, every bill collector I’d paid off, and every late-night promise we’d made to each other was for nothing. How I was just another dumb guy, used up and spat out like a hundred billion before me, lost among them all like the stars above me, not special or unique in any way, not original at all. We got to the doors, tried them, and found them open. My heart leaped! The interior lights came on, and I held my breath, praying that no one would see the sudden yellow bea- con in the corner of their eye and come out to catch us. We hurriedly prized the doors open and slid in, smelling the leather seats and the stale cigarette smoke, shutting the doors again with a soft chunk, and sat there in the dark for a moment. When I’d gotten my breathing back down to normal, I asked Marshall if he was going to hot-wire the car, or what? And then, of all the disastrous things that could’ve happened, Charlotte’s car came rolling past with the headlights on, every face staring at us in the windows. We watched it in shock, watched as it rolled past us, turned into the neighbor’s driveway, the boyfriend’s mom’s driveway, a crunching gravel driveway just like this one, and three-point-turned its way back onto the road to roll past us back the way it’d come. I couldn’t believe it. “Hurry!” I hissed at Marshall. He stared blankly at the steering wheel.

And, Jesus Christ Almighty, I couldn’t believe it, but here came Charlotte’s car again, Karen doing another fricking drive- by, ever so slowly, all eyes glued to us, and they noisily turned around in the boyfriend’s mom’s gravel driveway again! And came back watching us oh-so-casually as if they were just innocent passers-by. “What are you doing?” I asked them silently. They stopped. They actually stopped. “What?” Karen stage-whispered. “Get the feck outta here!” I lip-synched. She put on a face of Excuse me and drove away in a huff. “What’s the hold-up, Marshall?” I asked. And before he could say anything, a light came on in the neighbor’s house, a poofy-haired old woman standing in her extra-large Stone Cold Steve Austin night-shirt coming to look through the window at her driveway. We stared in horror as Charlotte’s car came back, ever-so-slowly, so painfully slowly, and pulled into the old woman’s driveway, and she cupped her hands around her eyes to look through the window instead of at her reflection in the glass to watch. And she watched them three-point-turn their way back onto the road, each of them making a point not to look at her, as if that would make them seem less guilty of something, and they rolled up on us once again. Staring at us. I looked at the old woman again, saw her in the other window, the one facing us now, following the gaze of the people in the car and looking straight at me. To her, I wasn’t a poor boy come to get his car back. I wasn’t some victim of a lying, thieving whore. I was somebody in the car in her son’s driveway in the middle of the night. I watched her pick up a phone. I watched her punch in a number. I listened to a phone ring in the house in front of me. I saw a shadow rise in the blue flickering light of a television. “You don’t really know how to hot-wire a car, do you, Mar- shall?” I asked. He shook his head.

Note to self―learn how to hot-wire the car before you go to steal it. And another one: don’t let your last resort be the second thing you try. I opened the door, flooding the inside of the car with yellow light, watching the sister’s boyfriend’s mom’s head snap around to lock eyes with me, and bolted. I heard Marshall coming out and crunching the gravel behind me, and the front door of the house opening, and the heart-stopping cracks of gunfire, and I ran like I’d never run in my life. Charlotte’s car sped off down the road, and somehow I’d caught up with it, was running alongside it, when it slammed on the brakes and was behind me. I was still running. I don’t know if I felt the hot wind of bullets passing my head, or if I’d only imagined it, but I was certain of it while replaying it in my mind later that night. The car picked me up somewhere down the road after they’d gotten Marshall, throwing open the front passenger’s door for me, and they were laughing at me for running so fast. I wanted to scream at them for their stupidity, for ruining any chance we’d had, but I had no breath for it. I wheezed and sputtered and regretted every cigarette I’d ever smoked for the next few minutes, listening to their excited bullshit. We went back the way we had come, and found the main road, hanging a right, and surprise of all surprises, there was a police car waiting for us with his red and blue lights on. “Oh shit!” Brent and the skinny girl said. “Oh shit, oh shit oh shit oh shit!” Marshall started to scream, but I reached around to grab him by his hair, yanking him forward, and hissed at him to shut his mouth or I’d kill him. “I’ll do the talking,” Karen said. “If you talk the way you stayed put,” I started to say, but the cop-car’s door opened and out stepped one of those double-Y chromosome mustache types that doesn’t fall for anything. This guy was the kind of guy who was born to be a cop and when you see him coming you know the game is up.

He came over to our idling car and blinded us with his flashlight, frisking us with it, and told us to shut our engine off. Karen started to say something and he said Shut Up with the coldest authority I’d ever heard. Karen froze. I reached over and shut off the engine, feeling my extendable baton in one pocket of the same jeans as the other night, and my can of bear mace in the other. Thinking, Jesus, not again. The Cop studied each of our quiet faces, and the beam of his flashlight came back to me. He must’ve seen something in my eyes that he didn’t see in the others’. Something actually going on behind them, probably. He regarded me for a moment, then spoke. “Step out of the car, please.” “Officer―” Karen started to say. “Shut up.” Feeling the need to swallow, but really not wanting to, I obeyed. Opening the door, climbing out onto the pavement, I found myself listening to the crickets and the night-birds and the buzzing flies, the rustling of the leaves all around us, as if this might be the last time I ever heard them. I faced the cop. “Come over here, son.” I went, feeling all eyes on me. The Cop shone his flashlight on me while we spoke, and I felt naked because of it. “What’s your name?” he asked. “Johnny Yen. John.” My voice sounded very far away. I kept having to shift my weight from one foot to the other. “Where you from?” “Um, Palm Beach, in Florida.” “You’re a long way from home.” “Yes sir.” “What are you doing in that car with them?” I watched his Don’t-lie-to-me-boy eyes, thinking up and discarding a dozen answers before I finally spoke. “I’m just trying to get home, sir.” He watched me for another long moment.

I felt those stars above me, and the wind. “I got a call somebody was breaking into a car,” he said, prompting me. “I don’t doubt you got that call from Jim Davis’s house, where we just were,” I said, surprising him. Doing that counter-intuitive response when he’d expected me to lie to him, tell him Oh no, sir, we just happen to be out here in the middle of nowhere at the same time a few shots are fired at trespassers. Trespassers who’ve magically disappeared, no less. “Go on.” “Up until just a few minutes ago, I was engaged to Ginger Newton, Jim’s girlfriend’s sister.” Something flickered in the Cop’s eyes, and he twitched his mustache in the faintest smile. “Maybe you’ve heard of her,” I said, catching on. “Oh, I’ve come across her once or twice.” “Well, then you know what she’s like. And I just found out the hard way.” He was nodding, knowing exactly where I was coming from, and sympathizing. “So, we’ve been having a little party out here, all of us, and she had one drink too many and started in on me about something some other boyfriend did to her years ago that now she’s blaming me for.” “Or her daddy,” the Cop said. Whoa. There was a thun- derclap of subtext in those three words that spoke volumes. He definitely knew about her. I nodded, doing a subtle lean in towards him, a lean and nod that said Yeah, yunno what I’m talking about, and we’re on the same side here. He warmed to me. “Go on,” he said again, less like a cop this time. “Well, she laid into me and Jim broke it up, but some of these idiots in the car there started acting up and we all got kicked out. We got the one girl at the party who wasn’t drinking to drive us back home, and Ginger was screaming about

79 how she was going to call the cops and have us all locked up. Screaming with spit flying everywhere. Yunno how she gets.” “Boy, do I,” he said. “Okay, Mister Yen, why don’t you and the kiddies run along and stay out of trouble for the rest of the night. If I were you, I’d get myself a bus ticket home to the beach and forget all about her. You’ll be better off.” “Yes sir. Thank you sir.” “You bet. Have yourself a good night.” “We will.” “Hi, Officer Dobbs.” We both stopped and looked at the car, at the gaunt and ugly face of Marshall leaning across the skinny girl to smile out the window at us. “Hi, Officer Dobbs.” The Cop shined his flashlight into Marshall’s face, making him squint, baring all his teeth in a big stupid grin. “Why do you know my name, boy?” “You don’t remember me, Officer Dobbs?” “Should I?” “Ya broke my nose when you arrested me a month ago for possession. How you doing?” I could have died at that moment. You. Fricking. Idiot. Officer Dobbs turned cold again and his hard eyes came back to burn into me. He knew in that moment that everything I’d said had been a lie. It was all over my face and there was nothing I could do to hide it. We were as home free as we could’ve been, ‘cept without my car, and in one fell swoop Marshall had to open his big frickin’ mouth and ruin everything. In that moment, I realized something a more observant person would’ve put together the first day walking into Char- lotte Love’s house. All these wankers, these two-bit hoods and verminous skanks, they’d all met in jail. That’s how they came to be with Ray and Karen in Charlotte’s house, all of them

80 getting a free ride while they “got back on their feet and got their shit together and blah blah blah.” This is what they do, get locked up and do a stint and get out and then get locked up again. Get their three meals a day and a roof over their heads, their laundry done, all at the expense of the county. In a flash, I saw my future. We’d all go downtown, sit in a bullpen for a few hours awaiting booking, bitching about our bad luck, and then get processed into a cell or a dorm of cells, and say Hi to all the people they know in there and play cards for a bit, and wish we had cigarettes. And maybe I’d get my ass kicked by someone or other. Or raped. All because of the stupid-ass people in that car. Bull. Shit. So I risked everything and made one desperate stab at my freedom, looking wide-eyed over the Cop’s shoulder at Mar- shall and yelling “No! Don’t shoot!” The Cop wheeled about, yanking his sidearm from its hol- ster while I yanked the bear mace out of my pocket, sliding the safety off with a snick! In that split second, the Cop was jumping out of the way to avoid whatever shot might be coming at his back, extending his fist with his pistol in it, and the car full of idiots was looking at us in confusion, and I sprayed all of them with the mace and took off running. I heard gunshots and screaming, the Cop firing blindly, and a moment later, return fire from whoever was packing in the car. I ran for my life, down the main road farther and farther from Jackson, Mississippi, without knowing where I was going and not caring, either. Running until my lungs burned and my body ached, running until I ran like a girl, until I could hear nothing except the crickets and the night-birds and the wind, and the stars.

I hitch-hiked to Biloxi, where I found a casino and managed to make a little money playing blackjack. I kept it low, making five-dollar bets and letting either God or destiny or

81 just good luck tell me when to ask for another card or stay with what I had. I started with twelve bucks, got up to seventy-five, lost one hand, and quit. Rather than risk losing it all, I took what I had and was happy with it. Out of curiosity, I went by the one-arm-bandits and had a look, sorely tempted to put a coin in one of them. All those lemons and cherries and flashing lights, and the warped reflections of other machines and lights in the faux-gold surfaces, and the bleeps and whoops, all of the neon oracles promised me sudden wealth and happiness and a way out of this mess. Then I saw a middle-aged, frumpy old woman full of lone- liness, sidle up to a stool with a bucket full of quarters. Like an automaton, she began feeding coins into the slot and pulling the lever, watching all the lemons and cherries and pots of gold roll blindingly until stopping one after the other, to dis- appoint her. I watched her do it seven times, each time mar- veling at her faith, and feeling sorry for her, until the miracle happened. Chunk! Chunk! Chunk! Three bunches of fat purple grapes! The alarm sounded, a metal bell banging away at the top while lights flashed and quarters began to spill with a machine gun rattle out of the wide mouth and into her lap. She gaped at them in shock, watching them fill her blue gingham lap and overflow, jingling over her legs and onto the monogrammed green and gold carpet beneath her stool. It only took a few seconds, but those seconds seemed to last a lifetime, and when the last coin came banging out of the machine to fall with a silvery tink! she stared in baffled wonder. I realized I was grinning from ear to ear, so happy for this poor woman until she picked up one of the quarters and stuck it into the slot, pulled on the lever, and watched with sad and hopeful eyes. I couldn’t believe it. I shook my head in disgust and walked out of the casino

82 with my seventy dollars, started thumbing rides to Florida. My parents had moved to rural Ireland, and they sent me a ticket to come over and get back on my feet. Years later, I was in prison when that show Cops was on TV, and I watched with half an eye until a car was pulled over for weaving. It always amazed me how religiously prisoners would watch that show. They delighted in seeing other people get arrested. I wonder what that says about us as a society. Anyway, the officer ran the tag, went up to the window to talk to the driver, and I heard Karen’s voice. After he asked her to step out of the car with her wasted companion, she said proudly “I’ma tell you right now I got warrants for mah arrest in Mississippi.” Apparently, they were in Arizona. The cop asked what her warrants were for, not without a little surprise at her volun- teering that information. She seemed to think for a second, and decide to opt for a lesser charge than arms trafficking and jumping bail. “Bad checks,” she said. Christ. What an idiot. The officer cuffed her and stuck her in the back of the patrol car, where she started crying about the rotten world and her bad luck. I take some strange consolation in knowing that she didn’t get shot or go blind during my escape that night, years ago, but she didn’t learn anything, either.

VIII

You might have noticed where I casually let slip that I was in prison, just now. So, I will take a minute to talk about that and clear it up. See, the day I was transferred from County—after eleven long horrible months—I had to sign a piece of paper swearing I would never write a book about my crime. Everybody has to do that. So I won’t say anything about what I did, except this: the points (determining a sentence is done on a point system) for my charges called for a minimum mandatory sentence of eleven years, and I was caught dead to the wrong and offered a plea of five. The victim’s family wanted life plus ten, and the victim dropped the charges, for Chrissakes. State picked them back up. Anyway, they could’ve nailed me to the wall and they gave me less than half of the minimum mandatory, and even the guy himself wanted me off the hook, so right there you know there was more to it than what you’ll see on paper. The short version: I sent a junkie psycho to the hospital for being a danger to the children of our neighborhood. And not just that, a junkie psycho who left long black skid marks on the street outside the door of anyone he visited, as a sign that he’d been there, and he had crashed into parked cars three times while doing it. Wrecked his car, went to jail, and was not only out again the next day, he just popped on down to his dad’s car dealership and picked out a new Camaro con- vertible. He was the black sheep of a wealthy, influential family, and they wouldn’t have anything to do with him, but he could get a new car whenever he wanted. Just like that. He drove around the parking lots of restaurants and, if he saw a car he recognized, he came in and sat down at your table and started shouting. “Oh, look at you guys eating! How come you didn’t invite me along? Were you afraid I would embarrass you? Were you

85 afraid I’d yell ‘penis’ or something? Well penispenispenis balls! Oh, is that your waitress over there? Sorry, miss! Sorry I had to say ‘penis’ just now! And balls. Did I embarrass you, too?” There were a bunch of other things, but you get the picture. He was the kind of person everybody wished somebody else would kill. Anyway, while I was on Zoloft, the same pills that caused my first suicide attempt a few years before, he did something I felt he should die for, but the police department did not agree —at least not on the record. And miraculously, he survived. I shouldn’t’ve done it. You want to judge me, go on ahead. A lot of other people did. It was the reason I didn’t get a lot of second dates. Chicks would Google me to see my paintings, still all dizzy from my kisses, and boom! There it was at the top of the search results. My mug shot. Not a bad picture, but not my best, either. Did the website say anything about me being an otherwise great guy? Noooooo. So it was Dumpedville, population: me. So anyway, now you know. And I’ll tell you a little about it, while I’m on the subject, because it was a great opportunity to do a little anthropology research. What I’m about to say bothered a lot of people, because it contradicts all they think they know and like to say about what the world is like. Well, sorry, but this is gospel truth, and in a perfect world, I’d win a Prizelitzer Pool for telling you about it, but this is reality and I’ll probably get crucified, instead. It is important to finally come out with it, though, so that you, dear reader, will believe some of the stuff I’m going to tell you later. Like how I became who I am. First, I want to say how I found myself in the situation. In the Bible, specifically Luke 11:24-25, it says that “When the unclean spirit has gone out of a man, he roams through water- less places in search of rest; and finding none, he says, “I will

86 return to my house which I left.” And when he has come to it, he finds the place swept and clean. Then he goes and takes seven other spirits more evil than himself, and they enter in and dwell there; and the last state of that man becomes worse that the first.” I believe that ‘unclean spirit’ or ‘demon’ is a metaphor for addiction, because I know full well what happens when you backslide. Now, I know not everybody who uses drugs is an addict, and some have only ever tried, say, weed. That’s great. Good for them. I’m not talking about them. I’m talking about the overwhelming amount of people for whom weed was the gateway drug that led to their downfall. When you’re first descending into the drug life, maybe you swear that you’ll only try weed a few times. You then enjoy the culture of it, and after a while, get burned out. The depression that comes from it gets to you, and you switch to stimulants to make up for all the productivity you lost. Then, hallucinogens. After that, you’re on the short road to Nowhere. Maybe there’s an intervention, or you manage to kick it all by yourself, and you’re “swept and clean” for a while. Then, it happens. You give in to temptation, and where before it was a gradual fall from grace, this time you swan dive into the Abyss and do everything all at once. The state of you is seven times worse than the first time around. How did this happen? Well, I was in Ireland for a bit, and working for my father. I had quit drugs, cigarettes, and only drank in moderation. He was being his regular horrible self, however, and about the time I decided I’d had enough, Mark contacted me. He invited me down to Orlando, Florida where he was having the time of his life, and I went. First it was just cigarettes and liquor. Then, I met my pot head neighbors and started hanging out with them, since Mark slept during the day. I sat between them and passed their joint from one to the other for several days, while talking to them or watching movies, until just for the hell of it, I took a hit.

Within a month, my money was gone because I smoked it, snorted it up my nose, or blew it rolling or tripping in clubs. I fell so fast I can’t even believe it now, looking back. It was in that desperate state of limbo that I turned once more away from God and back to Satan. My neighbors affected a brand of devil worship not too different from the one I had embraced in college, and it was comforting. Perhaps I will tell you about it later. Anyway, three months of that, and I was a very different person from the one who had left Ireland. Perhaps trying to kill that bastard was my way of trying to redeem myself, or like Dorian Gray, trying to stab the portrait and destroy what I had become. Like I said, though, it didn’t work. I also want to reiterate, at the time of this attack, just like my prior suicide attempt, I was back on Zoloft. Let me take a moment to list some of the perpetrators of mass shootings in the US and the drugs they were taking, or had been taking shortly before their horrific actions. I will also include some of the unexpected suicides. The list was compiled and published on Facebook by John Noveske, founder and owner of Noveske Rifleworks just days before he was mysteriously killed in a single-car accident.

 Eric Harris, age 18 (first on Zoloft then Luvox) and Dylan Klebold aged 17 (Columbine school shooting in Littleton, Colorado), killed 12 students and one teacher and wounded 23 others, before killing themselves.

 Jeff Weise, age 16, had been prescribed 60 mg/day of Prozac (three times the average starting dose for adults!) when he shot his grandfather, his grandfather's girlfriend and many fellow students at Red Lake, Min- nesota. He then shot himself. Ten dead, 12 wounded.

 Cory Baadsgaard, age 16, Wahluke (Washington state)

High School, was on Paxil (which caused him to have hallucinations) when he took a rifle to his high school and held 23 classmates hostage.

 Chris Fetters, age 13, killed his favorite aunt while taking Prozac.

 Christopher Pittman, age 12, murdered both his grandparents while taking Zoloft.

 Mathew Miller, age 13, hanged himself in his bedroom closet after taking Zoloft for six days.

 Kip Kinkel, age 15, (on Prozac and Ritalin) shot his parents while they slept, then went to school and opened fire, killing two classmates and injuring 22 shortly after beginning Prozac treatment.

 Luke Woodham, age 16 (Prozac) killed his mother and then killed two students, wounding six others.

 A boy in Pocatello, ID (Zoloft) in 1998 had a Zoloft- induced seizure that caused an armed standoff at his school.

 Michael Carneal (Ritalin), age 14, opened fire on students at a high school prayer meeting in West Paducah, Kentucky. Three teenagers were killed, five others were wounded.

 A young man in Huntsville, Alabama (Ritalin) went psychotic chopping up his parents with an ax and also killing one sibling and almost murdering another.

 Andrew Golden, age 11, (Ritalin) and Mitchell John-

son, aged 14, (Ritalin) shot 15 people, killing four students, one teacher, and wounding ten others.

 TJ Solomon, age 15, (Ritalin) high school student in Conyers, Georgia opened fire on and wounded six of his classmates.

 Rod Mathews, age 14, (Ritalin) beat a classmate to death with a bat.

 James Wilson, age 19, (various psychiatric drugs) from Breenwood, South Carolina, took a .22 caliber revolver into an elementary school killing two young girls and wounding seven other children and two teachers.

 Elizabeth Bush, age 13, (Paxil) was responsible for a school shooting in Pennsylvania

 Jason Hoffman (Effexor and Celexa) – school shooting in El Cajon, California

 Jarred Viktor, age 15, (Paxil), after five days on Paxil he stabbed his grandmother 61 times.

 Chris Shanahan, age 15 (Paxil) in Rigby, ID who out of the blue killed a woman.

 Jeff Franklin (Prozac and Ritalin), Huntsville, AL, killed his parents as they came home from work using a sledgehammer, hatchet, butcher knife, and mechan- ic’s file, then attacked his younger brothers and sister.

 Neal Furrow (Prozac) in LA Jewish school shooting reported having been court-ordered to be on Prozac along with several other medications.

 Kevin Rider, age 14, was withdrawing from Prozac when he died from a gunshot wound to his head. Ini- tially, it was ruled a suicide, but two years later, the investigation into his death was opened as a possible homicide. The prime suspect, also age 14, had been taking Zoloft and other SSRI antidepressants.

 Alex Kim, age 13, hanged himself shortly after his Lexapro prescription had been doubled.

 Diane Routhier was prescribed Welbutrin for gallstone problems. Six days later, after suffering many adverse effects of the drug, she shot herself.

 Billy Willkomm, an accomplished wrestler and a Uni- versity of Florida student, was prescribed Prozac at the age of 17. His family found him dead of suicide – hanging from a tall ladder at the family’s Gulf Shore Boulevard home in July 2002.

 Kara Jaye Anne Fuller-Otter, age 12, was on Paxil when she hanged herself from a hook in her closet. Kara’s parents said “….the damn doctor wouldn't take her off it and I asked him to when we went in on the second visit. I told him I thought she was having some sort of reaction to Paxil…”)

 Gareth Christian, Vancouver, age 18, was on Paxil when he committed suicide in 2002. His father could not accept his son’s death and killed himself.

 Julie Woodward, age 17, was on Zoloft when she hanged herself in her family’s detached garage.

 Matthew Miller was 13 when he saw a psychiatrist because he was having difficulty at school. The psychiatrist gave him samples of Zoloft. Seven days later his mother found him dead, hanging by a belt from a laundry hook in his closet.

 Kurt Danysh, age 18, and on Prozac, killed his father with a shotgun. He is now behind prison bars, and writes letters, trying to warn the world that SSRI drugs can kill.

 Hammad Memon, age 15, shot and killed a fellow middle school student. He had been diagnosed with ADHD and depression and was taking Zoloft and “other drugs for the conditions.”

 Matti Saari, a 22-year-old culinary student, shot and killed nine students and a teacher, and wounded another student, before killing himself. Saari was taking an SSRI and a benzodiazapine.

 Steven Kazmierczak, age 27, shot and killed five people and wounded 21 others before killing himself in a Northern Illinois University auditorium. According to his girlfriend, he had recently been taking Prozac, Xanax, and Ambien. Toxicology results showed that he still had trace amounts of Xanax in his system.

 Finnish gunman Pekka-Eric Auvinen, age 18, had been taking antidepressants before he killed eight people and wounded a dozen more at Jokela High School – then he committed suicide.

 Asa Coon from Cleveland, age 14, shot and wounded four before taking his own life. Court records show

Coon was on Trazodone.

 Jon Romano, age 16, on medication for depression, fired a shotgun at a teacher in his New York high school.

I tried to tell a psychiatrist about all the strange thoughts I was having while on Zoloft, thoughts of harming myself and others. His verdict was that I was faking it for attention. Well, fast-forward to me trying to kill someone. All of the details of my apprehension and the whole post- arrest ceremony with the fingerprints and photographing and hours of holding cell storytelling are unimportant. As tedious in the retelling as in the experiencing. Suffice to say, it sucked. By the way, if you go ‘up the road,’ beware of anyone who tells you that he isn’t an inmate, he’s a convict. It’s just seman- tics, really, but there is an underlying message that he isn’t just a guy that made a mistake, and is currently locked up for it. He’s telling you right away that he will cheat you, and that you shouldn’t believe a word he says. I don’t know why they admit it so readily, but they do. The “convict code” is “might makes right,” and “You mah bitch, white boy.” And I don’t care what all the PC people try to tell you. I honestly don’t. Poor Tyrone in the cell with you is not an honor student who got falsely arrested in a case of mistaken identity by racist cops, and Julius caught red-handed with his heel pressed on the night watchman’s throat was not acting out a desperate cry for help. Take a moment to look up “Chris Rock civil war” because he can get away with saying it, while I can’t. The majority of racist people—that I have met, anyway—hated others not for the color of their skin, but truly for the content of their character. Keep in mind, I said the majority that I have met. Sure, there are black honor students, but they’re not in jail. Yeah, every once in a while, there is a false accusation or some

93 poor guy gets framed, but he’s not the one I’m talking about. Everybody knew a Juliet in school, I think. She’s the black girl who wore skirts and those barrettes and little bolo-looking things in her hair. She is humble, consistently makes straight A’s in class, and gets a sad look on her face when somebody tries to cheat off her paper during the math test. She doesn’t sneer, doesn’t put on airs; she just looks sad, and that’ll make a kid feel guilty as hell for taking advantage of her...but he’ll still copy her answers, because she was always right. She’s the one that actually studies, goes to church, minds her parents, and is going somewhere in life, and other black children hate her, because when she gets there, she will never turn around and give them a free ride. She grows up to be a successful woman, a real lady, and the kind of person I genuinely love to know. What is it that made her different? Invariably, it’s the pres- ence of two important figures in the home where she grew up: God, and her father. She had both parents, and they went to church. That makes a huge difference in how she will grow up. Uncle Tom, her classmates call her, and curse her because she “sold out” and “turned White”―which I hate because it’s a bullshit label. Look at a lot of white kids in my old school; they pretended to be black and failed because of it. Because of busing, the integration of black kids who didn’t want to be with us, in my school, who’d intimidate us into being afraid to come to school, most white kids I knew imitated their bullies in the hopes of being spared. It’s like feeding your peers to the crocodiles so you’d get eaten last. They’d defy the teacher more than they did before, show off their indifference to learning, and they didn’t dare excel in class because of the bell curve, and the fear of getting their asses kicked―or shot ―if they raised the standards of the class so high that Rashawn or Kervince couldn’t skate by with a forty percent. This wigger phenomenon caught on like wildfire, until it had swept the nation, and A students relinquished their status, with the weaker kids talking Ebonics and cakewalking through

94 the halls with guns tucked into the low-hanging waists of their over-sized pants. Accepting minor injustices from angry blacks every now and then, rather than facing open conflict all of the time. Of course, if you’re white you can’t say any of this. You get branded a racist and excommunicated, for lack of a better word, and that’s only if you’re lucky. Freedom of Speech? Oh, hell no. Not in the US. But the irony of it is what I heard Antonio Jones saying to Mrs. Reynolds one day, years ago, when she’d threatened him with his permanent record keeping him out of a good college. He said “Bitch, check dis out. Ah’m a mino’ity. Ah ken git inna any school Ah want. Ah doan need you, ya feel me?” I don’t know about Mrs. Reynolds, but I sure felt him. He could get into any school he wanted―if he wanted―with just a C average, but every white kid who’d given him daps in the hallway, or shared a blunt with him in the bathroom, would be either at the labor pool or in Lancaster by then. But yeah, I can’t say that, because not sweeping it all under the rug and pretending it didn’t happen, makes you a racist. Well, screw that. This all happened to me, and as they say in the vernacular, I’m keepin’ it real. If it offends you, maybe you should ask yourself what it is that offends you most—the fact that I say it, or that it is the truth? Besides, how many of you got offended earlier when I was reporting on Mississippi or South Florida? I bet your laughter at Marshall and disgust at Travis were guilt free. And sure, there are a few guys in jail, black, brown, white, whichever―you can tell them by their eyes when they look at you―who are not pond scum. Get to know them, and you’ll find out they just made a mistake in life, and are now paying for it. Some are even good people who got framed or railroad- ed or whatever. But admit it, they don’t have dreadlocks and gold teeth. Not all of the blacks, but most of them, see you with your white skin and ignore those orange coveralls you’re wearing.

They don’t even see the orange. You are not a fellow criminal, another sad and desperate soul whose life is on hold in this horrible four-walled world. You a cracka. You are the root of all their troubles. You put them here. Now, don’t get me wrong. There were some pretty stupid white guys in there, too, and some real scum. That’s why they were in jail. They belong there. And I suppose I belonged there, too. It’s what you do when you get out that matters. They call it the Department of Corrections in the hope that you will get corrected. The people I am talking about are the ones that are in there frequently, and openly brag about it. They call it Thug Life. Your number of times being In is a badge of honor. Yunno how so many Muslims hate the West, because they see Miley Cyrus and Kim Kardashian on TV, and think all of us are like that? I have talked to racist whites to find out why they feel the way they do, and they assume all black people are like the ones they see in gangsta rap videos and movies. If that is what people are shown all the time, that’s what they believe. In my experience, most Southern men are Andy Griffith, and most black men are TD Jakes. I’m not talking about them. I’m talking about Tyrone and Julius, Wang-Wang and B-Money. Tyrone and Julius will beat the living shit out of you because your skin is white. They call it revenge for what happened to their ancestors, even though more British, Scottish, Irish, and Germans were slaves in the New World long before Kunta Kinte showed up. That doan mean shit. It doesn’t matter if you’re a white trash deadbeat either―you da rich white mothafucka who’s keepin’ da black man down. They will rob and beat and sodomize you until you either strike back or tell a guard, at which time they will kill you. If you shake your head at this and try to say I’ve got it all wrong, or that I’m a bigot, you are either a liar or an imbecile. You weren’t there. Or, Tyrone and Julius are your cousins. Tyrone has a shank hidden up his boongie. It’s the handle of a toothbrush, the plastic of one end melted to hold a single-

96 edge razor blade. He got the fire to melt it by shoving the point of a pencil into the day room electrical socket where the dorm TV used to be plugged in―before he and Wang-Wang threw it off the upper tier walkway, because the crackas got together and tried to hold a vote over what we’d all watch that night―and when the sparks jumped out, he caught them in a wad of toilet paper. A small bloom of fire leaped up out of his hand to lick at the air, and he hurried back to his cell with it before a guard might see. Every two days, the guards brought around these disposa- ble razors that we’d cut our faces up with for twenty minutes, then came around again to collect them. The weak and feeble, or white and scared, usually had only splintered plastic to turn in since the blade had been confiscated by guys with “Thug 4 Life” tattooed in an arch over their navels or across their traps and shoulder blades. Uh-oh, cracka. It’s shakedown time. And you know better than to point out who took the blade from you, so you’ll accept the blame and wear the charge, because going to the box beats getting killed. Once you get to prison, you will get those razors once a week, and you have to use them every day or get in trouble. A lot of black guys get a shaving pass, though, because their skin tends to bump up. White guys bump up, too, but this is where racism is stoked by the administration. No one is allowed to grow any facial hair, but blacks get the pass, and then grow a goatee. What is absurd about that is, it’s the cheeks and throat that bump up, not the lips and chin. This causes a great deal of resentment, because they shave the rest of the face every day. Something else that stokes racism is the canteen line. You can buy things in the commissary if your family puts money in your account, and you line up like good little ants. The problem is, whites, Hispanics, and the comparatively few Asians line up early and start waiting. However, crowds of blacks often cut into the front of the line and bunch up there. The guards tell all the people who showed up early to back up

97 and make room for them, and of course, we don’t, so they just shut down the canteen and not let anyone go. Of course, it doesn’t happen all the time, but it happened to me often enough. But that’s in prison. Rewind back to jail. Oh, and those tattoos? A lot of them had been done right here, using the most primitive method I’ve ever seen. They’d burn the dominoes or chess pieces that were donated by well- meaning people for us to pass the time, burn them underneath the metal writing desks in our cells, then scrape the soot off the undersides, mixing it with the shampoo or some other shit we can buy out of the commissary once a week, and then pick- ‘n-poke the design into their skin with a staple. Real high quality art we’re talking, for people with standards. This ink is easily recognizable. Before, if you saw someone covered in tattoos, it was easy to label them as troublemakers, but now that everybody has one, it can be hard. If you are the manager of a business and need to tell the difference between heavily-tattooed suburban kids and gangbangers on Interview Day, the quality of the ink is the dead giveaway. And these fine specimens are the people who are staring at you when you’re led into the dorm, a dungeon with four cells (two upstairs and two down, enclosed with a common space where we eat and congregate three times a day) each of which is meant to house four men but contained eight or nine, and sometimes as many as twelve. They watch you carrying in your fireproof ratty green mat- tress and itchy bedroll, scuffing your feet in the orange shower slides you must wear if you don’t want to get warts all over the soles of your feet. They watch you while the shackles are taken off of you. Then, after you have already been strip-searched, photographed, fingerprinted, and pushed around, now you get tried. Tyrone wants to charge you rent to sleep on the floor. Julius wants you to sick his duck. All Hector wants is to beat your ass, because hey, it’s fun. And every last one of them is going to try and get your tray at chow time, that tray of brown

98 mud and cold soggy noodles in snot sauce, nothing edible on it, except for―sometimes―the dessert, which every now and then is a tiny little raisin cake, or oatmeal cake, whichever, with the cream filling in it, or a dinky red apple. There’s this “fortified beverage” they serve with chow, a fruit punch that doesn’t taste like any fruit I know of. And we call that Jim Jones. Also, the toilet paper they give you two rolls of a week, that’s John Wayne. Get this: John Wayne, because it’s true grit, and don’t take shit from nobody. They put a red plastic bracelet on me, that everyone called an armband, since I guess ‘bracelet’ didn’t sound tough, and I spent one night in General Population before doing the only smart thing I could do: got in a fight so I’d get sent to the box. Without a book to read, “solitary” confinement is nothing but masturbation, pushups, and sleep. The isolation cellblock is comprised of forty two-man cells, almost all of which contain dreadlocked assholes who pound on the doors and rap all day and all night. It’s horrible. Boom boom boom ba-da-bap boom. “Kill Whitey!” Boom boom boom ba-da-bap. “Smoke crack!” All day, all night. Day in, day out. There are two bunks in each cell, and each one is an elon- gated bedspring that’s built into, and passes through, the concrete wall that separates each cell. When the man in the cell next to you jerks off, you feel every stroke. I beat off a few times until I felt the guy next door do it, and then I stopped. He didn’t though. He kept at it pretty much all the time. I moved to the other bunk in my cell, and either there were two of them in that other cell, or he’d followed me. I’m not sure which is worse. I got sentenced by the DR board to one month, and spent a mind-numbing week of it alone. The less said about the next three, the better. Let’s just say, I got blamed for slavery. When I finally got out, I got moved into another dorm. At about ten or so, we all go back to our cells, to our ratty, flame retardant green mattresses, and mind-bogglingly stupid

99 conversations. There are four cells in a dorm, with four bunks in each fastened to the walls, and two double bunk racks made of angle iron welded together, plus a couple of mattresses on the floor. Between ten and twelve men sleep in each four man cell. And I had to listen to them All. Night. Long. “Nigga, I peeped da lick, right off rip. I know whut da lick read, mah nigga.” “Word. But dem shits be off da chain.” Linguistics enthusiast that I am, I have been struggling to interpret what these guys are saying. Sometimes I don’t think they know what they’re trying to express, judging from how often they feel compelled to ask “know whut I’m sayin’?” And I’ve managed to figure out that “off da chain” is a reference to slave days, and being off the chain means to be wild. A point cannot be gotten across unless stated ad-fricking-nauseum, the louder the better. That’s how little faith they have in each other’s comprehensive skills. We whites and the Hispanics have a little joke amongst ourselves: “Ah’m gonna repeat mahsef, you know whut Ah’m sayin’? Ah’m gonna repeat mahsef. Ah’m gonna repeat mahsef, yunno whut Ah’m sayin’? Ah’m gonna repeat mahsef.” Their repetition will continue until acknowledged. They need what they say to be acknowledged, or they can’t seem to continue, hence the inevitable question: “You heard me?” When they ask me if I heard them, especially if I’m sitting two, three feet away, I loved to just stare off into space, waiting. They fidget. The awkward pause lengthens, until they have to ask again. “You heard?” I finally look over, say “hmmm?” with my eyebrows raised, and they suck their teeth in irritation―“stck!” I love it. Hey, entertainment’s scarce in here. You have to make do with what you’ve got, and the longer one lowers his standards…well, the search for something new has strange horizons. We have two phones in each dorm, and fights are frequent over the use of them, on account of “dem in-love-assed niggas

100 be hoggin’ da phone all mothafuckin’ day.” That’s a quote. Verbatim. So is this other example of one dog ejamacatin’ another: “Escape? Yeah, dog. Dat’s da shit now, escape. All dem niggas be escapin’ dese days, know whut I’m sayin’? Yeah, dog. Es- cape. Dat’s real.” Like it’s a new fad, something prisoners have just started doing. “Man, dat nigga’s one mothafuckin’-ass mothafucka, mah nigga. Ya feel me, cuz? Know whut I’m sayin’? Tha’s real.” On my mother’s eyes, I am not making this up. And some of them use the word “nigger” in one breath so many times it doesn’t even sound bad to you anymore, first addressing the guy they’re speaking to with it, calling themselves it, and concluding with it. “Nigga, you betta not be runnin’ up on a nigga, mah nigga. Puss’ass shit. Fuck wrong whichoo, mah nigga?” “Nigga, I’m tellin’ ya she doan want a nigga to be takin’ no blood test, mah nigga, cuz den they’s proof it ain’t mah baby, mah nigga. Dat’s real.” When you’re in the box, and you get a runaround to carry a note to someone out on the ‘pound, that’s called a kite. But the blacks call it a ‘kike.’ And you don’t steadily supply somebody else, like your bitch, for example, with cigarettes—you keek him in rip. Keek. So, there was this jackass I got stuck rooming with, who touted himself as a edumacated nigga, who was “all about dat knowledge and shit,” but didn’t know a goddamned thing. He was always preaching to me about his particular sect of Islam that was worshipping Yahweh Ben Yahweh. They’re terrorists who claim he is God, the son of God, and he’s in a Florida prison. Anyway, this cellmate of mine would lecture me about how da white man, who be trying to keep him down—oh, I’m sorry, keek him down—is unda direck ordas from da Cafolicks, and da king of da Cafolicks, who is da Poke. And if they’re not talking, they’re rapping. Beating on the

101 stainless steel sink and toilet and writing desks, rapping about crack and firearms, and the solace found in the arms of fallen women, and how them crackas got them down and won’t let them go, won’t let them be free. This is not “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” I am forced to listen to. This is “Kill Whitey” and “Cash Dat Welfare Check So’s We Can Git Mo’ Crack Rock,” but none of them seem to understand that if they kill Whitey there won’t be anyone to write the welfare check. Now I’m going to say something that needs to be said. It’s on everybody’s mind, but no one has the gall to say it, because they all know they are going to get publically destroyed for it, but I was already killed by one of them and don’t give a shit. I heard several of them talking about how dey hate to wear condoms, ain’t never goan do it, and ain’t never goan pull out neither, like dem crackas be tellin’ dem to, cuz it don’t feel no good. And each a dem had several kids. One twenty-one-year- old thug boasted that he had ten kids. And there he was in jail.

Who should be the one to tell her?

Every last one of these asshats is a bastard. Think about it. Black community illegitimacy went up from 24% in the early 1960s to over 90% in what’s called the urban core, and 70% nationwide. Sure, there are white, hispanic, and Asian bastards,

102 but damn, not as many, and not for the same horrific reason. The willingness of “economically disadvantaged” girls to start having babies at the tender age of sixteen, with ‘bad boys’ who neither can, nor will, be able to support them, induces a massive burden on society. Said bad boys are seen to be appealing due to their overtly macho and combative behavior, including gang membership and criminal violence. Now, for women in general, all is forgivable, because it’s sexy. Sexiness is seen as all-important, to the detriment of Western society, and here’s how: Sexy bad boys don’t produce the nice things women want, such as a safe and secure environment, don’t work toward an expanding economy, and they don’t do anything to advance technology or medical practices. Instead, they produce a rapid descent into poverty and violence by not committing to the raising of their illegitimate offspring. No, screw that flowery language. They don’t raise their bastards. They are, therefore, poverty factories. Their bastard kids grow up to beget more bastard children, requiring exponentially more tax dollars to feed their kids, who will, in turn, raise the taxes once again. A social welfare system under huge pressure from this already unwieldy and exponentially multiplying un- derclass is unsustainable. Statistically, white and Asian parents, more often than not, have children they can afford to have. They’re responsible. They are then forced to pay for the subsidization of people with no interest in responsibility. Not just that, the subsidization of people who will knowingly beget more bastards for the express purpose of bumping up their welfare check, with no interest in providing for those children, who’ll grow up as easy prey for gang recruiters and drug dealers who will act as their surrogate fathers, and urge them to commit even more crimes and acts of violence, and beget their own bastard kids, to make everything even worse. With the exception of the Juliets, of course.

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So, what it all comes down to, these guys in the dorm with me, excluding the comparatively few people of other ancestry who were just plain bad or stupid, owe their very existence to white people for paying their mothers to have them, and here they were, talking about how the white man is keeping them down. And they wouldn’t even be here if they weren’t violent or stupid―or just plain evil―and had committed crimes. Now, here’s where I, no doubt, look like a hypocrite, because here I was in jail too, but for trying to do what I thought was “right.” Here was genuine evil, the desire to hurt someone else without even the motives of greed or lust or selfishness, for no reason whatsoever, and I am far from it. And I have begun to hate the people who effectively created these people around me, by creating welfare and then writing higher checks to the crack-whore broodmares and knowingly increasing the strain on our economy until its inevitable collapse, to hasten the day that people will say Enough. Now, I have reason to believe that this isn’t some mistake that the government made and is now stuck with. I think that it is a way to continue slavery by putting it out in the open. A few years ago, a much-contested anonymous open letter claimed that top music industry executives promoted gangsta rap, to encourage people to more actively pursue the glorious life of crime, ultimately to fill private prisons they had a sizable financial interest in. Because of poor grammar in the letter, some felt it was a hoax and was unfairly painting a bad picture of black youth―even though the letter never once included the word “black.” The gist of it can be summed up in this excerpt: “We were told that these prisons were built by privately owned companies who received funding from the government based on the number of inmates. The more inmates, the more money the government would pay these prisons. It was also made clear to us that since these prisons are privately owned, as they become publicly traded, we’d be able to buy shares. Most of us

104 were taken back by this. Again, a couple of people asked what this had to do with us. At this point, my industry colleague who had first opened the meeting took the floor again and answered our questions. He told us that since our employers had become silent investors in this prison business, it was now in their interest to make sure that these prisons remained filled. Our job would be to help make this happen by market- ing music which promotes criminal behavior, rap being the music of choice. He assured us that this would be a great situation for us because rap music was becoming an increasingly profitable market for our companies, and as employees, we’d also be able to buy personal stocks in these prisons.” Critics of the letter said that it was preposterous, because nobody goes to prison just for listening to music. Sigh. Of course, people don’t get arrested, much less convicted, for listening to music. They do, however, go up da road following the example set by those rappers. Glorification of violence, drug use, and misogyny isn’t something people just enjoy for its artistic merit and then go on about their day. It is a lifestyle that people adopt. They imitate what they see and hear, and it leads inevitably to the commission of crimes, and the subsequent three meals a day, roof over their heads, and laundry done, all at the expense of the state, of which they are proud. I was asking Sherfonki Robinson one day if he understood this, that if he kept up the way he was acting when he got out, he’d be right back in again. His reply? “Dere ain’t no question! Dere ain’t no question! Dere ain’t no question, dog. Dat’s real!” Ah’m gonna repeat mahsef, I thought. I wonder if I ought to look him up on the FL DOC offender search, and see how many times he’s been in since. One day, if I’m not too busy. There are two kinds of prisons you can go to: work camps and psyche camps. I went to the psyche camp, to avoid work, and was made into a guinea pig. The other camp is slavery, but

105 in retrospect it might have been less horrific, which makes me twice the sucker. So, the point? I believe that welfare creates the people that will do either free clinical trials for Big Pharma, which I will explain in a moment, or free labor for the state, perpetuating slavery that people will enter more or less of their own free will. And brag about it.

Again, I can see if parts of this could offend you, but you should ask yourself what aspect of it is offensive? Should you be mad at me for coming out and saying it, or at the people responsible?

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So, every time you fight in jail, after you serve your time in confinement, they’ll move you into a new cellblock to prevent future revenge attempts, and there are only so many dorms on one floor. If you can’t play well with others, eventually you’ll wind up in the Chaplain’s cell. In our case, Cellblock M3B. That’s where all the wimpier criminals go, who want to hide from the bullies. Or maybe those words are too strong. Let me rephrase that: all the guys who want to use the phone and eat their food like civilized people, without getting beaten or raped. Oh, one or two of them actually believe all that Bible- thumping garbage and want to change their lives, but most of them have what’s called Jailhouse Religion. They’ll pray, and sing, and put on a big show, even snitch- ing on others who don’t “edify their Lord” enough, right up until their god sets them free, and then they’ll toss their Bibles into the trashcan on the way out the door. All of them had to put in requests and wait in line to get moved into the dorm. Except me.

We had three church services a day, with volunteer speakers coming in for an agonizing hour’s worth of spiritual masturbation apiece. The funniest of them were Reverend Barnes, Harrison, and the dynamic duo that I called The George and Everett Show. Reverend Willy Barnes was an enormous ex- boxer/ex-drunkard with no nose, a bullet head, and a serious underbite that made him look like a cartoon character. He had a Pentecostal way of screaming fire n’ brimstone, while spray- ing spit all over everybody. Harrison was a stereotypical snake- oil salesman who was always “anointing” people, laying on his hands, speaking in tongues, then pushing you over. If you didn’t just let yourself fall, if you tried to catch yourself, you were full of demons and in desperate need of an exorcism. It

107 was The Emperor’s New Clothes all over again. He started every visit the same way, with that revival style of hyperventilation, making us shout “I don’t mind” as loud as we could for almost ten minutes so that we would all get light- headed and sweaty, go numb, and have chest pains. Respirato- ry alkalosis, it’s called, by those who know. Rapture, it’s called, by the suckers they preach to. He’d faith-heal us individually by boxing our ears, jabbing his thumbs in our eyes, and pushing us over backwards so that those waiting behind could catch us and lay us gently onto the floor. We’d hear a thunder-clap, see a flash of white light, and fall down all disoriented. That was being touched by God. The George and Everett Show, now there was a real piece of work. Picture an old man with a gray pompadour who plays these archaic gospel tapes, and sings along with all his might in a voice that sounds like he’d been gargling glass, while the other one stands next to him with his comb-over and Coke- bottle bifocals, looking embarrassed. Looking back on it now, I see they meant well. It’s the thought. I guess they could have spent their afternoons doing anything else, but they chose to come and be nice to us. Those three acts were the real stars, the life of the party. The rest of the preachers just read aloud out of the Bible and told us what it meant. Yay. Remedial kindergarten discussions and over-analyzation of simple parables to make sure the message got across to the slowest of minds. Imagine this dull pressure behind your eyes, as if your brain is being pushed slowly through oatmeal. That’s what it felt like. And one of the preachers brought up the subject of Greek and Hebrew translations of the Bible, and said they were hogwash. “Hogwash” is the word he used. Because he doesn’t want the Word of God tampered with, when translated by whoever’s doing the translating. “Just give me that King James Ver- sion, and I’ll be happy.” He really said that. With conviction. And nobody else in the room noticed how absurd it was. Re-

108 minds me of a certain governor of Texas who, when asked if the Bible should be taught in Spanish for the benefit of immi- grants, replied that “English was good enough for Jesus, so it’s good enough for me.” Every Friday, our homework assignment was to choose a scripture out of the Bible, and read it aloud, one at a time, in the day room at church time. Rather than refusing, I followed the Letter of the Law to a T. When my turn came around, I’d stand slowly and, with great ceremony, open my book of lies. With all the pomp and circumstance I could muster, I would clear my throat and address the congregation, voice booming. “The Book of the Prophet Isaiah, chapter 3, verse 21…” ―and there I would clear my throat again―“‘The rings…and nose jewels.’” Wait a beat for the echo of my voice to fade...then snap the book shut with a resounding thump! and plop back down into my plastic chair. Hey, look, they said to read a scripture. A scripture. Well, that’s a scripture. So’s John 11:35. “Jesus wept.” Period. I followed your rule. Make me waste my time? Here, then. Isaiah 28:8. “For all tables are full of vomit.” Take a bow. The Second Book of Kings. Chapter 9. Verse 35. “And they went to bury her: but they found no more than the skull, and the feet, and the palms of her hands.” Imperious glare at every face looking up at me, my bearing as sanctimonious as I could manage, wasting their time. My favorite quote of all was from Numbers, where Moses raged at his generals after a battle for sparing civilians. “Now, therefore, kill every male among the children, and kill every woman that hath known a man by lying with him. But all the girl-children that hath not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.” Contemplate that. Cute words from someone who had just brought “Thou shalt not kill” down from a mountaintop, now

109 ordering murder and pedophilia. I put up with this stupid little exercise because the only alternative is to go back to the box, and I just couldn’t take that any more. Anyway, back to the services we had to endure. Standing in front of us, Willy Barnes opened up his Bible, licking a fingertip to turn a few translucent pages, tilting back his head and raising his eyebrows to see through the lenses of his reading glasses perched on the tip of his flattened nose. With his forehead wrinkled up toward the fluorescent lights and his page-turning finger running down the text searching for the right line to start with, the word that came to mind was “supercilious.” Like one of those guys who steepled his finger- tips when he wanted to appear thoughtful. He even went so far as to clear his throat before reading. Reminds me of, hmm…me? “Chaptuh Fo’ of da Gospel Accodin’ ta Maffyew,” and he paused to clear his throat again. “Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the Devil and when he had fasted forty days and forty nights―think about that, men! Think about it! Forty days and forty nights! Amen! I betcha he was hungry! Do you think you’d be hungry?” he asked, bending down to peer over the rim of his glasses at one of the prisoners. The startled guy managed to shrink his head back on his neck a few inches, but Reverend Barnes was still uncom- fortably close to him. “Do you?” Almost all of us had seen the small white fleck of spit that had shot from one man’s lips to the other’s. I squinted at it, staring in fascination. The guy was too scared to say anything! I couldn’t believe it. “How ‘bout choo?” Barnes shouted at Flaco sitting in the next seat over. The Puerto Rican winced, wiping at his eye, and said “Yeah, I guess so.” “You guess so?” Barnes asked incredulously, shooting back upright and bouncing a little. “Uh-unh, brotha, you wouldn’t be hungry. You’d be dead!”

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Nervous and embarrassed laughter broke the tension. I was still watching the spit. “An’ that’s what the Devil figgered when he showed up in the wilderness, that if Jesus wasn’t dead by now, well, he must be the Son of God. But he knew, if the Son of God was even bothering to fast, he musta bin hungry by now, mighty hungry, else what was the point of fastin’ in the fust place? So he went to temp’ him! Say, you really in human form, ain’tcha? ‘Cause if you wasn’t, you wouldn’t care ‘bout food, but that doan really mean you the Son of God, now does it? If you was the Son of God, you could take these stones and make ‘em bread! “And Jesus said back to him―lissen to this, lissen!―‘Man shall not live by bread alone but by e’ry word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.’ Do ya hear that? Do ya hear that, brefren?” he shouted, bouncing on the balls of his feet and strutting about the day room like a rooster. Holding his Bible shut in one hand with a finger inserted to mark his place, he started gesturing at people with it to emphasize what he was shouting. “You doan need them drugs! You doan need dat likka! You doan need them fancy cars or them fancy clothes!” “Amen!” the spiritual yes-men of the dorm said. “Amen! Yes, Lord! Preach it!” Barnes wiped his foam-flecked lips and mopped his face with his handkerchief. “So then the Devil try this,” he said, opening up his Bible again and reading more calmly. “‘Then the Devil taketh Jesus up unto the holy city and set him on top of the highest temple. And he said unto him if thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down, for it is said that the angels watch over thee, and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest thou dash a foot upon a stone.’ And Jesus―lissen to what he said, men! Lissen!―‘And Jesus said unto him it is written, thou shalt not temp’ the Lord thy God!’ But the Devil, he still ain’t givin’ up, what he do nex’ he took Jesus up to the highest mountain this time and showed him all the kingdoms of the world. And he say lookit the way I

111 taken us all over the place so easy. Lookit all the things I can do. You can’t do diddly squat ‘cuz if you coulda, you woulda by now! See the great things I can do?” And here Barnes shut the Bible again, started using it for enunciation once more. “I can do more than that! See all them fine houses and fancy cars and fancy clothes, in all these kingdoms of the world? Well, if you fall down an’ worship me, all them things will I give unto thee! But Jesus―what Jesus do?―Jesus said ‘Get thee hence, Satan!’” Several people winced in the front row. “Get thee hence!” Barnes shouted, throwing his arms out, spit flying every whicha way. “Amen!” the yes-men cried. “Amen! Thank you, Jesus!” “Get thee hence, Satan!” Barnes screamed again, jumping up and down. “For it is written! Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and only him shalt thou serve! He shook off the Dev- il!” Barnes went down on his knees so fast, with his fist and Bible shaking above his head, that until I got up for a better view I thought he’d done a James Brown split. “Jesus shook off the Devil! Jeeee-zuss!” “Amen!” “Amen-amen!” “Yes, Lord!” “And you men can do it too!” he shouted, getting back up. “Who’s ready to do it wi’ me? Who’s ready? Who’s comin’ to Heaven wi’ me? How ‘bout choo?” The man he’d rounded on sharply jerked back, swallowed, and nodded. There was applause as Reverend Barnes shouted ‘Hallellujah!’ and laid his hands on the poor man’s bowed head, chanting ‘Oh, rashumba dudda darosha! Rashumba dudda darosha! Amen, Lord! Oh, rashumba dudda da―” “What’s he doing?” one of the chicos asked no one in particular. “Speaking in tongues,” a half-believer said out of the side of his mouth. “Speaking in the language of the angels!” Barnes hollered.

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“But I can’t understand none a that. In Corinthians 14:5 it says―” “Then you ain’t got Jesus in your heart! You still got the Devil lodged in you!” “I got plenty a Jesus,” the chico said indignantly. “No, you don’t, not if you can’t unnerstan’ God speaking through me. Maybe you think you got Jesus, but dat’s the devil telling ya you do when you don’t, leadin’ you furder astray!” “Now, waitaminute―” he started, but the others seated near him started shushing him urgently. “Anybody else not unnerstan’ the tongues I’m speakin’ in?” Barnes asked us all. “Oh, no! Nope! Uh-unh!” everybody but me answered. Yep. They were reading him loud and clear. “Good. Oh, rashumba dudda da rosha! Rashumba dud―” And that was the chink in his armor that I burrowed into. Talking to the chico later, I told him all about how Maryknolls converting pagans to their bullshit religion would integrate any of the indigenous practices they had to in order to make it stick. If the locals insisted on saying Rashumba diddly whatever, while clutching people’s heads and rolling their eyes up, well, let them. But they’d give them a different reason to do it. Say, oh you’re right to be doing what you’re doing, but you are doing it for the wrong reason. This is what Rashumba-doodle- doo really means. Now, aren’t you glad we came into your god- forsaken land to tell you that? Good. So, amen-amen, salva- tion all around. Now you can tell all these other servants of the Lord we brought with us where the gold and ivory is. “The Holy Trinity, for example,” I said. “Is not anywhere at all in the Bible. No implications, even. The idea of a Triune God didn’t find its way into the Church formally until the fourth century, under Constantine in Rome. It was adopted into Christianity because of politics. Mesopotamians had Anu, Ea, and Enlil. Egypt had Horus, Isis, and Osiris. Babylon had Ishtar, Sin, and Shamash. India had Brahma, Shiva, and Vish-

113 nu. So, we had to have them all, too, if we wanted a hold over those people. That’s why we changed the Sabbath to Sunday. The day of the sun god. We took the sun disks from Egypt and turned them into haloes. We took the Goddess and called her the Virgin Mary. Where do you think the miter, the altar, dox- ology, and Communion came from? Pagans! Yunno, in India, when Krishna was born? Their book is a lot older than ours, and they say that Krishna was visited by three kings who brought him gold, frankincense, and myrrh! Then Constantine brought all this shit under his roof because that‘s the quickest way to get people’s loyalty―through their gods.” I told the chico that this was the root of it, how we ended up with all of this false religious dogma he had to pretend he believed in or be cast back into the den of wolves. I told him that’s all “churchianity” and there was no real dogma to believe in, no Hell to be sent to, and no good reason why he should stop tasting of the fruit. But go on pretending like everyone else does, I told him, or else they’ll know you know, and they’ll find a way to silence you before you can open anyone else’s eyes―just like the Spanish Inquisition did, calling people like you who ask questions blasphemers and heretics and burning them alive in public so everyone else could see what happens when you think. And his eyes narrowed, his jaw set in determination, and he said―like so many have before him and so many will after―“Guero, I tell my family wha jew tell me. I call them now. I tell them an’ I make them stop geeving money to tha church.” “Good. Tell them to spend that money on getting you set free instead.” We were playing cards in the cell later on, and someone brought up a problem he had with what he’d learned that day. This wasn’t that uncommon. We were playing spades, so there were three others: a fat bald guy, whose face had been somewhat rearranged during the car accident he was awaiting trial for, a muscular black dude named Al Bristol, and a tall skinny

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Boriqua named Reuben. Reuben Jimenez with his bloodhound eyes, and his great big Stalin mustache. I can’t remember the fat guy’s name. There were also a few other guys in our cell, this red-faced older blond guy named Jim Harding, a child porn downloader named Chuck, a punkass wigger who went by the name Kid, and Bismark Rodriguez. You might remember Bismark from being on the news for his little hostage-taking incident at Dis- ney World. His wife worked there and he wanted to confront her about something or other, and it got ugly. You would be surprised how quickly these things happen. While telling me his story, he assured me he’d get out of this because “you can’t sink the Bismark.” I didn’t bother to tell him that the Bismarck was famous for being a sunken warship. “So, the problem I have,” Bristol was saying. “Is that I’m reading the Bible for the second time around, and I haven’t seen the words ‘decorated tree’ or ‘bunny rabbit’ anywhere in there.” Bristol had been locked up for almost two years awaiting trial, because the case against him was flimsy at best, and so he’d plenty of time to read the whole book and then some. He was a pretty bright fella. He was one of those black dudes that came from an actual family, and had just gotten himself mixed up in something. We became really good friends. The fat guy trumped with a spade to take the book, frown- ing and looking quizzically at Bristol. Reuben smirked. “I just been wondering, what do trees have to do with Je- sus being born? And what does a bunny rabbit hiding colored eggs in the night have to do with him rising from the dead?” “You really want to know?” I asked. They looked at me, and the fat guy led out with the five of diamonds. “It’s because of dragons.” “What?” Bristol and Fat Guy asked at once. I laughed. Reuben had listened to some of my heresy in

115 the past, so he’d already peeped da lick, as they say in the vernacular. “Well, in a way,” I said, sitting back. “You ever heard of Saint George?” Everybody in the cell was looking at me. Harding nodded. “Saint George and the Dragon, yeah.” “So,” I said. “All anybody really remembers him for is he killed a dragon. But dragons don’t exist, do they? But back in the Middle Ages, a lot of people believed in them. Now, I’m into history so I know a bit about ancient customs. Germanic people used to have a folk hero called Siegfried, who was like Achilles, bulletproof except for one spot on his body. His big thing was he slew a dragon. But the Danes had a dragonslayer too, and they called him Beowulf. Maybe you heard of him.” “Diamonds led,” the fat guy said. “Oh, my bad.” I threw a spade. “So when Christians were stamping out all the pagan beliefs of the people they’d converted, they had to put an end to the hero worship that they had, and the best way was to tell them, Oh yeah, there was a Germanic guy who killed a dragon, but his name was George, not Siegfried. And our god gave him that magic power he had. That’s how we have so many saints. The worship of heroes and the old gods and goddesses continued under the guise of Catholic saints so it would be easier to convert the pagans.” “That has what to do with Christmas trees?” Bristol asked. “Glad you asked.” “Are you going to throw something?” Fat Guy asked. Bristol silenced him with a look. “It’s the same as dragons,” I said. “Every year at Yuletide, Germanic people would decorate trees in sacred groves hoping to attract the spirits of their ancestors, who they called ‘alfs.’ Sounds a little like ‘elves’ doesn’t it? And they did that to attract the alfs because they thought the alfs would bring gifts. Christians tried to put an end to that, the Church outlawed it, so the trees were cut down and brought inside to keep the

116 tradition alive by hiding it. Now it’s out in the open again because the Christians knew as long as the Germans kept something of their old ways, they would never be truly loyal. So they came up with some shit about a miraculous tree appearing to the poor because of their faith during a hard winter and giving them an unexpected bunch of presents. “Easter eggs, now, they were Ukrainian. The yolk reminded people of the sun, and a rooster that hatched out of an egg seemed to have the power to summon the sun. And the egg is also a symbol of birth, the re-birth of Nature when winter is over. That’s why we decorate eggs in the spring. And the symbols we put on them are supposed to mean certain things, like a swastika, that is also a sign for the sun, if you put that on an egg it was a powerful talisman that was supposed to ward off sickness, bad luck, and the evil eye.” “So how does Jesus come into that?” Bristol asked. “A completely ridiculous story. You’re not going to believe this, but the newly converted Ukrainians sure did. When Jesus was dying on the cross, every drop of blood that hit the ground turned into a red egg. Mary collected them all and was going to take them to Pontius Pilate as a bribe to let her bury her son. On the way to the palace, she gave one to every child she met, and just as she got where she was going, she fainted. The eggs rolled out of her little sack, and went all over the world, and children are still looking for them.” “That’s the stupidest goddamn thing I’ve ever heard!” the punkass wigger said. Everybody else looked sharply at him, and Reuben, who was one of the best yes-men for the Chap- lain in the entire cell, pointed a crooked bony finger at him. “That kinda language isn’t edifying the Lord, young man.” “Oh, come on!” “For real,” Fat Guy said. “Don’t damn God. Now, Alex, are you gonna play your hand, or what?” “Now, he’s not damning God when he says ‘Goddamn.’” I said. “He’s saying something’s ‘damned by God,’ specifically,

117 that bullshit story. And he’s right.” The punkass wigger nodded at me, grateful. “And that’s another thing that bothers me,” I went on, ready to make my move and do some converting. “The idea that you could damn God. A lot of people think you can, but if you could, he’d be fallible. And it says in the Bible that the unrighteous are flourishing like the green bay tree and nothing can be done about it, their sins are going unpunished. If a god can not notice people doing wrong, or get tricked when they pretend to repent, like some of the guys in here, then that’s not an almighty god. If earthquakes, floods, famines, and plagues are god’s punishment on everybody instead of just the guilty, then divine justice is just some kind of blind, hit-or-miss system, isn’t it? I won’t bow to a god like that. My God is too busy with other shit to throw lightning bolts and not care who he hits.” “Yunno somethin’?” Fat Guy said. “God didn’t strike that carjacker with lightning when he stuck a gun in my face. I had to grab his gun and hit the gas to drag his sorry ass down the road until he let go, and did angels come and rescue me and carry me home on a pillow with music and shit? No, God sent two cars to crash into me while I fishtailed all over the place. I mean, look at my face. Look at what happened to me. And now I’m looking at ten years, for what? Because I had a nicer car than someone else? Where’s God right now? Huh?” Everyone else in the cell took on the expression he had in his eyes. The look of one who knows he’s been cheated. You might wonder at my motive for doing this. I see people do it all the time, overcompensating for their shortcomings by lashing out at something else. Finding fault in other people or institutions and zeroing in on it, hoping that if they point their fingers and shout enough, they’ll make themselves look good by comparison. And nobody will notice how empty they are. How bereft of content or purpose. Do you know why people turn themselves into monsters?

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Because it’s better than feeling like a failure. So, I had a great time being a heretic, pointing out contra- dictions and discrepancies, spreading dissension, and causing unrest, until one day I found out I could pretend to be crazy and get on free psyche meds, and spend my time in a waking dreamland. Hey, what downside could there possibly be?

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I spent the next five years of my life as a guinea pig for Big Pharma. They’d take me off one pill to put me on another and see what happened. Paxil, Lithium, Tegretol, Geodon, Well- butrin, and a bunch of others I was too stoned to remember the names of. I can’t remember which one of them made everyone look like a monkey. I don’t mean I was hallucinating, but everyone I looked at, I could see the unmistakable stamp of our ancestry on their faces. Some were more evolved than others but it was disturbingly present on all of us. I checked my reflection in the mirror later, and really wished I hadn’t. You can’t unsee that. Paxil was fine for a while, but it only lasts a short time, until you have to up your dosage, because it makes your head zap as if you’re getting electric shocks, and it makes you think the most horrible thoughts, like Kill yourself, just out of nowhere. Hey, I just painted a really great picture. I should kill myself. So I told the doctor and he said, okay, we’ll raise your dosage, and everything is all daisies and bunnies and hugs for another couple of months. Not a bad way to survive the worst years of your life. This, by the way, is what they mean when they say Research. When they say Clinical Trials. Paxil’s made from phenylpiperidine, which is what makes opioids addictive. Take a moment to Google “Dobbs v. Wy- eth Pharms” in which the court found the Food and Drug Ad- ministration repeatedly prevented at least one SSRI manufacturer from issuing a suicide risk warning label. What the soothing female voice is saying in the commercials now is “Fatal events have occurred” which doesn’t sound nearly as bad as “people have killed themselves, out of the blue.” If you aren’t paying attention, it might just go in one ear and out the other. For the record, at the time of this writing, February 2019, the last time I took Paxil was in 2006 and still consider

121 suicide alarmingly often. I’ll call a quick time-out to tell you more about prison. I’d spent eleven months in jail, which was horrible. Those of us who went up the road to the Central Florida Reception Center were actually excited, because even though it was prison, it’s better than jail. The food is horrible, but at least it’s edible. In jail, you are stuck in the same four-walled world all day every day. In prison, you get to go outside twice a day. It’s lovely. My first Christmas, they let us go to Midnight Mass, those of us who wanted to, and we were so happy we could not only be outside, but at night. It was beautiful. Now, the guards had told us sternly that we had to keep our mouths shut. Not a peep. It is very strict at reception centers, you see. A lot of yelling and rules to see how you’ll respond, and which prison you’ll be sent on to after processing. Well, rebel that I am, I started singing Silent Night. When the others saw that the guards didn’t stop me, they joined in. I think the guards appreciated it because they were stuck there at work instead of with their families. We had a pleasant walk in single file to the chapel. Aside from that one time, stepping out of line was ill-advised, because consequences were harsh. But, we were in CFRC and we were happy for the first, oh, two weeks or so, then the complaining started. Man, this place sucks. I hope we get sent to Tomoka. Tomoka is like summer camp, dog. Inmates run that camp. And they got hobby-craft, the food is a thousand times better, they got softball, weights, you can get drugs on the pound, man, Tomoka’s where it’s at. And yeah, after all that build-up, when we did get sent to Tomoka, we were pretty happy. The first week was awesome. We loved being there, really. It was like summer camp. But you’ll never guess what happened on week two. Man, this place sucks. Punkass Tomoka. I wish we were in a real prison. A real prison would have this (fill in the blank.) Now there is where I got to learn a lot about people. My anthropology research advanced by leaps and bounds.

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One thing I found remarkable was how creative men got in trying to make the time they spent more bearable. I think it is a great example of why communism and socialism will never work. We all went in as equals, even having our heads shaved like Buddhist monks to take our sense of individuality. We all had the same clothes, the same bedroll, and the same meals. A real Utopia, right? All of us the same! Ha. The hustles, the extortion, intimidation, everyone trying to get a piece of you because no one is ever happy with the same thing their neighbor has. Everyone wants just a little something extra, or they have to break a rule just to get away with it. You got your sexaholics, the perverts, you wouldn’t believe how many of them are black, that don’t just stop at paying off bitches to “get down” with them, and raping little white boys, they also become “mad gunners,” jacking off at female officers. Some of the women get off on it, but some will lock you up, and if you get busted for gunning down an officer, that’s sixty and all. Sixty days locked up in confinement, loss of all gain time. So, they try to be slick. You’ll see a guy standing off somewhere, watching whoever, and tapping his foot. He’s got a long strip that he tore off of his bed sheet, one end tied around his shaft, running down his pant leg, the other end tied to his big toe. There are some innovations that are useful, too, like tat- too guns. You can make them out of electric razors you buy from the commissary, a toothbrush, and either a straightened- out lighter spring or an e-string stolen from the guitar on the rec yard for the needle. You make a battery pack, use your lighter to heat up and bend the toothbrush handle, fasten the razor motor to it, make a wheel out of plastic and set the needle in it. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Want to hear something else cool? I was in confinement, and you can’t smoke back there, so it’s extra punishment. You maybe, if you’ve got a good enough friend, have some rips

123 smuggled in by the inmates that come to bring your meals and sweep up the place, the trusties, runarounds, we call them. But if you don’t have a lighter, you’re scarred. You can either fish for a light, or—this is where you see regular guys turn into geniuses. Take two batteries out of your radio, if you got one. Get a short length of wire out of your headphones, set them on your metal toilet and make a circuit between positive and negative, boom! you got a hot-enough wire to light a cigarette. A razor blade, if you don’t have headphones or don’t want to risk ruining the wires. If the batteries are strong enough, you only need one of them to do it. That ridge around it close to the negative end? From that ridge on, it’s all positive, not just the other end. Just peel back the wrapping. Where there’s a will… So, what’s that fishing I mentioned earlier? Make a long string from your blanket, tie it to a battery or a toothpaste tube, whatever, throw it under your door to the next cell down. Takes practice. They might have what you need. Rips, stamps, fire, kites—oh, I’m sorry, kikes—coffee, anything. You have stamps, you’ve got business. But the cell I was in, we were upstairs on the second tier. The guy with the rip, he was downstairs. No problem. I made a dart out of tightly rolled paper, tied it to a super long fishing line, and launched it out from under our door with a rubber band, over a ramp we made with cardboard and slid out onto the walkway, to arch the dart over the metal strip they welded to the railing—to keep guys from shooting their lines over the edge—the guy on the ground floor shot out his line to hook ours. Again, takes practice. We made sure there was enough line he could take in a bunch of slack to fasten what he had to trade on it, and we pulled it up while he kept the end, so we didn’t have to go through the whole process again to get him what we had to offer. Good times. But I have to get to the point of all this: My death.

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It’s funny. I got in a lot of fights with black guys because they were always trying to put down on me. Trying to get my ass or the money my Dad put in my commissary account, or a few times just because I’m white. Yeah, go on and shake your head, but you weren’t there. When the guards would come and pry us apart, they’d ask what we were fighting about and the other guy would always tell the same lie. He’d say it was because I had called him a nigger. And then the fight was justified and it was all my fault. Anyway, there was one time I got beaten into a coma by Darell Saffore, one of those mentally under-developed guys that have multiple rows of teeth. If he hadn’t’ve busted my head on the concrete he would’ve gotten out a few years later, but instead he tried to kill me in front of God and everybody, and got himself another twenty years. Now, I see people wake up from comas in movies and on TV all the time, and I wish I could say what it was really like. I have no memory of waking up at all, or of how long I had been up before I actually came to. When my life began, I was in the middle of telling jokes to two nurses and some guy that turned out to be the Assistant Warden of my prison. They were there at the side of my gurney, laughing at everything I said until I realized I was in a hospital. “Hey, hold on a sec,” I remember asking. “Where am I?” “Halifax Medical Center,” one of the women said. “Why? Why am I strapped to a bed?” “Don’t worry about it, sweetie.” “How can I not worry about it? Being tied up to a bed in a hospital doesn’t tend to happen to people with nothing to wor—” “Shhhh, you’d better get some rest.” They left me alone to watch Power Puff Girls on the TV and wonder what the hell I was doing there. And who I was. That was the question that really bugged me. Who the hell I was.

It turned out I had a blood clot in my brain, and there was

125 nothing the doctors could do about it except wait and see if I had a stroke. Then, they would be able to help me recover, but that’s it. No way to prevent it. Man, I cursed God. I cursed God as I lay there, staring up at the ceiling, for letting this happen to me, for three weeks. Then, my twenty-fifth birthday, staring up at that ceiling because I couldn’t focus my eyes enough to read a book, and I couldn’t remember the last line I had read even if I could read, it occurred to me that God was the one in charge. If anyone was going to let me get better, it’d be Him, and no one else, so it was a bit dumb to tell Him off. So, I prayed. I apologized for every rotten thing I had ever done. And I didn’t bargain. I didn’t promise to do this, that, or the other thing because I don’t believe in that. I saw enough Bibles left in the trash by the freed people on their way out. I knew God wouldn’t fall for it. So I just said I was sorry, and said Do with me whatever you wish. I commended my soul to him in Jesus’ name, and resigned myself. I had an MRI the next day, and they said it was a miracle. The blood clot had just disappeared. I’m really not making this up. I have a constant reminder of it though, because I still see these black specks of blood particles everywhere I look. Then, they put me back on the pills that had gotten me there in the first place. Slowly, my memory came back, and I remembered what I had seen during my out-of-body experience. It felt like someone else had entered during my absence. Same body, totally different person. It was hell trying to learn to draw again, and so I didn’t waste time on doodles. Everything I drew had to be the best thing I’d ever done, or it was a waste of time. To keep myself busy, I wrote seven books and matured as an artist, and learned to play guitar and, in my downtime, read cooking magazines that the chaplain brought in for us. This was during the first few years of the new millennium, when I was in my early twenties. I’d sit and dream about real

126 food, until photos of exotic ingredients were more interesting than the porn rags that were making the rounds in the dorms. I’d wonder which chili peppers would complement which fruits, and what cheeses you could melt on top of it all. Which wines to wash it down with. Since I had no formal training, I had no prefab rules to follow, and nothing to hold my imagination back. I’d sit there and dream up dishes that I hoped I’d someday cook, and work wonders with the junk food that we bought in the commissary. I’d soak beef jerky in water for a day, grind up cheese crackers into powder, then make a type of tortilla out of it with the spicy black juice. Fill it with the jerky that was now tender, and it wasn’t half bad. But mostly, I did comedy to make people laugh and forget where they were, at least for a little while. I think that was why most of the bad guys left me alone. I was only in nine fights in those five years, because someone had put the word out that I was to be left alone. I never found out who. Some black dude. I wasn’t sure if that was ironic or not. Anyway, I got out. Went back to live in Ireland with my parents, where I was a different kind of prisoner. We had fifty- five acres out in the middle of nowhere, and I had no money, so I could only go into the village or the nearest town by my father’s leave, and he got his kicks by making sure I knew all of his problems with Mom were my fault. Even if I’d had any money to go get a place of my own, I was only allowed to stay in Ireland because he had arranged something with the police. He treated me like shit in front of everybody because he knew he could. Plus, I was on a short leash because of the Paxil I still had to take, because if I didn’t wean myself off of it really slowly, I’d cut my own throat. Trust me, it happens to people. A lot. He had the meds, and money to buy more, so I couldn’t tell him to go screw himself. All he’d have to do is not give me my pills and I’d start having head zaps, hot flashes, and violent sudden mood swings. Then, within two days, kill myself. Maybe I’ll go off on another rant here for a sec.

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Psychiatry is one of the biggest scams in history, causing more damage to the people of America and, these days, the world, than even organized religion. The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual has grown from 7 mental disorders in 1880 to 112 in the 1952 edition, to 374 in the 1994 DSM-IV, and not because more was learned about the human brain, but because quacks are more creative. By 1970, psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical industry had agreed upon a joint marketplace strategy. They would call all things emotional and behavioral “psychiatric disorders” or “brain diseases” and claim that each and every human attrib- ute was due to a “chemical imbalance” of the brain. They then launched a propaganda campaign, so intense and persistent that the public soon believed that pills would cure you of the horror of being you. NIMH, the National Institute of Mental Health, invented what they call “attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder.” You might’ve heard of it. It’s the most successful invented disease ever. They revise its diagnostic criteria fairly regularly, not for any medical or altruistic scientific purpose, but really just to cast a wider marketplace net. The US Department of Educa- tion Children and Adults with Attention Deficit Disorders call ADHD a “disease” so real and terrible that the parent who dares not believe in it, or allow its treatment, is likely to be deemed negligent, and no longer deserving of custody of their child. This is happening in family courts across the country by the hundreds of thousands. As if drugging more than eight million kids with Ritalin wasn’t enough, they doubled and almost tripled the psychiatric diagnosing and drugging of normal infants, toddlers and pre- schoolers between 1990 and ‘95. They knew these drugs were addictive, dangerous and even deadly. They know that Ritalin and all amphetamines cause growth retardation, brain atrophy, seizures, psychosis, tics, and Tourette's. They do it anyway. I know of three cases where there appeared to have been

128 deaths due to Ritalin or amphetamine treatment for ADHD. There was Stephanie Hall, eleven years old, of Canton, Ohio, who died in her sleep the day she started an increased dose of Ritalin. In March 21, 2000, Matthew Smith, fourteen, of Claw- son, Michigan, fell off his skateboard, turned blue and died. His myocardium was diffusely scarred, its coronary arteries diffusely narrowed. Ritalin was, indisputably, the cause of his death. Randy Steele, a nine-year-old from Bexar County, Tex- as, became unresponsive without a pulse while he was being restrained in a psychiatric facility. His heart was found to be ‘enlarged.’ He’d had ADHD and had been on Dexedrine; d- amphetamine. Of the 2,993 adverse reactions to Ritalin, at least the ones that were reported to the FDA, from 1990 to 1997, there were 160 deaths and 569 hospitalizations. You can look all this up. Praise be to Google. The fact is, all those kids were normal, at least until the amphetamines they were given caused brain atrophy, making their little noggins shrink about ten percent smaller. Just like everybody else they diagnosed and then unnecessarily drugged. For the vast majority of drugs they use to combat mental illness—especially depression—they have no idea how they work, yet pretend they do. Patients are regularly told, when prescribed antidepressants like SSRIs, that their depression is due to a chemical imbalance in the brain. SSRIs, like Prozac for example, increase the amount of serotonin in the synapses between neurons by preventing its re-absorption by the neurons. Because these drugs seem to work, doctors and pharmaceutical companies decided that depression results from deficit of serotonin. But that’s just stupid, because a drug alleviating a symptom doesn’t mean you can conclude the symptom is due to the deficit of that drug. It’s like saying headaches are caused by not enough aspirin in your system. Basically, instead of developing drugs to treat abnormalities, abnormalities are postulated to fit the drugs. Doctors can make a lot more money prescribing drugs than talking, so dur-

129 ing the hour occupied by a talk therapy session, a psychiatrist can see and prescribe their meds to three or four patients, and pharmaceutical companies make millions by prescribing drugs for mental illnesses, so they’re continually trying to expand the range of imaginary conditions they can count as drug-requiring “illnesses,” including obsessive-compulsive disorder, ADHD, you name it. Medical students are now given minimal training in talk therapy and lots of training in how to prescribe drugs. Of course, we also have adverinfotainment masquerading as news to help us. Take CNN, for example. They did a spot for Strattera, yet another drug for ADHD, and they were laughing about the diagnostic questions on the drug’s website. ‘Do you feel unfocused, disorganized, or restless?’ Why, yes! ‘Do you feel unable to concentrate?’ Of course, I do! All the while, the crawl on the bottom of the screen is keeping us up- dated about Laci Peterson, sports scores and temperatures are flashing, along with blips and blurbs and graphics all compet- ing for our attention. Who could focus on anything after that? Now that we are accustomed to absorbing all that information simultaneously, trying to focus on one thing bores us quickly. Now, what reason for this could there possibly be? Take a moment to Google “Operation Paperclip.” More than 1,600 Nazi scientists were brought to the Unit- ed States after World War II, where they worked for the US government during the Cold War in order to avoid trial. After helping one enemy get an edge over another, they went on to form pharmaceutical companies, creating drugs to poison the minds of the people they once tried to conquer by force. During the war, they had experimented with psychotropic drugs in concentration camps that the Third Reich had hoped to use for mind control. Now they’re calling it ‘Cosmetic psychopharmacology,’ the reordering of society through drugs. Personality traits can be eradicated, altered, or enhanced but primarily, their purpose is to make the user complacent, compliant, and open to sugges-

130 tion. These pills work on the limbic system and frontal lobes of the brain, extinguishing normal emotions, including empa- thy, and causing memory loss. With all of the movies and shows about serial killers, all of the constant suggestions that violence is an option, it was just a matter of time for me. It is well-known among those who control the masses that if something is going to catch on, it has to have what they call a low-ability threshold. It must be something that any monkey can do easily, like hula hoops and Tamagotchis. When the opportunity to be a part of something new and trendy is easy as pie, everybody will hop on the band- wagon. Think, the Macarena, or abstract art. If you tell the world that going to all the trouble of learning how to dance well, or painting something realistic, is passé, everybody who wants to dance or be called an artist—while putting forth minimal effort—will jump at the chance. So, now the cool thing to be is a serial killer. If you are a failure of an individual, you can get revenge on the world for rejecting you, and be part of an exclusive clique by giving in to the voice inside your head. A voice the meds put there. There are subcultures on the internet, grooming kids that take SSRIs to become mass murderers. At least one of these kids has come out and admitted it, that he was in competition with other “players” to see how many people he could kill. Take a moment to Google “Columbiners” and the “Incel Rebellion.” These subcultures are not discouraged because it is in the interests of a corrupt government to disarm its citizens. It’s no secret that widely-broadcast events tend to set precedents and inspire copycats. Not many people knew, for example, about the many people who died in Arkansas, Washington, Alaska, and Mississippi before the Columbine shootings, but afterwards, all the world knew. And then an epidemic of copycats, more and more kids following suit because the news kept showing it. Next thing you know, if it hadn’t happened in a whole year

131 they’d show the last one again to keep it fresh in everyone’s minds so that the next pissed-off kid would consider it a solution. Or even “Columbine, five years later.” Keep it alive in the minds of the populace, keep it ever present, so the ticking timebomb of a man will remember that re-enacting that atroci- ty is always an option. That if it ever seems that there is no way out of his predicament, he can always go out with a bang. This news coverage popularized such crimes, and in turn called attention to the availability and accessibility of firearms, which helps to tighten the hold on honest citizens and effectively disarm them. So, here we are, killing ourselves and each other, and many of us are calling for the government to ban all firearms. And a bunch of Nazis are behind it, the group who’d seized power in their own country after doing what? Taking everyone’s guns. Does it sound a little far-fetched? Truth is stranger than fiction. And how can I give you all this information? What makes me an expert on it? Because I was one of the foot-soldiers. I’d begun to plan the mass shooting of my bullies in school while on Zoloft. The only thing that stopped me was belief in God, and the certainty that I would never get away with it. However, after graduating and going on to college, Zoloft continued to change me into a different person. For example, at the end of high school I’d heard a clip of Natural Born Killers on the movie soundtrack in someone’s car, and was horrified. After another year of taking those mind-bending pills, it became my favorite movie, and I was fascinated by all of the killing sprees that were inspired by it. I started reading books about serial killers, listening to Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson, and thought all of my failures in life could be washed away with blood. Remember what I said about becoming what you watch or read or listen to? My friends became petty and nit-picky after watching Seinfeld for months. My brother admitted to being a

132 self-important pompous ass from watching too much Frasier. The biggest problem with films like Natural Born Killers and Fight Club, and books like Hannibal, was that the bad guys won in the end. You’d think we were smart enough to know it was just a story, but look at all the killings that followed. So, when my heroes became villains, especially with my mind made soft and malleable by drugs, it was just a matter of time. If I became a predator, that would be so much better than being a nobody.

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It wasn’t until I was free of the meds and their side effects that I could think clearly again. I began to look at the world around me and realize what was going on. I had a newfound sense of discernment, and could see what was happening, who was doing what, and why. The meds had been blocking me. I must say that it took a year and a half of weaning myself off of Paxil and taking supplements to keep from committing suicide. If it wasn’t for the Relív line of products I wouldn’t be here now, and even with them, it was horrific. I was a mess. The memory of what I had experienced during my coma returned, and I was flooded with the knowledge I had lost. Psychologists call it schizophrenia, claiming that when the patient says “I just know,” it is a clear case of delusion. When my father tried to put me in the mental hospital for suddenly knowing he was cheating on my mother, I knew better than to tell the doctors how I knew. In reality, I just knew. With my criminal record, and all of the meds I’d taken, it should have looked like I was delusional. If I had said those three magic words, I would be back in the slammer, and probably for good. Instead, I told the doctors all the clues I’d noticed, little things that were pieces of a puzzle, that all just put themselves together. They saw through my father’s ploy and wouldn’t commit me. They saw I was right, and while my entire family insisted I was crazy, they had to keep me at home. That was when the real mental torture began―because you can’t unblow a whistle. I had to do something. I had to get out of there. Maybe you’re in a situation and you feel there’s no escape? There is absolutely nothing you can do to save yourself? This was when what I’d learned during my coma would save me. If you can remember this when you are at your wit’s end, it can help you overcome your obstacles.

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We’re all just scurrying around like a bunch of ants on the surface of a rock, that’s spinning around a ball of flaming gas. We’ve no idea how we got here, no idea where we’re going or what we’re going to do when we get there, and nothing we do will get us anywhere because all of us will die, and in dying, are eventually forgotten. The truth shall set you free. I needed money and there was only one legal way to get it. I walked the eight miles into the nearest town, found the only art venue, and talked my way into a show. I found out about the art group that met every Monday night in that town, and exhibited twice a year in popular venues, and I joined. Remember what I said earlier, about the Spartans and their agoge, the Chambri “crocodile people” and the ritual scarring? I think this was the ordeal that marked my passage of the boy into manhood. Not the coma, because I slept through that and while prison was hellish, I had not surmounted anything. I just survived it. This, however, was when I became a man. The hero we love in any story is one that must overcome a great obstacle, usually making a sacrifice. The best sacrifice is when that hero must renounce a valuable part of themselves. I consider it to be abandoning an aspect of ourselves that we’re comfortable with, but is detrimental, so we can make room in our souls for the new. It is difficult, but necessary, and in this day and age can be more specific to the individual than a ritual of scarring or some kind of horrific ordeal. I do not believe the physical pain of the sacrifice is critical, but it must be something that causes mental discomfort if it is to cause a psychological rebirth. Nietzsche said that the snake that cannot shed its skin perishes. “You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame; how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?” If you don’t slough off the Old You, or “kill the boy,” the man cannot be born. And the sacrifice itself is often not the cure, but the overcoming of the emptiness that follows it. That is the real ordeal. We are, on the whole, conservative beings. We need a sta-

136 ble sense of order in our lives, and the easiest way to achieve it is through laziness. Just keeping things as they are, accepting a minor injustice here and there rather than risk the upheaval of rebelling. That is how we stay enslaved. The fear of emptiness or destruction following the sacrifice keeps us from rising to our potential, and with good reason. Some psychologists believe the difference between rebirth and a psychological breakdown is the end result. Jung said the loss of balance produced by your sacrifice “is similar in principle to a psychotic disturbance; that is, it differs from the initial stage of mental illness only by the fact that it leads in the end to greater health, while the latter leads to yet greater destruction.” The way to prevent one and lead to the other is, like I said earlier, to get into the driver’s seat of your life. One way to make the difference is by taking on practices like meditation, physical activity, breathing exercises and other types of relaxation and discipline. Michael Mahoney wrote in Constructive Psychotherapy: “When new experiences destabilize one’s system, it is valuable to have skills in re-stabilizing and returning to a sense of safety and security. The more often one practices and refines such exercises, the more competent one feels in risking excur- sions toward the edges of unfamiliar experiencing.” Jung wrote in Symbols of Transformation: “Yet every descent is followed by an ascent; the vanishing shapes are shaped anew, and a truth is valid in the end only if it suffers change and bears new witness in new images, in new tongues, like a new wine that is put into new bottles.” For several months, on a borrowed bicycle I rode the long and difficult way to town in the evening. It was about eight miles, and in places it actually was uphill both ways. There was a steep incline that, after an arduous climb, plunged into a deep trough followed by another steep incline, where momentum would not carry me. There were ferocious dogs that attacked at the bottom of that trough. Then there were long

137 stretches of dark and lonely road that gave me ample time to meditate. It was bitterly cold some nights, and I was often tempted to give up. But when I arrived at St Macartan’s College, I painted with ten other artists for three hours, we shared tips and advice and encouragement, and then we went off to a pub until midnight. Then, the eight arduous miles back, on a much darker and colder and lonelier road. I did not complain, or ask for a lift home, because this was my ordeal and I had to do it, and be grateful that it wasn’t worse. I made friends, I honed my craft, and in the next show I sold several paintings. I blew people away, got offers for more shows, and sold them all as fast as I could paint them. I had money to spend, and friends to go out with, and then I had girlfriends. The truth came out about my father and his mistress, and my family had to reluctantly admit they’d been wrong. Then, the next miracle of discernment came. You see, we had moved to Ireland in 1998, when it was still a more or less poor country. When they joined the EU, Germany loaned the country a lot of money to improve their infrastructure, and in no time at all, Dublin became the most expensive city in the world to live. But the standard of living had not gone up. Just the cost. I somehow knew that the bottom was going to fall out from under them, and soon. There was rampant spending, reminding me of the US just before the Great Depression. No one had learned. Without a degree in economics, or even an inkling of it, I knew the EU was loaning money to countries that would not be able to pay it back. It’s an old trick: visit poor countries and offer them a ton of money to fix their infrastructure, knowing they’re going to blow it all. Then call in the debt and whaddaya know? They can’t pay. No problem. The so-called “election” will just swing this way next year. Your puppet will be installed. So, it was plain that the crash was imminent, and I had to

138 leave. I had money from the paintings I’d sold, and was ready to go back to the States. With a few exhibitions under my belt, I knew how to talk the talk, and had survived the meds that were holding me back. I went back to Florida, got a job in a mob restaurant—that didn’t care about my record—and worked as hard as I could, as many hours as I could, and started raising money. I got my new paintings into five more shows, sold them, got commis- sions for portraits, saved up, and got ready for my next move. This was early 2008, and I was having déjà vu. That feeling of impending doom was on me once again. The economy was about to crash in the US as well. The first thing to tip me off was the downsizing of every- day products in the supermarket. It was all getting smaller, but the prices were staying the same, or even going up. A Hershey bar, for example, went from 8oz to 6.8, and they had the nerve to put “Giant” on the label, to try and fool us. Cereal boxes are thinner now, so they hold much less of a food that is cheap to make in the first place. The Hellmann’s mayonnaise jar now has a concave bottom, bars of soap now have a chunk cut out of one side, and plastic bags are thinner so you have to use two of them to hold the same weight. Hershey’s, Hellman’s, Kellogg’s and Breyers Ice Cream all said that the rising cost of commodities led to this unfortunate change in business practices, and that got me thinking about a unit of currency that fluctuates on a daily basis. Everyone is paying more for less and not noticing, or what is worse, noticing and just saying “Well, what can you do?” A general indifference had taken root, and that set off alarm bells in my mind. I began to investigate more devaluations of the dollar, and learned that this very act had led to the fall of Rome. You might want to take a moment to Google “Rome USA devalue currency” to read several illuminating articles. Think of it this way: say you are baking a cake. While the

139 rules of most cooking can be flexible, the rules of baking are not. If you want the cake to come out right, you must use the right amounts of ingredients, bake them the correct amount of time, and at the right temperature. There is no forgiveness for “artistic expression.” But imagine a world where, before you begin, you have to check the constantly changing daily value of a teaspoon. Oh, wait, it says 45 minutes, but how long is a minute this week? Some website arbitrarily decided that our planet is traveling a little bit faster around the sun now, so a minute is now only fifty seconds long. But wait, does that mean I don’t have to be at work for the full eight hours? Oh no! The planet just slowed down a full 20 minutes so we have to work even longer for the same wages. See what I mean? It doesn’t make sense. So why do we use a currency that cannot maintain its value from one day to the next? Especially when we have already seen what happened to other empires? Take Rome, for example. Originally, their coins were gold, silver, and cheaper metals for smaller denominations. Then, because of greed, the purity of the metals was compromised. With finite amounts of those metals entering the empire through trade and conquest, limits had to be put on the minting of new money. That would prevent the building of new palaces, the launching of new wars, the throwing of more extravagant orgies. Can’t have that. So, they cheapened the money. They raised the debt ceiling. Infla- tion led to exorbitant taxes, the coins became worthless, their society fell into moral decay, and there followed a thousand years of darkness. Kind of like what’s happening right now. Something similar happened in Guatemala. The owner of a powerful bank went into the coffee business. He wanted to make more money by selling his product to the US, but could not charge more. So, what he did was devalue the Guatemalan currency so he could pay less to the workers who made it. The entire country suffered, but he didn’t care. He made a fortune.

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We have since seen what happens when someone opposes the manipulation of the dollar. Since the US dollar hasn’t been backed by actual gold in a long time, we have all been trading worthless paper. Muammar Gaddafi tried to create an African unit of currency that would actually be gold, and if you haven’t seen Hillary Clinton callously laughing about murdering him, then I recommend looking for it online. His ill-fated attempt to empower Africans and stand up to the European banking frauds was met with sudden and swift violence, because there is no shortage of people who will kill for false wealth. Just type a few zeros at the end of someone’s bank balance, because that number is an illusion anyway, and Bob’s your uncle. There were other things I noticed. Walmart, for example, would have the price of a product marked at $4.89 in the aisle, but when the cashier rang it up, it was $4.98. I caught it, and when I mentioned it they blew it off. First it was my mistake, then, when I showed them the price sticker, it must have been a system error. But what’s the big deal? It’s only ten cents! Oy, how petty I was. But it isn’t just ten cents, is it? It’s ten cents for every item bought by every customer, at every cash register in the entire country, all day every day. And while it may not necessarily be the policy of Walmart to short me on my change, it definitely was the policy of several cashiers. Say you buy something that costs $20 and you pay with a hundred. Watch them rapidly count you out seven tens and dismiss you impatiently instead of four twenties. They assume their show of irritation will get you to leave without counting, and once, it almost did. But I interrupted his talking to the next customer in line and said I was missing money. He opened the register again and angrily threw me the other ten without a word. He knew exactly how much he’d shorted me, and once I knew, I noticed it happen a lot. I wonder how many times I’d been shorted without paying attention. I wonder who else was shorting me every day.

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The next thing to go after the devaluing of currency is the decay of morality. If the standards to which we are held mean nothing, then why should we bother upholding any of them? In 2018, Bethany Mandel wrote about something else I think we all saw coming. “Lowering standards has become a nationwide—and even global—phenomenon. When schools were unable to pass the basic proficiency tests of the No Child Left Behind law in 2002, educators simply made the tests easier over the years, allowing more kids to pass while keeping the schools’ federal funding intact. And, as of last year, teachers in New York no longer have to take a literacy test that many found too difficult. Meanwhile, in England, schools are now removing analogue clocks in exam rooms and replacing them with digital versions because students unable to read clock faces felt stressed about it.” “When some women were unable to pass the fitness test for combat positions in the Marines, one of the most difficult endurance tests for female recruits was removed. And as low levels of unemployment reduced their pool of potential enlist- ees, the Army started allowing at least 4 percent of those scoring at the bottom third of its aptitude tests into basic training (up from 2 percent). The Army also expanded its waivers for marijuana use, so where once a history of taking pot was disqualifying, it no longer is.” If the standards are lowered for the people who defend us, then how safe can we feel? How confident can we be about a banker counting our money when he can’t even tell time? If he can’t even read? I began thinking about where to go next. Someplace where the consequences for failure are more severe, where I would be forced to be a real man, or perish. No excuses. It would have to be somewhere inexpensive, where my little bit of money would go far. Someplace where all the knowledge I’d gained of the art market and restaurants would serve me well.

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I remembered my grandfather just packing up and leaving New York to go build an empire in a developing nation, and it felt right. It felt like it was the thing to do, because the States was about to go into another recession. That’s when I found out about Guatemala. Antigua was a new destination hotspot, and their quetzal was one seventh of a dollar. People were visiting from all over the world, and even deciding to stay because they loved it. Affluent people chose to relocate, abandoning the US and Europe like rats swimming away from a sinking ship. There would be opportunities there. I left, for the second time, just before the crash. I had my adventures for the first few months, which can be read in the Memoirs of a Swine series, before settling down and getting to work on my destiny. With my much-more-highly-valued dollar I could live like a king for a little while, or start my own business and become a king in my own right.

Something that helped me make a lot of friends in Antigua was helping people every chance I got. I highly recommend it, no matter where you live. I don’t know why everyone doesn’t do this, and since they don’t, if you start, your social value will go through the roof. What happened, I was on my way to have lunch with Mali, the hot Norwegian chick with the faux-hawk, and I was half- way to the restaurant when I saw this little old Mayan lady, maybe four feet tall, all bent and stooped over and bowlegged, struggling to carry two big baskets full of what must’ve been bricks for all the trouble she was having with them. She kept stopping to readjust her burden and stagger a few more steps. I looked at her for a moment, thinking I really ought to help her, but I’d be late and…and then it hit me. How great it would be if I was late because I just had to stop and help some little old lady with her baskets. What a saint I’d seem to Mali! I immediately felt terrible about it, thought about what a self-centered prick I was, and started to walk again. Keeping

143 one eye on the little old lady. She was hobbling down the long colonnade on the south side of central park, and all I had to do was take two more steps for her to be out of my sight, and out of my life forever. Then, hating myself for even considering ignoring her, I ran down the colonnade to help the unsteady woman. And again, for the record, I mostly did it because it was the right thing to do. “Señora!” I said when I got to her side. “Un momento.” She looked up at me with a very clear and cynical expression on her wizened face. I held out my hands and, not knowing how to say it in Spanish, asked her in English where she thought she was going with my baskets. “Como?” I thought for a second, then shrugged and just took the baskets from her, asking “Donde vamos?” “Ahhh,” she said, without wasting any time acting surprised or grateful. “Gracias.” She waved me forward and started hobbling on, and I followed her. She tried a few times to engage me in conversation, but even if my Spanish was good I’d never be able to follow her dialect. “Lo siento, no hablo mucho español,” I told her. I was getting pretty good at saying that, what with all the practice. She nodded, like she’d expected as much. “No estoy sorprendida, canche.” Then she garbled a bunch of gibberish at me to pass the time until we reached the end of the colonnade. We had to wait a moment to let a horse and carriage go slowly by. The driver was a young Mayan fella who stared at the two of us as he passed, then nodded and gave me a thumbs-up. Maybe this means I’ve watched too many movies, but I thought for a second that one day there would be a robbery, a bunch of guys with masks and guns, and one of them would be threatening me and demanding I hand over my money or

144 he’d shoot me in the face, and this one robber would recognize me and go “Hey, not him. Let that one go.” In Spanish, of course. And I would look at him and I’d recognize his eyes looking at me over the bandana he had on, covering the rest of his face. Then I thought, yeah, I’ve definitely seen too many movies. After he passed, there were a few cars that were spaced far enough apart that we could have crossed, but she seemed to be a little cautious. I felt bad again for being impatient, because she was still bent over and bowlegged and probably had good reason for not darting across the street. When we finally made it across the cobblestones, back on- to the sidewalk, damnedest thing, there was a really cute girl standing there watching us. Ceci, the suicide-blonde Antigueña who worked with Mali at Reilly’s. With a big ol’ grin splitting her face and showing me all of her perfect white teeth. “So what’re you, a...?” she asked when we got to her. “How do you say it? Good…Samaritan?” I smiled and shrugged. “I have my moments.” “Ah, okay. You knock yourself out.” Perfect, I thought while we moved on at a snail’s pace. She works with Mali, sees her every day, and she’ll tell her all about me being such a nice guy. I couldn’t’ve paid for better publicity than that. Asshole, I thought immediately after. Don’t do this because someone might see you. You do it because it’s the right thing to do. But the selfish little voice in my head kept suggesting my karma would improve, if there was such a thing, or God would smile down upon me (again, if) and that I could go ahead and count my chickens, all the blessings that would rain down upon me for doing this one act of kindness. And God damn, we were going a long way. Christ! I looked back at the colonnade several blocks back and couldn’t believe how long it had taken us to get that far, and wondered how much farther we’d have to go.

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The baskets were getting heavy, and I scolded myself for thinking that, because I was one hell of a lot stronger than this little old lady, and she was going to make the trip all on her own without bitching about it. She probably made it by herself every day since forever. And would tomorrow, and every day until she died, carry these baskets full of bricks (it seemed) back and forth across Antigua. I wondered what she thought about that. Had she even bothered to dream about becoming a princess when she was younger, or did she already know she was going to carry heavy shit all over creation for her entire life? And was she resigned to it, or did she never even think there was an option? And was there an option at all? And where the hell was her house? Christ Almighty! We had walked all the way to First Ave- nue and a bit past it, over the bridge to the forest that started across the easternmost street and sloped up the side of the mountain. She finally turned and said “Muchas gracias, joven.” Gave me a little bow and took the baskets from me. I asked her if she was sure, and she nodded. Turned away and hob- bled toward the forest. I watched her go, and looked at my watch. Shit! I turned and ran back the way I’d come. A couple of times I ran across a street without looking and had to jump when I heard the screech of tires, feeling metal graze the fabric of my jeans and knowing I’d just barely missed being crippled. But I kept running. Thinking, damn, I must like this girl if I care that much about not keeping her waiting. I felt the wind messing up the hair I’d gone to all the trouble of making perfect. I felt the heat of the sun and the exer- tion making my inner thighs start to sweat, and knew I’d need another shower before I could be comfortable taking my jeans off in someone else’s company. And then, because I was already unclean, I went ahead and busted some parkour moves as I ran, every time I had to dodge something. Or someone.

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Vaulting over this and that, making a fool of myself, until I heard someone shout my name and I skidded to a stop. Mali was standing on the other side of the street, in her tank top and faux-hawk, with her big happy smile. “In a hurry somewhere?” “Yeah, I got this really hot date and…” All of a sudden, my breath gave out on me, and my wind left and I was soaked in sweat, having to lean on a cyclopean wall behind me while Mali laughed. “Sounds like every cigarette you’ve ever had is coming back to haunt you.” I wheezed at her and shook my head, grinning at how dumb I must’ve looked. “Well, you can relax, honey. I’m running late too, as you may have noticed.” I started to say something clever, but doubled over and had to put my hands on my knees instead. There was this voice I was hearing in my head, a guy with an Australian ac- cent I’d heard somewhere before, saying “Ah gotta tell ya, Ah’ve looked bettah.” And I had to smile, shaking my head at myself. So that was the start of it. The second time I saw the little old lady, I was on my way home from work (I had gotten a job since then, teaching Eng- lish) and I was going in that direction anyway, so I just said “Hola. Donde vamos?” again and took the baskets. Some people smiled at me as we passed. The third time, I was in a hurry to my work and saw her on the sidewalk up ahead. I thought to myself, Fuuuuuck, not now, and crossed the street so that I could hurry past without seeing her seeing me, or at least pretend I hadn’t seen her if she noticed. Again, I was ashamed of myself, and turned back around. Cursing myself because I knew I’d be late, I walked back to where she was readjusting her burden and stuck out my hands. She looked up and almost smiled. Almost, but not

147 quite. Just gave me a little nod and handed the baskets over. That time we went the other way, all the way cross town once again, but this time from central park to the market. We passed some young women who applauded from the window of the restaurant they worked in. The fourth time, no one smiled at me, clapped, gave me a thumbs-up, none of that. I was disappointed, and even more disappointed in myself that I felt that way, and decided never to go out of my way to help anyone again, especially that little old lady, because if I was just doing it for attention or karma or God’s favor, then it wasn’t worth anything and was probably bad for my soul in some way. So, I never did it again, ever. Until the next week, when I saw her again, and it occurred to me she didn’t give a shit why I helped her. She was just glad that I did. And I thought, as I was taking her baskets again, man, this woman just lives to make me late, doesn’t she? One of the nights I was in Reilly’s, this pretty Guatemalan girl came up to me and said in the Queen’s English, “I’ve seen you out on the street, helping an old woman with her baskets. You’re a good man. I’m Ana. What’s your name?” And that worked out pretty well for me. It got me thinking. The process of picking up a girl begins a long time before the pickup line. First, be friendly to everyone you see, and always be ready with a warm smile. That way, you will have laid the foundation in everyone’s mind that you are worth knowing. Every time I saw somebody pushing a stalled car down the street, trying to start it, from that moment on I dropped whatever I was doing and lent a hand. That crippled guy who was always trying to take photos for tourists by the fountain in the park? Edwin? I carry him across the street and help him up to Doña Luisa, a block and a half away. I admit that I keep an eye out for hot chicks while I’m do-

148 ing it, hoping they’ll see me, but I don’t think the people I help give a damn why I do it. They’re just happy I do it. So, I say, instead of practicing pickup lines and palmistry, make an effort to be a better man. Maybe the person you’ll want to meet later may have been someone you were nice to before. Or maybe it will be a friend of hers who will vouch for you that you are a decent guy. And who knows? Maybe you will have become one.

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XII

I know it would have been easier to have paid attention in school. Learning from a book would have hurt a lot less than learning from trial and error, but working in a mob restaurant had been a big step forward. It took a lot of hard work, a lot of perseverance, and a ton of heartache, but I eventually got to open an art gallery and restaurant in the corner of Central Park, where people from all over the world come to enjoy my food, buy my art and books, and teach me new things to make me do everything better. So, let me tell you a little about my restaurant. I had been playing the field and was involved with several women when I met someone I seemed strangely drawn to. It was bizarre. She wasn’t my type, but I felt a strong push like God’s hand on my shoulder, and I dropped the other girls I was seeing for her. We’ve had our ups and downs, of course, but we’ve been together ever since, and own several businesses we built from the ground up. With all the money I’d made from selling paintings in the shows my wife and I put on around town, and from the books I’d finally published, we opened a tiny art gallery coffee shop like they have in Ireland. Maybe they have them in other countries, but that’s where I first saw them, when I lived there in my twenties. I think art gallery coffee shops are better than art galleries because the latter have less foot traffic and the people I see there usually say “Well, we’ll think about it. Let’s go get something to eat.” More people go into coffee shops, chill for a while, and eventually ask “Hey, how much is that painting?” Quick side note: I went into one gallery offering my work, and this lady with her nose in the air told me they don’t take art from just anyone. See that over there? That was painted by John Lennon. I’ve never heard of you.

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Oh. I then featured in some shows, sold a lot, and, right before moving to Guatemala, went back to that gallery to ask if they would like to see what I had left. The same lady with her nose in the air told me they don’t take art from just anyone. See that over there? That was painted by John Lennon. “Really?” I asked. “You have had it for at least a year, and still haven’t sold it?” So, anyway. The week we were going to open, a big coffee franchise opened on the other side of our block, bringing our immediate-vicinity coffee shop competition to seven. So, we had to evolve, and fast. I think God stepped in at this point, because there is just no way anyone is this lucky. I put up a sign saying we were hiring cooks, and one of my roommates from the vagabond days came in. Marcos Sáenz. You can take a moment to Google him if you want. So, he walked in and saw me for the first time in months. “Alex? What’re you doing here? You work here now?” “Nope. I own this place.” “Really. And it’s a restaurant?” He looked around the tiny space, at the absence of tables and chairs. “It will be.” “Okay. And do you know how to cook?” “Not really,” I said, winking. “But I like a challenge.” He smirked, and said “Well, I know how to cook a little. I can teach you a few things if you’d like.” And there it began, him showing me a few things, how to make a port reduction to pour on top of a steak so you can charge a lot more for it. What the trends were. And before he left, he gave me the best advice I would ever receive. “Don’t be afraid to experiment.” He would pop in every now and then and ask me what I had come up with, and like a little puppy dog I’d happily offer him the new wild dish. Like linguini with strawberries, fennel,

152 basil and rosemary, roasted garlic and diced prosciutto. We did it for him and waited with expectant smiles. He liked it. He did not love it, but he liked it, and when I asked him what it needed to be spectacular, he said maybe we should make fennel confit instead of just sautéing it with the garlic and chile flakes. “What’s a fennel confit?” I asked, and he smiled slyly. “Figure it out.” Damn. Okay. Google it. But there was nothing about fennel confit on the internet, at least at that time. So, shit. What’s a confit? Learned how to do a confit and then did it with fennel, added it to the pasta, and damn, it was amazing. How the hell did he know? I’ll skip ahead a couple years to the day I walked into a little diner for breakfast, and there he was, doing what looked a bit like homework. Notebook, pencil, coffee. I said Hey, and we made small talk for a minute until he invited me to sit with him. When I asked if that was homework, he smiled slyly again and said “Something like that.” I looked over his shoulder and read aloud quietly. “Salmon in cauliflower curry sauce with tomato dust and plantain crumble, charred guisquil, confit leek, croquette filled with corn puree…Tenderloin with a beet and hibiscus mousse and spinach-stuffed polenta bonbons…and a mushroom gal- antine? What is this? Ginger air? Wasabi foam?” Turned out he was doing the new menu for the restaurant in Casa Santo Domingo, the one that has a whole room full of trophies, all of them just crammed into boxes and stacked one on top of the other until they tower over you. And he had the title of Best Chef in Latin America from the last Bocuse d’Or. So, from Mexico to Antarctica, he was at the top. And I had no idea, because he didn’t go around beating on his chest and telling you how great he was. I hadn’t a clue. So, here I was being mentored by the best of the best. That’s how we came to be one of the most popular restaurants in the city. And we kept getting better and better. For the vegetarians

153 we made a fusion of French and Indian cuisine, this version of ratatouille with roasted bell peppers—red, yellow, and orange for color—eggplant, zucchini, garlic mushrooms, tomato, ca- pers, and olives, and the sauce was a reduced orange juice with cardamom and saffron, all kinds of stuff, really. That made me want to do lamb bourguignon, an Indian version, with cardamom, cinnamon, everything but curry, because I think if anyone was going to do a fusion of French and Indian cuisines, they’d just make a French dish and put curry in it, so I pur- posely avoided using curry. Second-guess the semi-creative. Then, we had to do our new, improved Croque Madame. Toasted ciabatta bread with gruyére melted on top, mozzarella melted inside, tomato, turkey ham—in case we’d have Jewish people in—mushrooms sautéed in sherry, and all of it cooked in garlic confit cream sauce that we’d pour over the top when it was done, and crown it with a fried egg. When you pierce the yolk with your fork, the goo mixes with the sauce and it’s so good. Really proud of it. Yeah, once Marcos turned me on to confit, I started making confit everything. Confit tomatoes to put in spicy chiltepe linguini to give some relief from the heat. Confit garlic bread, which tastes so much better, I think. We had linguini in arugu- la walnut pesto, with confit leeks. Confit baby potatoes on the side of all main courses, with confit carrots and zucchini angel hair done with a mandolin. I remembered a dessert I had tried once, the presentation of which was beautiful. It looked so good, that when I tried it, I thought there was something wrong with me. It tasted like it was just sugar. Maybe I’d had too many sweet things that day. So, I took it to go, and tried it again at home. Stood there and admired it for a moment, the sheer artistry of it, and then tried it again. Aaaaand spat it out. It was all sizzle, no steak. So, now, I pictured it in my mind and wondered what it should have tasted like. It was mostly orange, so, pumpkin. And it ought to have a nutty, oaky rancio flavor, so, Cognac infused

154 with cinnamon sticks to give it a little extra bite. And caramel. And diced apples, too, since we have some ready for sangrias, anyway, and we might as well have them serve two purposes. I ended up with pumpkin cheesecake and a scoop of Cog- nac ice cream, drizzled with caramel and sprinkled with apple. Later on I changed the apples to paper-thin slices, roasted in Calvados and fall spices, and it got even better. Next thing I had to do was bananas foster, but it had to be the most insanely original bananas foster ever. Ever since I’d heard spiciness is measured in a unit called Scovilles, and they are determined by how much sugar is needed to neutralize the burn, I’ve been thinking about spicy caramels. I had jalapeños on hand, and cooked them in sugar and cream until I had this sauce with a lot of potential. It was missing something though. I thought of everything from espresso to pipe tobacco and finally settled on dark rum, and was very happy with the result. Okay, bananas in dark rum with jalapeño caramel was still too close to my jalapeño banana chicken, so sautéed pineapple and some kind of ice cream. Not vanilla. I think putting vanilla ice cream on something is the least creative thing you could do. I ended up with a scoop of coconut milk, white chocolate hazelnut ice cream, on top of a caramelized banana and fried pineapple, covered in hot dark rum jalapeño caramel that you have to eat quickly before it melts. If you’re not a foodie, and this is boring you, you can skip ahead. But I want to keep talking shop here, because I love it. Then, I started thinking about all the restaurants that say “Try our decadent desserts!” and it’s always chocolate. Really? Chocolate isn’t decadent. If you saw Paris When it Sizzles, and heard Audrey Hepburn say ‘Depravity can be terribly boring if you don’t smoke or drink’ you know what I mean. So I already had tobacco ice cream with Zacapa, and coffee rum walnut, so caramelizing two bananas in more Zacapa and putting those two ice creams on top, with a bit of that hot sauce over it all would be the most “decadent” dessert I could make without

155 venturing into Illegal. The Pecado Split was born. Okay, now what about all the people who don’t like sugar, but still want dessert? And all the chocolate lovers? Had to do something out of the ordinary for them. Since I already knew chocolate and basil go well together, I made a triple chocolate cake with basil ganache, and put three roasted strawberries on top of a swoosh of balsamic reduction beside it, and sprinkled cardamom on them. And before too long, we were #1 on TripAdvisor and the diners were praising me every day. And yeah, it went to my head for a little while. I put a lot of thought into every little detail. The music, for example. None of what I normally listened to would work, so I did a ton of research. I found out people tend to spend more in restaurants that play classical, and spend less where they are listening to pop. I didn’t want people to accidentally overex- tend themselves, and have buyer’s remorse when the bill came, so I had to pick something in between, keep ‘em coming back. Now, this may seem wholly disparate, but it was my dislike of vegetarians that led me to pick jazz. Darwin believed plants are fully conscious, and George Washington Carver developed relationships with them, making huge scientific advances with what they told him. Jagadis Chandra Bose proved that they’ll respond to your tone of voice when spoken to.* Dorothy Retallack played music for plants to see if they’d react, and, when they heard Duke Ellington and Louis Arm- strong, they actually grew toward the speakers, as if toward the sunlight, entwining themselves lovingly around them. And when they listened to Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, or Vanilla Fudge, they died. So, it was settled. Remember what I said earlier about feeding your mind with music? ______*Scientists can measure a pulse that all plants have, and every time you pick a flower or pull off a leaf, the pulse jumps as if that plant is screaming. Think about it: a flower contains a plant’s stamen and pistils, its reproductive organs. And how would you feel if somebody came along and ripped

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My diners would listen to jazz, feel good, and keep coming back. Because of reading that, I also started listening to swing during my workout, instead of loud, angry music, and found I grew a lot bigger, recovered far more quickly, and I was less stressed, afterward. A quick side note. I’m very sorry about the lead singer of Linkin Park’s suicide, and I have to say this. I used to listen to their music, until I realized, singing about being miserable and wanting to die will seep into your soul and make you want to kill yourself. If just listening to it made me depressed, imagine what singing it every day for years will do to you. Just like that gangsta rap I mentioned earlier will, beyond the shadow of a doubt, lead you to a life of crime, miserable music like that will suck away your will to live. ______your genitalia off, to give to his sweetheart on Valentine’s Day? Also, pancake syrup. What is that but the blood of a tree? Pretty damn barbaric wouldn’t you say? You may ask why, if I feel so bad about plants being alive and having a consciousness, do I eat meat? Because an animal can defend itself or run away. It has a chance. Poor broccoli, on the other hand, is just sitting there, minding its own business, not bothering anybody. Besides, if God didn’t want us to eat animals, He wouldn’t have made them out of meat. There was this loud girl going off on me once because I was wearing a leather jacket, saying it was a poor cow I was strutting around in. But I had her, because the top she was wearing was made of silk. I asked what she was wearing and she said silk, all haughty. So, I reminded her of how much stuff out of the butts of bugs is used to make just a bolt of silk. Hundreds of millions of poor exploited bugs, while I was wearing one dead cow. And it was purple silk, too. Where did she think purple dye comes from? Murex mollusks. Been doing it since the Phoenicians. It takes thousands of murex mollusks to make just an ounce of purple dye. Speaking of millions of dead bugs, carmine comes from one place on this planet, and one place only. A pregnant cochineal. When a female cochineal bug gets knocked up, and you squash it, you get one drop of carmine. So if a couple thousand of them get pregnant, and you grind the whole lot of ‘em into a pulp, you get a tube of lipstick. I tried not to smirk when I told her “You have dead bugs on your face to make you look pretty.” Okay, rant over.

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You’ll become the books you read, the movies you watch, the music you listen to, so choose wisely what you feed your mind. Life imitates Art. Anyway, I digress. Back to the restaurant. It was a lot of hard work, and long hours, especially since good workers were hard to find. For a while there, it was just me, going to the market and buying everything, schlepping it back, prepping it, waiting the tables, cooking and serving, then washing the dishes and starting over again. I had an arrange- ment of mirrors set up, bouncing reflections all over the place so I could see who was coming in the door, or trying to sneak out without paying while I was cooking or washing up. I made my bones there, and bit by bit gained fame and the extra money to hire an employee that wouldn’t try to steal from me. There had been a high turn-over rate in my little restaurant of cooks who were either thieves or idiots, or both, and it was tedious enough in the experience that I won’t bother with the retelling. But, slowly, I built us from a tiny operation in a hole in the wall to a full-grown restaurant in a new location, in the corner of Central Park, and all of the loyal clients from before were proud of me, and all of the returning tourists were blown away. I had done it.

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We would have people from all over the world coming in to the restaurant, and I wanted to be able to greet them and make them feel at home here. Sometimes, potential customers would come in to look at the menu, and when I asked where they were from, they would assume I had no idea where that was. Like, when they said Czech Republic, and I looked up to think, I could hear in their tone “Ignorant American” as they said “It’s in Eastern Europe.” “Oh, I know,” I’d say. “Um…vee tay da?” And they’d look at me in surprise, blink and smile, and say “Close. Vítejte.” “Dĕkuji. I’m working on my pronunciation.” “No, that’s very good. Thank you for trying. Okay, where can we sit?” The more obscure people thought their country was, the more they appreciated me knowing how to welcome them. I decided to learn how to say Hello, Nice to meetcha, En- joy your meal, and Thank you, in every language I could, so I did a Google search and found Omniglot. It wasn’t as hard as I’d thought. Some of the Northern European languages were tough, because I got them mixed up a lot. What I did was make a list of all the tough ones and tape it to the small waste- basket I had behind the bar, next to my row of cookbooks. Stuff like: “Jó étvágyat!” for the Hungarians. “Afiyet olsun!” for the Turks. “Douzo meshiagare,” in Japanese. Once, I had a very bitter-looking old man scowling at the menu in the doorway. I tried to welcome him, and he just grunted at me. I asked if he was looking for anything in particular, and he grunted again. Then, I asked where he was from, and he finally turned. With a bit of a challenge in his

159 voice, he barked “Poland.” I said brightly, “Dzień dobry!” and his face lit up. Then, he turned his back on me, walked out the door, and was gone. Shoot, I thought. Did I mispronounce it somehow, and accidentally say I wanted to shag his sister? Then, he came back in with fourteen people behind him, nodding to me and saying “You said dzień dobry. We drink here.” They all drank a ton of beer, and I got to say Zdrowia! to a bunch of them. They were all very enthusiastic about saying it back to me. Then, they left, and came back a few hours later to eat dinner. All of them. I had to Google how to pronounce “Milego wieczoru” and listen to it on my phone a few times, and it made them even happier as they left. The best though, was the day there was an entire UN del- egation in my doorway, looking skeptically at the menu, some of them overflowing out on the sidewalk. I smiled at the young woman in front of the menu stand, and she ignored me. “Hello,” I said. “Where are you from?” “France,” she said with a dismissive tone. “Ah, bon jour, enchanté.” She glanced at me and nodded, with an unimpressed look. “And you?” I asked a darker fellow beside her. “India,” he said. “Namaste.” He smiled and said, “That was easy.” “Apga svagat hain.” His eyebrows jumped, and he made that wide-eyed down- curving smile, nodding. I looked at the skinny, scruffily-bearded guy next to him, who said “Turkey.” “Hoş geldiniz!” “Teşekkürler,” he answered, pleased as punch. The Asian girl next to him grinned and said “Japan.” “Iras shai masé?” “Close enough.”

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There were five others, but you get the picture. The last of them was a pretty girl, the shortest in the group, who seemed to have a Napoleon complex. She folded her arms and stood with a cocked hip, her attitude challenging, and said “Poland.” “Dzień dobry!” I laughed, holding my arms out, as if for a hug. The angry look in her eyes vanished, and she said “We’re eating here.” The French girl tried to stop her, but she asserted herself, pushing through the others. “No. We are eating here.” And they followed her in. I guess no one had ever taken a minute to pay attention to her, and now she felt grateful, so I ushered them all into the back garden, got them seats, and had to listen to “Smacznego” several times on my phone to get the pronunciation right. Then my wife came in, with a couple we knew, and we sat at Table #4. We were all talking, but I admit I was being a bit rude by constantly leaning back in my chair, craning my neck to peer down the corridor at the people in the garden. I waited impatiently for their food to be cooked and leave the window, so I could go back there and say Smash-nay-go to that girl. The husband of the couple, watching me lean back on the chair’s rear legs like a kid, finally asked “What’re you doing?” “I’m waiting for just the right moment to say smacznego.” And he, not knowing what I was talking about, said “It’s always a good time to say that.” The absurdity of it made me laugh at myself, and I decided to pay more attention to my friends. They were, after all, coming to see me, and not just sit at a table in a restaurant with its absent-minded owner. But that is an example of going the extra mile. If you make a commitment to excellence, and stick to it, you can increase your business a thousandfold. It’s in little details like that. I believe that having been an addict and a poseur is a good indoctrination for this. I can’t help but smirk at the look you may have on your face right now, but it’s true, and this is why:

161 addicts and poseurs go to great lengths to lie to the world. We put a lot of thought into the false image we’ll present, while I think normal people (if there is any such thing) do not. If you can channel all that creative energy into something positive, there is no limit to what you can do. It may seem like I’m going off-topic, but if you’re patient, I’ll bring this back around and there will be a point. I also want to tell you about how I may have saved someone from suicide, and set in motion a chain of events like one of those Butterfly Effect plots. This was when the entire town was empty all day every day, and a general depression fell over us all. Not even tumbleweeds rolled down the street. There was this guy Balthazar, who had a Thai-style restaurant. It wasn’t my favorite, and that’s all I’ll say about it. He played the piano there, and when his China-doll girlfriend got tired of wasting her life there with him, listening to him play sad piano music that chased away all the people passing on the street, she left him. Went off to Costa Rica or something. If his mood had been dark before, he was now in a black cave, underground, blind-folded. Wife and I tried to cheer him up by going to his place now and again, even though we didn’t have any money to spare either, and we didn’t care too much for the food. It was just the nice thing to do, so we did it. He had recorded a CD of his music and asked me to sell it for Q80 in the restaurant, and nobody bought it. It was good, really, it was just slow and sad. I played it all day to get people to ask about it, and the only thing they said was tell me to put on the jazz I used to play. Well, one night I had all of two customers, an Irish couple, travelling the world and writing a blog, and Balthazar came in looking like Eeyore. He asked if, since I had someone there to listen to him, he couple play the guitar. I said of course, and he played a few mournful tunes. The Irishman asked if he could take a video and put it on YouTube, and Balthazar was rather quietly flattered. He sang The Blower’s Daughter, received some

162 sympathetic applause, and took his leave, after exchanging his business card for the Irishman’s. I watched him go, walking with slumped shoulders down a dark street, a defeated man. I saw myself in him, that moment. A man who just didn’t have it, and was trying to fake it but no one was falling for it. And he knew, and he knew that we knew and that was killing him. He was going to check out that night. “Hey,” I said to the couple. “I’m going to give you his CD and tell him you bought it. Could you listen to it so that when he emails you, asking which songs are your favorite, you can give him a plausible answer?” “We’d be delighted.” They finished eating, paid, and left, and I called Balthazar to tell him the good news. It raised his spirits instantly, and he asked if I’d like to go with him to spend that money in a bar somewhere. I said Of course. I closed early and we walked up the street to a quiet place with a pool table and a cute blonde behind the bar. We each had a Cuba, played pool and threw darts for a bit, and I let him win, which was a mistake. He got all kinds of cocky, but I let it slide because it was better than hearing about him slitting his wrists in the bathtub the next day. Yadda yadda yadda, eventually we left, taking the cute blonde bartender with us because she needed a lift home. We piled into his car, he let me off first, and, damnedest thing, he shagged that girl right after. I mean, seriously? But yeah, he did it. And then he regained his confidence enough to pick up this other chick, a pretty good-looking lady, and was engaged to her after only two weeks. They were married within the year and have a lovely daughter. All because of a lie I told. When you can tell that someone is hurting, do not hesitate to help them. You can change their entire life, just like that. That’s when I started feeding the poor. I’d seen people in the parks on my way home, digging through the garbage for scraps of food, and decided to eliminate the middle man.

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All the food my diners didn’t eat, the one potato, the slice of tomato, whatever, went into little bags that I would leave next to the homeless sleeping on the ground. I’d leave bottles of water next to drunks for them to find when they awoke. I became the fairy godfather of the hopeless. But, of course, there were nights when all the plates were empty, even wiped clean of sauce with pieces of bread, so I had nothing to give. Then I would give whatever I had left in the pantry that was going to go bad soon, but that was never very much. I would have to choose between all of the huddled masses on the sidewalk who would be the lucky one, and there was no way to know which was a saint in disguise, and which was a fugitive rapist in hiding from some other town. I hated to think that I might be feeding some wastrel while ignoring a poor sap who’d just fallen on hard times. So, when things started to pick up again, I decided to help out not just the homeless people, but also the little old lady sitting on the corner every night. She showed up like clockwork with her son and two baskets. One was filled with chuchitos and tama- litos, and the other with a large pot of atol, a thick, hot, sweet corn drink. There were nights she sold everything to the people passing by in cars, or the poor who still had the few quetzales to spare, and some nights she didn’t sell a thing. She and the young man would have to carry everything back home, with heavy hearts. Since it was Q3.50 for any item, the equivalent of 45¢, it wouldn’t cost much to buy everything she had, thereby helping somebody who was trying to make a living, and hit two birds with one stone. And there was the benefit of, much as I hate to admit it, being seen doing this by other people. I had to do it before eight o’clock, because that’s when the little old lady went home, and there were always people in the street. While I tried not to be grateful that I was being seen, I could not avoid it. I was getting a lot of great publicity for the restaurant and for me as a person, and that made me feel like a

164 jerk, as if I would be judged for doing it solely for that reason. One of the reasons I did it was, when I was down and out, a long time ago, I used to wish some Deus Ex Machina would kick in and magically save me. So, as soon as I found myself in a position to magically save other people, I didn’t hesitate. Maybe part of me did it as a way of redeeming myself for a lot of the shitty things I had done. But for the most part it was because I thought it was the right thing to do. Gandhi said you should be the change you wish to see in the world. If no one else was doing it, who would, if not me? And I figured the people didn’t give a shit why I did it, as long as it got done. We had a lot of customers because of it, I think. Someone wrote about me doing it on Tripadvisor, and that helped a lot. People would see me doing it, and then I’d go right back into the restaurant, and hey, it’s a small town. And many of them, if they had not seen me feeding the poor or helping Edwin the cripple across the street from the park to the public restroom several times every day, or do this, that, or the other thing, they’d heard about it. It planted a seed in their minds that I was a decent guy. It brought them to my restaurant and I got a good reputation, and I felt better about the…other stuff I had done. It reminded me of Batman Begins, in a way. Remember in the part where Bruce Wayne is acting like an ass in public so no one will believe he is a hero? And the love of his life shows up? He is embarrassed and tries to assure her that that wasn’t the real him she was seeing. She tells him that it isn’t who he is underneath, but what he does that defines him. Later, when he rescues her and a little boy from a group of escaped convicts, he gets to repeat that line to her, revealing his secret identity and redeeming himself in her eyes. How do I feel like Batman? Maybe I’m not a hero like him, but every night I get to be a hero to those homeless people, or to Edwin the cripple, or the blind men that want to cross the street. It doesn’t matter what a rotten person I used to be when

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I am serving others like this. I’m not saying I’m absolved, necessarily, but I am definitely a better person. I’m their hero. Remember what I said about going off-topic, but if you’re patient, there would be a point? My mind is like that, going off on tangents and probably losing many of you, but this ties in. Having had an abusive parent, and being an addict, then a prisoner, I am sensitive to every single detail. There are a lot of people out there, and probably you’re one too, who tend to “over-think.” We magnify small nuances because we know, if conditions are right, they result in explosions. We’ve had to learn how to manage the moods of others, perceive danger in a tiny shift in body weight or the order of someone’s words. I say it’s a strength, not a weakness. Look how I’ve used it. The reason I mention all this, it’s a way to make lemonade out of the unpleasantness in your past. Let’s say you had a few bad years, maybe you suffered an addiction or two, maybe you succumbed as I did to peer pressure and spent too much time on the wild side, and there were consequences. Use it as fuel for your mission in life. Consider it your training for what you must do now. If you survived something awful, I think you can find joy in helping others survive something similar. No one who looks at me can imagine that I was this person I’ve described to you. I just don’t look like I have been through those things, and that is a blessing. But I did indeed, and when I look at any one of those people drinking rubbing alcohol or sniffing glue at night, huddled under the colonnade, I know that it’s by the grace of God that I’m not among them. Perhaps your criminal record makes it difficult for you to get a job. If so, then that is not the job for you. Go find work in an area you are qualified for, like rehabilitation. Remember what I said earlier, about not accepting dating advice from a virgin priest? Why would you accept addiction recovery advice from someone who never indulged? You, on the other hand, have already had all the training you need. You can recognize the signs, you can see through the alibis

166 and the lies, and you can help people make it out of their hell and return to the real world like you did. I think that the lost sheep who found their way back make the best shepherds. Be authentic. Don’t try to hide the mistakes you made, but don’t brag about them either. Once you acknowledge that you had certain experiences you regret, it is far easier for society to accept your return. Like the prodigal son, chances are you’ll be welcomed with open arms.

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And now, your diet. Sure, there are plenty of people out there with real food al- lergies, some of them deadly, but now there’s close to 18 million people in the US claiming gluten intolerance, and some of us are calling bullshit. Because honestly, bread and milk have been dietary staples for thousands of years, and here we are at the top of the food chain, but all of a sudden, we can’t eat it? Outta the blue, everybody has a problem with gluten and lactose? I say there’s a good chance they’re all fine with gluten, they’re just reacting to the glyphosate used to desiccate wheat where they come from. Google the lawsuit that Monsanto just lost, and it looks like they made up “gluten intolerance” to cover up their guilt in mass poisoning. Something fishy is also going on with the milk. Apart from that meddling, though, I believe people have forgotten how to eat. As a chef, and scholar in what people euphemistically call the “Venusian arts” I have come to notice the role one’s diet plays in…other arenas. Okay, no beating around the bush. Every food ingested affects the taste of your “sweet nectar.” Salty food makes ejaculations, both male and female, especially salty. A lot of garlic makes you downright nasty, and the reason for this is the same reason garlic is so good for you: the sulfides in it that lower your risk of various cancers and improve your overall health, and ward off vampires. Those same sulfides make your breath horrible for days after eating it, and even if someone can get past the ordeal of kissing you, they won’t spend a lot of time kissing other parts of you. Unless… If you find yourself in a situation where you are eating food with garlic, and it suddenly becomes apparent that you might score in the next few hours, there are things you can do

169 that will counteract the sulfides that might stop your tryst in its tracks. If you have an apple handy, have it for dessert. The polyphenols in apples, which are compounds that act like an- tioxidants, break down the garlic’s smelly sulfur compounds. If you are the cook and you are hoping the meal will lead to subsequent nookie, you can incorporate apples into the recipe. Garlic apple sauces go very well with pork or chicken. Spinach, basil, and parsley are also rich in polyphenols and get along famously with garlic. They should be part of the recipe and will work to break down the sulfides without rob- bing you of their goodness. Now, I have no experience in the tasting of semen, so I can only report that some say it smells like a mélange of newly cut grass and alfalfa sprouts and usually has a slightly bitter, salty taste. That can’t be pleasant. Combining that with red meat makes it saltier. A common aphrodisiac, alcohol, makes it acidic and bitter, so the Catch-22 there is that what makes scoring happen more often, keeps the best parts of it from happening more frequently. What you need to do is either spice yourself up by ingesting more cardamom or cinnamon every day, or sweeten yourself by consuming fruits like strawberries, that are high in fructose, to up the sugar level. Washing your meal down with whole milk or green tea works too, up to a point, but nothing is as effective in my experience as pineapple juice. Pineapple juice will counteract just about everything, and the improve- ment it makes in your “personal intimate flavor” is dramatic. Eating a lot of strawberries, or chugging a strawberry smooth- ie, will make her (or him, to be fair) keep coming back for more. The problem with these beverages is that they don’t necessarily combine well with the flavors of the meal, sooo… Enter the theory. The people who commonly eat seafood or dishes with lots of garlic, vinegar, et cetera, and have for centuries―namely, the French, Italians, and Greeks―were not just the pioneers of great food and wine, but also lovemaking.

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If anyone would notice the difference in their lovers’ personal, intimate flavors after eating certain foods, it would be them. So, trial and error established the rules of what to drink along with what meals, not just because they were pleasant to the palate at the time, but afterward as well. It would make sense that the snobbery of knowing which wines go with which foods was for more than just the sake of snobbery. If you’re having a bucket of Extra Crispy, for example, or fried seafood, you should wash it down with cham- pagne, or Prosecco, or a cava, instead of sodie pop. I know it sounds silly, but while light beers match up well with fried seafood, most wines lose something when paired with tempu- ra or a thick beer batter. This doesn’t happen with sparkling wine, whose bubbles cut through the weight of fried food as if the wines were made for the dish. These wines also pair well with caviar, and caviar wreaks havoc on your hoohoodilly or cha-cha. Seafood is normally great for men to eat before sex for virility, but if reproducing is not really the object of the activity, you might want to skip it. If it is, though, drinking Chenin or Sauvignon Blanc, or Pinot Grigio is good to combine with flounder, halibut, walleye, snapper, raw clams or oysters. They can also cut through the natural fat in some fish, like striped bass and catfish, or lobster, shrimp and mussels. Fuller whites, like Chardonnay, Fume Blanc, Viognier or Pinot Gris go better with striped bass, crab, raw oysters and lobster. The theory here is to match a full-bodied wine with a full bodied dish. If you have a broth-based soup, such as she- crab soup, Chardonnay works wonderfully. If you have a fish that’s a little oilier, such as bluefish or mackerel, try Pinot Gris or Viognier, or an Italian Grillo. For steak, Malbec is at the top of my list, with Sangiovese in close second, but you should really eat a bunch of strawberries as an appetizer, if you plan on changing the music later. Because I put this kind of thought into the food I serve, I

171 have learned quite a bit about how what you eat affects your mind as well as your body. As I mentioned earlier, my choices of food leading up to my crime and imprisonment didn’t help with my decision-making. The bad food affected my mind, and my parents tried to cure me with an easy fix in magic pill form, resulting in prison. So, this is how I feel we can alleviate depression, for example, with food. The trillions of micro-organisms alive in our gut are called the microbiome, and they make molecules that can alter the production of serotonin, according to Lisa Mosconi, a neuro- scientist, nutritionist and associate director of the Alzheimer’s Prevention Clinic at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. She says that the good and bad bacteria in our gut have complex ways to communicate with our brain and change our mood, We must maximize good bacteria and minimize bad. A Mediterranean-style diet made up of meat and seafood, fruits and vegetables, extra-virgin olive oil, yogurt and cheese, legumes, and nuts will provide the nutrition our brain needs, regulate our inflammatory response and support the good bacteria in our gut, says Dr. Mosconi, author of Brain Food: The Surprising Science of Eating for Cognitive Power. But what about the food pyramid, you ask? We were all brought up to believe that it was the “proper” way to eat. The 1970’s dietary guidelines were a result of the McGov- ern report and were written with no science to support them. The first food pyramid was created in 1988, as a visual guide to help people make good food choices and a balanced diet, and encouraged a huge increase in carbs and reduced fat. Sure, they reduced the fat consumption by Americans by 15%, but obesity and diabetes went through the roof. An article in the NY Times asked if the Food Pyramid and Dietary Guidelines are all a lie: “Over the past five years, however, there has been a subtle shift in the scientific consensus. It used to be that even considering the possibility of the alternative hypothesis, let alone researching it, was tantamount to

172 quackery by association. Now a small but growing minority of establishment researchers have come to take seriously what the low-carb-diet doctors have been saying all along. Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Har- vard School of Public Health, may be the most visible proponent of testing this heretic hypothesis. Willett is the de facto spokesman of the longest-running, most comprehensive diet and health studies ever performed, which have already cost upward of $100 million and include data on nearly 300,000 individuals. Those data, says Willett, clearly contradict the low- fat-is-good-health message, “and the idea that all fat is bad for you; the exclusive focus on adverse effects of fat may have contributed to the obesity epidemic.” I recommend Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz, an exposé the politics surrounding the food pyramid. Also, Diabetic Cook- ery, Recipes and Menus by Rebecca W Oppenheimer has sensible eating advice. Foods that should be forbidden to diabetics are sugar, starches, bread, rice, flour and oats, but somehow this is now the base of the food pyramid. Foods that are actually good for you include butter, olive oil, meats, organs, cheese, eggs, and fish. Suspiciously, butter and olive oil and good fats are at the top of the food pyramid, and we are advised against them. I predict diabetes explosion by 2030, unless people start eating properly. Another thing, if you have “IBS” you probably have parasites, and you probably got them by getting produce wet under a faucet and thinking that counted as “washing it.” IBS is just a catch-all diagnosis that means We-don’t-really-know. Get tested for bugs and, from now on, use disinfectant. I tried eating “organic” vegetables instead of just meat all the time, and I got sick for almost two years. Take a moment to Google “organic restaurant parasite lawsuit” and see what comes up. I guarantee you’ll change your mind about what you think the word “healthy” means. I have never been sicker than when I tried to “eat healthy.” Look at Eskimos. They are

173 healthy people. It’s impossible for vegetables to grow where they live, and so they live on fish and seals, et al. They do not, unfortunately, fit into the narrative, and so are excluded. So, my advice is to eat a small breakfast, consisting of first, a glass of water. Second, one forkful of raw sauerkraut, either bought from a health store or made at home, and a good cup of coffee. The sauerkraut must be made with raw ingredients, or there won’t be probiotics in it. Honestly, a doctor recom- mended this and it fixed my ruined GI almost overnight. It’ll fight parasites and the bacteria that cause diarrhea. Also, kefir, kimchi and yogurt are a big help. You need a daily intake of Vitamin B6 to produce serotonin and combat depression, and you can get it from pistachios, garlic, sweet potatoes, salmon and tuna, chicken, spinach, cab- bage, bananas and avocados. Salmon is also a good source of DHA, the main omega-3 fat in the brain, which helps produce BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor) to protect neurons and promote the birth of new brain cells. You can also get it from oysters, mussels, mackerel and anchovies. The garlic and bananas will also help keep your good microbes alive, because they have what’s called prebiotics, also available in artichokes, asparagus and onions. Also, whichever coffee machine you use, you must clean it thoroughly after each use. And inspect the coffee machine at work. Nobody ever cleans it, so it is full of bacteria. You should avoid eating fruits after meats because they’ll take less time to break down. Meat takes longer, so it will be sitting there in your stomach while the fruit is already decom- posed on top of it, creating gas and discomfort. After watching a scorpion killed by a man pouring Coca- Cola on it, I have stopped drinking sodas altogether, and my abdominal bloating went away. I used to love Coke, but after seeing that poor thing shrivel up I knew why it always hurt my tummy. Nowadays, I use the anti-inflammatory properties of red wine as an excuse to drink lots of Malbec and Shiraz.

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We need to talk about art, because I believe life imitates it, instead of the other way around. Remember what I said about people going to prison because they follow the examples set in rap culture? Now I will explain how modern art contributes to moral decay and the fall of our society. I was privileged to attend what’s touted as “the most pres- tigious contemporary art fair in the Western Hemisphere” according to Jan Sjostrom of Palm Beach Daily News. I doubt there’s any word in any language strong enough to express the disappointment I felt when I saw what qualified for display. There was, I kid you not, a very large blank white canvas entitled (of all things) “Untitled” that proudly took up far more wall space than it should have. Not too far away were two others—a diptych, no less—that were also white, but with small black specks meant to represent people out in a snowy wasteland. How different is that from a child coloring a page black and calling it “Black Bears in the Black Forest at Night”? Further on, two desk lamps were clamped to a small shelf and turned on, facing the wall, making what looked like boo- bies of light. And I can’t leave out the three boxes of Cheerios on another shelf. Three boxes—or boxen as I prefer to call them— of Cheerios. And not even Honey Nut or Apple Cinnamon or Yogurt Burst. Just plain ol’ Cheerios. If anyone can claim that a box of Cheerios is art, it should be the guy who designed the box, not some jackass who just went out and bought three of them and glued them to a shelf. Same applies to the famous Andy Warhol Campbell Soup can that was also hanging. Where is the credit assigned to the mastermind who planned the label of that can? I saw an even worse plagiarism later on. Someone did a blatant copy of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and made

175 only one tiny alteration: he gave her a lazy eye, making it a grotesque parody, bereft of any artistic merit. Now, I know, I know, who am I to judge? Who out there has the right to decide what is art and what is not? I’ll say this now and stand by it. If a work can be replicated by vandalism, it isn’t art. If somebody else did it first and you copied it, it isn’t art. It is theft. If it’s a blank canvas, it’s an affront to everyone out there who makes the smallest effort at painting, and believe me, there was plenty of tiny effort shown prominently. Squiggles. And not even coordinated squiggles. And certainly no evidence of skill or creativity. Most of this crap is acceptable only when the artists’ parents affix it with magnets to refriger- ators. It’s about time somebody called Bullshit. This is the Em- peror’s New Clothes and nothing more, and it is insulting to everyone who views it, because it is basically giving them the Finger, saying “you’re all dupes who will accept our contempt of you and love us for it.” Maybe my art isn’t Art. Maybe it is merely craft. But I can promise you that every effort of mine is to present the world with something as close as I can come to art, and I can sleep at night. Abstract artists, free-verse poets, or weirdo musicians who play discordant notes, all of them were the kids who got trophies for participating, and are now grown up, thinking that all they have to do is throw paint at something, or dash off a couple of words that don’t rhyme but “ache with significance” or leave a piano out in the rain for a year and then play it, and get the same praise as someone who studies theory and puts in the effort and makes something truly beautiful. And I’m tired of hearing that beauty’s in the eye of the beholder. That only encourages underachievement. The first abstract artists painted their way to give the Fin- ger to someone. Everybody else who copies them does it just for the ability to say they are artists. Ditto with e. e. cummings. He was a revolutionary poet, back when being a poet used to

176 mean something. But since so many people’ve followed in his footsteps, poetry has become diluted to the point it is largely ignored. Poseurs shouldn’t get to be called artists or poets or musicians just because they want to. If a figure skater in the Olympics just threw herself on the ice and slid a few feet on her stomach, should the judges give her anything other than a Zero? Of course not. And it would be an insult to all the other figure skaters who trained hard for the competition. So why should art be any different? The owner of one of the biggest art licensing companies in the US said he went to the Tate Museum with his wife to see the new “important” art exhibition of Blah blah blah, and gave it some credit for being Whatever, but couldn’t help but notice that they were alone in the room. They went all through the museum seeing no one else until they got to a Pre-Raphaelite exhibit. That room was packed. Ditto that time I went to Rome and took a tour of the Vatican Museums. The guide said that if we spent one minute in front of every piece of art there, we would be there for over thirteen years, and after the tour, I believed him. We spent a few minutes in most of the rooms, and he had a lot to say about many of the pieces, but when we came to the Modern Art exhibition, he led us swiftly through each room—whoosh, whoosh, whoosh—until we came up to the tail end of another tour and had to wait. I appreciated the time we didn’t waste looking at the things we passed, most of which was nonsensical, but what really impressed me was that not one of our group (and it was a large group) said ‘Hey, hold on! We’re missing all the good stuff! Stop a minute and explain this…green…thing.’ Not once. In fact, the only comment I heard was the gentle- man behind me, when he made his family laugh by saying ‘Ah, over here on the right is a fine example of 1970s wallpaper.’ Nobody was interested. But everyone marveled at the realistic art in the rest of the museums. Now, there are some people that say realistic art was made

177 irrelevant by the advent of the camera. If you want a picture that looks exactly like a photograph, why not just take a photograph instead of going to all the trouble painting a realistic painting? The answer to that is on the faces of everybody who sees a photorealistic painting. I’ve seen people passing by my art gallery, glance inside and see a photo that’d been printed on canvas, and stop in their tracks. They came in and said “Oh my God look at the incredible detail on this painting! Omigod, look at all that detail! Who painted this?” And when they were told it was just a photograph, they stormed out of the place in disgust. That’s why realistic art has not been made obsolete by a camera, and never will be. The fact that someone with talent sits down and puts forth great effort and discipline to create something beautiful is what im- presses people. Someone who doesn’t take art seriously, but wants to be called an artist, is just mocking all true artists and all people that know what they’re talking about. That’s all there is to the argument, and the best response to someone saying you’re a Nazi or a Philistine, or in the very least, a bigoted reactionary, is just turning a cold shoulder and not wasting your time with them. They have created a kind of elitism where they are “superior” to you without actually being so, and no logic will make them accept that they are not. Now, the reason I bring this up, I was in an art exhibition that consisted of a “performance,” some of my work, a few nonsensical pieces of garbage (childishly executed portraits of people with maggots coming out of their noses and ears, etc) and the efforts of a girl in one of those military officer dress caps and a jacket with epaulets who put a bunch of wigs in frames. Seriously, wigs. All kinds, from curly blonde to straight black and every variation, all pressed flat behind glass. They had names like “Perseverance”. Mine were the only ones people were really looking at, and I even sold a few (seven, actually) but the other “artists” kept up their smug and haughty attitudes, and even put my work

178 down as soulless corporate crap. Corporate? Um… Now, it is not just the nature of Abstract art that I have a problem with. The history of it is repugnant. I learned many of the deep, dark secrets of the United States during my research for a book about the CIA, and one of them was that the bogus Abstract Art scandal was a cover-up for money laundering, making large amounts of money disappear whenever they needed to fund a coup in some other country. When arms were needed by someplace like Guatemala or Iraq, that’s when people like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko came into play. There would be an auction, and a piece of art would sell for millions of dollars. A short time later, that money would be used to supply weapons to terrorist cells in any of the countries the US wanted to destabilize. The story that was told was a semi-patriotic one. In the Cold War, the CIA promoted Abstract Expressionism, supposedly as propaganda against the Soviets, as proof of the creativity and intellectual freedom of the West. In the late 1940s, the dominant art movement in Russia was that of realistic paintings, showing the appeal of stoicism and discipline, a bit of a justification for communism. Allen Dulles, who headed the CIA, couldn’t stand it. There had to be something so fundamentally different that could catch on quickly and put the Soviets back into the shadows where they belonged. Remember what I said about low-ability thresholds? If we tell the world that painting something realistic is passé, everyone who wants to be called an artist—while putting forth minimal effort—will jump at the chance. What was funny is that many of those artists were, in fact, ex-communists and certainly not likely to receive backing from the government in the McCarthy era. They had little respect for the government and none whatsoever for the CIA. That was what the CIA thought would make it work. No one would ever suspect them. The connection was improbable at best. The Propaganda Assets Inventory had in its heyday more

179 than eight hundred newspapers and magazines, and other news sources to play whatever tune the CIA wanted the world to dance to that week. Then there was the International Or- ganizations Division, under Tom Braden, that funded and promoted jazz musicians, books and films that made the Sovi- ets look bad, like George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and bad art that even the President said was trash. Many years later, Braden would say: “We wanted to unite all the people who were writers, who were musicians, who were artists, to demonstrate that the West and the United States was devoted to freedom of expression and to intellectual achievement without any rigid barriers as to what you must write, and what you must say, and what you must do, and what you must paint, which was what was going on in the Soviet Union. I think it was the most important division that the agency had, and I think that it played an enormous role in the Cold War.” So, millionaires like Nelson Rockefeller were asked to say that they liked Abstract Expressionism, and support it publicly. Paintings of senseless scribble or simple fields of flat colors began to sell for millions of dollars. The low-ability threshold of art was at its lowest point since prehistoric cave drawings. As a consequence, just like children who play in Little League in the US stop trying so hard to win when they see they’ll all get a trophy anyway, and even come to expect a trophy for everything they do in life afterwards, the quality of art plummeted. Any monkey could do it, and the new avant-garde now held in contempt anyone who held true to real discipline, tarring them with the same brush as the cold, rigid Soviets. I feel that this culture of underachievement we’re suffering today was caused, in part, by that governmental manipulation, and the way to fight it is return to good old-fashioned discipline. A grass-roots movement of pictures that truly are worth a thousand words.

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XVI

I remember thinking while I was in school that the books we were forced to read were depressing, and they engendered in my classmates an aversion to reading. Because we would read books like A Separate Peace, or anything by Hawthorne, those among us who didn’t already love to read began to believe all books were boring. I never understood why schools did that, until it occurred to me that, maybe, they didn’t want us to read. I’ll come back to that in a moment. Aldous Huxley and George Orwell predicted our enslavement by the government decades ago. Huxley believed society could be oppressed through hedonism, because people would willingly forgo freedom in exchange for “sensory pleasure and endless consumption”. If people can be convinced to pursue pleasure, gratify material wants, and drug themselves to escape reality, then the noose will be free to tighten around them with very little effort. Neil Postman wrote in Amusing Ourselves to Death the difference between the two authors. “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one… Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrele- vance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture…In 1984 people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.” After investigating the compulsory public school system, and seeing the fruits of it in the US, and even having been one of its dim-witted creations, I have to agree with Huxley. Seth Godin has an interesting take on public schooling. A

181 podcast of his rang true for me, and so I began looking into what he had to say. It turns out that, in the US, compulsory public schooling began as a form of social control.* H.L. Mencken said “The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence… Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dis- sent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians…and that is its aim everywhere else.” But rather than quote a critic of the system, I’ll let those in charge of it speak for themselves. In his 1916 book Public School Administration, Ellwood Cubberley, the Head of Stanford’s School of Education wrote: “Our schools are, in a sense, factories, in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life. The specifications for manufacturing come from the demands of 20th-century civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.” Rena Upitis, the former Dean of Education at Queen’s University in Canada, explained some of the features of the factory model of schooling in her book Raising a School: “In factory schools, teaching—like the buildings—tends to be boxlike and linear. Transmission teaching dominates: standing at the front of the classroom, the teacher transmits knowledge to the students. This kind of teaching works best ______* Academy of Ideas is a great source of information on a variety of topics, some of which is consolidated and paraphrased here. They can be found on YouTube with great narrations of those articles, and while I insist that I am not affiliated with them, I highly recommend you look them up.

182 when the teacher can see everyone at once, and so, classrooms are created as a series of boxes, the most pervasive example being one of double-loaded classrooms down a single long hallway.” She went on to describe them as “Windowless concrete containers, surrounded by barbed wire fences—looking more like prisons than schools.” The factory model of schooling that I rebelled against, in which we were stifled by standardization of teaching, testing, bell curves, et cetera, really just tried to instill in us a fear for authority, and the mindless regurgitation of dates and names. The truth of history in context, the ability to reason, gather information, and think for ourselves was set aside in favor of ant-like conformity. A lot of the reformers who influenced the development of what we call public school weren’t looking to develop the intellects of their students. They were creating a means of social engineering. In his book The Philosophy of Education, William Torrey Har- ris, the US Commissioner of Education in the late 19th century, came right out and said it. He believed that children were the absolute property of the government. “Ninety-nine out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education which, scientifical- ly defined, is the subsumption of the individual.” John D. Rockefeller’s business advisor, Frederick Taylor Gates, wrote in his 1913 book The Country School of Tomorrow: “In our dream…the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand…We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or of science. We are not to raise up from among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians. Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply…For the task that we set

183 before ourselves is a very simple as well as a very beautiful one: to train these people as we find them for a perfectly ideal life just where they are…an idyllic life under the skies and within the horizon, however narrow, where they first open their eyes.” Why is it so hard to believe that the government would go to great lengths to keep its citizens stupid, if they wrote it in plain English? Charles Sanders Peirce wrote in The Fixation of Belief: “Let all possible causes of a change of mind be removed from men’s apprehensions. Let them be kept ignorant, lest they should learn of some reason to think otherwise than they do. Let their passions be enlisted, so that they may regard private and unusual opinions with hatred and horror.” John Taylor Gatto, a New York City and New York state teacher of the year, resigned out of frustration and wrote books condemning the very schooling he was praised for. This is a quote from Dumbing us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Com- pulsory Schooling: “Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your road map through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing…it should teach you what is important: how to live and how to die.” So, what motivation could a government have to dumb us down? To make us mindlessly obedient? Even if it means doing things that in any other situation we would consider im- moral? Need I remind you of the common defense of Nazis at the Nuremburg Trials? “We were just following orders.” The Nazi reign of terror, Stalin’s Russia, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Turks’ genocide of the Armenians, “ethnic cleansing” of Indians by the US, all showed people obeying to

184 the point of committing the most brutal murder and torture of completely innocent people. How could people take part in such horror? Freud said we should “never underestimate the power of the need to obey.” We are, I think, evolutionarily hardwired to do it instinctually. We’ve always lived in what they call dominance hierarchies. Survival in a dominance hierarchy requires us to distinguish between ranks and recognize what is permit- ted and forbidden based on those ranks. Failure to do either results in death or expulsion from the group, so those who fall in line get to survive and pass on their genes. Don Mixon wrote in Obedience and Civilization: “We may be genuinely puzzled as to how people could obey commands that seem both bloodthirsty and stupid. Puz- zlement can vanish when we realize that in the eyes of their perpetrators the hideous crimes of history are not hideous crimes at all, but acts of loyalty, patriotism and duty. From the vantage point of the present we can see them as hideous crimes, but ordinarily from that same vantage point we cannot see the crimes of our own governments as hideous or even as crimes.” Michael Huemer suggests in The Problem of Political Authority that maybe we’re unable to recognize the injustice of our own government. “…we experience an uncomfortable state, known as ‘cognitive dissonance’, when we have two or more cognitions that stand in conflict or tension with one another—and particularly when our behavior or other reactions appear to conflict with our self-image. We then tend to alter our beliefs or reactions to reduce the dissonance. For instance, a person who sees himself as compassionate yet finds himself inflicting pain on others will experience cognitive dissonance. He might reduce this dissonance by ceasing to inflict pain, changing his image of himself, or adopting auxiliary beliefs to explain why a compassionate person may inflict pain in this situation.”

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Cognitive dissonance can be triggered when one must pay taxes that fund government activities like the fighting of wars, the bailing out of crony-capitalists, or the mass surveillance of the people that government is sworn to protect. But, to deal with that dissonance, some people will make excuses for their government, even going so far as to change their beliefs. They may ridicule and seek to silence any sources of information which make them aware of that immorality. Our willingness to obey even a tyrannical government is so powerful that we want to see our side as very obviously the side of truth and virtue. This extends also to religions, and can be used to motivate followers to torture and murder anyone who calls their god by a different name. The need of people to be accepted causes a powerful drive to conform, and is made all the stronger by indoctrination since childhood. This is what they mean by the phrase “go with the flow.” But those who rule us go to a very different school. Recall Walter Lippmann, and note that he was one of the founding fathers of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the most influential foreign policy think tank in the world. “Political and economic power in the United States is concentrated in the hands of a “ruling elite” that controls most of U.S.-based multinational corporations, major communication media, the most influential foundations, major private universities and most public utilities. Founded in 1921, the Council of Foreign Relations is the key link between the large corporations and the federal government. It has been called a “school for statesmen” and “comes close to being an organ of what C. Wright Mills has called the Power Elite—a group of men, similar in interest and outlook shaping events from invulnerable positions behind the scenes. The creation of the United Nations was a Council project, as well as the Inter- national Monetary Fund and the World Bank.” (Steve Jacob- son, Mind Control in the United States) Some of the current members of the CFR, Lippmann’s

186 school for statesmen, include David Rockefeller, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, the mega-church pastor Rick Warren, and the CEOs of major corporations like CBS, Nike, Coca-Cola and Visa. These are the students of a man who had called us a “great beast” and a “bewildered herd,” incapable of making decisions for itself. So, what does it take to stand up to evil? How can we stop being slaves and do what is right? How can we become heroes? First, we must each leave the comfort of our echo cham- bers with an open mind, and seek out the opposing points of view. This can be done simply by creating a new email identity and using it to watch YouTube videos and register for Face- book groups. These days, it’s so much easier than when Norah Vincent disguised herself as a man to infiltrate a group of men and learn that they weren’t all that bad. You can do this from the comfort of your own home. Start watching videos uploaded by the groups you’ve been conditioned by your group to hate. The website algorithm will then predict other videos you might like to see, and feed them to you in a sort of opposing-viewpoint echo chamber. Look up the blogs of people unlike you. Don’t do it with the expectation of finding something to be offended by. Do it to actually see what different people think. What is it like from where they’re sitting? There are, of course, some actually crazy people writing nonsense out there, like “Diary of a Negress,” just to stir up hatred, but it is good to be aware of them and to know that they exist and are causing harm. But expose yourself to conservative speakers if you are a liberal, and vice-versa. Genuinely give them their day in court. Then go back and read the comments that people from your side are leaving and try to separate yourself from any knee-jerk hatred that they are spewing. It is not conducive to any peace that might be brought about, and you mustn’t let the emotions that you’ve programmed to feel cloud your judgment. Here is an example, a few screenshots from Facebook of

187 the hatred following the burning of Notre Dame in Paris:

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There is, however, a minor inconvenience. The MSM did not report all the other churches attacked in the months prior, nor the significance of the timing. The burning occurred during Holy Week, the most import time of year for Catholics. It was not a coincidence at all. It was the climax of a strong message sent to Catholics worldwide. There is an ideological war being waged and certain people are willfully ignorant of it, doing everything they can to silence anyone who speaks on it. It reminds me of the way some people in the 1930s refused to acknowledge the imminent threat in the rise of Hitler. Dr. Seuss drew them in a political cartoon as putting on “ostrich bonnets” and sticking their heads in the sand. The similarity to some skeptics today is appalling. Here is a map illustrating of all the attacks on churches in

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France for the four years leading up to the burning in 2019:

So, once outside the comfort of your echo chamber, you might find that the cause you once fought for so vehemently was really the political machination of someone using you as their pawn. Don’t feel ashamed. It’s happened to millions. Lenin pushed his agenda with disciples called useful idiots, who were fanatics dedicated to his cause, but who he said had to be lined up against a wall and shot as soon as they fulfilled their purpose. They performed their duties with enthusiasm— subverting diplomatic processes, fomenting strikes, amassing secret armies, murdering people—but after they’d succeeded,

190 they had to be put to death, because fighting is all they are good at. What good would they be in times of “peace?” They could only be expected to rebel again once Communism had taken hold, and they realized that it was the opposite of the party they’d been promised. They’d see they had been duped. On both sides of the political spectrum in the US there are useful idiots waging war against one another, not to win, rather to justify the intervention of the military and the tightening of governmental control. Somebody has to do something to put a stop to all this madness, and who better than those who started it in the first place?

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important ele- ment in democratic society. Those who manipulate this un- seen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are gov- erned, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.” (Propaganda, Edward Bernays) In his classic work Group Psychology and The Analysis of the Ego, Bernays’ uncle Sigmund Freud wrote that group psychology is “concerned with the individual man as a member of a race, of a nation, of a caste, of a profession, of an institution, or as a component part of a crowd of people who have been organized into a group at some particular time for some defi- nite purpose.” It is the study of how our behavior, thoughts, and emotions change when becoming a part of a group. Our primitive ancestors were more likely to survive and

191 reproduce in an unforgiving world if they banded together in tribes. The conditions under which we live may be radically different, but we are still wired to identify ourselves and others based on things such as race, class, gender, nationality, religion, or the political party or ideology to which we adhere. A little over a century ago, those in power took note of this study and began developing practical methods to manipulate the masses. Bernays discusses his role in that endeavor in his book Propaganda: “The systematic study of mass psychology revealed…the potentialities of invisible government of society by manipulation of the motives which actuate man in the group…[these studies] established that the group has mental characteristics distinct from those of the individual, and is motivated by im- pulses and emotions which cannot be explained on the basis of what we know of individual psychology. So the question naturally arose: If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it?” In Crystallizing Public Opinion, he wrote that a crowd “does not mean merely a physical aggregation of a number of persons…the crowd is rather a state of mind.” So, once we have identified ourselves as part of a group, we don’t need any other members of that group around us to continue feeling their influence. Bernays went on in Propaganda to explain how we can then be manipulated: “…many of man’s thoughts and actions are compensatory substitutes for desires which he has been obliged to suppress. A thing may be desired not for its intrinsic worth or useful- ness, but because he has unconsciously come to see in it a symbol of something else, the desire for which he is ashamed to admit to himself. A man buying a car may think he wants it for purposes of locomotion…He may really want it because it is a symbol of social position, an evidence of his success in business, or a means of pleasing his wife.”

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That means propaganda can bypass our conscious, rational minds, to target our innermost suppressed emotions and hidden desires, causing us to adopt beliefs and behaviors without knowing it. Once someone has succumbed to group identifi- cation, honest and critical introspection is nearly impossible. “A group is extraordinarily credulous and open to influence,” wrote Freud. “It has no critical faculty.” (Group Psychology and The Analysis of the Ego, Sigmund Freud) Self-analysis and interest in truth goes out the window in favor of maintaining group interests and cohesion. With critical capacity weakened by the influence of group psychology, we become highly susceptible to psychological operations designed to target suppressed or unconscious desires and emotions. Today, there are forces operating through the mainstream media and popular culture, manipulating us to choose sides. It doesn’t matter which, as long as the population is divided into conflicting groups. “Each group…considers its own standards ultimate and indisputable, and tends to dismiss all contrary or different standards as indefensible.” (Crystallizing Public Opinion, Edward Bernays) Just look at the comment thread on Facebook under any politically-oriented post. Unable to settle any difference in opinion through rational discourse, we’ve become divided in increasingly hostile conflict, and not only have we as a whole become weakened, but our eyes are diverted from the actions of those behind the scenes who constitute what Bernays called the “invisible government who controls the destinies of millions” (Propaganda, Edward Bernays). Personally, I think “Liberal,” “Conservative,” “Nazi,” and “Snowflake” are just labels we use to pre-define strangers and invalidate them, preventing any meaningful debate before their opinions can even be heard. Count how many times you have said “that’s an especially conservative opinion” compared to how many times you’ve called someone called a Nazi. Or the number of times you have heard “I appreciate your desire to

193 create a level playing field, but I don't see how that’s economically feasible” versus “you’re a typical bleeding heart liberal.” This prevents progress because it only leads to blind anger, ignorance-entrenched positions, and a focus on “winning” and revenge. It’s time to choose whether we keep screaming from the kiddie table, while covering our ears and singing “LA LA LA,” or join the other adults who are trying to make a meal everyone can enjoy.

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XVII

Now, let us talk about the people we are expected to obey.

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” That quote has been misattributed and paraphrased for centuries. What I think is the worst thing that can happen to it, though, is for it to be ignored. I’d like to return to my earlier comment about pedophilia, and start with a list of convicted officials recently charged with child sex crimes up until 2016:

• Acting Director of Cyber Security at the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), Timothy DeFoggi, age 56, was sentenced, January 2015, to 25 years in federal prison for “participating in a child pornography ring that sources say was so depraved, it even shocked veteran investigators.”

DeFoggi was a registered user of an online child rape and torture trading site. DeFoggi “expressed an interest in the violent rape and murder of children. DeFoggi suggested meeting one member in person to fulfill their mutual fantasies to violently rape and murder children.”

• Former Undersecretary of the Navy, 70 year old James Dan- iel Howard, arrested on child porn possession and reproduc- tion charges in 2013. Howard had served as special assistant to President Ronald Reagan. He pled guilty to ten child porn counts and served only seven months in jail.

• Joint Strike Fighter Program Navy officer, Bruce Babchyck, arrested in 2014 for downloading “hundreds of gigabytes” of young girls and bestiality on government computers. He received a one year sentence.

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• Anthony Mangione, 50 year old Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for South Florida, was arrested on “extreme child abuse” charges on 28 September 2011. He was sentenced, November 2012, to nearly six years in prison. Mangione is a 1982 graduate of the University of Maine Orono (UMO) where former Senior Child Protection Services (CPS) Cynthia Wellman claimed, at the time, CPS was operating a child sex ring, on campus, with UMO’s involvement. “Little is known about Mangione’s time at UMaine. Originally from Rhode Island, he arrived in Orono in August 1978.”

• David Bourque, formerly the 51 year old Police Captain of Granby, Connecticut, was sentenced to ten years for child porn possession and distribution. He had more than 328,528 images and 4,000 videos on his police department computer including “sadistic and violent acts” against infants and toddlers. His “collection” was organized into more than 300 sub- folders named “photos — babies — men” and “6–10yo boys pics” In this excerpt Bourque is D for defendant. Prosecutors said the images were “extremely disturbing; some are especially horrific” including: (1) a boy between 1 and 3 years old being raped by an adult male penis in the child’s anus, (2) a boy between 3 and 6 years old with a “penis of what appears to be an adult male pressed against the child’s anus” and (3) a child, less than a year old, “performing oral sex on an adult male.” Bourque showed “callous disregard” for the children being abused telling people to “enjoy” themselves and “have fun.” Samples of his on-line chats include extensive discussions of rape and bondage of children. Bourque was a decorated officer with more than 31 years in law enforcement.

• Army prosecutor and judge advocate, Daniel Woolverton, father of two, convicted in 2011 for infant sodomy and possession of over 30,000 images and 1,000 videos of brutal child

196 sex abuse including that of a three month old infant.

• Maine Assistant Attorney General, 52 year old James Cam- eron, was sentenced to just over 15 years in federal prison, December 2014, for seven counts of child porn possession, receipt and transmission. Cameron, widely recognized as Maine’s “top drug prosecutor,” had been trading in PTHC - pre-teen hard core. Images/videos that investigators seized included “images depicted prepubescent children, sadistic and other violent conduct.”

• Army Colonel, 55 year old Robert Joel Rice, a war game de- veloper at Army War College, was charged with 130 child porn counts. He had more than 30,000 images/videos of child sex abuse when his wife discovered the files and notified local police. The Army War College had continued to employ Rice, and allow him supervised access to Army computers, while on bail pending trial. Col. Rice had been scheduled for a July 2013 arraignment; however, Rice’s federal hearing was delayed until February 2015.

• David O’Brien, America’s chief scientist responsible for monitoring global nuclear activity at Patrick Air Force Base’s Technical Applications Center, which operates our Atomic Energy Detection System, was arrested May 2013 and charged with ten counts of child porn possession and distribution. O’Brien had a large child porn collection on his home and Air Force computers. On 17 October 2014 he was sentenced to five years in federal prison in exchange for a guilty plea to one child porn count. O’Brien had download videos of the sex abuse of children as young as three years old. He had taken pictures of his granddaughter and placed images of her head over images of children being sexually abused. He also had pictures of Air Force employees transposed over sex abuse images.

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US Department of State

• Carl Carey, a 54 year Senior Project Manager in Information Technology (IT) at the US State Department, was arrested on ten counts of child porn possession, April 2012, by the Fairfax County Police.

• Gons Nachman, a 42 year old former US diplomat “admitted taping his sexual encounters with teenage girls while sta- tioned in Brazil and the Congo” was sentenced, August 2008, to 20 years in prison. Nachman pleaded guilty to child porn possession. One of his videos was titled “Congo 2004 Sexual Adventures.” His law degree is from the University of Penn- sylvania, where he was president of the Naturist Student As- sociation and “led demonstrations involving public nudity in 1995.”

• James Cafferty, 45 year old Special Agent with the US State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, pleaded guilty, 5 January 2012, to child porn charges and was sentenced, 26 April 2012, to 7 years in federal prison. Upon his arrest he had more than 30,000 images of child sex abuse. He “had shipped computer equipment containing many of those images from London to the United States when he returned home from his last official government assignment.”

• Timothy Towell, 75 year old former US Ambassador to Par- aguay, was charged with “sex crimes” against an 18 year old in 2009.

• Howard Gutman, former US Ambassador to Belgium was accused of “routinely… soliciting sexual favors from both prostitutes and minor children” according to an Office In- spector General (OIG) investigation. Aurelia Fedenisn, a now former OIG investigator said her unit had found widespread

198 evidence of “sex and drug scandals” but “were told not to look into it.” Fedenisn said “investigations into the allegations were called off by senior officials to avoid political embar- rassment.”

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)

• Andrew Warren, a 42 year old former CIA Chief of Station in Algeria, was arrested April 2010. Warren’s neighbors called Norfolk police when Warren exposed himself in public. “He had his genitals hanging out of his pants, over the top of ‘em,” said one witness. Warren reportedly said “Excuse me. I’ve had minor surgery so I get a little horny sometimes.” He had been terminated from employment with the CIA in May 2009, after he drugged the drink of a woman in Algiers and raped her. Warren pleaded guilty and, June 2009, was indicted on sexual assault charges. Diplomatic Security Service agents also found child pornography on Warren’s laptop computer in 2008. When he was the CIA’s Chief of Station in Algeria, he allegedly “drugged and raped multiple women before getting recalled home.” Warren was sentenced, on sex assault charges, among others, to more than five years in federal prison in March 2011. It appears Warren was not charged for the child pornography on his government computer.

Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI)

• Donald Sachtleben, a 54 year old former FBI Agent was arrested, 14 May 2012, and charged on child pornography charges. He pleaded guilty to distribution and possession and was sentenced, 14 November 2013, to eight years in prison. He was also sentenced to unrelated charges of one count of disclosing and one count of possessing classified information. At the time of his arrest Sachtleben was Director of Training at the Center for Improvised Explosives at Oklahoma State

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University. He served the FBI from 1983 to 2008 as a bomb technician and counter terrorism investigator. Sachtleben had been using the handle [email protected] when he was caught sending images of child sex abuse in an on-line forum. He wrote, “Saw your profile on (a file sharing network). Hope you like these and can send me some of ours (sic). I have even better ones if you like.”

• Keith Dietterle, a 28 year old FBI Analyst, was arrested, 23 November 2012, on child porn charges. He pleaded guilty to child porn possession and was sentenced, September 2013, to more than three years in prison. Dietterle was caught when he sent child sex abuse images/videos to an undercover Metro DC Detective. The detective was posing as a man sexually abusing his 3 year old nephew and 12 year old daughter. Dietterle described the rape of the children as “So hot man … how’d it start?” and discussed meeting the detective with the intention of sexually abusing the three year old boy. Upon his arrest, the FBI terminated Dietterle’s employment.

Homeland Security

• Brian Doyle, Deputy Press Secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, was arrested “for trying to seduce online someone he thought was a teenage girl.” Doyle was charged with 23 felony charges related to sexually graphic conversations with a person he thought was a 14 year old girl who, in reality was, an undercover detective. On 17 November 2006, Doyle was sentenced to five years in prison with ten years probation thereafter. He is a registered sex offender and was released from prison on 11 January 2015.

• 31 year old Eric Higgins, a Homeland Security Customs and Border Protection agent in Michigan, pleaded guilty to child porn possession. Over forty images of a child previously iden-

200 tified by law enforcement were found on his laptop.

• Nicholas Bolden, a 40 year old Homeland Security Customs and Border Patrol agent, was sentenced for child porn possession on his government computer. Bolden had accessed a Russian child porn website while at work from his work computer. A child porn CD was also found at his workplace desk.

• Gilbert Lam, a 38 year old Homeland Security Customs and Border Protection agent who worked at San Francisco airport, was charged with child porn possession and distribution. In- vestigators said his electronic resources were “elaborate” and included “a whole closet… independent server, several computers, several hard drives…”

• Robert Rennie, a 43 year old Homeland Security agent who worked in the National Protection and Programs Directorate, was charged with attempting to solicit sexual acts from more than seventy young girls using a fake Facebook account and pretending to be a male student at a Virginia middle schools as well as a college student at George Mason University.

• An unnamed Homeland Security agent with Customs and Border Protection and Byungki Koo an Air Marshal were arrested for trafficking “young women” from South Korea in a sex-trafficking ring in Queens, New York.

National Children’s Museum

• Robert Singer, 49 year old father of two and Chief Operating Officer for Washington DC’s National Children’s Museum, was arrested, 6 November 2007, and charged on five child porn distribution counts. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced 16 July 2009, to five years in prison. Singer was caught sending child sex abuse images of children as young as five years old,

201 including from his work computer, to an undercover New York Police Detective who was posing as a 12 year old girl and her 33 year old mother. Singer was pretending to be a 15 year old boy. He was using the online handle badboy2. Upon his arrest, the museum terminated his employment.

Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA)

• 48 year old Scott Whitcomb, a former police officer, at the time of his arrest a Drug Enforcement Agent, was sentenced for child porn production. He had been producing and distributing sex abuse of boys under sixteen years old since 2007. Whitcomb lured boys to his house with video games and porn magazines and would turn violent if the boys didn’t submit to the sex abuse. He had been an Air Marshal and a prison guard.

• DEA agent Darren Argento was arrested for possession and distribution of child sex abuse of girls between seven and fourteen years old his work laptop.

Department of Energy

• David Busby, 61 year old computer technician who had worked for the National Energy Research Scientific Compu- ting Center for 30 years, was arrested on child porn charges. He was sentenced, March 2014, to ten years in federal prison. He had been trading in child sex abuse on his US government computer. He was previously convicted for “lewd behavior” toward his 7 year old stepdaughter in 1990. At the time of his arrest, investigators found some 1,400 child sex abuse images/videos. Busby was also a Navy veteran who served in Vi- etnam.

Department of Agriculture

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• James Spargo, a 66 year old employee with the Department of Agriculture in Florida, pleaded no contest to 20 felonies child porn counts and was sentenced, February 2015, to 10 years in prison. Spargo was arrested when investigators found child sex abuse images/videos on his government computer. Most of the children in the images/videos were infants and toddlers. “The activity we uncovered here was just was just horrible,” said Florida Department of Agriculture and Con- sumer Services spokesperson Erin Gillespie. “It was horrifying, it was disgusting, and we gathered all the evidence we could to make sure that this arrest was going to happen.”

Forest and Park Rangers

• Bobby Kelly, a 31 year old US Forest Ranger was sentenced to five years for more than two dozen child porn related charges.

• Derek Alan Lee, a 44 year old US Forest Service employee, was sentenced for child porn. Lee was sentenced with his 21 year old step-son Jeffrey McMillan. Their computers were found sending “several hundred files” of child sex abuse on the internet. Lee said he had been downloading child porn for ten years. At the time of his arrest his computer had 111 videos and 116 images of child sex abuse. He also had a collection of “incest stories.”

Department of Health & Human Services (DHHS)

• William Shaffer, a Child Protection Services (CPS) staff was arrested, July 2013, after he purchased nearly $7,000 of child rape and torture, aka child porn. According Shaffer’s criminal complaint “a 1987 police report alleged Shaffer sexually molested a boy between the ages of 8 and 9. The police report alleged the incident happened while Shafer was a Child Pro-

203 tective Services employee.” Investigators also seized “sexual stories” from Shaffer’s home. “One of them describes a seventh grade boy being abducted, molested and sodomized. It is not clear if Shaffer wrote the story — but refers to Michigan State University and 16 Mile Road. Shaffer’s residence is locat- ed just south of Maple Road.”

• Stanley Dorozynski, a 53 year old Child Protective Services (CPS) employee, was arrested, 21 December 2010, and charged with two counts, one each, of possessing and receiving child porn. Upon his arrest, Dorozynski possessed more than 2,400 child sex abuse images/videos including the abuse of children as young as four years old. Investigators also recovered 11 zip discs of child porn in a locked trunk, among other CDs. Doroszynski had been trading in child rape and torture since 1990. Dorozynski pleaded guilty 27 July 2012 and was sentenced to six years in federal prison. His girlfriend found the child sex abuse images/videos and notified law enforcement. He had been a police officer in Utica, New York, before he went to work for Health and Human Services.

Air Marshals

• Michael McGowan, a 41 year old Air Marshal, was convicted for molesting three young boys, age eleven to thirteen, and child porn possession. He had 1,300 videos and images, along with fake FBI and CIA badges.

• Richard Castillo, a Houston Air Marshal, was indicted for indecency with a child after his daughter’s fourteen year old friend said he sexually assaulted her during a sleepover.

• Air Marshal Byungki Koo, who was mentioned under the Homeland Security section, received four years probation for participating in the sex trafficking of young women from Ko-

204 rea in Queens.

Transportation Security Agency (TSA)

• 59 year old Boston TSA agent Jose Salgado, charged with possession and distribution of child porn. As of this arrest April 2012, it was reported that a total of twelve child sex crimes in the previous sixteen months had been brought against TSA agents across America.

• Michael Wilson, 41 year old Baltimore TSA agent was indi- cated for child porn possession including videos “depicting a prepubescent female engaged in masturbation and anal sex with an adult male.”

• Andrew Smeal, 39 year old Florida TSA agent, was charged with twenty-five counts of child porn possession. An investigator said “…the living room was loaded with electronics, storage devices, hard drives.” I couldn’t locate information on how much child porn he had or what it was depicting; however, given he was charged with twenty-five counts, one can assume he had a large amount of child sex abuse videos and images.

• Thomas Gordon, a 46 year old TSA agent in Philadelphia, was sentenced for possession and distribution of child porn. He had over 600 images and videos of child sex abuse including children as young as six years old which were described as “horrific.” He had as many as six fake Facebook accounts he was using to distribute child porn.

• TSA hired 65 year old Thomas Harkin, a former Catholic priest who had been removed from the church for the sex abuse of an eleven year old girl, among possible other victims, to work at Philadelphia airport.

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• TSA Agent, 38 year old Miguel Angel Quinones, who worked at Manchester airport in New Hampshire, was indicted on twenty counts of child porn possession. He had more than 1,000 child sex abuse images and videos. He kept his child porn in his airport work locker.

Bureau of Indian Affairs

• Jasper Neil Blair, a 27 year civil engineer with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, was arrested for child porn possession and pleaded guilty, 31 May 2012, “to knowingly possessing an image of a six-year-old girl being sexually abused,” and was sentenced, 4 October 2012, to two and half years in federal prison. Blair was using his government computer to trade in child rape and torture, aka child pornography.

Corrections and Probation Officers

• Former West Virginia Corrections Center Officer, 35 year old Joseph Roush pleaded guilty to child porn possession and distribution. He had more than 500 image of child sex abuse.

• Leon Perry Brookes, a 39 year old a Corrections Officer for Jacksonville (Florida) Sheriff’s Office was arrested for child porn possession and distribution. Among others, he had child sex abuse files called “pthc- freaky latin parents and 5yr daughter.mpg” and “video-8yr orgasm and anal fuck hard ! new ! (ptch) 2007 new girl img.”

• Gerald Silva, a 59 year old Rhode Island State Probation Officer, was convicted of child porn for his $1,589 USD purchase of 22 orders of child sex abuse from Azov Film’s website, spending a total of $1,589 on 75 different videos. He was

206 caught by USPS Inspectors and Toronto Police investigation, Project Spade.

• Stuart Forrest, 62 year old Chief Probation Officer of San Mateo County, California, was sentenced for child porn possession that included the abuse of young bound boys. He had more than 400 images and videos of child sex abuse. This case was also part of Project Spade, run by the USPS and Toronto Police.

• Supervisor of Adult Probation and Parole and Sex Offender Unit in New Mexico, Larry Franco, 56 years old, was charged two counts of fourth-degree felony sexual exploitation of a minor by possession and one count of tampering with evidence. He had originally been charged with 26 new child porn counts. He was producing child porn.

• James Leone, a 50 year old Senior Parole Official in New York who supervised officers who monitored paroled sex offenders, was arrested for child porn possession. He had been downloading child sex abuse images in online searches for “preteen hard-core” including ten or twelve year old girls being sexually abused by their parents and a brother. Leone was a Child Abuse Investigator with New York City Child Welfare Bureau before he became a parole officer.

• Barry Porter Griffith, a 45 year old Parole Officer from Flint Texas, was sentenced for child porn possession after investigators noticed “significant Internet bandwidth being used by a state-owned computer to view pornography” including child sex abuse from his office computer.

• James Kriegner, a 43 year old Corrections Officer with Mer- cer County, New Jersey, charged with downloading more than 100 child sex abuse images.

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Now, a list of US politicians/activists/donors—both Republi- cans and Democrats—who’ve been charged/convicted of sex crimes against children.

REPUBLICANS

• Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert was indicted on federal charges of structuring bank withdrawals after prosecutors alleged Hastert had molested at least four boys as young as 14 and attempted to compensate his victims and subsequently conceal the transactions. Hastert eventually admitted that he sexually abused the boys whom he had coached decades earlier, and was sentenced to fifteen months in prison. • Republican Tim Nolan, chairman of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in Kentucky, pled guilty to child sex trafficking and on February 11, 2018 he was sentenced to serve 20 years in prison. • Republican state Senator Ralph Shortey was indicted on four counts of human trafficking and child pornography. In No- vember 2017, he pleaded guilty to one count of child sex trafficking in exchange for the dropping of the other charges. • Republican anti-abortion activist Howard Scott Heldreth is a convicted child rapist in Florida. • Republican County Commissioner David Swartz pleaded guilty to molesting two girls under the age of 11 and was sentenced to 8 years in prison. • Republican judge Mark Pazuhanich pleaded no contest to fondling a 10-year old girl and was sentenced to 10 years probation. • Republican anti-abortion activist Nicholas Morency pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography on his computer and

208 offering a bounty to anybody who murders an abortion doctor. • Republican legislator Edison Misla Aldarondo was sentenced to 10 years in prison for raping his daughter between the ages of 9 and 17. • Republican Mayor Philip Giordano is serving a 37-year sentence in federal prison for sexually abusing 8- and 10-year old girls. • Republican campaign consultant Tom Shortridge was sentenced to three years probation for taking nude photographs of a 15-year old girl. • Republican Senator Strom Thurmond, a notable racist, had sex with a 15-year old black girl which produced a child. • Republican pastor Mike Hintz, whom George W. Bush commended during the 2004 presidential campaign, surren- dered to police after admitting to a sexual affair with a female juvenile. • Republican legislator Peter Dibble pleaded no contest to having an inappropriate relationship with a 13-year-old girl. • Republican Congressman Donald “Buz” Lukens was found guilty of having sex with a female minor and sentenced to one month in jail. • Republican fundraiser Richard A. Delgaudio was found guilty of child porn charges and paying two teenage girls to pose for sexual photos. • Republican activist Mark A. Grethen convicted on six counts of sex crimes involving children. • Republican activist Randal David Ankeney pleaded guilty to attempted sexual assault on a child. • Republican Congressman Dan Crane had sex with a female

209 minor working as a congressional page. • Republican activist and Christian Coalition leader Beverly Russell admitted to an incestuous relationship with his step daughter. • Republican congressman and anti-gay activist Robert Bau- man was charged with having sex with a 16-year-old boy he picked up at a gay bar. • Republican Committee Chairman Jeffrey Patti was arrested for distributing a video clip of a 5-year-old girl being raped. • Republican activist Marty Glickman (a.k.a. “Republican Marty”), was taken into custody by Florida police on four counts of unlawful sexual activity with an underage girl and one count of delivering the drug LSD. • Republican legislative aide Howard L. Brooks was charged with molesting a 12-year old boy and possession of child pornography. • Republican Senate candidate John Hathaway was accused of having sex with his 12-year old baby sitter and withdrew his candidacy after the allegations were reported in the media. • Republican preacher Stephen White, who demanded a return to traditional values, was sentenced to jail after offering $20 to a 14-year-old boy for permission to perform oral sex on him. • Republican talk show host Jon Matthews pleaded guilty to exposing his genitals to an 11 year old girl. • Republican anti-gay activist Earl “Butch” Kimmerling was sentenced to 40 years in prison for molesting an 8-year old girl after he attempted to stop a gay couple from adopting her. • Republican Party leader Paul Ingram pleaded guilty to six counts of raping his daughters and served 14 years in federal prison.

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• Republican election board official Kevin Coan was sentenced to two years probation for soliciting sex over the internet from a 14-year old girl. • Republican politician Andrew Buhr was charged with two counts of first degree sodomy with a 13-year old boy. • Republican politician Keith Westmoreland was arrested on seven felony counts of lewd and lascivious exhibition to girls under the age of 16 (i.e. exposing himself to children). • Republican anti-abortion activist John Allen Burt was charged with sexual misconduct involving a 15-year old girl. • Republican County Councilman Keola Childs pleaded guilty to molesting a male child. • Republican activist John Butler was charged with criminal sexual assault on a teenage girl. • Republican candidate Richard Gardner admitted to molesting his two daughters. • Republican Councilman and former Marine Jack W. Gardner was convicted of molesting a 13-year old girl. • Republican County Commissioner Merrill Robert Barter pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual contact and assault on a teenage boy. • Republican City Councilman Fred C. Smeltzer, Jr. pleaded no contest to raping a 15 year-old girl and served 6-months in prison. • Republican activist Parker J. Bena pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography on his home computer and was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison and fined $18,000. • Republican parole board officer and former Colorado state representative, Larry Jack Schwarz, was fired after child pornography was found in his possession.

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• Republican strategist and Citadel Military College graduate Robin Vanderwall was convicted in Virginia on five counts of soliciting sex from boys and girls over the internet. • Republican city councilman Mark Harris, who is described as a “good military man” and “church goer,” was convicted of repeatedly having sex with an 11-year-old girl and sentenced to 12 years in prison. • Republican businessman Jon Grunseth withdrew his candidacy for Minnesota governor after allegations surfaced that he went swimming in the nude with four underage girls, including his daughter. • Republican director of the “Young Republican Federation” Nicholas Elizondo molested his 6-year old daughter and was sentenced to six years in prison. • Republican benefactor of conservative Christian groups, Richard A. Dasen Sr., was charged with rape for allegedly paying a 15-year old girl for sex. Dasen, 62, who is married with grown children and several grandchildren, has allegedly told police that over the past decade he paid more than $1 million to have sex with a large number of young women.

DEMOCRATS • Democratic donor and billionaire, Jeffrey Epstein, ran an underage child sex brothel and was convicted of soliciting underage girls for prostitution. • Democratic New York Congressman, Anthony Weiner, pled guilty to transferring obscene material to a minor as part of a plea agreement for ‘sexting’ and sending Twitter DMs to underage girls as young as 15. • Democratic donor, activist, and Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein is being criminally prosecuted and civilly sued for

212 years of sexual abuse (that was a well known “secret” in Hol- lywood) including underage sexual activities with aspiring female actresses. • Democratic activist and #MeToo proponent Asia Argento settled a lawsuit for sexual harassment stemming from sexual activities with an underage actor. • Democratic Mayor of Racine, Wisconsin, Gary Becker was convicted of attempted child seduction, child pornography, and other child sex crimes. • Democratic Seattle Mayor Ed Murray resigned after multiple accusations of child sexual abuse were levied against him including by family members. • Democratic activist and aid to NYC Mayor De Blasio, Jacob Schwartz, was arrested on possession of 3,000+ child pornographic images. • Democratic activist and actor Russell Simmons was sued based on an allegation of sexual assault where he coerced an underage model for sex. • Democratic Governor of Oregon Neil Goldschmidt, after being caught by a newspaper, publicly admitted to having a past sexual relationship with a 13-year-old girl after the statute of limitations on the rape charges had expired. • Democratic Illinois Congressman Mel Reynolds resigned from Congress after he was convicted of statutory rape of a 16-year-old campaign volunteer. • Democratic New York Congressman Fred Richmond was arrested in Washington D.C. for soliciting sex from a 16-year- old boy. • Democratic activist, donor, and director Roman Polanski fled the country after pleading guilty to statutory rape of a 13- year-old girl. Democrats and Hollywood actors still defend

213 him to this day. • Democratic State Senator from Alaska George Jacko was found guilty of sexual harassment of an underage legislative page. • Democratic State Representative candidate for Colorado Andrew Myers was convicted for possession of child pornography and enticing children. • Democratic Illinois Congressman Gus Savage was investigated by the Democrat-controlled House Committee on Eth- ics for attempting to rape an underage female Peace Corps volunteer in Zaire. The Committee concluded that while the events did occur his apology was sufficient and took no further action. • Democratic activist, donor, and spokesperson for Subway Jared Fogle was convicted of distribution and receipt of child pornography and traveling to engage in illicit sexual conduct with a minor. • Democratic State Department official Carl Carey, under Hil- lary Clinton’s state department, was arrested on ten counts of child porn possession. • Democratic Maine Assistant Attorney General James Cam- eron was sentenced to just over 15 years in federal prison for seven counts of child porn possession, receipt and transmission. • Democratic State Department official Daniel Rosen, under Hillary Clinton’s state department, was arrested and charged with allegedly soliciting sex from a minor over the internet. • Democratic State Department official James Cafferty pleaded guilty to one count of transportation of child pornography. • Democratic radio host Bernie Ward pleaded guilty to one count of sending child pornography over the Internet.

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• Democratic deputy attorney general from California Ray- mond Liddy was arrested for possession of child pornography. • Democratic Illinois State Representative Keith Farnham has resigned and was charged with possession of child pornography and has been accused of bragging at an online site about sexually molesting a 6-year-old girl. • Democratic spokesperson for the Arkansas Democratic Par- ty Harold Moody, Jr., was charged with distribution and possession of child pornography. • Democratic Radnor Township Board of Commissioners member Philip Ahr resigned from his position after being charged with possession of child pornography and abusing children between 2 and 6 years-old. • Democratic activist and BLM organizer Charles Wade was arrested and charged with human trafficking and underage prostitution. • Democratic Texas attorney and activist Mark Benavides was charged with having sex with a minor, inducing a child under 18 to have sex and compelling prostitution of at least nine legal clients and possession of child pornography. He was found guilty on six counts of sex trafficking. • Democratic Virginia Delegate Joe Morrissey was indicted on charges connected to his relationship with a 17-year-old girl and was charged with supervisory indecent liberties with a minor, electronic solicitation of a minor, possession of child pornography and distribution of child pornography. • Democratic Massachusetts Congressman Gerry Studds was censured by the House of Representatives after he admitted to an inappropriate relationship with a 17-year-old page. • Democratic Former Mayor of Stillwater, New York, Rick Nelson pleaded guilty to five counts of possession of child

215 pornography of children less than 16 years of age. • Democratic Former Mayor of Clayton, New York, Dale Kenyon was indicted for sexual acts against a teenager. • Democratic Former Mayor of Hubbard, Ohio, Richard Kee- nan was given a life sentence in jail for raping a 4-year-old girl. • Democratic Former Mayor of Winston, Oregeon, Kenneth Barrett was arrested for setting up a meeting to have sex with a 14-year-old girl who turned out to be a police officer. • Democratic Former Mayor of Randolph, Nebraska, Dwayne L. Schutt was arrested and charged with four counts of felony third-degree sexual assault of a child and one count of inten- tional child abuse. • Democratic Former Mayor of Dawson, Georgia, Christo- pher Wright was indicted on the charges of aggravated child molestation, aggravated sodomy, rape, child molestation and statutory rape of an 11-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl. • Democratic Former Mayor of Stockton, California, Anthony Silva was charged with providing alcohol to young adults during a game of strip poker that included a 16-year-old boy at a camp for underprivileged children run by the mayor. • Democratic Former Mayor of Millbrook, New York, Donald Briggs was arrested and charged with inappropriate sexual contact with a person younger than 17. • Democratic party leader for Victoria County, Texas, Stephen Jabbour pleaded guilty to possession and receiving over half a million child pornographic images. • Democratic activist and fundraiser Terrence Bean was arrested on charges of sodomy and sex abuse in a case involving a 15-year-old boy. When the alleged victim declined to testify, the judge dismissed the case.

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• Democratic Party Chairman for Davidson County, Tennes- see, Rodney Mullin resigned amid child pornography allegations. • Democratic activist, Andrew Douglas Reed pleaded guilty to a multiple counts of 2nd-degree sexual exploitation of a minor for producing child pornography. • Democratic official from Terre Haute, Indiana, David Rob- erts was sentenced to federal prison for producing and possessing child pornography including placing hidden cameras in the bedrooms and bathrooms at a home he shared with two minor female victims. • Democratic California Congressman, Tony Cárdenas is being sued in LA County for allegedly sexually abused a 16-year-old girl. • Democratic aide to Sen. Barbara Boxer, Jeff Rosato pleaded guilty to charges of trading in child pornography. • Democratic Alaskan State Representative Dean Westlake resigned from his seat after the media published a report alleg- ing he fathered a child with a 16-year-old girl when he was 28. • Democratic New Jersey State Assemblyman Neil Cohen was convicted of possession and distribution of child pornography. Somehow, any mention of the Catholic Church often elic- its negative comments about the molestation of altar boys. While I do agree that pedophile priests have done these horrible things, it’s important to understand that this is a disturbingly widespread problem, not confined to the clergy. As I have said before, the world is full of predators. Some dress in sheep’s clothing to get near their prey. What better way to gain access to children than to be a trusted authority figure? But the exaggerated emphasis on Catholicism is, as you can see above, a smear campaign by haters of the Church.

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There are many other ways that these evil people gain access to your children: summer camp and schools, for example. Children are abused there with astonishing frequency, but how often are either of those institutions lambasted by the media, online forums, or in pop culture? It is because those institutions are far more adept at covering up their scandals. About the priests, if I was a sicko and wanted to molest children, I would put myself in a position where I had access to them. I would become a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Does that make all the good people in the clergy guilty? Only the ones who know about it and do nothing, which contrary to popular belief, is few. And those enablers are going down along with the diddlers. Justice is being done. Pope Francisco is imprison- ing pedophiles and those who’ve protected them. To continue pointing your finger at all of the good clergymen is just plain wrong. Those people are the first responders to disasters all over the world. They have offices everywhere, and when that mudslide destroyed hundreds of homes in Guatemala, for example, they were there before the paramedics were. They give food and shelter to the poor, and comfort to the sick. The people in our government, however, who revel in the torture and murder of children, do so because they believe in the ancient wisdom of their religion. The first ethical lesson in the Bible teaches that the only sacrifice pleasing to the Lord is that of blood. Abel found favor with God by sacrificing the firstborn of his flock, while Cain went the vegan route, and we all know how that story ended. Then Abraham was ordered to sacrifice his firstborn son. Since then, people who will look for any excuse to do evil use this to justify the sacrifice of babies. “For the highest spiritual working one must accordingly choose that victim which contains the greatest and purest force. A male child of perfect innocence and high intelligence is the most satisfactory and suitable victim.” (Magick in Theory and Practice, Aleister Crowley) There really is no victim more innocent and pure than a

218 baby, except an unborn baby. I’ll discuss it later. For now, I’ll leave it at this: the more deaths that can be dedicated to your god, the better. If you can outsource those sacrifices, imagine the “glory” you can be expected to receive. Take a moment to Google the West Memphis Three, and all the celebrities who came out of the woodwork to support them. This is a congregation that looks after its own. If you’ve ever wondered why some people can commit rape and murder and then get away with it, as we have seen recently, now you know. Remember when I said Evil existed long before Good? Those judges who were lenient with rapists worship the same god as the offenders, a god whose worship goes back much farther than ours. So, now that we have established exactly who is governing us, let’s discuss what they have in mind.

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In the US, we are taught in our perfunctory history classes that the Pilgrims came over on the Mayflower to escape religious persecution, but they don’t really go into detail about it. Here are scanned pages from a book found by historian Demi Pietchell. She says “This is an excerpt from an historical document, a book published in 1899 detailing the history and ge- nealogy of the Borden family. This account details part of why so many groups of settlers chose to move to the New World. “In our history books, ‘religious persecution’ is cited. This is the cover story we grew up believing―because history is written by the victors. This historical account tells a much different story―a story where settlers were forced to leave their homes to protect their families from infant abductions and child sacrifices. People with no means or recourse fled to Wales and America. “It is not important that you believe in what other people believe. What is important is that you view this document as an historian or an anthropologist would, and that, based on this, you understand that this is what other people believe―and that those who believe in it may still act upon it.”

What the people I’ve described are working to bring about

221 is another feudal system where this can continue to happen.

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The history of civilization is a study in varying degrees of slavery. Tyrants have always existed, and we could say that the masses are their victims, unable to resist because of the threat of force wielded by those in power. However, in the 16th century, the French philosopher Etienne de La Boétie challenged this view in The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. All governments, he wrote, including the most tyrannical, can only rule for extended durations if they have the general support of the populace. Not only are those in power vastly outnumbered by those over whom they rule, but governments rely on the subjugated populations to provide them with a continual supply of resources and manpower. If one day enough people refused to obey and stopped surrendering their wealth and property, their oppressors would, in the words of La Boétie, “become naked and undone and as nothing, just as, when the root receives no nourishment, the branch withers and dies.” “Obviously there is no need of fighting to overcome this single tyrant, for he is automatically defeated if the country refuses consent to its own enslavement: it is not necessary to deprive him of anything, but simply to give him nothing; there is no need that the country make an effort to do anything for itself provided it does nothing against itself. It is therefore the inhabitants themselves who permit, or, rather, bring about, their own subjection, since by ceasing to submit they would put an end to their servitude. A people enslaves itself, cuts its own throat, when, having a choice between being vassals and being free men, it deserts its liberties and takes on the yoke, gives consent to its own misery, or, rather, apparently wel- comes it.” Why would people act against their best interests and consent to their enslavement? The same way animals born in cap- tivity don’t know the freedom of which they’re deprived, and do not think to resist their chains, those of us who are born in

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State slavery accept our servitude as natural. When we spend our formative years observing everyone else accepting their oppressors without resistance, our pressure to fall in line and follow custom overrides the natural instinct for freedom. Submission becomes habitual. La Boétie went on to say: “It is true that in the beginning men submit under con- straint and by force; but those who come after them obey without regret and perform willingly what their predecessors had done because they had to. This is why men born under the yoke and then nourished and reared in slavery are content, without further effort, to live in their native circumstance, unaware of any other state or right, and considering as quite natural the condition into which they were born.” La Boétie notes that, on certain days, the elite used to distribute bread, wine, and some money to their subjects, and the recipients of their welfare would shout “Long live the King!” “The fools did not realize,” La Boétie wrote. “That they were merely recovering a portion of their own property, and that their ruler could not have given them what they were receiving without having first taken it from them.”

The following was written by someone who will remain anonymous, because on a disturbingly regular basis, journalists and witnesses who have evidence against people mentioned in this chapter have either been murdered or “committed suicide” by unrealistic means. The large number of celebrities who mysteriously died or ‘committed suicide’ preceding the MeToo movement appeared to have been ready to speak out and were silenced. This section is in response to an article appearing in the Guardian, trying to debunk the “Pizzagate” scandal. Pas- sages quoted from the article appear in italics. Link to original article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec /05/pizzagate-lie-what-it-says-about-society-real

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“In any other year, a story like “Pizzagate” would get you laughed out of the room. The conspiracy theory claiming that Hillary Clinton was part of an underground child-sex trafficking ring run out of a pizza shop, is bizarre and disturbing from start to finish. But in 2016 – a year where nothing seems to make sense anymore – a story like that can be cited as a motive for a crime.

“Pizzagate” is nothing new. It has been around for decades, but has always gone by different names. Yes, the specif- ics change, but the central theme of these past scandals is always the same. Each scandal involves respected members of our government, each scandal involves child abuse, and each scandal involves a great cover-up.

First, there was the Franklin scandal; in this case, George Bush, Sr. and other political figures were implicated. One of the abused victims, Paul Bonacci, later won a one million dollar lawsuit against one of his abusers—a prominent Republi- can politician, Lawrence King. There was also the Boys Town scandal. There were also the plethora of child abuse scandals that occurred at numerous military bases such as the Presidio day care center, the daycare at West Point, and the daycare at Fort Dix. There was also the Dutroux affair in Belgium, and the Hampstead cover-up in London, just to name a few. All of these cases involved high ranking political figures, and all of these scandals were covered up. If one was to actually research “Pizzagate”, they would see that none of us are claiming that a child sex-trafficking ring is “run out of a pizza shop”. Those who are legitimately researching this actually laugh at media sources, such as yours, that suggest this. We don’t claim this. You do.

This is much, much, larger than this pizza shop, despite the…disturbing…fact that Comet Ping Pong advertises “all ages welcome”, yet sets up gigs for bands with names such as

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“The Sex Stains”. Despite other bands who regularly play here who talk about selling and euthanizing babies. Despite other bands playing here with song titles such as “Rophynol” De- spite all the creepy/sexual artwork on their walls (that they have since taken down), and DESPITE the x-rated comments scrawled across the bathroom walls of a “kid friendly” restaurant, that perfectly complement the sexually explicit graffiti. “But Comet Ping Pong is fun for all ages!”

Yes, the owner of Comet Ping Pong’s character is a very... questionable…to say the least. But Comet Ping Pong is not at the center of this. The political ties to Comet Ping Pong, coupled with the very poor business decisions of the establishment’s owner, just helped solidify our instincts that the relationship of children and the DC network, need to be further looked into. Something is off, and that is a given.

On Sunday, a gunman carrying an assault rifle entered a pizza shop in Washington DC, Comet Ping Pong. He reportedly wanted to “self- investigate” the spurious Clinton report. Thankfully no-one was injured or killed. Make no mistake: this grim story is a prime example of the free rein we’ve given to the worst of ourselves this year. It also shows how eager political operatives are to feed our basest instincts.

Multiple people predicted a “false flag” incident like this occurring, weeks before Sunday’s incident was reported. It is painfully obvious that people involved in these crimes want Pizzagate shut down. They are panicking, and rightfully so. This scandal implicates hundreds of members of our government.

Immediately after Pizzagate started gaining momentum, there was the crackdown on “fake news”. Then Reddit shut down the /pizzagate sub, where most of the real journalism/investigating was being done- after gaining, on average,

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TWO THOUSAND new subscribers, PER DAY. Calling this story a “hoax”, “fake news”, a “conspiracy theory”, etc., isn’t changing anyone’s minds, and this is obvious. The amount of people becoming interested in and realizing that Pizzagate is anything but “fake news”, is growing exponentially. So yes, calling us “tin-foil-hat-wearing-conspiracy-theorists” isn’t quite cutting it. Time to step it up and call us domestic terrorists, right? Surely that will work.

Oh, but wait. Let’s get back to the shooter- what is his name? Oh, right. Edgar Maddison Welch. You can search him up on IMDB. This “crazy gunman” is an actor. It gets EVEN better. His father works for the government. Please go on about “political operatives”.

The people spreading this fake story – and countless other ones which circulated this year, out-performing real articles on Facebook – don’t actually believe in Pizzagate. They do not really believe that there is a child trafficking ring being run underneath a pizza shop in Washington DC in which Hillary Clinton takes part.

Wait, Pizzagate articles are outperforming other articles on Facebook? That’s funny, because I have yet to see Pizzagate “trending” on there, nor on Twitter for that matter, despite how huge this is. Why do you think that is? Probably for the same reasons that the Twitter users got banned for exposing 20,000+ active accounts that contained child pornography, yet the accounts that actually tweet and retweet these images are still up and running. Funny how censorship works. They don’t really believe in Pizzagate just like they do not believe that Hillary Clinton had an FBI agent killed for supposedly leaking her emails, or that three million people “illegally voted” for Clinton in this election.

The Wikileaks informant who was murdered? His name

229 was Seth Rich. You know what they do believe? That Hillary Clinton – and liber- als more generally –are their enemy. And because they have labeled them their enemy, they believe they are at war with them. And in this war they are looking for weapons. The internet, which has found a way to monetize their hate, has been happy to provide them with these weapons.

What is amazing about this is that Pizzagate transcends politics and has brought the people together, more so than any other national/global event ever could. Some of us are “liber- als.” Some of us are “conservatives.” A growing number of us haven’t even stepped foot inside the US, and yet, we stand together on this.

Democrats and Republicans are both implicated in Pizza- gate. The Bushes and the Clintons are implicated, as well as many, many others on both sides of the political spectrum.

We are looking for weapons? If you are considering “truth” and “information” to be weapons, you are exactly right. Knowledge IS power. This is an agreement they have willingly entered into with the internet: it provides them with the content that justifies their hate, they provide the clicks and shares that pay the bills of fake-news factories.

Oh. Like this place and CNN right? Because if I remember correctly, I remember MSM stating that Donald Trump never had a chance of winning the election. They were not duped, they are not taken advantage of. They willingly take whatever outrageous story fits their unjustified hatred at face-value without asking any questions. And they are deciding to spread those lies to others looking for a funnel that they can pour their vitriol down.

We are the only ones asking any questions. We read John Podesta’s emails. We asked ourselves “why” there are multiple

230 emails talking in obvious code. We ask “what” this code could be referencing. We have been asking questions. Questions like “why” are so many of our government leaders are friends with known pedophiles like Denny Hastert, Jeffrey Epstein, Clem- ent Freud, and Terry Bean?

…and “why” hasn’t there ever been a crackdown on other “conspiracy theories”, such 9/11? ”What” makes Pizzagate so special? We did, and continue to, ask questions. We have thousands of questions. But they are never addressed. Why is no one else asking these things?

There will likely be a few people who will believe the lie, a few angry, violent and deluded people in crisis who are desperate to belong to something who will honestly believe these horrific lies. They will show up at a pizza shop with a gun, endangering the lives of many people. Just as a man showed up at a Planned Parenthood clinic last year, killing three people, believing the lie that almost nobody else honestly did, that Planned Parenthood was selling baby parts. People can and will die because of these lies, but people will continue to spread them, because people die in war.

We spread the truth. We don’t suppress information. We feel that the people deserve to know the truth about the horrific truth, no matter how upsetting it is. We share info amongst each other, and research each other’s research. If we see someone spreading false information, we call them out on it and let others know as well, to minimize the spread of disinfo.

Countless numbers of children already have been abused and killed because these scandals keep getting covered up, but we live in a different time now. We are in the beginning stages of a mass awakening. When people finally realize what is really going on, they are not going to be happy.

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The internet is not evil and we are not innocent children. The internet gives us what we want and makes money off of that. Whether you want truth or lies, the internet can give you either – and people will be able to make a living off of that. But when you hate someone, truth is not what you’re in the market for.

We hate people who hurt children. We hate that this has been going on for decades and it keeps getting covered up. We hate the fact that we don’t trust the media to do the job they are getting paid to do. We hate that we have lost absolute faith in not only the media, but our government, and our law enforcement agencies.

We are not “in the market” for anything except justice.

When you look at scandals like Pizzagate, you should be sad and afraid, but not about how “gullible” the American public is. You should be terrified of how low some of us are willing to stoop – the lies some of us are willing to spread and the lives some of us are willing to risk and ruin – in order to destroy our political foes. Again, this isn’t about politics. This is about the children whose lives have already been risked and ruined because nobody wants to talk about this. That is the only thing this is about. If anyone is to be afraid of anything, whether they want to believe this is real or not, is the undeniable truth that the government and the media are doing everything in their power to discredit and bury this. If there wasn’t at least some truth to Pizzagate, why would the media and the government go to such unprecedented measures to keep this from spreading?

When we are right, all we need is the truth to justify our actions. If the truth doesn’t suffice, that’s a good indicator that we are wrong. We should all be investigating that second of satisfaction and justification we feel when we see a headline claiming horrific wrongdoing by those we op-

232 pose, because therein lies our undoing. Pizzagate is a lie, but what it says about our society is real.

Yes, please keep telling your readers to investigate Pizza- gate for themselves. That is exactly what we have been urging everyone to do. No one should believe or disbelieve a story like this until they do their own research. Some people need to be presented with more facts and evidence than others before they start realizing the truth in this, but eventually they do all come to the same conclusion. Pizzagate is real.

The public is much less gullible than it ever was. More and more people are beginning to ask questions. I suggest that you (and other media outlets that claim Pizzagate is a hoax, without presenting any evidence or counterclaims whatsoever against it) take your own advice and think for yourselves before you lose ALL credibility.

According to the most recent Gallup polls, government distrust is at an all time high (81%), and the public’s trust in mass media is at all time low (40%). More and more people have been turning to alternative news to get the truth, because they can’t depend on mainstream media to provide it. Your coverage of Pizzagate is a prime example of this.

This is only the beginning. Pandora’s box has been opened and there is no closing it now. Big media outlets can keep claiming Pizzagate is just a “conspiracy theory.” The government can keep insisting that “fake news” is Russian propaganda in an attempt to keep this story from being talked about. But I am only one of thousands that “know too much”. Once you know about all the things that we know, you cannot un- know it. Once you have seen the things that we have seen, you cannot un-see it. THIS is what keeps us going. THIS is why we have not given this up, and also why we will NEVER give

233 up. This is why Pizzagate is so big. It is growing despite every pathetic attempt the government and the media have taken to shut this up. Not only is Pizzagate not going away, the attention given to this topic continues to grow on a daily basis.” ______

Satanists did not begin as resistance, as I had grown up believing, to a hypocritical and tyrannical Church. A group of freethinkers rebelling against evil. Not even close. Devil-worship has always existed, and the Church arose to combat it, to drive it back into the shadows where it belongs. Sure, over the years, the Church fell into the hands of evil men from time to time, but at the heart it was always a bastion of light. A means of controlling the masses, but not in a bad way. It kept us from giving into our dark desires, and fought the evil that at all times battles for our souls. I don’t mean metaphorically. I know it sounds crazy, and you’ll want to put this down as conspiracy theory, but devil worshippers are all around us. In the supermarket. On the street. They handle your money at the bank, they prepare the food you eat, they sit next to you at church—if you go. They appear perfectly normal until you catch them in the right place, at the right time. And these people stick together. They take care of their own and if you offend one, you’re blacklisted by all. Your life is made difficult in every way they can manage, which is no small amount. They are behind governmental cover-ups and media blackouts. Some are behind your luggage being lost at the airport, your credit rating slashed, your food contaminated. Your sudden losing streak is not plain old bad karma. It has nothing to do with luck. Does it sound far-fetched? Absolutely. But it explains a lot that used to perplex me. Partial-birth abortion, for example. Satanists say that the younger a victim is, the more powerful its sacrifice. It is the reason certain people cheered when it was

234 legalized. If you can outsource those sacrifices, just imagine. And below is what I have to say about the Pizzagate scandal. In 2016, WikiLeaks released the Podesta emails. If you’re behind on that, you can look it up, too. The Cliff’s Notes version is the Podesta brothers talked about having the pizza they got for Christmas, several months later when real pizza would have gone bad. They repeatedly incriminated themselves using pedophilia code words you can see on the FBI’s website. If a person talks about pizza like that, what they mean is, sex with a little boy. Pasta is sex with a little girl. Ping-pong is a three- some. The origin is the initials, CP for Child Porn, which became Cheese Pizza. There are thousands of pizza restaurants used as fronts for a massive child trafficking ring. After the Podesta emails were released, there were sting operations resulting in dozens of arrests across the US and Canada, and the rescue of hundreds of missing children. In my investigation of it, I found many disturbing screenshots that made no sense at first, but the more I saw, I began to piece together a very shocking organized crime ring. Just like a pair of shoes tied together, hanging by the laces from a power line signify drugs for sale in the nearest house, a pizza joint with a spiraling triangle means you can buy children who have either been bought from orphanages, snatched from playgrounds, or born into slavery by teenaged prostitutes. There are underground tunnels in Washington DC, along NW Connecticut Ave with openings at several locations where the pedophilia symbols are present, either on their signs or on their websites. Tesarol Bistro has a little hand inside a big hand and a little heart inside a big heart. Right next door is Beyond Borders, the headquarters of a charity focused on Haiti, which is rumored to be a front for smuggling children. The story was just about to be broken when the lady reporter who wrote it was murdered. So, I don’t think I should say anything about it. I’d better not.

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Across the street and a few doors up are Bestia Pizza, with the Boy Lover logo thinly disguised as a piece of pizza, Huck’s Fishing & Camping and a nightmarish freakshow: the afore- mentioned _____ Pizza & Ping Pong. The last two are owned by Jeff Alefantis, a man GQ named one of the 50 Most Pow- erful people in DC. A pizza guy. Powerful person #49. Go in his pizza joint, which advertises itself as kid-friendly, and see murals of naked adults getting blown by children, and more naked adults passing around severed heads. There is one in the bathroom of a naked man jerking off, playing ping pong with an alien. “Shut up and fuck” is written on the wall, with “Amen” underneath it. I think I’d’ve washed it off if it wasn’t part of my décor. Since no one had, I guess he didn’t mind. Their publicity has a drawing of someone jerking off, pizza coming out of the tip of his dick. Also graphics of naked people in various poses, covering themselves with slices of pizza. Flyers for concerts announce that all ages are welcome to see bands like the Sex Stains, and their Instagram has a photo of a drag queen called Ms Summer Camp, mostly nude, covered in blood, posing next to a bloody glute print with an unmistakable circle on the floor. There are child-sized cages on top of a kind of pergola behind him. They have a picture of a metal-walled dungeon, captioned “The Kill Room.” There are photos of children hanging from shackles set in the wall, a little girl with her outstretched arms taped down to a table, a little baby doll with a large price tag. There are videos of their concerts, where a drag queen MC named ‘Majestic Ape’ makes tasteless pedophilia jokes onstage and the people cheer. There’s really nothing else it can be. It’s definitely not a kid-friendly pizza joint. All of these places are apparently connected by catacombs dug by a Smithsonian entomologist named Harrison G. Dyar. He decorated them with sculpted animal and human heads. In one arch, he carved Facilis descensus Averno—a line from Virgil,

236 meaning “descent to the Underworld is easy,” or, figuratively, “the road to evil is smooth.” The story is, he dug them just to dig them. They served no real purpose. But that is, of course, just the story. Abducted children are moved between these places, and many others, because the tunnels honeycomb the city. Those addresses on Connecticut Avenue, then, are gateways to Hell.

Some of the murals in the “kid-friendly” pizza restaurant.

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I apologize for the low resolution. This is the best I can do in this medium. All of these screenshots are available online, however, along with many others unfit to print.

Oh, look, what do we have here? Fun for all ages!

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XIX

Now let’s lighten things up and talk about abortion. I understand that a lot of women have abortions because they just can’t handle a kid at the time. It would be inconvenient. I get that. And a small number of abortions are had by rape victims who, for some reason or other, do not take advantage of the resources available to them when they go to a hospital, and some have to have one because of health reasons.

I get that.

Let’s speak plainly. There is no such thing as an accidental pregnancy, or a surprise. The whole point of sex is to reproduce, and if you do not take advantage of all the methods available to you to avoid it, pregnancy will result. It’s the most obvious

241 thing in the world. But, that’s not what I’m here to talk about. What I want you to understand is why it’s such a hot topic issue. Why do the people who control your minds—I mean the people involved in politics—constantly throw fuel on the fire of the debate and get people so riled up, to the extent that they will run around half-naked, paint themselves green, attack churches and assault the Catholics trying to defend them? To the extent that they would stage horrifically vulgar protests in public, with babies tortured in effigy? It’s Walter Lippmann’s manufacture of consent. Those in charge could never convince people to stop having children by just coming out and saying it. It’s the most basic instinct of all. It is what we are on this planet to do—propagate the species. But the elite are outnumbered, in spite of all the wars the US is fighting all over the world. The people at home continue churning out babies at a record rate, and it isn’t even to replace the lives lost overseas, because the soldiers just aren’t dying like they used to. Back in the good ol’ days, you start a war, send people off to die, and maybe they gained you some new property. Take the so-called “Big Push” in the trenches during World War I. Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig could not have gotten to be a Field Marshal by being a complete idiot. So why would he insist on ordering all his men to walk slowly en masse into the crosshairs of chattering German machine guns, getting mown down pitifully, again and again? Could he really be so dumb? No. I suggest he did it on purpose, culling thousands of young men so they wouldn’t ever make it home to Blighty. It solves the unemployment problem back home. It helps the economy. It prevents rebellions. But Americans managed to catch on and tried to stay out of wars that they didn’t feel affected them. So, the higher-ups learned to orchestrate atrocities to infuriate common men and make them rush to enlist, like printing false pictures in news-

242 papers of Spanish customs officials in Cuba strip-searching white women without cause, or blowing up the Lusitania and then the Housatonic and blaming it on the German Navy, or goading Japan into sending planes to attack Pearl Harbor, or crashing planes into the World Trade Center and blaming it on Muslims. For example. But these days, the weapons are just too good. You can wipe out your enemy without ever getting anywhere near him. Since good old-fashioned wars aren’t keeping the population in check, the same people who start them are manufacturing the consent of their followers, convincing them to stop reproducing back home. If you’re a Democrat, your political leaders are not on your side. They’re pushing agendas that lead to your extinction and you are fighting for their right to do it. Think of it this way. The question’s been raised whether a zombie apocalypse is feasible or not, since the wholesale consumption of brains is unsustainable. Zombies would not fare well in the West because of a declining birth rate, due to the fashionability of homosexuality, abortion, and a growing reluctance of educated women to “tie themselves down” with kids until much later in life. In predominantly Muslim countries, however, they have on average four children, and at far earlier ages. Where a man takes four wives, he nets sixteen children. Therefore, in that demographic, zombie culture will flourish. Muslim countries are growing in population while we are fading away because we are being programmed to engage in behavior that suppresses the birth rates and lowers the population. It’s not about acceptance, or civil rights. It’s about convincing people to not reproduce, because the US has too many idiots running around already. Meanwhile, the Republicans in general are not having abortions or gay marriages. Instead, they celebrate the traditional family, and will continue to exist well into the future, whereas the Democrat population will dwindle and possibly disappear

243 in a few generations. But is this because the Democrat leaders are as stupid as Republicans say they are? No. Not at all. Because, like Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, they know exactly what they are doing. All of these bickering parties are a puppet show put on by an octopus, and we are enthralled, all walking into differently-decorated traps, each one set by the same mind and for the same goal. It reminds me of vampire stories. They say that a vampire can only enter your home if it is invited. Convincing you, the victim, that not allowing it in is a violation of your rights, will make you throw open the door and welcome your death with open arms. Politicians frame the debate as an equality issue, one in which women are lacking “reproductive freedom,” and say until they have full, unrestricted access to government- funded abortions, it’s impossible for them to be equal. It isn’t the killing of babies that most women are in favor of. It is the struggle to gain autonomy they don’t know they already have.

I’d like to quote from a speech delivered in 1933, by Major General Smedley Butler, USMC. “War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses. “I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag. “I wouldn’t go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes

244 and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket. “There isn’t a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its “finger men” to point out enemies, its “muscle men” to destroy enemies, its “brain men” to plan war preparations, and a “Big Boss” Super-Nationalistic Capi- talism. “It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gang- ster for capitalism. “I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service. “I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect reve- nues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central Ameri- can republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Do- minican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way un- molested. “During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I

245 could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”

It doesn’t all seem so far-fetched now, does it? Look, there are people who just shouldn’t reproduce. It may be a horrible thing to say, but it needs to be said. Many people who are alive today would not be if it weren’t for the medical breakthroughs and the security that advanced civilization provides. They would have been eliminated through natural selection, but instead, they get to survive and have children of their own. Thus, the quality of life is lowered. If you’re not worthy to reproduce and continue your line, use a condom or get surgery and don’t have kids, but if you are, you owe it to your ancestors, who had crawled out of the primordial slime to fight with fang and claw every day just for a warm place to sleep that night, for a scrap of food to eat. All of them for hundreds of thousands of years, through the rises and falls of civilizations, faced ungodly horrors, to make all the people who’d made you, and now here you are, the pinnacle of their evolution, talking about throwing it all away. If you do have children, remember they’re a blank canvas, and it is your job to fill it. Will you make them into people like Karen and Marshall, or Ginger? Or will you raise them to be philosopher kings, who’ll rise to the occasion and take control when the fit hits the shan? If the people should rise up and say Enough, will your child be the one who stops the descent into anarchy that will inevitably follow? Who will prevent savagery from plunging us once again into the Dark Ages? There is a supercomputer in your pocket with access to far more knowledge than Napoleon or George Washington—or, for that matter, Hitler or Stalin or Mao—could ever dream of. Will you use it to teach your children or to take selfies?

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So, what can we do? Aside from rebellion, which I am not advising. People get imprisoned and executed for that kind of thing. My first suggestion, after reversing your mental polarity, changing your diet, and freeing your mind from group identi- fication, is to act like a man. I’m talking to the males at this point. Ladies, you can keep reading, but this is for them. Do you know the origin of the word Faggot? It doesn’t really mean “gay,” and gay men can be gay without being faggots, and straight men can be faggots without being gay. First, it meant “kindling.” The small pieces of wood used to start a fire. In Britain, they began to call cigarettes faggots, or fags. In boarding school, the bigger kids would push around the smaller or wimpier kids in the dominance hierarchy, and take their fags. The kids that didn’t stand up for themselves, and would be killed off early if it weren’t for the rule of law, then became synonymous with faggots. Delicate guys. If you recall my earlier stories about Ginger, she told me once that the reason she treated me so badly was, simply, that I let her. I was weak, so she pushed me around. I have noticed since then that women have a low tolerance for men who care too much about appearing nonthreatening. Males who do any of the things we were told in the 90s that we had to do, don’t really blow women’s skirts up. I cannot speak for everyone, but the reasons I was weak were, apart from my upbringing, the bombardment in high school and college of this bizarre and very unsexy “morality.” I was told that I had to ask specific permission to touch a girl here, or here, and couldn’t escalate the passion naturally. This programming my generation was subjected to made a lot of us go overboard trying to assure girls we were nonthreatening. It gave a lot of girls no choice but to look for abusive men to be dominant with them. Hold your knee-jerk righteous indigna-

247 tion for a moment while I explain. You’ve made it this far. We’re doing what our society has taught us to do, trying to appeal to women’s emotions, be supportive and comforting, behaving in ways that modern women say they want us to, and we’re being rebuffed because—while women may say this is exactly what they want—they don’t. Discussing feelings, especially, is the very thing that’ll turn women off, no matter how much they claim to want it. Nobody wants a faggot. You absolutely must be the leader, or she will ditch you for someone who is, even if he just seems to be. I have two Facebook friends who I met in my restaurant, on their honeymoon, who are now divorced. One is Danish, the other Finnish, and they looked like the perfect Scandinavi- an couple. Both had long blonde hair, great posture, impecca- ble manners. He has a long, manly beard and collects swords. He even goes to a sword club and practices with others, trying to keep the masculine warrior tradition alive. The problem is he’s a pussy. She started cheating, privately and then openly, shaved her head, started dressing like a man, and divorced him. Instead of Helena, her name, she now goes by He. But why? I can only speak from what I’ve been told by both of them and what I’ve seen that they publish online. His Facebook posts are often lengthy complaints about his being mistreated by someone, and he’s quick to condemn any kind of masculine behavior. For example, even saying “Good morning” to a woman you don’t know is “verbal assault.” There was a several-hour video circulating a few years ago, wherein a woman walked around Manhattan, being filmed by someone walking ahead of her. They kept a count of all the people who said “Hello” to her, or “How you doing?” or anything at all. These were called “verbal assault.” Now, some of them were catcalling, sure. Some were rude. A few of them even got aggressive, but a lot of them did not. Calling every instance “verbal assault” is silly, especially when the same

248 people who condemn speaking to a woman also defend Joe Biden for groping little girls and kissing women on the back of their necks after just meeting them. She was “verbally assaulted” 108 times, notably by males dressed in a manner inconsistent with working men on their lunch break, so I don’t consider them representative of men in general. But the makers of the video claimed it demonstrates how toxic men are. Not just lower-income men, not just trash, but all men. We are all tarred with the same brush. Someone made a rebuttal video, wherein a male walked the streets and got the same catcalls from other men, and also women. While discussing the video and all of the claims made regarding it, the Dane condemned the video’s “excusionism,” and the man’s putting “harassment” in quotations as “class A douchebaggery,” saying that no matter what, catcalling is unacceptable. While I may not like catcalling, I have to disagree. First off, unacceptable to you is not unacceptable to someone else, as evidenced by the fact that the most important people in this case are women, and with the exception of a minority, they not only accept it, they approve. I’ll “mansplain” how in just a second. In the meantime, we can use him as the case in point. She left him. His following relationships all had an unhappy ending. Now he cites the catcalling woes of his girlfriend who lives in New York, and I have yet to tell him that, if he lives in Denmark and she lives in New York, she’s not his girlfriend. Those assholes on the street, however, tend to have at least one girl in their lives. I am seeing a lot of guys, especially forgettable white guys, shouting in public over the plight of women and minorities as a way to ingratiate themselves and possibly get laid. Outrage is trendy nowadays, and it has a low-ability threshold, so anyone can scream and insult people for the cell phone cameras, hoping to become famous on YouTube. It has started an epidemic of one-upmanship, males trying to outdo one another in their defense of the victim du jour, with the hope of standing out in

249 the herd. Unfortunately for them, the girls they try to impress are being turned off by that defense and looking to each other for sexual companionship. Now, remember what I said about Life imitating Art? This is a perfect example. For decades, we in the West have been programmed by film and television to accept the inversion of masculine and feminine roles. Have you noticed, many male characters have become Homer Simpson? A bunch of hapless nitwits who succeed only by accident, while the female lead saves the day? People have come to believe in that, to the great detriment of our culture. I’m going to quote one of my experiences from Memoirs of a Swine Volume II, because it mystified me for years until now:

Esmeralda opened a tab for me at the bar, and handed me the first of many drinks, and the next few hours were a happy blur. As it got dark, she went into the back and came out with a pile of clothes, dumping them onto the floor. “What’s that?” I asked Todd. “This,” he said. “Is Ladies’ Night and that is our wardrobe. Three quetzal Cubas and screwdrivers for guys, if you put on one of those dresses.” “Are you serious?” He nodded, eyes wide. “You won’t believe how much fun it is. Go pick out a dress.” I went skeptically over to the pile of clothes, looking from it to Esmeralda, and she nodded. “Go ahead.” It was a bunch of cheap trashy dresses from the Paca, out behind the market, where the poorest people get their clothes, and these dresses looked like they were destined for the cheap whorehouses on the outskirts of town. I chose the trashiest dress of them all, and went into my dorm to change. Shaking my head at my reflection in the mirror, I chuckled and went back out to the courtyard. I was met with cheers and whistles and catcalls. All of the guests, boys

250 and girls alike, were laughing, and they went looking for their dresses right away. Esmeralda had to tell the girls No, sorry. It was for boys to wear only. It was amazing. Right up until then, the hostel was filled with guys that were affecting unfriendliness by macho posing, making sure everybody knew they were ‘absolutely not gay’ and too cool for this place. Then, they put on dresses, and boom! It was gay pride night in Jungle Party. Strangers sidled up to me at the bar saying “Hey sailor, what ship are you from?” “You wanna buy a girl a drink, studmuffin?” Man, it was hilarious. The place came alive in no time. At eight, that’s when London Todd announced the dance-off. We had to dance as badly as we could to very gay songs, and three chicks were chosen out of the crowd to be judges. The three girls sat on the floor with their backs to the bar, looking up at all of us idiots dancing to the Village People for a bottle of cheap rum. I had a good time, and then was a little shocked at this one guy, a muscular brute, who went up to the chick with the short hair―who I was convinced was a lesbian. He braced his legs wide, putting his crotch right in her face, to gyrate and make her squeal with shame and disgust. We all just stopped and watched with mouths agape. The other two judges screamed as loudly as the poor girl, and that only encouraged the guy. He planted one foot up on the front of the bar to get his junk even closer, and I was sure he was rubbing himself against the tip of her nose. When the music stopped, we went back to our drinks and the judges conferred. A few seconds later, London Todd announced “We have a winner!” and the three girls unanimously declared the muscular brute Jungle Party dancing champion. I was really shocked then. Seriously? But I thought that stuff was reprehensible? I learned a lot about people at that moment. I’ll go ahead and tell you that, for the next few weeks, I danced in every Ladies’ Night dance-off, and this happened every time. No kidding. A guy would do this, and every girl judge that

251 was ‘disgusted’ by it ended up voting for him. If this book was fiction, my character would then try it himself and fail misera- bly, and be looked on with the disgust you would think all the other guys should have been. And I could rail about how unfair it was and blah blah blah. But it’s not, and I never did it, because there are some things I just don’t do.

The undeniable fact, though, is that that beast of a man always went on to sleep with one of the girls there, and I think it’s because, on a deep level she wouldn’t admit to herself, she was turned off by the men in dresses. The overcompensation, the “toxic masculinity” of the dance champion, was necessary for her to be aroused. It doesn’t matter if you find it acceptable, if it’s true. The Incel Rebellion and the majority of serial killers are comprised of males who are resentful of women for not sleeping with them. Perhaps no one ever explained to them what it is about them that makes them undesirable. Whenever women are approached by interested males, they are evolutionarily hardwired to size them up and judge whether they’re potential mates. Is this the man who’ll keep me safe during the zombie apocalypse, and I should repopulate the world with afterward? They often don’t realize that’s what they’re thinking, but they are. That’s why they will repeatedly test men even long after they have chosen to be with them. If you haven’t heard of this, you can look it up as “shit test,” but since I find that term unintellectual and vulgar, we’ll continue referring to it as simply “testing.” One subtle way they’ll test is by asking, when they see that he likes a certain song, “Omigod you actually like this?” Like, omigod, right? Ewww. Maybe they don’t have anything against the song at all. It is his reaction that they are looking for. Will he, in an effort to avoid admitting to like something she hates, pretend he doesn’t like it? If so, he lacks the spine to stand up for himself and is

252 no longer worth her time. She will lose respect for him. The only correct answer is “Hell yes, I like it. You don’t?” We are in an age right now where males are programmed to please women at our own expense, and I do not see that as something women should be blamed for. It is an artificial way to weed out unworthy men and prevent them from passing on their genes. Unfortunately, those males can become resentful, and have access to guns. I’ll get back to that a little later. It’s up for debate that that is why so many white women are turning to darker men for love. I’ve heard Dr. Jordan Pe- terson say that there’s an inherent attraction for that totalitari- an male dominance that feminists have chased out of the west. The more women scream for equality, the more their unconscious longs to be dominated. While many would like that not to be true, I’d like to cite the evidence one cannot deny, namely, porn analytics. Since porn is the number one internet industry, there are people who analyze it and take notice of what people search for. It has been found that people overwhelming search for “weird porn,” which means that there is no normal. While women search significantly less for porn than men do, search rates for porn featuring violence against women are at least twice as common among women than men. Sophia Rahman wrote a great article for Vice.com in May 2017: Why Are So Many Women Searching for Ultra-Violent Porn? I’ll paraphrase. “If there is a genre of porn in which violence is perpetrat- ed against a woman, my analysis of the data shows that it almost always appeals disproportionately to women,” wrote Dr. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a former Google data scientist, based on his study of access to PornHub’s search and views data. The results are in. About 25% of straight porn searches by women are for videos featuring violence against other women. 5% are for nonconsensual sex. Rahman asked “But why are so many women so keen to

253 see videos tagged with, say, ‘painful anal crying,’ ‘public dis- grace’ or ‘extreme brutal gangbang’? Or content marked as ‘forced’ or ‘rape’? The feminist porn movement―one focus- ing on equality and empowerment―might be thriving, but the data shows, proportionally, women are also consuming much more of the most extreme misogynistic sexual material available online. Researchers from Notre Dame and University of North Texas let 355 young women listen to an erotic rape fantasy and investigated how aroused they became. 52% of them had fantasies about forced sex with a man, 32% about being raped and 28% about being forced to perform oral sex on a man. Overall, 62% of the women reported having had at least one fantasy around a forced sex act. First, I ought to say the test subjects reported being less repressed about sex, open to fantasies in general, more likely to have consensual fantasies and had high self-esteem. So, the assumptions one might make that they were not the ideal test subjects have already been taken into consideration. They’re fine. They are more or less “normal.” In the fantasy, the male is strongly attracted to the female character. He expresses his desire for sex, but she’s unresponsive. She continues to refuse his advances until he overpowers and rapes her. She resists throughout, and at no time gives consent, but somehow experiencing gratification from it. You would think they were repulsed by it, but just like the brute on Ladies’ Night, they ate it up. Like Esther Perel says, “Most of us will get turned on at night by the very same things that we will demonstrate against during the day―the erotic mind is not very politically correct.” I’m absolutely not saying to act that way, like the brute or any of the actors in these porn videos. What I’m saying is, act like men instead of a bunch of pussies, so that girls don’t have to go to this extreme in their search for a mate. And how do you act like a man?

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First, take control of your mind. Do not be one of those people who throw a fit and then later, instead of apologizing, say “I was upset.” Do not be my father, getting revenge on his bully from fifty years ago by beating up his children today. When I catch myself revisiting a memory that I know will lead to anger, one of those neural pathways I created long ago, I have found that my mind can be called back with exercises like these:

1) Pick a word or phrase that’ll bring you back to the present. It can be something like “Bananas.” Whatever you want. Mine is “The one you feed,” to remind me of the two wolves.

2) Take 3 deep breaths with six-second exhales. Concentrate on your breathing.

3) Look around and notice things—a tiny plant growing out of a crack in the pavement. A cobweb in the corner. Then, try to imagine that you are not standing in a room or on a street, but on the surface of an enormous rock, spinning around a gigan- tic ball of flaming gas—which are, in fact, quite small.

4) Your posture affects the way you feel and your level of confidence. Timid, unsexy people try to make themselves smaller, as if they are hiding. They hunch over, cross their arms, look down, and keep their feet together. As unpopular as “man- spreading” may be, it is a sign of confidence. I am not advising anyone to do it, just to understand it. Stronger people don’t try to hide. Imagine you have a light coming out of your sternum, and it’s a light you have to let all the world see. When people aren’t confident, they hide that light by hunching over and rounding their shoulders, trying to protect it. Every time I catch myself doing that, I do a triumphant pose with my arms outstretched and my back arched. Just stand there with my arms out, and my head back, like the end of 300 when Leoni-

255 das embraces the falling hail of arrows. Do that, the “power pose,” and you will change your attitude and maintain your composure no matter what happens. Try not to do it in public, though. You’ll look like a fruitcake.

Now, finally, the point of this book—the Hero Mindset. What is it you really like about James Bond? He’s cool, in that he’s non-reactive in times of danger, and he gets the job done in record time without complaining. There’s really nothing he can’t do. How is this possible? Simple. He works hard. You don’t see it in between scenes where he’s thwarting the villain and getting the girl. They don’t bother to show you that part because it’s not sexy. But what he is doing is practicing all of the things he’ll need to do. That isn’t some raw talent that he just happened to have. The stars were not aligned just right when he was conceived, so he was born a card shark, dancer and genius of improvisational violence. And women don’t love him because he just happened to get bitten by a radioactive love spider. Everything that he knows he will have to do, not just for his mission, but throughout life in general, he trains for. He dresses very well, has good conversation skills, speaks a variety of languages, and has a wide range of competence― all of which can be learned, and these days, easily and inexpen- sively. I got my education on style from Pinterest. For a little while, I followed a Turkish model named Tufanir, and bought good quality cloth from the wholesalers to be made into suits and outfits by local tailors. That way they fit me perfectly. When I lived in Orlando, all the guys wore the same thing: shorts, flip-flops, t-shirts and baseball caps, and yunno what? They were a bunch of douchebags. If you want to look like them, go right ahead, but don’t complain about the class of girl who settles for you. Conversation skills? I cannot recommend Dale Carnegie’s book How to Win Friends and Influence People enough. Best book

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I’ve ever read, aside from 48 Laws of Power. When I’m king, those two will be required reading for all of my subjects. About the languages, really, speaking a different language isn’t that hard. Just think of it as a different way to say something. That’s all it is. And as the world gets smaller, a lot more people are becoming multilingual. Here’s a joke, by the way: What do you call someone who speaks many languages? Multilingual. What do you call someone who speaks two languages? Bilingual. What do you call someone who speaks only one language? An American. You wanna be that guy? The butt of other countries’ jokes? Or do you want to be the one who hooks up with a smoking hot Venezuelan chick at the club, or doesn’t get his ass kicked by the Mexicans down at the 2:00am taco cart? You can at least learn a little bit of everything, like I did. It really opens doors for you, just showing people that you tried. Something that bugs me about tourists anywhere I go, they all start speaking English to the locals. In my restaurant, even if they are not native English speakers, they’ll assume the chapín waiters understand English, and start yakking away, and then complain later that they weren’t understood. Honestly, buy a fricken phrasebook. Don’t assume speaking pidgin English counts as “speaking Spanish.” Every day, someone starts speaking English to a local and gets annoyed that no one understands them. And stop asking people if they speak English. If they came up to you in your country and asked if you spoke Spanish, you’d laugh at them. I’ve seen it. Competence. There are these myths that abound regarding how black people can automatically dance and gays inherently have good taste. In reality, it has nothing at all to do with the color of your skin or sexual preference. It’s just that, stereo- typically, people of certain persuasions have certain interests, and pursue them. Latin and black people know the importance

257 of dance, so they study and practice it. Remember what I said about the mating rituals in the club? Dancing matters. When I was in middle school, I’d be standing in the lunch line behind black girls who were practicing dance moves right there. I realized that that was why they always seemed to know how to do it―because they actually did. It wasn’t a mystery to them like it was to my friends and me, who would never have thought to talk about it, much less practice amongst ourselves. “Check this out, I did this last night. Yunno the part when it goes Baba daba doom? How about we go like this?” And they tried it a couple of times until they had it down pat, and I had to admit, it looked pretty good. Gay guys in general have style because they care about it, and pursue the development of good taste. They go to fashion shows, and read books and magazines and interviews with the people they admire. They take an interest and develop it. Therefore, James Bond would have had to devote a lot of time and effort to the perfection of all his skills in order to use them flawlessly when the occasion demanded. But he’s a fictional character. So? There are plenty of men who aren’t, and who are sweeping your dream girl off her feet at this moment while you’re busy practicing, what? Beer pong? Watching sports? Let me go off on another rant here for a second. Over one hundred years ago, HG Wells published a book that inspired a few of the ways we are kept stupid. People in power who read that book built temples all over the world to replace churches, temples where people would worship men instead of gods. Instead of caring about world events, people would devote much of their lives and identities to the study of men who play games that children are expected to grow out of. No one back then believed it was possible. It was just another of HG Wells’ fantasies, like lasers, atomic bombs, and email. In his book, the men “rode horses, raced chariots, fought, and played competitive games of skill, and the dull, cowardly

258 and base came in thousands to admire, and howl, and bet.” In short time, the men “degenerated fast enough into a sort of athletic prostitute, with all the defects, all the vanity, trickery, and self-assertion of the common actor, and with even less intelligence.” (A Modern Utopia, HG Wells) When a male’s manhood has been taken away, he projects it onto others, living vicariously through their struggle, taking pleasure in their triumphs so that he can feel better about his own defeat. He will strip to the waist and paint himself in the colors of a city he has never visited. In some countries, he will travel in packs with other males, like dogs, and viciously attack people who wear the colors of their rival team. But ask him to stand up to the men in power who murdered his neighbors in staged massacres, to justify further trampling his rights? Never going to happen. Which brings me to the next of James Bond’s skills. Learn how to fight. You absolutely must be capable of defending yourself and your mate. If not, she will find someone who is, and rightfully so. That ridiculous claim going around the internet now, that real men do not use violence? It is a crock. If you do not have the power to kill or harm, you will always be subject to those who do. I cite the examples of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot all confiscating everyone’s guns before killing over 13, 20, 45, and 2 million people, respectively. They couldn’t’ve done it before. I do need to point out though, that while the ability to defend yourself is necessary, there’s a very old saying you must heed. Jesus said that the meek will inherit the Earth, but that’s actually a mistranslation. Of course it is, because the meek will inherit squat. The real word is, people who have swords, but know when to keep them sheathed. Everyone else, pricks who resort to violence at the drop of a hat, are not covered in that statement. You need to choose your battles wisely. In movies that cater to the lowest common denominator, the hero is often someone who loses something, like his entire

259 family, and comes back to kill all of the bad guys by himself. It isn’t original, and it isn’t much of a plot, but people eat it up because they love justified violence. But let’s be fair, they do not care about the justice of it. They want to see killing. They will then contrive reasons to justify their own violence against someone else, such as anyone who commits the heinous sin of slowing them down in traffic. I believe an example of the violence women will approve of could be seen at the screenings of two films: The Passion of the Christ, and Avengers: Endgame. The year Passion came out, Mel Gibson made it available for prisoners to watch on Easter Sunday. I saw it and was just blown away. But the real surprise came when a stunned guard came up to tell me the audience reaction over on the women’s side of the prison. He said in the Gethsemane scene, when the Lord was being tempted by Satan and a snake slithered across the ground toward him, the crowd went wild when Jesus stood up and stomped on its head. The women were screaming with such ferocity that the guards were afraid. Avengers I saw first in the cinema, then on bootleg DVDs to see how other audiences reacted. Every time, when Thanos was bashed in the head by Mjolnir, there was a collective gasp, everyone wondering who beside Thor could have thrown it. A joyful shout drowns out all sound when it boomerangs back to Captain America’s fist. But why? Cap is so square, right? Sure, Chris Evans did a great job playing the character and the writers wrote him well, yadda yadda yadda. The important thing is that, like Jesus, Cap is a righteous man. He may still be stuck in the 1940s with some of his habits, but the howl of the crowd says it all. He is the kind of man who is not just worthy of wielding Mjolnir, during the Ultron Afterparty a few movies back, when everyone was trying to lift the hammer, he could do it and pretended he couldn’t, so Thor wouldn’t look bad. If you want the women, then, you must become not just a strong man, but a righteous one. The first of those, I have tips

260 for. My advice for the second is this: imagine that you are the hero of your own movie. All day, every day, whatever you do is being watched by an audience of millions. How do you want them to see you? As someone they’ll stand up and cheer? Or a loser they will be disgusted by? About strength, I mean more than the obvious getting in shape. You need strength of character and discipline. I know, that is a big turn-off because it implies work, but luckily I have a shortcut for that, too. I see men buying testosterone supplements because they think a pill will make them more masculine, and it’s ridiculous. You don’t need to buy something your body makes naturally. All you have to do to raise your level is stop masturbating. If you satisfy yourself, you lose the motivation to succeed. If you short circuit your natural urge to excel in life and thereby attract mates, there is nothing to fight for. Have you ever had the kind of orgasm where you’re so re- laxed afterward that nothing’s important? Nothing could ever bother you? To me, it feels as if my fire has been put out. I’ve imagined it as if there was a plant growing out of my penis, with its roots going all through my body, and that plant was my vitality, and that all of it has been pulled out of me, roots and all, leaving me spent and useless. Well, I have a sneaky suspicion that great men don’t like that. They probably never masturbate, and hate that feeling of complete satisfaction. The downside is, if you never do it at all, or never have sex, your testosterone will naturally decrease. So, what I do is, boost my testosterone by touching myself in the shower after working out, and stop right before orgasm. It may sound awful, but the feeling of power that comes over me in the next moment is definitely worth a few seconds of frustration. My mind gets sharper, my will gets stronger, and it seems that that is when my pheromones come out in force. I think so because, if I do it three days in a row, I always hook up with someone. Girls seem to approach me more than when

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I am sated. Perhaps my pheromones are working overtime, or perhaps they see the alertness in my eyes. Whatever it is, it works. My productivity goes up, I get a lot more assertive, more confident, perhaps confrontational, but very definitely masculine. I don’t know if this would work for women, but I have a feeling it would have a similar result. It is a great way to build self-discipline because you can see it work immediately to your benefit, which is useful in our culture of instant gratification. Of course, the audience of my life movie are off getting more popcorn during that scene. Yours should be, too. Two other things you can do to practice self-discipline are:

Put an object on top of your television, put on your favorite show, and for five minutes, watch the object instead of the show. If you even so much as glance down at the screen, you have to start over.

And the second is more useful in today’s world. Read the comments on politically-oriented Facebook threads, especially the controversial ones. Read all of the hateful comments trolls are writing, all of the things you know in your heart are wrong, and resist the urge to respond. Don’t tell them how stupid they are, or question their ancestry, or any of that. Just realize it doesn’t affect you at all, and then get your ass back to work.

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XXI

We are bombarded in the media about “toxic masculinity,” and while I will concede that it exists, I’d like to call your attention to toxic femininity. Here is an example of both:

Many people said that, whether she willingly took her top off or not, no one has the right to touch her. If you go swimming at the beach, I’m sure you think you have a right not to be eaten by a sea monster. Jews had a right not to be rounded up and loaded onto trucks bound for concentration camps by socialists. Or, in the case of this young woman, people think they have the right to act like a whore at the douchebag con-

263 vention, and still be treated like a lady. I’m sorry, but the first step to not being grabbed like this by a bunch of douchebags is to not be surrounded by them. I do feel terrible for her that she made that dumb mistake and suffered the humiliation of it, but she should not have done that. They definitely shouldn’t’ve either, but the assumption that they wouldn’t was naïve, at best. Don’t think I am excus- ing their actions. But really, why show your boobs at all? It’s a Spring Break video uploaded in 2007. What an interesting phenomenon is Spring Break, a lot of college kids coming to Florida to get drunk and hook up with strangers once a year, to just go wild. Sounds suspiciously like the same fertility festival that every pagan culture had since forever. We’ve just changed the name of it and continued to do it. If you look up the video, she is making the devil’s horns sign with her hand right before she lifts her shirt, and again after she’s comforted. Does that mean she is a devil-worshipper? I doubt it. But this is how ingrained it is into our society, that such a sign means to Party. The best of the devil’s tricks…but I digress. Something similar happened to a young woman on a video I saw, who’d smeared glitter on her boobs so she could walk around bare-chested at an Australian music festival. Surprise! Some schmuck came up behind her to squeeze a boob and run away. Sure, he didn’t have the right to do it. We can agree he was wrong. But her online indictment of rape culture that followed was worthy of an eye-roll and little else. First off, that was evidence of grope culture, if anything. And what did she think would happen? Her sense of enti- tlement that she could do that while surrounded by a bunch of drunken youths, speaks volumes about her. Like I said earlier, it doesn’t matter if you find it unacceptable. It’ll happen anyway, like gunmen in a gun-free zone, so you’d do better to not open yourself up to it. Before I go on, I have to point out that breastfeeding your baby in public is absolutely not toxic femininity, or bad form,

264 or anything like that. That’s what boobs are for. Anyone who doesn’t like to see it can look the other way and get on with their life. That is natural and sacred, and no one can touch it. When people use their boobs for other purposes, like what I’ll describe next, that’s when I call foul. In my restaurant, I have had girls flirt with me rather often and I didn’t rebuff them. Then, when their bill came, they’ve acted shocked that I wasn’t giving them their meal or the wine they drank for free. They caused a scene, accusing me of being a jerk, not understanding their predicament, not caring how good they’d been about not spending too much. They’ve pout- ed, actually sticking their bottom lip out in the most comical fashion. I’ve kept my cool, but been firm, and when they had finally paid, they stormed out in a huff…and on several occa- sions, came back to press themselves to me, rubbing a warm breast against my arm, and ask me if I was mad at them. Why I call this toxic femininity is the arrogance some girls have, saying they have the right to behave however they wish without consequences. They can falsely accuse males of rape, ruin their lives, and get away with it. They can hit men without being hit back. They can marry affluent men for the express purpose of divorcing them. I am told that’s her right. It is now the practice of some to begin the divorce process by emptying the bank accounts, and having a police officer at the house to prevent the poor husband from entering his home while she steals whatever she wants, and arrest him when he gets upset. The man loses everything and she is praised for it. Yet we live in a “patriarchy” where women are “oppressed.” And you can say that not all women do this, and of course you would be right, but take a moment to Google when men have said #NotAllMen and feminists reacted with disgust. We all know that women regularly use males for financial support, or as errand boys, chauffeurs, validation, shoulders to cry on, free meals, anything they can get away with, knowing full well that he is hoping for a relationship—or at least affec-

265 tion and companionship—in return. We just shake our heads at the poor sucker and agree that he deserves it for being a chump. But if he finally speaks up about it, and she denounces him for daring to think such a thing, that is toxic femininity. “Oh, I thought we were friends! Do you think I’m obligated to like you that way, just because you pay for everything?” is a common narcissist’s way of turning it back on him, to make him feel bad for calling her out. Heather Heying wrote a great article about it for Quillette, in which she recounted a story: “I had a student on one of my study abroad trips who had a perennial problem with clothing. She was never wearing enough of it. She was smart, athletic, and beautiful, but also intent on advertising hotness at all moments. At a field station in a jungle in Latin America, she approached me to complain that the local men were looking at her. The rest of us were wearing field gear—a distinctly unrevealing and unsexy garb. She was in a swimsuit. “Put on more clothes,” I told her. She was aghast. She wanted me to change the men, to talk to them about where to point their eyes. Here in their home, where we were visitors, and one of the gringos had shown up nearly naked, she wanted the men to change.” “Yes, toxic masculinity exists,” she wrote. “But the use of the term has been weaponized. It is being hurled without care at every man. When it emerged, its use seemed merely impre- cise—in most groups of people, there’s some guy waiting for an opportunity to fondle a woman’s ass without her consent, put his hand where he shouldn’t, right? That’s who was being outed as toxic. Those men—and far, far worse—do exist. Ob- viously. But wait—does every human assemblage contain such men? It does not. This term, toxic masculinity, is being wielded indiscriminately, and with force. We are not talking impre- cision now, we are talking thoroughgoing inaccuracy. “Most men are not toxic. Their maleness does not make them toxic, any more than one’s ‘whiteness’ makes one racist.

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Assume for the moment that we could agree on terms: Is maleness more highly correlated with toxic masculinity than is femaleness? Yes. Ipso facto—the term is about maleness, so men will display more of it than will women. The logical leap is then concluding that all men are toxic. The very communities where ‘toxic masculinity’ is being discussed most are the communities where the men are, in my experience, compassionate, egalitarian, and not at all toxic. “Calling good men toxic does everyone a deep disservice. Everyone except those who seek empowerment through victim narratives. “For the record: I am not suggesting that actual victims do not exist, nor that they do not deserve full emotional, physical, legal, medical, and other support. I also do not want to minimize the fact that most women, perhaps even all, have experienced unpleasantness from a subset of men. But not all women are victims. And even among those women who have truly suffered at the hands of men, many—most, I would hazard to guess—do not want their status in the world to be ‘victim.’ “Historical appetites and desires persist. Straight men will look at beautiful women, especially if those women are a) young and hot and b) actively displaying. Display invites attention. Hotness-amplifying femininity puts on a full display, advertising fertility and urgent sexuality. It invites male attention by, for instance, revealing flesh, or by painting on signals of sexual receptivity. This, I would argue, is inviting trouble. No, I did not just say that she was asking for it. I did, however, just say that she was displaying herself, and of course she was going to get looked at. “The amplification of hotness is not, in and of itself, toxic, although personally, I don’t respect it, and never have. Hot- ness fades, wisdom grows—wise young women will invest accordingly. Femininity becomes toxic when it cries foul, chas- tising men for responding to a provocative display. “Where we set our boundaries is a question about which

267 reasonable people might disagree, but two bright-lines are widely agreed upon: Every woman has the right not to be touched if she does not wish to be; and coercive quid pro quo, in which sexual favors are demanded for the possibility of career advancement, is unacceptable. But when women doll themselves up in clothes that highlight sexually-selected anat- omy, and put on make-up that hints at impending orgasm, it is toxic—yes, toxic—to demand that men do not look, do not approach, do not query. “Young women have vast sexual power. Everyone who is being honest with themselves knows this: Women in their sexual prime who are anywhere near the beauty-norms for their culture have a kind of power that nobody else has. They are also all but certain to lack the wisdom to manage it. Toxic femininity is an abuse of that power, in which hotness is max- imized, and victim status is then claimed when straight men don’t treat them as peers. “Creating hunger in men by actively inviting the male gaze, then demanding that men have no such hunger—that is toxic femininity. Subjugating men, emasculating them when they display strength—physical, intellectual, or other—that is toxic femininity. Insisting that men, simply by virtue of being men, are toxic, and then acting surprised as relationships between men and women become more strained—that is toxic femininity. It is a game, the benefits of which go to a few while the costs are shared by all of us.” Someone commented in the thread below her article “She says showing skin isn’t ‘asking for it’ but rather ‘inviting trouble.’ Asking = inviting. It = trouble. She conveniently doesn’t elaborate on what the difference is to her. Someone help me out here…” I am including this for the benefit of anyone else who might have had the question. Someone else answered “Simple. It’s like the police giving advice on how to prevent break-ins, or how to prevent getting pick-pocketed, or having your bicycle stolen, or advice given

268 to travelers on how to avoid getting scammed abroad, or having their passport stolen, etc. “Young men might be advised not to get drunk and pick up strange women in bars and take them to their hotel room when abroad, in, say, Thailand, for example. Or don’t go into dark alleys alone, late at night. If someone is aware of the advice, and nevertheless ignores it, and does not follow that advice, or is generally careless, that is “inviting trouble.” If they then get robbed, or scammed while traveling, or their house gets broken into, etc, most people are going to be sympathetic, and no one is going to defend the robbers or scammers for taking advantage of them because the person was “asking for it”…but they will say things like, “What were you thinking?!” “Taking obvious steps so that bad things don’t happen to you is just common sense, and it doesn’t imply that the person doing the bad thing isn’t guilty of wrongdoing.” So, what I have to say to men about it is, simply avoid that kind of woman. There are plenty of others out there that will be everything you dreamed of. Stop looking for her based on the criteria you were programmed by Hollywood and Madison Avenue to use. Chances are, she’s not a stripper. Remember what I said earlier, about the irony of women testing men to see if they are worthy, when they themselves are not? You need to first become worthy of the woman you want, then raise your own standards to accept only her. That saying “Behind every great man is a great woman,” doesn’t mean the woman is automatically great, like TV is trying to tell us. You have to first find that great woman. She’s out there. And, sure, you might meet her in a bar, or at the Spring Break douchebag convention, but don’t bet on it.

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XXII

So, now you are on your way. What can you do once you become a man? I highly recommend travel. Go out and see this amazing world, and learn everything you can about all of the wonderful exotic people in it. Then, think about how you can be of service to them. Thousands of people leave countries like Guatemala to go to the United States, making the arduous journey in pursuit of the American Dream. What if we—those of us from First World countries—take our expertise to them and open businesses to provide jobs for people so they won’t have to leave? A block away from my restaurant is another one that only hires single mothers. I have several entrepreneur friends who organize workers and turn them into profitable companies. This is the only way to fight the Imperialism that is stoking wars all over this planet. By going to other countries, to help them recover from the evil done to them. Find a culture that really resonates with you, integrate yourself, and offer the best that you can. The imperialism I speak of has taken many forms. One of the many ways the US has crippled Guatemala, for example, is through the adoption process. I won’t cite the civil war they started, because there are already enough books on that topic. This is something no one speaks about, and has to be dragged into the light. Long ago, the Church handled adoptions here, and ran it well. Then, the Clinton Administration got involved, and they privatized adoptions, making babies available to the highest bidder instead of vetted childless households. When parents found they could receive money for their unwanted children, a cottage industry was created almost overnight. The cost ranged from around $12,000 to $30,000. Of this, the adoption agency charged a fee of about $3,000, the Gua-

271 temalan lawyers between $10,000 and $15,000 and the mother received as little as between $500 and $1,000. Fathers made their daughters get pregnant as early and as often as they could, devaluing their children for the sake of a small income. Those babies were being purchased not just by couples unable to have their own, but by slave traffickers who would use them for all manner of evil. When the US government realized that they had created a monster, they put a stop to it by disqualifying Guatemala from the process. Then, with no more money coming in, and their daughters already devalued, the families put them out on the street or in whorehouses to earn that money. I just learned that girls have been escaping from one such bordello not far from my house, having been sold into slavery by their parents. I’ve contacted some other concerned people to see what we can do about it, but considering the corruption, it would be unwise to publish anything about it at this time. There was an orphanage not far away where teenage girls were rented out to men for sex, and the girls tried to tell their story to journalists. The next day, the orphanage burned down with 41 of them dying inside, while over a dozen police officers stood outside the locked doors, with the keys. The truth is starting to come out, and you can read about it in the New York Times’ article “A Locked Door, a Fire and 41 Girls Killed as Police Stood By” published on Valentine’s Day 2019. Also, a shocking exposé by my friend Alex, a young man abused in one such orphanage, is coming out now, called Looking at My Past, I Found My Future. It tells the harrowing story of Alexander Chisholm Guibault, who found a loving family with a truly great lady, his adopted mother Leceta. And this is just the small corner of the world I inhabit. I’ve written more in-depth about the plight of young women in the Icarus series, with veiled suggestions about what can be done. Heroes, there are damsels in distress in need of you. I wrote a book where the villain—one of the Trojan horse

272 operatives the US government sends to poor countries under the guise of “aid,” who then contact gangs and recruit them to overthrow their own governments—confides in the hero: “We fund and encourage terrorism in places like Syria. We destabilize volatile countries, while lying about it to the public, so that the people will be forced to flee their homeland. That’ll create a massive refugee crisis that we’ll bully Western Europe into accepting. Why? To destabilize Europe! Now, while not all Muslims are assholes, enough of them have very different sets of values, and they’ll inevitably clash with modern Europeans. They’ll see women in skimpy clothes, and either chastise them or rape them. They will see gay men and beat them to death in the street. They will take over whole towns with their morality. “Of course, the people won’t stand for this. They’ve come a long way in recent years, only to see the ground they’ve won trampled on by outsiders. We’ll make it illegal for them to say anything about it, and that will make the people turn on their own governments. There will be rebellions, the streets will run with blood, and the world will see how quickly that paper-thin veneer of civilization drops, exposing what lies underneath. “On this side of the Pond we do it in El Salvador, Hondu- ras, and Nicaragua, making conditions so horrible that people have no choice but to emigrate to the US, causing all kinds of trouble at the border, pitting the entire country against itself. I see the entire First World on the brink of self-annihilation, all the people who are quick to violence not just ready, but willing to kill each other off. Leaving us, the intelligent ones to inherit the Earth.” I do not believe that is the goal, but it is definitely similar. The idea is cause civil wars in North America and Europe, so that the military will be forced to intervene and establish order —specifically, the new feudal system I mentioned earlier. I have been saying for years that the Republican Party now is different from the one I listened to growing up. Republicans themselves are the same, wanting less governmental control in

273 their lives, saying to work hard and earn your money and mind your own business. But the politicians seem to have become caricatures of themselves, getting more and more extreme, and seeming to promote a massive swing of the population toward the left. Why would they want to do this, I wondered. Then, it hit me. The idea was to make the majority of the voting public identify with a group that favored more governmental control. The side that would consider themselves the rebels in Star Wars, fighting the tyranny of the Empire, are now the ones pushing for the strengthening of that empire. I find comfort in meeting other people who are more educated than myself, who’ve been making the same predictions independently. Because how did I come up with it? Me, the crackpot who bumped his head? It just came to me in a flash one day, like knowing my father was cheating on my mother, and the Irish and US economies were about to tank. I am sure this does nothing for my credibility, but I just knew. And what tipped me off, crackpot that I am?

$1 Trillion Motherlode of Lithium and Gold Discov- ered in Afghanistan—Mining.com

Lorimer Wilson - Financial Article Summaries Today | June 16, 2010 | 9:08 am Careers Precious Metals Gold A recently unearthed 2007 United States Geological Service survey appears to have discovered nearly $1 trillion in mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself. The previously un- known deposits—including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world. An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could

274 become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.

Batteries to make us all smartphone-addicted Eloi. Click! From reading that line, it all fell into place and made sense. If you were to Google “Algorithmic Discrimination from an Environmental Psychology Perspective, Stress-Inducing Differential Treatment” you would find that studies have been done before 2016 to find ways to increase stress in smartphone users. And why? Because people have been proven to buy more online when they’re upset over racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination. And they buy more of something in particular when they are bombarded by stress: antidepressants. The pills made with opiates plundered from Afghanistan that make us kill ourselves and others, thereby calling attention to the “over-availability” of guns and justifying their confiscation. I would like to quote Gregory Prinsze, who I think says it better than I can: “Here’s a ‘conspiracy theory’ I’ve been con- templating since Trump was elected. The ruling criminal oligarchy—which has been a de facto organized crime syndicate based on banking, intelligence, and secret societies since the late 1700s in Europe and since the early 1900s in the US—has always wanted a much more controlled society…a tyranny with themselves in control. “The question for the elites is how to make the tyranny permanent, how to avoid rebellion, and how to create what Charles Galton Darwin referred to as “a more perfect form of slavery”…a society in which the slaves “love their servitude” in the words of Aldous Huxley, because they’re comfortable, perfectly conditioned, and not even aware of their existence as a form of slavery in the first place. “The traditional approach to tyranny is by force, with the ultimate technology-assisted manifestation represented in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four. Let’s refer to this as the right wing approach to tyranny. The newer approach to

275 tyranny is found in Huxley’s Brave New World, where people are kept docile and compliant through the use of drugs, all sorts of distraction, and unlimited sexual freedom. In his forward to the 1946 edition of Brave New World, Huxley actually referred to sexual freedom as a form of political control. Let’s call this the left wing approach to tyranny. Although the ruling elites always want overwhelming force to be available to them as a last resort if necessary, by the early decades of the 20th century they had decided that the left wing approach to tyranny would be more acceptable to the masses, less likely to produce revolt, and more sustainable…with the goal being a permanent tyranny based on “a more perfect form of slavery.” “This decision led to the so-called counterculture movement, which was conceived in ruling elite think tanks and fully supported by the CIA and other Establishment organizations. Much of what we associate with modern liberalism—rejection of traditional values, rejection of religion, feminism, abortion, the pill, sex, drugs, rock and roll—were heavily supported and pushed by “conservative” Establishment institutions such as the major foundations, think tanks, intelligence agencies, mainstream media, Hollywood, and eventually television. “The purpose of this was to move society toward the left, with the ultimate goal of getting people to accept a left wing tyranny, all the while thinking that they’re free. At the same time, the elites always lived in fear of a populist right wing revolt which could expose them, remove them from power, and destroy their long term plans. “So the “conspiracy theory” is as follows. By the early 21st century, the ruling criminal oligarchy had pretty much destroyed or at least badly damaged most forms of conservatism and traditional societal cohesiveness. They had also firmly established liberalism as an increasingly dominant ideology. “But there was still risk of a conservative and/or populist backlash at this point, so preventing that was necessary before moving fully into a left wing form of tyranny. What to do?

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The answer was to support conservative and populist candi- dates like Trump and Bolsonaro…people who were so narcis- sistic…and reckless that they would permanently damage the conservative and populist brands forever. “That’s the stage we’re in now, and Trump has one more year to finish the job ahead of the 2020 elections. All signs are that he’ll lead us into a complete disaster, which will not only permanently end any risk of conservative or populist revolt, but will also have the public clamoring for the liberal approach which has always been intended to bring about the left wing Brave New World form of tyranny. “The public will actually embrace it early on as the obvious solution to the misguided and disastrous conservatism and populism which will forever be represented by the Trump and Bolsonaro disasters. By the time this new liberalism has mor- phed into a full blown left wing tryanny, the public will be so distracted, so drugged, and so perfectly conditioned that they don’t even notice the fact that it’s a tyranny. They will “love their servitude” just as Huxley predicted.” He went on to say “Lots of large scale plans work out as intended. For example...Encouraging the attack on Pearl Har- bor and allowing it to happen as the excuse for US entry into WW2, covering up that scandal during and after the war, numerous CIA coups during the 1950s, the assassination of JFK and the coverup, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the assassina- tions of MLK and RFK, years of war profiteering in Vietnam on totally dubious pretenses, the sabotage of the Church Committee to cover up CIA crimes including a blackmail operation very similar to what Epstein would be running a few decades later, the sabotage of Carter’s presidency, the election of Reagan, Iran Contra, large scale illegal CIA weapons ex- ports and cocaine imports via the Mena Arkansas airport when Slick Willie Clinton was governor, the election of Slick Willie Clinton as president, pardons for all the big shots involved in Iran Contra, covering up the Inslaw and PROMIS

277 scandal, huge consolidation of media ownership, early foundations for the Patriot Act following the Oklahoma City bomb- ing, NAFTA, GATT, WTO, repeal of Glass-Steagall setting the stage for the 2008 financial crisis, the selection of Dubya Bush, the false flag attacks of 9/11, coordinated lying and coverup on the part of government and MSM, the nearly 18 year old “War on Terror” based on false flag lies with no end in sight, the election of Mr. Hope and Change who continued the Bush-Cheney neocon wars for Israel and started new wars of his own, further dismantling of the Bill of Rights, the election of Donald Trump who is BY FAR the most pro Israel president the Zionists have ever installed in the White House, and allowing Jeffrey Epstein (the most important witness and the most at risk inmate in the world) to be killed or to escape from custody, which will lead to the entire blackmail operation which has compromised hundreds of politicians to be buried, which will allow other blackmail operations to continue. I could reference much more...those are just a few highlights since 1941. “All of the above benefits the same organized crime syndicate, and all of it worked out pretty much as intended despite minor setbacks along the way. “As for Trump being some big disruption for the ruling elites, it’s all theater. The people who hate him are predominantly liberal Democrats...all part of the Barnum and Bailey circus of two party politics. “At the highest levels of the organized crime syndicate, they would’ve been perfectly happy with either the D or the R, Clinton or Trump... which is almost always the case with presidential elections. If that was not the case, Sheldon Adelson would not have given Trump $100 million. “The white collar plutocrat mobsters at the top are getting everything they want from Trump. At some point they’ll decide that it’s time for another recession, a depression, a major new war, or all of the above. If this happens within the next

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14 months (or after the election if Trump wins another term) the disaster will be blamed on Trump the man, as well as on conservatism, populism, and nationalism. “If the NWO isn’t stopped, it’ll be a global authoritarian tyranny with a left wing socialist or communist control structure to keep the masses placated and in line...very similar to Communist China. The elites see this as being more sustainable than a purely right wing control structure. “The bottom line is this: the people who planned and per- petrated 9/11 and the “War on Terror” are very happy with Trump...which means the “Deep State” is very happy with Trump. Why not? They’re getting everything they want. The wars continue in Afghanistan and Syria, and tensions with Iran, Russia, and China are increasing. Hillary could hardly have done a better job. This is a key part of the globalist agenda. They not only want to do away with conservatism and implement more socialism as part of their control structure, they also want to do away with populism and nationalism, eventually ending national sovereignty all together.” I am not trying to convince you to try and stop it. I believe it’s inevitable. What you can do is escape what Wallace Shawn called “the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves and the inmates are the guards and they have this pride in this thing that they’ve built—they have built their own prison—and so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners. And as a result they no longer have—having been lobotomized— the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made or even to see it as a prison.” What I offer is a chance to join me and my followers as we leave civilization and make our way deep into the rainforests of South America, where we will build a new, self-sustaining Garden of Eden, and I will be worshipped a la Colonel Kurtz in my temple carved into the living rock of an active volcano. Those who join early will get to be part of the Great Nep-

279 otism when we structure the social hierarchy. For those of you who wish to remain in civilization, think about how Orwellian the world has become, with people spied upon in their homes by the smart devices they buy. Volunteer- ing photos of themselves ten years apart so the developers of facial recognition software can improve their technology for free. Giving away your freedom little by little, like pigs in the woods, until the very mention of civil disobedience is a crime. As we discussed earlier with the tendency to obey, and to align ourselves with a group that supersedes our individuality, it is far easier to accept the programming of failure and suffer the same slavery as our neighbors. But there are always a brave few who are willing to defy corruption and tyranny. Those are the heroes with the courage to disobey who, as Erich Fromm wrote, are necessary to move a society forward. “Man has continued to evolve by acts of disobedience. Not only was his spiritual development possible only because there were men who dared to say no to the powers that be in the name of their conscience or their faith, but also his intellectual development was dependent on the capacity for being disobedient, disobedient to authorities who tried to muzzle new thoughts and to the authority of long-established opinions which declared a change to be nonsense.” (On Disobedience and Other Essays, Erich Fromm) And finally, to those of you who feel you are beyond hope and must take up a weapon, if it is too late for you, if you feel you must make what is left of your life count for something, I urge you to choose carefully. There’s no glory in harming the innocent. If you must, you can allow yourself to be recruited by a terrorist group—it isn’t hard—receive their training, and when they are at their most vulnerable, wipe them out from the inside. Try to get as much of the leadership as you can, because there is no shortage of desperate men who can be led astray by their lies. As long as they live, there will be others to replace a suicide bomber or a team of gunmen.

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I cannot guarantee that your next life will be better if you do it, but if you choose to murder innocent people, there isn’t the shadow of a doubt that it will be worse. Be the one to save hundreds of good people’s lives, and know the pride of doing something truly heroic. Be the one to stand up for the migrant worker when Terry Griffin picks a fight. When you’re about to open fire on the crowd you’ve helped usher into a mass grave, shoot the commanding officer instead.

Be this guy.

Because, honestly, if you don’t, who will?

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in paperback

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Prologue In the marvellous city of Antigua, in the Land of Eternal Spring, there is an exotic ice cream shop across the street from a sports bar with jacked-up prices, and every day a man and a woman pretend not to see each other while they open them. It is the subject of much gossip between their neighbours, who wonder why the man, who smiles and says Hello to everybody he sees, would somehow not notice such a beautiful woman, and why she, who lights up every room she enters, finds herself fascinated by the cobblestones beneath her feet. The waiters and bartender of the sports bar all know the ice cream man, and wave to him when they see him, and once or twice have noticed her flinch when they call his name. Since the ice cream shop has a lot more business, they’ll sometimes stand at their door and watch people gush over whatever bizarre flavours he has that day, and remark upon the change that comes over him when the last customer in a shoal walks away. His smile fades, and his eyes glaze over, until he shakes his head as if to clear it. When he feels the burn of their eyes upon him, he glances over and does an upward tilt of the head that is somehow still a nod, and they’ll wave again and go back inside. One day, one of the waiters came across the street. He was a stocky Guatemalan with cinnamon skin and boy-band hair, and the ice cream man was ready with his smile. “Hey, you’re from the States, right?” the waiter asked in Spanish. The ice cream man shook his head. “Bahamas.” “You’re kidding? But I thought Bahamians were black.” The ice cream man laughed. “Well, the black ones are.” They beat around the bush for a while, talking about the flavours of ice cream, and how long the shop had been open, and which came first, the ice cream or the restaurant around

285 the corner, and blah blah blah until the waiter was ready to ask “So, when’re you going to come over and have a drink?” The ice cream man made the face the waiter expected to see, and he was satisfied for the moment. Slowly, he thought. The sports bar had no sign, and was only open after six on weekdays, because it was right next door to the Muni and they still hadn’t gotten their paperwork done. The ice cream man wondered if they thought the clerks of the Muni only lived to work and went home to sleep in caves as soon as their shift was over, living in ignorance of what went on in their city for the rest of the day. It had opened a month before, and was a sister business to Bistrot Cinq, down the road, the same way the ice cream shop was a satellite of the restaurant art gallery around the corner. The beautiful woman had been the manager of Cinq for only three months, after losing her job as chef at a golf resort several miles outside of town. Rumours abounded as to why, but no one knew for certain. So, she’d come back to Antigua, and when the owner of Cinq offered her the second job man- aging the new place a few hours a day, she was hesitant, knowing she would have to walk past either of the Bahamian’s two businesses to get there. “So, Bahamas,” the waiter said. “Why would you want to leave there?” “Oh, I left when I was eight. My parents moved to Flor- ida, and then we went to live in Ireland for many years. Then I came here.” “What brought you here?” “Long story.” The waiter shrugged. “Es silencio.” Meaning, there are no customers, so what else is there to do? The ice cream man hesitated, wanting to get something off his chest and thinking he’d rather trust a complete stranger than a priest. He looked at the nosy waiter for a long moment, wondering how much he was going to tell him.

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“I think people often try to find through sex things that are much easier to find in other ways.” ―Patricia Highsmith

Okay, first off, lemme say this: nobody can tell you how many times you can be in love or how often or after how long. I fell madly for two different women on one day in Taormina, Sicily (for real, they were the one, both of them) and then again with a hot dark waitress in Venice a week later, and anyone who scoffs just doesn’t know how to live. Now, that trip to Italy was years ago, and since then I’ve been in love maybe only three or four times, tops. This time, though, it was different. But back up a minute. I’d been reading up on what they (apparently) call the Venusian Arts—not because I needed to, no way, definitely not, but maybe just to beef up my game a little, because it never hurts. The first thing I learned was that Less is More. Canned pick-up lines and slick dance moves and flashing your money are nothing compared to just giving her a look. Not a look like “I want you” or “Wow, you’re gorgeous” or “You'll have the night of your life with me,” and not a leer or a stare or an appraisal. Just making eye contact until she looks away, then looking away yourself until you feel her eyes on you, and meeting her gaze a second time. Yunno in Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach” video, where she’s hanging with her girlfriends, wearing that Italians-Do-It-Better t-shirt, and she sees the guy her father warned her all about (the one he said she could do without) and their eyes meet? That look. It’s magic. So, I’m in Rome this past summer with my Dad and two brothers and two of our cousins and our grandma, and I can’t

287 get that look right to save my life. I’d done it a bunch of times in the past by accident and it worked just fine, but I couldn't contrive it worth a damn. Either I was coming off as sly or dismissive or creepy…not like I saw anyone I really wanted to pull, but it’s practice for when I do, yunno? Whatever. Anyway, skip ahead, skip ahead, skip ahead. We get to Corsica and both my brothers are too hung- over to do anything but lie in their beds and grunt, so just my cousins go with me to the top of Bonifacio and take pictures. We get a bunch of landscapes and some of this elaborate mar- ble tomb in the graveyard, and some of us just posing, when I try just a plain ol’ glance at this one chick standing with her boyfriend as we’re passing by. We lock eyes. Now, y’ever get spotted by a dude when you’re eyeing his chick, and he decides to make out with her? Kind of a passive aggressive non-confrontational marking of territory? Used to be, the guy’d come up on me swinging, but since I’ve been going to the gym and drinking shakes and popping pills they aren’t so quick to throw down, so, instead, they grab the girl and kiss her. And show tongue, as if I wouldn’t get the hint otherwise. And I’m watching this thinking “Take that, dead horse! And that! And that!” So, that’s what this guy does, this guy with long, shaggy black hair, and I’m startled to see her protest. She’s resisting, saying something in a language that I don’t recognize, but the meaning is all too clear. And she’s looking at me while she’s saying it, with her gray-blue-green eyes that are all I can see as I watch over my shoulder. He’s saying something back, insisting, but she’s having none of it. We leave the top of the mountain and make our way back to the city, and I try that glance on a few other women that we pass, but they’re too into their boyfriends or husbands to respond. Now, I feel I ought to add that I’m not like every other guy you’ll meet. I may have only slept with forty-something

288 women, but already I’m (for lack of a better word) bored with it. It’s the chase I enjoy, the anticipation, and when I get it right away, I’m disappointed, even a little depressed the next day. When I meet some girl at a club and kiss her all the way to my car, if that isn’t as far as we go, in less than an hour I’ll be wondering with each thrust if this is what it’s all about. If this is what’s so coveted by all the world, the end all be all. ‘Cause if it is, it is so overrated. That’s why I’m into creating sexual tension and longing and frustration, to build it up, and sometimes I’ll just let the whole thing drop because I know I’ll never get disappointed that way. Anyone can tell you that the sex you imagine having is almost always better than real life. She’ll always remember you doing such-and-such, and no matter how good it was she’ll eventually get tired of reliving it in her mind. But if it doesn’t happen, she’ll spend the rest of her life hypothesizing what it could’ve been like. It’s a kind of immortality, and I can live with that. So, I’m reflecting on this while we’re in a souvenir shop, looking at the kind of useless stuff that only reminds you later of having been in a souvenir shop. “I went all the way to Cor- sica to buy this coffee mug/tee shirt/whatever.” Stuff you can buy anywhere with a different name on it. Moving out to the front of the store where the postcards are, I see the shaggy black hair and oversized shades of the boyfriend passing in front of me, and right behind, a pretty face with chin-length brown hair that turns gray-blue-green eyes straight into mine. They widen a little, and her face jerks back to stare straight ahead, and I come out of the shop to watch them go. She’s wearing a short black dress and flip flops, and she is a little big-boned, but not in a bad way. A sturdy kind of way, but with very little fat. Healthy. Not like those skinny girls that’re so popular nowadays that I hate, because making love to them is like humping a bag of chisels. The boyfriend, he’s wearing flip flops too, only her feet’re clean and his aren’t, and

289 his maroon tee shirt says California something. Just as I’m wondering where they’re from, she glances back to see if I’m looking at her still and this confusion flashes across her face, like “What’s with this guy? Why’s he looking at me?” so I turn my gaze to postcards, pulling my shades out of where they hang in the point of my v-neck, and putting them on so she can’t tell where my eyes are fixed. When I see her again, she's drifting away from Maroon California and looking at me uncertainly. I let her look at me for a moment, because for a tourist I’m close enough to handsome, and I’m dressed pretty well. My eyes cut sideways to my reflection in the souvenir shop’s glass door, propped open with a ship-in-a-bottle, to check my hair’s not too windblown, and I’m alarmed that it is. I cut my eyes back and get my first really good look at her face. She has Cupid’s bow lips that are pursed in concentration and a strong jaw with a pointed chin. Above all, she has the face of a sweet person, which I’ve always preferred. I turn my face back toward hers full-on and she snaps her head away, suddenly absorbed in all of the different ice cream flavors on display outside the gelateria. I cross the cobbled street to a café, order an espresso so I won’t feel guilty about using their bathroom, and go straight for the sink while they’re preparing it. A little water to wake up the gel in my hair from last night, and I’m spruced up enough to look like I didn’t do it on purpose. I shut my eyes and take a deep breath, listen to the hum of the air conditioning and the ringing in my ears, feel the weight of my body and relax. Outside, I down my espresso and go into the street. I can’t believe it, but I feel like a teenager again, with my heart shuddering and my senses heightened, and the paranoid fear that all my thoughts are on the air. She’s not anywhere in sight, so I go back into the souvenir shop to look at Corsican shot glasses and ashtrays with my cousins. Didn’t want to be seen too much—that’s the second

290 thing I learned about attraction: if you want to feed it, you’ve got to keep it hungry. Eric and Jorge, my cousins, they say we should go across the street to the outdoor café and have a little hair of the dog, and I couldn’t agree more. We debated the merits of one beer over the other, passing around our pints the same way we all shared our food at the restaurants every night. The two of them had all kinds of criti- cisms for the three different brands, but I confess they all tasted the same to me. Like Coke and Pepsi. Sorry. And while we’re all catching up on what’s different in our lives that we can’t talk about with my Dad and our grandma around, I’ve got one eye on all of the girls passing by. Jorge tells me about how his son is going to Pre-K and how well he’s doing, and how weird the mother is getting, and we finish our beers and get up to go when I spot Maroon California out of the corner of my eye. The two of them, they’re walking past us holding hands, both with their sunglasses on, and I can’t tell if he’s bristling because he recognizes me or he always walks that way, but I don’t wonder long because she slows up ever so slightly to hang behind him, and takes off her shades. With a quick glance at him to make sure he won’t see, she turns her head and gives me a full-on stare. In that fleeting moment that lasted an eternity I felt my face being soaked up like…like what? How do you describe the feeling of someone memoriz- ing your image? In those bright gray-blue-green eyes I saw “I want you” and “Wow, you’re gorgeous” and “You’ll have the night of your life with me” and I knew right then that the next time she slept with Maroon California she’d be pretending it was me, and she’d tell all her girlfriends back home in Wher- everia, and because it’ll be her imagination instead of me making love to her, I'll be the best lover she’ll ever remember. She tells me all this with those eyes that I find myself lost in, and in a flash, whoosh, she’s gone. I dunno how long I stood there, stunned, watching the

291 corner she’d disappeared behind before Eric gave me a shove. “Ya might wanna close your mouth,” he said. “Flies’re getting in.” I heard someone holler my name, and Jorge pointed to my brothers coming through the milling tourists. We all sat back down at the table and ordered more drinks. The four of them yakked away about God-knows-what, but I was too busy staring at that corner to pay attention. Thinking, were those two just boyfriend-slash-girlfriend, were they on their honeymoon, what? I don’t imagine you take some chick you’re just dating to Corsica, excepting maybe you live in Sardinia or something. How long had they been together? What were they planning? Or were they just playing it by ear? Only thing I knew for sure was, maybe this morning when they woke up next to each other she loved him truly with her whole entire heart, but she certainly didn’t now. Did he pay for this romantic trip out here and it’s here that her love for him ended, just like that, over a perfect stranger? Third thing I learned was, life’s like that. Attraction is not a choice. It’ll come on all over you even despite preju- dice and there’s nothing you can do about it, or just as quickly it can vanish. You can’t decide to want someone—either you do or you don’t, and the second you stop it’s over for good, and they can’t reason with you, persuade, cajole, coerce, or anything. Can’t do anything but drive you away further. And it doesn’t matter who someone is, what they look like, or whether you’ve ever even heard the sound of their voice, much less been fascinated by something they’ve said. Sometimes it just happens, bam! And you can’t get them out of your head, those gray-blue-green eyes staring into yours like a Cheshire Cat grin long after the rest of the face has gone. I spent the next hour or so searching all of the faces I passed until I gave up, and resigned myself to looking at drift- wood dream catchers and jewellery made out of indigenous shells, t-shirts and coffee mugs and postcards. Odd, I thought,

292 that my little exercise had backfired, but somehow strangely wonderful. All I cared about was seeing her again, just to have a moment alone together and be lost in her. I felt a tingling drunkenness like I remember feeling after my first kiss, and some of the ones after that. We turned into some other store and I was shocked to be bumping into a maroon shirt and looking up into the un- shaven face of Whatshisname, the shaggy-haired guy, the boyfriend. I said “Pardón” and he gave me a curt little nod, brush- ing past me, and there she was. Not three feet away. My heart seized up inside my chest, my throat closed. Her profile was close enough to touch as she was looking at leather handbags and something-or-others and I wished she wouldn’t notice just long enough for me to memorize every detail of her face. But she glanced up and saw me, and her Cupid’s bow lips spread wide in a warm smile as she stepped past me to follow her boyfriend. I realized I had bitten my lower lip, but didn’t let go of it until I’d turned around and seen him take her hand and lead her away, and she peered back over her shoulder the way I’d done when we first locked eyes, smiling broadly at me as she walked out of my life forever. I didn’t tell anyone else about what’d happened, not because they’d tease me for not pursuing, but because I thought it would somehow cheapen it. That night we ate dinner at the outdoor pavilion of a nice restaurant near our marina, and it might’ve been a coincidence, but the veal chops in sour apri- cot sauce was the best thing I’d ever eaten in my life, the wine that my family complained about was wonderful, and when a waiter knocked over a glass and spilled my brother’s water into my lap, I couldn’t bring myself to care. I spent the entire evening keeping a vigil, watching the sidewalks on either side of the pavilion, checking every face that came into view. Desperate to see her just one more time, even though I knew it would be better if I didn’t. I knew I’d step out of my chair and weave my way in between the tables

293 to stop her, take her face in my hands and kiss her deeply. No matter where the boyfriend was. I bought a bunch of souvenirs the next day. Corsica has got some indigenous shell they call “Saint Lucy’s Eye” that’s got a cute little swirl in it, and they exploit the hell out of it in earrings, necklaces, bracelets, and whatevers. I bought one of each, ostensibly to give to my girlfriend when I went home. I also had to buy a Corsica shot glass, coffee mug, espresso set, ashtray—anything that would remind me of this great town. City, whatever. I vaguely remember from Sunday School that Saint Lucy is the one you prayed to if you’d gone blind or needed glasses or something, because she could restore your sight. It seemed appropriate somehow but I try not to think about it too much. We’re in Sardinia now and I’ve seen no women that interest me at all. I wonder if I’ll feel the same way when I get home. I wonder if I’ll pretend the girl I’m seeing is this one with the chin-length brown hair and the gray-blue-green eyes and the Cupid’s bow lips. I don’t even know that girl’s name, or what country she’s from, or how to contact her or what I’d say if I did, but I have a funny feeling I'll never forget her. Like she’s achieved a kind of immortality. And I can live with that.

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Alexander Ferrar has been traveling the world since the publication of this book, enjoying as much of it as he can before the inevitable bullet finds him.

He’s also the author of the Heresy series and Icarus trilogy of crime fiction novels, the sword-and-sorcery comedy Saga of the Beverage Men, the alternative history adventure The Prince of Foxes, Navarre, the Memoirs of a Swine series, the art collection A Thousand Words, and the cookbook of his restaurant Variety is the Spice.

If we do not hear from him after this, we hope his death will not be in vain.

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