my brother and his friends are smoking pot, playing ping pong, listening to the kottonmouth kings.

this article is from:
http://www.slate.com/id/2185274?wpisrc=newsletter

today's papers: A summary of what's in the major U.S. newspapers.
Fighting for SurvivalBy Daniel PolitiPosted Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2008, at 6:20 AM ET
The New York Times, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal's world-wide newsbox lead with yesterday's Democratic debate in Ohio, where Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama clashed over a number of issues, including campaign tactics, Iraq, health care, and NAFTA. As opposed to the largely cordial encounter last week, the sharp words began almost as soon as the debate got started yesterday, although it did remain "generally civil," as the WP points out. There was huge anticipation for the 20th, and maybe final, Democratic debate of the primary season, which was seen as possibly the last chance for Clinton to stop Obama's momentum before the contests in Ohio and Texas that have been described as must-win states. But, overall, nobody thinks Clinton was able to drastically change the race last night with her criticisms of Obama.
Whoever ends up winning the nomination will face a tough time against Sen. John McCain, notes the Los Angeles Times in its lead story. A new in-house nationwide poll shows 61 percent of voters view McCain favorably. McCain holds an advantages in several fronts as voters are more likely to rate him as the strongest leader who has "the right experience" and would be better at protecting the country and dealing with Iraq. On the economy, McCain gets higher marks than Obama but not Clinton. In a hypothetical matchup, McCain gets more support than either of the two Democratic contenders, leading Clinton by 6 percentage points and Obama by 2 points, which is within the poll's margin of error. USA Today leads with the as many as 3 million people in Florida who were left without power yesterday. A malfunction forced two nuclear reactors to shut down and led to a blackout that affected "one-sixth of Florida's population." Energy experts are now trying to figure out what happened. Although officials contend the nuclear reactors were meant to shut down in order to avoid more damage, they still don't understand why the blackout was so expansive.
Everyone was expecting last night's debate to be confrontational, and the NBC moderators seemed to do everything in their power to encourage the fighting from the beginning by starting out with clips that showed Clinton's criticism of Obama's campaign flyers. After some back-and-forth about tactics, where Obama countered her criticism by saying he has also been on the receiving end of attacks "and we haven't whined about it," the candidates launched into a 16-minute familiar argument over health care. The LAT emphasizes that when the discussion turned to trade, both candidates said they would threaten to opt out of NAFTA if Mexico and Canada didn't agree to renegotiate the deal.



Clinton also directed criticism at the news media and asked why it is that she seems "to get the first question all the time?" In a move that the LAT describes as "a clear ploy for the sympathies of women voters," Clinton then went on to reference a Saturday Night Live skit that portrayed reporters as being madly in love with Obama. "Maybe we should ask Barack if he's comfortable and needs another pillow," she said. (In a piece inside, the NYT says: "She has a point." Clinton has been on the receiving end of the first question in all of her one-on-one debates with Obama.) A while later, almost seeming to prove her point, Tim Russert asked her to name the man who Russian President Vladimir Putin has named as his successor, Dmitry Medvedev. (She sort of got it right: "Medved ... Medvedeva ...") The NYT's Alessandra Stanley, who has the only quasi-critical look at the operational side of the debate, notes that the encounter "did look a bit like the SNL parody."
Overall, TP is surprised there aren't more critical stories about Russert's performance yesterday, which included an almost surreal question where he asked the contenders to give a specific answer to an incredibly detailed hypothetical question that involved Iraqis kicking out all U.S. troops, a resurgence of al-Qaida, Iraq going "to hell," and the possibility of a re-invasion of Iraq (but what if it's raining?). When Clinton confronted Russert on the hypothetical nature of the question, he answered: "But this is reality."
In an analysis piece, the LAT notes that while Obama "did not walk away unscathed from the debate, the damage Clinton inflicted was minor." The NYT's Adam Nagourney agrees, noting that "Obama had the advantage" last night and was helped along by Russert's "aggressive questioning" of Clinton. The LAT goes on to say that both candidates "were tipped off balance by tough questions" from the moderators and mentions how Obama "stuttered a response" to Russert's question about whether he would reject the support from Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. After Russert found it necessary to remind viewers of Farrakhan's opinion of Judaism, and some interjection from Clinton, Obama said he "would reject and denounce." The LAT says that although this might not matter now, "his hesitancy could provide an opening for Republicans."
The LAT's poll shows Obama is beating Clinton 48 percent to 42 percent, although Clinton still holds a lead in states that haven't voted yet. But "one of the most striking findings" of the poll is that when Democratic voters were asked whom they support now, regardless of what vote they may have already cast in an earlier primary or caucus, Obama leads by 20 percentage points.
The LAT and NYT both front the latest bleak news about the economy. New inflation figures reveal prices were up 7.4 percent compared with a year ago, which is the highest rate since 1981. Meanwhile, other new figures showed home prices fell 8.9 percent in the fourth quarter of last year, which is the steepest decline in 20 years. "Consumers are getting squeezed on all sides," an economic analyst tells the LAT. The increases are largely being fueled by higher energy and food prices. The NYT focuses on how the increasing price of oil is "finally showing up at the pump," and it "could not come at a worse time for the economy." All this is adding up to the worst consumer confidence in five years, which, as the LAT points out, "risks making a sharp economic pullback a self-fulfilling prophecy."
The WP, LAT, and WSJ front the performance given by the New York Philharmonic in North Korea. The concert opened with the national anthems of both countries, and finished with a roaring standing ovation that went on for five minutes. Although no one thinks the one performance will automatically lead to better diplomatic relations, "it was an exceptional moment for two nations mired in six decades of mistrust, with political and economic policies in direct opposition," notes the WSJ.
The most interesting parts of the dispatches from North Korea involve the reporters' descriptions of what the WP calls "the undertow of strangeness, fakery and fear that infects life in this country." For example, reporters, who always had to travel with "minders," were taken to the Grand People's Study House, where there appeared to be a grand theatrical scene going on with hundreds of people who had supposedly decided to attend classes there that day. "No one was waiting; no one came, and no one left," notes the NYT. At one point, a librarian said the huge building had millions of foreign-language books, but when she pulled out some of them for the visitors to see, they were all about computers.

watch this video

work was okay today.

this blog and my dad are endorsing the black guy for president.
the fact that my dad actually said that he would be voting for the black guy if he got the nomination really surprised me.
i do say, it really surprised me.

there is a black girl with the sniffles sitting next to me.

this is from:
http://www.slate.com/id/2184768/

today's papers:
A summary of what's in the major U.S. newspapers.
The Big Steal
By Daniel Politi
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 20, 2008, at 6:32 AM ET
The Washington Post and USA Today lead with Sen. Barack Obama's decisive victory over Sen. Hillary Clinton in the Wisconsin primary.
With almost all the precincts reporting, Obama managed to get 58 percent of the vote to Clinton's 41 percent to mark his ninth-straight victory since Super Tuesday.
On the Republican side, Sen. John McCain continued racking up victories over Mike Huckabee in Wisconsin and Washington.
During his victory speech, McCain acted as if the Democratic nominee had already been decided and pointedly criticized Obama for offering "an eloquent but empty call for change."
As was widely expected, Obama also won the Hawaii caucuses by a landslide, according to early-morning wire reports.
The Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal's world-wide newsbox lead with, and everybody fronts, Fidel Castro's announcement that he will step down as Cuba's head of state after holding on to power for almost 50 years.
"The resignation closes a singular chapter in modern political history," says the Post.
Leaders in Washington emphasized there aren't likely to be any modifications in U.S. policy toward Cuba, and most believe there won't be any big changes in the island while Castro is still alive.
Meanwhile, in Pakistan, the winners of Monday's election made it clear there are lots of changes in store, says the New York Times in its lead story.
The leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party said his party would seek to hold talks with militants in the country's tribal areas and move away from a reliance on the military that is widely seen as following orders from the United States.
He also said the new parliament would quickly restore independence to the judiciary and get rid of restrictions on the media.
The most revealing aspect of the Wisconsin vote was how Obama continued to take away voters from Clinton's base, which could spell trouble for her in the Texas and Ohio primaries on March 4.
The candidates pretty much split the votes from women, while Obama had a significant advantage among men.
Also, Obama defeated her by a wide margin among voters with incomes of less than $50,000 as well as those without college degrees, two groups that had been essential to Clinton's past victories.
Slate's John Dickerson says that by winning "in every key geographical area and across racial and gender lines" Obama has proved that "he is not just the boutique fascination of young people and wealthy elites."
The NYT says Clinton will now need to pull off "double-digit victories to pick up enough delegates to close the gap."
If Wisconsin is any guide, "the next two weeks could be the most negative of the Democratic race," says the Post.
After losing yesterday's primary, Clinton didn't mince words and launched what the LAT calls "her most lancing election night critique of Obama yet."
But the line of attack was hardly new, as she once again chose to call attention to Obama's inexperience, which, as the NYT points out, is an argument she has made many times before, but it doesn't appear to be resonating with voters.
The Post says McCain's victory "signaled a coalescing of a Republican electorate that has struggled for a year to find a candidate it likes."
It was one of his best nights, but, as the NYT emphasizes, exit polls showed that many still have doubts about whether McCain is conservative enough.
Huckabee continued to carry the vote of those who described themselves as very conservative, even as the majority also said they'd be satisfied with McCain.
Slate's Chadwick Matlin suggests Huckabee may actually be helping Republicans get some free publicity, because if he were to drop out, "McCain's victories would be completely empty—and completely unnewsworthy."
It is widely expected that Fidel Castro's 76-year-old brother, Raul, will be Cuba's next president. But some are suggesting there might be a surprise when Cuba's National Assembly meets on Sunday, particularly since Castro didn't specifically mention his brother in his resignation letter. The LAT also notes that Castro has recently suggested he might want to hand power to someone younger.
If someone other than Raul were to be selected, speculation centers around Vice President Carlos Lage, whom the WSJ describes as the country's "economic czar."
Other possibilities include the foreign minister and the president of the National Assembly (the LAT has brief profiles of the four possible successors).
Regardless, the NYT emphasizes that any decision on a successor "remains in the hands of the Castro brothers and their inner circle."
And certainly Castro himself will still play a significant role in the government as a leader in Cuba's Communist Party, a member of parliament, and overall behind-the-scenes adviser.
This is why there appeared to be few signs yesterday that Cubans expected much to change in the near future.
"This isn't news," a Cuban dissident said.
"It was expected and it does nothing to change the human rights situation. …
There's no reason to celebrate."
At least some sort of change might be inevitable, though.
In a profile of Raul Castro, the WP notes that if he becomes president, he "is almost certain to preside over a government based more on a collective style of leadership, and less on personality."
The NYT points out that he has "a reputation as a manager who demands results from his cabinet members."
In recent months Raul has been encouraging more debates about policy and has hinted that changes are on the way, even if no one really expects them to come quickly.
In a separate Page One story, the LAT says that the changes "may at best resemble Chinese economic reforms, except on a tiny, Cuban scale."
The resignation is also likely to intensify debate within the United States about whether the long-running economic embargo should continue.
But any big changes would probably have to wait until President Bush leaves the White House, and even then, the three presidential candidates "offered little sign that they will break with the pillars of existing policy," says the Post inside.
"We always knew the embargo would topple the 49-year-old regime of the 81-year-old Fidel Castro someday," jokes the Post's Al Kamen.
"Patience is finally being rewarded."
The Pakistan Peoples Party, which was led by Benazir Bhutto, seems to have won the most seats from Monday's elections.
But the "emerging political landscape was far from clear" yesterday, notes the Post.
Neither of the two main opposition parties received a majority, and there doesn't appear to be an obvious candidate for prime minister from either one.
The WSJ interviewed President Pervez Musharraf, who insisted he has no plans to step down from power even as some, including former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, called for his impeachment.
Whether Musharraf survives will largely depend on what the ruling coalition will look like, but it's clear that his power has been greatly diminished.
Back to the U.S. presidential campaign for a moment:
Barack Obama writes an op-ed piece for USAT where he answers criticism that he has gone back on his pledge to use public funding in the general election if his Republican opponent also agreed to shun private money.
Obama insists he will "aggressively pursue such an agreement" if he's the nominee but emphasizes that it cannot "be reached overnight."
Obama writes that an agreement would have to commit the candidates to "discouraging cheating by their supporters" as well as refusing help from outside groups so that it "results in real spending limits."
He also suggests that it might have to include what McCain will spend while the Democratic primaries continue.
In a related story, the NYT notes the Obama campaign will report today that it collected $36 million in January, which is $4 million more than previous estimates.
After missing out on some of the most exciting weeks of the political primary season, Saturday Night Live is back this weekend.
One of the biggest concerns of SNL's producers right now is that the show "is bereft of a Barack Obama mimic," notes USAT.
Auditions are ongoing, and someone will probably be picked this week.
"Finding a way to get people to laugh at him is complicated right now," the executive producer said.
"People aren't seeing the cracks yet, but it will happen."

i am going to get my dinnner in a couple of minutes.

Matthew Good / August 15th, 2000
Beyond this Place Behind the Stars
Once, not so long ago, the world came to an end. Millions of people ceased to exist all of a sudden, all with no time to prepare. This did not mean that they stopped moving or speaking or producing. It just meant that they ceased to exist all of a sudden. The world had come to an end.
One morning, some years after the end of the world, a young woman patiently sat in a waiting room with fourteen other women. These other women were all roughly the same as her. They were all exactly the same age, they were all unwed, they were all relatively dim. These three primary characteristics had brought them together on that day. They had all had birthdays during the previous week. This meant that they could be legally put to work. So, their names having been run through various machines that do nothing all day except compile lists of names, they received notice that they were to come that morning to that office to be given a job.
She hoped she might be given a fantastic job. It was not to be, of course, but one can always hope.
During the hour or so that she spent waiting, she fantasized about being given a job so fantastic that it would make her burst with happiness. Perhaps she would become an events coordinator on a cruise ship or at a holiday resort.
Instead, she was given a job painting pieces of coral. She also painted a plastic word that had been glued to the coral. It consisted of the following four letters: M-A-U-I.
It was to be her life’s work.
The real world. That being the one in which we live.
The People’s Republic of China is a very large place. It is rather easy to become lost within it. Not so much because it covers such vast distances, but because there are so very many people vying for the solitude that such a vastness once offered. There are, at this very moment, approximately 1.2 billion people living in the People’s Republic of China. It is one of the most populated countries in the world. There was a time when China was ruled by emperors who were considered divine. After the world came to an end, the Chinese government spent a great many years telling its countrymen that the ways of their forefathers were wrong. Unfortunately, they did little to present anything concrete that showed themselves to be any better. But that is the way of the world. Everyone’s got to learn everything the hard way for some reason.
There was a time when a fraction of those 1.2 billion people tried to do something to change that reality. But it seems that it made for good television rather than being entirely realistic. So little has changed. Taiwan is next on the list. And thousands of incarcerated criminals still labour to produce cheaply made clothing and souvenirs for stupid North Americans. Oh how ironic, and so on.
Sometimes something is better than nothing. Sometimes having enough is better than expected. There are those that might consider painting clay dolphins glued to coral altogether unappealing, but if it’s all you’ve got then it’s something. And sometimes something is everything.
The unreal world. That being the one within my head.
There are tiny people living inside of your head, at this very moment, just as I write this, just as you read it. Some of those tiny people are making you second-guess everything that you take in, whatever it may be. Some of them make you confident, some of them are undecided as to what should be done. Most of them are far too busy making sure that you have enough inner power left to keep you going long enough for you to feel as though you’ve earned the right to stop.
There is a peace to assembly lines. More so to those that do not move at a fast pace. An assembly line that consists of a variety of different work stations is far more attractive than one that employs conveyor belts, ramps, and levers. Mostly because you get to sit down and work. Assembly lines with conveyor belts usually require workers to stand during assembly. Better to sit your life away. Better to have an impossibly uncomfortable chair than impossibly uncomfortable shoes.
When the girl was shown her work station she had no idea of her good fortune. She looked down the endless rows of work stations, each occupied by entirely miserable women.
Twenty-six years later she would look up from her work and watch another young girl, not unlike herself, look about the factory floor with the same quiet disgust. And, twenty-six years later, she would crack the slightest of smiles. By that time in her life she had come to realize that most things aren’t about keeping up defiant appearances in an attempt to buttress whatever’s left of some youthfully over-romanticized inner core. But rather one’s ability to convince oneself that life is nothing but a series of impractical maneuvers ending in a standoff with either a disappointing god or a disappointing devil.
Before the world came to an end the planet was populated by people that refused to acknowledge their defeats as anything but failures. They had spent evolution winding themselves up over the matter, convinced that forwards was far more interesting than any other direction. Up had nothing to do with it, mind you. Just forwards. Many of these people, unknowingly mired in the make-believe state of emancipation, had come to view their liberties as nothing more than “things that people are entitled to just because.��? That’s not to say that everyone was blind to the dangers of the Forwards Plan. For decades prior to the end of the world, a handful of gas jockeys, Orange Julius girls, and dishwashers had begun to realize that all was not well with the presumption that forwards was the way to go. Most of those people spent their lives standing in one place, wishing only that the smell of bullshit would eventually wash out of their clothes. Everybody else kept pushing forwards though. And then, all of a sudden, the world came to an end.
Despite the fact that the girl ended up painting clay dolphins and coral for the majority of her existence, she was granted something in the way of compensation for her complacency. She was given a son. And that might not seem like much to you, but that’s only because you’re waiting for the lights to change.
The World Unanswered.
An incomprehensible number of years ago something rather odd occurred. Something quite large and altogether volatile decided to explode. This sent a great manner of things every which way, some of it good and some of it not so good. Things flew, things cooled, things boiled, things adhered to the cosmic rules of magnetic repulsion and attraction. All in all it produced some interesting side effects. The most important of them being, of course, the Tilt-A-Whirl and the Garden Weasel.
There are those who contend that the world was created by an all powerful force, perhaps even a supreme being. There are those who contend that the world was created by a galactic event of unimaginable magnitude. There are those who contend that Elvis Presley is still alive and, if not, was actually a talent beyond compare. It’s a crapshoot really.
1] The universe is expanding. Throw some deceleration in there and you’ve got yourself one hell of a deity killer.
2] Did ancient peoples really begin building a massive tower in an attempt to reach God only to be made to speak different languages so that miscommunication would halt construction?
3] Why did Pink Floyd perform at the pyramids on the eve of the millennium?
People are stupid. I did not come up with that on my own. I had help. The world, entirely in love with itself, has come to condemn all things opposed to the fundamental aspects of “safe intelligence.��? Some might say that we are intelligent simply because we can communicate with a variety of complicated sounds and can recognize the indoctrinated difference between the moral and the immoral. Drop anything on its head long enough and you’ll probably get the gist of what it’s trying to say.
Unfortunation.
Men are pigs. It is universally acknowledged that all men are just looking for one thing: sex.
I couldn’t agree more.
Females, considered by experts to be far more mature than men, have been cheated out of millennia of consequence-free clam baking. The end of the world aside, to all things a backlash. Take feminism. In the years leading up to the end of the world a great many women were prancing around in revealing tops and tight little skirts. Most of them believed that such attire should not diminish the respect that they should receive as women. That’s the problem with having your cake and eating it too, I suppose. I would love nothing more than to walk around wearing a shirt with a giant arrow pointing downwards, but I have this strange feeling that most people would take it as some kind of sexual suggestion rather than an attempt to infer one’s final destination. The ability of the standard human being to realize that most things aren’t literal is next to none. So why, in the face of such knowledge, do people play such ridiculous games? Nothing better to do, I suppose. At least women know what men want. Mostly they want sex. Sex and relative silence. It’s not their fault that women have skipped several steps in the evolutionary ladder, now is it? Were it so simple for women then I highly doubt that men would have ever been given the chance to take control of this planet. Instead, women would balk at the notion of using sex as a control mechanism. They would simply use the other thing that they seem to have in abundance. An entirely unique and irrational adaptation of common sense. This, of course, would divert the connection between sex and singular devotion towards the unexplored regions of sex as a sport, leaving men either a) too tired to cause trouble or b) too hungry to.
That resolved, we are left with sex’s primary function in nature: procreation. The most powerful weapon of all. Despite what you might think, there is no greater force on the planet than the deliberate multiplication of a people. History is filled with examples of sexually minded warfare, as it would be altogether boring if nations of conquest were to have gone to the trouble of defeating their enemies only to turn around and go home. Back in the good old days soldiers were often promised rape and pillage as reward. This was done for a number of reasons, two of them being: a) to ensure that your men were contented and realized that you, their leader, wanted them to be so, and b) to impregnate local women, forcing them to give birth to illegitimate children that would, if all went to plan, ultimately lead to the complete disappearance of the aforementioned conquered peoples, leaving a unified realm for the conqueror’s heirs. It rarely all worked out, of course, but on occasion it did leave lasting impressions. The problem with such an undertaking is time. To see something such as the deliberate “breeding out��? of a people come to fruition one must ensure that the people in question remain conquered long enough to be “bred out.��? It is far easier to wipe out a people than breed them out. It’s just nowhere near as fun is all.
If you stop to consider the implications of time (and the ability of mankind to spread like anthrax through a dairy field) you’ll come to realize that nature has always had time in abundance. Nature has mastered time, as it has existed long enough to have become intimate with the forms and functions of necessity as they apply to perpetual endlessness. Thus, it is only a matter of time until nature itself uses this weapon against her inhabitants. The world will one day become too small to offer separation and, as the globe shrinks, the inevitable union of all peoples will occur. One day, in a future that neither you nor I can possibly imagine, the world will be filled with a single people. And knowing full well that you can change the clothes but not the man, we will have no choice but to look to the stars in hopes of finding someone else’s ass to kick. If anything, predictable we will always be.
The Universe Of One.
One can attain immortality through one’s own children. That’s not to say that things always work out as planned. Just that they work.The years sped like clouds in wrathful passing. Last year she was twenty-five, this year she’s forty-two. Somewhere along the way she encountered a man. And then, some years later, they had a child. And then, some years after that, the man left. It is not unlike men to leave. Parents die slow deaths so that their young might rally in their stead and get a little back for their sake. Some men, the good ones, know the difference between aiding in this principle and foolishly battling against it. But it is not unlike men to leave.
In the mornings she would often find herself staring at the seat of her chair, contemplating the years she had spent sitting in it. The carefree days of hoping to be a cruise ship events coordinator were far away. Here she painted coral and the word MAUI. Somewhere else, presumably in MAUI, tourists purchase the coral and send it to the people back home that they care little for.
She named her son Jack. She had always liked that name. She did not know that it was actually John. She did not know a great many things. She was lucky.
When Jack was born, his father, who had also worked at the factory, accidentally dropped him. The boy tumbled from his grasping hands to the floor and sustained massive head injuries. From that day on Jack became what professionals like to call special. Jack’s father left, afraid he would kill the boy by accident in the future, or so the story went. Jack never did learn to speak like normal people. He never did learn to swear or talk about girls with his mates. He had no mates. He was special. Special people only have friends on specific days of the week, depending on the state of health care. One life, no chair, and friends with union benefits.
The day that it happened she was doing what she always did. She was sitting painting coral. Water based paints were applied to the coral and then quickly brushed over to allow the natural white to highlight the ridges. Then she painted the letters blue and put the finished product in a box. The box was collected and taken to another table. And someone at that table glued a plastic dolphin onto it. And that’s how it had been going on for almost thirty years. The day that it happened was no different.
That morning Jack hadn’t eaten. Some days he ate, some days he didn’t. It depended on his mood. The friends of special people rarely tried to push the matter. If he didn’t want to eat then they didn’t bother trying to make him. They went back to playing cards and let him sit in his wheelchair, staring out the window. On that particular afternoon Jack’s eyes closed and never opened again. His mother, to whom Jack was everything, was most likely painting coral when her son slipped quietly away. Perhaps Jack had no comprehension concerning the ramifications of mortality and his part in it.
A friend of mine once told me that special people were not special at all. That they were, by her reckoning, cognizant disciples of humanity come to test the waning compassion of man.
Jack was not discovered by the friends of special people. They thought he was sleeping. His mother walked into the room, ran her fingers through his hair, and realized that he was cold. And she was left there, alone to rediscover the horrible truth. It is not unlike men to leave.One day, not so long ago, the world came to an end. A woman stands on a beach, her feet brushed by the advancing and retreating water. In her hand she holds a piece of coral emblazoned with a word and a little dolphin. She is standing on that word. She is looking out to sea, talking to her son.
this is from:
http://www.matthewgood.org/2000/08/beyond-this-place-behind-the-stars/

my brother is downstairs smoking beer and drinking pot.

Matthew Good / November 15th, 2000
Milton Hadley
There are pessimists in this world and there are optimists. There are the hunted, the hunters, the victims, the victimizers, the fools, the frayed, the genius, the ignorant, the oblivious, the obvious, and the incomprehensible. There are those who must deal with having been dealt impossible hands, those who know only the soft sides of luxury, and those who dwell in the small distance that often separates them. If you stop to consider it there is nothing more important than your life. And by that I am implying that your life is something altogether separate from yourself. Just because you are you does not make you your life. Life is too often misused to be considered the property of someone that never bothered to actually live it. No matter what happens during it, or how it is lived, you will eventually have to give it back. If you spend some time pondering such strange logic you may find yourself not going to work tomorrow morning. You may decide instead to sell the kids, kill your spouse, and head off into the adventure you always said that your life would be. But don’t worry, you won’t.
There are angry people in the world and there are those who know only the bliss of a simplistic ignorance. There are those who sell and those who buy. At the same instant that a child in some small village in Africa is getting their arms chopped off amidst the turmoil of yet another people’s revolution, another of the same age and relative appearance might be nagging their mother to buy them the latest video game halfway around the would. Distraught that they will not get their way in the matter, they may say “I wish I was dead.��? There is quiet in the world and there is the noise of those who are too fractured to let it grow. There is force and there is frailty. There is worth and there is worthlessness.
This is a story about a little boy who was none of the above.
Just The Sky
Milton Hadley was a genius. When he was seven years old he could multiply six-digit numbers in a matter of seconds. His father, who was a retired United States Air Force Captain, sent Milton to a military academy when he was ten. He had hoped that Milton would one day work for the government cracking Soviet codes and such. Thankfully, the following year, both Mr. and Mrs. Hadley were killed by a freak tornado that swept through their suburb on the outskirts of Wichita. Had Mr. Hadley lived, Milton would have most likely remained at the military academy. Which would have been tragic, since the dorm that Milton had lived in was completely destroyed by an artillery shell that one of his classmates had hidden in a footlocker. Everyone on the top floor was killed by the blast. Everyone on the second and first floors were crushed to death by the third floor. Milton, it seemed, was the beneficiary of impeccable timing.
Following the death of his parents, Milton was sent to Bellingham, Washington to live with his Uncle Rex, whom he had never met before. Rex was socially baffling. He lived in a renovated barn with his third wife, Cora, and an assortment of animals that were, for the most part, matted with dirt and permanently smelt of marsh water. His acreage was considerable though, and was home to numerous wrecked cars, buses, and tire fires. It was also home to four very well-constructed ramps, three world-class jumping bikes, two street bikes, and one of the world’s ugliest RVs. Since the age of twenty-four Rex had been a daredevil. Hence the name: Reckless Rex.
Milton arrived at the bus station still wearing his uniform, expecting his uncle to be the mirror image of his father. As he walked off of the bus he looked to his right and saw Rex and Cora standing there with his name written on a piece of yellow construction paper in purple marker. It was raining lightly and the paper had started to break apart in places. Rex, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, stood there leaning on the seat of his bike, covered in mud from head to toe. Milton was so mortified that he fainted.
Four months after Milton moved into the barn with Rex and Cora, Rex was severely injured during a performance at a monster truck show in the Tacoma Dome. Three days after the accident he would die of complications in hospital. This left Milton in the care of Cora, a borderline alcoholic, who knew very little beyond how to operate a kiln, roll grass, and make instant coffee. Knowing full well that she wouldn’t be able to take care of Milton properly, she was left with little choice but to send him to live with Rex’s first wife, Anna Hadley St. Claire, who was the nearest thing to a blood relative—as Anna and Rex had two daughters together. Cora gave him some half-assed explanations and put him on another bus.
Some days after his departure, Cora fell asleep while watching television one night and her cigarette, ill-balanced in the ashtray, fell to the floor and started a fire. The flames consumed the barn, killing Cora, the animals, and the majority of the world’s Reckless Rex collectibles. Had Milton been there he too would have perished.
Dizzy from the orbit of his life, Milton had no clue what he would have to deal with in Massachusetts. He was about to play a key role in one of the most bizarre happenings in world history. All he wanted was a Coke and a bag of Lay’s.
Just A Calm
Anna Hadley St.Claire met Rex Hadley at Boston College. The daughter of one of the most powerful industrialists in the Northeast, Anna had spent the majority of her life, up until college that is, in exclusive beach and country clubs.
When the unthinkable occurred—being rejected by Harvard—her father decided it would be best to sober her up by making her endure dorm life. Her roommate was a girl named Camille Stewart, the daughter of a Motel 6 maintenance man. Camille, who would—years later—go on to become a world-renowned and award-winning botanist, knew Rex Hadley from a local restaurant where the two of them had worked.
Rex did not attend Boston College. Rex was pretty much an idiot. The type that rich girls use to piss off their fathers.
The first time Anna met Rex he was naked. She had returned to her room following a literature class to discover him standing in front of her full-length mirror, flexing. She immediately began to laugh. After the initial shock of being discovered wore off, so did he. Camille had been allowing Rex to sleep in her bed during the day because he had been evicted from his apartment and was working as a bartender in a nearby tavern to pay off a gambling debt.
The two of them hit it off and the next thing they knew Anna was naked and Rex was flexing elsewhere. Two months later Anna dropped out of school and they eloped to Orlando during spring break. They were drunk, of course. Following their elopement they moved to Bakersfield, California, where Rex got a job working at a garage and began his love affair with jumping motorcycles. Anna, on the other hand, despised the place and everyone in it. She slowly began to realize that her actions were motivated by some need to anger her father. Late one October night, she left Rex, stole his car, and headed back to Massachusetts. When he awoke the next morning, Rex was not surprised when he read the note that she had left. He was somewhat angered that she took his car, but beyond that he didn’t care much. What Anna failed to tell him in that note was that she was pregnant. With twins no less. But Rex would never learn of it.
Her father welcomed Anna back with open arms. Overjoyed that she had left Rex, their lifelong feud ended mere minutes after her arrival. And, even though he was secretly disappointed that she was having Rex’s child, he realized that regaining his daughter far outweighed the whispers that would fill the locker room at the golf club.
Anna moved back into her parents’ house and gave birth to the twins in June. She named them Emma and Erica. Decades later Anna would be struck with massive bouts of guilt for denying her daughters any sort of relationship with their real father. She had remarried, of course, but not until the girls were old enough to realize that their stepfather wasn’t their biological father.
Eleven days after Cora had buried Rex, she received a letter in the mail from Anna asking if Emma and Erica could get to know their real father. And that’s where Cora got the idea. She knew that she would most likely deter Milton from becoming anything useful so she decided to write Anna back and work the guilt thing. She told Anna that Rex had recently been killed and that his nephew was now in need of family to look after him. Four days, two postmen, and three phone calls later it was settled. And Milton was packed off to yet another accident waiting to happen.
Just Some Black Clouds
Milton arrived at the St. Claire residence in the middle of an argument. The twins, Erica and Emma, were in front of the house screaming obscenities at each other while they hoisted .38s from time to time in threatening gestures. Anna was nowhere to been seen.
Anna’s second husband, Jack St. Claire, had given up on the three of them four years earlier, having met someone altogether younger and far more sexually capitulating. This left the housemaid, Uma, to deal with the girls. An ex-Soviet power lifter, Uma was not the kind of woman to permit such nonsense for very long. Years of steroid use had left her nerves in a very precarious state. Stressful situations caused her head to start twitching uncontrollably, leaving her no option but to wedge her skull between a door and a doorframe until it subsided. Uma feared the twitching more than death itself.
When she realized that the girls were outside with the pistols again she immediately got the house shotgun and fired a shot out one of the windows. This caused several things to occur. The first was to cause the girls to dramatically throw themselves to the ground, where they immediately began rolling about with their guns pointed every which way in search of the illusionary threat. The cab driver that had dropped Milton off decided it best to simply depart the residence at the highest possible speed available him, his fee no longer a concern. And Milton fainted. He would awaken minutes later to discover the twins standing over him, their guns still clutched in their hands. And, before fainting the second time, he heard one say to the other “you get his feet, I’ll get the device.��?
It is commonly thought that identical twins tend to get along better than most siblings. There are even those that contend that they share a special telepathic bond, one being able to detect when something happens to the other. This was not the case with the St. Claire twins. Their only aim was to kill each other. They attended school for all of four days before being sent home for their behaviour. They physically attacked four different private tutors, injuring one so badly that she spent three months in hospital. Their crowning achievement, though, was the accidental shooting of the their gardener, Dale Sellers.
Emma had fired several shots at her sister while she had been diving behind a hedgerow. As fate would have it, Dale was also behind the hedgerow, trying to coax a wounded parrot from beneath it. The bullet took him in the forehead. Erica spent a year in a juvenile detention facility, while her sister received three months for her part in it. The girls had attempted to kill each other on seven other occasions.
Fortunately the St. Claire estate was large enough to offer a buffer between the insanity of its occupants and the outside world. The twins hadn’t left the grounds in over eleven years, having since moved out of the main house, taking up residences in diametrically opposed buildings on the property. Emma had turned the pool house into a fortress while Erica lived in the basement of the staff house (where she spent the majority of her time mixing volatile chemicals).
It was rare for the twins to work together on anything, so it came as a surprise to Uma when they wheeled Milton through the front door in a wheelchair that had been fitted with restraints. Erica had designed the chair to kill Emma. She had also built a runway from the top of the highest hill on the estate down to the duck pond. Her plan was to surprise her sister, knock her unconscious, strap her in the chair, wait until she came around, and then push her down the runway into the pond where she would drown.
Erica was pleased that she actually got to put one of her inventions to use. Emma just eyeballed the thing, frantically trying to figure a way to break out of it if ever she found herself strapped in. There was never a dull moment at the St. Claire’s. Sort of like there was never a dull at Stalingrad.
By the time Milton had regained consciousness Anna had returned from the city. The twins were nowhere to be found by then, as they rarely ventured near the large estate house when their mother was at home. Uma had carried the boy upstairs and put him in bed well before Anna’s return. Milton lay there looking up at the shadows on the ceiling, wondering what was to become of him. He counted the spaces between the shadows. There were 210,346 of them.
That night the twins did not sleep. They paced back and forth in their respective dwellings attempting to deduce the meaning behind the arrival of the little boy. And, in their own demented ways, they both came to the same conclusion. Each was convinced that their mother was in league with the other and that the boy had been brought in to replace them. Emma went immediately to her machine gun and fired several volleys into the corner of the staff house. Following this brief outburst Milton drifted off into what would be the last deep slumber of his life. And that night he dreamed of a land of baguette lovers occupied by barrette haters.
Ninny Hawks
In 1951 Colonel Albert St. Claire spent the majority of his time casually walking his estate. A full life of industrial strong-arming comfortably behind him, he favoured wandering the wooded bits of his property flushing out fowl with his dogs and blasting them from the sky. The colonel enjoyed it so much that, when proper game was out of season, he would pay top dollar to have a variety of domesticated birds released around the grounds so that he might continue to spend his days flushing and blasting. Many a cockatoo and parrot met their end in the sights of his shotgun.
Years later his granddaughter would spend her nights wondering from whom her daughters had inherited their instabilities. She had read the appropriate literature, conferred with the appropriate specialists, adopted and abandoned the appropriate religions, and even spent tens of thousands of dollars travelling to the Italian Alps to meet with one of the world’s foremost psychics. But try as she might she could never put a finger on it. Her twin daughters, whom she loved, detested each other. And one day their inability to successfully do away with one another would come to an end. What Anna did not know was that her grandfather was partially to blame.
In the summer of 1951 the butler at the St. Claires’ was a coloured man by the name of Albert Hawks. Albert hailed from Kentucky. He had come north in search of work as a small boy some thirty-four years earlier. And, since the day he left home, he had neither seen nor heard from any of his relations. Albert started at the St. Claire manor as a yard boy at the age of sixteen. By his thirty-fifth birthday he had become the estate’s butler. In his later years the colonel tended to trust Albert more than his oldest friends and even his own family. Albert did the firing and hiring of staff. Albert kept in phone contact with the lawyers and doctors and politicians. Albert kept up the colonel’s correspondence. When President Kennedy was assassinated, Albert attended the funeral for him.
Late one Saturday morning in the summer of 1951 the phone in the staff house kitchen started ringing. Albert Hawks was sitting at the kitchen table drinking a cup of coffee and perusing a copy of Life magazine. He got up from his chair and answered the phone. And, to his great surprise, his youngest sister was on the other end. Her name was Ninny.
Ninny Hawks had, up until that week, been the victim of a very violent marriage. Her husband had done time for a variety of crimes during their twelve years together. He had returned home from a three-year term five days earlier and had taken up where he had left off. This meant that he slept all day and beat his wife when he was sober enough to keep his balance. Having just spent the better part of two years alone, Ninny came to the conclusion that enough was enough. She planted an axe between his eyes when he was asleep, packed a suitcase, and walked out of town in the middle of the night. Five days later she arrived in Boston and called the only number that she had for her brother. Albert had sent it in a letter when their mother passed away. He had not been able to attend the funeral and sent a letter to his siblings and aunt in his stead.
Ninny had kept the letter, realizing that she might one day need some way of contacting Albert in the event that the family ever attempted to get together for a reunion or whatnot. As it turned out her reunion with her older brother was not a joyous one. Albert was not pleased with the circumstances surrounding Ninny’s arrival. It was one thing to show up unannounced on his doorstep, it was something altogether different to show up with a murder rap.
The first thing that Albert did was put Ninny in his bedroom so that no one would see her. He then went directly to the colonel’s study to have a conversation about what to do with her. Despite what most might have thought, the colonel and Albert were the closest of friends. This would explain why Albert looked after the colonel as he did right up until his death.
Albert walked from the staff house to the main house and found the colonel in his study, reading. The two had a brief conversation that was followed by a minute of violent screaming. Albert then left the study, walked back to the staff house, gathered up his sister and her things, put on a coat, and led her out into the woods. To this day, Ninny has no clue what was said between her brother and the colonel. But whatever it was, it ended up with her living in a filthy cabin in the backwoods of Massachusetts.
And, since the 12th of July 1951, Ninny Hawks had not left the St. Claire estate. Even when Albert died she did not venture from the small, self-imposed confines of her time-warped condition. Albert always told her that the colonel strictly forbade it. For all of the 1960s she did not venture further than a half mile from her shack. She kept chickens and goats, a garden, and she fished. And during all that time she went, for lack of a more grandiose term, completely mad. Ninny would inadvertently turn the twins against each another when they were very little.
One evening, during a violent storm, Ninny lost her footing on some rocks and fell off of an overhang into a creek. She landed on her right leg, puncturing her thigh. Realizing how serious the wound was, she decided to do what was for her the unthinkable. The next night she would make her way to the estate house and find something to help prevent infection. It was easy enough, seeing as the doors on the estate were never locked. Once she made it to the house, she simply entered and went about looking for some alcohol or antiseptic. Luckily, in one of the ground floor washrooms, she came across some peroxide. It was during that visit that Ninny met the twins. Erica and Emma caught her red-handed as she limped down the hall between the main foyer and the kitchen.
Ninny, realizing that the girls could quite easily tell their parents about her, decided to do the only thing that she could think of. She sat the girls down in the kitchen and told them this story. It went a little something like this…
A real long time ago there was this little girl that lived in the country. One day, when the girl was walking through the forest, she came upon a small little fella standing on a rock. The little fella didn’t say nothing. So the little girl picked up a stick and gave him a little poke. Still the little fella didn’t say nothing. So she poked him some more. Finally, after a whole heap of poking, the little fella put his hands on his hips and said “Now little girl! Why in the world would you spend all this time poking at a little fella such as me?��?
The little girl just stood there and didn’t say a thing. So the little fella jumped off the rock and climbed up into a nearby tree. The little girl thought that he looked real funny up in that tree and she started laughing at him. The little fella inched his way out onto one of the big, overhanging branches until he was right over the little girl, and then jumped off the branch and landed on the little girl’s head. The little girl wasn’t laughing anymore. The little fella went back to his rock and stood on it as he had been before. The little girl’s body eventually rotted away, though some of it was eaten by a fox that came by.
The weeks went by and the little girl’s parents were beginning to think that they were never going to see her again. Her pap thought it best to go wandering in the woods to see if he could find her. So he went into the woods and started calling her name while he searched around. But no matter his calling, the little girl never answered.
One day, while he was wandering, he came across the little fella standing on the rock. And, like before, the little fella didn’t say anything. So the man picked up a stick and gave the little fella a poke. Still, the little fella didn’t move from his rock. Hours went by and then the little fella finally put his hands on his hips and said “Now sir! Why in the world would you spend all this time poking a little fella such as me?��?
The man just stood there shrugging his shoulders. So the little fella got off his rock and climbed up the tree. The man thought the little fella looked funny, and he started to laugh. When the little fella got up onto the branch he crept out on it until he was right over the man’s head. And then, while the man was pointing up at him laughing, the little fella jumped on his head and knocked him to the ground. Eventually, his body rotted away just like his daughter’s had.
Months went by and the mother of the little girl was beginning to think that she would never see her daughter or her husband ever again. So one night, in a fit, she went running out into the woods and came across a little fella standing on top of a giant diamond.
She said, “My, that’s a very pretty diamond you have!��?
And the little fella jumped down, took off his little cap, wiped his brow with his sleeve, and said, “Ma’am, you’re the first person that ever realized I was standing on a diamond.��?
And at that wondrous point in the telling, Ninny produced a very large piece of glass from her handbag and slammed it down on the table. And from that moment on both Emma and Erica St. Claire considered Ninny Hawks to be the greatest person they had ever met.
Two Little Rich Girls in a Pot of Stew. Add a Dash of Garlic, Cook Em ’Till They’re Through.
The twins viewed their mother as a figure constantly in transit. Occasionally she might dare to put on the mask of motherhood for a while, but for the most part she spent her days in Boston playing bridge and drinking a considerable amount of gin. Their stepfather, to be fair, was even more of a shadow than their mother. He commonly deemed it necessary to personally oversee the completion of whatever project his company was involved in at the time. Of course such things invariably meant travelling to distant parts of the world for extended periods of time. Being as young as they were it seemed to them as if their stepfather was merely a voice that came floating out of a telephone receiver. Surely all fathers were the same, they thought. Perhaps all fathers lived in a far-off land. And there was only one phone in this land. Surely, had his phone time not been limited by the fact that all those other fathers had to call their daughters as well, he would have called more often. But to their credit, the twins dwelled on the absence of their parents for only a brief time in their early childhood. The truth of the matter was that they were far too intelligent to give much thought to it once they realized that their parents were worse off than themselves.
The girls read the paper and watched the news. They realized how well-off their family was. And they also realized that their parents only had themselves to blame for their lives. So it seemed to them that there were better things to do than lament over the absence of love and support. Such as tracking down old ladies that surely dwelt somewhere on the vastness of their estate.
The twins set about finding Ninny in the most expedient way possible. Tapping into the psychosis that would eventually engulf them, they got theYellow Pages, thumbed through it until they found what they were looking for, picked up the phone, and dialed a number. A rented helicopter arrived at noon the next day.
Discovering Ninny’s location was simple after that. Being that it was winter they had the pilot hover high enough to allow Erica to survey the entire estate with a pair of binoculars. All she needed to do was search for signs of chimney smoke. They had the pilot fly to the area where Ninny’s shack stood and made sure to note the location on a map. They then had him turn back and return to the house.
You might think this unlikely of girls so young but I assure you that it did occur. Some of you might think that no one in their right mind would rent a helicopter to two young girls. A free-flowing multitude of one-hundred-dollar bills can have that effect on a financially ailing helicopter-rental company though. And, despite the fact that they were preschoolers, they were astoundingly smart for their age. Imagine being confronted by two small girls with fists full of hundreds trying to explain to you that they’re looking at various options for a landscaping endeavour that they wish to surprise their parents with for their anniversary. After five minutes of standing there completely stunned I just took the money and kept my mouth shut.
The following morning Erica and Emma set out from the house in search of Ninny’s hideout. Having packed the provisions and equipment they considered necessary for the journey, they marched through the rear gardens, past the greenhouses, and into the park. The St. Claire estate was, for the most part, littered with stands of trees separated by small clearings, ponds, and creeks that spread out across a small range of hills. The further one went from the gardens and polo park, the rougher the terrain became. Having underestimated how difficult it would actually become, the twins found themselves faced with a variety of ravines and other impassible terrain that they were forced to circumnavigate. This took time of course. Time that, under such circumstances, slipped by quite unnoticed.
Having walked deep into the wilds of their property, the girls paid little attention to the fact that the afternoon had turned into evening. Things under the spreading trees were clouded by an encroaching darkness that is legendary in the forest. One minute the sun is shining and the next it isn’t. An hour after sunset the girls were pushing through underbrush in the dark, unable to see more than five feet in front of them. And it was then that the unthinkable occurred.
Having taken the lead most of the day, Emma had started to cut corners when it came to paying attention to things such as dips in the ground and branches that lashed back to hit her sister. The further they went the more careless and annoyed she became. They were little girls, mind you, which meant that smallish holes were, in fact, medium-sized holes and so on. It also meant that they were somewhat frightened. Geniuses or not, they were still children. It also meant that they spent most of the latter portion of their expedition arguing. About things like who had finished the cream soda or who had allegedly read the map incorrectly. When Emma fell off the cliff the two of them were going on about who was to blame for this adventure.
Ninny Hawks had been following the girls for about an hour when Emma fell off the cliff. Despite the fact that Ninny knew they were approaching the cliff, for it was there that she had fallen and hurt herself only weeks before, she did nothing to alert the girls to the danger. She had doubled back behind them in an attempt to ford the river at a shallow point and then watch them as they argued about how they were going to get across.Ninny thought quite highly of the twins at first. She was impressed that they did not turn back at the first sign of adversity, nor when the sun went down. They pushed relentlessly forward, which is what made Ninny change her mind about them. In the beginning she thought it sweet that the girls were trying to find her. But it is not like rich little girls to go to such extremes as this. Rich little girls give up after several hours of being lashed in the face by pine boughs, they do not wander further into the woods with night setting in. This made Ninny think that they were up to something. At that moment she decided that the girls must never find her or her house.
Emma fell off the cliff and down into the icy waters of the creek below. She landed flat on her back which, due to her small stature, probably saved her life. Had she gone in head first she would have hit the creek bed and split her head wide open. Had she gone in feet first she would have easily broken both legs. Thankfully she weighed so little that landing on her back, though painful, allowed the shallow water to break her fall.She cried out in pain, which terrified Erica to no end. Having heard but not seen her sister plummet in the blackness before her, she stood clinging to a tree trunk, paralyzed with fear. Emma, on the other hand, once her crying abated, sobered up to the reality of the situation. It was extremely dark and extremely cold. And, to top it off, her attempts to coax her sister into looking for a way down to her were futile. Erica refused to move. The two talked for a while until Erica was cut off abruptly in mid-sentence. That was all she remembered. After screaming her sister’s name in terror for four or five minutes Erica was hit on the head from behind as well.
When the twins regained consciousness they were lying on a wet mattress facing each other, their hands and feet bound with gardening string. The room that held them was faintly lit by a candle and the mattress smelled as if it had been soaked in gasoline. Ninny Hawks was nowhere to be seen, though the girls could hear something or someone moving around in an adjacent area. Their first order of business was to begin wailing terribly, which they did for some time. Following the outburst Emma decided the best thing for them would be to attempt an escape, though she could offer no plan as to how it should be done. They deliberated on into the night or the morning, neither could be sure.
At long last, as the girls were about to admit to each other that, despite their formidable brains, neither could come up with any realistic escape method, Ninny emerged through a rickety door and walked over to them. Too terrified to say anything, they lay there watching her. After standing over them, moving her eyes from one to the other, Ninny reached down, grabbed them by the feet, and dragged them across the floor. The twins started to scream. Ninny stopped dragging them and began kicking them in the back. The twins screamed even louder.
Ninny returned to dragging them across the floor and up a small dirt tunnel into another room. Once inside the room Ninny dragged the girls towards a large pit that was situated in the centre of the room. The pit was about ten feet from side to side and seven or eight feet deep. It smelled of offal and teemed with flies. Loosening the bonds on their legs, she kicked the girls several more times to subdue them and then tipped them into the pit. The girls fell in tandem, Erica landing squarely on her sister.
The pit was filled with the remains of various animals in varying states of decomposition and what smelled like human waste. Having screamed themselves hoarse, the twins struggled to free their legs and then worked together to loosen their hands. This was easier said than done, as Emma had broken several ribs during the fall and was having difficulty breathing. The girls lay there clinging to each other, their voices spent, tears streaming down their faces. And then, as if the situation couldn’t be made any worse, the lights went out.
A Fraction of an Inch Either Way.
Ten hours would pass before Uma thought to trouble Mrs. St. Claire with the news that her daughters were nowhere to be found. Having tied one on the night before, Anna dismissed the intrusion with a wave of her hand, adjusted her night mask, and went back to bed. Her instructions on the matter were clear. “They’ll turn up,��? she said.
By nine that night Anna was a nervous wreck, the police had been summoned, and Uma had been fired and rehired a half dozen times. The police were convinced that the twins had fallen prey to kidnappers and were most likely miles away, locked in the trunk of a car. They spared Anna this theory, of course, thinking it best to feed her false hope by convincing her that the girls were just hiding.
The local police did not think to search the St. Claire estate for the twins, nor did they inform other law-enforcement agencies concerning the possibility that the St. Claire girls had been abducted. Instead they sat around waiting for the inevitable phone call that would confirm their theory. But no ransom call would come.
Within walking distance of the twins’ location, the police spent the better part of a week trying to piece together what had become of the girls. It wasn’t until a junior officer dropped a chocolate bar behind a desk in the foyer that they turned up the receipt for the helicopter rental. Later that day the police came to question me and I returned to the St. Claire estate with my helicopter to show them what I had done with the twins.
You’d think that the police would have been suspicious of chimney smoke rising from the woods off in the distance but it really didn’t occur to them that it was out of the ordinary. Another four days would pass before a detective, quite harmlessly, mentioned to Anna that he admired the estate and inquired why the guest house was located so far from the main house, referring to the chimney smoke he’d seen from my chopper. Anna perked up at this of course, telling him immediately that the only other lodging on the property, besides those located within plain view of the estate house, was the stable house.
This confused the detective, who did his best to match up the location of the stable house with the smoke he had seen rising from the woods off in the distance. Anna gave it little thought as well, automatically thinking the man to be one of those Better-Homes-and-Gardens types that loves to find cheap ways to make their paltry suburban houses look majestic.
I won’t bore you with the arduous details concerning the eventual realization that there was something odd about that smoke. I won’t bother telling you about how they spent the whole night and most of the next morning searching the property in grids. But I will tell you that, when they finally did discover Ninny’s shack and kicked in the door, Ninny was dead.
They found her lying on the floor with a fire poker stuck in her stomach. The girls, on the other hand, were discovered at the end of the earthen tunnel that Ninny had burrowed out over three decades of delusion. They found Erica first, crouched up in a ball at the edge of the pit, covered in blood, gripping a large piece of glass. Emma, who had been run through by the fire poker as well, was lying comatose in the pit, barely alive. Thankfully my helicopter was at hand and the police had me fly her to the hospital. Another half hour and she wouldn’t have lived.
The days and weeks that followed teemed with innuendo and scandal. Firmly in the hot seat, Anna was badgered by the media day and night about Ninny Hawks and how something of that nature could occur right under her nose. Anna’s only option given the circumstances was to drink, sleep all day, and try to forget that her life had turned into a nightmare. The sheer bizarreness of the situation could be easily encapsulated by the fact that Anna’s husband, having been contacted and presented with the details, chose not to come home.
In the months following the ordeal the girls were seen by a variety of psychologists in an attempt to help them deal with what had happened. Neither had talked about it though. Nor would they ever.
Once the twins returned home from the hospital the bizarre hatred that now exists between them was glaringly evident. And it was then that the murder attempts began. The first such attempt came when Erica tried to stab Emma with a kitchen knife during breakfast, right in front of their parents. Her stepfather was forced to wrestle her to the floor, as Emma rushed over and immediately started kicking her in the head. It’s been like that ever since.
And So—The War.
Milton awoke to unfamiliar surroundings. Having been at the St. Claires’ for only two weeks he was still not used to the place. Replacing the smell of wet hay was the harsh, headache smell of lemon Pledge. And every morning, as he drew air in through his nose, it reminded him that he had been packed off to this place to avoid complication. He was beginning to wonder what exactly the complication was. Him? Or everyone else?And during those first fourteen days at the estate he had not encountered either of the girls that had set upon him on the front drive. He had spent time exchanging pleasantries with Anna and Uma, but his only formal introduction to the twins came in the small hours of the morning when they exchanged heavy weapons fire and insults at the top of their lungs. No one ever brought it up though, so Milton never bothered to ask. To Milton the only advantage to being at the St. Claires’ was the many books that the colonel had been wise enough to collect during his life. His library was extensive. Having spent the majority of his veraciously available reading years living in a barn with a stunt man and the wife of a stunt man, he viewed the St. Claire library as ancient scholars must have the great library of Alexandria.
On the fourteenth day of Milton’s habitation there came a knock at the front door that went unanswered. Having been left to fend for himself that day, as Uma had gone into Boston with Anna, Milton had forgotten that there was no one else to answer it. An hour passed before Milton, who was reading in the library, realized that there had been no answer to the knocking. Curious about who it was, he put his book down and started to walk across the room towards the main foyer. As he was walking something caught his eye through the large rear library windows. Walking over to investigate, Milton found himself staring at the most bizarre sight of his young life.
There was a man in a suit dangling over the swimming pool, his arms and legs attached to ropes that had been tied between the pool-house balcony and an upper window of the staff house. The man, who struck Milton as being rather calm, was facing the water, his head moving about in an attempt to survey his bonds. The twins, who had obviously subdued the poor old man, stood facing each other on opposite sides of the pool, both simultaneously slotting 9-mm bullets into handgun clips. Why they had worked together to dangle a stranger above the swimming pool was anyone’s guess. Since Milton was not the confrontational sort, he could think of nothing better to do than simply watch. Thankfully the old man had a pretty good idea of what he was going to do. He would melt the guns with his mind and then implore the boy at the window to cut the ropes.
The Incredible Dr. Chalky
It all started in a chair. Ernie Chalky was sitting in the larger of his two living-room chairs flipping through a National Geographic when the phone rang. It was not as if he commonly received calls about ceramic dogs that had allegedly attacked and killed human beings. Over the years Ernie had discovered that the clergy, compared to most, almost always tended to blow things out of proportion. So when he found himself talking to a frantic priest he really thought little of it. The fact that the priest was attacked and consumed by a ceramic dog mid-sentence had nothing to do with his inability to take the priest seriously. Granted, once Ernie heard the receiver hit the floor and the priest’s screams echo off into the bare-walled corners of the room, he realized there was a good chance that the priest was on the level (and, more than likely, in a basement). It wasn’t until the dog picked up the phone and started talking that Ernie knew he was dealing with a very serious situation. Because it is, in the opinion of most, quite odd for ceramic dogs to be able to speak perfect Latin.
For someone in Ernie’s profession it is not uncommon to come across inanimate objects that possess the ability to move about of their own free will and speak a variety of languages. For example, four years earlier Ernie had spent the better part of three months tracking a Portuguese-speaking flaming sword all over northern Madagascar. He prevailed, of course, but it was not without anguish. It had been appearing out of thin air and hacking unsuspecting villagers to pieces. You may think it trivial, but it is actually quite difficult to catch something that pops in and out of a standardized molecular constitution. But who are you to call when such abnormalities abound? Ghostbusters was just a movie.
Ernie was just a boy when Captain Chalky found him in a ditch in the dead of winter. England was a different place then, having survived German bombs and rockets. Perhaps that’s why Ernie’s parents decided to leave it. His mother was an Essex girl, but moved to Wales after his father was unable to find work in London. His father was a Welshman, as was Ernie. His mother, being that she was entirely English, didn’t think much of the Welsh. Perhaps that’s why she left Wales and returned to England when Ernie was seven years old. After all, it was filled not only with Welshmen but Ernie’s father, who was, to his great discredit in her eyes, as Welsh as one could be. Ernie ended up staying with his father. Perhaps she simply forgot him in her haste to leave. Perhaps, realizing that she had, she paused some distance away and considered going back for him. In doing so, she realized that she might wake her husband and thought better of it. So Ernie’s mother left him and his father in the dead of night and went back to England with his unborn brother Andrew as passenger. Ernie has never met Andrew. He hadn’t really met his mother either.
Ernie’s father was not what you would call an intelligent man. His father was a coal miner. The life of a miner is one filled with nightmares of suffocation and collapse. Maybe that is why a great many of them drink as they do. To see if they can destroy their livers before they succumb to the inevitability of black lung. Ernie’s father would die from a combination of the two. So Ernie found himself in the care of Father Michael O’Reilly at the Boys School of Holy Seclusion. And during his time there Father Michael repeatedly attempted to convince Ernie that Jesus was ever-present, if only he looked hard enough. But try as he might, Ernie would always come to the same conclusion: the Almighty’s picture was everywhere, but He was nowhere to be found.
Five months after his arrival at Holy Seclusion, Ernie came to the realization that his life would be doomed if he were to remain for long. Ernie, not unlike his mother, left Wales in the middle of the night and travelled to England. He would get no further than Lydney before the horrific reality of his actions would set in. He would spend that night in an abandoned barn and would awaken the next morning to find that his toes had turned completely purple. He would then hobble as far as he could in an effort to find help. He made it as far as the roadway. And that’s where Captain Chalky discovered him.
Doctor Captain Finnegan Chalky was a Cambridge man. He was also an ordained Anglican minister and a highly decorated RAF fighter pilot. These three things had very little to do with one another, and he would later tell Ernie that each was a foolish pursuit of three goals: 1) knowledge 2) presumed access to the afterlife 3) a vehicle in which to test the boundaries between being smart enough to know better and ignorant enough not to. To the best of Ernie’s knowledge Captain Chalky didn’t hold a Ph.D in anything except himself, despite the fact that he could speak four languages and knew the answer to every question that Ernie ever put to him. He was, in Ernie’s eyes, someone that one would consider to be the perfect representation of a human being. Well, up until the point when he told Ernie that he could bend metal with his mind anyway.
He could melt the fenders of cars, turn doorknobs, open locks, and so on. The first time Ernie ever witnessed it Captain Chalky was attempting to loose some earth under a fence with a hoe. He couldn’t get the hoe far enough under the fence so he simply bent the end of it and slid it under. For days Ernie could not believe what he saw. Captain Chalky could in fact bend metal with his mind. And Ernie, as his student, would receive the secret of this gift before the captain’s passing.
Ernie lived with Captain Chalky in a variety of places up until his death in 1976. Known in various circles in Europe as paranormal superstars, they were employed by a wide variety of organizations that included such celebrity members as the Pope, the Prince of Monaco, and Salvador Dali. When Captain Chalky died, Ernie decided to carry on their work by himself. He packed and moved to Mexico, where he purchased a large estate near San Carlos on the Baja. From there Dr. Ernie Chalky would conduct the business of dealing with those things that no one else would believe possible.
Ernie Chalky, hot on the trail of a Latin-speaking ceramic dog, has tracked the beast through Central America, up the west coast of the States, and then east to New England. Two days before arriving at the St. Claires’ front door he had learned that the dog was camped out on their property. He was oblivious to the added danger of the insane twins that had full run of the grounds. Before he knew it he found himself dangling above a swimming pool, having been hit on the head and knocked unconscious. And, to make matters worse, there was a demonically possessed ceramic dog somewhere in the area that was out for blood.
Good movies…
Having finished loading before her sister, Erica attempted to move towards a nearby retaining wall for cover. But something wouldn’t allow her to. Instead she found the weight of the gun change, as if she was no longer burdened by it. She then felt the gun raise her arm, coming to rest in line with her sister’s head. And then, without her finger being on the trigger, the gun went off. As if in slowmotion, as all horrific things in this world tend to happen, the shot took Emma in the forehead, ripping her head apart.
What had begun as a promising day had turned suddenly sour. The arrival of the old man had provided the twins with a welcome distraction. As intrusions tended to, their fantastic hatred for one another abated long enough for them to subdue the stranger and dangle him above the pool. Then it was back to business. But how this could have happened was beyond Erica. She stood there wobbling, the gun falling from her hand to the pool deck. Her eyes, as if out of focus, searched for some explanation, forcing her head from side to side in a druglike trance. And then she fainted and fell into the pool.
Milton was in shock. His eyes refused to leave the expanding pool of blood on the pool deck. Somewhere in the background he could faintly hear a man’s voice yelling, but it failed to register. The contents of Emma’s head took a slippery ride from her skull onto the concrete and tiles, filling a nearby pool-filter cap. Milton vomited. Which was, of course, a step up from passing out.
Ernie Chalky stopped yelling. There was no point. He would have to wait there until the boy came to his senses and realized that he was in need of assistance. He hung there casually counting the air bubbles that rose to the surface of the water, after having crept out of Erica’s lungs. Almost an hour would pass before the little boy from inside the house would emerge. But unfortunately for Ernie Chalky it was not to aid in his escape.
…end badly.
Milton woke to find himself lying next to a swimming pool. Which was strange since the last place he remembered being was in his bed at home in the loft of a barn. Being that he was a genius, he was quick to come to the realization that he was not dreaming. He was nauseous, though nowhere as profoundly as he would become after pulling himself up to survey his surroundings. In doing so he would discover three bodies. One of an old man hanging above the pool, blood cascading from his body into the water below. A drowned mermaid. And a third on the far side of the pool deck with no head.
After a considerable amount of time, Milton got up, walked the length of the pool, and slumped into a sun chair, where he hopelessly began trying to piece together what had befallen him. He could feel the sun against his face and arms. Despite the gruesome display before him, he felt somehow assured that he had played no part in it. Sitting there he began to laugh. Sitting there, laughing in that sun chair, his eyes came upon the strangest thing.
From the pool-house door there came a dogged little fella carrying an enormous burden. A giant sack slung over his shoulder, the little fella wobbled his way as far as the sun chairs before stopping to take a rest. Removing his tiny cap, he wiped his brow and looked around as if determining which direction to go.
Then he looked up at Milton.
And being that Milton was at a loss for words he could think of nothing better to say than “What’s in the sack?��?
Replacing his cap on his tiny little head, the little fella lifted the sack and slung it back over his shoulder. Standing there wobbling, he replied“Funny you should ask.��?

this wonderful story is from http://www.matthewgood.org/2000/11/milton-hadley/

happy vd!

happy valentines day everyone!
this isn't a video of me but i thought this guy made some good points about valentines day.
its a you tube video...just watch the damn video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COpzwJmT28I

i should take a shower now.

Matthew Good / December 1st, 2002
Nine Lives At The Dolphin House
Call Ahead For Reservations.
Phil Mack and the Whack Attack were on the super bill that last visit to The Dolphin House, that I remember. Thinking about it I can’t rightly say that I’ve ever heard a name for a band that’s so utterly asinine. There have been many that have come close, but the Whack Attack is simply the worst. Then again, we’re talking about a band that were bizarre enough to precipitate the rumor that the six of them had entered into a pact whereby they would blow themselves up in the middle of Earth Wind and Fire’s Jungle Boogie at the stroke of midnight at the millennium, so take it how you will. Unfortunately, that night marked the demise of the sextet. Not because they were any better or worse than any other band that spent seven days of the week slogging it out in a lounge, but because that night I shot Phil Mack in the back of the head while he was taking a piss.
After awhile it can get difficult to remember why it is you’re there to do what you’re there to do. Phil, if I recall correctly, owed Kreshbaum money. Who didn’t? Who doesn’t? So ‘ha ha’ is all that you can say to that. Because after a point it’s allowed to be funny. It comes to mind that I may have killed another person at The Dolphin House but really can’t remember who or why. They must have owed Kreshbaum money or done something or other. It’s all quite a vicious circle really.
This is where you ask who I am, which poses some difficulties. Nothing simple, not a capitalist or lunatic tax dollars hard at work. Not even just a bad guy, or a swell guy that just fell in with the wrong crowd as a kid and ended up rough and tumbled and barking up a series of wrong trees with bad dogs. What does it matter? What would it matter if I said I was? What would it matter if I said I wasn’t? It’s crap, all of it, really.
So who am I? That’s the problem with everyone. If it were that simple then the seas would be calm and flat and full of fishes. If it were that simple then there’d be no need to be anything but nothing at all. Because that would be fine. So who I am is the guy who could waste your time connecting dots and details but won’t. Because there are two kinds of time, wise time and a waste of time. So let’s make it simple. I’m the guy who shoots people in toilets. And like most guys who shoot people in toilets (or restaurants or parking garages) I work for a man that needs people shot every so often. It’s a growth industry. Chances are men like that are going to be upset about something sooner or later. And that’s where guys like me come in.
If you look up Peewit in the dictionary you won’t find anything most of the time. Sometimes it’ll say it’s the same as a Lapwing and if you look up Lapwing it’ll say - plover with a tuft of feathers on the head. So you look up plover and it says - shore bird with a straight bill and pointed wings. And then the confusion will set in. Because you’re not sure what it’s supposed to mean. It’s not my real name though, not the one my mother gave me, so it’s really no big deal. On the other hand, if you were to look up terrible you’d find it says - very serious; very bad.
Kreshbaum has an enormous aviary where he houses hundreds of birds, some rare, some not so. He also has smaller rooms just off the main aviary where he keeps vultures and crows. Sometimes he puts people in those rooms when they’re half dead and leaves them there. Sometimes I bring them to him half dead. One night we were walking through the aviary and he started going on about Peewits. And from there he indulged himself in a rather confused and quite extraordinary moment of snakes and ladders wherein he thought them to be uniquely boring and a bit of a waste. And somehow all of it found it’s way to me, walking beside him dragging some body, and he said that I was very much like a Peewit. So by some osmosis I became one. After we dumped the body in one of the rooms we went back into the house and he said “that’s what Terrible Peewit’s are for Gerald” to Gerald who was sitting in the living room watching television. And that’s how I got the name.
When I was a boy my grand-dad used to sit out on our front porch and chain smoke and talk to himself. He wasn’t crazy, mind you, just dealing with his fair share of senility. Things got quick somewhere along the line and grand-dad got left. A lot of people did. You have to get on the boat if you want to see the new world. You have to leave grand-dad sitting out on the porch chain smoking his way to the grave, pulling a ratty green sweater around his shoulders, watching the cars drive up and down the block. I used to shiver when I looked at him. It made me uncomfortable with the world. When he used to talk about his life I would sit there and listen and feel robbed. I would sit there and wonder if, like Cortez, someone would burn our boat when we got to our new world. It’s a dangerous game, change. Cloaked by a foolish and irrational electricity, it’s always risky, leaving you entranced and wholly removed from the self imposed question of whether it’s worth it or not. But I would sit out there and watch him smoke and listen to him tell me about all the things he missed. He’d talk about all of it and then snap at me like I was responsible for everything to the contrary. Like somewhere someone had flipped sides and dragged an entire generation down with them into an abysmal pit. Maybe there was some truth to it, I was too young to know. He would yell at me and shake his fists and cough violently and then fall into long silences while he tried to catch his breath. But I would never help him or touch him. No one did, not even on Christmas. Not that he hated it or scorned people for trying, just that no one did. It was like he was a disease, sitting there, a time capsule that held within him a perfect picture of a last grasp at decency but with the kind of exterior that turned you away before you could figure it out.
Even I can think up something to say, I would tell myself. Maybe even something worth hearing. The fodder of the world rarely comes up with anything beyond grunts of yes and no and excitability. But once in a while one of them might think up something to say. The world, drowned in the courageous inner monologues of those that march to their own drummers is strangely quiet. Mistakes are made all around, leaving the majority bitter and safe within their discontent. For most it’s best to see the world as the mistake of those who took what looked like a good idea and made it bad. The fact that we don’t realize the idea was bad to begin isn’t our fault. It’s nobody’s fault when it comes right down to it. It’s just one of those things that you find yourself unable to remember with any clarity. Which came first? The bad idea? Or you befallen by it?
So there I stood waiting for the hostess, eyeing my watch and hoping that I would have enough time to eat before I had to get to it. Because if you’re going to confront someone that you later intend to kill, it’s best to do it in a restaurant around dinner. That way you can eat first. Especially if the person that you’re going to kill has no idea that they’re going to die. Then everything’s relaxed, everything’s with blinders until the gun comes out and the smiles go south. I’ve never given that part of it much consideration to be honest. If you don’t want to find yourself in a situation like that then don’t borrow money from a ruthless fuck that pays people like me do their dirty work for them. It really is that simple.
Grand-dad would have disagreed.
Neptune Tower, The Lights Come On
Have a good time, that’s all that matters. Nights filled with uncertainties, breasts, penises, drinks, drugs, money, and pointless conversations. Life’s too short to fuck about with anything that looks like it’s concerned with something other than having a good time. It’s pointless to care. It expends far too much energy that you don’t have or you can’t spare. Maybe there was a time when people actually gave a shit about things other than proverbially jacking themselves off, but whatever. The bottom line is simple. Either you’re getting yours or you’re not. And if you’re not then you’d better find a way to.
Spiraling out of control has become second nature. The deeper you dig the less you notice the depth. Until one day you find yourself at a seafood restaurant ordering The Neptune Tower and waiting patiently for a waitress slash escort to show up and offer you various sexual favors in hopes of buying another week. The first couple of times it works. Right up until Kreshbaum begins to mention it every other time you talk to him. It doesn’t matter that her now dead pimp slash boyfriend borrowed the money, used it to buy drugs, sold them, and then blew the money. When I went to kill him I found the two of them in bed and after I shot him she told me that she was good for the whole way. So instead of killing her I thought getting the money and killing him would be a win-win. A month later she was still empty handed and I’d had just about enough teeth punctuated blow jobs to last me a lifetime. So if she didn’t have the money then I was left with little choice. The upside was that I could use the sexual favors angle to my advantage. It made my life far less complicated in that she would willingly leave the restaurant with me so I didn’t have to grab her by the arm, walk her outside, and shove her in a trash bin. That way I could get her into the car, unzip my pants, let her rake her teeth across my cock a few times, zip up, and then shoot her and shove her in a trash bin.
We’ve become desensitized to violence. Television, movies, the news, whatever else. Killing is entertainment if fantasy and repulsive if realistic, which is odd if you think about it. I’ve always been quite in love with the term justifiable homicide, for example. There’s something about the hypocrisy of it that makes me easy about killing people. Justifiable circumstances that are defined in law by a society that is desensitized to violence. Go figure.
When she showed up looking like a million dollars short nine hundred and ninety grand I could see it play out. Some clams, some prawns, a beer, and it would be teeth time. But there was something about watching her walk across the room like that that made me lose myself for a second. They all look the same when they walk. Their shoulders are tense and hunched towards their heads and they’re always bent over like they’re going to be sick . It made me think about how many people I’d seen walk towards me like that over the years. It wasn’t that I pitied her, rather that I saw the situation in a way I never had, that people would always be walking towards me like that. In all my years I had never thought of myself as an awful conclusion of a person, I considered myself an intelligent, reasonable person that just happened to do something for a living that required a certain moral flexibility. But as she walked across the restaurant towards me it made me feel less of the more I considered myself to be. It made my skin crawl, and that’s always the first sign of the beginning of the end. I always wondered how it would be when I finally went soft. And as it is with most things in life, it was nothing like I expected.
That night my cock stayed in my pants, she and I stayed in the restaurant, and she walked out of it fourty minutes later. Sitting beside me shaking like a leaf, I was relieved when she pulled out the envelope filled with the balance of her debt. I have no idea what became of her after that, nor do I care. It had nothing to do with her, it could have been anyone.
Stay in school, don’t do drugs, and so on. You hear that a lot as a kid and you think nothing of it because you’re smarter than everyone else in the world at that age. I used to love biology, botany especially. I always thought I would end up a botanist, despite the fact that my parents never went to college or even knew where one was, let alone being able to afford one. Years after grand-dad died I went home for some holiday, I can’t remember which, and my sister told me that he went to college. He took architecture supposedly but left school and joined the infantry when the Second World War started. When he got home he never went back, he just got a job working construction and then became a pipe fitter.
I became a killer and not a botanist in a world where the former is glorified and the latter is seen as boring. One ends life and the other studies the science of its most fundamental roots. When my war ended I decided that I would at least try to grasp at what I had once thought myself passionate about, not merely capable of. So I moved to France, where they’re tired of killing, and started to grow things.
this is located at:
http://www.matthewgood.org/2002/12/nine-lives-at-the-dolphin-house/