I want you to picture something.
You work at a toy'r'us.

it's the saturday before christmas

you don't have any of the cool buzz lightyears that in the ad(and you only got three when you did have them any way)

the boss took the day off (presumably he didn't think it was an important day)

he also left you with less staff than you would have on a normal saturday.(approximately half of which are B-players you wouldn't even have hired much less have still working.)

everything profitable is locked up so you customers can't help themselves (even assuming that they knew enough about the product to)

every eighth customer tramples the six patient(they at least know that they should be embarassed to be shopping at the last minute) customers to blurt out "is this the right doll for my kid!?"

you have a slightly misanthropic nature in the best of crowds.

with that picture in your head I am going to bed.

I have a bimbobox. It's not like the standard ones from chrysler that are made out of a car. It's the chevy astro flavor wit light truck underpinnings. It has a relatively new motor and the frame and floor is perfect. The doorskins and rocker panels have succumbed to the great cancer that eventually claims all vehicles here in the Rust belt. For quite awhile I possessed this minivan without actually using it. Part of it was financial. I just didn't want to spend the money to fix it,but some of it was that I didn't really put being a bimbobox driver at the top of my priority list.

I am here to tell you folks I was wrong(insert social distortion tune here). Minivans are cool. you can load three kids, wife, and all their assorted paraphernalia into the van and go to the beach. Without drama. You can make it so none of the kids can even touch each other. they are cool.

plus you sit up high enough that you can look down into other vehicles. In western new york in the summer, that's a pretty nice perk

Have Imentioned that I hate the heat? In case I haven't i'll mention it again.

I have been peering internally to try and figure out where my nearly unbreakable obsession with going to see the new TombRaider. I desperately want to see it. The problem is this: My wife and I get out to see slightly less the two movies a year. I don't even want to ask her to go see this one. It's not that she won't enjoy it, but if she gets to go out to only one movie each year, she likes it to be something with substance.

So the question becomes why the obsession?

The knee jerk answer is Angelina but that doesn't really make the cut. My wife is at least that sexy and is married to me instead of billybob. The next obvious answer is the obvious eyecandy and effects. But I'm not that powerfully motivated by F/X either.

And then it came to me. Molly.

yes that Molly. the one he wrote out of the script when he realized that the movie would suck and he would lose the rights to use her again. And since Johnny dies before neuromancer even begins nobody cared about losing him.

"You want to get out of here, boss? People are starting to stare." She stood up. She was wearing leather jeans the color of dried blood.

How can you not fall in love with a girl like that. That sexy lithe sweet little thing, who just happens to be armed to the teeth, and ready to kill to protect you. Gibson isn't alone in his creation. Heinlein wrote Friday. parts of her trickled into America Shaftoe for Neal Stephenson.

So how did we(I say we because I know I am not alone) get this little obsession? This need for a girl who is sex, violence, death. and savior all rolled into one. For me I think I know the answer.

I first met Molly when I was fourteen or fifteen. I didn't fit in in school. I got my ass kicked on a regular basis(this was before I discovered the secret of not getting your ass kicked all the time. Once, just once, you have to react out of proportion to the offense. Billy Joe Jock hits you in some kind of locker room bullying, hit him in the side of the face with the combination lock in your hand. when he goes down hit him again. once he is on the ground just keep kicking him, don't stop till someone comes to pull you off. get him once more in the face with you booted foot as they pull you off. No jock ever hit's you like that again. the verbal abuse will continue but always from a distance.) I had been a practicing pacifist for years, even to the point that I wouldn't hit back in a fight. but somewhere inside there was a thing growing. A thing built of a pubescent male fantasy. the rescue thing. the sex thing. the need for a girl who's just not like the other girls.

In college(the first attempt) I had a friend who taught me to fence. She was good, competed nationally, the whole bit. Even after I reached the point where I was good, my six inches of reach advantage didn't mean i ever won a match with her. While she was very attractive, the sex thing just wasn't there for us. But the violence, that was there. In spades.

years go by. I meet a nearly perfect(although decidedly non violent) woman. Marry her, have kids and eight years into that it just keeps getting better. but somewher the is still that little fantasy part that knows I betrayed Molly. And that is one little girl you don't want to be betraying.

Maybe I'll go see TombRaider alone.

old news
after you read that go read this

I often tell people that there is no better place in the world to live than western new york. you get four perfect seasons. there are things to do. the apples and peaches are better here than anywhere else on the planet. unlike many people who might make this claim, i have actually been other places but chose to come back here.

there is one little thing i forgot to mention. It can get hot in the summer. like alabama hot. like 90 degrees fahrenheit and 90 percent humidity. one thing i can say about winter; you can always put more clothes on. after a certain point you can't get any more naked in the summer. hopefully this weather will be mercifully brief.

Here are some of the things I have done in the last few days.

I took a ride delivering a sailboat upriver and got caught in a vale of dogwoods so thick it looked like flurries.

I drove the family communal one ton stake bed Chevy truck out to the very small town where my inlaws live. circumstances dictated that I drive the stuck down the center of town, climb out of the truck wearing grease-stained clothes and walk into the combination gas station/subshop/grocery store. I am not sure if I can convey to you just how white trash I looked at that moment.

I brought the old chevy astro van that my father in law gave my wife(she promptly failed to take into account the small item of having to put back the oil that leaked and wound up with bits of crankshaft all over the road) in to the garage that one of my little brother's friends just purchased. Since the incident with the crankshaft the van has had another engine installed, but it's never run. Because I was constantly travelling while this was going on I was never close to the details and never really put the effort into figuring out what the problem was that I should have. Well, the hard unfortunate truth is that my brother's friend not only figured it out in less than twenty minutes when three other mechanics failed he did it whilst continuing to run all the paying customers through the shop. Frank's da man. I mean it. If you live in the area he has the old sunoco station just south of the 290 on Niagara Falls Blvd.

I became involved in the barter economy. See it works like this. My brother(who is a detail obsessed gunsmith who needs a shop) builds a very nice "AT&T" rifle for Frank out of parts that Frank pays for. Frank gets an incredibly accurate long range bolt action rifle for the price of raw materials. I provide a bunch of free semi-skilled labor to my brother while he builds some furniture on contract. My brother eventuall collects severall thousand dollars for the furniture. I get my van fixed for the price of the parts. Nobody spends as much money as it really costs (except the furniture buyer who is actually getting a price only couple hundred dollars less than they would have paid elsewhere). I got a running van for the price of the parts and access to a really nice shop when I need it for the other vehicles. none of this ever exists in the money economy. so I with the assistance of some other people enriched all of our lives while reducing the GNP proportionately.

I took my two younger boys to the hot dog stand on the canal that I very occasionally went to whe I was a kid.

A kid I knew was killed this morning. Granted I only knew him in the tangential way that you know the older brother of your best friend's girlfriend. But I live in a small town and we all know each other at least a little.

He was a bright kid. A bit prone to railing on about the injustices in the world but bright nonetheless. He was a skillful and caring hunter. His dad and he didn't get along very well. He adored his little sister. Who adored him even more.

He voluntarily served his country in a war which he did not believe in. Unlike the Vietnam Veterans, he came back to flags, fanfare and a hero's welcome. and a minimum wage job with no real future.

He was angry with the way he had been used in the gulf war. He was angry with the way our government treated certain bizarre religious sects. He was angry with the way our government treated people who were paranoid and afraid of the government(I interrupt this otherwise terse monologue to remind you that just because you are paranoid doesn't mean you are wrong). He was angry at the way small farm families were being treated at the hands of the corporations who actually had influence with our government.

He was just plain angry at a lot of things. Then he did something stupid. He let that anger fester into a rage while he waited for somebody else to do something about the things he was angry about. "They", to noone's surprise, didn't do a damn thing.

Then, to the surprise of practically everyone who ever knew him, he murdered 168 or so people.

There are, however, some things to remember on the event of "we the People"'s retribution:

Our government is still guilty of everything that he accused it.

there are lots of other angry ragefilled wackjobs out there

most of them have good justifications for their rage

we, the common people still have little or no access to government even at a local level(don't believe me? go down to your local school board and try to get a copy of their bylaws and policies without going through hours of paperwork and eventually having to threat a FOIA suit)

most of us would agree that it is better to effect change in a manner which does not kill people, but it only takes one person to screw it up for the rest of us.

our federal agents are fortunate that with the current administration's new focus on removing the first and fourth ammendment rights of U.S. citizens that they will be less likely to meet an untimely death at the hands of a very scared fourteen year boy. Fans of the first and fourth ammendments tend to be less heavily armed that do fans of the second.

No matter what the media and other related spin doctors say, Timothy McVeigh was not a White Supremacist Christian Identity wackjob. Whatever kind of wackjob he was, he was one of the most vehemently antiracist people I've ever met.

p.s. lest any of you readers worry about my state of mind. Don't worry!! I'm not angry or going to blow anything up. Not only do I have a wife and three kids to care for, but in my old age I find that I am too feeble to carry on Rage for enough time to listen to a Ministry album all the way through let alone plan anything destructive.

here's a search query I like and look there I am number six on the list. but from number one one the list:

The Archer Daniels Midland Corporation (ADM) has been the most prominent recipient of corporate welfare in recent U.S. history. ADM and its chairman Dwayne Andreas have lavishly fertilized both political parties with millions of dollars in handouts and in return have reaped billion-dollar windfalls from taxpayers and consumers. Thanks to federal protection of the domestic sugar industry, ethanol subsidies, subsidized grain exports, and various other programs, ADM has cost the American economy billions of dollars since 1980 and has indirectly cost Americans tens of billions of dollars in higher prices and higher taxes over that same period. At least 43 percent of ADM's annual profits are from products heavily subsidized or protected by the American government. Moreover, every $1 of profits earned by ADM's corn sweetener operation costs consumers $10, and every $1 of profits earned by its ethanol operation costs taxpayers $30.

And that boys and girls is just the economic havoc they cause. wait till you see the long term ecoligical damage from their monoculture pesticide and chemical fertilizer intense one size fits all approach to agribusiness does. in another decade or so most of the "breadbasket to the world" the midwest united states will be capable of growing slightly less food than the sahara.