I've been doing a lot of editing on my ms and I'm about ready to tie it to a twenty pound propane tank and blast it with a 50BMG API-T. I think I'll take a break after these edits and let it sit for awhile.
Every Saint Patrick’s Day for several years I’ve watched The Boondock Saints. This year my wife bought the sequel and we watched it last night. I wish they had shown me a viewing of it before it was released. I would have bet the house I built with my own hands I could have written a better screenplay. The acting was horrible but at least it was better than the writing. The plot theme was completely different from the original and it seemed like a bad fan film written by dozens of different people with different goals. The antagonist’s motivations were not revealed until more than halfway through, and then they were presented in the form of multiple flashbacks and dream sequences that were so long that they pulled the watcher away from the actual plot. I suspect the writer(s) wanted to match the dark humor of the original and after failing settled for crude jokes about prison rapes. It had all the elegance of a public service announcement and appeared to be written at the same level of intelligence. The original was such a well written movie that sharing its name with this is an insult. Thank God I had watched a quirky little Icelandic film called White Night Wedding the night before. That was a good film. The memories of which kept me from chewing off my own arm in an attempt to escape after the wife and kids refused to turn it off.
From this morning: [Middle-aged husband and wife are lying on their bed] [One of the new “R&B” songs comes on the Top 40 radio program they were listening to.] [Husband] “I’m not real keen on the direction music is going now days.” [Wife rolls over and looks at husband] [Husband] “It sounds like three moneys thrown in a room with some instruments.” [Wife] “Be careful with the whole “monkey” direction.” [Husband]” Why?” [Wife] “These guys are black.” [Husband] “Really, they don’t sound black. More metrosexual…. maybe Porto Rican .” [Wife] “Nope, black.” [Husband] “Huh, I pictured a guy in skin tight black leather pants and a pink shirt.” [Wife] “Like Ricky Martin?”
Dear God, I need you to explain a few things. Since you are supposedly all knowing and all powerful feel free to comment here. I wouldn’t want to waste your very valuable time by demanding a personal appearance. 1) Cancer: OK, so you are all powerful but have chosen people will die anyways, fine. Heaven, angels, harps, yaddy yada. But, what kind of sadistic freak would come up with cancer? 2) Dogs: Why don’t dogs live as long as people? 3) Hunger: If you could do that thing with the fish and bread, why are so many people on this earth going to bed hungry tonight? 4) Sanction of the Church: One of your churches refused to marry my wife and me because I was a “heathen” but we are still happily married almost two decades later. Yet, that same church married my wife’s brother and his Christian wife and their marriage ended horribly after only a few years. How could this happen? 5) Sex: Why is this supposedly so bad? 6) War: WTF….What The ****. No really, What the ****? 7) Birth Defects: Why are so many innocent babies born with debilitating often fatal illnesses? 8) Torture: Why hasn’t Dick Chaney and those like him not received lightning bolts up their asses? 9) Taxes and tithing: Why are people forced to take care of others? What’s wrong with your voluntary Christian charity? Where is the Free Will your followers love to go on about? 10) Hate: Why do so many people hate others just because they are different from themselves? 11) Alzheimer’s: Why will one of the brightest people I have even known be reduced to wearing diapers soon?
The intention of this post is not to slander any person involved with the recent actions here. In fact, in every aspect I’m aware of I believe it was handled very fairly. That is not to say that I know everything that might have happened privately just that what I witnessed showed restraint beyond most moderators I’ve dealt with. In this kind of community an anarchist, at least an AnCap such as me is faced with difficult ethical questions. Firstly an Anarchist doesn’t believe any person has the right to limit their freedom beyond the preservation of that other person’s same freedoms. The conflict comes from the belief in contractual law, and property rights. This forum is private property, and as such the owner has the right to do whatever they want with it. When we as members join we enter into a contractual agreement to follow a certain set of rules, or limitations upon our rights. The event has got me thinking about times in the past (none here) where moderators have allowed their almost godlike powers to harm the community. I’m writing this as an example of what can happen when abuse, be it from members of the community or the moderators gets out of hand. In the following story I was the primary individual responsible for what happened. I won’t claim I was blameless, but will say that my actions were comparatively innocent to the rest of the participants. Six years ago, at the height of my Libertarian activism days I joined a very lightly moderated libertarian forum. Over the next four years I cultivated a lot of friendships with those members and we personally and as a community grew. However, right from the beginning I had a personality conflict with another Alpha Type writer. We shared almost all political and philosophical beliefs but there was always friction between us. One day I posted a link to an erotica picture (A Blackie IIRC) in the picture nipples could (sort of) be seen. This was a very lightly moderated forum, and more graphic content than it had been (openly) posted in the past. I even hung a NSFW tag above the link. The other writer who was one of the Mods banned me with no warning whatsoever. This forum had always listed “banned” under any member who was kicked out. The other Mods realizing the unfairness of this action chose not to list me as banned, in order to avoid addressing what had happened to the community. As I said I had developed quite a few good friendships there and it didn’t take them long to find out what had happened. They tried to redress the event within threads there. The Mods would delete these threads very quickly. Several of my friends quit in protest, several others stayed to fight on our behalf. They were banned in what eventually led to a 30% purge of active members. This event led to us starting our own un-moderated anarchist forum, one of only a handful on the net I know of. The writer who I had the conflict with eventually quit because we were all unbanned and invited back. Most of us, myself included returned, but the place was never the same. We had seen the effects of bad moderation and preferred our new board. As I said, I feel this event here was handled very fairly but thought I’d post this as a plea for restraint by all.
I can count on one hand all the times I've ever felt things getting out of control. Usually I'm the one with the fireworks/beer bong/pitch fork/fill-in-the-blank. This link is for those two young and crazy kids who have shown me how old I'm getting tonight. To you I dedicate this and feel comfortable passing into where I'm at knowing that there are those of younger generations to take my place.
The snow falls Ending the purpose of everything seeking warmth and light A reminder of the cold and darkness Believed to be behind us My soul cries for the baby plants As much as for myself I envision myself shivering Buried under a smothering white blanket of nonexistence A sadistic joke upon hope All promise of rebirth withdrawn Cruelty for its own sake An impersonal death Killing the ambitious Those who rise will be cut down Returned to nothingness Nothingness
I had to put down one of my two week old baby goats today. He was born with his two front knees fused in a curled position. We gave him two weeks to get better, but didn't. Now, I kill and butcher the bucklings when they are ten months old anyways but, they live a good life till then and have a great herd to be part of. It just seems so unfair to have to kill something so small and innocent. I held it in the palm of one hand and held the pistol in the other. It was a very humane death. But it makes a person wonder why would this innocent creature be born in a way that was basically a death sentence. But like the friend of the main character in my current book would say. "There aint no guarantees in life when you live on the mountain." I didn't feel like writing after this, so I called a friend and we busted trail up to a high mountain lake and ice fished all day.
I couldn't sleep again last night so I decided to work on the novel. Just thinking about it seemed like work so I started another book. It started off as "Oh, I'll just write a short story to get warmed up....." I'm sure you all know how it goes after that. It's kind of cliche, with my hat and where I live, but I started a sort-of western. I had a lot of fun writing it and had a thousand proofed words before I knew it. They say to write what you know and I do know guns, horses and cow-dogs I just don't want to be pigeonholed.
In the long gone days before the country was roamed by packs of bureaucrats and lawyers a boy could smoke whenever he wanted provided he planned ahead and rationed himself. There were certain designated smoking areas. These all had only one requirement; a lack of adults. Mind you most of the smoking came from around the singed remains of his eyebrows, but occasionally a person could witness a “full body” smoke. Full body smokes were, even then, agreed to be unhealthy. Back in those days we had a holiday, the best holiday of the year, and it was called The Fourth. Now days during this same time of the year a different holiday call The Fourth of July has displaced the original and vastly superior holiday. The Fourth of July has as much in common with The Fourth as a kitten does with a wet rabid mountain lion. I’ve heard some conspiracy theories about how the government has enslaved the citizenry by making them fill out their names on forms using only capital letters. What has happened to The Fourth could be the key to unlocking the answer to that theory. The necessary smoking supplies were secured from handy dispensaries that popped up all over the country in spring like colorful flower displays. The proprietors of these shops of bliss weren’t without ethics and didn’t just sell to anyone though. A customer had to meet stringent standards. To wit; they had to be tall enough to see over the counter, they had to be able to articulate the words “I want” and they had to bring their allowance money. Every member of the Cult of Things That Go Boom I know got their start with what is commonly called The Blackcat. For those who might have grown up in Zaire or are too young to remember what freedom is, a Blackcat looks like half of a grey cigarette. Like cigarettes they can not only lead to smoking but are just as addictive. The average eight year old boy would start by purchasing a “brick” which is a quantity that could last for up to 15 minutes, or much less if they didn’t spend the hour separating them into single servings. The first boom he released into this universe used the technique of dashing three of four times up to the Blackcat with a lit punk from twenty feet away until the fuse finally caught. A punk was a stick with cow poop glued to it and was good for smoking only when combined with things that go boom, but that’s a completely different story. After a boy had lit, or to use the technical phrase, set off half a dozen on the driveway the quest to see what they could really do began. An ant hill would be located and a miniature model of NASA would be constructed. No one realizes how hard it is to find an anthill when you actually need it. Then a soda can would be found with the intention of setting off the Blackcat inside it. The boy would then realize that his technique of repeatedly dashing up to the fuse with a lit punk couldn’t be used for this application. The smarter boys would attempt to dangle the Blackcat in the can by pinning the fuse between the top of the can and a pebble. This would invariably lead to the Blackcat falling into the last few drops of soda in the bottom of the can and extinguishing the fuse. The less intelligent boys would then use this as an example of the stupidity of being smart. However, this was actually part of a larger conspiracy I’ll explain later. The end result would be the least intelligent boy would be nominated by using the word chicken repeatedly to hold the Blackcat over the opening, lighting the fuse and then releasing it only when there wasn’t too much fuse to be extinguished. That boy was now acclimated to holding a Blackcat in his hand while lighting the fuse. This would turn out to be a false sense of security since the Communist country that produced these Blackcats and the soda cans had adapted them for warfare. Every hundredth fuse was designed to burn at a speed usually only associated with comets. This would invariably lead to fingers that looked like elongated pomegranates and the success of the communist country in forever crippling the trigger fingers of a whole generation. This also led the boy to want to dissect the Blackcat like an alien invader to figure out what makes it tick. It wouldn’t take long for the boy to figure out that the grey powder in the center was where the real power was at, much less time in fact, than it took his mother to ask where his eyebrows went. This grey powder is something like a “gateway drug”. Since I’m pretty sure the statute of limitations has expired for denting a baseball diamond I will give an example of what it can lead to: Not that long before I discovered the power of the grey powder, through a gross lack of intelligence I now realize, my mother bought me an Estes Rocket Kit. Kids now days may not know what these are, since the last I heard; the government classified them as terrorist devices or something like that. Basically what the Kit was for was to build a miniature surface to air missile. Why the government would feel it needed to be worried about something like this I will never know. The only failure of the kit was that Mr. Estes always forgot to pack the actual warhead. I thought about writing a letter to point out this gross oversight to him but then I got too busy unlocking the magic of The Grey Powder. Besides, the powder itself had presented a solution to me that would save all that tedious writing. I realized that by taking a shotgun shell and emptying it out, filling it up with Grey powder and taping a BB over the primer in the end of the shell anyone could make a warhead. The first and only flight of Grey Powder1 was an absolute success however it also resulted in the absolute loss of all hardware and pointed out the unnecessaryness of putting the “One” after Grey Powder. These lesser examples of the power of things that go boom aren’t nearly as dangerous as more advanced applications. The most dangerous is when you add “has a father who owns a laboratory” to the list of positive attributes of potential wives. This can actually not pay off so I’d recommend leaving it off, by the way. As it turns out, the vast majority of owners of laboratories learned about the power of the Grey Powder long before you did. Not to worry though it will turn out all right because by this point in his life he will have discovered that the grey powder can be bought at most Sporting Goods stores in pound cans, and can be content with a brass cannon even if he didn’t get the twenty kilograms of the good stuff…. or so I’d speculate.