Forty eight years old. Still not dead. But this year's different than every year for the last seven: this year, I think maybe I know why. I have to explain this again, because I know that my obsession with this question sounds macabre. And I was reminded again this evening at dinner that I really haven't explained well enough, not even to most of my closest friends, what my question has been for the last seven years, and why it was so important to me. So let me start at the beginning:

By the age of 13, I'd come within in an inch of my life three times already, and each time, I'd survived by a combination of skill and luck. And around the time of my 14th birthday, thinking back on this, I realized something: sooner or later, the coin comes up tails. So I did some back of an envelope calculations, assuming that because of my particular distinct problems I would face a 50/50 chance of death every 4 years or so. I already understood, instinctively, the difference between dependent and independent probability, so I graphed it out: how many years can I last? How many times in a row do I have to throw "heads" to make it to a certain age? And I saw the graph had a distinct "knee" at about age 35, that the odds of my making it to 35 were about on the order of dozens to 1 against (as best as I recall, and I'm too lazy to do the math again), and the next multiple of four to five years after that were on the order of a hundred to one against. So I concluded, based on my math, that anything I didn't get done by age 35 almost certainly wasn't going to get done. And if I did make it to 35, I'd better be damned sure to spend the time from then to the next catastrophe getting as much done as possible. I needed to leave no dependents, I needed to leave no projects undone, and I needed to make for damned sure, every day from about age 25 or so on, that everybody I loved knew that I loved them. Simple math.

I made it to 40.

And when I made it to 40, I went back over my life history, totaling up the catastrophes that stood at least a 50/50 chance of killing me, every accident, every disaster, every bad decision, every doctor who wouldn't listen to what I was saying because I couldn't figure out how to get him or her to understand or believe me, every person in authority who massively over-reacted to the irreducible weirdness of my various mental disorders and threatened to shoot me or who set out to wreck my life. I wasn't wrong, as a kid: it's been about every 3 to 7 years. And every single one of them was a close call of some kind. So for seven years now, I've been trying to figure out, with something akin to desperation, why am I still alive? How in the hell do I keep throwing heads? Can I keep doing this? Or am I just playing Russian Roulette with a Tommy gun with one dud bullet in a full drum? Do the odds stay 50/50 the next time? And the next time? And the next time? From now until my luck runs out? Or is there a fundamental flaw in my theory?

Now do you understand? Good. Because I think I do have an answer, now. Maybe. I at least have a hypothesis, and that's more than I had seven years ago: I had one truly lucky day, and that one day changed everything. I've told the story in more detail before, and my friends have all heard it in full florid Technicolor: the story of how I accidentally bought a house. My divorce from my deranged ex-wife left me fragile, and more to the point, friendless: she had spent three years making sure that I didn't have a single friend in the whole world other than her. I didn't know it at the time, but it should have been obvious from the math that I did, in fact, have yet another disaster in my short-term future, about three years out. Had nothing else changed, that disaster would still have happened, and this time, there would have been no one to help me; no one would have even known when I lost everything, had nowhere to turn, found myself homeless and starving and sick, and shortly thereafter died -- right on schedule, at age 36.

But one day when I was 33, sitting in my apartment alone on a weekday because I had vacation days I had to use up or lose, in a fit of boredom I decided to spend an afternoon looking at other people's houses that were for sale, and mentally mocking their stuff. Through a chain of events so improbable and funny that they make a good story in and of themselves, 18 hours later I was the owner of my own house. And not just any house: I had, by insanely implausible luck, stumbled into a house that was almost completely perfectly designed for entertaining. It was also a house that was way, way too big for me. And I was, at least temporarily (I being a network engineer, and this being at the beginning of the dot-com bubble) making a hell of a lot of money, by my working class standards, more money than it could reasonably cost to keep me in food, clothes, and toys. So I did two things, both of them entirely selfish on my part.

First of all, for the next three years, any time an even mildly pretty girl that I knew became homeless, if I had a spare room, I offered it to her. I asked nothing from them; I got my payment because I just plain like having pretty girls around. Creepy, but there you have it. I never missed the tiny amount of groceries any of them ate, they never even showed up as a blip on the utility bills, they were using rooms I seldom used and one of the too many parking spaces outside, and in exchange for this absolutely nothing on my part, I got to eat the occasional dinner with or eat breakfast with a pretty girl. Win. Didn't hurt that I tended to pick them for being well read, artists (I'm a total sucker for artists), and/or good conversationalists, either. None of them were mine. Which was fine; I wasn't looking for a girlfriend, and never minded their boyfriends. (Well, twice. But they were both total jerks, and I think I was more than adequately polite to both of them, enough that I know that they both liked me.) I just liked having the company. And because I've had serious problems with inappropriately-felt gratitude before (it wrecked the closest thing I've ever had to a stable poly triad), I always made it clear to them that they owed me no favors, that just being there was as much a favor to me as the room and board was a favor to them.

Anyway, the other thing I did, for equally selfish reasons, was started throwing parties, and I mean a lot of parties, one every 6 to 8 weeks for the next three years. The Infamous Brad Parties, they came to be known as, because I put hard work and scientific study into trying to figure out how to throw good parties. Although honestly, I hardly had to work at it: I know that my pretty roommates, my fun-house house, and the couple of hundred bucks of free food and booze I threw out every six to eight weeks were the main attraction, not me. Those parties ran me ragged; I don't think I ever once had a good time actually at one of my parties. For me, the fun was over about half an hour after the door first opened; all the fun was the time up to that part, plus an hour or two of "post mortem" and "lessons learned" the next day over breakfast. That part, on the other hand, never stopped being fun, and I sometimes miss it terribly.

And then, sure as heck, as regular as clockwork, disaster struck. I won't go into the details again at this time, but my career was over, as dead as any Kennedy. I got offered more help than usual, but that's not why I survived, that time, not least of which because I turned down most of the help I was offered. I got through that one on my usual combination of determination, skill, and holy frelling cats the tiniest ever sliver of last-second luck I ever had. The money to start my next career was tied up in the house, and had closing been delayed for another six hours, that money would have gone to bankruptcy court, not me, and I might well have ended up under that bridge abutment that's been lurking in my future all this time, waiting for organ failure or violent death. I never want to have that close a call again, I count that one as narrower than the time an armed gang tried to kill me and the only way I survived was to convince them their first blow had done the job.

But the next time, the disaster came early. My own poor planning and lack of skill combined with some truly awful luck to kill off yet another career, plus six layers of emergency backup plans laid in advance, and I limped back to St. Louis with almost nothing, and promptly had almost all of the remainder stolen, first by a couple of teenage car thieves, and most of the rest by two corrupt cops on the St. Louis City Police Department. And when I wore out the welcome on my last couch to crash on after that ...

It got weird.

People came out of the woodwork, including people I didn't even know all that well, including people who I'd barely met once or twice and couldn't pull out of a police lineup (but then, I'm bad about that), people who'd never even met me. And with a level of determination usually only seen in intensive care wards (and one of them is, in fact, an emergency room doctor by trade, perhaps not a coincidence), they would not let me die, long past the point where I cared if I made it through that particular disaster or not. And since then, half of them have stuck around and keep reminding me that they are just plain never going to let me die. Some of them would even grudgingly admit that I'm not much use to much of anybody, any more, but it doesn't matter, nor does it matter that I did get done everything I ever wanted to do in my life by age 40; I'm going to end up as a brain in a jar on Futurama and there just isn't anything that any enemy, or any disaster, or any disease has to say about it, or that even I get to say about it.

Because on one day, so long ago that some of you were still in grade school, I had one incredible freaky lucky day. And my own selfishness in the three or so years after that established a reputation that no long chain of selfish acts has been able to erase, a reputation for goodness and generosity. I have tried to beat that reputation to death with a club of facts and self-revelation for years, because it's just not true, but it just won't die. And that's why I'm alive: because some freaky electrical signal in my bored mind one day, or some mischievous god, put it into my head to look at one house nobody in his right mind would have looked at on the very day the owners put it up for sale the second time at exactly the price I couldn't turn down. Luck. Permanent luck, the kind of luck that no statistics can predict in advance, the kind of luck that changes futures forever. And it probably is forever; because I have that reputation that won't die, people keep putting me in positions to help other people, where it's clearly in my own selfish interest to do so, and keep giving me the resources to do it, and then inexplicably giving me the credit for all their work.

The actuarial tables tell me, based on age, weight, zip code, income, diet, social class, (lack of a) daily commute, and flawed family and medical history that I've got about 30 more years of this to go. I'm about due for another disaster, any year now at the earliest, three to four years from now at the latest as such things go, and then another one every 3 to 7 years after that, so call it another six disasters before total permanent organ failure of some kind overtakes me. But I now have so much more help than I could have predicted was possible back in 1974, the odds are not based on the 2 to the 6th power to one odds against my throwing heads six more times. The odds are that three of those times, I'll throw heads, and the other three of those times, people who think that I'm this great and generous guy will bale me out whether I want them to or not.

I may actually be beginning to be at peace with the idea.

True story.

I'm not really close to any of my family, but I hear of one of them rather more often than the others. About once every three or four years, he makes the news locally, in some minor way, and I recognize his name: he's in law enforcement, and he's the officer quoted in some news story about that often. And I notice something every time, without exception. But first, some preface.

I've scarcely seen him at all since a family holiday event a smidgen over 25 years ago. I was back from college, he was a recent college graduate working for the county police department. And it came up in conversation that he'd been recently assigned to the vice and narcotics squad, working undercover. Knowing what I knew about vice and narcotics work in general, and about the then truly awful reputation of the county's vice and narcotics squad, I expressed my sympathy, and assured him that most officers find it pretty easy to rotate out within at most a year or two. He demured, and stated right out loud that he'd asked for the transfer to narcotics and vice, and intended to make a career out of it. I couldn't square that with his life-long reputation as the straightest of straight arrows in the family, as someone with zero taste for any kind of moral or ethical compromise, couldn't see how he could do work that compromises you ethically and morally even in the cleanest of departments, which the county vice and narcotics squad absolutely wasn't at the time. He couldn't understand what part of it was confusing me. So after talking past each other for a while, I brought up all the scandals I'd seen in the past year's worth of newspapers, asked how a guy who felt the way he did could make the ethical and moral compromises necessary to do undercover work at all, let alone participate in cover-ups of criminal activity by fellow officers and superior officers, and not want to escape it as fast as possible?

I think I was expecting some kind of nuanced answer. I did not get one, nor was I braced at all for what I got: an explosion. Incoherent, angry raving and screaming. To which, being no more mature than any other 20-something, I responded by trying to yell over him to try to ask him what he was yelling about, which, of course, only made things worse. The family began to steadily gather around us from other rooms, to see what the yelling was about, just in time for he and I to figure out exactly what the point of conflict was between us:

My relative is firmly of the opinion that it is flatly never acceptable to place your own moral judgment above that of anybody in authority over you. Ever. Not only is it never acceptable, it's never moral. Not only is it never moral, it is never even legal, he insisted. Not only is it illegal, but it's a sign of a sick mind; only the most twisted and psychopathic and immoral of perverted reprobates says that their moral judgment is more reliable and more trustworthy than that of any authority figure over them. If someone in authority over you tells you that something is moral, then either that settles it, or you're the kind of criminal monster sicko that guys like my relative have sworn to protect society against. And when he got that across to me, I lost my temper even bigger than he had. I reminded him of the Fourth Nuremberg Principle, as I'd been taught it all the way back in first grade: "I was only following orders" is not a defense, it's an indictment. I reminded him that we had sent Nazi and Japanese war criminals to long prison sentences for not exercising independent moral judgment when given immoral orders by their superiors. Within seconds, we were both screaming apoplectics, and that's when the whole family stepped in to separate us. Both his mother and my father said the same thing: "There is no way for you two to ever talk to each other ever again, if that's how you both feel." And we've both stuck to it, even at my parents' funerals; he stays over there, I stay over here. Even though he's almost one of the only living relatives I have in the local area, we never, ever interact, and it suits us both just fine.

And the thing is, in the immediate aftermath of that screaming match, my parents said something to me that took me decades to even grudgingly accept the possibility of: they told me that both he and I are completely insane on this subject. Someone who can never accept another person's moral authority when that person is in authority is just as crazy as someone who can never question it, they told me; the sane course is to know when the other person's moral authority is more trustworthy than your own, and to know when to question it. Some days, I can even intellectually accept that. But I cannot make myself actually believe it. I can be persuaded, when no moral issue is at stake, to follow orders I disagree with, because I accept that sometimes it's just not up to me. When moral issues are at stake but those in authority decree that there is to be no punishment for the path that's abhorrent to me, I can usually pretty effortlessly persuade myself to suspend judgment on others, usually even mind my own business, especially in cases where the people who're accepting the moral mis-steps are themselves the only ones being ripped off or hurt. But I can never, ever, ever judge right and wrong, especially as it applies to my own actions, by any standard other than my own moral compass.

Chalk it up as more evidence that I'm crazy, I know. But here's the thing I notice, every time he's in the news: he's gotten another promotion. Every couple of years, he moves up in rank, moves to a more prestigious department, or both. My particular insanity on this subject has rendered me unemployable, made enough actual and potential employers and co-workers uncomfortable as to have explicitly cost me three jobs, for not being unethical enough. Even when I was willing to go along to get along, people felt judged. His insanity, on the other hand, has been steadily lucrative for him, a lifetime source of satisfaction and prestige. And that makes me uncomfortable in ways I can't even begin to express, not all of which I even understand myself.

I got sent a link to another blog that Orcinus' Sara Robinson is also all-too-infrequently guest blogging at, her column at the website of the Campaign for America's Future. The person who sent me the link wanted to show me her column, "When Change is Not Enough: The Seven Steps to Revolution," and it's good stuff. In fact, everything by her, especially the stuff there, is good stuff. If you wish I was writing more, stop looking for my stuff on days that I don't get around to it, and go looking for her stuff, which is better than mine, anyway. But as I was reading over the columns there, something in "Mythbusting Canadian Healthcare, Part II: Debunking the Free Marketers" reminded me of a grim story from my own past that I've been meaning to share. First, here's what she said, at this point in the article on the accusation that only single-payer systems "ration health care," that the American system doesn't:

Another persistent (and ridiculously mendacious) rationing myth about the Canadian system is that old people are cut off from treatment and left to die. I've never heard about a single case of this in Canada; but it happens routinely to Americans on Medicare and many private policies, which have strict limits on how long you can stay in the hospital with an acute illness. When the benefits run out, ready or not, they send you home. If you die, you die. The Canadian plan has no such limits: you stay for as long as you need to. But in the US, these limits fit the very definition of "rationed care."
-- Sara Robinson, "Mythbusting Canadian Healthcare, Part II," Campaign for America's Future, 2/11/08

In 1983 I was working for no-longer-extant (but then the single largest in the entire world) defense contractor McDonnell Douglas, in the McDonnell Aircraft Quality Assurance department. QA tended to be a lot of guys who'd worked their way up from the factory floor, using their union benefits to take college classes. Everybody knew each other from way back; young guys like me fresh out of college were a rarity. And one day, when I'd been there for less than a year, we had a guy literally die at his desk. Here's his story.

He was in his mid 40s, a health food nut and an exercise freak, and six months before this story he had a massive, massive heart attack. Way beyond what you're used to hearing called "massive" in heart attacks, almost half his heart blew out at once. Congenital, probably. He was "exempt," not qualified any more to be in the union, so he didn't get the union health plan. He got the same corporate health plan I got, the same one all the engineering guys and all the low to middle managers got too. It covered his surgery, covered his first month in the hospital recovering, and then there was a benefits review. Because his doctors were, frankly, still going back in from time to time to patch more blown-out arteries and patch more damaged muscle tissue; his attack had been that massive. They were saying that it would be at least a year before he could sit up under his own strength, let alone return to work, but if they could keep working on him, then put him through very patient physical therapy, they could eventually return him to work in about a year to 18 months. (If that sounds implausible to you, please remember that this was 25 years ago. The state of the art in heart surgery has advanced since then.)

But that posed a problem: the insurance plan only covered six months of convalescent care. More importantly, the company had a hard-and-fast rule that nobody could miss more than that six months, period, or they'd be fired ... and, this being back before COBRA, their health benefits immediately terminated. As it was, during those six months of convalescence, they were only paying something like 1/3rd of his regular salary, but at least they were continuing to pay his insurance premiums. So they had a conference, I was told, and the doctors said, well, look, we don't see any way to get him back to work for even one day six months from now, but we'll try.

Six months later? Not even a chance. So his manager, and his entire department, and of course his family, and even the union although he was no longer a member, lobbied the human resources department hard for a one-time exception to the "can't miss six months of work" rule, in light of the fact that the guy had literally been with the company for decades, had valuable knowledge the company didn't want to lose, had never missed a day of work in his life. Grudgingly, complainingly, the HR department offered this "compromise:" if he came back to work for one day, any time before his six months off work ran out, they would hand down a one-time ruling that for him and him only, that would reset the clock on his disability time off, that he could then recover for another six months. If he wasn't willing to come in and pretend to work that one day, tough. His doctors were aghast. They said it couldn't be done, that it would kill him, no matter how careful he was. They begged him to stay, offering to find some way to find some charity that would step in, while admitting they'd been trying to find such a charity for a month and had no luck. Finally, on the last day of HR's ultimatum, he felt that he had no choice. He checked himself out of the hospital, a.m.a. (Against Medical Advice, a standard acronym, not a pun on the American Medical Association.)

His family and his co-workers carried him to the car on a stretcher, with the tubes still in him, carrying his tube stands. They carried him on a stretcher to his desk, lifted him into his chair, being careful not to damage the lines hooking him up to various IV drips and catheters and such. And then his manager flatly ruled that other than the one person who would stand watch over him, nobody was to go near him. His phone was switched not to allow inbound calls. His in-box was taken away from him. He was told to rest, no actual work would come his way, 4.5 hours from now they were going to "send him home early" and make HR call that "good enough." He never had a chance, as his doctors predicted. Two hours in, unhealed stitches in his heart blew from the strain of having been moved around that much; he bled out internally and died within seconds.

Everybody in QA was wrecked. An hour or so later, I made a bitter, Brad-like joke, alluding to the classic bit of cubicle art, the fake management sign insisting that any employees who die on the job fall down, so as to make it possible to tell the difference between them and the employees who are merely not working. The co-worker I told this to thought I was being disgusting, until I explained that I had to find some way to laugh about this, whether in good taste or not. Because if I didn't, I was going to march over to HR with a fireman's axe and have a "conversation" with the person who blackmailed this guy into committing suicide in front of his co-workers, and leaving us to call the ambulance and notify the family.

Even before the widespread adoption of America's official health-care-rationing system, the "Health Maintenance Organization," even before Reagan made us all flush any two-way loyalty between corporations and their employees down the drain, let alone between the employees themselves, I had my own deep-seated and implacable reason to think that it's morally evil to expect people to get their health care from the corporation that hires them, and to expect that corporation to do right by them. Nothing I've seen since then has changed my mind one bit. To your corporate employer, with its obligation to screw whoever they can get away with for profit and its carefully designed system to diffuse blame so its managers can all sleep at night, well, as Sara Robinson said, "if you die, you die."

Neopaganism (the religion and not the early-2oth-century literary and artistic movement) is a term that was coined by an old St. Louis hippy science fiction fan, then still calling himself by his real name, Tim Zell, in a commune in University City, to describe a syncretic religious movement combining the best of Diannic Witchcraft, Gardnerian Witchcraft, Discordianism, Thelema, west-coast Reformed Druidism, high ceremonial magic, several flavors of pre-Christian reconstructionist polytheism, and a kind of hippy panentheism that coalesced around the borrowed name "Church of All Worlds." A compromise sort of "Franken-religion" was built out of all these parts by Zell and his various contributors over the course of the late 60s, thrashed out in the pages (and especially the letter columns) of an Amateur Press Association magazine called Green Egg.

Isaac Bonewits, founder of three different attempts at reformed or re-created druidry and one of the early enthusiastic contributors to this project has long had a standing bet that it is impossible to complete the sentence "Pagans all believe ..." with anything and have it be true. I will never forget the first time I heard him say this, at a workshop at the 1985 or '86 (I forget) Pagan Spirit Gathering in Wisconsin. Some tiny little college student jumped up and said, "That's not TRUE! For example, we're all opposed to nuclear power!" She would have been hard pressed to pick a worse example; within seconds the whole workshop was on their feet, divided up into warring camps, literally screaming at each other for several minutes. Two equally divided camps. That being said, when it comes to theology, there is if not an actual agreement then certainly a very widely held attitude about the divine, and it goes approximately like this (with, of course, ample wiggle room for people to differ on the finer points at almost Talmudic length): the entire universe is alive, and divine. That divinity expresses itself first through two generic divinities; the horned hunter God of the sun and the maiden-mother-crone triple Goddess of the moon; all other Gods and Goddesses are special cases of or avatars of or misunderstood aspects of those two facets of the divine universe.

It's also fundamental to Neopaganism, at least where I live and as I see it in my Neopagan friends, that you don't have to believe any of that to be literally true. Some large percentage, probably approaching half, are for all practical purposes secular humanist agnostics or atheists to whom the god(s) and goddess(es) of Neopaganism are merely convenient spiritual or artistic symbols. In fact, if you count in the further large percentage of Neopagans who believe that The God and The Goddess exist because they're projections of our own human collective spirit, collective unconscious, and that what we're really worshipping are things that we made up ourselves? Then the percentage of Neopagans who believe that the gods aren't "really real" probably approaches the high 90% range. And they're okay with that. And frankly, as someone of a very scientific bent, when I left Christian fundamentalism so was I.

And of course, where Neopaganism takes the very specific form of Neopagan Witchcraft (which it pretty much does everywhere in this man's town), where the borrowings from Gardner and Starhawk are the thickest, you get that idea married to a pseudo-history that is, frankly, sillier than the Operating Thetan material from Scientology's claim that all human souls are reincarnated alien criminals, no, worse than that, even sillier than the Book of Mormon's claim that the Olmecs were Jewish: the belief that for all of human history there have been Goddess-worshipping, nature-worshipping herbalists and conjurers who called themselves "witches." You know what? When Margaret Murray and J.G. Frazer were publishing their separate but similar hypotheses to this effect a hundred years ago, this was vaguely plausible, just as a hundred years ago it would have been hard to disprove the Book of Mormon's claim that the Olmecs were the lost twelfth tribe of the Jews. Sorry, in both cases history and archeology continued to progress. And this leaves Neopagan Witches in an awkward position. While they keep insisting that their religion is, in some way, older than the late 19th century, if you compare what we know now about medieval (let alone pre-Christian) Europe with the parts of The Golden Bough that have since been discredited scientifically, the Wiccans are 100% on Frazer's side.

In its earliest forms, the old English word "witch" (however you spell it) doesn't mean any kind of a human, let alone a member of some religion. It's used synonymously with "pixie." In particular, a "witch" is a creature it is too small to see with the naked eye, that travels on the wind, and causes fevers, sickness, crop blight, and miscarriage. Historically speaking, witch is their word for "germ." Until Renaissance times and the sick inquisitorial fantasy that there were Satan-worshipping home churches like the secret Jewish reconverso synagogues that they were used to rooting out and slaughtering, and until they in their misunderstanding picked up the old English word for "disease-causing organism" and applied it to those fictional devil-worshippers, you cannot find any historical reference to any person being called a witch. At most, what you find is some kind of specialist in curing people of diseases caused by witches ... not witches, but witch doctors.

Now, when I thought that there were no true religions, that all human religions were human-made creations, I was perfectly comfortable with the idea that a fiction that was invented in the 1890s or the 1950s or the 1960s or even day before yesterday was just as spiritually valid as one that was made up in the 1500s or the 300s or before. But I'm afflicted with a curse: I am, at least in some situations, an Authenticity Cop. Once I get interested in something, I want to wallow in not merely tertiary but secondary sources, and primary sources if I can read the language they're in. And in the process of expanding my Neopagan spirituality, and studying as many pre-Christian pagan sources as possible, something really weird and inexplicable happened to me: piety.

Scattered among all of the ancients' (and even moderns') writings about the gods there are several historical periods where it is widely attested by multiple sober and generally reliable sources that beings who looked much like us, but had abilities far beyond those of mortal humans, walked among us. Whether we're talking about the djinn living in the Arabian and Sahara deserts, the faerie folk living in northern Europe, the angels seen by members of various Mesopotamian tribes, or the gods seen everywhere throughout the Peloponnese and Ionia, they are described with clarity and a degree of precision, and with an inescapable consistency. They claimed to have been here before, but to only have mingled openly with us in the aftermath of civilization-threatening disasters. At such times, they taught the survivors of various disasters like the fall of Bronze Age civilization or the fall of the Roman Empire various useful arts, married into and/or generally left children with various families, and handed out rewards and punishments for various virtues and vices among those who were organizing the reconstruction efforts in an attempt to make sure that viable societies arose. It's popular now to insist that these beings were fictions made up by people long after the fact who were embellishing the oral historical record for their own purposes. Maybe that's what you believe. It's not what I believe.

I don't know who or what those beings, those people, were, or where they came from. I don't know if they're in any way still here, watching us, although for a couple of generations after they withdrew from common contact they kept showing up to give nasty surprises to those who thought they could get away with stuff because the gods were no longer watching. But I honor them, now, not made-up gods of philosophers or hallucinated gods of mystics and other schizophrenics. And in particular, I honor the gods of one particular place and time, the gods who helped the Greek-speaking survivors of the end of the Bronze Age, for having hammered out a unique compromise way of life that was even better than the aristocratic monarchies the gods left behind everywhere else: freedom and democracy and entrepreneurial capitalism. All ideas that came from men, and that were sold grudgingly to the gods, but causes that a particular set of gods took up as their own after seeing just how much prosperity and (just as importantly) how much justice that way of life could create.

I don't think it's an accident that America became the shining beacon of those same values after they were rediscovered at the end of the Renaissance in the surviving writings of those particular worshippers of those particular gods. And I worry how much longer we can keep them in a world where, the gods help us, people are suddenly noticing the conflicts between the values of Hellenic pagan democracy and Christian monotheistic dictatorship and consciously choosing the latter. And I sure as all holy gods don't think it helps when even the vast majority of the Pagans believe, or act as if, the gods who co-created and endorsed that way of life that we've so benefited from in this country over the last couple of hundred years were just a convenient fiction, any more than I think that it's a coincidence that the generation of Athenians who were taught by the (wealthy-elite-funded) "philosophers" to call the historical reality of the gods "the lies of the poets" were the generation who fell into slavery to the Spartans, then their own wealthy aristocrats, then the Macedonians, then the Romans, and then the Church, and then the Caliphate, never actually gaining even a semblance of freedom for thousands of years.

So whenever I contemplate going to a Pagan gathering, I find myself confronting two awkward propositions. First of all, I feel like the only non-atheist in the room, practically the only guy in the whole gathering who actually believes that the gods have an external verifiable reality that extends beyond wishful thinking. And secondly, I find myself in the company of hundreds of people who are just as wrong about the provable facts of other history as the Flat Earthers and the Lamarckians and the young-earth Creationists are. And when they start nattering on about these things, and expecting me to agree with them because I'm some kind of a Pagan too, it puts me in a very uncomfortable situation.

(That, sad to say, is probably why I found it so easy to make excuses not to go to St. Louis Pagan Picnic this year.)

You know, I spent two weeks trying to boil the preceding 16 paragraphs down to a sentence or two before I gave up.

The Independent/Southern Baptist doctrine of soteriology (theology of salvation) is that Adam's sin (not Eve's sin, but Adam's) resulted in an actual change in the nature of the human soul. Original Sin is not, in their interpretation of the Scriptures, a historical event but a condition: the condition in which an inherited part of your soul is permanently and irretrievably infected with "sin nature." That sin nature has two irreversible, unresistable side effects: it creates in you a permanent impulse to sin, and it stains your soul in such a way that it is repulsive to God, such that your whole soul is inadmissible to God's personal presence. Their interpretation of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ is that through this act, and through the teachings of his divinely inspired apostles, God created a way for you to change this. (You've probably seen this over-simplified as Campus Crusade for Christ's Four Spiritual Laws.) First, you must do two things as a pre-requisite for the third: you must sincerely repent of all of your past sins, and you must wholeheartedly commit yourself to obedience to God through his revealed word. Having done so, you are now eligible for real baptism, baptism that counts, where as an act of overt public obedience to God you allow yourself to be submerged in water by someone who is already a Christian: when you come back up out of that water, the "sin nature" part of your soul is killed dead, drowned in the water.

In extremis, they argue, it is possible to do without the water baptism ... but it is not okay to want to do without the water baptism, nor even okay to put it off any longer than the minimum necessary. To do so is to show that your repentance and vow of obedience weren't sincere. But now here's the part that caught my eye, when taught it by real expert professional theologians. They argued that this death of the sin nature is a measurable, perceptible change. If you have submitted to Christ, repented your sins, and demonstrated your obedience through baptism you should be able to tell the difference in your self, and it should be visible to other people around you. Unlike the Catharist heresy, they didn't argue that you'll never sin again. External temptations still apply, conscious choice to sin is still possible, and if nothing else you have a pre-baptism lifetime of habits to break. But the Independent Baptists and Southern Baptists argue that the second-born soul is qualitatively different from the soul that is still infected with sin nature, and that that difference is clear to both the person who's been born again and to those around them.

To those of us of more scientific bent, the theology professors say, "If you doubt our hypothesis, reproduce the experiment and verify the experimental results for yourself." Unbeknownst to me at the time, this exact question was being looked at by scientists, specifically by psychologists and psychiatrists, but in the context of cults, not Biblical literalist fundamentalism. No, this qualitative change in personality after a religious conversion was an already observed scientific phenomenon. But the scientists had observed, again not that I found this out for a lot of years, regardless of which religion the subject converts to. The results have been demonstrated to be short-lived, regardless of what faith the person converts to or from, and this has resulted in documented cases of people becoming addicted to the "rush" that comes from religious conversion. But again, I didn't know that yet.

What I did know, in May of 1975, was that I had spent half a year around people who clearly were "new men" (and new women), who clearly were an entirely different species than I was. That, combined with some other things going on in my life and my own experimental nature, lead me to attempt the experiment that had been put before me. And sure as heck, I did become a qualitatively different person, in ways that are hard to explain still. I became tremendously more compassionate. I became substantially more mystical and spiritual, aware of divine presence at all times. Scientific progress still mattered to me, and cultural progress, but now whole ranges of human endeavor that I'd never cared about also became things that mattered to me, including but hardly limited to religion and public service. I planned out a life for myself as someone who would go on to college, get a degree in math, and come back to a place like Faith Academy (if almost certainly not that particular school) to teach math and sciences myself. When I went on to a Christian college, Taylor University, my sense of mission shifted when I found out that I was even better at computer science than I was at math or teaching, but that sense that my life was a mission of service to others and that I was submitting to God's will as revealed to me through regular devotion, reading of his word, and sensitivity to his guidance in my life didn't change.

But long before I discovered the (often brilliant) music of the earliest of the gospel rockers, Larry Norman, I started to discover some of the same problems that he had with Biblical literalist Christianity: cultural problems. Christian fundamentalism is infected ... no, that word isn't strong enough, is infested with some truly obnoxiously reactionary cultural values, absolutely none of which are defensible from a plain reading of the Christian scriptures. You've seen me rant about this subject at substantial length before; those of you who haven't, check any of the stuff I've written under the "religion" tag. That made it an awkward fit for me, culturally. No matter where I am or what I'm calling myself, one great constant of my life is that I'm from Missouri (as the man said), you can't just tell me I'm wrong, you have to show me. And if you can't do it, and I can show that the facts are on my side, not yours, I'm not knuckling under just because you're older than me or some church elected you to some office or you've published some book. It was true before I became a fundamentalist, it stayed true when I was one, and it's still true to this day. That is just how I am.

But that was a problem I was willing to live with. No, by the early 1980s, several years into my walk with Jesus, I had a bigger problem than that: polyamory. One thing that clearly did not change when I went down into the water and came back up, despite ample other evidence of the spirit, is that I did not acquire a spirit of jealousy or possessiveness about other people. And while I was willing to submit my life to God in monogamy since that was his expressed will, one thing kept itching at me: what makes him right about this? That led me back to a subject that my theology instructors had alluded to as the problem of justice: when we say that God is just, what do we mean? Is there an abstract standard of justice, higher than God in authority, that we judge him against and find that he complies? Or do we call him just because, as the creator of the universe and its rules, he gets to decide what justice is and therefore it's whatever he wants to do? The longest meditation on this in the Bible is the book of Job, and I spent a lot of time reading and studying it before I came to the following conclusion: God's answer to Job is, "I get to say what's just and what's unjust because I'm bigger than you. If you were bigger than me, you'd get to tell me what justice is."

Did I mention that after a lifetime of being bullied I recognize bullying when I see it, and I'm never okay with it? Not even a little? I cannot cure myself of the belief that the word "justice" means something independent of any God's definition of justice, and the God of the Bible does not live up to any standard of justice that I recognize.

Once I was out of my own tiny neighborhood and traveling even a little, I also saw something that started to cast some serious doubt on this whole "new man" thing. I started seeing people who cared passionately about other people, and who cared passionately about things other than jobs and cars and stereo equipment and sports, and who were determined to do the best they could to make themselves better people and to make the world a better place who weren't Christian. Eventually it slowly dawned on me what I really was seeing: not a difference in the soul, but a difference of social class. Because of the determination to take over the country that spread throughout Christian fundamentalism in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, huge numbers of fundamentalist parents, regardless of social class, developed the fierce determination to put their kids on the college prep track, en route to positions in the upper middle class. I had grown up in a world where people were perfectly comfortable living working class lives (something much easier to do before Reagan, dammit), where people had no such ambition.

The Bible's own test for a false prophet is laid out all the way back in the books of Moses. If, even the Bible agrees, somebody says "thus sayeth the Lord" and anything they say in God's name turns out to not be true, then they are a false prophet. All of the prophets of the Christian God agree that there is a qualitative difference between Christians and those who have not been redeemed from sin. I found this to be a false prophesy, that there were no differences that could not be explained by equivalent levels of spirituality and equivalent determination to display the class signifiers of the upper middle class, regardless of which religion was professed. All of the prophets of the Christian God agreed that God had told them that it was impossible for anybody to love two or more people equally. I found this to be a false prophesy, something that was clearly not true of me or of several other people I'd known. More and more, whenever I took the specific claims that Christianity makes that are distinct from the claims that other religions make and tested them against external reality, I found that 100% consistently Christianity was wrong. And after struggling with this for a year and a half, it dawned on me to ask myself an even more direct question. (I'm slow.) I had often heard what I believed to be the voice of God telling me what to do or not to do. Could I think of even one example, any time in the preceding seven years, that God had told me something I didn't already know and turned out to be right?

No.

That left me with a strong sense that there was value to mysticism, spirituality, and religion themselves. I'd seen that value in my own life, and in the lives of many other people. But it also left me free to shop for a religion that seemed to me to be more consistent with how I knew the world to work, with the facts as I knew them. Being from St. Louis, and science fiction fannish, and St. Louis science fiction fandom being the birthplace of that religion, I suppose it's no surprise that over the course of July 1983 I ended up in Neopagan Witchcraft, one of the only religions in the world that's entirely comfortable with polyamory and that claims to have respect for science, math, law, history and all other forms of the search for knowledge and truth while still having a place for personal mysticism and intense spiritual practice.

Because most of you are smarter than I was back in 1983, you can probably see some of where this is going.

Eris' name, I keep trying to trim this down to a couple of paragraphs, running into things that won't make any sense if I don't explain them, and watching it balloon back up. So even though I said yesterday I'd cover the transition from secular progressivist to Christian fundamentalist to Neopagan Witch in one journal entry, sorry, forget it because I can't do it.

On my first day of school in 1966, it was very important to my north St. Louis county classmates to determine if I was Catholic, and therefore OK to beat on, or Protestant, and therefore available to help them go over to the Catholic school next door and beat on those kids. Here's the funny thing I forgot to mention yesterday: I had no idea what they were asking. I had heard the word "Christian" in my life, but not often enough to remember the word with any precision, let alone define it, so I almost did get myself beat on because all I could remember was that our family's religion started with a C -- but, I hastened to explain when they asked, no, the word "Catholic" didn't sound like the word I was trying to remember. Like pretty much everybody else that first year, they just wrote me off as retarded; I mean seriously, I'm sure they thought, who doesn't know if they're Protestant or Catholic unless they're retarded?

When I went home and asked, I still didn't get a coherent answer, and there turned out to be a whole complicated set of reasons for that that didn't surface for almost another decade. You see, Mom had been raised Baptist ... but that's giving her family too much credit, I was later told. The family considered themselves to be Baptist; they considered Mom not so much a daughter or (after being sent away after her mother's divorce) a niece or whatever. To the relatives who agreed grudgingly to take her in, one or more of which almost certainly brutally sexually abused her, Mom was a slave, and slaves don't go to church with decent people. And that's more than I know about the Man of Concrete. I know from hearing it from his parents that they raised him Catholic. I know from something Mom said that Dad considered himself a very-much ex-Catholic, that he had some kind of grudge against the Catholic Church that left him with a fierce determination to never let the Church he was raised in ever touch him or his family in any way ever again. What was the nature of his grudge? He carried that secret, if few others, to his grave; even his sister, who as far as I know still is a good Catholic, is baffled.

How all of this affected me and my baby sister was that Mom inherited from her extended family a vague sense of Baptist tribal identity, but no idea at all what that meant; Dad thought of himself as a bitter ex-Catholic who was still vaguely Christian, although he could most accurately be described as a self-taught Christian New Ager. We kids got almost nothing in the way of religious education or upbringing; my sister perhaps more than me but even her only a trace. So it was hardly a long jump for me, or particularly disappointing to Dad or more than vaguely disappointing to Mom, when I started devouring books on science and science fiction during the Space Race, came to the same conclusion that Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have so famously been publishing lately that all religion was based on indefensible superstition and dishonesty, and concluded that I was an atheistic secular progressivist.

But my parents' lack of strong religious identification posed a very serious problem for them over the summer of 1974, and that problem very quickly became my problem. You see, even though the race riots in the local school system were starting to die down, that school district was starting to acquire a very ugly reputation for drug-dealing and random violence. My parents concluded that they could trust my sister to take care of herself in a fight but couldn't trust her around drug dealers; they concluded that I could be trusted not to gamble with drugs but worried that my luck at escaping from violence was going to run out. (And they didn't even know how close it had come to having done just that the year before.) So getting us kids out of the public school system became a very urgent concern, something that had to have something done about it right then, before my freshman year of high school. But the choices then were more or less the same choices now:

• Catholic school: flatly out of the question to both parents
  
• Lutheran Church Missouri Synod school: something they barely knew anything about but concluded they couldn't afford anyway
  
• Upper-class college prep school: completely unaffordable without a scholarship, and my parents' marriage wouldn't have survived the revelation of enough financial details (specifically, where all the money Dad was making was going) for us to get scholarships
  
• Home-schooling: both parents had a 3rd grade education; Mom wasn't terrribly widely read, and Dad worked too many hours to be much help
  
• A small chain of fundamentalist home-school-assistance programs and church-run schools called the Missouri Union of Christian Schools: Hobson's choice

And that's how I ended up being told, in one of the only major decisions about my life in which I wasn't consulted or given a vote, that I was to start at Faith Christian Academy, a small Independent Baptist run school founded by famous conspiracy-theory author John Stormer, in September of 1974. As a secular progressive, the prospect of being sent to a school system run by paranoiac Bible-thumpers scared me senseless. I quickly brushed up on enough Christian dialect and Biblical lore to hopefully pass for Christian myself, and hoped to somehow improbably fail to be noticed as the pink monkey in the proverbial cage full of brown monkeys. Later on, I found out that my act hadn't fooled anybody; that kind of thing is hard to fake, and as with any undercover job it's the little details that anybody inside would know but no outsider would understand the significance of that trip you up. But, and here's the fascinating part, that wasn't what most fascinated my teachers and classmates about me ... or me about them.

I may not have grown up with the same attitudes about religion or race that my neighbors had in old north county, but I had absorbed the same priorities they had, namely that there are only four things in the whole world that are worth thinking about very much: jobs and cars and stereo equipment and sports. Except that for me, already by 1974, I had substituted "science fiction books" for "sports" in that sacred list. But nowhere on that list is "grades." And you may remember from other personal history entries that I was testing as having a college-sophomore level of education in every subject but math while I was still 7, so there was no way I could sustain the effort needed to do any homework or to do any class project that couldn't be completed in class. I napped or goofed off or read during classes, blew off all homework and projects and papers and reading, and counted on my test scores to maintain a minimally passing C-minus grade. Other kids I'd known in my life had to work harder to sustain that C-minus grade, and resented me for that. But never, ever, ever before in my life had I ever met a child or adult who thought that there was any point to getting a grade above a C. Well, yeah, a few teachers, but we wrote off their opinion on the subject as biased. In the school system I grew up in, even the nerdiest of the apple-polishers didn't bother to aim much higher than a high B. Why bother? It was a working class neighborhood; whatever job you started when you graduated from high school was only going to care that you passed, and there were always better things to do with your time and energy.

So when a high school jock came up to me after one of my first classes at Faith with a ticked-off look on his face, I figured it was just my first beating at the hands of this school's athletes, and took off running. But it was a smaller building, with fewer places to run, and they knew it a lot better than I did. And were baffled as to why I'd run, because all he wanted was to ask me a question. "Look," he said, "even I can tell that you aren't even trying in there, that you could do a lot better if you tried. Why not? Everybody else is, and that you're not is ticking us off." Not very many days later, a cheerleader, a sub-species of human that had never even noticed me before, stopped me in the halls to ask, concern written all over her face, if there was something wrong at home and that's why I wasn't paying attention in class or turning in homework? I spent months bumping my nose on that. It seemed like every time I turned around, I ran into somebody else who was baffled by that part of me. It turned out that they could understand why the obviously-faking-it kid was pretending to be born again, what I was afraid of there. But that I wouldn't try to get the best grades I could? Unimaginable; they'd never in their lives met anyone like that. And when I realized that, I began to wonder what the heck planet I'd landed on?

That same first semester of high school was also the first time I ever bumped into the intensely intellectual world of professional-level theology. It was a mandatory 4-year subject at Faith, taught exclusively by graduates of Dallas Theological Seminary who were convinced that yes, teenagers can master as deep an understanding of the full text of the King James Version of the Bible and of the history of theological dispute from the Church fathers to the present as any seminary grad student came away with. And it was in this context that I ran into an argument that rocked me all the way to the bottom of the foundation of my soul: that the 20th century Biblical literalist interpretation of the doctrine of soteriology, the theology of salvation from sin, was an experimentally verifiable scientific theory.

Gah, this has run way too long even with my trying to trim out as many irrelevancies as possible. I'll finish it up tomorrow, hopefully with room to explain how I left fundamentalist Christianity, and Christianity altogether, after I finish explaining how I became a born again fundamentalist Christian in the first place.

There's something that I've been struggling all week with trying to write. It occurs to me lately that it would be easier to explain if I first told you a story that phierma says that I haven't told in writing here yet, and that's the story of how I ended up becoming a born-again fundamentalist Christian in May of 1976 and how I came to leave that faith in July of 1983. To tell that story, I have to start even farther back, to my upbringing in a working-class neighborhood of far north county, Spanish Lake, in the St. Louis metro area in the 1960s. Perhaps this will interest some of you if for no other reason than that it'll end up being a glimpse into a world that you could never have imagined.

The most important thing that you have to understand about religious upbringing in working class north St. Louis county in the 1960s is that religion was not something that you were expected to have any concrete beliefs about. You weren't supposed to think about it very much, any more than you were supposed to think about anything at all. After all, while preachers and Sunday School teachers found things to occupy Sunday mornings talking about, nobody that I ever met thought that any of that, not even one single word of it, was either interesting or important. There were only a few things in this world that you needed to know. Good people go to heaven when they die. Bad people go to hell when they die. There are two religions in the world, Catholics and Protestants, and you either come from a Protestant family or a Catholic family. And which ever one you grew up with, all you need to know about the difference is that the other ones are all bad people who go to hell, and exist so that kids from your families can beat on kids from their families. Everything else was, like much of any kind of abstract thought, seen as an unpleasant distraction from the only important things in life: jobs and cars and stereo equipment and sports.

If you were a Protestant kid, it was an expected and natural part of your growing up that you would go to the public schools, even though your parents were likely to complain that the federal government was filling them up with black kids. (At the time I started hearing this, "filling up" in my case meant a total of 2 black kids in a school with over 300 white kids.) After school, it was fully expected that you would gang up with some of your fellow Protestant kids, and ambush the Catholic school kids on their way out of school and beat them up. It was, of course, also tolerated for you to sneak off campus and do this during recesses and lunch breaks, if there was a Catholic school close enough that you could run there, beat up some Catholic kids, and get back in time before the bell rang. If you were a Catholic kid, it was completely assumed that you would attend an all-white parochial school. During recesses and after school, it was a fully expected part of your natural childhood to beat up Protestant kids any time the numbers were on your side. This whole way of life didn't come crashing down until 1972, when north county became the official dumping ground for the last remaining inhabitants of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing complex after its demolition. For several years thereafter, white Catholic kids and white Protestant kids decided they had common ground. They, and the black newcomers to the neighborhood, then turned their substantial negotiating skills to agreeing upon official dates for each school's approximately monthly after-school race riot. On those days, white and black kids all knew what was expected of them, just as Protestant and Catholic kids had understood in a lesser way before. Instead of rushing to the buses to get a good seat for the ride home after school, they were all expected to report to the side yard of the school, all of the boys and nearly all of the girls. Once there, they were expected to find a kid of the same gender but the other color and beat on them with fists until everybody was tired, usually about 45 minutes later, and then all go home.

I want to stress, to those of you who are thinking how barbaric this was, two things. First of all, never once did I hear of anybody over the age of 14 engaged in this behavior. And secondly, in 8 years of Protestant/Catholic and then white/black violence, never once did I hear of anybody needing more than an ice pack for bruises or sprains or, at most, a few stitches. Only once in that whole time did I hear of anybody bringing a weapon to the riots -- and that was the beginning of the end for the riots, because thereafter the cops (somehow also clued into the riot calendar) started showing up about half the time with K-9 units to herd kids straight from the school building to the buses. I never understood the process of how they came to agreement on the date, time, place, and manner of the engagements, not as a nominally Protestant kid prior to 1972 nor as a white kid in 1972 through 1974. Nor, thanks to my neurological disorder, was I ever able to learn just how hard it was okay to fight under what circumstances, a decision I still don't really trust myself to make. So I concluded, at a very early age, that I was a nominal pacifist, not out of any moral sense that violence was wrong but for the pragmatic reason that I didn't know how to engage in it without making things worse. I also concluded that I was neither Protestant nor Catholic, but secular progressivist. And I concluded that I was neither white nor black, but extraterrestrial. You might think that this would get me in trouble with both sides, but no, it was only with the white and Protestant kids, who would occasionally notice my betrayal of my born side long enough to take a break from thrashing Catholics or black kids to chase me around for a while, seldom catching me.

Next: From secular progressivist to Biblical literalist Protestant Christian, and then from there to Neopagan Witchcraft, the story that phierma asked me to write down for y'all. And then, after that, my explanation of why I made excuses not to go to St. Louis Pagan Picnic last weekend.

(Warning: I'm annoyed enough to drop my written journal language filter. The following post contains dirty words.)

In the (insanely long) comments thread for yesterday's journal entry, wickedgameff wrote, "The only reason that any kind of expression or speech should be ruled against is if the words are meant to incite violence or crime. And since the yaoi I write is only meant to express love between two (or more) characters, I know it doesn't fall into that category." technosage, concurring, went further: "the DJ and yaoi and fan fiction generally can be so beautiful it takes your breath away." It's funny you should say that so poetically, because you remind me of someone. Over on the polyamory community, there's apparently a guy who's a regular source of amusement to the cynics on dot_poly_snark who writes just as poetically about the sublimity and spiritual beauty of his happy, loving poly triad: himself, his wife, and his horse. The poly snarksters aren't buying it. I know of no reason to think he's not sincere, but, dude, you're talking about fucking a horse. And I'm sure that WickedGameFF and Technosage are just as sincere, and are convinced that their fantasy lives aren't anything like that guy's real life, because what they love is spiritual and pure and he's just a horse-fucker. But dude, you're writing or collecting pornography about fucking little boys. Frankly, if it were up to me, I wouldn't give a rat's ass what you're writing or reading. But you know what? It's not up to me. And it's not up to you. You can go out there and make your case that it should be up to you and me, that people shouldn't give a rat's ass what fiction you write and you read because "it's just fiction." But at least here in the US, I flatly guarantee you that you will not win that fight in your lifetime.

Right now, no prosecutor or police chief that I know of is so bored or so fired up about boy-love animé, boy-love manga, cartoon-character child porn cartoons, or Harry Potter pornographic fanfic to devote the resources to tracking down the writers, artists, importers, distributors, and collectors of that material. The resources in question would be relatively trivial. Internet anonymity is a fig leaf, not an impregnable vault. But right now, nobody in law enforcement cares enough to move it ahead of the thousand other things they have to care about. But people a lot more reputable and a lot better connected to law enforcement and the media than those moronic cranks at Warriors for Innocence are determined to change that. If you acquire any kind of a public reputation for involvement in those scenes and they win, you're in a lot of trouble. You may think that what you're doing is perfectly legal under the First Amendment, but I'm telling you right now, you're wrong.

My prediction is that it will probably never come to that. Groups like Perverted Justice aren't, so far as I can tell, sufficiently determined to push it that far. What they want the most is zero tolerance for the stuff you like on the big public Internet services, and for every one of those Internet services to dedicate at least one full time employee to enforcement of that policy. And having seen MySpace and Blogspot cave on that, I predict with absolute confidence that many of the journals that were reinstated after Strikethrough '07 will be deleted again in the near future. If you're determined to keep writing and keep collecting this stuff, back it up to your local hard disk now, and make plans to move it to a website that is dedicated to your particular kink. And as long as that website makes at least a token effort to keep minors out and as long as that website doesn't come to major media attention at the hands of somebody like Geraldo Rivera back in 1983, that is where it will probably end.

But I could be wrong. And if I am? Then welcome to the world that I've lived in since 1983. You won't like it.

As I've written about before, in 1983, a local cop concluded that I was "obviously" a pedophile. In his opinion, no adult would set up a BBS like Weirdbase, the one I was running, if he wasn't looking to cruise teenage and pre-teen boys for sex, and nobody would set up a world-wide network of BBSes like MagickNet, the one I was running, if he wasn't looking to network with other pedophiles so that we could help each other gain sexual access to pre-teen boys to rape and then kill in Satanic sacrifices. I lived with that guy intermittently following me around, and interviewing every contact he could find to try to find even one child that I had ever been alone with, for eight fucking years. And I learned very early in the Satanic Panic just how dangerous that was, as people in my same predicament all over the country found out that if you take almost any child and hand him or her over to the "tender mercies" of coercive child psychologists hand-picked by the prosecutors, if you give them even 18 hours to convince that child that since everybody "knows" that some particular adult "obviously" raped him and the only reason he doesn't remember it is that he "blocked it out," almost any child will testify to that abuse eventually. And even though the means of obtaining that testimony are pseudo-scientific bullshit, and even if the testimony that results contradicts important laws of physics as happened in the McMartin case, that child will be believed by a judge and a jury, both of whom have been repeatedly (demonstrably wrongly) assured that no child has ever lied about sex, that no child has ever made a false accusation.

So for eight god damned years I felt a perceptible rush of panic, an urgent need to look over my shoulder and to flee the room, if the situation presented itself where I was at any risk of being in the same room with a child and there wasn't at least one neutral adult witness present to testify that nothing happened, should any anti-occult cop pick up that child for questioning about what I might have done to him or her. The Satanic Ritual Abuse hoax was debunked and dropped off of radar, into the misty depths of cranky right wing conspiracy theory, all the hell the way back in 1991 or 1992. And you know what? Fifteen fucking years later, I still panic if there is any risk that I will be alone with a child. Habits die hard, especially when you know that your life depends on those habits when you're forming them. I will probably go to my grave pathologically terrified of children.

And if the cops single you out because of your collection of boy-love manga, or because the found your user name on the list of people reading pornish_pixies and therefore you're "obviously" sexually attracted to children, so it's "obviously inevitable" that if you've ever had a chance to molest one you probably did? Then you'll have to develop the same paranoid habit that I did. Because it's either that, or simply accept the fact that there is a cartoon piano hanging over your head by a fraying rope at all times, that at any time your entire future could be snuffed out whether you ever really did anything to a child or not. Is there anything you can do about it now? Nope. Oh, you can try. But too many of you have made the mistake of discussing this stuff on, or posting this stuff to, the Internet. And trust me, because I know this of my own experience, too: the net never fucking forgets. Just a few months before the Satanic Panic began, I happened to write a short pro-Wicca propaganda piece called "A Little Less Misunderstanding." People loved it. A few years later, I found out that one of my primary sources was horribly biased, and I had passed along one of his particularly obnoxious slanders. I've been trying, off and on for more than 20 years, to erase that piece of shit from the Internet. Well, frankly, not trying very hard lately, because I gave up. If you wrote or drew or scanned something and posted it to the Internet and anybody liked it, the odds are that somebody has a copy saved to their hard disk. Some day somebody will be wanting to populate yet another Internet archive of stuff like it, and that copy will be re-uploaded. Once they do, more people will see and like it, and download backup copies of it to their hard disks too. Ad infinitum.

And you know what? Now you need to learn what every actual pedophile, and every horse-fucker, and every corpse-fucker, and everybody else with a kink that isn't legal, will never be legal, and which will end your fucking life if you get caught even feeling that way learns early or learns the hard way: shut the fuck up about it. At the very least, shut the fuck up about it any time that there is any risk whatsoever that any journalist or any infiltrating cop or any private investigator or any vigilante will find it, and let me tell you right now, there is nowhere online that doesn't meet that definition, nor should you assume the physical mail is safe. Because if a moral panic starts, no fancy digital anonymity will guarantee your safety. Only two things will: that nobody anywhere with even the slightest grudge against you knows that you're interested, and that you have the extreme luck not to be one of the people picked by the cops to be made an example of when they bust anybody in your network and then subpoena your Internet provider. I mean, you could actually be that lucky. There are probably thousands of people in the US who read or watch boy-love Japanese-style porn or who read or write pornographic stories about fictional teenage characters. Even in the event of a nation-wide moral panic, they probably won't socially crucify and legally destroy more than a couple of hundred of them, and probably won't jail more than a few dozen, the few dozen they were able to (honestly or dishonestly) convict of molesting children. Maybe those are good odds, by your standards. Maybe your love for this stuff is so "breathtaking" that it's worth that risk to you. But know this: you will never be safe in this country, never truly safe. And you're going to have to learn to live with that, so start getting used to the idea.

When I turned 30, I got divorced and went out and bought a little red sports car.

As with many things, it's never as simple as that self-deprecating joke suggests. The marriage was one I should never have agreed to in the first place and had turned into a living hell on earth before I escaped. And the divorce had nothing to do with why I bought the little red sports car, nor for that matter my age. No, when I was a married man, I drove a Dodge Caravan. Second worst car I ever drove, no matter what Consumer Reports had to say about it that model year: horrible unreadable instrument panel, rotten gas mileage, constantly having mechanical problems. But the thing that I really bumped my nose on after the divorce was that the car payment on the thing was about $25 a month more than my rent. That was way too much to be paying for a car I didn't even like, so I started shopping for something cheaper and more economical. About that time, there was a car available from an off-shoot GM brand, a rebranded Canadian Sprint called the Geo Metro. It was not entirely unfairly derided as "America's Yugo," the cheapest and flimsiest thing on the market. But I couldn't dismiss it completely out of hand, because it was also the highest gas mileage street legal automobile in the US at the time. So I spent a lot of months trying to convince myself to get over the fact that it was not only flimsy, it was pathologically ugly, the single ugliest car in America.

And then, just by luck, I found myself parked at a shopping mall next to a car that looked just like a discount version of a Mazda Miata, a little red convertible just the size of the Miata, and just slightly boxier. And even though I'd been car shopping off and on for months, I'd never seen anything that looked like it and couldn't figure out what it was. You could have knocked me over with a feather when I walked around the back and saw the words "Geo Metro LSI" on the back. So let me get this straight -- I could buy one of the cheapest cars in America, get the best gas mileage of any car in America, and it's a convertible? I called every dealer in St. Louis until I found one in stock, a year-old program vehicle (that is to say, retired company fleet vehicle, probably from a rental place) and bought it that very weekend. And I loved that car the way I have only loved perhaps three cars in my life, at most four, and one of those was the Libertalia. The Little Red Thing's engine wore out and I got rid of it a decade or more ago, but there are still people who when they think of me think of the L.R.T.

Any old year now, I'll decide that I have enough money saved up and be confident enough of my budget to think about buying a car again. And for the same reasons I loved my old Geo Metro, I had been looking at a car that is only available in Europe. But the manufacturer has been promising to make it available in the USA "any day now" for four years, always (as now) "next year," and never yet the exact model I want: the Daimler Smart Fourtwo Cabrio Passion convertible. But with Daimler divesting itself of Chrysler, and with there being rumors that the Smart division isn't profitable, who knows if it'll ever make it to the US, or even continue to be sold in Europe. And besides, at the rate the green peso is depreciating, it also looks to cost about half again to twice what it was originally predicted to cost.

On a lark, last night I went looking into the current availability of one of my previous lust objects, only to find out that the company that made it, Electric Motor Bikes, has gone out of business, taking their "EMB Lectra" brand all-electric motorcycle with them into whatever afterlife awaits the umpteen-plus defunct makers of electric vehicles for the US. But since EMB went under, several newer companies have leapt into the same product niche with even better engineering, and one of them is even available in the US at a not entirely unreasonable price. Behold, my current techno-lust object:



The Vectrix Maxi all-electric scooter has about the same size, weight, and performance characteristics as a 500cc scooter, does 0 to 50 in 6.8 seconds, cruises at surface street speeds for 5 hours on a single charge, recharges fully in 2.5 hours on about 15 cents worth of electricity, runs almost completely silently (except for the sound of tires on pavement) on brushless electric motors, requires almost no maintenance, and costs $11,000, about the same as any other similar 500cc scooter or motorcycle. Yes, I'm aware that it'd be a rotten driving solution roughly 150 or so days a year here in St. Louis, and yes, I'm aware that the cargo capacity amounts to basically about one bag of groceries in the helmet compartment under the seat, and yes, I'm aware that that it's experimental technology and that the price doesn't include delivery charges. So I'm probably not going to get one.

I want one, though. Hey, drewkitty -- how do these figure into your World Without Oil scenario?

I saw this on BoingBoing, did some searches, and found some more detailed (and more ambivalent) coverage in a more local newspaper to the story, the Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald: "Bullied schoolboy may get $1m in damages" (Australian Associated Press, 5/14/07) and "He was bullied at school - now he'll walk away with $1 million" (Leonie Lamont, 5/15/07).

The long and short of it: back in 1994 and 1995, then 7 year old Australian child Benjamin Cox was a repeat victim of very severe violence from what is described as an "older, disturbed student." He complained to school authorities, then to his mother. His mother complained to school authorities, then to the state board of education. What they were both told was to get over it, that bullying was part of growing up, and that being choked into unconsciousness and beaten in the face so severely he had teeth knocked out was good for young Benjamin, that that kind of thing "builds character." Rather than allow him to be bullied, his mother did the same thing my parents did under similar circumstances, only much sooner; she pulled him out of that school. He did better in the new school, but never fully recovered, and now that he's 18 he is on lifetime disability for PTSD, depression, and anxiety disorder. (Not coincidentally, perhaps, a 2/3rds overlap with my own diagnosis.) Now that he has his formal disability ruling and diagnosis, and that he's old enough to file suit in his own name, he and his mom have sued the state school board and the school for refusing to even try to protect him, for taking the bully's side. The judge found for the plaintiff, awarding $213,000 AUS for pain and suffering and lifetime payments, over time, amounting to about $800,000 AUS. The school insists that they had no legal responsibility or authority to prevent bullying back in 1974 and 1975, blame Cox's mother more than the bullying for his mental illnesses, and is considering appealing the verdict.

It shouldn't surprise any of you who know anything about me that I have an opinion about this. And while I was formulating that opinion for this journal entry, I had a new insight into my own similar problems, and into my reaction to the Columbine Massacre.

Remember my continuing to argue with my former doctor, minidoc, about whether or not I have intrusive memories or unwanted automatic reactions to events that trigger flashbacks to past traumas? I argue that I don't, she argues that I do? MiniDoc is wise, perhaps, because I think she may have picked up an important clue out of something I've said a very few times: I forgave the actual bullies themselves years ago. In fact, I had a rather dramatic demonstration of that a few years back. I was on a job site, and another guy who was there looked at my name badge, looked at me, and said, "I know that name, and you look familiar, but I can't place it? Where did you go to school?" After playing the St. Louis game of rattling off our respective schools, we found out that we overlapped by one year, a year that we were both at C.R. Kirby Junior High School in North County. And the second that we both figured this out, I saw growing horror dawn on him, and he got very frightened and very nervous, because we both realized why he remembered me: he was one of the gang that tried to kill me. Only now I was much, much bigger than him. I let him off the hook. I hinted that I knew who he was, said that that was a long time ago, then changed the subject and let him walk away. Because I don't blame him, not any more, and I haven't in a very long time. He was 14 at the time. By and large, we don't hold 14 year old children legally responsible for their actions, and for good reason. And he, and the rest of the bullies who attacked me over and over again, were only acting upon what the adults in the school were encouraging them to feel towards me, were only doing what the culture around them told them was right to do.

No, the people I blamed then, and still blame, are the adults. I blame the adults who put him up to it, by singling me out for intimidation because my good grades were imperiling his beloved athletic team's more troubled star players (they graded on the curve). I blame the adults who taught him that jingoistic tribal identification with "our team" was more important than anything else in life. But no, more than anything else, I blame the teachers and principals who knew what was happening to me, and who turned away from my suffering, who would have let me die, who told me that it was my responsibility to find a way to placate or subdue my attackers without any help from them. My betrayal by them hurt me far, far worse than all the knives and chains that were waved at me, all the shoes and boots that kicked me, all the punches in the face and in the gut, hurt me even worse than the baseball bat to the ribs that was meant to kill me. The more I think about it, the more I realize that the anger that some very sensitive people sense deep down inside me is at them, because what they did, I can never forgive. That's why I leapt up and screamed at the television when the assistant principal of Columbine High School said on 60 Minutes that Eric and Dylan had never filed any violence complaints against the school's athletes, "and if they had, I wouldn't have believed them, because our athletes are champions, and champions don't behave like that." It is that implacable indifference to my suffering by those I held responsible for protecting me that I flash back to whenever I feel threatened by bureaucratic indifference or hostility, that puts me in bed for up to 36 hours of bleak catatonic terror myself.

I have been trying my whole life to understand what motivated them to value my own life and safety as little as the New South Wales school system valued Benjamin Cox's. I suspect that if I could ever make myself understand, I could begin to forgive, and perhaps some of the anger would begin to drain away. Maybe I'm wrong about that. All I've got so far is a hypothesis that to the neurotypical, tribal identification rituals like school sports really are the school's most important mission, because they prepare people for a life where they will be expected to cheer for whatever tribe they're in's top warriors for the rest of their life, because the consequences for failing to do so sufficiently convincingly can be career ending. And perhaps that the school felt that it lacked the resources to do everything it would like, and protecting the weak from the cruel, while important to them, wasn't important enough to assign the resources to. Maybe. I can't make myself believe it, though. No, the piece of evidence that's missing from any claim that there was a rational, humane reason to let Benjamin Cox be choked half to death and to let me be attacked by a gang with baseball bats and bicycle chains and knives is that if there were any rationality or humanity in them, there would have at least been some visible sympathy for the victims, wouldn't there? Not the cold valuing of the bullies' lives over his and mine and Dylan's and Eric's and all the rest of the victims that says, ""You lose some kids and keep some."

Thinking about mother's day (despite the fact that my mom died about a decade ago) and thinking about what I said the other day about the various traumas in my childhood reminded me that I may not have told what is perhaps the most impressive Man of Concrete story there is.

You've got to remember that MRI is a very new technology, from my point of view. I can't remember exactly what year this happened, but I think it must have been 1970 plus or minus a year or so, and back then, they had only four tools for finding out what was wrong inside of you: palpitate for masses, examine the blood chemistry, run x-rays, or, if all of that failed, open you up and directly examine any organs they were suspicious of. It was called "exploratory surgery." I gather that it's very, very rare now, but when I was a kid, an awful lot of the time it was all that they had. But around the time that my mom went into the hospital with symptoms of an inflamed or infected gall bladder, the big name hospital she went into was under pressure from regulators over their reputation for wanting to do the exploratory surgery first, without even trying to figure out what was wrong from patient history, physical examination, blood work, and x-rays. So the hospital administrators had passed down word: no more exploratory surgeries this month. Period. Not until the regulators get off of our backs.

Mom's medical history, symptoms, and blood work all made it clear that there was something very wrong with her gall bladder. However, on the x-rays, her gall bladder looked perfectly normal and healthy. Her doctor wanted to go in and see what the x-rays missed, but got turned down. Every day for several weeks, he went back and applied for permis