#imagine we get married in the penalty box | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

coeurdastronaute · 8 years ago

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Essays in Existentialism: Monarchy

I know you did a royal one but how about a different spin where one isn’t suposed to get the crown maybe second or third and then they get it or will get it? And they have to grow up quick to take over?

Pulled back from the front, the shore was a paradise, compared to inland where the stalemate waged, waiting for the big push. The sun took its time dripping through the July sky. Frozen in the thick, heavy evening, it glowed and made the world red and blue and purple and golden, while the water licked at the burnt shore and tried to soothe a bit of the earth for the soldiers.

Finally, on a much needed reprieve, Lexa stretched out in the low chair, wiggling her toes in the warm sand until it was cool enough to relax her aching muscles. The sun still baked her skin, until her shoulders were dark brown and slowly peeling, with freckles speckled across every inch of shoulder that peeked out beneath tank top.

Sand kicked up between her and the ocean as her squad fought over a sliding tackle, half arguing for a penalty, the other insisting on its fairness. Lexa grabbed her camera and pushed her sunglasses over her hair, careful to find a few angles before joining in herself with a steal.

If she squinted hard enough, if she forgot what just the day before had entailed, she could convince herself that it was just a beach, and they were just friends, frittering the summer away with nothing else to do but soak up sun like turtles on rocks, and cool off in the shallows when it got to be too much.

“I could spend a whole war like this,” Gomez sighed, lounging in one of the many mismatched chairs at the impromptu bar on the edge of the base.

“It’s not a war,” Seif shook his head and scratched his cheek disinterestedly. “It’s a skirmish.”

“Feels like a war,” the squat gunner tweaked and eyebrow challengingly. “I mean, not right now, but it sure feels like it most of the time.”

“What do you say?”

“Don’t get Gus started,” Lexa groaned as she drank the terrible Castrilian beer that had been confiscated from an abandoned outpost miles west of their current position. The taste didn’t matter. It was cold, and strong, though she expected nothing less of the country she found herself in, so far away from home.

“Kids these days can’t even have a war right,” Fowler mimicked the oldest member of their squad. “Back in my day, we threw rocks and spears that we made ourselves.”

The table laughed, and he even earned a chuckle from the indomitable, grizzled veteran who had eyes that never stopped watching, and a guard that never went down. Lexa shook her head and surveyed the scene from behind her sunglasses, suddenly distracted by a pair of legs leaning by the bar.

At some point, Gus responded, arguing and earning laughs from the rest of the group. Lexa caught bits of a request to braid his beard. She didn’t care about a damn thing except the chill of the bottle against her own collarbone and the girl who sat in the corner and picked at the bottle label in the corner.

“Hmm?” she snapped her head back toward the conversation when her name was dropped. “No, that was the training in Denmark.”

“Right! Denmark!” her co-pilot nodded, returning to his argument.

The sun disappeared finally, dripping beneath the horizon, extinguished by the ocean, overcome by the welcomed relief from itself as the salve of night lathered the tired people who relished the reward of the salt and breeze. The lights were cast offs from vehicles, or generator parts, all hodgepodged together to create a cantina miles from the front. Lexa hid behind her sunglasses anyway, watching the stranger.

Every so often, she convinced herself that she had the nerve to introduce herself. Every time she got to that point, put her hands on her thighs, ready to push herself up, nodding gently as she prepared, rehearsed in her head, she remembered her own name and stopped forgetting what it meant.

Instead, she watched the girl at the bar nurse a drink and ask for seconds before anyone joined her. She had bruises on her arm, black and blue and ugly, up to her shoulder. Lexa wondered if there were more, hidden beneath the salty waves of blonde that was bleached by the equator and the ocean. The only thing Lexa could infer was that this stranger was not military. She did not carry herself like it.

When the laughter of her table barked out in the night, the stranger looked at the table and Lexa finally met her eyes. Mid-smile and suddenly flustered, she took a gulp and watched her look away, back to her friend at the bar.

“Ready to turn in?” Gus asked, leaning close after Lexa let her head slump back while she cursed herself.

“Yeah, why not,” she decided, adding another empty bottle to the completely covered table.

Finally able to push herself up, she shoved her hands in her pockets and followed the group toward their barracks. With a final glance over her shoulder, she watched the stranger not even notice she was leaving.

Safe and sterile, the hospital was finally, almost nearly completed. The staff was almost trained, they seemed almost capable, and with no recent major skirmishes or tragedies, the inane details were able to be worked out better.

Three weeks on the front lines working with triage units led to a welcomed day doing nothing but immunizing children and making supply orders for the next shipment.

Her father once told her that a day spent busy, spent breaking her back, spent exhausting herself was the best kind of gift she could give to the world. As she packed up the last few boxes of the night, as she ran a cloth over her sweaty neck and over her flushed face, she wondered if he ever considered how much the world exhausted her, and how to combat that. He hadn’t taught her that skill, though she was certain he never imagined her to volunteer for an assignment in a war-torn country, or to have the words ‘while under fire’ added to any story she may have, or to have seen the things she saw.

The sun wouldn’t set, but after checking her old watch, Clarke decided to call it a day, shouldered her bag, and walked out into the quiet. For two years, the city was her home, and for two years her love for it grew more and more. The city a few miles away was her home now, and the base was simply where she worked and begged for supplies, and trained new recruits from the surrounding villages.

“Can I have whatever you brewed last night?” Clarke asked as she took a seat at the makeshift bar on the beach.

“That bad of a day, doc?” the bartender asked with a smile. “Haven’t seen you for a few.”

“I was over in Teji, helping with the hospital there.”

“How is it?”

“Good,” she nodded, hissing at the drink. “We have a whole new round of volunteers, and the UN has sent in actual people. It finally feels like I’m not mashing my head against the wall.”

“Dr. Ardense would be impressed with all you’ve done.”

“She would have told me I should have stayed home,” the doctor disagreed with a smile. “Almost done with what she started.”

“On me,” he filled up the glass again.

With a grateful nod, Clarke sipped the second glass as the sun burned out once more, all pink and red and plunging the rest into the dark of night, upset only by the lights of the camp. A table of soldier enjoyed themselves behind her, while all Clarke could do was focus on two lists. One was the things to do tomorrow, the other was the things that would need to be figured out for when her job came to an end, if it ever came to an end.

All of it was exhausting, and too much for her brain. As she finished the second drink, she sighed and looked at the sky, and asked someone for just something, something good, and something that would make her feel human, to distract her from the numbness she discovered.

“Is this seat taken?”

“Hm?”

“Is this seat taken?” the voice asked again as Clarke looked up, suddenly sitting up and being surprised by the face the voice was attached. “I saw you hear a few days ago, and I couldn’t ask then, but I’m leaving for a few days...”

“No, it’s not.”

“Thank you,” she ducked her head as she took her seat, smiling to herself while Clarke watched it happen, watched her face before looking back at her drink quickly to avoid too much of those eyes. “Could I get you another?”

“Another?”

“Another drink.”

“Oh, yes, thank you.”

With a confident wave of her hand, the soldier beckoned a few more drinks to appear. The doctor took the moment to size up the girl who now occupied the chair beside her, startled that prayers could be answered so literally and so quickly.

The tattoo wiggled on tan skin as bicep flexed with the movement. Shoulders were sprinkled with freckles from hours in the sun, half hidden under wavy, half-damp hair.

“I’m Lexa,” she finally introduced herself when the drinks were slid in front of them.

All Clarke could do was stare at the person who gave her a drink. She had eyes like stormy forests and a smile that took residence in them.

“I know who you are.”

“How’s that?”

“I’ve watched the news at least once in my life.”

“I don’t know who you are though.”

“Does that line work?” Clarke asked as she took a sip of her drink.

“Never tried it, honestly. Should I try another? What brings a pretty girl to a place like this seems kind of relevant--”

“Clarke.”

“Clarke,” Lexa smiled as she sipped her drink and maintained the eyes on the girl who she would never admit she watched more than just one day a week ago.

“What brings you here, princess?”

“You’re good at deflecting, did you know that?”

“I’ve heard that before, but usually I deflect it.”

“A useful skill,” Lexa hummed, enjoying the way Clarke was amused by herself after drinking more. “Fine. I’ll go first. I enlisted after I told my mother that I was not interested in marrying some Duke’s son, and that I had a crush on my roommate in college. I always wanted to, just never could, and then I found some spine.”

“Sounds like you ran away.”

“Maybe a little. It all seems worth it tonight,” she confessed. “Since I’m disarmed and very honest with you, apparently.”

“We have a bit in common,” Clarke shrugged, twirling her drink around.

“You were going to marry a duke, too?”

“You’re funny, did you know that?”

“I don’t get that a lot.”

“I’m in the middle of a war getting chatted up by a princess. That’s funny enough, in a cosmic way.”

“It’s not a war,” Lexa interrupted. “Skirmish. That’s important.”

“Sure feels like one sometimes.”

“Yeah.”

“A duke, huh?” Clarke shook the thoughts from her head, let the drink linger a bit longer on her lips and watched the girl beside her blush a little.

The sun disappeared and everything dimmed until the bar felt as if it were just two people sitting there. Unsure of where she’d come from, Clarke wasn’t upset that she now had a way to spend the night. She definitely wasn’t bothered that the princess was humble and kind and funny and awkward and interesting.

Clarke stopped herself with drinks because her lips were numb and the heat of the night was worse than the day, with July roaring through, unrelenting and angry at everything.

“He comes with me everywhere,” Lexa offered as Clarke eyed the stoic man who lingered as they walked through the camp in the almost dark.

“He enlisted with you?”

“No, he has special clearance. He was enlisted before he signed up to work for my family. I do have about ten other agents who are here,” she rattled, meandering down the path.

“Seems like a lot of trouble.”

“You’ll learn that is all I am.”

The world was quiet, the bulk of the people already in bed, or already out on patrol. They shut down the bar and were thrust out into the world on their own, without much of a crutch. But Clarke learned that Lexa loved flying ever since she was young and her grandfather took her. And Clarke told her that she couldn’t remember much of her life before two years ago. And Lexa told her how much she loved the hot, sticky summer on the equator. And Clarke looked at the lights of the city just outside of the base and made Lexa stand still and listen to the world that still happened despite the terribleness of the world.

“I’m glad my squad made me buy you a drink,” Lexa offered as they reached the back of the visitor’s barracks that Clarke took her semi-permanent residence.

“I am, too,” Clarke smiled and leaned against the wall. “I’m still not used to that.”

“Gus?” Lexa looked over her shoulder. “He’s fine.”

“What if…” she stopped and looked around before leaning a little closer. “What if I wanted to try to kiss you?” Lexa chuckled at the whisper and blushed slightly. “It’s not funny. I take it back.”

“Give me a second.”

Oddly alarmed at to what she was doing, Clarke reconsidered everything in the few steps the princess took to her bodyguard. She talked herself back while they whispered, and by the time Lexa made it back to her, she thought she would work herself into the ground trying to figure out her own head. A charming princess with a tattoo and muscles and a jaw like that, gives a look like she did at the bar, and all sense went out the window.

“I’m going back home tomorrow,” Lexa said, shoving her hands in her pockets. “Just for a week. My sister is getting married.”

“I heard something about that.”

“In case you want to kiss me, and then don’t see me around, it’s not because I’m avoiding you or anything.”

“Just in case,” Clarke smiled and stared at her lips. “What did you tell him?”

“Not to wait up.”

“You’re getting ahead of yourself.”

“Am I?”

There was a smirk. A moonshine-driven and infatuatedly-fueled smirk that made Clarke look away and gulp. The princess stood in front of her, honest and genuine. The doctor exhaled and pushed some of the hair from her forehead that stuck a bit in the heat. She looked at Lexa one last time before pushing herself from the wall. She took a step and opened the door to the small office that had once been the back room to the temporary clinic on post, but now turned into volunteers and storage.

“Wait, am I?” Lexa suddenly tensed and stood a little straighter.

“No.”

The middle of the night was his favorite time of day. It was quiet and honest. If anything, people succumbed to the silence of it, to the natural wayward wandering that lived at three in the morning, and could only spill their secrets, give up to the natural longing to unburden themselves. The inbetween hours were made for in between people, stuck between this or that, standing at the forks in life’s roads.

The king pulled his hat down and strolled through the streets of closing bars and all-night convenience marts, of single rider bus stops and empty taxis who trolled for any sign of life. It was not as if he was escaping, but that sometimes he just craved the smell of street food before it changed into fresh baked bread of morning. He longed for the terrible kind of coffee that came from the diner six blocks over from the palace and wet sidewalks licking the soles of his shoes.

It was well into dawn by the time he returned, relaxed and relieved from his wonderings. He cleared his mind from the jumble. He couldn’t sleep to save his life on a night like this, waiting.

“Nice walk, sir?” Agent Cooper greeted his mark inside the gate.

“I didn’t keep the boys out too late, did I?”

“Just a third of the night crew trailing you and clearing your path and sweeping the stops.”

“My daughter is coming home today,” the king smiled, wide and genuine and disinterested in the sarcasm of the agent.

“I heard a rumor.”

“Is everyone awake?”

“They are,” he was informed.

“Perfect,” he smiled. “It’s going to be a good day, Coop. A great day.”

“Yes, sir,” the agent agreed to the enthusiasm.

After a quick change, King Alexander, ruler for twenty-six glorious and prosperous years, the fifth of that name, descendant of the great clan who conquered this land, who lived his entire life in the very palace, who was tall and broad and square-jawed with eyes like mountains on maps, made his way through the familiar hallway to meet his family for breakfast. Dinner often meant some or half or a few were gone, pulled this way and that for their duties of the day, but come rain or sleet or snow, breakfast brought them back. An unspoken rule he had was to be uninterrupted during it, for just a half hour, he had his family.

“All night again?” his wife tsked, not even looking up from her paper as he leaned down and kissed her cheek. “You could have at least brought ba--” a bag appeared in front of her face, where her husband earned a smile. He took the moment of distraction as his chance to steal a much better kiss until he heard a boo from the other end of the table.

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“Should we talk to the doctor again?” she whispered, looking back at those eyes before checking the bag.

“Just excited, love,” he promised. “How’s it going, kiddo?” the king asked, ruffling his son’s hair as he moved around the table.

“Do I have to go to school today?” Aden asked. The spitting image of his father, the sixteen year old’s voice cracked at the suggestion.

“Of course you do.”

“But Lexa is coming home today.”

“Aren’t we missing a kid?” the king asked, pretending to count before taking his seat at the head of the table.

“Good morning, Dad,” Anya strolled in a second later. She kissed her father’s cheek and slid into her seat a second later. “When does Lexa get back?”

“I think we should have a talk,” the queen decided, primly dusting her hands from the powdered donut her husband supplied her with, the guiltiest of guilty pleasures.

The kids shared a look with their father, knowing full well what one of the matriarch’s cautionary tales would sound like. Their eyes bounced around until they were all smiling, frustrating the queen without a word.

“You all want to smother her and make a big deal, but that’s not Lexa, and you should know that. She’s low fuss and you’re all too excited.”

“We’re appropriately excited, Ev,” her husband explained reasonably, recognizing her own form of preparedness at the final return of the middle daughter. “Nearly eleven months is a long time.”

“I’ve read the reports. It wasn’t as if she was on a beach somewhere the whole time. Things were rough.”

“We know how to talk to our sister,” Anya scoffed, pouring herself a cup of coffee.

“Just be gentle. She’s the quiet one.”

“The favourite,” Aden teased.

“The oldest,” the king pointed at Anya, who stuck out her tongue at her father. “The precious baby,” he pointed at Aden. “Naturally she’s the favourite.”

“That was a funny joke when we were kids,” Aden rolled his eyes. His sister looked over at her parents, amused that he refused to call himself a child despite living up to his title of baby of the brood.

Ten years stood between the siblings, but still they were close, though without their middle to balance them, they fought and complained. Both were eager for the sturdy part of the siblings to come back. Both missed her ferociously. Both were too stubborn to admit it.

“Okay, tell me about our days,” the king stopped the argument before it started.

“I’m at the Children’s Hospital luncheon, followed by planning for the holiday party,” the queen rattled off absently, earning a smile from her husband as he dusted the dust from her nose.

“I have that meeting with the security council, and then I’m having lunch with Bellamy and Katie. I think later I have another fitting. I don’t know.”

“School,” Aden grumbled.

The entire domestic scene was perfect, was exactly what she could remember, what she missed being a part of. Forever the voyeur, forever the watcher, her mother always said Lexa was born with big eyes and ears that were always open, always searching. Sometimes she remembered that. It didn’t stop her from watching her family have breakfast.

So many months away, and she was convinced they’d be different, and they were, but eerily enough, it felt as if only Lexa, herself, had changed. Her father seemed a bit more wrinkled, a bit wiser. The deep auburn of his hair somehow darker. Her mother seemed slimmer, seemed happier. People said that Anya took after her most. Lexa was this hodge podge of both, never looking enough like either. Anya teased her father, and looked radiant. Aden somehow sprouted four inches in as many months.

“Glad to know I’ve been pencilled in,” Lexa dropped her bag on the floor with a thud.

“Lexa!” voices joined up after a stretch of quiet.

A second later, the returning soldier was engulfed by arms and surprise. She swallowed it up and enjoyed it despite her natural aversion to huge displays. It was necessary and she closed her eyes and inhaled it all.

“You weren’t due in until tonight,” Alex smiled widely, hugging his daughter tighter.

“Are you okay? You’re not hurt?” her mother fret, scooping her up next.

“I called in a few favours,” Lexa shrugged.

“And Ironfell plays tonight,” Aden nudged her until she threw her arm around his neck and pretended to choke him.

“And I missed you all,” she teased. “But since you’re all busy, I guess I’m on my own.”

“I could ditch school!”

“No!” both parents furrowed and directed. Lexa winked at her brother.

All too soon, she was part of the panorama of her family, she was included once again, swallowed whole by them and loved even more for it. As much as she’d fled from it, she found that returning was a bitter kind of gentleness that she craved and gorged upon until it would make her sick.

Her brother handed her a cup while her father sat at the end of the table and realized how great of a day it was going to be.

“Well, I’d say that was a successful chat up,” Lexa swallowed and turned her head to look at the girl who tried to catch her breath beside her.

“I just slept with royalty. What the hell did I just do?”

“Deep breath,” the princess chuckled. “Just the spare.”

“I don’t usually do this.”

“Me neither.”

“Sure.”

“I don’t. Ask Gus. He’ll tell you.”

“I never do this,” Clarke turned her head and looked at the profile of the girl in her bed.

Lexa felt her eyes and met them with a smile before pushing the hair from Clarke’s face, a sweet gesture that did not go unnoticed by the doctor. The tiny back room that became the acting medical advisor’s quarters was bare, lit only by the light that snuck in through the windows near the ceiling. Slowly, she ran her hands down the doctor’s neck and to her chest. She earned a turn, earned a leg slipped between her own, pulling her closer.

“Save me a seat when I get back?”

“Getting ahead of yourself, aren’t you?”

“I’ve been known to do that, yeah.”

With gentle fingertips moving up and down her back, Clarke closed her eyes and smiled, amused at herself. The pilot smelled like soap and summer, with the salt of sweat and the beach behind them lingering on her neck and skin.

“What brings a pretty girl like you to a place like this?” Lexa asked again. She smiled as hips pressed against her and lips trailed under her chin.

“Let me deflect.”

“Come on.”

Despite the hour, Lexa was eager to hear the answer. Everyone had a story for that question, and it said more about them than anything else. She felt hands on her hips, felt them grow restless with thoughts brewing. With a long, deep sigh, she heard Clarke start.

“I was in my second year of residency when this started. My professor, she was my godmother. She was here training students who were kicked out of school because of the fighting. She was killed in the first year, and I came down as soon as I finished. Been here nearly two years.”

“And you built all of this?”

“Most I was triaging at first. I got some time in up front. And then I was training. And then it was getting hospitals re-established.”

“Now?”

“Now I just sleep with helicopter pilots who buy me a drink.” Lexa didn’t care about much, except kissing her again, because she could. It felt nice. The thin sheet tangled up with their legs. “You kiss really good.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m heading back in a few months. I’m going to miss it here, is that weird?”

“Not at all.”

Lexa dipped her head and kissed the doctor again, because she could, because it felt nice. Her hip pressed against Clarke’s, and she felt palms ghosting over the scratches of her ribs and back. Cool in the hot summer midnight, the hands grabbed and held tighter as the kiss got deeper, mingling with words and thoughts and distracting each other from thinking too much.

“Tell me about the wedding,” Clarke decided, changing the subject away from her own worries. “Everyone here is excited.”

“We should keep kissing.”

“I’m enjoying it,” she nipped at lips and dragged nails down naked chest. “I’m deflecting.”

“There will be a big ceremony in St. Luke’s.”

“Oh, that little venue.”

“You’ve been?”

“Once, on a field trip. Did you know you can fit the entire Remembrance Memorial in it, four times?”

“I did know that,” Lexa chuckled and propped her head up on her hand, lazily running her hands against Clarke’s chest. “I have to wear a fancy dress. They’ll put makeup on my tattoo. And with any luck, in a year, I will be farther away from taking the throne.”

“A baby?”

“Hopefully.”

“You never told me why the call sign Wolf.”

“To make me sound tough to pretty girls in dive bars,” Lexa shrugged, toying with nipple, letting her fingers circle it lethargically, with little motivation other than she could and she wanted nothing else.

“Tell me.”

“You’re demanding. Normally, you can be convicted of treason for not at least adding your highness.”

“I couldn’t let something like that go to your head, in bed.”

“Fair enough,” she chuckled and sighed. “Haven’t you ever heard the story of my family?”

“The myth you mean?” Clarke corrected, pushing her chest out against her will, needing more of the touches. She moved against the thigh between her legs and pieced together Lexa’s face in the candles.

“It’s not a myth. Wolveshire Palace. The coat of arms. Wolfrik the Great.”

“Tell me the truth.”

“Before the oceans were salty, before the mountains shrunk, people and animals were the same. We come from the great leaders of the wolf clan, animals that were six times as large as ones we have now. They said we lost the magic eventually, that let us change back and forth, but the truth is, we still have it. My grandfather said his father used to transform and run through the woods, across the country, and wake up on the border.”

“So you want me to believe you’re werewolves.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I’m ridiculous?” Clarke scoffed.

“We are descended from wolves. They say the wolves were born right from the earth itself. I kind of like that idea.”

“It’s cute.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“Transform into a wolf.”

“I’ve never done it. I think each generation it gets harder. It’s a nice story, isn’t it?”

“I think you should show me how close you can get to being a wolf,” Clarke growled, sucking on the bare neck in response to nails skating down her side and cupping her teasingly. “Right now.”

“That story never got me laid before.”

“I’m a fan of fairytales.”

“I see that,” Lexa grinned as she bit jaw and kissed a trail lower.

Not one thing changed in her bedroom. Not one stitch was out of order, though Lexa knew it was completely cleaned and meticulously placed back in its proper order. With a sad kind of sigh, the returning occupant ran her fingers over the petals of the fresh lavender bouquet she knew her mother prepared herself that very morning, more than likely.

It felt like home.

With a deep breath, she held it all in her lungs and tossed her hat on the table before placing her bag on the couch. She unbuttoned her top button before hurrying to shed the rest of her camouflage shirt, as it suddenly felt stifling in the setting of her bedroom.

She ran her hand into her hair and remembered the feeling of Clarke tugging at it. In a flash she remembered all of it and swallowed. Just twenty-four hours ago, and she was pulling herself out of the tiny bed in the back of the supply office, away from the girl at the bar.

“Mom is going to kill you,” Anya interrupted her thoughts, quietly closing the door behind her.

“For what?”

“A tattoo?” her sister pointed at her ribs as Lexa tossed her shirt, leaving her in nothing more than a bra in her own room. “Two tattoos?”

“She’ll never know.”

“She always knows,” Anya rolled her eyes.

“I thought you had a security council meeting.”

“You were over there. Brief me.”

“There’s not one story from over there that I’d want to tell you about,” she shook her head. “I’m going to shower.”

“You don’t want to talk about it?”

“Not really. I’m home.”

Anya debated, but didn’t say anything else. Instead, she crossed her legs and draped herself over the couch, running her fingers over her mouth, the studious kind of way her father could be found mulling in his study. She listened to her sister move around the room behind her, propped her head up on her chin and absently perused the bunch of fresh flowers that reminded her of the summer house in the country, when they were twelve and eight and would run through the fields until they thought they were lost.

Without another word, Lexa turned the shower on in the adjoining room. Anya surveyed the duffle bag, the camo and the uniform. She didn’t have much time.

“You should stay home,” Anya decided, walking into the bathroom as her sister showered.

“I had more privacy in a tent,” Lexa grumbled.

“We miss you.”

“Can we do the whole sibling bonding after my shower?” Lexa asked, sticking her head out, shampoo slipping into her eye, making her squint.

Even sitting on the toilet, legs crossed and body sublimely languid, her sister looked regal, as if she truly were bred to always hold that kind of grace. Their mother was beautiful, was demure and sophisticated, with her pointed chin, and gentle jaw, polite brown eyes and porcelain skin. Anya followed her tradition, with dainty wrists and soft curves. Tall and with a stern glare, her sister was her favorite person on the planet, though moments like this tried her sisterly devotion. Beautiful and sitting on a toilet, disrupting her shower, Lexa smiled despite it, genuinely happy to have this problem.

“Have lunch with me and Bellamy.”

“Is that still happening?” Lexa teased, returning to the water.

“It’s a small wedding,” Anya dismissed it, waving her hand, smiling at her own disinterest in marriage. “What are you doing tonight?”

“I literally just walked in the door. I don’t have plans.”

“Okay.”

“Are you going to tell me what I’ve missed?” Lexa sighed at the sing song nature of her sister’s return.

By the time she grabbed a towel, Lexa learned that the family was traveling in the new year. She learned that she was lucky enough to miss it. That her sister was running out of reasons to put off marrying Bellamy. Together since they were eleven, a perfect match in every way, the future ruler was most afraid of love, though she couldn’t admit it. She found out that her brother got caught smoking weed because he caught a four century old tapestry on fire. That news only made both sisters remember when got caught by leaving roaches in the bottom of a vase gifted to their family by a country that didn’t even exist any longer a thousand years ago.

“You’re different,” Anya accused, meeting her sister’s eyes through the mirror as she adjusted her make up. Lexa toweled at her hair and balked at the suggestion.

“What?”

Anya pushed on the bruise on Lexa’s neck, earning a wince and guilty smile.

“The makeup washed off, punk.”

“Just a bruise from the straps in the copter,” Lexa trailed off, stretching her neck and gently touching the bruise herself before sighing and walking into her bedroom.

It took a few more minutes, but her sister finished adjusting her eye shadow and followed. Lexa rummaged in a drawer and pulled on her pants.

“What?” the younger sister sighed as she pulled on a shirt. “Come on. Out with it. I shouldn’t be out drinking in public. I shouldn’t give in and sleep with someone--”

“I was going to ask about her.”

“Oh.”

“It’s her, isn’t it?” Delicately, Anya walked the thin line of trying to be there for her sister and not pressing her buttons.

If there was anything she knew about Lexa, it was that holding in the secret of Costia for so long made her almost unable to tell the truth, or at least, unable to know how to do it. The only reason she ran away was because of her mother’s reaction, and Anya hated that. But this Lexa, the one that returned, she was free, light even, with the gift of being exactly who she wanted to be.

Lexa was quiet, reserved. Anya knew it, and she worked hard at her in the gentlest way possible. If she had to describe it, she’d say getting information from Lexa was like assembling a ship in a bottle. Tedious and delicate work.

“Yeah,” Lexa smiled dreamily.

“You big nerd.”

“She’s… gorgeous, Anya. She has these eyes, and this… personality.”

“Do you mean personality? Or personality?” she made a movement in front of her chest, earning a pillow as Lexa flopped down on her bed.

“I seriously felt like such a loser the other night, chatting her up. I didn’t know what I was doing, but she kind of enjoyed it I think. It just happened.”

“You can be charming without meaning to.”

“It was a good night. She’s a doctor. Super smart. And funny.”

“Sometimes that’s how it happens,” Anya shrugged. “Are you going to see her again?”

“Do you think she’d want to see me again?”

“I don’t know. Did you tell her you’d see her again?”

“Yeah, but it was kind of off-handed, like when I get back, maybe I’ll see you around. How do you take anything seriously when that place is so removed from the world? Everything feels like it never happened. Everything feels so fleeting. Every day is a new slate, which sounds great, but it’s… draining.”

To her credit, the oldest tried to figure out that feeling, to understand the impossible to articulate. Mostly, she just wanted to help her sister with a girl because that was much easier than peace in their time.

“Do you want to?”

“Yeah.” She sighed and turned her head to find her big sister smiling.

“You’re seriously hopeless.”

“Mom won’t be happy.”

“She’s… been working on herself the past few months. I think you’ll be surprised,” Anya offered as she grabbed her phone and checked it. “I have to go, but we’re not done talking about this. I want to know more. Come to lunch.”

“I’ll see you tonight.”

“Fine.”

“I’m going to see Dad for lunch.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t be mad.”

“Why would I be mad? You would rather hang out with Dad than me. It’s fine,” she feigned disappointment. “Maybe we’ll go grab some drinks tonight,” Anya smirked.

Lexa felt her cheeks flush before the realization of what Anya would spend her resources for the day investigating came to her and she shot out of bed.

The crowd yelled and shouted as they made their way into the store, but Lexa barely heard them. Her mother waved and smiled, did it all well enough. Even though it was late, well after the normal hours, they stayed open. Lexa wasn’t one for the spotlight if it could be avoided. She was barely one for time with her mother lately, but if the queen could try, then so could she.

“I don’t know what to get your father.”

“Don’t take my idea.”

“You get him a tie every year.”

“And he always says he needs them,” Lexa teased, holding the door for her to the department store.

“You have it easy. He’s so particular on his birthday and getting gifts.”

“Set the bar low and ride it.”

“How charming,” the queen rolled her eyes as she pulled off her gloves.

Empty except for a few shop girls and the secret service, the two perused uninterrupted, finding a kind of safe stillness between them where they avoided anything more than easy topics.

It didn’t hurt that things were different now. Before she left, there had been a tenseness with her mother. There was this quiet war that lingered. And then Lexa left, for the first time in her life honest, and told it would never be known. But her mother wrote her letters, as old fashioned as it had been. Words that she could never say, and now they shopped.

“I met this girl,” Lexa stated after an hour of chatter. She held up the ties in the mirror and debated which her father would like more. “I met a girl. Once. I met her once.”

“Oh?” her mother did her best to hide the startling tint to her voice. She thought she’d have time to prepare. She did her best.

“She went to Mammoth.”

“That’s a good school.”

“I know.”

“Your grandmother went there.”

“That’s what I said,” Lexa laughed, picking up two different colors. Her mother watched her debate and try again.

“Well, tell me about her.”

“It was just once. But I can’t stop thinking about her,” her daughter furrowed, both at the decision and the confession. “I mean. Maybe it was just the night. But. I don’t know. I liked talking to her.”

“It’s okay for you to ask her out.”

“Mom,” she groaned, making a weird face in the mirror. “I don’t… I don’t know. It’s not that simple.”

“I just mean that if you’re holding yourself back because of my reaction, you shouldn’t. I support you. Whatever makes you happy, honey.”

“I know, I know.”

“The yellow one, I think.”

“Yeah, that’s the one I like, too,” Lexa decided, holding the first one she picked up once more.

For a moment, the queen stood in the men’s department and watched her daughter politely smile and give her pick to the girl who waited on them. As a kid there were days when she was unsure where Lexa came from. Anya was easy. She needed her mother. And then Lexa came and didn’t need anyone or anything. She ran barefoot through the halls and fought brushing her hair, bore her duty and chomped at the bit, fighting against it in tiny ways. She was never her mother’s, and she was never her father’s. It often left the queen at a loss.

“I do only want you to be happy, you know that, don’t you?” the mother finally asked when her daughter caught her staring, thoughtful. “You have to know that.”

“I know,” Lexa nodded, eyes on fire and fearless. “I can take some getting used to.”

“You’re my favorite, did you know that?”

“I’m sure the other two have heard the same thing.”

“I know it’s a joke, but you’re the only one I ever think I mean it when I say it.”

“I’m not mad about before, Mom.”

“I am.”

“Why?”

“You’re my daughter,” she balked at the question. “I should have… I should have been more understanding. Tried harder. I guess… I just have so many years, my whole life, actually, is about the proper way to do things. I never questioned it. You’ve been questioning everything since the day you were born.”

“I should thank you though,” Lexa fiddled with a tie, straightening it it back to the position. “If everything went smoothly, I wouldn’t have found this job I love.”

“Then I did it on purpose,” the queen decided, bowing to the imaginary crowd.

“We’ll go with that,” her daughter acquiesced before linking their arms. “Now pick out what you want me to get you.”

“Tell me about this girl.”

Even across the globe, the wedding was seen as a grand affair, warranting half of a holiday and half of a celebration for a party. Not much else was done for the day, though the flags were strung up and the bars were full.

Clarke made her way out into the city to her favorite café, oddly afraid to look at the television. She connected to the ancient internet and attempted to respond to emails she’d been avoiding. Something about a certain night just a week ago made her feel different, made her feel very disinterested in plans for the future. But her time was coming to an end, and she would have to get on a plane, and so plans had to be made.

In the little shop, on the tiny television, she looked up every so often from the emails she attempted to reply to, and allowed herself a few seconds of thinking of the helicopter pilot who had the eyes of the planet on her at that very moment.

So very far removed from their place, the room, that night, the princess stood primly before her sister marched down the aisle. With a small smile to herself, the doctor went back to her emails.

For the life of her, Lexa could never imagine a day in which her father was off limits. Whenever he was in the country, he never went a day without seeing his children, stealing as long as he could with them whenever he could. And that was what she always remembered as a child.

“You’ve been busy since you’ve been back,” the king observed. The city sprawled out sleepily before them, decked in its gayest apparel.

“Anya’s been dragging me around getting ready. There’s a lot that goes into getting married apparently. She didn’t get the memo on the whole heir and spare thing.”

“You know I hate when you call yourself that.”

“As much as when I call Aden spare squared?”

“Just about,” her father grumbled.

She had a secret weapon though, something he couldn’t resist, and so she pouted slightly and grabbed his arm, holding it to her against the weather. Sometimes she let herself pretend she was the favorite. She knew it didn’t exist, that each of them had their own special things with their father. It didn’t matter.

In the middle of the city, with security trialing behind and ahead, Lexa dug her nose into her father’s shoulder and inhaled the smell that was him, that was bore into his clothes.

“So do you want to tell me why I had to give away your cousin’s box seats to the Championship next week or should I just guess?” His daughter chuckled.

“I let someone beat me at a bar.”

“Let them?”

“They deserve to be at the game,” Lexa amended.

“As long as they deserve it.”

It wasn’t planned, that they strolled together. Both were prone to sleeplessness and wandering minds. Both were unable to fight it. Both found each other sneaking out.

“You keep safe out there, don’t you?” the king asked, kissing his daughter’s head.

“I’m good at my job.”

“I mean when you’re out in public. You’re safe? Gus does a good job?”

“I’m very safe,” she promised. “All of the time.”

“You know that I just want you to be happy, right?”

“You know I just want that for you too,” she offered, earning a chuckle from her father. “I’m happy. Happy as I can be, I think.”

“I’m glad you’re home.”

“Mom hasn’t scheduled me to do anything has she?”

“Oh, honey, you know better than that.” With a resigned growl of complaint, Lexa let her head drop and her father tug her along down the sidewalk. “Your mother mentioned something about a girl you met?”

“I think I liked it better when she hated the idea of me with anyone,” Lexa sighed, earning a kiss on the top of her head.

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thorntonkrell-blog-blog · 5 years ago

Text

WAFFLE IRON MYSTERY

Luck? I'll tell you about luck.

In November my wife ordered a wafffle iron through Amazon.

Time went by and no waffle maker.

We were getting irritated, not so much by the absence of waffles but rather by the delay in delivery

A couple of weeks later a very large box arrived at our doorstep. I asked Lynn what the hell is this? The package was a lot bigger than any waffles I have ever consumed.

We took the package into the house. We opened it. The package did not include a waffle maker.

Lynn, immediately got on the phone.

She's great on the phone.

She made contact with a representative whose accent was a lot different from ours.

Lynn told her about the erroneous delivery.

The voice on the other end offered a remedy. All we had to do was rewrap the package, take it to the post office , send it back. and we'll credit your account

The ears on our end were not pleased.

The voice on our end had another remedy. We aren't gonna rewrap this thing nor take it to the post office. This package is here because of an error on your part. We don't intend to make up for your error with our time and our gasoline.

The voice on the other end needed a moment to listen to the voice of her supervisor.

For five minutes there were no voices on either end.

Then the voice on the other end offered another remedy. We may keep the package and they would send the wafflemaker.

The voice on our end accepted the remedy.

Four months later having discovered our cancer, we decided that we would fight the condition with radiation. After we made the decision and began to schedule the treatment dates, a nurse entered the room with piece of paper that listed some of the potential side effects during radiation. Among the side effects were these two: Urination Changes and Bowel changes.

Urination changes include burning with urination, urinating more often and more urgently. Possible incontinence

Bowel changes include increased gas, urgent or loose bowel movements sometimes activated by the increased gas.

Considering the alternatives, we considered and consider our selves very fortunate.

We got this covered, no problem. And not thank God with a waffle iron.

The mystery package that we kept , even though we couldn't imagine a use for it at the time, contained 36 extra large adult diapers.

This is what I mean by luck and it's all true.

No shit.

TROT ON THE BLOCK

I remember my first Thanksgiving in a previous wifetime. We had been married a month and a half. We had built a chicken coop together. We had horses. We had a goose. We had a mule. We even had a peacock. The chickens were laying. We also had a couple of turkeys. As Thanksgiving approached, I wondered about the fate of the turkeys.

My wife didn’t wonder. She acted.

She coaxed one of the turkeys out to a stump that unbeknownst to the fowl was a chopping block. She got the bird to stretch his neck out on the block. She took a mighty swing with her ax. Contradicting rumors of stupidity, the turkey lurched out of the way as the ax buried itself in the stump.

The turkey trotted away as if nothing had happened and gtried to regain his dignity.

My wife was accompanied by her friend Beth who was eager to help but who was laughing her ass off.

The turkey meanwhile doubled down on rumors of stupidity and walked right back to the stump and confidently stuck his neck out. This time, Beth grabbed the turkey’s back legs. A moment later the axe fell.

I was photographing the whole thing.

Although the actual photograph, like the marriage itself, is long gone…I have an imprint of the photograph indelibly recorded in my mind.

It is the moment of contact.

Beth on the left is flinching.

Cindy on the right is baring her teeth, arms fully extended.

All of it is in a slight blur except for where the ax has come to a sudden stop as it passed through the neck of the bird and hit the stump. The ax and the neck of the bird are in perfect focus.

A darkened area on the axe is the blood erupting from the birds neck as the ax has passed through.

And yes, the turkey did run a round a little bit after his head was cut off.

I think it was the first time for everybody.

I know it was the first time for the turkey.

I was pretty sure I got the picture.

I proceeded to my dark room and made a print while the women were finishing up with the turkey.

Because I was working in my own darkroom, the image was in black and white and it turned out exactly as I described it above. The black and white nature of the image enhanced the reality of the situation.

We had invited several guests to come over and join us for Thanksgiving the following day.

The picture was so remarkable that we decided to frame it.

We put the framed picture in the dining room.

Our guests arrived, smoking joints and drinking shots as was the custom of the day.

John McCormack, who three years later died sober in a drunken car accident was the first to notice the image.

“Wow, what a picture”

People came over and looked at the image with varying degrees of astonishment.

Finally, someone asked the inevitable question.

“Is that photo a picture of the turkey we are about to eat?”

We nodded.

Beth spoke up.

“This is thanksgiving”

More joints were passed around. More shots taken.

When the transformed fowl appeared on the table, John asked if he could do the carving.

He did one helluva job.

There was plenty of meat to go around and a multitude of Thanks were given as a certain degree of reality grasped the gathering.

God, how I miss Roseland.

Starting with Galloping Gertie, through my first round of miniature golf, into the Penny Arcade across f from the changemakers where I got an authentic Tom Mix photograph, beyond the Wild Mouse, through the Bumper Cars next to the shooting gallery behind the Cotton Candy stand near the restaurant which eventually became a beer stop where one of my friends once asked what the penalty was for punching out a clown. Back to the hot dog stands beneath the swings and beyond the Skyliner with skeeball coupons in hand. Tee shirts, cut offs and a pair of thongs, for decades we'd been having fun all summer long.

I knew Roseland big time and the feeling was mutual.

I had to be present for her last night.

We all knew the date of the execution.

Lots of Landlovers showed up, most young only in heart.

We traded in all of our skee ball tickets which we had amassed over the last ten years and won a forty inch plaster statue of a bearded guy in a yellow raincoat holding on to a bunch of lobsters as if his plaster depended on it.

We posed for pictures in front of or onboard all of the rides.

When my mother died many years later, the picture of her riding the merry go round was the photo nearest her flowers.

We kept trying to pretend that the fun, the eternal summer was never going to end. We knew in our hearts that some point the cups would stop whirling.

During my last ride on the carousel, I began to wonder if, in fact, the rides would stop that night. The operators after all were mostly college kids on the last shift of their summer jobs, probably a week or two from the quad. What would stop them from keeping the rides going all, night, hell all weekend. What could happen to them if they did? They certainly didn't have to worry about getting fired.

But before that paradoxical showdown, the management would present one final fireworks show out over the pier on Canandaigua Lake. The fireworks would begin at eleven. We took our rides on everything as eleven approached.

It was a startlingly clear star spangled evening; a Roseland night.

At ten-thirty the announcement of the fireworks started to come over the p.a. system. Everybody in the park wanted to be in on this event, including the ride operators. So like some kind of blissful, mourning army, we all strode to the site of the fireworks.

At eleven o'clock, the main park was deserted. I distinctly remember looking at that deserted park. I don't remember Roseland ever looking brighter or more inviting, resonating not only the remnants of that night's crowd but also all of the crowds of all the decades past. Although Roseland trembled, it appeared alive and ready to get up on its feet and sprint all the way to Rochester, to Lake Ontario thirty miles South to say goodbye to Sea Breeze.

Complete

Vital

Vibrant

vigorous

empty

throbbing

trembling

pulsating

eternal Roseland over my shoulder.

And then the first fireworks exploded in breathtaking perfection over the lake. The crowd as one ooohed.

At that exact instant, I tore my eyes away from the miracle in the sky for one last peek and saw all of the lights in the main park slam off at once, never to come on again.

Total darkness. A silent sound as deafening as any I had ever not heard.

Most of the crowd

As if on cue

turned away

from the sky

gasped

laughed

and cried

Roseland

died.

Sgt Pepper’s Radiation Team

We got a great team at the hospital.

So let me introduce to you

the radiation therapists

Who deal with me every day.

They're Amy, Maggie, Paul and Mike.

Bompop Bombpop, Bompop, Bompop Bompup

Bompop, Bompop Bompop BUMBUMBUMBUMBUM Bop Dooah.

They put me on the table every day

They make sure that my feet are in the cast

Then when all is ready, they quickly run away

And from the booth send out another blast.

They're Amy, Maggie, Paulie and Mike

They're learning who I am and what I like

They always seem to know the exact words to say

To help me through another healing day

etc.

It's always nice when I start to write and bam...it goes right into Sgt. Pepper but sure enough I'm getting by with a little help from these friends. And I've got to admit, I'm getting better.

Okay, Okay, I'll stop and break into prose.

Gradually

Amy looks like a grown up version of a friend from high school.

Maggie looks like a grown up version of a friend from college.

Paulie looks like a grown up version of a guy I played baseball with.

Mike looks like the guy who played guitar in my band.

In other words, they all look familiar. So right from the get go I had the feeling I was with friends.

When I told Amy that she looked familar. She said " a lot of people think I look familiar"

Looking familiar is a pretty good thing don'cha' think?

The first task is getting me on the sled. I'm nowhere near as flexible as I used to be so they team up and gently lift me into position. They've made a cast of my lower body and that cast is on top of what at first looked like random sheets. I have to get my feet into the cast part shaped for my feet and then the therapists take over.

They tell me to "lay heavy" and I'm learning how to do that. Of course at my weight, it comes kinda natural. I'm getting pretty good at laying heavy. Laying heavy means when I feel movement beneath me, I resist the urge to move with that movement. Of course the radiation blasts have to be exactly precise, so when I am laying heavy they are maneuvering the sheets beneath me to put me into the right postion without my feet leaving the mold. They pull on the sheet and that puts me right where they want me.

All this time we are making small talk and laughing.

Then one of them will say "perfect" and they duck away to a protected area where they watch me through the glass. While watching me, they are also seeing a three dimensional rendering of my inner lower body projected on to a computer screen and making sure that the zaps are zapping the tatoo where the zaps should be zapping.

I'm laying heavy and except for the radio playing in the background, there is silence.

I am under the linear accelerator, looking up at the ceiling where I see a red laser cross.

The accelerator moves around me and does what it's supposed to do for about five minutes.

Then I hear one of them say "great" and next thing I know, they are lifting me off the sled.

When my feet first hit the ground, I experience some vertigo. I sit down in the chair and usually tell a story.

The first story on the first day was what happened when the skeleton walked into the bar. The bartender said. "whaddya want". The skeleton said "a beer and a mop".

The second story on the second day had a fish walking into the bar.

Bartender said "whaddya need".

The fish said "water".

The third day,a duck walked into the drugstore. The duck asked for lip gloss. The astonished pharmacist brought back the gloss. The duck said "I don't have any money, just put it on my bill.

The fourth day, ham and eggs walked into the bar. Bartender said "we don't serve breakfast.

The fifth day Jesus Christ walked into a wine bar etc. The wine pourer asked," what would you like". Jesus answered 'just a glass of water.

Every story got the reaction I hoped it would get. They acted as if they had never heard the story before and then after a pause like after the fish says "water," they gave me the kind of laugh that indicates an amused aha .

Perfect.

Unfortunately I had used all of my clean jokes.

So today, the ninth day, I went with golf. Jesus and St. Peter are playing Pebble Beach. St Peter tees up and blast a beautiful drive right down the middle of the fairway. Jesus whistles in admiration and steps to the tee box. He hits a little dribble that barely makes it to the cart path of the elevated tee. The ball rolls down the path and gets picked up by a rabbit who starts bounding away only to be captured in the talons of a magnificent swooping eagle who grabs the rabbit and starts to fly down the fairway. A flash of lightning hits the eagle who drops the rabbit who drops the ball which lands on the green, takes a giant bounce hits the flagstick and plops into the hole. St Peter turns to Jesus and says "Hey, are you gonna play golf or just fuck around."

Everybody laughed again. I'm starting to enjoy this here radiation.

Go team go.

WILD BILL FROM BABYLON

I'm starting to wonder how long I will last. I'm already older than I deserve to be; based on the way that I've conducted my life. I want to give credit before I go to people who should already be famous if they gave a shit for fame.

One of those people is my friend Wild Bill. We've been buddies for over fifty years. I asked him to be my daughter's Godfather. I couldn't have made a better choice. I haven't spoken to Amanda for at least five years but Wild Bill has and he tells me she's nice.

Thank you, Godfather.

Wild Bill will never be married but to this day he carries ten rubbers in his wallet on his never ending quest to "get laid". Ya gotta love guys like that.

Sometimes he does, God bless them.

He's always having misadventures with cops maybe because of the dozens of messages on his car, the latest being FUCK DONALD TRUMP.

We pissed, side by side, into Walden Pond.

Sitting shotgun on the Long Island Expressway with Bill is a shit your pants experience.

He's seen the Dead fifty times at least. He had a conversation with George Harrison. Nowadays, Bill's the oldest man at every concert and the most energized.

Nobody dances like Wild Bill.

He was a friend of Bobby Vee.

He's a roller coaster fanatic.

I've seen him punch a taxi cab driver on Fifth Avenue.

He's got season tickets for both the Yankees and the Mets.

He cried when he heard that my mother died.

He sends birthday cards to all of his friends even though none of us have the slightest idea when His birthday arrives.

Christmas cards, Father and Mother’s day cards as well

He's a master of trivia, an expert on the Bobby Fuller Four.

He's the last of the great mooners.

He gets along with dogs and cats.

He's got my back.

He should be a movie if he gave a shit.

He's Wild Bill from Babylon.

One remarkable afternoon, I was sitting at a booth in Kennedy airport slamming some suds with my brother Deke while waiting on Wild Bill to pick us up for a weekend of irresponsibility.

Naturally, Bill being capricious from the get go was already two hours late. Responding in kind, I took the opportunity to waste even more money with the rest of the clubless apes on overpriced beers drafted at the airport watering hole.

While in the midst of this activity, I happened to notice a guy sitting at the bar. The guy had his back turned to me. Apparently, he too was waiting for his connection because every ten miutes or so I could hear him say to the barkeep, "I'll have another one please" witha sorta under control yet fighting panic quality to his request.

The guy was in the bar before I got there and I'd been there a couple of hours. I figured our consciousnesses were at the same level of disarray. I never saw the guy's face but something about the tone of his voice reminded me of the voice of the astronaut in 2001 who on the Jupiter Mission gets locked out of his ship by the computer and trying to keep his composure under control without panicking, keeps insisting that the computer open the portal for him to retake control of the ship.

"I'll have another one please" sounded exactly like "Open the pod bay door, Hal" to my altered listening.

Judging from the size of the guy's back and the fact that this was Kennedy Airport, the possibility did exist that this was in fact Keir Dullea, the actor from 2001.

I passed my perception on to my brother. I said "Listen to the way this guy says 'I'll have another one please'. I think that's the guy from 2001".

My brother equally committed to his beerz but still acutely attentive to timbre detail, laughed at my Bud soaked perception. Childishly egged on by his laughter, I decided to approach the guy at the bar.

I took a seat on a stool next to him. I ordered yet another brewski and got a side view. The side view kept me in the ballpark. The guy ordered another drink and the recognition possibilty grew even stronger.

Finally, I tapped the guy on the shoulder and said "Excuse me, are you Keir Dullea?"

The man turned to me and before he spoke I knew, holy shit he's the guy.

Keir said "Yes I am, do I know you."

I said "not really but you're in one of my favorite movies....2001. I've seen that movie ten times and even though I love it, Im not sure what it's about."

Keir said that it was one of his favorite movies as well but he wasn't real sure what it was about either. He thought it was "something about God". Apparently he had been called by Kubrick, accepted the job...worked on his scenes for a month or so and then left the production not knowing anymore about the entire project then what he had experienced while acting in it. He told me that when he saw the movie after it's release, he was "stunned."

We carried on a conversation for about fifteen minutes. I told him I was a teacher and he told me how much he respected the profession and how flattered he was that I recognized him.

A great guy.

I excused myself and went back to my table where a great commotion had taken place as Wild Bill finally arrived. I had enough respect for Dullea's provacy that I didn't tell Bill about what had just happened.

When my brother asked, I said "yep, it was him. check him out and let's get outta here before this whole thing gets too absurd". Deacon took a look. I could tell he was astonished by the whole situation.

We started to head out of the airport in a huge, blurry hurry considering we were already an hour late for that night's concert.

Bill started relating the wild excuses he had for being so late. I told him don't worry about it. Let's make the most of tonight, after all as Noel Coward once said "Keir Dullea, gone tomorrow."

STARLIT HUMAN NATURE

I didn’t feel like working one Friday night at the Starlite Drive-in. I wasn’t too concerned because we were playing yet another in a long line of low budget Jean Michael Vincent flicks that nobody came to see anyhow. I figured that I’d hang out with the projection crew and the homeless derelicts who were living in the projection booth until between movies when I’d man the concession stand. Then I’d go home and feed a few unpurchased meatball sandwiches to my pig Seymour.

Driving down West Henrietta Road, I ran into an unexpected, unexplainable traffic jam. I wasn’t in any particular hurry so I cranked up my eight track and started listening to Arthur by the Kinks. By the time I got to “Brainwashed”, I could see what was causing the clot. All of the cars were pulling into the Starlite. I rechecked the title marquee and although a few of the words were misspelled, the basic idea remained; something about a Hawk starring Vincent and Will Sampson was indeed playing.

I pulled into the long, gravel road that led to the ticket booth and the cubicle was empty. When, at last, I got to the booth, I discovered that the restraining rope was down. The ticket seller had unlocked the rope, opened the booth and as I learned later, in a fit of self-righteous drunken, immature responsibility had decided to quit his “godamned shitty job”. He took off and left the gate unattended. I never saw the guy again but I heard he opened a fruit stand in Irondequoit specializing in illegally imported bananas.

I was ambivalent about the situation. It didn’t hurt me any that more people were attending the show, since I was paid a commission based on the sales of the concession stand. The more people who came to the flick, the more money I would make. Remember though that I didn’t feel like working that night and since I hadn’t expected anybody to show up, I was all by myself which meant I was going to have to do the work of three people maybe four even if I got a couple of the derelicts living in the projection booth to stop smoking weed, get off their asses and help me out a bit.

When I pulled into my stand, the projectionist greeted me. Drunk as he was, he didn’t particularly care how many people were in the lot. He was being paid by the hour. I told him that the reason that all of these people were here was because Mark had opened the gate and abandoned the booth.

One of the great mysteries of this night was how in the world did the people get the word that the movie was free and how did it spread so fast. If we had put FREE on the marquee, probably nobody would have pulled into the lot.

Reminded me of a friend of mine, named Rick who was trying to get rid of an old refrigerator. He put the thing in front of his house for a couple of days with a big FREE sign on its door. Nobody even sniffed it. Finally on the advice of another friend named Charlene, he put another sign on the fridge....$50. That night somebody stole the fuckin’ thing.

Art, the projectionist, and I were pondering these matters while also trying to figure out what the heck we were supposed to do. We had a parking lot full of freeloaders. Should I start popping the popper? Should Art start reeling the projector?

We looked around and got an eyeful of human nature as the sky grew dark.

People started to lean on their horns.

They were honking to start the movie.

That freakin’ did it!

A parking lot full of freeloaders defreakinmanding that they get what they didn’t pay for and expressing their rage by leaning on their horns.

I told Art, “I’ve got to say something.”

I didn’t know exactly what I was going to say but I knew that somebody had to had to say something and still I was still sober and going a shit, it had to be me.

I went into the projection booth.

I fired up the PA system.

I grabbed the mike and this is what I said:

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have a situation here. The guy who takes tickets left his post so all of you are here for free. Look around, the place is packed and nobody has paid as much as a dime.Now, I can’t blame you for taking advantage. I sure as hell can’t throw all of ya outta here. I do want you to know that this is NOT a FREE show and staying here would be like stealing. Stealing is wrong. I do have an idea, a solution. We’re going to send somebody back to the ticket booth. The right thing for you to do is exit the drive in on the right onto Brighton-Henrietta Town Line Road...then turn left and re-enter the lot. The ticket person will charge you half price and you will have the satisfaction of knowing that you did the right thing. We will begin the show in 10 minutes.”

Art had been listening to this with a look of astonishment on his shitfaced grill. He asked me what I thought would happen. I said “I believe in people.”

Silence ensued.

Honking stopped.

Then I heard a car engine start up. Then another and another. I saw a line of cars heading for the exit, God bless’ed, every single car that I could see headed out the exit. Moments later we got a call from the ticket booth out front.

“It looks like an invasion out here! There’s a procession of cars coming down West Henrietta Road and pulling in. What should I do?”

“charge ‘em half price and say thank you”, I told my man.

The drive-in filled back up not quite as full but almost. Ten minutes after my announcement, we started the movie. I gave away free popcorn all night. The owner made more money that night than he had any right to make. The people saw a movie for half price and got free popcorn along with the satisfaction of, on this occasion, doing the right thing.

That night, I went home and had a moonlight talk with Seymour about human nature. Pretty sure Seymour didn’t understand a word I was saying yet between gulps of his meatball sandwiches, although he grunted and farted at appropriate times.

ERIKA FROM A DISTANCE

Sometimes it's important to see things through the eyes of others. We received this letter from a niece named Erika who lives in North Carolina. Lynn responded to the letter before I even saw it. I was gonna respond but Lynn covered everything pretty objectively. Of course she left out the part about my brave, courageous, inspiring battle but that's probably because I've left it out of my own behavior especially when seen up close.

Anyways, here's what it looks like from a distance.

Erika's letter and Lynn's response.

Hey guys,

So I just wanted to reach out and let you guys know you are in my prayers everyday. Cancer is a very scary word. Usually I shy away from reaching out on a topic that I don't understand. Today I was thinking about it and I realized how selfish that was. I was so scared to bring up something you guys deal with everyday. But really as family its only right that we are here for each other through thick and thin. Even if we are scared we stand tall for the ones we love. We are the people who lend a shoulder to cry on. I want you guys to know I can and will be that person if you guys ever need anything. I've always looked up to you guys for being very knowledgable and kind and do not deserve this disease to come into your life. But, God works in mysterious ways and I strongly believe you guys will beat and overcome this obstacle. Love you guys and miss you! Hope to see you soon!!

Erika

What a wonderful letter. So full of love, concern and support. Thank you very, very much. Uncle Ice has just six more radiation treatments. They won't know if all the cancer is gone so he will have to go in for regular blood tests to check his PSA level which will tell them the potential threat of cancer cells remaining or not. He has been experiencing fatigue, depression and Incontinance . He is on meds for all of that which gives him some relief. No sleep at nites though which can make him zombie like. But the good news is that a few weeks after radiation he should return back to how he was before the radiation started. We are getting thru this by feeling how lucky we are that it was caught in time and the treatment just involves radiation not surgery or chemotherapy.

With love and appreciation,

Aunt Lynn and Uncle Ice

MORE SEYMOUR

I’ve almost forgotten how much fun it was to drink beer with Seymour, my pig.

Remember those delicious meatball sandwiches that only existed at drive-ins? We took a lot of pride in our meatball “sank witch” when we ran and cooked at the Starlite concession stand. We always threw in a load of extra sauce and cheese. Those subs were nuclear powered.

Some times we’d make a few nautili too many. I’d take whatever leftovers we still had hanging around and feed them to Seymour. At that juncture, feeding meatballs to a pig was my idea of a savings account.

I’d usually bring at least twelve pack of Bud to accompany the meatball sandwiches. I’d take the winding path down past the barn, past the manure pile, past the chicken coop and the duck pond into the wired off part of the pasture that we had converted into a pig pen.

I’d stand next to the pen, throw a few sandwiches on the ground and wait for Seymour to emerge. I was usually working on my first Bud while I was bringing the sandwiches to Seymour’s slophouse. By the time I got to Seymour’s place, I was finishing my second. I’d finish my third by the time Seymour emerged from his little tin hut.

At this point, I’d pop open my fourth Bud and pour the fifth and sixth beer into the black, circular, plastic container that we used as a watering tough for the pig.

Seymour could drink even faster than I could when he put his mind to it, in other words when he wasn’t peeing, pooping’ eating’ or sleeping’. The whole purpose of chilling with the pig in the first place was to avoid any semblance of pressure or constraints or manners. Burping, farting and even puking was no problem. I’d drink at my own pace and whenever I finished one I’d pop open another one for the pig and another for myself.

I’ve heard about dogs, who come to a kitchen table, sit on a chair, put their paws on the table and wait to be served. These are dogs who think they are humans. Seymour did not think he was human. Seymour knew for damned sure that he was a pig and when he partied with me I think he figured that I was one too and he weren’t far off. Seymour was all attitude, identity and appetite.

There was nobody else around except me and the pig. The stars were bright; the temperature perfect. The only sounds of the night were the natural sounds of the pasture and the pen along with the snortin’, slathering’, plopping’ burpin’ leaking’ sounds that Seymour routinely made at times like these. It was peaceful. I had been productive as in “I’m going down to feed the pig now, honey.” Life in the pasture drinking with the pig was a bizarre Bud commercial waiting to be made and shown at the Super Bowl.

One time, near the end, when we had come to grips with the sobering eventuality that Seymour was destined to become ham, bacon, sausage, etc, I had a barn party over at my house. Some of my buddies had heard me bragging about the peace of mind I enjoyed while drinking with the pig. Apparently they thought it was a good idea because by the time I got down to the trough, Seymour was passed out in the cooling mud, getting a bit of a sunburn, his trough still half full of beer.

I went back to the barn and asked how many people had been drinking with the pig. Six guys raised their hands: Tommy Tron, Bruce, Jack Stafford, Wayne, Wild Bill and Uncle George. I told them to come down to the sty and see the fruits of their labor.

The six of us walked down the path together. As we got close to Seymour, a reverent silence descended, When we arrived at his trough the stillness continued as we gazed and gaped at the five sheets to the wind bovine blacked out and basking in his combination of mud, Bud, swill and perceived freedom, catching some rays and judging by his apparent ease of breathing, completely relaxed, at peace with the world, unconcerned with appearances.

A few weeks later I recruited all of these guys to help me load the corpulent and non-co operative Seymour into the back of my truck to take him to processing about ten miles down the road. Seymour was no longer a little piggy on his way to the market. We had a rough, sweaty, shitty and muddy time trying to get Seymour into the truck until somebody suggested putting a pillowcase over his face. We did. It worked. We led Seymour into and out of the truck and into the processing pen where they spray painted the word “tendon” in large letters on his no longer sunburned hide.

I remember taking one last look at Seymour. There was another hugh pig in the holding pen with him. I imagined those two pigs looking at each other’s hides, seeing the black spray paint and thinking “this ain’t real good”. Then I shut the door and left Seymour in the darkness.

Seymour was committed.

The next time I saw him he was in packages

Over the next few decades, every time that I’ve gotten together with any of those guys, particularly during All Star games, somebody always comes up with “remember Seymour” and the next round of stories take off from that common point of departure as if Seymour the Pig was a space station and all previous stories were shuttle crafts arriving to be refueled enroute to homecoming or deeper exploration

MENDON SEA CRUISE

As in the case with most epics, many colorful events occurred during my final days at the Starlite. Most of those colorful events were driven by colorful people, people that I wouldn’t have known if it weren’t for the Starlite which was sort of a vortex of idiosynchracy. One of those people was Wayne Green.

Wayne was a regular at the Starlite, as well as a drive-in afficianado. One particularly slow night, Shane came in from his car and we began a snack bar conversation about drive in culture etc. Wayne became so engrossed in the conversation that he missed the second feature which was The Deep with Nick Nolte and Jackie Bissett. Due to no faul of our own, we had been playing the movie one reel short and out of order but nobody complained except one time when the sound went off for a minute or two and a few people honked. That’s when I realized that people didn’t give a shit what they were watching as long as they could hear it.

Wayne asked me how to operate the popcorn machine, I showed him. He was immediately hooked on concession stand life.

I told Wayne that anytime he wanted to stop by and help me run the stand, we’d let him in for free. Most nights, Wayne would show up and volunteer his services as popcorn popper. Wayne wasn’t the only one. Towards the end I had six or seven people who enjoyed the concession stand so much that they would come to the drive in just to hang around every so often going back to their cars to drink beer or whatever. The concession stand became an oddball country club. Almost every night one or two or more of these volunteers would show up to pop and pour. In the end, they were basically running the stand and I was spending more and more time in party cars.

Outside of the stand, I didn’t know much about Wayne of the other “volunteers but I figured they were either geniuses or lunatics and probably both. We’d get into some pretty crazy conversations on slow nights and since we kept playing Jean Michael Vincent level movies without half price admission or free popcorn, there were a lot of slow nights.

One night Wayne and I were talking about making lemonade of lemons, making a fortune out of a misfortune. Wayne told me about a guy that he knew whose truck caught fire the same week that the engine of his boat blew up. Shane told me that the guy welded the body of his boat on to the frame and motor of his car, got some dealer plates and drove around in his truck boat.

I had trouble believing that one. I told Wayne so. He assured me that the story was true. I said “yeah, right” and forgot about the whole deal.

About a month later, I was mowing my lawn when a boat with dealer plates pulled into my driveway. Wayne was at the wheel. How can I describe this contraption? I know. A speed boat on wheels and that’s exactly what it looked like although you couldn’t see the wheels too well. I called up a few people and there were already a few folks partying in my hose. Everybody changed into shorts and swim suits. The guys stripped off their shirts. Before long we had a boat chock full of nuts all singing “ooh Wee, Ooh wee Baby, come and let me take you on a Sea Cruise.” We set off driving through Mendon like five dimensional survivors from a demented Beach Blanket Bingo flick minus Frankie and Annette with Beach Boy, Dick Dale and Surfaris music blasting from the deck on the deck.

You should have seen the cars as they passed us. Imagine a cool late September afternoon. You’re driving down Mendon Town Line Road. Suddenly you see a speed boat approaching you full of lunatic/geniuses mash potatoing, twisting and watusiying to Msirlou or I get Around or Wipeout. My only regret is we didn’t take the time to grab Seymour the pig, throw some shades on him and include him in the voyage.

We cruised around Pittsford and Mendon for a half hour. Truck boats use an awful lot of gas. Eventually, we pulled back into my driveway and abandoned ship.

I never doubted Wayne again.

The Starlite era had ended. The truck boat had been revealed. Apparently Wayne’s purpose in my life was fulfilled, including one bit of information that I was awake enough to remember.

As we were heading back to the house, Wayne asked me if I wanted to take the wheel. Paranoia set in. I could see the headlines, “Local teacher crashes into telephone pole in truck boat filled with passengers without seat belts or life jackets.”

Wayne was silent for a moment, keeping his eyes on the road and his hands on the wheel. He asked me “if I remembered the night when all the cars pulled out of the Starlite and then pulled back in.”

I said, “of course I remembered that.’

Wayne said that He hadn’t believed ME when I told him that story.

Wayne believed it now because he knew the guy who was the first person to pull out, the guy who had started the entire righteous exodus. The guy who helped right the wrong.

Turns out the guy was on his first date that night and legitimately wanted to see the movie because he and his date were fans of Will Sampson and Tonto.

The guy’s named was Ovid and his date was named Julia.

The date had been a success.

LAST DAY OF RADIATION

Today's the day. Last night was the night. I only had to steal one mirror last night so I got my first half way decent shuteye in months.

At this moment I am resisting the urge to hit the sack and indulge in fatigue.

I'm thinking about the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Nightmare on Elm Street. In both of those flicks, sleep was to be avoided unless you wanted Freddy to slash through your walls or wake up as a pod.

Those movies always bothered me.

I hate the feeling of falling asleep when I don't want to fall asleep. This used to happen to me all the time, particularly on Wednesday nights when I was young.

Because I was big fan of horror films, my parents used to let me stay up "late" to watch Shock Theater which played all of the Lugosi, Karloff and Chaney films. Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolfman, the Raven, the Mummy, the Black Cat, The Invisible Ray,The Ghoul,The Werewolf of London etc. The show came on came on past my bedtime so it was quite a privilege and quite a challenge.

Plus, I was actually scared by the movies or at least I expected to be.

I would take my position on the carpet in front of our timy teevee set. The movie would start and before too long, I would realize that I was falling asleep. I learned to recognize the feeling and the "oh no" that accompanied it. I would invariably choose to "rest my eyes" for just a minute during a commercial. I learned after awhile that once I started to rest my eyes, the rest periods would increase in frequency and duration until at last I was asleep on the floor and had to be carted of to bed all the time insisting "I'm awake, I'm awake"

The morning came and I awoke with a sense of failure and a determination to make it all the way through the next week. I realized that once I started to "rest my eyes", it was all over. I would make a conscious effort to "resist the rest" but week after week I failed.

I wasn't used to failure back in those days and it frightened me more than the movies did. I was learning about temptation and my inability to resist it.

This was my first previews of fatigue but I really didn't know what fatigue was until a few months ago. There's a difference between fatigue and being tired, passing out, blacking out, dozing off or being exhausted.

For the past few months, I've suffered fatigue and it's a lot different from "resting my eyes" because in fatigue I'm not even interested in the "movie" that is my life. All I want to do is sleep, well not exactly sleep but more like escape but evdn in the escaping there is the over-riding sense of failure and guilt as days melt away and merge with nights.

Fatigue sucks.

So as I write these words, I am resisting the urge to "rest my eyes" and to go downstairs to my cave/pit. The urtge is strong but not as strong as yesterday and yesterday wasn't as strong as the day before.

They told me after my last blast of radiation that sometimes the fatigue starts to go away after a week and a half but sometimes it can continue for three or four months or in some cases forever.

Today is exactly a week and a half since my last blast. I'm gonna go the distance. I'm not goin' downstairs. I'm not gonna turn into a pod person again today. No way. I've charged up my camera. I'm snapping flowers. I'll be leaving for the ballpark in three hours. I'm gonna look good. This is the day I marked down on my calendar for the beginning of my comeback and I'm not gonna rest my eyes until I get back from Frontier Field.

My brother is my best friend and I haven't seen him during this whole situation. I want to see him now. I want him to see me snapping pictures, keeping score, drinking a beer and rooting for the old home team.

Freddy Fatigue can't get me at Frontier Field if I keep my eyes on the ball.

OVID WARREN PEETS

Even though I think I'm a smart ass, I'm not as smart as I think I am.

My name is Ovid Peets.

I'm here to tell you a story about a guy who was proud of his ignorance and worried that he wasn’t as dumb as he thought he was . Over the course of our acquaintance this man gratified himself by proving conclusively that he was even dumber than he had hoped.

His name was Thornton Krell. He was my professor. I was taking a class called Metaphysiction at a place called Montgomery Community College. I didn't know what the hell Metaphysiction was and neither did my advisor, Ward Stokes. As soon as I found out that Stokes was vague on the course, I decided to throw it into my schedule. I figured I could drop the course later and blame the drop on Stokes who would have to admit that he didn't know what the hell he was talking about when we first discussed the course.

Everyone knows that in a fire, the survival strategy is to drop and roll. Only MCC students know that academic survival strategy is to enroll and then drop.

I can remember the first few minutes of the first class without looking at my notes. I can’t look at my notes from any class before Krell’s class because I never took notes. I used to draw pictures. I had contempt for anyone who actually took notes. What a waste of time. What a waste of paper. I figured it was all posturing because anytime I would ask anyone to see their “notes” they would always say they didn’t have any notes either.

They must have been drawing pictures too or writing those little love letters that begin “I‘m sitting in class bored out of mind and thinking about what we did last night…...

For some reason I used to draw a hockey rink as seen from a nosebleed seat. After I drew the rink in great detail, including stick figure crowds, I would rest the point of the pen somewhere on the “Ice” and wrist flick the point towards the “Goal” which resembled a large E turned without the middle perpendicular. If I managed to stop the point within the E, the stroke counted as a goal. I would disallow goals in which the stroke was slowed down enough to mimic conscious purpose. Only subconscious strokes counted. Sometimes the pencil and the “ref” would get in long arguments about whether or not a goal should count or not. In this way, with an occasional fake “I’m listening and I’m interested” glance at the teacher, class time passed.

When I wasn't drawing hockey rinks, I was drawing drum sets. This habit was about to change within the first ten minutes of encountering Krell.

They say that a student pretty much makes up his mind how he will get along with a teacher within the first five minutes that the teacher is in front of the class. Even while Krell was taking attendance and reviewing the institute rules, which everyone had heard at the beginning of every class at MCC (and still disobeyed) I was forming my impression of Krell. I kept hearing the song 96 Tears playing in my brain. Anytime I hear ninety-six tears in my brain, I remember the group that sang the song…..Question Mark and the Mysterians with Question Mark written as ?.

So, my initial and lasting impression of Krell was of a mysterious guy who would have a lot of questions for me to consider and about whom I would have a lot of questions which he would probably never consider because I would never pose the questions what with the hockey playing and the drum sets.

And that someone would cry: cry, cry, cry; ninety six tears yeah. The first thing he did after the preliminary administrivia was to turn his gaze upon the class and make these sounds: (and now I consult the notes that I didn’t have at the time that Krell was making the sounds)

Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, Zeta, Eta, Theta, Iota, Kappa, Lambda, Mu, Nu, Xi, Omicron, Pi, Rho, Sigma, Tau, Upsilon, Phi, Chi, Psi, Omega.

Next, he took out a match. Before striking the match he informed us that the sounds he had just made were the letters of the Greek alphabet. He said his first goal was to have everyone in the class be able to repeat those sounds in the time it took a match to burn down to the finger tips. With that he struck the match and recited the alphabet and with a flourish blew out the match in plenty of time.

“I’m going to repeat the alphabet. You will take notes while I recite. Then, I’m going to call on one of you. . I will light the match. You will recite the Greek alphabet before the match burns my fingers. You may use your notes”

With that, he repeated “Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, Zeta, Eta, Theta, Iota, Kappa, Lambda, Mu, Nu, Xi, Omicron, Pi, Rho, Sigma, Tau, Upsilon, Phi, Chi, Psi, Omega“.

I stopped drawing the hockey rink and right there on the still freezing ice, I took my first serious notes Alfa, Bayta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, Zayta, Eighta, Theta, Iota, Kappa, Lambda, Mew, New, Zi, Omicron, Pi, Rho, Sigma, Tau, Upsilon, Phi, Chi, Sigh, Omega.

I wasn’t looking around to see if anybody else was taking notes.

Krell paused at Omega. He looked at the attendance roster. He took a match from the pack. He said “Mr. Paris. You will give me back the alphabet. You may use your notes. I will count to five and light the match”

I don’t remember much about Mr. Paris except that he was wearing a tee shirt that said “Weed Man”. When Krell got to five, Paris got to his feet and headed to the door. With the match still burning in Krell’s hand, Paris looked back at the spontaneous combustion in the front of the room. “Kiss my fart” he yelled and walked out the door.

Krell kept the match burning in silence until it reached his finger tips at which point he said “Ouch” and shook the match out.

“Kiss my fart” Krell mused aloud "what an interesting juxtaposition of the physical upon the invisible. He might have been a great student but alas, I’m afraid that’s the last time we’ll see Paris”

He took out another match. “Let’s try it again. Helen Kamp, it‘s your turn”

Helen read the alphabet from her notes. She finished with plenty of match to spare.

Very good. Haylen” said Krell while snapping his fingers with the loudest snap I‘d heard since my left handed sixth grade clarinet teacher snapped me out of music lessons for incorrectly counting measures. Krell’s snaps, on the other hand, conveyed praise not criticism “How do you account for your success?”

“I read from my notes” said Helen.

“And before you read them……..”

“I wrote them.”

"And before you wrote them?” Krell asked.

“I listened, Mr Krell.”

“And in literary terms, Haylen, what verbal exercise are we involved in right now?”

“A dialogue.”

“All correct. Thank You Haylen for introducing the basic tenents of this class. The dullest pencil on the roughest paper has a better memory than the sharpest brain in the smoothest intellect. Any questions?”

In the pause that inevitably follows any teacher asking if there are any questions, two impressions raced through my mind. 1: Helen might be the Hawking of the class which greatly increased my odds of bozohood and 2: The teacher had a Southern accent when he called on Helen. He called her Haylen.

The pause ended as it always does with a dork with a question.

Arthur Georger raised his hand.

Krell nodded in his direction.

Georger asked “Well, Mr. Krell what exactly is the definition of metaphysics and the relationship of that defintion to metaphysiction”

Krell responded, “ With all due respect, the answer to that question comes at the end of the class not at the beginning because the entire purpose of this class is to explore the intellectual journey that led to metaphysics and later metaphysiction".

Krell continued, "Haylen has already touched upon some of the primary components. We will be learning how Socrates led to Plato how Plato led to Aristotle and how Aristotle led to metaphysics. In a nutshell, Socrates asked questions in verbal dialogue. Plato was the student of Socrates. Plato listened to the dialogues that Socrates narrated. Plato recorded the dialogues which were a history of the philosophical life of Socrates. Socrates only spoke. Plato listened and took notes. Plato added his own thoughts to the thoughts of Socrates which he had noted. He passed his thoughts and notes on to others who were taking note of his thoughts which were the thoughts of Socrates filtered through the lens of Plato. Thus, Plato became a teacher."

Krell went to the blackboard and printed the words Socrates, Aristitole and Plato. He began drawing lines between and amongst the names and explained; "Aristotle was a student of Plato. Aristotle added his own thoughts to Plato’s thoughts which were themselves thoughts upon the thoughts of Socrates which led through logic and biology and astrology to metaphysics. Aristotle was the first teacher of metaphysics. I’m not going to even try to describe the lineage that led from Aristotle to Krell because it’s taken me my entire life up to this very second to unravel that journey which is continuing even as I speak and upon which you, Mr. Georger are a fellow traveler until you follow the path of Paris“.

By this time, the hockey game had ended and I was, for the first time, taking notes furiously, afraid that I would be called upon to suffer the fate of Paris. I know for sure that I was taking notes at this time because the above paragraphs are an interpretive reconstructions of the words of Krell based upon the actual notes of that first class on that last hockey rink upon which I glanced as I composed the last paragraph and will be consulting for the rest of this effort.

See,another thing about notes is, they stick around.

If nothing else this class of Krell’s was, by definition, noteworthy.

I’m not sure if my notes are worthy of the noteworthiness of Krell’s class (what with the high probability of bozos on this bus) because I’ myself may be a bozo and if you’re on this particular bus, holding on to the handrail next to mine, you may be a bozo as well.

Unless you're a Hawking.

By the time I left class that day only three of us remained, myself, Helen and Julia. Arthur had taken an early lav break and had not returned. Weedman Paris had apparently enrolled and dropped, at least that's what Krell said at the end of the period.

"The bad news is that five is the minimum enrollment to hold a class. The good news for you four survivors, if in fact the class itself survives, is that if we continue the class and I use the traditional grading curve, the E has already directed me to kiss his fart."

When you're riding in my bus, in which failure is always an option, it's reassuring to hear the E has left the building. I made up my mind I was in this class for the duration. I even had notes to prove my determination.

Riding this wave of confidence and conviction, I decided to approach Helen and confess my embarrassment at Krell's mispronuniciation of her name.

"Excuse me. I was in your Metaphysiction class. I couldn't figure out why the teacher had a Southern accent only when he said your name. Helen is such a nice, classical name. I'm sorry he had to butcher it."

Helen looked at me as if she were looking at a dog turd tidbit on the sole of a wedding shoe.

"Why thank you for your sensititivity Oafid. Not only have you underestimated the teacher but also you've insulted me and my parents. My father's name is Haynes. My mothers name is Helen. They named me Haylen. I'm sorry my name isn't classical enough for you"

Haylen turned on her heel and was gone before I had the opportunity to clear either my throat, my name or hers or her parents or Krell.

I beat the teacher to the second class. We all did. I was the last to arrive not including Krell.

Arthur, Haylen and Julia were all in their seats. I nodded at Arthur, tried to avoid Haylen's gaze by looking down at the floor. Then after noting the awesome old school sandals that were between the floor and Haylen's soles, I got a better look at Julia.

Julia was not a beautiful woman but there was something about her that demanded my attention. After about two seconds I realized what that something was. Julia was dressed in an exact replica of the curtain rendered green velvet gown that Scarlett O'Hara had worn to visit Rhett Butler when he was in jail where he was sick and tired of seeing women in rags; where he was relieved to see that Scarlett was not in rags and was ready to give her anything until he discovers that her hands are filled with callouses.

I was surfing in this state of stupefication and cinematic reverie when Krell entered the classroom. Apparently I had walked in on the conclusion of the customary debate about how long the class waited for the tardy teacher before disbanding, five minutes for adjunct or TA, ten minutes for assistant professor, fifteen minutes for full professor.

Nobody knew what category Krell was so I have the feeling if he would have been five seconds late, the class would have been empty by the time he entered which would have spelled the end of metaphysiction, right there.

But there he was right in the nick of time. I took out my notebook and pencil. I gazed at the Greek alphabet just in case we began where we left off.

Krell said "Well folks it looks like we have a class. It seems that after Paris burned out, he immediately dropped the class which caused Ryan Montana of interdisciplinary to have a meeting with June Brickwood of the bursars office which led to a meeting with Kay Stafford of the philosophy department which led to a meeting with Dr. Gary Gottschalk of the English Dept. which led to a meeting with Charlene Bellavia the supervisor of instruction which led to a meeting with Richard Grotto of adjunct education which led to a meeting with Dean Dean Holland who okayed the class fifteen minutes ago while I waited outside his office."

"In case you're wondering, everyone of those people make much more money than I do"

"So, Julia, when I strike this match, tell me the Greek alphabet and when you're finished I'll explain education to you."

With that Krell struck his match and Julia finished her recitation beautifully before the flame was gone with the wind.

Krell congratulated Julia and began his lecture.

"Once upon a time there was a guy who was a terrific learner. Let's call him Torch." Krell began and continued.

"Everything activated Torch's curiosity which fired up his intellect which filled him with inexhaustible creative, emotional, intuitional and investigative energy. Torch learned everything he could about each person, place, thing or idea that he encountered with his senses, with his emotions, with his feelings and with his intuitions.One day it dawned on Torch that the best way to increase his own learning was to give away what he had. Torch decided to teach."

Krell printed the word TEACH on the board and continued.

"When the teacher is ready, the students will appear and when the students are ready the teacher will appear. In the early days of Torch's teaching, there were many appearances and disappearances. Usually, they were out of synch.Sometimes, Torch's teaching schedule got a little unpredictable what with the perpetual investigations of all things attracting his attention for random amounts of time. Similarly, his students, their curiosity activated by Torch, were out and about making their own discoveries, building their own toys. Eventually, one of his students, let's call him Arclipides, came up wih an idea."

Krell wrote ARCLIPEDES on the board and continued.

"After a session of sharing on the steps of the Athaneeum Arclipides asked "Why don't we all come back here to these very same steps on the same day at the same time next week".Next week arrved and everybody showed up. Everybody was only four people and Torch, the teacher. The four people were Lysis, Arclipides, Sachelli, and Lyviia.As time went on the four people grew to forty people. The forty people grew into a hundred people. At this point Arclipedes came up with his second big idea, "why don't we break this group into four groups. One group can meet on Monday, the next group on Tuesday, the third group on Wednesday and the fourth group on Thursday".

Krell wrote SCHEDULE on the board and continued.

"Torch had a little problem with this big idea. Even though meeting with the people was definitely feeding his learning habit, four days a week was a bit much. Torch suggested two groups on Monday and two groups on Wednesday. Arclipedes went along with the idea. Arclipedes divided the hundred into four groups of twenty five and told them which day and time to show up on the steps.As time went on, the hundred turned into thousands and the thousands turned into millions and the millions turned into billions.The steps turned into hundreds of thousand of schools.Torch continued to learn.Sachelli, Lysis and Lyviia went on to become the first faculty. Arclipedes became the first administrator.

Krell wrote ADMINISTRATOR on the board and next to the word a dollar sign. Then he continued

"Eventually, Arclipedes and his followers started telling everybody where to go, what to learn and how to teach.All of the followers of Arclipedes seemed to have a natural interest in finances so the gathering places grew bigger and bigger as a price tag began to be attached to learning. Torch never had much interest in money and neither did Sachelli, Lysis or Lyviia. Learning was their treasure and giving away what they had earned (after all, learned is earned plus an l for either life or love)was the best way to preserve and enrich their intellectual treasure.This was fine for Arclipedes. Altruism always cuts cost."

Krell paused for a moment as a bell rang somehwere.

Krell shrugged his shoulders at the sound of the bell as if indicating "See that's a perfect example of what I'm talking about".

Then, he continued:

"Way, way back before the steps turned into schools, Torch and Arclipedes were on a collision course. When the crash finally happened only Arclipedes walked away. Arclipedes had amassed more money and with more money had come more power.All Torch had was teaching, learning and the love and respct of his students.Trouble. Mismatch.Arclipedes insisted that what Torch was espousing was not good for the people. The powers that be agreed. Torch drank the Kool Aid."

Krell wrote KOOL AID on the board and continued.

"The remaining faculty insisted upon some degree of intellectual freedom if they were to continue coming back to the steps. This was the beginning of tenure.Tenure is to education what beer is to Homer Simpson; the cause of as well as the solution to all of the problems in the classroom.Arclipedes "not good for the people" eventually turned into the standard administrative method of suppressing progressive ideas while sustaining status quo. "Not good for the people" became "not good for the kids" if an innovative idea needed to be stopped or "good for the kids" if a stale idea needed to be preserved.

Krell paused, looked out the window and wrote STATUS QUO on the board before he continued.

"Today, for example we have middle schools. Not only do we have middle schools but those schools usually start the earliest in the morning and contain the kids who would benefit most from getting more sleep.Going back to K-8 schools would simply be "not good for the kids" until the decision was made to return to K-8 schools, the justification for which will be that it has suddenly become "good for the kids".Other examples abound.The factory schedule. SAT exams. Standardized testing. The categorization and separation of knowledge into subjects and departments. The hierarchy of the sciences. How did anyone ever determine that biology was easier than chemistry and chemistry easier than physics.For those seeking entry into the closed fraternity/sorority of "science" biology is traditionally taken first, then chemistry then physics.

This is how that particular hierarchy was determined.

An Arclipedean confronted this choice at the beginning of the twentieth century and determined the order of scientific investigation,the way Arclipedians determine many subdivisions of learning.

Alphabetical order.

Thus we have

Biology

Chemistry

Physics

and

they are all

Good

For

the Kids

Until

They're

Not."

Krell wondered if there were any questions.

I raised my hand.

"So, Mr. Krell, physics is no more difficult than biology?"

Krell turned his gaze on me as a cat gazes at a mouse except with kindness rather than ferocity. "You're name is Ovid, right? That's an unusual name. Where did it come from?"

"My father named me after an eye doctor who cured him of lazy eye. His name was Dr. Ovid Pearson. He operated on my Dad's eyes."

"The reason I asked", said Krell, is that I have a great affection for the Latin poet Ovid whose most famous work is the Art of Love."

As if on cue Arthur sneezed snottily.

" Well, Ovid, do you think it's more complicated or important to figure out how we got here than who we are? All the sciences are the same. We've constructed the borders as another means of educational elimination of the unworthy."

He took a sip from whatever he was drinking and continued.

"The more the Arclipedeans took over the steps, the more schools came to resemble businesses. This was the great Arclipedian strategy. Find something essential, turn that essential into a business and keep the business a secret.Thus we have the great experiment of American public education. The schools serve as filtering devices for American society. The idea was for the rich to get richer, the poor to get poorer and for the multitude in the middle to miss the picture entirely.And for the Arclipedeans to make money, raise tuition and determine what is "good for the kids".

Krell wrote TUITION on the blackboard and then he continued.

"Arclipedeans realized that everybody loves rags to riches stories, so the most brilliant 2% of the poor and 18% of the middle class were permitted to pass through the screen. This permission was based upon stupendous grades which were largely based upon persistence, note-taking and subscription to values that were "good for kids". Value to society was determined by the college attended at the end of the twelve year rainbow of public education. The kids with the most money went to the best schools which were, by Arclipedean definition, the schools that cost the most to attend. As soon as those kids graduated, they were expected to contribute generously to the alumni fund in support of their schools which kept the coffers of their selected schools full which enhanced the reputation of that school which made the prestige of a degree from that school so much greater. It was possible for a child from a rich family to go to a great school and become the most powerful man on the face of the earth even if that kid without the money could or should have Peter principled out as an assistant manager at Wendy's."

Krell wrote HAMBURGER on the board. I wanted one bad.

Then he continued.

"This is what Arclpedes foresaw when he said "let's all meet here at the same time next week".What to do with the masses of people who didn't have the money, the brains, the values or the persistence to make it through the screen to the Ivy League or even the Big Ten or even the SUNY system.There must be business posibilities in that mess er mass.We built colleges without dormitories and called those colleges junior colleges or community colleges.At these places we set up one last screen for entrance to the American dream. One final fling to begin to grab the brass ring."

He wrote MCC on the board. He looked around the room and continued.

"We can always find teachers who will work for next to nothing. We can put those teachers who will work for nothing in front of students who have next to nowhere to go.We can hire a load of budding Arclipedeans to keep the cruise on course, even if the cruise sometimes resembles a cross between McHale's Navy and the Love Boat. They can be Deans (short for Arclipedean) and department heads and project managers and instructional specialists and financial aid counselors and bursars etc, etc, etc.They can help us determine "what's good for kids".

In the end there will be a classroom with a minimum of five students and a teacher

in our

case,

four."

I noticed that whenever Krell wanted to make a point, he seriously

slowed

down

the pace

of his speech.

I looked around and noticed that neither Julia nor Arthur were taking notes of any kind. I was still too embarrassed to look at Haylen. I did look at her foot and noticed that her awesome sandal was half on and half off.

Did that mean she was taking notes or not?

When I raised my glance upward, I noticed that Arthur had a gloved hand in the air. I hadn't noticed the glove before. I figured Arthur was doing some sort of Wacko Jacko comedy act or something.

Krell spotted the glove and nodded at Arthur.

"Question?"

"Yes," said Arthur, "Are we gonna have a test on this stuff".

Arthur looked over at Julia, who nodded her head first at Arthur then at Krell.

Julia raised her hand. "Yes" said Julia "how exactly will we be graded in this course?"

Krell answered, "Let me answer the second question first. The grading will be metaphysical"

"And as far as the first question, thank you for reminding me to bring up another early Arclipidean

whose

name

was

testacles"

Krell wrote TESTACLES on the board and continued.

"Back in the torch-lit prearclipidean days of learning, all instructional elements were in balance. Structure was in balance with substance. Sensing in balance with thinking. Feeling in balance with intuition. Process in balance with coverage. Evaluation in balance with instruction.The distance between evaluation and instruction was minimal. Evaluation was part of instruction and instruction part of evaluation. Self-evaluation was evident. If a student could follow the instruction that meant the student could grasp the body of knowledge within the instruction. The level of individual grasp could be ascertained by the intensity with which the student applied the instruction to his, or in Lyviia's case, her life. In other words the illumination of torch was built upon two principles:

1) Take what you need and leave the rest.

2) By your works, you will be judged. Something about this didn't sit well with Arclipides. The problem began with sub-division and led to differrentiation. How could differentiations within sub-divisions be articulated.That's when Testacles revolutionized education. "Why don't we demand that the students repeat the words of the teacher to show that they have heard the words"

Krell wrote the word REPETITION on the board and then wrote it again and smirked.

"Arclipedes thought about this for a few days. When next he saw Testacles, he said "I like your idea about the students repeating the words of the teacher. The student who repeats the words most accurately gets the highest ranking in his subdivision.We need a word to describe the instrument that we will use to determine the level of repetition and the differentiation based upon that repetition. I've decided we should name that instrument after you, because it was your idea. When we ask students to repeat the words of the teacher,we'll call that demand for repetition a test. Now we need a word to call the differerentiations themselves. What should we call the results of the ya know, the uh test. It should be something like steps indicating movement up or down. What's another word for steps, Testacles "

"Ummm, steps are actually grades"

Krell wrote GRADES on the board and continued, pretending that he was both Arclipedes and Testacles. When speaking as Arclipedes Krell spoke in a higher, more rapid pitch. When Testacles, Krell slowed down and spoke in a deep basso profundo.

"Grades is great, Testacles. Students will take tests to earn grades. The higher the grades, the greater the rewards. 'Testacles, you're a genius'.Relentless, determined Testacles (pronounced test ah kleez) was honored but he had yet another question. "which words of the teacher should we demand that the students repeat on these tests. Should the same words be asked of every student even if they have different teachers/"

"The words', answered Arclipedes, "should be the words that are

best

for

the people"

Testacles, whose spirit was not easily broken, had one more question. "Who then determines what words of what teachers are best for the people/"

Arclipedes knew the answer to that one. "Testacles, my virile friend,

are

the people."

The class continued but my notes ended with

are

the

people.

After class I decided to cruise over to the town library to see if I could check out a copy of Cat's Cradle, Catch 22, Catcher or Crime. Hey if I can save a buck using the library, I'll save that buck.

Libraries are great anyways. Where else can a guy go to search for something that he wants, find that something and have somebody give him that something for free as long as the guy promises to bring that something back in a reasonable time.

Of course, even that level of freedom and civilization poses an ethical problem for some guys.

I know a guy who steals books from the library. In his mind he's not stealing them, he's just making his own due date. He'll swipe a book. He'll take it home. He'll take a lesiurely five month read. He'll slip the book back in the slot when he's finished, if he gets finished.

No problem.

Anyways when I was walking into the library, I noticed that somebody had unloaded maybe fifty cardboard boxes full of books on the sidewalk in front of the building. There were at least a thousand and maybe twenty five hundred books in those boxes. The sky was gray. Rain was drizzling down upon these abandoned books.

I stopped by the pile and looked at a couple of titles. One of the books that I picked up was called Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock and Roll. Another book which looked like a prayer book was called As Bill sees It. A third book was called Myths and Facts: A guide to the Arab-Israeli Conflict.

I tried to form a mental picture of the guy who had read and deep-sixed all these books and what kind of drama led to that abandonment/donation.

The only guy I could think of was Krell.

I assumed that all of the books in his collection would be equally compelling/comKrelling. I figured that when I came out, I could grab a dozen or so soaked books, dry them out and make them mine.

I entered the library. I picked up Catcher and Catch. I walked around the stacks for a few minutes looking at periodicals. Unlike the guy I told you about earlier, I checked out my books at the circulation desk in a civilized way.

Maybe twenty minutes had passed.

I went outside, intending to grab some soaked books.

The garbage truck had beat me to the books. Of the fifty boxes only four remained. I watched as the burly garbage guy picked up box number forty six of fifty and threw it into the grinder.

Forty five boxes had already been devoured. Millions of words. Hours, weeks, years, centuries of attention.

The garbage guy noticed me looking at him. He hit me with a glance that howled "yeah?"

I said, "kinda sad, really"

He said, "It will all be recycled"

I said "You got it" and walked to my car.

I had learned something about life, death and eternity.The garbage guy had been yet another teacher.

His name might as well have been Hamlet.

Mine might as well be Torch

I got in my car and headed South.

I wondered what the guy who had brought all of those boxes of books to the library would have thought if he knew his beloved books would not even get into the door of the library.

His donation was in vain.

It reminded me of the time that a buddy of mine accidentally ran over a cat. He was backing out of my family's driveway at the time. He heard a tiny thump.He got out of the car. He found the lifeless cat. He put the cat in a bag. There would be no letting this cat out of this bag, not as a functioning cat anyways.

My buddy brought the bag full of broken cat to our front door. He rang the bell. When my mother answered the door, my friend said:

"This cat died in vain"

I've often wondered about that quote. My friend was suggesting that the cat in the bag had been ripped off before realizing its purpose in life. This suggests that cats actually have a purpose in life. If that purpose is to live nine lives, then the cat in the bag definitely died in vain.

Or maybe the cat's purpose in life, like all of ours, is to simply not be hungry.

I was feeling hungry so I stopped at Dee's delicatessen and bought a ridiculously huge submarine sandwich with everything aboard.

I continued to aim South, heading towards Keenan Park.

Keenan Park is a great place to relax, meditate the purpose of cats, contemplate American education, take a nature walk and/or eat a sandwich.

As I approached the Park, I noticed paper plates with arrows and words nailed to telephone poles. The plates read Civil War Re-enactment ahead. The arrows pointed towards Keenan Park. I noticed another word on some of the plates. That word was FREE.

Hey, if it's FREE it's me.

Me, the words, my car, my submarine and the arrows were all headed for a collision at the same place.

Keenan Park.

I got out of my car at Keenan and started looking for a bench upon which to sink into my submarine. That's when I came face to face with Robert E. Lee.

General Lee was heading North as I was heading South. I was amazed to see General Lee. What do you say when you're walking South into a park to eat a submarine sandwich after a morning with Krell and you run into the replica of a dead rebel general who has reconstituted himself and is heading North?

I figured a crisp salute would be a good start. I snapped one off. General Lee smiled beatifically upon me and said "At ease, Johnny".

I relaxed and spoke "General Lee, you were a genius. You waged one hell of a campaign. If only the artillery had been more accurate, Pickett's charge might have worked and we'd be in a whole different ballgame right now."

"Actually," said General Lee, "Maybe not all that different. American politics today are more or less dominated by the old Confederacy if you think about it. So my men who were slaughtered goin' up the hill didn't totally die in vain"

"Unlike a cat I once owned", I replied.

"I have a cat too" said General Lee. "I mean not me as General Lee but me the guy who dresses up like General Lee at these here re-enactments. My cat once killed a Doberman named Duke"

"That sounds like one helluva story, uh General Lee"

"Just call me Lee. That's my given name, son. Lee Edward Roberts. I guess it was inevitable that I would end up masquerading as Robert E Lee. For all my years in school, they kept calling my name directory style whenever they took attendance. Ovah and ovah and ovah. One day, it hit me. My purpose in life. A simple twist of fate"

I wanted to hear about the cat and the Doberman but my stomach was starting to growl. I resisted my urge to inquire further. I snapped off another salute and said the only thing I could think of at such an odd moment: "Thank God for Aristotle"

General Lee nodded in agreement.

"Generally, I agree" is what I think I heard General Lee say as we parted and I headed further down the path, deeper into the Park. I continued to head south towards the bench in front of the pavillion past the meadow. As I strode towards the bench, two dozen people on horseback began to congregate at opposite ends of the meadow. A dozen were dressed in blue, another dozen in grey. All twenty four were brandishing wooden swords.

I reached the bench. I vowed never to be hungry again. I unwrapped my sub and began chomping just as the two dozen calvarymen began to charge towards each other.

I didn't mind the noise. I actually kinda liked it. The submarine tasted a little better because of it. It wasn't the noise that was causing my thought processes to grow blurry and dark.

I wasn't sure if what I was watching was a calvary or a cavalry re-enactment. I knew one of them was the correct word for the place where Christ got nailed and the other was the correct word for soldiers on horses.

I knew that soldiers on horses must have been quite the military breakthrough and quite an advantage over terrified, soon to be trampled soldiers not on horses.

I knew that soldiers on horses turned out to be quite a disadvantage when the fabled Polish calvary encountered German soldiers not on horses but rather in tanks. The Polish cavalry was blown to smithereens.

Even in my mind I started using both words for one meaning. I could settle for a fifty percent grade on my internal vocabulary. If I kept my mouth shut, no one would discover that I didn't know the difference between calvary and cavalry.

My muddled thoughts grew darker when I thought of that proud Polish calvary splattered across their particular slaughterfield. That was a bad scene for sure but nowhere near as bad a scene as nailing the son of God to a cross after whipping the crap out of him and crowning him with thorns like they did at cavalry.

Meanwhile the cavalrys in the meadow were having the time of their lives running into each other while flailing their wooden, fake swords. I realized the swords were crosses painted black and silver with one perpendicular four times longer than the other.

These replica forces were attacking each other with crosses.

I imagined all of the crosses with an outstretched figure upon them. I imagined the blue and the gray horsemen attacking each other with half-assed crucifixes.

In that way, my description of the charge as either calvary or cavalry would have been correct.

Oh yeah, even on this bright afternoon my thinking had once again grown dark and out of focus.

"......................... .................... in focus"

I heard her before I saw her and I didn't clearly hear her until after I saw her. When I saw her, I didn't really see her. I saw Scarlett.

"Are you talking to me?" I said in subdued DeNiro as I turned my head to the left. The face I saw inside the green bonnet belonged to Julia.

"Yes, I am" said Julia," and I was talking to you before when you were lost somewhere in dark space. I said 'hi', you didn't answer. Then I said, 'get your thinking back in focus' and you turned your head my way, all Taxi Driver. If you don't mind me saying so, you still don't appear to be seeing things too clearly"

I returned her greeting, told her that I didn't mind her saying so and added "that's quite a projection", even as I noted with internal alarm and external denial how accurate she was.

Julia said "I know a lot about projection. My grandfather was an arc-light carbon projectionist at the old RKO Palace. My father was a projectionist at Loew's before he became a megaplex manager. He would like me to become a professional projectionist but my mother has different ideas. She wants me to keep my projections intuitive."

"Well, what made you project that I was out of focus?" I asked

"Guys between eighteen and twenty five are always out of focus, sometimes more so than other times but always muddled, always absorbed by noise. Lots of times the puddle grows darker than it ought to be" said Julia.

I remembered how much the noise of the calvary charge helped me to enjoy my sandwich.

Julia/Scarlett was starting to scare me.

I feigned indifference.

"And upon what does your Dad base his projection"

"He bases his projection about the attention span of people on his policy for projectionists at his plex".

"He bases his projection about the attention span of people on his policy for projectionists at his plex? Is that what you said" I asked Julia.

"That's what I said", she answered."There's nothing wrong with your listening"

"Well, Julia, do you want me to project as to how your Pop's policy for projectioninsts at his plex affects his projection about the attention span of people or are you going to explain"

"Ovid, I'm flattered, You remembered my name. Why don't you go ahead and project"

"Julia I'm afraid my projection, according to your father's projection, would be dark and out of focus. Why don't you go ahead and explain"

I finished up my plastic twenty ounce bottle of Diet coke and tossed it at the waste basket next to the bench. A miracle...it went in. I pumped my fist and said 'yes' which Julia took as a signal to explain.

" Fair enough. Back in the days of Grand- Dad" Julia began, "movie theaters could seat many more viewers. Some, if not most theaters could sit a thousand folks at a time. Still, for all those people, they had only one projectionist operating two projectors. Each projector would carry a reel of film. Just before the reel ran out on the first projector, the projectionist would flip on the second projector which he had just loaded with the next reel. Didja ever notice those little scratches or circles that show up on the upper right corner of movies and wonder if you were seeing things?"

"Yeah, I've noticed those marks. They even show up on teevee when the old movies are played"

"Those marks signalled that the reel that was playing was coming to an end. The projectionist would fire up the second projector and at the exact second that projector one ran out of film, projector two picked up the slack and threw its light on the screen. As soon as projector two took over, projector one went into rewind. When the rewind was finished, the projectionist would take that rewound reel off the projector and replace that reel with the next reel which would be ready to go on projector one as soon as the film ran out on projector two."

"That's reely interesting" I punned as I felt my focus starting to slip. Julia missed the quip and continued.

"Those were the old days. One theater, one screen, two projectors, one projectionist. My Dad's multiplex has sixteen theaters, only two of which have more than three hundred seats. One has five hundred, the other has four hundred fifty. The other twelve range from one hundred to three hundred, Most of them are three hundred."

"Ya know, Julia, it's funny. I've always wanted to bowl a three hundred game. I think I'd rather bowl a three hundred game than hit a hole in one. It's close though. Which would you prefer"

"I'd prefer that you maintain your focus and let me finish what we started. If that's too much to ask just say so"

Here I was presented with the perfect storm, the ideal situation to use the greatest line of all time. I knew that all I had to do was say, 'Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn' turn my back on Julia and exit stage North. I would have a story for my future wife, my future kids, my future grand-kids maybe even Krell.

And I was pretty sure Julia would sit there, watch me

walk

away

and

say

tomorrow

another

day.

I'm polite. I blinked. Castles made of sand melt into the sea.

Julia continued.

"Nowadays, in the megaplex, we have one projectionist operating eight projectors.This bit of planning saves us seven salaries for starters. That's part of the reason why we stagger the starting times of movies. Another reason is to keep a stready stream of customers passing by the concessions stand".

"Who can watch a movie without popcorn?" I asked.

Julia, at least one step ahead of me answered "And who can eat popcorn, especially popcorn loaded with extra salt and butter, without having a soft drink.?

"I'm getting thirsty just talking about it", I said while glancing at the empty Diet coke in the waste basket and wishing I had more.

"That's why the invention of cup holders in megaplex seats actually saved movies" she said while unfastening her bonnet.

Julia continued.

"The projectionists can change the reels on eight projectors at a time by changing reels on one while the other seven go unattended. This more efficient operation does run the risk that other films not being attended to might snag in the projector and get burnt by the lamp. To prevent this from happening, the projectionists who work for my father routinely expand the gap between the gate that supports the film and the lamp. This provides a margin of safety. It also results in the films being shown out of focus.The higher the population of males between eighteen and twenty five in the opening weekend audience, the greater the gap between the gate and the lamp. Nobody ever complains. Ever."

Whoa. I thought that I was beginning to see the big picture.

I reflected back to Julia's original projection with a question"And you're projecting that we young guys don't complain because we don't know the movies are not in focus because our perception of life itself is out of focus therefore in synch with the out of focus film being projected behind us that shows up in front of us ?."

"Exacata mundo". replied Julia "And there's more. See, Dad's got to save money on projector lamps. Those things cost a grand a pop. The more play we can get from the bulb, the more money we save. So we play the out of focus movies that you guys watch on the projectors with the dimmest lamps.These are the lamps that we should replace but we can use on you guys because you never complain about the darkness or the out of focus projection because we turn the volume ten percent louder in the dim bulb auditorium than we do in the other auditoriums. As long as you guys hear a lot of noise, you don't particularly care what you see. And whatever it is that you're seeing, you don't mind if it's dark as long as it's loud."

The cavalry charge in the background had quieted down for a moment. I hoped the noise would begin again so I could concentrate on what Julia was saying and not be so distracted by looking at her.

Especially without her bonnet.

She was starting to piss me off.

Julia stood up suddenly and took a furtive look North followed by a lingering look South. As she stood, I got another look. Julia was vee shaped, or should I say vee vee shaped with the bottom vee inverted and the top vee tottering precariously on the the bottom vee.

No woman looks like that.

Julia was wearing a corset.

Why not, Scarlett wore one.

Julia was channeling Scarlett .

To my great relief, the calvary in the meadow started another charge. The din helped me relax. I wanted to ask Julia about the corset but didn't know where to start.

I figured that I'd feign innocence and since she was so good at reading my mind maybe she'd take the bait.

" Julia, your dress is beautiful. Is your outfit authentic?"

She smiled infuriatingly and changed the subject.

"Where did you ever get a name like Ovid."

"Well, when I was young, I had a problem with my eyes and......"

Julia interrupted, "don't you have a nickname or something"

"Until Bush got elected, people used to call me by my middle initial....Dubya"

She seemed interested. "And what perchance does the Dubya stand for Ovid?"

"The Dubya stands for Warren. That's my middle name."

Julia repeated my name aloud a couple of times "Ovid Warren Peets hmmmm.Ovid Warren Peets.

I had the feeling she'd get half the puzzle and she did.

"War and Peace. Damn, your last two names are war and peace"

"That's only the half of it" I confessed.

"Explain, Warren" She demanded.

"My first name is Ovid. Ovid was a Roman poet. His most famous poem was The Art of Love. If you put the whole thing together, my name is Art, Love, War and Peace. My father thought that pretty well summed up life"

I could tell Julia was impressed because she shut up for a couple of minutes while she once again stood and looked North and then South.

I tried again. "Is your dress comfortable"

She sat down, smiled her Mona Lisa smile and changed the subject once again. "Have you ever seen the video O, Ovid"

Twenty four hours earlier, Julia was bivouacked in the midst of a huge misunderstanding between the over-all Confederate commander Robert E. Lee and his wife, Barbara 'Bobbi' Roberts'.

Julia had been participating in these encampments semi-willingly since she a was child. Because she no longer felt that she was a child, Julia didn't want to come to these "freak shows" any longer. The dustup began when Julia arrived in civvies and reported directly to the commander.

When the commander asked Julia why she was out of costume, Julia nuclear dumped.

"I'm out of costume because I'm sick and tired of feeding people crappy popcorn at the plex. I never want to have that giant salt shaker in my hand again.I've lifted my last box of Diet pepsi syrup and brewed my last batch of fake pop. I'm tired of Dad, thinking that I'm going to get into the theater business. That business is falling apart.Everybody knows that movies now are nothing more than sneak previews for DVD's and pay TV. Mom wants me to be a seamstress. I can't sew worth a damn. She knows it. I know it"

I'm going to community college now. I'm going there because my grades sucked in high school because I missed way too much school traveling around to these encampments.None of my history teachers gave me any credit for being here.The other teachers just thought encampment was odd; a gathering of live in the past doofusses with too much time on their hands. I'm having trouble keeping up in my classes. There are too many students in all of them, except one and that one has only four students and a weird teacher. There's a guy in that class who wears a glove all the time, who looks like he's got some interesting issues but he doesn't pay any attention to me. I don't like the other two students and I don't know what in hell the teacher is talking about nor how he intends to mark anybody."

By this time, Julia had tears streaming down her face." I can't stand my job. I'm a disappointment to my parents. I'm invisible at school. I have no future plans. I might get thrown out of a flunky college. I'm attracted to a weirdo with a glove who doesn't know I exist.I've come to believe that these encampments that I used to love are egotistical freak shows. I'm not the cute little kid at the camp anymore. I'm a nobody, a nothing."

Lee Lee was a bit conflicted.

Lee Roberts was picking up a snootful of the most alluring perfume emanating from Julia, desperation, vulnerability, sincerity and low self-esteem. This combination of pheremonic emotional aromas has always created an irresistible bouquet for the opportunistic male. Lee Roberts was such an animal.

General Robert E Lee, on the other hand, was all about empathy, action, and healing. General Robert E Lee was a God-like perfect example of man at the zenith of courage,compassion, chivalry, and Confederate culture.

Lee Lee was a combination of both.

So too was Robert Roberts.

The commander put his arms around Julia. She leaned her face against his shoulder. The tears increased. The commander ran his hand soothingly along the back of Julia's head.

"I wish you were wearing your snood", he said.

Julia began to laugh, wondering what that comment would sound like to anyone overhearing the comment who had no idea what a snood was. The commander pulled her in a little tighter. Julia felt safe. She felt protected.

"Why don't we take things one day at a time. Come back here tomorrow. Wear that Scarlett O'Hara curtain dress that I love so much, that we all love."

"But", said Julia, "I have classes tomorrow."

"I figured that you did" said the commander " Here's what you do. wear your dress to the classes. I'm sure you'll get noticed not only by the guy with the glove......"

at the mention of the guy with the glove Julia laughed again

"but also by the other folks in the class. It might even be a good time to ask the teacher about how he determines his grades. You certainly wouldn't look desperate or vulnerable or uh"

Lee Roberts hesitated. He was afraid that he was letting his mask slip.

"Or what?" asked Julia.

"Or lacking in confidence" Lee continued. "Then after class, meet me right here and we'll talk again. Does that sound like a plan"

"You always have such brilliant strategy, General Lee" Julia whisperered even as she was coming up with some strategy of her own.

The rebellious embrace tightened before it relaxed. As they pulled away from one another, Julia brushed her cheek against the beard of Lee. Her lips might have grazed his cheek as they passed.

Maybe more than grazed.

Maybe lightly kissed.

All in the eye of the beholder.

The South had risen again.

Or hadn't.

The General’s wife, Bobbi Roberts had seen the whole thing.

Buxom would have been an understatement. Reubenesque an overstatement. Voluptuous might have worked at one time when Bobbi had curves in places in which other women didn't even have places.

Simplicity is best.

Wide is the word.

Everything about Barbara "Bobbi" Roberts was wide, including her teeth.'Wide and white' is how Bobbi herself described them. She was proud of her teeth. They were her most outstanding physical feature, a feature that demanded maintenance to preserve the sparkle. Bobbi was all about maintenance.

Bobbi was in costume and her costume was flaunting her wideness. Her sleeves were wide. Folds on her bodice lent a further sense of width at the sholders and the bustline. She wore a wide hoop skirt which grew even wider as it descended towards her wide feet. The only thing relatively narrow about Bobbi was her waist which was narrow only in comparison to everything else and emphasized by gathers from her bodice and skirt. The narrowness at the waist only emphasized, by contrast, the width of her sleeves whenever her hands rested at her sides.

Bobbi parted her hair in the middle and her simple flat hairstyle added to the dimension of her width by accentuating the width of her face. She gathered her long hair in a mesh net known as a snood at the nape of what reamined of her retreating neck. Bobbi's snood was ornamented with bows and ribbons.

Bobbi was proud of her snood and also aware that for some reason her snood seemed to, uh shall we say 'invigorate' her husband.

A photograph of women during Civil War times usually caught the subjects with their lips tightly closed, often to conceal poor teeth. Bobbi's lips were tightly closed even though her teeth were far from poor. Bobbi's lips were closed because she was furious at what her eyes beheld as she looked through the window of the cabin in the park, the imaginary headquarters.

Her husband, the so-called commander, was hugging and kissing some young hussy in civvies. Since the slut was in civvies, there was no way that Lee could justify his action as part of his duties as Commander. The dirty, cheating son of a bitch was whispering some indiscretion to that little crying/laughing harlot. Probably trying to arrange a slimy rendezvous for more intense cradle robbing.

Bobbi bided her time. She watched as the embrace ended with, what was that? was that a kiss?. She resisted the urge to barge into the cabin while the strumpet was still in residence. She would wait until the whore left then she would charge into that cabin and make life living hell for the commander, which she proceeded to do.

Besides her teeth, Bobbi had two other major assets that she could use like her teeth as weapons, tools or adornments. Bobbi had a voluminous vocabulary and could wield that weapon with deadly, withering lucidity. Bobbi didn't need the eff word and had contempt for those who did. She used the language precisely rather than inarticulately to express her rage.

Bobbi was an inveterate reader of Miss Manners and was excruciatingly aware of correct behavior. This was asset number two. When Bobbi synthesized the two; withering lucidity with excruciating observation, the results were devastating.

Julia was not devastated. Julia was a lot like Bobbi except far younger and far narrower and not so well teethed. Julia was likewise a fan of Miss Manners. Julia also eschewed profanity in her discourse. Julia was not convinced of her innocence. She was going to have to convince herself with her spoken words. Julia leapt to her own defense.

"Mrs Roberts, you're advice is well taken but superfluous. I've made a habit of faking delight at worthless presents during Christmas time. I've radiated faux pleasure in the success of my competitors. I've expressed curiosity about the lives of the terminally boring who don't have much of a life for anyone to be curious about. Perhaps I did step over the line in my sharing with your husband and for that I am sorry. I hope you will accept my apology."

Bobbi, astonished at Julia's response, had an unexpected autonamous response. She succumbed to an inevitable natural phenomena. She burped.

Inexcusable.

Julia was aware that Bobbi had burped even as Bobbi attempted to cover the burp by treating it as if it were a cough. Bobbi formed the fingers of her hand into a wide fist and placed the thumbside of that fist against her mouth.

"Excuse me" said Bobbi, still pretending that the burp was a cough but aware that Julia probably knew the difference.

"There's no need to for me to excuse you, Mrs Roberts. Society recognizes the necessity of breathing and ingesting but ignores digestion as much as possible. I take digestion as a natural consequence of ingestion. Life is all about inclusion, exclusion and toleration. Sometimes we can not tolerate what we include and our bodies stammer before they exclude. Wouldn't you agree, Mrs Roberts?"

" That's true" said the General's wife who found herself starting to like the girl in the Scarlett O'Hara costume "And of the three, inclusion, exclusion and toleration, we spend most of our time in toleration. Our main troubles occurs when we attempt to include someone or something that we should have merely tolerated or completely avoided"

Jula nodded in agreement and prepared to explain the projected "kiss".

General Lee, meanwhile, had reached the meadow and was continuing to head North.

At the same time, a few clicks further North,Ovid grabbed his submarine sandwich and Diet Coke before booking out of his car which he had just parked after a weird morning with Krell.

Before Julia could begin her explanation of the projected kiss, she was surprised that Mrs. Roberts broke the silence first.

"On the subject of tolerance, we must be careful not to abandon our sense of right and wrong only to preserve transparent tranquility passing as toleration. We must not become doormats in a perpetual state of forgiving. We need not accept every apology. Or is this what forgive and forget is all about, pride swallowing and resignation?"

"No, Mrs Roberts, if that were the case, we wouldn't need forgive and forget, we'd just need forget. There are two parts to that equation and we can always do one without the other. Surely, you have forgotten situations that you didn't choose to forgive. I know that I have. I don't want to load up my mind with those troubling distractions so I let them go. Still, I don't want to pass off toleration as absent-mindedness."

Bobbi Roberts was impressed by Julia yet not quite won over. "My dear, a few minutes ago, you apologized to me. You asked for my forgiveness. Doesn't that indicate some guilt on your part. Why else would you ask for forgiveness. How can I forgive you for something that you haven't done? Something that I clearly haven't forgotten? What does forgiveness mean to you?"

Julia thought for a moment. She was not afraid of wait time.

"Forgiveness, Mrs. Roberts, is a contract. Forgiveness is a two part deal. Forgiveness is a response to an apology. Just as we have become a society unwilling to pretend happiness, we have also become a society unwilling to apologize. Without apology, there can be no forgiveness. We have become an unforgiving society filled with unforgiven members. And no, you should not assume my guilt because of my willingness to apologize. In a more tolerant world, a more forgiving world accidents or mistakes, even those obviously lacking in ill will or intention, would require an apology. That is the reason why I once again ask your forgiveness. I am prepared to explain my lack of ill will if you require that as a condition of your forgiveness"

Once again Julia was ready to explain the projected kiss.

Further North, Ovid saluted General Lee as the cavalry prepared to charge.

Bobbi was by now genuinely impressed.

"There is no need for further explanation. I accept your apology.You are a young woman of great promise. Futhermore, the quality of mercy is not strained.......

"It falleth as the gentle rain from heaven" Julia continued. Both women laughed. The storm clouds disappeared. Sunshine appeared over the meadow.

'Thank God for Shakespeare' Julia thought to herself in the momentary silence that ensued.

Julia knew the etiquette of social kissing but she was relieved that she didn't have to review that etiquette with Mrs. Roberts, the wife of the man with whom Julia had tested the boundaries of that etiquette. She was sure that Mrs Roberts knew the same rules that she did and that any misstep might bring back the storm or even worse, the whirlwind.

Julia knew that five areas were available in the realm of acceptable social kissing: the lips, the right cheek only, the right cheek followed by the left cheek and/or the hand. Julia knew that when she pulled away from her embrace with General Lee that she had perhaps kissed his right cheek. Even if she had for sure kissed his right cheek, that indulgence would fall safely within the boundaries of acceptable ettiquette.

Julia also knew that as the woman in the embrace, it was her privilege and not General Lee's to initiate a public kiss on the lips. Julia was aware that if she presented her lips by tilting her face upward without moving it to either side, any gentleman would have no choice but to accept her offering. Especially if she closed her eyes after fluttering her lashes amidst the face tilt. General Lee was without a doubt such a gentleman. Any such offering would have been enthusiastically accepted. Julia was certain of that consequence.

Julia remembered that she had considered that posture and for the sake of propriety had decided against it. This recollection nearly enabled Julia to rationalize her peck on the cheek of General Lee as an innocent expression of affection.

Nearly but not completely.

Julia did have the remnants of a nagging self-suspicion. Had she loaded up an extra thrill charge on the peck? She suspected that she had.

She needed a further demonstration of her innocence along with a reason to get away from Mrs Roberts while the getting was still good.

That's when Julia spotted Ovid as he walked past the meadow and headed for the bench.

"Please excuse me, Mrs Roberts, but that's my boyfriend over there with the sandwich. He said he'd come over here today and there he is"

Bobbi was relieved that Julia had such a young boyfriend. She chuckled at the foolishness of her own suspicion that one as young as Julia would be in any way interested in one as much older as her husband.

"Oh, he's cute" Bobbi lied. "Go over and greet him right now. We'll talk later"

"I'll take my leave then" said Julia and started heading over to Ovid.

The old and reliable fake boy friend trick had seemingly worked again but Julia was going to need an almost immediate hug and maybe even a subsequent kiss from Ovid to seal the illusion. She didn't think that would present much of a problem.

Meanwhile Ovid was trying to grasp the difference between cavalry and calvary.

Julia surprised me by giving me a quick hug as if I were her boyfriend.

At that very instant I realized that Julia and I were totally different. Her embrace felt to me like the kind of embrace a cat would throw on a mouse if the cat and the mouse were about the same size and if they were standing on their hind legs and if the cat was wearing Scarlett O'Hara gear and the mouse had just finished eating a submarine. The mouse might try to put his arms around the cat but since the arms of the cat are so much longer than the arms of the mouse, his embrace would be considerably less determined than hers; as was my embrace of Julia.

Even as I held on loosely I could sense that Julia was not above stealing apples to get her free ride to skull island. I thought she might look real good strapped to a stone altar. I figured that she was the kind of woman who would make a tiny man live in a dollhouse until she accidentally knocked him down the cellar stairs and assumed he was lost in the flood.

That's when I sensed her moving away from our embrace. That's when I felt her lips brush against my right cheek.That's when she lifted her chin, tilted back her head, fluttered her eyelashes and closed her eyes.

I'm no gentleman.

I did the same thing.

As we both tilted our heads in opposite directions, I had a moment to think. If a photographer came by and snapped a picture of the two of us at that instant, the picture might look as if we were praying.

I know this is true because a photographer did snap a picture at that moment and a week later it was published in the paper above the caption, Prayer in the Meadow. In the picture Julia looks a lot like a female praying mantis.I look like the male mantis who an hour earlier had been telling his mantis friends "Man, I'd love to be torn limb from limb by that."

Back in real time, I opened my eyes, looked down at Julia with her pursed lips and realized that I had one more chance. This time, I took it.

"No, I don't think I will kiss you, although you need kissing, badly. That's what's wrong with you. You should be kissed and often, and by someone who knows how."

Julia whispered "But Dubya, I need a little kiss right now"

Damn, she had given me yet another opportunity. I took it.

"That's your misfortune".

I broke from her embrace and started heading North.

I resisted the urge to turn around for one final look at Julia. I figured that she figured that tomorrow would be another day.

As I neared the parking lot, I once again encountered General Lee, who was heading South. He was heading back towards the battle ground. Once again I saluted.

"I've been thinking about your cat story", said the General, "that must have been one bigass cat"

"I imagine it was"

General Lee straightened himself into his full height. Dude was tall.

I felt myself growing smaller.

"That fool dog must have made the mistake of getting between the big cat and her kittens. That strategic position is a must to avoid whether it's cats or humans; individuals or armies" observed Lee Roberts. "Sometimes, it's not the size of the dog in the fight or the size of the fight in the dog, it's the size of the fight in the cat in the dogfight"

"Cats are cats. Dogs are dogs. As a rule, they don't get along. Cats and dogs are not people" I saluted again looking to be discharged.

"That's right Johnny. We are the people" concluded Lee Roberts as he dismissively and somewhat doggedly returned my salute.

I'd heard that one somewhere before.

General Lee went South. I went North. I recaptured my car, put it into reverse and then pointed it towards my apartment.

By the time I got home, I was ready for some serious tube. I hit the couch, grabbed the remote and checked the guide. The Incredible Shrinking Man was going to start in five minutes. I locked in and flashed back.

When my brother was a baby, my parents got their first VCR. My folks had a lot of chores to do around the farm so he did a lot of solitary playpen time. They'd stash him in the pen, turn on the VCR and go about their business. Our VCR collection of movies consisted of two; King Kong and The Incredible Shrinking Man. I used to stand by his pen and watch those flicks over and over again. My parents tell me that by the time he was three, I must have seen each of those movies over a hundred times each.

I’ve seen each of them at least 50 times.

As a matter of fact, as I was driving away from Julia and General Lee I did what I usually do when times get complicated, I started thinking about Scott Carey, The Incredible Shrinking Man.

I wondered what kind of vision Scott had. I wondered if Scott's wife could hear him yelling when she booted him down the cellar stairs. I understood once again, why cats are not my favorite animals. I recalled the terrifying strength of spiders.

I know a thing or two about eyes. I know that we need light to see. I know that the amount of light we recieve is determined by the size of our retina. When Scott Carey grew smaller, I assume that the size of his retina grew smaller in proportion to the rest of his dome. Otherwise, Scott would have been an eyeball, way beyond 'bulging', atop tiny legs scurrying around the floor. Scott's body would have been eighty percent eyeball We would have had an even more horribly absurd movie, particularly if somehow during the scurry, the bulging eyeball with feet had blinded itself which under the circumstances was probably inevitable

I imagined an observer of the scurrying impaired eyeball watching as the miniscule monster ricocheted from wall to wall. "Oh, my God, what could be worse than to be just an eye" , the observer might say to his companion who might reply "well, it could be blind" which in this case it would have been

which wasn't of course

the case in the uh movie.

The case in the movie was that Scott had normally proportioned retinas about seventy times smaller than the retinas he had before he started shrinking which means that he was stumbling around with hardly any light flying through the pinhole of his retina. Just think how scary everything is in the semi-darkness, especially the blurry semi-darkness. Scott's blur was infinitely more dark and out of focus than any projector Julia might try to imagine.

Although there were a lot of loud noises.

Besides the cat and the spider and his wife's high heels, Scott had to deal with perpetual semi-darkness.

And as his vocal chords shrunk, his ability to generate sound waves also shrunk. I'm sure that Scott was screaming his head off at his wife before she kicked him down the stairs and equally sure that she couldn't hear a sound he was screaming which may have been just as well because with diminished hammer, anvil and stirrup, he wouldn't have been able to understand her reply any more than we are able to make out the words in thunder.

Is Thunder really Godspeak for "it's raining".

Hmmm.

This of course made me think about ants. Are they trying to yell something at us as we step on them? Are we huge, incomprehendible thunderhead blurs in a dark world trampling upon them even as they warn us about their homes and their children and the work that has to be done?

I think not. They're different from Scott Carey. They never shrank.

The movie started. I watched it again for the first time in at least ten years.

I realized how much I had grown.

RETURN TO KRELL”S CLASS

" Phi, Chi, sigh, omega"

Haylen smiled. She had completed the Greek alphabet twice on one match. She hadn't even glanced at her notes.

While Krell nodded at Haylen; Arthur, Julia and I exchanged glances that screamed " we're the bozos on this bus".

A moment later, according to my notes, Krell started in about Socrates.

"Socrates was born in 469 BC and lived until 399 BC. If you do the math, you'll see that Socrates died when he was only thirty two years old. Go ahead and do the math and find out for yourself."

I did the math.

We did the math.

No problem. Socrates was only thirty two when he died.

Then Haylen raised her hand.

Problem.

"Mr. Krell, according to my math. Socrates was seventy when he died."

"Seventy, Haylen?" Krell raised his eyebrow.

I thought maybe the three of us were geting off the bozo bus or at least making room on board for Haylen.

Haylen continued. "Yes sir. In this case, the count is backward rather than forward. Socrates wasn't one year old in 470 BC. 470 BC was also 1 BS."

Krell seemed not only to understand but also to be entertained. "What, may I ask for the good of the class, is 1 BS?"

"Sure" responded Haylen. " 1 BS is one year before the birth of Socrates. Socrates was born in 469 BC. One year before his birth, the year would have been 470 BC not 468. In 468 Socrates would have been one year old. Of course, he didn't know the year was 470 or 468 or anything BC. Nobody had any idea when Christ would be born or who Christ was or why Christ would be important or why their very birthdays would be determined by the future son of a carpenter"

"Very true, Haylen. Now how does your counting backward mechanism work" asked Krell.

"It took sixty nine years to get from 469BC to 400 BC. Then you add one more for 399 and that leaves you with seventy. Socrates lived to be seventy"

I did the math. Haylen was absolutely correct.

"Do the math again and you'll find that Haylen is absolutely correct. You should also learn to think carefully about anything that your teacher says. Particularly if that teacher is I" said Krell.

At that moment because I had done what Krell had said before he said it, I felt like an Advanced Placement Bozo. I was still on the bus but I was moving a couple of seats closer to the driver.

"Before we go any further, does anybody know anything else about ancient Greece that would be illuminating for the class to consider?" Krell asked.

The usual silence followed.

The usual silence was followed by the usual two follow ups. "Anybody?.....Anything"

I was feeling pretty smart in a stupid way so I decided to step up.

"Yeah, that's where the first French fries were made"

Julia, got all over that observation. "No they weren't they were made in France. That's why we call them French fries"

Krell came to my rescue.

"Wherever they were made, they were indisputably made in Grease. Good one Ovid"

Haylen laughed out loud.

Arthur and Julia were pissed.

I probably should have quit when I was ahead but instead I tried one more.

"And judging from what I remember about Paris, that grease would have been awesomely ancient "

Krell laughed again. Haylen out laughed Krell. Good thing she wasn't drinking milk.

Julia lightened up a little.

Arthur must have felt marginalized because he responded with a snarky comment to Krell which he read from a three by five index card. "My father told me that Socrates, despite his place in history, was over-rated. He actually wrote nothing because in essence he felt that knowledge was a living, interactive thing. Most of what we know of him comes from the historical inaccuracy and misinterpretation found in the works of Plato and later Thomas Aquinas."

Krell answered " Well Arthur, your father seems like quite a smart man. I imagine he's had a great influence on your life. There's a lot of truth in what he says but like all truths it bears closer examination"

Arthur seemed to wince at the mention of paternal influence.

Krell continued.

"First of all, let's deal with the concept of over-rated and let's consider the list of the over-rated. I'll bring up a few: Shakespeare, Caesar, Elvis, Lincoln, Marie Curie, Eleanor Roosevelt, Meryl Streep, the Beatles,Amelia Earhart Picasso, Da Vinci, Rosa Parks, Muhammad Ali, Katherine Hepburn, Mother Theresa. All may be considered over-rated simply because they are famous. Fame is an integral part of iconic over-rating. How can you be over-rated unless you're famous? Nobody's gonna over-rate Sid Gertner, the guy who lent Lincoln the pen that Abraham used to write the Gettysburg Address. Where would we be today if at that moment of inspiration, Gertner didn't have a pen. The reason nobody's going to over rate Gertner is because nobody knows that Sid, performing one of the millions of unnoticeded acts of kindness that characterize human behavior lent the pen to Lincoln in the first place.”

Krell write SID GERTNER on the board and continued

"Of course, you might say that since I identified Gertner and Gertner is long departed, he must be somewhat famous and thus susceptible to be over-rated. The problem is that I don't know whether or not Gertner gave Lincoln the pen. Somebody probably did. That somebody has been totally forgotten by history so just because I name that somebody Gertner doesn't mean that Gertner becomes a figure of historical importance although I'm sure that exact mechanism has occurred in history many times over.”

Kell wrote OBSCURITY on the board and continued

"Even when that somebody, like Gertner, might not have existed at all at least under that name.We remain alive as long as anyone who ever knew us or knew of us remains alive. The people who live the longest are those who have created enduring works of art or who have had enduring works of art created about them or who are simply remembered by the most people.These people are famous. These people may end up over-rated.Socrates was such a one as for that matter was Plato and Aquinas. So Arthur, I agree with your Dad about part one."

Krell paused.

PLAY MEATBALL

Ya know how when you go to concerts there's always some doofus yelling out for the performer to play their most overplayed song as if the performer doesn't realize that people want to hear the overplayed song and no matter how much he hates playing the overplayed song over and over again, he's going to have to play it some time during the show and he's already figured out when and where it will fit into the program that will cause him the least discomfort and cessation of creative momentum? Usually that place will be at the very end of the show when the artist can't put it off any longer and where momentum can mercifully end.

Ya know the guy standing fifteen feet away from Dylan after Dylan opens his show with Maggie's Farm who starts yelling for Like a Rolling Stone as if Dylan is not going to play that song.

Or even worse, the guy who starts yelling for "Blowin' in the Wind". Ya know, the guy who has never heard Visions of Johanna but knows every word to Blowin in the Wind and has come to the show for a hootenanny after walking down many roads that have led him to the conclusion that he can indeed call himself a man. And his wife next to him, the woman who married him anyway, who somehow thinks Dylan is going to sing Puff the Magic Dragon or If I were a Carpenter.

Whenever I hear one of those guys, I try to balance out their request by yelling out a request for a song that nobody knows, not even the artist because the song doesn't exist. I picked out a title for this imaginary song, a title unlike any title I have ever heard for a song. The title of the non-existent song that I yell out for the artist to play after a nimrod has just yelled out the name of the artist's most overplayed song, the title of that song is MEATBALL.

I yell out "PLAY MEATBALL".

I've even gone so far as to light my lighter while yelling out PLAY MEATBALL. I've even been pro-active and yelled PLAY MEATBALL before the other guy has yelled out say PLAY BORN TO RUN at a Springsteen show.

Once, sweet Jesus, I was in the front row for a Neil Diamond show with a single ticket that I had won after accidentally being the seventeeth caller. I knew the blue hair next to me would be screaming for "Sweet Caroline" so the instant that Neil took the stage I beat her to the punch by yelling "PLAY MEATBALL". Neil heard me. I think he put a mental comma after "play" so he heard "PLAY,MEATBALL" before he had song a note or strummed his guitar.

Neil was more puzzled then pissed.

So was the blue hair next to me.

Who, now that I think about it, looked a lot like Barabra Bush.

But that's unusual.

Usually, the people around me look at me as if I know something that they don't know which might even indicate that I am an actual "friend of the band" because actual friends of the band are always yelling out things to their friends in the band that nobody but the guys in the band or the friends of the band understand. The old fake in-joke trick.

Those who don't mistake me for an actual friend of the band often regard me as an expert on the band because only an expert on the band would know such an obscure title as MEATBALL and have the insight expressed through his bellowing to suggest to the performer who may have forgotten the song that the exact instant of the yell would be a great time to reach into an ancient bag of tricks, to redistribute the stones in the kaleidoscope by twisting the barrel in a new-old fashioned way.

I usually get a lot of respect when I yell PLAY MEATBALL.

After Krell's bit about the torches in response to Julia's snit fit, I wanted to yell PLAY MEATBALL to see if I could get him back on track but since this was a college class and not a concert I decided to do a variation of PLAY MEATBALL.

I yelled out

"What about Socrates"

Krell continued

"Ovid's response is a perfect example of what we call in education 'a window of instructional opportunity'. In show biz, that's referred to as giving the people what they want or putting the light on the star. Apparently, Ovid wants me to get on with the story of Socrates which is what I wanted to do in the first place but hesitated to do so because I felt as if the venetian blinds were covering the windows and then when we started down the road, we had to take a small detour at the straw man. The good teacher, of which I'm sure Socrates was one, recognizes these windows of instructional opportunity when they arise and usesthem to the advantage of the class. So on we go with Socrates.”

Arthur whispere4d loudly to Haylen.”I gotta here THIS.”

Krell continued

"Socrates as a child wasn't handsome but he was probably rich which is a trade off many of us would accept. We assume that he came from a prosperous family because as a young man he had enough leisure time available to master the philosophy of his era.The emerging philosphy consisted largely of various attempts to provide scientific explanations for the origin and structure of the universe. This wasn't going too well because we still hadn't discovered that what goes up must come down and just about everything else regarding science including the concept that the sun rather than the earth was the center of our astronomical system and that the Milky Way is composed of an infinite number of stars and the Milky Way is one of an infinite number of solar systems and that man might not be the center and purpose of the universe. Of course, Galileo added much of that information two thousand years after Socrates and the great Italian scientist was immediately confronted with a mob carrying torches who took him to the Inquisition where the Pope made him promise that he wouldn't tell anybody that the earth moves.”

Krell wrote Pope on the board and continued.

"A smart guy like Socrates could see right off the bat that lots of problems existed within the emerging scientific explanations but he also understood that they were much better than the mythological explanations that were prevalent in his time.It's not clear what levels of academic success Socrates attained in his study of science or physical philosophy but we do know that by the start of the Pelopennesian War which occurred when Socrates was in his mid thirties, he had abandoned physical philosophy and began the examination of conduct that he would continue for the rest of his life.Apparently that transition which began with alienation from science was precipitated by Socrates' interpretation of an inquiry directed to the oracle of Apollo at Delphi by an Athenian named Chaerephon. According to the oracle.........."

Julia again.

"How do you spell that last name that you mentioned. The guy who asked the question of the oracle. It sounds like 'chair on a phone but I'm sure it's not spelled that way."

Then Arthur

"And how do you spell the name of the war that was going on when Socrates was in his thirties"

Krell wrote Chaerephon and Pelopennesian on the board.

Then Julia again

"And, uh, isn't the Milky Way a galaxy and not a solar system?"

Krell heard Julia's question with his back.

When he finished writing the two words on the board, he turned and faced the class.

"Solar system or galaxy, what's the difference?" Krell shrugged his shoulders as if he had been asked to explain the difference between an aardvark and an anteater.

Julia answered. "I should think there would be quite a huge difference as a solar system is part of a galaxy which means a galaxy is bigger than a solar system"

Arthur chimed in. "yeah, and a solar system is smaller than a galaxy"

Krell responded, "Thank you two for overstating the obvious. I was being metaphysical which is of course unfair because you guys still don't know what metaphysics is."

This response fired Arthur's obsession with definition. "Well then, Mr. Krell, can you finally give us a definition of metaphysics"

"Arthur, I can give you a definition of metaphysics but that definition by definition can not be the defintion of metaphysics. Voltaire said 'when he that speaks and he to whom he speaks, neither of them understand what is meant, that is metaphysics '

I thought I understood so I yelled out "I don't understand what you mean"

To which Krell joyfully responded "And I don't understand what you mean when you say you don't understand what I mean"

To which Haylen, who had been quiet since her Greek alphabet recitation at the beginning of the class, added "Eureka. At last we arrive at an example of Voltairean metaphysics, if I am understanding you both incorrectly"

Krell was obviously pleased with the lesson. The venetian blinds were opening and the sun was streaming into the consciousness of at least three of us in the room.

Krell continued.

"I always consider solar systems and galaxies to be similar because of the beach. When I walk on the beach, I realize that there are as many stars in our solar system as there are grains of sand on all the sandy beaches of our planet. The sun is one of those grains of sand. Our grain of sand is surrounded by by nine planets, thirty one moons, thousands of planetoids, millions of comets, innumberable meteoroids and vast quantitities of interpplanetary dust and gas. Can you grasp that Ovid"

"No I can't grasp that Mr, Krell"

"Excellent, then I will continue. Our grain of sand, our sun, appears toward the outer rim of our galaxy in which there are billions of other grains of sand like our sun, millions of which are surrounded by moons, planetoids, comets, meteorites and are thus known as solar systems. Now we continue walking down the beach and pick up yet another grain of sand and realize that there are as many galaxies out there in the universe as there are grains of sand on all the beaches on our planet. Every time that we increase the magnitude of our telescopes we discover more galaxies which means the number of galaxies may well be infinite which is even more galaxies than grains of sand. And the universe is expanding and with each expansion more beaches, more grains of sand. Can you comprehend what I'm saying Haylen"

"No sir, I can not comprehend the enormity of what you are saying," answered Haylen.

Julia again, "I can clearly understand what you're saying. You're asking what's the difference between a solar system and a galaxy and you're answering your own question by saying 'hey they're both grains of sand on the grand scale of things so what's the diff'. That's what you are saying"

Krell again

"Thank you Julia because what you are saying is a perfect example of exactly what I've been saying but I don't suppose you understand why it is such a perfect example"

Julia again, "No, I don't"

Krell again, "You're learning"

"But what is it that I'm learning?" Julia wanted to know.

"Julia, if you had understood me a little less correctly, I would guess that you had learned something about the way we as humans misinterpret the consequentiality of the physical and have therefore embraced the metaphysical.Certainly, it's fine to deny the immensity of the physical as defined by the incomprehensibility of the cosmic but all of that changes the moment someone hits you in the face with a rock.A rock is not theoretical. A rock is nothing but a fact.And as far as an abstract idea like freedom goes, my freedom to throw a rock ends where your freedom to have a face begins. Once we have defined the actual boundaries of an abstract idea like 'freedom' we can begin to explore the consequences of another abstract idea known as 'justice'.. Both 'freedom' and 'justice' are based upon the shaky alliance between the abstact and the concrete"

I decided I better try to get this locomotive back on track. "Metaphysics rawks. Rawk on Sawkrates"

Krell took the hint and returned to Chair on a phone.

"When Chaerophon inquired at the shrine of oracle of Apollo at Delphi, he was informed that "no man was wiser than Socrates". Chaerophon passed this message to Socrates. Socrates knew that Apollo could not lie but he also knew that he himself possessed no great wisdom. Thus Socrates arrived at the riddle that would inspire him for the rest of his life.”

"I look at the clock and realize that our time together today is just about up. The sand has passed through the hour glass so to speak. I'll save the riddle that haunted Socrates for next time. Any questions?"

"Yes," said Julia. "Let's imagine that you are the oracle at Delphi and I am Chaerophon. My question Mighty Apollo is this, who is the smartest person in this class?"

Krell stepped right into the role " no one is wiser in this class, no one is wiser in this college, no one is wiser in this city, no one is wiser in this state, no one is wiser in this country than ........."

Krell made eye contact with everyone in the room

"No

One

Wiser

Than

Ovid."

I was more stunned than anyone in the class when Krell made his observation. I lingered around after class to see if I could get some validation from Krell about the seriousness of his remark. Julia was hanging around too, pretending to organize her notes but in reality, trying to make sure that I wouldn't get a moment with Krell.

Krell was getting edgy.

He looked at the both of us and asked "are you guys ready to get outta here"

Julia scurried out of the room without a word.

Now me and Krell were alone.

"Did you mean what you said when you were pretending to be Apollo?" I asked Krell.

Krell on his way out the door, turned back and said, "Does a bear shit in the woods?"

Then he was gone.

I left the room right behind Krell. I was thinking about bears and wisdom. Grizzly bears in particular. Grizzly bears are my favorite animal for a lot of reasons but the most outstanding reason is that Grizzly Bears have the ability to walk backwards in their own footprints for up to two and a half miles in order to confuse whomever/whatever is tracking them.

I started imagining, not for the first time, this gigantic ferocious grizzly bear somehow picking up one foot after another then stepping backwards daintily with that ponderous paw/claw and placing it exactly claw for claw in the track it had made leading up to the retreat. It's like bear moon-walking which certainly must befuddle, astonish and amuse whatever is tracking the bear.

And the next question is, of course, how and why did bears learn this distinctive survival trick. How often in the wild is something actually tracking a bear and what, if not a guy with a gun, could that something be? A grizzly bear is at the top of the food chain. You'd have to be an awesomely hungry cougar to be tracking a bear. Moose freak out at the tiniest whiff of bear crap. It's obviously not Bullwinkle tracking the bear. So if it's not a man or a moose or a cougar and the maneuver has been around long enough to turn the moonwalk behavior into an instinct, then who in hell is tracking a grizzly?

The only answer I could come up with was dinosaur.

I know there's a few billion years difference in the time these species blundered through their respective forrests but what else would bears be intimidated by enough to learn how to walk backwards in their own tracks to confuse whatever was theoretically threatening them.

And furthermore, what happened when the bear moonwalked all the way back to where he was face to ass with whatever was tracking him, what's the bears plan? To attack the dinosaur with its ass?

I wondered if this constituted wisdom.

Learning to walk backwards in our own tracks until we confront our imaginary Jurassic enemies with our asses at which point we back asswards attack?

I also knew that bears hibernate most of the winter.

So the answer to Krell's exit question which was his answer to my question is this:

It depends on the time of the year.

DUMMY AT STANFORD

Who knows where Krell would have ended up it if not for the ankle of Lou Henry Hoover?

Krell knew that without Paladin, Krell would have never become the Krell that he became. Krell also knew that without Richard Boone, Paladin would not have become the Paladin that he became. Krell also knew that without Paladin, Richard Boone would not have become the Richard Boone that he became.

Boone might not have become Paladin if he hadn't been thrown out of Stanford.

Boone had enrolled at Stanford in 1934. He went out for the boxing team and was one heluva good light-heavyweight. These were the golden days of fraternities and Boone became a member of Theta Xi. One day, the brothers of Theta had nothing to do and no particular place to go. They collected a bunch of rags and bottles. They used the rags and bottles to create a life size dummy. They covered the dummy with ketchup and threw the thing in the road in front of the fraternity houser to be hit by the first car that passed.

Sure enough, the first car that passed hit the dummy.

After the collision, the intimidating Boone ran into the street and began shreiking "You've killed my brother" at the innocent, terrified driver.

The driver panicked and sprang from her car to confront both Boone and the dummy. She slipped on some of the fake blood and sprained her ankle, much to the delight of the frat boys watching from a safe distance.

The woman with the sprained ankle, the innocent, terrified driver turned out to be Lou Henry Hoover; the wife of ex-president Herbert Hoover.

"A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage" and a fake dummy getting run over by the former first lady's car when she takes that car out of the garage for a leisurely spin around campus.

Boone was expelled from Stanford soon after the foolish incident.

If Boone had some particular place to go that day at Stanford, he might not have gone on to become Paladin. If he had not become Paladin, Krell might not have become Krell.

If Krell had not become Krell many, many other incidents would not have occurred including the incident that sent a kid named Ovid from the classroom one day, contemplating the possibility that he was the smartest guy in town.

And all of the rest of that saga.

Thank God for Herbert Hoover.

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miles06mcpherson-blog · 6 years ago

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flauntpage · 7 years ago

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A Guide for Who to Root For in This Trash-Ass Super Bowl

At long last, we know John Wick’s impossible task: picking the more likable team in a Super Bowl involving the New England Patriots and the Philadelphia Eagles.

Wick is a New Yorker and definitely a Giants fan, so you know this to be true.

Every year, those of us who are fans of the loser teams not playing on Super Bowl Sunday prefer to have an easily identifiable villain to root against and an underdog hero we can pin our hopes on. Last year, it was easy, as the beautiful Atlanta Falcons dominated the vile Patriots for two and a half quarters before proceeding to puke all over themselves and fall into quicksand while trying to hold up their sagging pants.

The decision this year is much more difficult.

That’s why I’m here, to break down everything about the teams and help you choose your new favorite team for three hours. Patriots? Eagles? Let’s look at this logically and solve the riddle of Super Bowl LII.

QUARTERBACKS: Tom Brady vs. Nick Foles

Brady: He was brought into existence in 2001 when a scientist stuffed a football into a jar of mayonnaise and buried it in radioactive waste. While some people can be stupid in a charming way, Brady’s idiocy is more dangerous. He’s Forrest Gump if instead of chocolates and running Forrest enjoyed highly expensive potions that give sick people false hope and cheating at football with near total impunity. Brady has so completely shed his human form that he can’t answer a simple question about which Kendrick Lamar songs he likes after saying he likes Kendrick Lamar.

Foles: No idea. Is he lefty? “Nick Foles” sounds less like a quarterback and more like a strategy created by evil hunters. He’s blond, I think. Who is the last blond quarterback to win a Super Bowl? John Elway? That was like 20 years ago. Foles would have to be the blondest since Terry Bradshaw, right? Apparently he has a gigantic shlong, but that’s going to make half the people jealous and half love him. He probably can’t name a Kendrick Lamar song, either.

Advantage: Push

COACHES: Bill Belichick vs. Doug Pederson

Belichick: He’s cold, calculating, and ruthlessly efficient at cheating. If they ever make a Horrible Bosses 3, he needs to be a character that’s stalked by Tiquan Underwood. This guy either dresses like he just got done with a three-hour biceps session at the YMCA or he’s traveling back in time to participate in prohibition. He’s a man of few words where the media is concerned because he prefers to save them for love letters to Donald Trump.

Pederson: Wasn’t this the name that Cameron Frye is always using in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off? “Doug Pederson, Chicago PD!” How is this team in the Super Bowl? Before becoming head coach in Philadelphia, he spent three seasons in Kansas City as offensive coordinator and guided the Chiefs to no better than 21st in total offense in his time there. Don’t you dare say the NFL isn’t a meritocracy! He got a Super Bowl ring as holder with the Packers in 1997, which is like telling people you won an Oscar for Saving Private Ryan because you played a corpse on the beach.

Advantage: Push

CHAIN RESTAURANTS: Dunkin’ Donuts vs. Wawa

Dunkin’ Donuts: Bostonians’ years of defending the watered-down piss coffee they serve turned out to be great practice for defending an indefensible football team. “There’s something about the Dunkies in Boston that’s just different!” No, there isn’t. Someone in 1948 spilled sewer water into a coffee machine in Quincy and nobody had the heart to say they were serving garbage juice. This would be the perfect #brand partnership for Brady if he didn’t think coffee beans contained ligament fiber thetans or some shit.

Wawa: It’s a 7-11 that’s not self-aware enough to realize it’s just a place to get beef jerky on a road trip or a pre-cooked hot dog when you’re drunk. Wawa is to Philadelphians what music is to people when they’re teenagers—it was there in your formative years so you think it’s better than it actually is. “Oh, but they make sandwiches!” Holy shit, sandwiches? Can you get sandwiches anywhere else in the world? It’s a fancy rest stop named for how babies say water. Get lost.

Advantage: Push

RECENT HISTORY: Patriots vs. Eagles

Patriots: This is the Patriots’ eighth Super Bowl appearance since 2002. The Patriots have won no fewer than nine regular-season games since 2001 and have a record of 209-63 over that time. With Belichick and Brady at the helm, the Patriots have become the model franchise across all sports.

Eagles: Donovan McNabb puked on the field during a Super Bowl. From 2001 to 2003, the Eagles lost three straight NFC title games, the last two occurring at home. When they finally got to the Super Bowl in 2004, they lost to the Patriots. They would go on to lose one more NFC title game in 2008, which makes them a less successful version of those Buffalo Bills teams that lost four straight Super Bowls.

Advantage: Push

FOLLOWING RULES: Cheating vs. Not Cheating

Cheating: The Patriots have been caught cheating on two occasions, Spygate and Deflategate. It’s doubtful a team with a history of cheating only cheated twice, so we will likely never know the full breadth of the Patriots’ cheating but it’s probably wild. If you told me Belichick would get nude and oil himself up so he could slide in air ducts above the visiting team’s locker room with a recording device, I would believe you and hate you for making me picture that image.

Not cheating: The beauty of being a franchise without a Super Bowl is there’s no way anyone can accuse you of cheating. Or trying. Or being good. Man, maybe cheat a little, huh? That town needs it.

Advantage: Push

FANS: Insufferable Pricks vs. Volatile Assholes

Insufferable pricks: The one thing I truly appreciate about the douchebag core of Patriots fans is their unapologetic nature. “Everyone fucking hates you!” “Good. I don’t give a shit. Go Pats.” You have to respect it. There’s never any, “Not all Patriots fans are like that!” nonsense. They know the team cheats and the players and coach are trash but all the winning is so orgasmic they go with it. Bill Simmons is a 50-year-old man who probably has a “hate us because they ain’t us” tattoo on his calf and it’s damn admirable.

Volatile idiots: Now with Eagles fans, you never know. You could wear a Giants jersey to an Eagles game and either engage in witty ribbing and banter with good-natured fans or have your throat slit while waiting to buy a beer. And unlike with Patriots fans, there are still Eagles fans who play the “every city has bad fans” card. Sure. Every city has people who intentionally puke on children, throw batteries at players, punch police horses, craft large signs that say “FUCK MILLIE” because 100-year-old people should eat shit too, throw snowballs at Santa Claus, boo the franchise’s best quarterback when he was drafted, cheer because Michael Irvin may be potentially paralyzed on the field, throw a beer bottle at the best first baseman in franchise history, or climb into a penalty box to fight Tie Domi. You’ll find all that in every sports town, absolutely.

Advantage: Push

TELEVISION SHOWS: Cheers vs. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

Cheers: Really funny show about 1980s people in Boston who don’t care about anyone but themselves, hanging out in bar. It stars Rhea Perlman, who is married to Danny DeVito.

It’s Always Sunny: Really funny show about 2000s people in Philadelphia who don’t care about anyone but themselves, hanging out in bar. It stars Danny DeVito, who is married to Rhea Perlman.

Wait, should I be writing a TV show about a bar in … New York?

Advantage: Push

MOST FAMOUS FAN: Mark Wahlberg vs. Mark Wahlberg

Seriously, this moron from Boston—who claims to be a huge Patriots fan even though he left in the middle of the Super Bowl comeback last year and blamed his child for it—says he doesn’t care who wins this year! Why? Because not only is Come Awn Come Awn Feel It Feel It a huge Pats bro, he once portrayed some shitty player who only made the Eagles roster because the team was so damn shitty.

Can you imagine this idiot being asked about global warming? “I’m really rooting for humans to survive climate change but I was in a movie where trees and plants killed people, so I’ve got a special place in my heart for leaves. I’ll be happy no matter who wins.”

Advantage: Push

It turns out the lesson here is don’t root for anyone. Don’t even watch the game. There’s a decent chance John Wick 2 will be on one of your HBOs. Watch that and don’t look back at NBC until Monday morning.

A Guide for Who to Root For in This Trash-Ass Super Bowl published first on https://footballhighlightseurope.tumblr.com/

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samanthasroberts · 7 years ago

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What Made This University Researcher Snap?

Update 9/12/2012: Amy Bishop pleaded guilty Tuesday to three counts of attempted murder and one count of capital murder of two or more victims, withdrawing her early plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. Sentencing is set for late September. According to the Associated Press, prosecutors have agreed not to seek the death penalty. Bishop still faces charges in Massachusetts in connection with the fatal shooting of her brother in 1986. Last March, Wired magazine ran this profile of Bishop, delving into her troubled and troubling inner life, dark glimpses of which emerged in three unpublished novels she wrote.

4 pm, February 12, 2010University of Alabama in Huntsville

Shelby Center for Science and Technology, Loading Dock.

Amy Bishop stepped out of the science building and into the afternoon light. She was a solid woman5’8″ and 150 poundsand from a distance, at least, her red V-neck sweater and jeans made her look more like a soccer mom on an errand than a remorseless killer leaving the scene of her crimes. Upstairs, in Room 369R, there was only suffering. Three professors lay on the floor, dying. Three more were wounded.

Now Bishop stood near the loading dock, unarmed. On her way down from the third floor, she had ducked into a restroom to stuff her Ruger 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol and blood-spattered black and red plaid jacket into a trash can. The 45-year-old assistant professor had also phoned her husband, James Anderson, and instructed himas she often didto come pick her up. “I’m done,” she’d said.

Bishop focused her blue eyes, so fierce under the horizon of her dark bangs. She paid attention to people’s eyes. There was so much you could see in them. Pain. Hardness. Sometimes she envisioned that people’s eyes made sounds. Tick. Tick. Tick. Other times she imagined she could feel eyes boring into the top of her head. Now her own eyes scanned the street. Where was James?

More than two decades earlier, the first time she’d fired a gun with fatal results, James had stood by her. Other boyfriends would have turned their backs. But not James. In the dark days after that 1986 shooting, Amythen a 21-year-old senior at Northeastern University in Bostonhad actually broken up with him. James waited patiently for her to return to herself, then to their relationship. The shooting was ruled an accident, and soon they were getting married, honeymooning in the Bahamas, starting a family. James would stand by her again, when she had problems on the job after earning her PhD from Harvard University. She had no reason to think he wouldn’t stand by her now.

At 4:10 pm, as ambulances rushed to the scene, a Madison County sheriff’s deputy approached Bishop and took hold of her. She looked dazed as her hands were cuffed and she was put into a squad car. Later, during an interrogation that went on for more than two hours, Bishop would insist, “I wasn’t there” and “It wasn’t me.” Her assertions seemed ludicrous, of course. Twelve people who knew Bishop, who saw her almost every day, had spent nearly an hour with her before she started shooting without a word of warning. Nine of those witnesses were still alive.

Yet some would say that when Bishop claimed she wasn’t there, she wasn’t entirely wrong. It didn’t seem to be the Amy they knew who had come to that meeting; another Amy had. Bishop “was someone I trusted,” says professor Debra Moriarity, who survived the massacre. “There were oddities of personality that made you just go, oh, well, that’s just the way she is. But nothing would have predicted any behavior like this. She never appeared hateful.” But that afternoon in Room 369R, “she seemed suddenly different.” Soon, Moriarity and her colleagues would learn that they weren’t the first to have seen Bishop’s dual nature. For years, there had been two sides to this quirky, haughty researcher known for introducing herself as “Dr. Amy Bishop, Harvard-trained.” Many had met Arrogant Amy, who seemed to thrive on order and usually had the upper hand. An unlucky few had encountered another Amychaotic, confused, full of menace. Angry Amy rarely took charge. But when she did, things never ended well.

What makes a smart, well-educated mother of four go on a killing spree? In the more than 12 months since Bishop became the first academic in US history to be accused of gunning down fellow professors, many theories have been offered up. One is that she’s a lunatic. That suggestion came from her attorney.

Bishop’s court-appointed lawyer, Roy Miller, called her simply “wacko.” Later he apologized for his word choice, but he has continued to press the point. “They’re going to try to show she’s sane, that she was just mean as hell,” he tells me, referring to the prosecution, which is seeking capital murder charges against Bishop in the killings of department chair Gopi Podila and professors Maria Ragland Davis and Adriel Johnson. “If they seek the death penalty, which we have to assume they will, our only defense is mental.”

Amy Bishop is taken into custody soon after leaving the building where the shooting took place. The Huntsville Times / Landov

The Wacko theory is often accompanied by the Tenure Made Her Do It hypothesis, which posits that the grueling, years-long process of trying to win a permanent professorshipand the despair that accompanied being denied tenure by her peersmade Bishop snap. This explanation got a lot of traction right after the vicious slayings, in part because it seemed to open the door to a more general indictment of academia. Is the tenure process itself vicious? Some, like Katherine van Wormer, a blogger for Psychology Today who has herself been denied tenure, says it is. “I would describe the denial of tenure as an end to one’s career, to one’s livelihood,” van Wormer wrote after the killings. “Being denied tenure, in effect, fired by your peers, is the ultimate rejection.”

She would complete three unpublished novelsnearly 900 pages of strikingly autobiographical prose.

But the Tenure Made Her Do It assertion is undermined by the calendar. Bishop learned she would not get tenure in March 2009, 11 full months before she transformed a routine faculty meeting into an execution chamber. She appealed the faculty’s decision, thus extending the process. But that appeal was denied for good in November 2009still three months before her alleged crimes. What’s more, although tenure decisions are not public, university officials say Bishop had indicated she’d found out which colleagues had voted for and against her. Yet she shot some of the very people who had supported her. If this was tenure-related payback, it was carried out with less than surgical precision.

Which brings us to the Maniac in Geek’s Clothing conjecture. Let’s face it, scientific and technical fields attract more than their share of socially awkward, obsessively focused oddballs. The history of science is rife with peculiar pioneersthink Einstein, Feynman. And it’s no different today: Tech companies and R&D labs all over the country don’t just tolerate idiosyncratic geniuses; they celebrate them. Why? Because their very ability to think differently, to do or be what’s unexpected, has led to tremendous success (think Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg).

Every once in a while, though, brainy weirdos turn out to be brutal killers. It happened in 1991, when Gang Lu, a 28-year-old former graduate student in physics at the University of Iowa, killed four faculty members. He was angry that his dissertation had not been nominated for a prestigious award. It happened again in 1992, when Valery Fabrikant, a mechanical engineering professor denied tenure by Concordia University in Montreal, loaded several guns, went to campus, and opened fire, killing four colleagues.

Obviously, not all number lovers and data geeks are potential murderers, just as not all postal workers go postal. But if a scientist becomes dangerously antisocial, colleagues may be slower to notice than people in other lines of work, where eccentricities aren’t regarded as a badge of authenticity. And academia may be especially ill equipped to handle such behavior, since it is organized around protecting differences and safeguarding intellectual freedom. If you’re an academic and a scientist and you’ve gone off the deep end, in other words, you may find it just a bit easier to hide in plain sight.

We like to think that what happened at the University of Alabama a year ago might have been prevented. But the sad truth is that there may be no way to anticipate when or how someone will snap. When it comes to Amy Bishop, the mask of Arrogant Amy made Angry Amy invisible to most everyone, perhaps even to Bishop herself.

December 6, 1986The home of Amy’s parents, Samuel and Judith Bishop

46 Hollis Avenue, Braintree, Massachusetts

Amy had said something that upset her father. That morning they’d squabbled, and at about 11:30 am, Sam, a film professor at Northeastern University, left the family’s Victorian home to go shopping. When he last saw his 18-year-old son, Seth, the young man was outside washing his car. Amy, 21, was in her bedroom upstairs. She was worried about “robbers,” she would later tell the police. So she loaded her father’s 12-gauge pump-action shotgun and accidentally discharged a round in her room. The blast struck a lamp and a mirror and blew a hole in the wall, which she tried to cover up using a Band-Aid box and a book cover. She didn’t want her mother, Judy, to see the damage.

The gun, a Mossberg model 500A, holds multiple rounds and must be pumped after each discharge to chamber another shell. Bishop had loaded the gun with number-four lead shot. After firing the round into the wall, she could have put the weapon aside. Instead, she took it downstairs and walked into the kitchen. At some point, she pumped the gun, chambering another round.

It was lunchtime, and Judy had just returned home from the riding stables. Later she’d speculate that, implausibly, she hadn’t heard the thunderous shotgun blast in Amy’s bedroom because the house was soundproof. She told police she was at the sink and Seth was by the stove when Amy appeared. “I have a shell in the gun, and I don’t know how to unload it,” Judy told police her daughter said. Judy continued, “I told Amy not to point the gun at anybody. Amy turned toward her brother and the gun fired, hitting him.”

Seth dropped to the floor, blood streaming from a gaping wound in his chest. His aorta had been ruptured; his liver destroyed. Judy called 911 at 2:22 pm. The first responder on the scene found Seth lying on his left side, facedown in a pool of blood. Blood and air were escaping each time he gasped for breath, the police report says. By the time Seth was pronounced dead, at 3:08 pm, Amy was long gone. She had run out of the house and headed to a nearby Ford dealership, where she encountered two employees. Pointing the gun at them, she demanded a car and a set of keys, but when they hesitated, she left. One of the men would later say she claimed she’d gotten into a fight with her husband, who was going to kill her.

Minutes later, workers at a local business spotted Bishop. When a police officer appeared, they waved him toward the woman with the gun. The officer told her to drop her weapon, but she complied only when another officer surprised her from behind. She seemed frightened and disoriented, according to police records. Her shotgun was still loaded with two unspent shells, and she had another live shell in her jacket pocket.

Later, police asked Amy if she had shot Seth on purpose. She said noand then her mother told her to stop answering questions, police records state. Judy Bishop said her two children, both violinists, got along well. Just three years before, in her high school yearbook, Amy had pledged: “I, Amy Bishop, hereby bequeath my violin and music to my brother Seth.” Seth Bishop’s death was an accident, his parents said. A tragic accident. And for nearly a quarter century, until Bishop opened fire in Room 369R, authorities would agree.

June 19, 1988Northeastern University commencement

Boston Garden

Graduation day was hot and humid, the sky hazy and overcast. Amy Bishop and James Anderson attended commencement together, heading to the old Boston Garden to hear Erma Bombeck deliver the morning address.

“Success dwells within you,” Bombeck told the graduates. “The trick is knowing it when you see it.”

Northeastern University had been an important place for Bishop, and not only because her father taught there. The private institution that now boasts of treating learning as “a contact sport” had helped Bishop come into her own in two key respects. First, she met the shy, baby-face undergrad who would become her husband. Second, she discovered she had a flair for writing fiction.

Years later, she would tell a friend that she’d been recognized for her writing as an undergraduate and encouraged to develop it further. But her mother and father frowned on the idea. “I think her parents steered her away from humanities and into science,” says Rob Dinsmoor, another friend, who met Bishop in the late ’90s, when they both were members of a writers group in Hamilton, Massachusetts. As a film professor, Bishop’s father knew how tough it was to make it in the arts, Dinsmoor says. “So he was pushing her.” After her brother’s death, she finished her bachelor’s degree in biology. Soon she was on her way to grad school at Harvard.

But she didn’t stop writing. Over the next 16 years, she would complete at least three unpublished novelsnearly 900 type-written pages of strikingly autobiographical prose. The Diary of Abigail White is her first book. It is told from the perspective of Abbie, a 9-year-old girl who is tormented by a shameful secret: She has killed a young boy. Amazon Fever is a futuristic thriller about Olivia, a struggling academic who finally gets the respect she deserves when she saves the world with her womb (having a baby after a rampant virus has unleashed a global epidemic that makes all other pregnant women miscarry). Easter in Boston, dated 2004, follows Beth, a gun-running Harvard researcher who’s testing an anticancer drug that has an unfortunate side effect: It makes mother rats eat their own young. Of all Bishop’s protagonists, Beth is the most fully drawn. Depressed about her life and career, she uses sarcasm to cope, tapping a vein of black humor, as in this exchange about an upcoming potluck hosted by the head of her lab:

Beth’s colleague: “I think I am bringing dumplings tomorrow to Dick’s … What are you bringing?”

Beth: “A gun… Death and destruction. Hell on earth. Horror.”

There’s a strong resemblance between Bishop’s fictional world and her real one. The protagonists in all three novels are scientists (or aspiring scientists) and have strong ties to their Greek heritage (Bishop’s father is of Greek descent). All have tumultuous, violent dreams and daydreamsBishop calls them “eyelid films.” All fantasize about the deaths of those who have wronged them. Abbie and Beth both have artistic fathers, as Bishop does. Olivia and Beth have “brittle,” overbearing mothers; both are involved with loyal but underachieving men who were raised in Alabama, just as Bishop’s husband was. Both have connections to Harvard, a place that was the main ingredient in Bishop’s fragile recipe for self-worth. Both struggle with the “black fog” of depression, lament the politics of the ivory tower, and imagine taking their own lives.

For her part, 9-year-old Abbie likes “to pretend and work herself up to peak fearfulness,” Bishop writesa quality that more than one of Bishop’s friends tell me they recognized in Abbie’s creator. Sometimes Abbie is confused by her gory fantasies but reassures herself: “My imagination strikes again.” Friends of Bishop say that statement also rang true: Bishop had a habit of making things up and presenting them as facts. “I sometimes didn’t believe everything that came out of her mouth. I can’t describe exactly why,” Dinsmoor says. But he admired her suspenseful prose: “She did dread real well.”

Abbie felt cold metal pressed against her forehead… [She] opened her eyes. Inches from her face the red head’s finger curled around the trigger of a revolver. “Surprise.” He pulled the trigger. from The Diary of Abigail White, by Amy Bishop

December 19, 1993the Home of Paul Rosenberg

14 Standish Street, Newton, Massachusetts

Paul Rosenberg was in his kitchen, opening the mail. It was about 11 pm, and the neurologist and his wife had just returned from a week’s vacation. He looked at the package on the counterthe house sitter had found it inside the front storm door. The white cardboard box was about a foot square and 3 inches deep. There were six 29-cent stamps on the box. They had not been canceled.

A medical researcher, Rosenberg had recently attended a seminar on letter bombsthe Unabomber had struck twice that yearand this heavy package looked suspicious. So, gingerly, he cut the tape around the edge with a knife and peeked inside. Two pieces of pipe, each about 6 inches long, were fixed in place. Wires were visible. He carefully shut the box, alerted his wife, and fled.

When the bomb squad arrived, they found that the contraption was designed to go off when the lid was pulled open. Rosenberg hadn’t done that. It probably saved his life.

Less than a month before, on November 30, Bishop had quit her job as a researcher in Rosenberg’s lab at Children’s Hospital Boston. She’d been there just a few months, but Rosenberg told investigators that he’d been instrumental in her departure. Rosenberg told authorities that despite Bishop’s credentialsshe’d gotten her doctorate in genetics from Harvard earlier that yearhe felt “she could not meet the standards required for the work.” One person told investigators that the episode had left Bishop “on the verge of a nervous breakdown.” Rosenberg said Bishop just didn’t seem stable.

Then there was her husband, James Anderson. One witness told investigators that the round-faced computer engineer with tentative blue eyes had it in for Rosenberg. He had said he “wanted to get back” at Rosenberg for his treatment of Bishop, according to case records from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms”to shoot him, bomb him, stab him, or strangle” him. Another witness told investigators that Anderson had trouble keeping a job. Anderson and Bishop were questioned in the attempted bombing of Rosenberg, but no one was ever charged.

Beth remembered what Jack was like when they met and fell in love, alive… Over this last year, he’d metamorphosed into a flaccid, bed-loving loser… Jack wasn’t always that way, ambition-challenged, but he was now. from Easter in Boston

<h31996Beth Israel Hospital Cardiology Department

330 Brookline Avenue, Boston

Bishop was the very definition of stressed out. By now, she had three kids under the age of 6: Lily, born in 1991; Thea, in 1993; and Phaedra, in 1995. Anderson was working sporadically, helping rebuild scientific laboratories or taking the occasional computer programming gig. The couple had constant money problems, friends say, and would soon consider filing for bankruptcy.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Bishop cared intensely about appearances, particularly those that connoted status. She wanted an address in Ipswich, she told friends, because the area north of Boston seemed classier than the city. Then there was the matter of her husband’s first name. He was christened Jimmy Jr., after an ancestor who was a Greek ship captain. But Bishop told him that combined with his Southern accent, “Jimmy” made him sound low class. “They think you’re a mechanic or somethinga hick,” Arrogant Amy told Anderson, insisting that the former Eagle Scout call himself James. So he did. “James was a name that Amy gave him,” says Jimmy Anderson Sr., Bishop’s father-in-law, who lives in Prattville, Alabama. “He deserves some kind of a medal for living with her. She was the extreme end of bossy.”

By 1996, Bishop had found employment as a researcher at a Harvard teaching hospital, Beth Israel. She was also doing work at the Harvard School of Public Health, but it eventually began to dawn on her, friends say, that she was not going to rise through the university’s ranks. She had taken multiple maternity leaves. She also had to deal with her severe allergies, which required her to take steroids that sometimes made her “zone out,” she told friends, and lose track of reality.

Bishop was starting to wonder whether it might be a good idea to take her Harvard credentials where she’d be a bigger fish in a smaller pond. Maybe then, she confided to friends, she’d get the recognition she deserved.

As it was, her resentment flared when she felt slighted. Hugo Gonzalez-Serratos, currently a professor of physiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, collaborated with her on a 1996 paper about deficient cellular cyclic AMP while they were at Beth Israel’s cardiology department. The paper had nine authors; Bishop was listed second. “She was very angry because she was not the first author,” Gonzalez-Serratos, who was listed eighth, told The New York Times. “She exploded into something emotional that we never saw before in our careers.” Again, Angry Amy had seized control, this time with self-destructive results: Her contract, the Times reported, was not renewed.

Beth’s temper flared and she couldn’t stop herself even though she knew it could be the death of her career… The thought of being some unemployed loser, a non-Harvard, a non-scientist made her shiver at her loss of identity. from Easter in Boston

1999Hamilton Public Library

299 Bay Road, Hamilton, Massachusetts

In her writing group, Bishop said what she thought, whenever it occurred to her, and then was surprised when people didn’t take it well. “She’s kind of clueless socially,” says Rob Dinsmoor, who was a regular. “She would read someone’s story and say, ‘Second paragraph. Doesn’t help. Kill it.’ Or ‘I don’t like this character. Kill it.’ It really wasn’t tactful.”

At one meeting not long after she’d joined the group, Bishop arrived toting hefty manuscripts. Usually, people brought passages or maybe chapters to share. But here was Arrogant Amy, distributing a massive tomeher first novel, the one about Abbie. “She said, ‘I’m sorry to spring it on you like this, but I wanted everyone to look at it before I gave it to my agent,’” Dinsmoor recalls. This was more than the group leader could bear. “He goes, ‘Agent? I don’t think you’re ready for an agent.’ He just went ballistic.”

Bishop didn’t care. She’d hatched a plan that would allow her to escape academia: Writing best-selling novels, Dinsmoor says, would be her ticket out of the drudgery of grant-writing and research that occupied her days and nights.

She aimed high in her role models. Lenny Cavallaro, a friend and writing teacher, recalls that when he told Bishop she could be marketed as “a female Michael Crichton“Crichton also went to Harvard”she was very excited. She was almost foaming at the mouth.” Soon she was hosting the writers group at her home. It was easier, what with three small kids and a fourth on the way.

As in many demanding professions, it’s difficult for women in science to climb the ladder while raising children. But Bishop was determined to master both. In one of her novels, she observes that “in this era of the supermom who’s a great wife, mother, and CEO,” if you’re not all three “you’re a failure.” Maybe the life of a writer would be more accommodating to motherhood than doing research had been.

To read Bishop’s books back-to-back is to be struck by a recurring plot point in all three: a little brother who has died too young. He’s called Luke in two of the novels, and ghostly memories of him appear frequently to those who’ve outlived him. Abbie suffers most from these visions. She is sure she killed Luke by throwing a “fist-sized rock” that hit him in the head. She “fired” it in anger, she admits, but she immediately feels remorse. Now Abbie is doomed to relive the moment of impact, again and again. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Bishop was channeling her own awful memories of her brother’s death.

By all accounts, Seth Bishop had been his sister’s doting companion, her fellow brainiac, even her savior. Years before his death she was quoted in the Braintree Forum and Observer as saying, “One day when he was about 7 and I was with him, I fell down a small cliff and couldn’t get up.” According to the account, Seth managed to hoist her to safety. “He saved my life that day,” Bishop said.

But as an adult, friends say, she never mentioned his name. Members of her writers group had no idea she’d even had a brother. It was as if Seth Bishop had never existed. But on the printed page, at least, he was always there.

Abbie closed her eyes and saw, almost like a film, the rock hit Luke’s head over and over again. Abbie opened her eyes then closed them again. The eyelid film still played. from The Diary of Abigail White

March 16, 2002International House of Pancakes

Peabody, Massachusetts

It was Saturday morning, and Bishop was about to have a meal with her kids. She asked for a booster seat for her youngesther only son, then an infantbut was told that the last one had just been given to another woman.

Bishop exploded. “I am Dr. Amy Bishop!” she screamed, launching into a tirade. The manager asked her to leave, but before she did, Bishop punched the other woman in the head. Several witnesses said Bishop seemed to have initiated the dispute. But when an officer followed up later, Bishop insisted that the other woman was the aggressor.

She told friends the same thing, explaining that the woman was neglecting her child and that she, Amy, was simply trying to help. She also said that she’d beat the rap by wearing her white lab coat to court, trumping the woman by looking more professional. “She’s like, ‘I’m going to make it go away,’” one friend recalls. Bishop was eventually charged with assault and disorderly conduct, but the charges were dismissed. Her record was still clean.

Bishop’s Ipswich neighbors didn’t know about the booster seat incident, but it probably wouldn’t have surprised them. To hear Arthur Kerr tell it, the problems had begun in 1998, the day Bishop and her family moved to 28 Birch Lane. Their rented moving truck backed into the freestanding basketball hoop where all the neighbor kids played, knocking it down. “At first we thought it was just an accident,” says Kerr, a Boston tax lawyer who lived next door at the time. “But it turns out they did it on purpose. It was just the start of a long, long battle with them.”

In the four-plus years that Bishop and her family lived on Birch Lane, they called the police more than a few times to complain about their neighbors. They didn’t like noise: A boom box on low volume, the sound of bouncing balls, even the ice cream truck was an affront. Bishop “would harass the driver,” Kerr says. “Finally the truck just stopped coming down our street.”

But on Birch Lane, bizarre behavior wasn’t considered normal or acceptable. From the moment he met Bishop, Kerr says, he “could just tell she wasn’t right. I said to my wife right away, stay away from her. She’s bad news.” There was something about her eyes, he addssomething off.

One night, after a new portable basketball hoop in the neighborhood had prompted a series of altercations with Bishop, a couple of parents asked her why the sound of kids playing bothered her so much. The argument almost escalated into a fistfight. “She was belligerent, confrontational, a bully,” Kerr says.

When word spread that the Bishop-Anderson family was moving to Alabama and their home was up for sale, neighbors rejoiced. Everyone agreed: While the house was on the market, they’d keep their lawns immaculateif only to make the neighborhood as appealing as possible to potential buyers.

Kerr remembers the afternoon in 2003, when he came home to see their moving truck pulling away. “Everyone was out in the street, and someone said, ‘Ding, dong, the witch is dead,’” he says. Pizza was ordered. Someone brought beer. It was, Kerr said, “a party to celebrate: Good riddance, Amy. We had a period of darkness, and it was really unpleasant. And then they left, and we were happy again.”

Every time Bishop had gotten into scrapes with the law, she emerged unscathed, her record never seriously marred. Now she had a new job. She was on her way to a tenure-track position at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Since the killings last February, university administrators have reviewed the process by which they hired Bishop. President David Williams, who hadn’t yet been appointed when Bishop arrived, says he worried that perhaps her Harvard credentials made some at UAHa well-respected but second-tier schoolturn a blind eye to problems that should have given them pause.

Faced with a candidate who had a doctorate from Harvard, he says, “the natural reaction of a small university trying to grow is to think, wow.” But a review of the file, Williams says, showed no corners had been cut. “We got recommendations from leading academics,” he says. “We went through the process that we go through for everybody we hire.”

Williams acknowledges that no criminal background check had been performed on Bishop before she was hired. It’s not standard procedure. But the week after the killings, he asked the Huntsville Police Department to put Bishop into their system, just to see what they would have found. The review came up clean: no prior convictions.

In the wake of the massacre, plenty of scrutiny was aimed at the Braintree Police Departmet, whose investigation of the 1986 shooting of Seth Bishop many felt was incomplete. Had Bishop been charged, tried, and convicted for that incident, three UAH professors could still be alive. “At some point in this woman’s life, her bad behavior should have been recognized before she got to UAH,” Joe Ritch, a member of the University of Alabama System Board of Trustees, told The Huntsville Times. “People kept sweeping her bad behavior under the rug, and now we’re paying a tremendous price for that.”

But once Bishop was in Alabama, working in her own lab, conducting research that she hoped would address devastating neurological diseases like Lou Gehrig’s, Parkinson’s, and multiple sclerosis, was there any way her colleagues could have known? She could be rude and dismissive to students and colleagues alike, and her teaching was often seen as disjointed. Was her unusual behavior and abrasive manner a red flag that got missed because some of her fellow academics could be just as odd? The truth bears repeating: Eccentrics are eccentrics; murderers are murderers. One does not imply the other.

If Bishop stands trialpresumably sometime in the coming monthsjurors will be asked to consider her psychological makeup. If convicted of capital murder, she will face either the death penalty or life in prison without possibility of parole. To spare her the harshest punishment, her lawyer must show that Bishop did not know right from wrong. But he has yet to reveal what exculpatory diagnosis he plans to offer.

According to Brenda Wade, a clinical psychologist who has followed this case closely, Bishop’s feelings of insecurityher fear of being slighted, her mood swings, her lack of impulse controlare symptoms of borderline personality disorder. People with this condition often toggle between two extremes, experiencing love-hate relationships, idealizing someone one minute, then being furious with them the next. But they aren’t typically violent. “She’s got something else going on: a remarkable lack of remorse,” Wade says. “That’s a huge feature, and it makes me wonder whether she also has what we used to call sociopathic or psychopathic behavior. Psychopaths have no remorse. In some way, they are disconnected from real life and real relationships.”

While the maze of Bishop’s mind will surely be explored in court, it may never be fully mapped. This much, though, seems clear: The memory of her brother, Seth, haunted her.

They had been friends for years before Luke and after, although after Luke, Ian was ticking. She could hear the ticking in his eyes. She knew how far to push him and usually didn’t go too far but now she was sure she had. from Easter in Boston

March 2008McDowling Drive

Huntsville, Alabama

The two-story green clapboard house that Bishop and Anderson bought when they moved to Huntsville had a strange defect: a split personality. Though their address in the Tara subdivision is listed as McDowling Drive, half of the house actually sits on Greenview Drive. If you stand facing the front door, McDowling heads left, Greenview right. Even Bishop’s house showed two faces to the world. “They’d lose mail all the time,” Bishop’s father-in-law says.

That ongoing confusion proved more than an inconvenience in the spring of 2008, when Anderson Jr. collided with a police car, totaling it. After the accident, police discovered he had an unpaid traffic citationwhich had never arrived in the mailand he was taken into custody on the spot. His father remembers getting a callnot from his daughter-in-law but from a bail bondsman.

Anderson Sr. drove three hours from Prattville and bailed out his son. Even before this, he acknowledges, he didn’t feel particularly warmly toward his daughter-in-law, mostly because of how she mistreated his wife, Sandy. Bishop, who has a fear of the herpes virus, wouldn’t let the woman near her grandchildren because she sometimes got cold sores. “My poor wifeshunned,” Anderson Sr. says.

Anderson Jr. always chalked up Bishop’s weirdest behavior to the pressure she was under. He knew his wife could seem brusque. “She’s a Harvard grad,” he says. “You’re not going to get ‘gushing’ out of somebody like that, sorry.” But he believed they were a team. “We were going to do a lot of work side by side and bring the kids in on it, just like the Curies did,” he says. In the meantime, he’d run the house while she focused on getting tenure.

But by 2008, Anderson Sr. says, when he came to town to pay his son’s bail, the arrangement seemed to be breaking down. The house was “a disaster,” he saysunopened mail amid a storm of clutter. Over a few days, he says, he tried to excavate and set things right. But he cut the visit short after a chilling altercation with Bishop. They were talking in the kitchenabout what, he can’t remember”and suddenly I said something that set her off, and she just totally changed. I have never seen anyone before or after whose face, whose body language, changed so 100 percent. I saw a major difference in her eyes. The color of her skin even changed. It was menacing.”

He takes a deep breath, remembering how the hostility in Bishop’s face made him pack up and head back to Prattville that day. I remind him that right after the killings, he told a reporter he’d called his daughter-in-law “evil,” saying he’d seen “the devil in her eyes.” He nods. “It definitely was frightening,” he says. “I didn’t know who I was talking to.” Until last year, when Bishop was put in jail, he didn’t visit Huntsville again.

In short, Olivia’s career was DOA. from Amazon Fever

March 2009The Provost’s Office

University of Alabama in Huntsville

Bishop sat at the table in provost Vistasp Karbhari‘s office. On the wall in front of her were three of those stylized motivational posters that herald an attribute to which we should all aspire: “Commitment.” “Vision.” “Imagination.”

At times, Bishop had exhibited all three. And yet, her overall academic achievement was lacking, her colleagues felt. Her teaching was scattered; her publication record thin. And when she did publish, the output could be bizarre, as in the case of a paper titled “Effects of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors on motor neuron survival,” which would soon appear in the International Journal of General Medicine. It listed five authors: Bishop, her husband, and three of their four children: Lily B., Phaedra B., and Thea B. Anderson. The B, of course, stood for Bishop. The daughters were kidsnone out of their teens. “It was creepy and kind of weird,” says Moriarity, the professor who survived Bishop’s shooting spree.

Bishop was not without her successes. Much of her research had focused on nitric oxide, which acts as a sort of carrier pigeon between cells, communicating information. But in large amounts, it can turn toxica phenomenon thought to be connected to the onset of certain cancers as well as MS and Lou Gehrig’s disease.

She was researching genetic therapies that might lead to treatments for these neurological disorders by turning on cells’ ability to resist nitric-oxide toxicity. This work had yielded her a $219,750 grant from the National Institutes of Health in 2008. And then there was the new kind of cell incubator, called the InQ, which she and her husband had invented together. UAH president David Williams had highlighted the invention on his blog in November 2008, calling it “remarkable.”

Still, the tenure committee voted Bishop down. Now Karbhari was letting her know: She was out. Asked to describe Bishop’s reaction, he said she seemed disappointed but not angry. “Normal,” he says. (The families of two professors killed in the shooting have since filed wrongful death lawsuits against Karbhari, Bishop, and Anderson.)

When Bishop found out that a member of her tenure review committee had referred to her as “crazy,” however, she filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging gender discrimination and citing the professor’s remark as possible evidence. According to court papers filed in a lawsuit against Bishop and her husband by some of the victims of the shooting, the professor was given a chance to back off from the comment, but he did not. The court filing states, “I said she was crazy multiple times and I stand by that… This woman has a pattern of erratic behavior. She did things that weren’t normal… she was out of touch with reality.”

It was a wonder none of his ex-employees didn’t come back to the lab shooting. Getting fired was bad enough, but to have everyone but her know about it for perhaps weeks in advance was worse. from Easter in Boston

Summer 2009An Indoor Shooting Range

Huntsville, Alabama

Target practice would be fun, James Anderson says his wife told him. “It’s a sport,” he recalls her saying. “And I’m like, you can do this?” If the thought of her brother, Seth, dead from a shotgun wound to the chest, crossed his mind then, he doesn’t say so. But Anderson confirms he did accompany his wife to aim and shoot guns. “I’ll just try it,” he remembers her saying.

2:30 pm, February 12, 2010Tara Subdivision

Huntsville, Alabama

After spending the morning on campus, Bishop drove her classic scarlet 1991 Cadillac back to Tara, to the green clapboard house with the confused identity. Later, Bishop would say she didn’t remember a thing about what she was about to do.

Around 3 pm, her husband took her back to campus. She had a faculty meeting to attend. And when she took her seat, she was carrying a bag with a 9-mm Ruger inside.

The empty clip slid into the 9mm easily. Beth sat on her bed, the gun and its paraphernalia, strewn about, while she worked on it… [She] sat back down with the dictionary. She mulled over words like love, loneliness, hopelessness, despair. She looked at words like suicide and murder. from Easter in Boston

3:56 pm, February 12, 2010University of Alabama in Huntsville

Shelby Center for Science and Technology, Room 369R

When she heard the first deafening boom, Debra Moriarity thought the walls were caving in. “What’s falling?” she wondered as she looked up from the notes she’d been taking. She could hardly make sense of what she saw: Bishop was firing a pistol at her fellow scientists. For the better part of an hour, Bishop had been sitting at the end of a long conference table, listening to a dozen people discuss the biology department’s budget and other matters. Now standing near the room’s only door, she was transformed. Aiming at one colleague’s head after another, she pulled the trigger again and again. Boom. Boom.

Gopi Podila, the department chair who specialized in the molecular biology of plants, was already down and bleeding. So was Stephanie Monticciolo, the staff assistant who’d attended the 3 pm meeting to keep the minutes. Those two had been on Bishop’s right. Now she turned left and shot the person nearest to her: Adriel Johnson, an expert in gastrointestinal physiology. Next to Johnson was plant scientist Maria Ragland Davis. Bishop shot her, too. Then the department’s newest faculty member, molecular biologist Luis Cruz-Vera, was wounded in the chest by a ricocheting bullet or bone fragment. As Joseph Leahy, whose research focused on the biodegradation of hydrocarbons, ducked for cover, a bullet tore through the top of his head, severing his right optic nerve.

Moriarity had dived under the table. Now, kneeling on the rug, she grabbed hold of Bishop’s blue-jeaned leg. “Amy, don’t do this,” she pleaded. “Think about my grandson. Think about your daughter.” Bishop’s eldest daughter, Lily, was a student at the university; she studied biology with some of the people trapped in this room. “Please snap out of this,” Moriarity thought. “This has to stop.” As if in response, Bishop pointed the gun at Moriarity and pulled the trigger. Click. It didn’t fire. Moriarity, still on hands and knees, half-rolled, half-crawled toward the door, Bishop right behind her. Bishop’s eyes seemed cold and “very, very evil-looking.”

Just a few weeks before, Bishop had invited Moriarity, an expert on growth-factor signaling, to collaborate on a grant application to study an enzyme that might inhibit breast cancer. “You know, no matter where I end up, we’re going to write that grant together,” Bishop had said. Because she’d been denied tenure, Bishop would be leaving UAH soon. Still, she’d told Moriarity, “I really want to do that project.” Moriarity thought they were friends.

Now they were in the hall. Bishop took aim at Moriarity again, and again squeezed the trigger. Click. The gun still wouldn’t fire. “Somebody help us!” Moriarity screamed and threw herself back into the room, slamming the door. In the few seconds she was in motion, she could hear Bishop trying but failing to get her weapon to work. Click. Click. Click.

With six people wounded, there was blood everywhereon the table, on the chairs, on the white drywall. Someone used a coffee table to barricade the door. Someone else found a cell phone and dialed 911.

Moriarity and the five others who were unhurt tried to aid their ravaged colleagues, but all they had to stanch the bleeding were napkins and their own clothes. Podilathe affable 52-year-old department chair who had been one of Bishop’s biggest supporterswas on the floor. He would soon die from his wounds. So, too, would associate professors Johnson, also 52, and Davis, 50. Three of the six injured would survive. Cruz-Vera would be hospitalized briefly. But the other two wouldn’t be so lucky. A bullet had entered Monticciolo’s right cheek and exited through her left temple. Her sinuses were shattered, the teeth on the right side of her mouth knocked out. The shot left tooth fragments in her airway. She would be blind in her left eye. Leahy had numerous fractured facial bones that would require wiring his jaw shut, implanting a feeding peg into his stomach, and affixing a titanium plate to his forehead. Eventually he would develop an antibiotic-resistant staph infection. But that would come later. Right now, they huddled in the windowless, fluorescently lit conference room. Just 17 by 21 feet, it was their safe house and also their prison. They had no idea whether Bishop was coming back.

June 16, 2010Norfolk District Attorney‘s Office

Canton, Massachusetts

Norfolk district attorney William Keating didn’t mince words. “Jobs weren’t done, responsibilities weren’t met, justice was not served,” he said in a news conference where he made an announcement: Nearly 24 years after Seth Bishop’s death, a grand jury had indicted his sister, Amy, on a charge of first-degree murder.

Keating said law enforcement officers in Massachusetts had failed in 1986. Police never told the district attorney’s office that after Bishop shot her brother, she tried to commandeer a getaway car at gunpoint and that she refused to drop her gun until officers repeatedly ordered her to do so, Keating said.

After Keating’s media event, William Delahunt, who was district attorney in Norfolk at the time of the 1986 shooting, released a statement along with his former top assistant: They would have prosecuted Bishop back then, but the Braintree police did not provide them with necessary reports and photos from the crime scene.

One photo of Bishop’s bedroom showed a National Enquirer article on the floor. It was about the killing of the parents of actor Patrick Duffy, who played Bobby Ewing on the television show Dallas and also involved the use of a shotgun and the commandeering a vehicle from a car dealership.

Sam and Judy Bishop made their first lengthy statement since the Alabama killings, releasing a pointed four-page statement that reasserted their daughter’s innocence in the killing of their son, accused the news media of sensationalism, and scolded law enforcement for seeking a scapegoat. “This prejudicial, biased review of the 1986 facts is an enormous waste of public resources that does not in any way provide a benefit to the public and proceeds only for the purposes of assessing blame where no blame was involved,” the Bishops said. While they felt “a deep, unremitting sorrow for the families involved” in the Alabama shootings and could not explain what happened there, they said, “we know that what happened 23 years ago to our son, Seth, was an accident.”

“I’m sorry I was spared! I’m sorry I was spared! I’m sorry I was spared!” Olivia in Amazon Fever

June 18, 2010Madison County Jail

Huntsville, Alabama

Two days after being indicted in Massachusetts, Bishop slashed her wrists with a razor blade. She’d imagined, in Easter in Boston, “how easy it would be to just step over the railing and fall backwards onto the parking lot below… Six stories should be high enough.” But killing oneself wasn’t easy after all; she survived. “I tried to kill myself because I was hallucinatory/delusional and could not take UAH and being indicted for my brother’s accident,” she said in a letter to her friend Dinsmoor.

The two had kept in touch after she’d moved to Alabama. She would call him sometimes late at night, just to talk. They’d spoken about two weeks before the killings. She was upbeat about a new project, he said. “She was working on the cell incubator, which I think was going to segue into something called the neurister, which was going to be a computer made of neurons,” Dinsmoor says. It sounded like something right out of a Crichton novel.

Months later, Bishop began calling Dinsmoor frequently from jail. But it was a different Bishop, neither arrogant nor angry. This Bishop was beseeching. She wanted him to try to sell her writingthe three existing novels as well as a diary she was keeping about life behind bars.

Bishop’s dream of being a famous writer hadn’t died. Recently, she asked Dinsmoor to try to sell a poem, writtenimprobablyin rap style. Once, she mentioned sending some money to the families of her victims. “Here we are sitting in jail. Let me go ahead and tell you our tales,” goes the poem “Jailhouse Rap,” which, Bishop told Dinsmoor, has been adopted by her fellow inmates as a sort of anthem. “We sleep and dream our way out of here. Our powerlessness is very clear. ”

She wondered whether she could survive her boy’s childhood. She wondered if she could, without crying, watch her child that looked like Luke run and play. She wondered if she would fear losing Luke again so much that she would wish she were dead. from Easter in Boston

Jim Anderson’s houseMcDowling Drive

Huntsville, Alabama

Bishop’s framed Harvard diploma still hangs in a cubbylike office off the laundry room in the home that her husband hopes like hell he won’t have to sell. With his four children to feed and a wifethe family’s main breadwinnerawaiting trial for murder, money is tight. “Might even go get food stamps,” Anderson says, shaking his head.

He’s calling himself Jim now. Not James. Not Jimmy. Just Jim.

Lately, Anderson says, his family has spent more time than usual in this house. The kids still go to school, of course. Although she’s sitting in a jail cell, their mother remains adamant about that. “Are they doing their homework?” she quizzes her husband when she calls from lockup. “Are they getting out and exercising?

On this night, their three teenage daughters and 9-year-old son have shared a pizza after attending a martial arts class. They’re not shut-insAnderson seems to want to make that clear as he sponges down the blond-wood table in his white-paneled kitchen. Still, he says, it’s often easier to stay close to home.

With the kitchen cleaned up, Anderson leads a tour. First stop is the tiny office where the diplomas hang. Smiling, he points out Bishop’s two and his own “lonesome” one from Northeastern. He leads me past a corkboard that displays a bumper stickerI Love My Country, But I Fear My Governmentand out to the garage.

“That’s where they blew up the pipe,” he says, his voice dismissive. He’s talking about investigators who executed a search warrant back in March. He points to a spot on the floor where they found something suspicious. “They’re like, oh, my God, what’s this? It’s a piece of pipe. Quick, call the robot out. What didn’t get their interest was right above it,” he says. He’d been looking for a way to sterilize cartridges for the InQ cell incubator. He’d built a little chamber that was clamped in the vice. “Gauges, knobs, with a tube leading down to this tank of compressed gas on the ground. I had it labeled so it would be scary: “Do Not Stand In Front of This Device”. And guess where they were standing? I felt like saying, guys, you didn’t notice I had a tank of compressed oxygen in there? And two tanks full of propane?”

He rolls his eyes. Then he heads to his workshop, which doubles as a playroom. There is a low table covered with Legos, a huge periodic table on the wall, a terrarium filled with frogs. On his workbench sits a device that looks like a canister of gas with wires sticking out of one end. Anderson has affixed a handwritten label, block letters on blue packing tape: “This is NOT a Bomb”. He added the label after the search warrant was served, he says, “just in case they showed up again.”

Back in the kitchen, I ask him whether he or his wife ever kept a gun in the house, as has been alleged. “No, no, no. Not with three teenagers,” he says, chuckling faintly. I ask him about the 2008 incident his father describes, when Anderson Sr. and Bishop faced off in the whitewashed kitchen. Does Anderson recognize the kind of transformation of his wife that his father witnessed? “I think I’ve seen it once or twice,” he says, looking down. “But maybe it was just the angryyou know, some people get the angry face.”

I ask Anderson about whether he thinks eccentricity and scientific aptitude go hand in hand. He doesn’t hesitate. “Yeah, I think there’s a certain brilliance and a certain insanity that goes along with it,” he says matter-of-factly. “People ask, well, didn’t you see that in her? Didn’t she act unusual? It’s like, she acted no more unusual than any other scientist I’ve ever been with. You sit down with a bunch of scientists andI hate to say it, buttheir demeanor is more like him.” He nods toward his only son, curled up in a worn armchair in a corner. “You know, like a 9-year-old. Impulsive. Selfish. Me-first.”

Anderson and Bishop’s son, introduced to me earlier as “Kid Number Four,” is bright-eyed and skinny, like he’s going through a growth spurt. He has a drawing pad and a picture book about scary monsters in his lap. His face is rapt as he uses a pencil to copy a plaintive-looking creature, with its arms outstretched.

The boy’s last name is his father’s: Anderson. But his first name is the haunting one. It honors Amy Bishop‘s brother, a violinist who died too young. Seth.

Amy Wallace ([email protected]) wrote about the anti-vaccine movement in issue 17.11.

Source: http://allofbeer.com/2017/09/05/what-made-this-university-researcher-snap/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2017/09/05/what-made-this-university-researcher-snap/

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allofbeercom · 7 years ago

Text

What Made This University Researcher Snap?

4 pm, February 12, 2010University of Alabama in Huntsville

Shelby Center for Science and Technology, Loading Dock.

Amy Bishop is taken into custody soon after leaving the building where the shooting took place. The Huntsville Times / Landov

She would complete three unpublished novelsnearly 900 pages of strikingly autobiographical prose.

December 6, 1986The home of Amy’s parents, Samuel and Judith Bishop

46 Hollis Avenue, Braintree, Massachusetts

June 19, 1988Northeastern University commencement

Boston Garden

“Success dwells within you,” Bombeck told the graduates. “The trick is knowing it when you see it.”

Beth’s colleague: “I think I am bringing dumplings tomorrow to Dick’s … What are you bringing?”

Beth: “A gun… Death and destruction. Hell on earth. Horror.”

December 19, 1993the Home of Paul Rosenberg

14 Standish Street, Newton, Massachusetts

When the bomb squad arrived, they found that the contraption was designed to go off when the lid was pulled open. Rosenberg hadn’t done that. It probably saved his life.

<h31996Beth Israel Hospital Cardiology Department

330 Brookline Avenue, Boston

1999Hamilton Public Library

299 Bay Road, Hamilton, Massachusetts

March 16, 2002International House of Pancakes

Peabody, Massachusetts

While the maze of Bishop’s mind will surely be explored in court, it may never be fully mapped. This much, though, seems clear: The memory of her brother, Seth, haunted her.

March 2008McDowling Drive

Huntsville, Alabama

In short, Olivia’s career was DOA. from Amazon Fever

March 2009The Provost’s Office

University of Alabama in Huntsville

Summer 2009An Indoor Shooting Range

Huntsville, Alabama

2:30 pm, February 12, 2010Tara Subdivision

Huntsville, Alabama

Around 3 pm, her husband took her back to campus. She had a faculty meeting to attend. And when she took her seat, she was carrying a bag with a 9-mm Ruger inside.

3:56 pm, February 12, 2010University of Alabama in Huntsville

Shelby Center for Science and Technology, Room 369R

June 16, 2010Norfolk District Attorney‘s Office

Canton, Massachusetts

“I’m sorry I was spared! I’m sorry I was spared! I’m sorry I was spared!” Olivia in Amazon Fever

June 18, 2010Madison County Jail

Huntsville, Alabama

Jim Anderson’s houseMcDowling Drive

Huntsville, Alabama

He’s calling himself Jim now. Not James. Not Jimmy. Just Jim.

The boy’s last name is his father’s: Anderson. But his first name is the haunting one. It honors Amy Bishop‘s brother, a violinist who died too young. Seth.

Amy Wallace ([email protected]) wrote about the anti-vaccine movement in issue 17.11.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/2017/09/05/what-made-this-university-researcher-snap/

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