Wait a minute. Wait just one gawd durned minute. Ain’t this here supposed to be some sort of junkie self help manual? Ain’t this supposed to be about the inner child and all that crap? Hell no. I want to make one thing very clear. I sincerely hope you like this. I sincerely hope you get a whole lot of goodness and morals out of this. If you do not… well, I could not give a rat’s ass. I wrote this because I am a writer and this was what I wanted to write about. Maybe it will help somebody one day. There is no way for me to know. Right now I am in this all by myself. If I do not do what it takes to make myself happy, to help myself, then this would be a big waste of time. I am happy to have you along for the ride, but please keep your mouth shut while you read this. Have a nice day.
***
I sold Susan weed for a long time without coming
onto her. Instead of setting my sights on someone who so obviously
wanted to be with me I wasted my time on a Spanish girl named Anna.
Anna would not put out no matter how hard I tried to get her into bed.
She finally told me she was a virgin. That tidbit of information
made me more determined than ever to get into her pants. I knew for
sure that I would never meet with anything but failure as far as Anna was
concerned. I became severely disheartened about the bad luck I had
with women. I decided to move out of state to get away from it all.
Never mind my “bad luck” amounted to my own faults. At the time it
was Bad Luck, and I had to take a vacation from it.
When I left for Arizona in the summer of ’92
it marked the second time I tried to move out west since I turned eighteen.
The first time I sold my car to make the trip to Santa Fe. That was
to be a permanent move. It didn’t work out that way. I arrived
in Santa Fe with no job, no place to stay and no car (that is my most familiar
way to go places).
I got a bed at the youth hostel. I walked
everywhere I wanted to go for a few days. When I recognized how hard
it was going to be to get a job I began looking for alternatives.
The final blow came one night when I went to a rave at the park on Canyon
Road. I started to freestyle, the same way I did at every dance club
or rave I ever went to. This time I dislocated my knee going into
a split. That made any prospect of making it on foot in Santa Fe
impossibly remote. I knew that I would have to go home eventually
so I looked for something to do until then. I found a new activity
when I met Trudy.
Trudy was from New York. She was on
her way to San Francisco. I talked her into letting me go with her.
I don’t want to say too much about her. In short, by the time we
reached Los Angeles her voice had driven me crazy. I had to get away
from her. I got her to drop me off at the youth hostel in Venice.
She couldn’t understand how I could possibly want to stay in Venice rather
than go on with her to San Francisco. I didn’t have the heart to
tell her she had the most irritating voice I had ever heard in my life.
I simply told her to drive away and leave me alone.
There I was stuck in the nation’s second largest
city without a job or a car, and with a dislocated knee. I got a
bed at the youth hostel. I went out the first night I was there.
I limped into one of the freak bars playing industrial underground.
Lots of men and women in groovy leather outfits were streaming in and out.
I was young and fairly good looking. Within a couple of hours I got
lucky and hooked up with a sexy young freak who wanted me to go back to
her place. When we got there she said I had a surprise coming.
She told me to get down on my knees and close my eyes. I thought
to myself, “Dude, you’re in Los Angeles with nothing. You’re about
ready for anything.” I figured it would be no big deal. I had
not even taken my clothes off yet.
“I got one,” she said. A second later
I heard a man’s voice telling me, “We’re going to have fun with you.”
I mentioned I still had my clothes on.
The entire trip I carried my Walther PPK against my belly everywhere I
went. I couldn’t very well leave it in my backpack at the youth hostel.
Once again I found the need to draw down on someone. I yanked the
9mm out of my pants as I took in a view of a big leather clad monster.
“The only thing you’re going to have fun with
is a fucking bullet in your stomach if you don’t back the fuck up off of
me!” I yelled. The girl (as usual her name escapes me) yelled
also. She told me to stop it. She yelled they didn’t mean it
like that. I could see from the look in the man’s eyes that he meant
it exactly the way he had said it.
“Yeah, right, baby,” I said. I got out
the door and hopped away as fast as I could on my dislocated knee.
Can I digress even further? I bet the
homosexual and bisexual members of my reading audience are wondering why
I did what I did instead of being the bottom in a dominant-submissive bisexual
threesome. Some people try all their lives to get into a situation
like that. I will explain it. It goes a lot deeper than the
fact that men physically disgust me. Eighteen? Oh, that was my age
when my best friend told me he was in love with me. I took that in
stride. I didn’t love him like that so I couldn’t continue to see
him. That set the foundation for me to have a problem when Biff messed
with me at the wrong time one night. I have never been homophobic.
I would be a liar if I said I never thought about homosexuality. I have
had gay friends ever since I became an adult, but I don’t trust men and
I am not attracted to them. One night I was trolling when Biff started
talking about raping me. Chris had dropped his homosexual bombshell
on our friendship a couple of weeks earlier. I think Biff was picking
at me about that. At the time I didn’t see it that way. I had
gotten too high to listen to anything like that without a very strong reaction.
I thought about him wanting to rape me, and then I got out my gun and shot
at him as he ran away. I have never liked the idea of being raped.
I would kill a man who did it to me, no matter the cost. That is
why I didn’t want to play in Venice. I have always been a soldier
and a gangster. I am a freak for freaky women and pain, but I am
a gangster, not a whore.
The next morning I took a plane out of LAX
headed for New Orleans. My knee hurt so badly from hauling ass the
night before I was in tears at the ticket counter. The tears, and
a convenient lie, got me a first class ticket for coach rate. I left
Los Angeles in style. That ended my first attempt to move out of
state.
The second time happened because I couldn’t
get into Anna’s pants, which was a terrible blow to my ego. My friend
Greg had a wife and a child he had left out in Arizona. We had been
promised a place to stay in Bisbee, slightly north of the border with Mexico.
We left Baton Rouge in good spirits. We averaged over one hundred
miles per hour all the way down Interstate 10 to the New Mexico state line.
We stopped for the night in Alamogordo. The small desert town was
out of the way, but Greg had friends there we could spend the night with.
When I woke up the air was so clean. It was a splendid, pretty place
to wake up. We partied there one more night before we went on to
Arizona.
When we got to Bisbee we went to Lenny’s house,
where we had been promised we could stay. There was no one home.
It was four o’clock in the morning and I had just driven all night long.
We didn’t have the money to stay in a hotel. I don’t think there
were any cheap motels in Bisbee. We wound up going to Greg’s brother-in-law
and begging for a place to spend the night. The next morning I was
so cold I could not stop shaking. That went away though.
Billy, Greg’s brother-in-law, had good coffee
and even better weed. He turned out to be a very cool individual.
Billy was in a band. He had a studio in his basement where they practiced.
He had red hair in long dreadlocks.
Billy said, “Greg, I can’t believe you came
back after the hard time you had here last time.”
That made me curious. Greg had told
me a number of stories about how much fun it was in Bisbee. So I
asked him, “What’s Billy talking about Greg?”
Billy answered for him, “Greg and his brother
got stuck here. They couldn’t get the money to get back to Louisiana.
There aren’t any jobs here, just a lot of dope.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. I disliked
the next part even more. When Greg told Billy that we were supposed
to be staying over at Lenny’s house Billy said, “Didn’t you know, man?
Lenny got busted with a bunch of heroin and he’s in rehab right now.”
Right away I could see that we were screwed,
that I was going to have to find a way to get back to Baton Rouge.
I started to trip on being stuck in Arizona. Before I left I had
a bad time. It became clear to me that Greg had lied to me because
of how badly he wanted to see his little boy. I wanted to leave him
there, but after I saw him with his son I couldn’t do it. I could
see how much he loved him. I knew he had pulled some slick maneuvering
to get me to Sierra Vista, Arizona. I figured he had a good enough
excuse to still have a ride back home.
I sold my Walther P38 to get the money for
the return trip. My father had given me that gun years earlier.
It made me sad to see it go. We stopped at a topless bar in El Paso
on the way back so I could do something to feel a little better about being
an idiot. There was an incredible Hispanic woman there. She
wore boots and nothing else. I was forced to leave. I drove
in excess of one hundred miles per hour another nine hours to get home.
Sexy women make me crazy. Greg videotaped us flying through traffic
on the interstate in Houston.
I returned to a surprisingly good life.
I recently graduated from college. I hadn’t shot up any dope in almost
four years, so I had plenty of friends to hang out with. A pretty
girl called me up because she wanted me to come to her house with some
weed. All of a sudden it struck me that Susan had been looking for
my company for a long time. It took me so long to understand that
love involves two people. Love doesn’t work when it is a one-sided
arrangement. She and I fell in love quickly, long before we ever
made it into bed.
Most of my life before she and I got together
exists as an introduction to the romance that took place between Susan
and I. If our relationship was a preface to something bigger I should
brace myself. Anything bigger is going to be a real doozy.
We started our love affair by smoking weed and looking out the window in
Spanish Town. Special things have always happened for me in Spanish
Town. It’s the oldest neighborhood in Baton Rouge. The State
Capitol stands at the front of it. From legislators to male prostitutes,
the area had always attracted the worst elements of society. By the
time I lived there with Susan there had been an effort to get rid of all
the lowlifes but the legislators.
We started out with a business arrangement.
I always had excellent weed. Susan was one of the people who wanted
it all the time. When I became her drinking buddy it was all over.
I regularly went to see her with a bottle of wine or bourbon. We
got drunk often. I was deeply in love with her before the night came
when she asked me to go to bed with her. I wanted to spend all of
my time with her. I lived to hear her voice and see her smile.
I wanted to see her piercing blue eyes looking directly into mine.
Susan asked me if I wanted to get into her
bed. I said yes. I had drunk to extreme excess. I had
also done some cocaine with our friends Chris and Angie. I was awful
in bed that night. I left her apartment that night feeling like I
had destroyed any chance of a relationship with her. I had been too
sloppy drunk to do much of anything. I was too embarrassed to see
her for about a week. When I went back over there I was on xanax and stoned
out of my gourd. We talked for a number of hours. I told her
how beautiful I thought she was. I told her I wasn’t happy about
how our sex had gone. I asked her to give me another chance.
She looked at me so sweet when she said she’d love to. The second time
we got into it a lot more. We didn’t stop after the first time we
both got off. We did it over and over, and it got sweeter every time.
Finally neither one of us was capable of doing it again. Exhausted
I ran my hands all over her lightly, and kissed her neck softly.
I knew there could be no going back to the life I had before.
“I don’t want you to be just another boy from
over the summer,” she said. “I want you to be here when the winter
comes.”
“I will be right here by your side,” I assured
her.
I wouldn’t say that all we did for the next
two weeks was make love. That would not be true. We ate food,
took baths, went out and made money. Then we came back home, got
high and made love all night long. To me it felt like she was the
woman I was made to be with. We were so good together. Our
relationship progressed beyond sexuality early on. I could never
record the bulk of our conversations because they went on for years.
They were very important to me, and I remember most of the deep things
we said to each other. If I had not spent so much time trying to
leave this world I would probably remember more of them. It hurts
me when I can not remember details. Bear with me and I will attempt
to reveal all things to you. I want this love and this tragedy to
be as beautiful and painful for the world as it was for me.
Susan and I talked about sexuality.
We talked about religion. We talked about human rights, love, pain
and guilt. We talked about justice, and everything else under the
sun. Perhaps you don’t care to read this. If that is the case
then I want you to go in peace. I don’t claim that these were the
words of some prophet. These were just words that were wonderful
to my life. I will always remember those conversations as wonderful
no matter what anybody says or does. Our first conversations about
sexuality began after the first time we made love sober.
“I believe people are like animals,” she said.
“People try so hard to disguise the fact that they are animals, but deep
down they have sexual urges just like wild beasts. Sex is such a
natural thing. To make it out to be something more than that, or
something wrong, is to deny the function that has preserved our species
as the dominant life form on this planet.”
“I have always thought of sex as one of the
more refined and cultivated practices of our culture,” I told her.
Susan did not understand that. She thought that was funny.
“Could you explain yourself?” she asked me.
“Simple sex will do for some people, but I
get into complicated sex,” I said.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“When I was young I didn’t know anything about
sex. I did it to please myself. It never occurred to me I could
work to please someone else,” I said. She had an amused look on her
face as I continued, “I met this witch who taught me all about male and
female sexuality. She taught me how to make it last.”
“Oh, really? A witch? Who was she?”
“Don’t worry about that. She taught
me how to do it right se we could both have fun. That’s all you need
to know.”
Susan thought about that for a second before
she responded, “So now that you have learned how, what makes you so different
from an animal when you have sex?”
“I can wait,” I said.
“What if I don’t want you to wait?” she asked.
***
Susan and I always had a good time learning
about each other. She told me a lot of things she had never told
anyone else. I told her all of my deep dark secrets. In retrospect
it is easy to see that most of our secrets were about sexuality.
It is difficult for me to describe the way
we came to know each other’s bodies as well as our own. We made love
during daylight hours. We both paid a lot of attention to our partner.
One day, early in our relationship, I found a scar on her in a particularly
private and unlikely place.
“How did this happen?” I asked her.
“Oh, that’s nothing,” she muttered, and changed
the subject quickly. She didn’t want to explain it to me. I
could never let something like that go, especially when it was so obvious
she didn’t want to tell me about it.
One of my talents has always been a knack
for dragging secrets out of my lovers. I prefer to use the tactic
of delay and question again. One night after we had exceptionally
good sex I asked her about it again.
“Someone took advantage of me,” she said.
When I pressed her for details she told me
a story I had heard too many times. It wasn’t exactly the same story,
but the important points all corresponded. She had been raped, and
she thought it was all her fault.
“I went out with this man a few times.
One night I let him tie me up. He abused me brutally, even though
I was crying and begging him to stop.”
“There is a difference between sadomasochistic
sex and rape,” I explained to her. “What this man did was an act of rape.”
“Forget all about it,” she urged me. “It was
all my fault.”
Society often indoctrinates young women to
make them feel they are responsible for the wrongs of men. That is
one of the evil things society does. Amy got raped, but she thought
it was her fault because she had been drinking. Erin got raped, but
she told me she should have known better. Susan got raped, and she
was telling me it was her fault because she thought she would have fun.
I became furious.
“How was it your fault when you were crying
and begging him to stop?” I asked her.
“It happened because I was stupid,” she said.
I held her face close to my chest and kissed
her. “No, my love, you could never be stupid,” I said. “You
are barely just a woman, and while you look all grown up I doubt you have
yet to grasp how evil a man can be. Don’t worry. Never again,
as long as I am alive, will you have to worry about something like that
happening to you again.”
I even went so far as to vow revenge on the
rotten bastard. I finally got his name out of her a couple of weeks
later. When I tracked him down I found he had moved out of town.
He was spared having a similar experience as the one Susan went through.
I was madly, insanely in love with her. I was capable of anything.
The man was lucky we never met.
“Who have you been with and what have you
done?” I more demanded than asked. The knowledge of Susan’s past
occupied my attention when we took the time to talk.
“If I am going to open up about those things
I want to know all about you first,” Susan ultimately said. I thought
that arrangement was more than fair. It was not an easy thing to
tell Susan about my past. There were parts of it that I thought should
never see the light of day. I did it anyway. I gave her my
complete trust.
“The first girl I kissed was a girl from Belaire
named Michelle,” I started off. “We made out a few times, but we
never had sex. Michelle was involved with an older guy. She
was frightened that if she went all the way with me he would find out and
hurt her. I was much too young and undeveloped to take on an older
man. I had to let her go. The whole affair made me feel week
and inferior. It was because of my feelings of inadequacy that I
went so overboard with macho bullshit later on. When I got older
I overcompensated for all the shortcomings of my youth.”
I spoke at length about obsession, possessiveness
and sexual addiction in my relationships with Amy and Erin. Susan
became very angry upon hearing how I had been treated in those relationships.
I had to go that extra mile to explain to her that I felt the injustice
had been done to the women I called myself loving.
“I refused to have sex with Amy on numerous
occasions because it allowed me to be more manipulative,” I explained.
“Amy slept with other guys because she was desperate for the physical affection
I refused to give her.” Both of these statements were partially true.
“I ascertained I could use my knowledge of
Amy’s activities to make her feel guilty, and thereby to extend my manipulation,”
I told her. “I stuck the needle in Amy’s arm the first time she ever
did an injection of heavy dope. Amy was just the first of many girls
I did that to.”
“But it was her decision,” Susan tried to
convince me. I silenced her and went on with my story.
“Erin was a nymphomaniac. I came to
suffer from the male equivalent of that disease. I became a monster.
Erin attempted to overcome her problem because sex for the pleasure made
her feel dirty. I never understood what Erin thought sex was for.
I spent all of the time we were together getting Erin out of her clothes
and onto her back,” I said about the messed up things that happened between
Erin and I.
“She must have been a stuck-up bitch to have
so many hang-ups about having sex with someone she claimed to be in love
with,” Susan said.
“Hush up,” I cooed to her, “I haven’t even
gotten to the good part.”
I went on to tell her about how after Erin
and I broke up she still came to see me. Erin could not find anyone
else who matched her sexual appetite, the one she was so ashamed of and
tried so hard to cure. Erin hurt me, so every time we had sex after
our break-up I hurt her in return. I taunted her with the truth.
I would say, “Erin, you and I both know the only reason you came over here
is because you wanted me to fuck you.” I twisted the knife, “Sex
is the only thing you are good for. You are nothing but a nice piece
of ass and a pretty mouth.” What I said had a lot of truth to it.
My words made her cry repeatedly.
When I told Susan I felt guilty about what
I had done she said, “The fucking bitch cheated on you, Josh. I’d
like to beat her ass.” I bet she could have done it too. I
found it funny that Susan was jealous of a woman I had not seen in years.
I also found her feelings very attractive.
“I turned out a lot of young girls on
dope,” I confessed to Susan. “The first one was a Spanish girl named
Marcella. I took her back to my apartment and gave her a speedball.
She liked it a lot. She liked me too, so it was easy for me to talk
her out of her clothes. I enjoyed the experience. When she
called me back I told her to come over looking nice. It became a
regular thing for her to come over and do what I told her so she could
get some dope. We did all sorts of naughty things together, but I
never forced her to do anything. If she wanted to stop we stopped,
even if I was in total control.” I made that point clear to Susan
so she would know where I was coming from. I was a very bad boy,
but I was not sadistic.
“I get off on your old stories,” Susan said.
She never wanted me to stop talking to her.
“My next victim’s name was Jennifer.”
I went on, “After she got hooked on dope she would come over uninvited
and offer herself openly for it. I got into humiliating her.
One night she came over with our friend Suzanne, who was a lesbian.
I told Jennifer if she wanted to get anything from me she would have to
perform oral sex on Suzanne for me. Suzanne seemed to like the idea.
She had a good time with Jennifer kneeling between her legs and lapping
at her sex. I grew bored with Jennifer before too many days went
by, though.”
I lied, “I couldn’t afford to get Jennifer
high anymore.” Jennifer was not a pretty girl. I didn’t tell
Susan I quit seeing Jennifer because of that. I knew how shallow
it was. I later heard Jennifer became a full-fledged prostitute.
I didn’t tell her that either.
Susan already knew about my relationships
with Connie and Joelle, but there was something else she wanted to know
about. “Tell me about witchcraft,” she implored. The evidence
of my involvement with wicca was still abundant in my house.
“Connie introduced me to wicca,” I revealed.
“I didn’t know Connie was a witch,” Susan
said.
“Connie was mostly a supernatural slut, but
she had a talent for reading people’s characters, and she had a massive
female intuition,” I conceded. Susan thought that was funny.
She didn’t find it funny at all when she found
out that Joelle had tested positive for HIV. Susan made me go get
tested with her. I couldn’t blame her. One can never be too
careful.
“I have told you about all of the women in
my past,” I promised her. I essentially had done that. I left
out the one-night stands. There were only a couple of them, and they
didn’t mean anything to my relationship with her. If anything my
revulsion for casual sex with strangers led me to be more faithful to her.
Now it was her turn to tell me about the past.
“My first lover was a Jewish boy in Austin,
Texas,” she started off.
“He came from a wealthy family, but we never
fell in love (as if one has anything to do with the other). We were
both inexperienced at love when we got together. We might have had
more of a relationship if I had not gone off to school here in Louisiana.”
She smiled at me when she said that last thing.
“How many people have you made love to?” I
asked her.
“Until I met you I only had sex, I never made
love.”
I had to respect the skill with which she
had evaded my question, but I would not be shaken that easily.
“You know what I meant. What? You don’t
trust me enough to tell me?” I doggedly pursued a response.
She counted for a few seconds, and then she
said, “Okay… fourteen including you.”
“It’s encouraging to know I was included.
I like to think I count for something.”
She hit me before she went on to tell me about
the crippled guy, the geology student, the law student, our friend Richard,
the guy who raped her, the married guy, a couple of guys in Austin and
a few more I can not remember. I was jealous. Fourteen is not
a high number, but she had outdone me. I figured it would not have
been hard for her to do considering how good she looked, and how free spirited
she was.
“I took part in a threesome with a married
man and his wife,” she leaked out one night when we drank wine and talked
about kinky sex.
“Ooh, tell me more,” I encouraged. I
was very interested. I spent so much of my life fascinated with sexuality
and deviations. Normal sex was never enough for me.
“I had been partying with this couple for
about a year and a half. One night they propositioned me to have
sexual relations with them.”
I wanted details, but she was slow to
give them up. Susan was free spirited. She was also a very
shy girl when it came to talking. I found out her secret when she
slipped and said something about it being good until a pubic hair got stuck
in her throat. The secret didn’t have anything to do with oral sex.
The secret was about how the hair could get lodged in her throat.
The answer I pried out of her was that the man’s wife had secured Susan’s
hands behind her neck. When she let me in on that I became very aroused.
It wasn’t her submissiveness that turned me on. It wasn’t the fact
she was in a threesome that got me off. It was the idea she would
do things that very few girls would do that got me all wound up.
By the time she revealed these things to me
I was already very much in love with her. The knowledge served to
fuel my sexual desire for her. I wanted to have her whenever there
was time and opportunity. Susan’s skin glowed and her features were
radiant. Evidently our activities affected her in a positive way.
“Sexually active women are often more attractive
than frustrated ones,” she told me. I could see that so clearly when
she told me.
“The bad news for frustrated women,” she continued,
“is that the more frustrated they become the less appealing they are.
So it only gets worse.”
“Let’s make sure you don’t have to worry about
that,” I said to her teasingly.
***
Providing readers with the details of our love
does not give me any sort of perverse pleasure. I certainly do not
enjoy the worry I feel about exposing information that might tarnish someone’s
reputation. I feel I must give these details, regardless of the judgments
they will bring. These are the details that make up my identity.
I was by far the freak of the relationship.
I went places physically and mentally that few of my girlfriends would
have dared. I would never say Susan was a shallow person. I
would say she took simple pleasure from sex, which she considered a natural
function. I, on the other hand, found pleasure in the heretical side
of sex. The more I did to make myself feel like an abomination the
greater the pleasure. When I reached adulthood I surrounded myself
with friends and lovers who lived outside of normal, mundane culture.
Even the tamest of my adult relationships involved the use of heavy drugs.
In the wildest of my relationships I drank my partner’s blood, and allowed
her to drink mine. I never allowed myself to believe I was any sort
of supernatural being, but I did engage in vampirism, both literal and
figurative. The things that Susan had done, like my other girlfriends,
barely scratched the surface of my own dark fantasies. The hardest
thing I have ever done in my entire life was come clean with Susan and
tell her how much of a freak I really was.
I told her that I had always been a dominant
lover, but that I had always wanted to be submissive. I always wanted
to meet a woman I could worship like a goddess. I told her about
how my frustrated desire led me to embrace increasingly aberrant behavior.
My religious guilt even led me to the brink of suicide. I never worried
about my own sexuality, I just never had the guts or the trust to reveal
my desires to anyone. My desires boiled down to a genuine wish to
please my lover before myself. When I told Susan about it the most
wonderful thing happened. She told me my big, bad secret was no big
deal. She thought it was very cool. I could tell the idea turned
her on. It made me happy that she was not disgusted, and I was relieved.
All of my fears brought on by heavy conservative Christian indoctrination
faded. It was replaced by a long kiss from a beautiful woman.
I haven’t even begun to talk about my relationship
with Susan. I have scratched a bare introduction. Before you
read any further I must admonish you: I don’t give a damn about your judgments.
In my heart I know that truth is beauty and beauty is truth. He who
lives with love as his law need never worry about divine retribution.
No benevolent god would condemn a being that bases life on love, spirituality
and good works. Christian dogma leaves a soul such as mine in turmoil,
but I must be true to myself. I must say, “Yes, this has been my
life.” This is my testimony. All of my wrongs and all of my
rights exist as evidence of my imperfection, and also of my willingness
to make a stand for the things I believe in, no matter the cost.
I say to you that I am free. I am free to do wonderful things or
make hideous mistakes, but free. In the end the only retribution
I fear is the living pain caused by my bad decisions. My suffering
comes because my own arrogance brought me to a place where I deserved to
suffer. I can not imagine a hell worse than sheer stupidity.
I think I need to be very careful that I do
not allow my message to be stolen by my homage to the dead. I will
be writing about dead people for a great number of pages to come, but the
story is not about the dead people. I did not intend this work as
some sort of bizarre shrine to the ghosts of the dearly departed.
The exact opposite holds true. I sincerely hope the spirits
of the dead do not have any say so on the fate of your soul after death.
I fear I may have pissed off a few of them. It could not be helped.
I know good material when I smell it.