Oh, yes, I just love to get letters like this one:

hey, watsup
      hows it goin?

I was just wondering what the hell you think your doing here.

What the hell is your goal in life; is it to be some bum, that complains about his life and blames everything on a religion that you cant figure out.

What the hell are you doing.

Are you trying to ruin peoples lives or something,

I just finished my DADS letters to you about being an ex mormon like he is, and because of you, I might as well beat the hell out of him.

You just agrivated a kid that wants nothing but good in this life.

why do you have to be like that, why do you have to put down a religion.

Your mind is so fixed on nothing that you dont know what you are doing.

My dad lives far away, and divorced my mom when i was one.

No i never saw him that often,

But the next time he does come down here, i am going to beat the living day lights out of him.

Its people like you that make this place a terrible place to be in.

You put things up, and you dont know the kind of consequences that you will get,

You dont see the big picture.

You just like my dad, sit there and care about yourselves. This website of yours makes you feel good doesnt it.

your selfish.

Maybe thats why you and my dad are the same. Maybe you dont have any love in you. Maybe your so cought up with yourselves that you dont care to love anyone else, like a normal human does.

You denied the truth, and you know it, no-matter what you say, you know you are miserable, and feel rotten.

I went with my dad a little while ago, and he looked miserable.

I felt sorry for him.

But what can i do, He has no love in him, and neither do you.

You loveless hate filled man, that likes to ruin peoples relationships, and ruin peoples faith, and bring people down from when they were happy and enjoying life.

You need to shut the hell up and get on with life you loser.

What do you even say to that? It makes me feel so sad for both the writer and his father, but I don't for a second labor under the delusion that any of it is my fault. I wouldn't even if I knew what letter the writer is referring to.

My contribution to the March CD Mix of the Month Club was Children of the Beatles.

(The story so far.)

My pal Mark Bourne, a liberal Portland writer of SF and other good things, offered this eminently sensible tongue-lashing to disruptive antiwar protesters in a guest commentary column published in yesterday's Oregonian:

Limbaugh's loving every minute of it If you engage in knee-jerk belligerence while protesting, don't pretend to be representing me. If you shut down traffic or close bridges or force people to endure other annoyance-for-peace tactics, don't think that I'm with you. If you harangue our police, insult the soldiers who are honor-bound to obey the orders they are given, or throw a brick through a window (corporate or otherwise), absolutely don't count me among your number. Instead, consider me against you....

If nothing else, think of it like this: When you block traffic or provoke anger in those who might otherwise listen to your words, Rush Limbaugh is right there, loving every minute of it. [read all]

Yes, Limbaugh is loving this He closes with this line: "When you block traffic or provoke anger in those who might otherwise listen to your words, Rush Limbaugh is right there, loving every minute of it." Damn, they're getting it! But they won't listen to the guy. If anti-war Canadians can turn on Wayne Gretzky over supporting Bush, then anti-war people on this side of the 49th parallel will turn on Bourne. He'll be called a traitor to the cause. He'll be accused of having lost his courage or selling out. These people have closed minds, and they don't care about persuading anyone. You're either with them or you're against them. [read all]

It's eighteen days since the burglary, and I've only just now finished writing out my account of the event for our insurance claim. Boy, does my hand hurt. They wanted detail. I gave them detail.

I'll try to hit the highlights, because I feel like I've left everyone hanging on this one. Laura called me at the office at 3:45 that fateful Friday to tell me that our upstairs neighbor Jason had called her from his cell phone to say there'd been a break-in. I left the office immediately and got on the subway. I had a book in my bag, but I couldn't read. I was consumed with a sick anticipation of what might be missing. My laptop, surely. Stereo components? Possibly. What else? I didn't care what else. I just hoped the mess wasn't too bad.

When I changed trains, I realized that I didn't want to think any longer. I want to read about violent things happening to bad people. Fortunately, the book in my bag was Hard Freeze by Dan Simmons, and he and his antihero Joe Kurtz cheerfully obliged me for the next segment of the trip.

Thirty minutes after leaving the office, I reached the house. Jason was standing in the street outside with a police officer. I joined them. Jason had not yet been inside. He had been coming home from class when he saw the front door open and a panel missing from the bottom of the solid-wood inner front door. Through the hole left by the kicked-in panel, he could see that the door to my and Laura's apartment was open. Rather than going in, he called Laura's cell phone, then called the police.

The officer with him had not been responding to the call. Jason had simply flagged him down as he drove past, since no one else had showed up yet. Two more officers showed up within the next few minutes, and the three of them went inside the house with their hands on their guns, to be sure the place was empty. It was.

Going inside, I inspected the panel that had been removed from the inner front door. The trim from around the panel had been pried off and stacked neatly to one side, along with the panel itself, which had split lengthwise. Every police officer I spoke to that day put this down to the work of crack addicts, lying down in the tiny vestibule out of sight of people passing in the street. They all used that phrase exactly—"crack addicts." By the end of the day, it started to sound like "boogeymen," or "weapons of mass destruction." Scary, meaningless phonemes.

Inside the house, the door to our apartment had been kicked open. My office was in disarray with items from the desk strewn around the floor. I saw immediately that the laptop was gone. I'd been right about that. I also registered the absence of Laura's Palm V, which she hasn't carried with her for several months, from its cradle.

In the bedroom the mess was worse. Every drawer of every dresser had been opened. Much of the contents had been laid out on the floor. Her jewelry chest had been dismantled and the small drawers were all laid out neatly on the bed. Not being familiar enough with the jewelry, I couldn't say immediately what might be gone.

In the living room and kitchen, every cabinet had been opened but nothing appeared to be missing.

The door from the entry hall to the basement was open, and downstairs the door to our neighbor Charlie's apartment had also been forced open. I could see a mess inside, but didn't go inside.

The upstairs apartment was intact, perhaps thanks to Duke, the dachshund who lives there and barks whenever someone opens the front door.

Jason's roommate Chris showed up before long, and Laura wasn't far behind. Shana accompanied her home from the office and stuck around for the next couple of hours, for which Laura and I both were grateful. Laura, agitated, went in to have a look around. She emerged from the house with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of Johnnie Walker Blue Label in the other.

To the assembled residents and police officers she announced, "Well, thank God they didn't find the good scotch!"

Laura told me it looked like the modem was missing. I gave a statement to one of the investigating officers, reporting the laptop, Palm, and modem as stolen. Then the police left and we sat around to wait for the evidence team to arrive.

Meantime, I found the modem. It hadn't been taken; it had simply been knocked behind the desk. The connections were still intact, so I booted up, sent some email, and made a brief LiveJournal post. Laura called the bank to cancel our accounts, because there might have been information about them on the Palm.

Around 8:00 two officers, a man and a woman, showed up to dust for prints. They came up with nothing, although Laura learned a lot about printing from the female officer, and I learned a lot about burglary prevention and how it's only a game of holding them off long enough, not stopping them, from the male. After they were gone, we started cleaning up.

The cleanup actually went quickly, unlike the time this happened to Laura in the East Village. The burglars had not trashed the place. They had removed a lot of items from their proper places, but had done so fairly purposefully and methodically. We had everything straightened up in half an hour or so. (Is it right to be thankful for disciplined burglars?)

In the course of this, I found an opaque blue plastic shopping bag lying in the middle of the office floor. Inside was a couple hundred bucks in change, a pair of headphones, and Laura's Palm. It looked as if the burglars had thrown these items into a bag they found in the kitchen, then set it down or dropped it and forgotten as they left.

Sadly, the laptop didn't turn up, and Laura was also able to catalogue her missing jewelry. Five or six pieces, all sentimental.

Our friends Stephanie and Andrew, who lived in the apartment before us, brought us dinner that night. They also very generously watched the place the next day, devoid of locks as it was, while we went into the city to deal with the bank accounts.

We managed to get a bunch of new locks installed fairly quickly, but we're still working out more of the physical repairs to the house. We're also trying to get the insurance all squared away. Fortunately we have renters insurance this time, and we'll probably be able to replace the laptop. But who knows about the jewelry? Probably not.

The more difficult thing is replacing our sense of security at home. The new locks and other measures help, but Jesus—burglars at one end of the spectrum, terrorists at the other. It's enough to make you want to kick a panel out of reality's door and wriggle through.

Yesterday I received my judging materials for the 2003 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards (SF/Fantasy category). I have forty-odd manuscripts to read and grade in the next couple of weeks. I'm looking forward to diving in, but I also suspect that by the end of it I'll have more sympathy for magazine editors. What I'm really looking forward to understanding, though, is the editor's delight in discovering gold.

Tom Marzullo at http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=31702:

We have hit the various compounds and facilities in that urban area with great precision, seeking to spare the populace from harm. Yet in ignoring the publicly announced paradigm of our enemy, we are in all likelihood targeting places long empty of the enemy's strength. So where are these divisions of Republican Guards?...

If we use the same facts plainly in evidence—but evaluate them by first taking Saddam at his word, in the awful knowledge of his brutal tactics and arrogant disregard for human life—it becomes apparent that he has not planned to use human shields for his facilities, but rather for each of his individual soldiers. This stratagem at a stroke accomplishes several critical military and political goals. First, it reduces the effectiveness of our advanced standoff weapons—forces us into close combat and the increased casualties, both civilian and/or coalition that it will inevitably create. It also suppresses any internal revolt without diverting forces away from engaging coalition forces. On the political side, it uses our own citizens' paradigm of expecting quick, bloodless victory and our public policy of reducing civilian casualties against us.

So where is the Iraqi military? It is hiding in the homes of everyday citizens, suppressing any nascent revolt while using their own country's women and children as living sandbags—a stunningly brutal, but highly effective tactic. Hitler told us what he was planning in "Mein Kampf" and was ignored at the cost of rivers of blood, but we cannot afford to discount Saddam's announcement—nor should we. Sept. 11 should have already taught us that innocents are of no concern to terrorists or their supporters.

What I have seen leads me to suspect that what we are being drawn into is a partisan style, urban conflict rather than the conventional one we hoped for. This will create a flood of civilian and coalition casualties with the predictable adverse political fallout.

Before arriving in South Carolina, Shana told Laura and me something I think we already understood intellectually: "You might want to avoid the subject of politics for the duration of your stay."

I never had to trot it out, but I had my response ready should anyone ask me my opinion of the war: "I just hope it's over quickly."

Like I say, I never had to use my response, but Shana herself certainly had a brush with the need. While we were at the steeplechase Saturday, she wandered over to where I was attepting not to eat very much of the food piled on a friend's tailgate.

"See that fellow over there in the green Polo shirt?" she asked.

I looked and saw a fiftyish fellow one tailgate over, sitting in a lawn chair surrounded by friends and family. His hair was dark silver, slicked back, and his pencil-line mustache was trimmed meticulously.

"I see him," I said.

"That's Mr. Blunderbuss-Wesson*, an old friend of the family's. I was just over talking to him. He asks me, 'You live in New York now?' I say, 'Yes.' He says, 'You were there when the Twin Towers got hit?' I say, 'Yes.' And he says, 'Don't worry, we'll git 'em for you.'"

Somehow, I'm not looking for quite that much Southern hospitality.

What a weekend Laura and I just had! We arrived back late last night from three days in beautiful Aiken, South Carolina. We were invited by our dear friend Shana, who lives here in the city and was going home for the annual Aiken Steeplechase, an afternoon of horseracing that is one of the biggest events in town.

Shana's father is a successful entrepreneur and state senator. His private jet was dispatched to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey to pick us up Friday morning. There were nine passengers: Shana, her sister, her brother-in-law, their twin infants, Laura, me, Shana's fellow Aikenite-in-exile Joe, and Joe's friend Matt. The jet seated seven passengers, so we were at capacity.

Laura and I stayed for the weekend in an upstairs bedroom in the senator's home in Aiken. We were treated to all the hospitality for which the South is famous (this was my first excursion into the real South), with far more caring and far less pretentiousness than I perhaps had expected.

Saturday afternoon at the Steeplechase was quite an experience. Thousands of cars pulled into neat rows around both the interior and exterior rails of the track, with boisterous but not rowdy tailgate parties everywhere. Wandering from place to place, we ended up at a central tent where the governor of South Carolina, dressed down in chinos and a plaid shirt, was shaking hands and breaking hearts left and right.

Saturday night we stayed out late—very late—with Shana's crowd of friends at a succession of great bars in Aiken, culminating at Whiskey Junction, a dark and amiable cinderblock cavern that sits behind a gas station on Whiskey Road, feels like a combination roadhouse and disco, serves two-dollar beers, and gives the impression from its entrance area that it spent a previous life as a strip club. The house band Wax Bean played hits that ranged from the expected Janis Joplin and Lynyrd Skynyrd to Pearl Jam, Live, and No Doubt, and between sets the DJ spun current rap and hip-hop. We danced until I thought I'd drop dead from a heart attack.

Sunday afternoon, in an amazing episode arranged by Shana's mother, we were invited to call on the neighbors down the street—Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, authors of true-crime books like The Mormon Murders and the massive biography Jackson Pollock: An American Saga (basis for the Ed Harris film). We received a tour of the amazing rambling mansion they inhabit (the purchase and renovation of which was chronicled in their book On a Street Called Easy, in a Cottage Called Joye), a place where every room contained not just architectural wonders but magnificent works of art—much 19th century American statuary, but also paintings by contemporaries and influences of Winslow Homer and Vincent Van Gogh (on whom they're at work on a biography), 16th century Japanese prints, Buddhas from southeast Asia, bronze Rodin castings, and sketches and silkscreens by Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Jackson Pollock. Despite all this, for me the most amazing sight in Joye Cottage was what looked like a humble diploma sitting on the mantle in one room. I stepped closer to read the citation.

It was the Pulitzer certificate for Steve and Greg's Jackson Pollock.

Still and all, the most vivid memory of our weekend in Aiken will always be Mike Hunt, whose campaign for Aiken County sheriff inspired a never-ending barrage of jokes all weekend long amongst the crowd we ran with. The eight of us seated together for dinner Friday night at a delightful restaurant called No. 10 Downing Street did little else but devise Mike Hunt cracks all through the meal, and there was not much let-up the rest of the weekend.

I'm not sure how this campaign sign found its way to Queens, but rest assured it will be displayed proudly at the first backyard barbecue of summer:

from http://www.dailyreckoning.com/home.cfm?loc=/body_headline.cfm&qs=id=3024

During the Clinton years, quite a few international affairs specialists wondered why American pre-eminence had not given rise to the kind of counterbalancing and ganging up against the leading power that classic international relations theory and diplomatic history would lead one to expect. Russia and China briefly eyed one another as allies, the Europeans griped, but nowhere did major countries come close to forming real military alliances to counter America's strength. Why not?

The most persuasive answer came from Joseph Joffe, a conservative pro-Atlanticist German. He wrote that while there was plenty of smoldering resentment of American power, no one felt it necessary to ally against it. The United States was a hegemon "different from all its predecessors. America annoys and antagonizes, but it does not conquer.... This is a critical departure from the traditional ways of the high and mighty. For the balance of power machinery to crank up, it makes a difference whether the rest of the world faces a huge but unusually placid elephant or a caniverous [sic] tyrannosaurus rex." America is an elephant that lumbers but does not crush and that uses its hegemony to create "public goods"—institutions that the rest needs for security and economic growth.

If America invades Iraq, the bottom will fall out of this argument. The first consequence would probably be sharp drop in international co-operation against terrorism, especially terrorism directed against the United States. After that, we can contemplate new alliances: Russia and China, Europe and the (unoccupied) Middle East, an international system in rapid flux but increasingly focused on restraining American power. Of course, the United States will always have Israel as its friend.

I was thinking about the war today
New York is a target, no doubt
People on the street, shoulders tensed
Against the possibility of flame and flying glass
What is it like in Baghdad tonight?
To know the bombs are coming
What kind of prayer is it to ask
Please, please, let it be someone else?