Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

I was seventeen, she was twenty five

and she was married to a teacher of mine.

He ended up fired, she ended up dead and I ended up a grade behind.

Can't really say it was a brilliant move, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

He was from Coahuila and he had solid plan

I wasn't over busy and said I'd lend a hand

I buried him next to the boarder guards and headed for the nearest state line.

Can't really say it was a brilliant move, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

She was a millionaire's daughter, all sex and class and curves.

I was sure that I was in love, but I lacked the cash reserves.

I didn't know that my perfect score was the cocaine her daddy refined.

Can't really say it was a brilliant move, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Collective story I started a while back on another site. It has one addition...(and where I unwittingly pulled my inspiration for Mercury Poisoning)

The door opened from the street flooding the dingy office with lukewarm spring sunshine and silhouetting the figure of a man in the doorway. The figure approached the woman seated at the reception desk.
"I am looking for a man" he said. "A man I know only as Bookhouser."
"That would be me" said a thin man near the rear of the office. "And you are late. I don't mean the pardon me traffic was heavy and I'm a few minutes late or even the I'm terribly sorry I was in an accident and got here two days late kind of late. You, my good man, are eighty three years late. Eighty three bloody years, I could have thumbed my way to Syren bloody Prime and back in under eighty three years."
"Funny you should say that." Said the man.
(Paul K)


Addressing the receptionist, he asked, "How old do I look to you?" as he removed his hat, to reveal a full head of hair. Light brown, natural looking color, long enough to be pulled back into a ponytail, which it was. The hat he held in both hands rather tightly, it might be noted by a more than casual observer, as if he might be afraid of dropping it."Um" she began, scanning him from head to knees, but distracted by the hat. "I'm not good at telling peoples' ages, but I would have to say...no more than mid-thirties at most, and possibly as young as 25..." She had heard that peoples' eyes best indicated age, but his were dark, of an ambiguous color, and not giving away any secrets. The hat seemed to have a personality of its own and she was sure one of its twitching movements hadn't been related to his grip on it."Excellent guess!" He cast a glance toward the back window where the other man had turned to examine the cloudy sky. Somehow his back made it obvious how intently he was actually listening. The man at the window had white hair and a slight stoop and could have passed for the great grandfather of either of the two younger people in the room. The old man whirled around and suddenly stood directly behind the seated woman, placing his thin, splotched hands on her shoulders. "Allow me to introduce you, my dear," he squeezed affectionately, "to Mr. Leven. Eric Leven...whose appearance can be deceiving. Eric--meet the companion of my old age, Milla, whose appearance, I might add was fortuitous."And whose appearance is quite pleasing, thought the younger-looking man. Sly old bastard!Milla released a quick but guarded smile and extended her hand across the desk. Eric shook her hand firmly and perhaps a few seconds longer than necessary for the occasion. Meanwhile his hat escaped and frisbeed solidly and loudly into the window glass, rebounding back across the room. Milla gasped. The hat was now hanging still in a corner near the ceiling. It appeared to be sulking. And it appeared to have grown a ponytail.Mr. Leven's bald head didn't seem to age his appearance at all. To the contrary. The young woman unleashed another smile, one not seen by the man behind her."I don't think we've been introduced to your hat, " she said.

(Tim K)

Mercury Poisoning

"Aren't you going to introduce me to your hat?" She purred.

"No Ma'am, I don't think that would be a good idea. This is a rather disreputable hat and I wouldn't want it on my conscience. You seem to be a nice girl." He said and tossed back the remainder of his scotch.

"Why don't you let me decide what is best for me?" She said sliding into the seat opposite him. "I like the look of your hat."

"Trust me ma'am, you don't. This felt is steeped in evil and would rain ruin down on one such as you. Besides it wouldn't match your pumps."

"If that hat is so rotten why do you wear it? Are you so good that you can't be corrupted? What makes you so special, huh?"

"I'm afraid that I have been so tarnished by the world that this hat can no further mar my soul." He said. "It finds me to be a kindred spirit."

"Oh you are not so tuff. You are still concerned about me. If you were truly corrupt you wouldn't care what hat I wore."

"Step back there sister," He said. "You never said anything about wearing. Wearing is a far cry from introductions. Have you no morals?"

She laughed derisively. "How better to meet a hat than to wear it? How else can a girl get acquainted?"

"I see you like to live dangerously," He said. "That kind of thinking could get you killed. A bad hat is not a laughing matter."

She slid off the seat and walked past him with deliberately amplified hip motions and tucking a card into the band of his fedora whispering, "If you change your mind, ring me up sometime. My head does get so cold on these winter nights."

He watched her leave in the mirror over the bar and then motioned to the barman for another scotch. Reaching up he tossed the fedora on the table and scowled at it. "Why is it all the dames go straight for you? I can't get any action at all since I stuck you on my head. I should trade you in for dapper bowler or a suave panama or a dashing Stetson, anything but you."

The hat just smiled quietly to itself as he downed another double.

Monday

Headache and tension mark the modern life.
A thousand pricks and cuts the soul degrades.
All beauty and joy rendered to paler shades.
Each day, 'tween office walls doth offer strife
and severs calm as a butcher's knife
doth sever flesh with whetted blades.
Each moment glimpsed of outdoors' shades
doth inflate a longing rife
to saunter out among the leaves
and nature's simple beauty capture.
A longing wells within that naught can ease
but memory of past times retrieves
one moment of nature's rapture
puts again the confined mind at ease.

Imagined Dialog Between a Man and His Girlfriend's Therapist.

All of the days the came before mean nothing; it is only what took place on that one day that matters.

I say that because they were nothing. They were wasted days when all I did was wander and try to forget.

I don't see why any of what went on during that time is relevant.

Well, I disagree. What drove me there is relevant and what brought me back is relevant. What is so important about the during?

Yeah a lot can happen in year, but it didn't. Trust me it was just lot of sleeping in doorways and on street corners. A lot of eating food scraps left by restaurants and tourists and a lot of soul crushing loneliness.

Well, maybe you are right. Maybe there some use to talking about that but I don't want to. That emotional state is what drove me there to begin with. The loneliness was merely a culmination of what put me on the street to begin with; and besides you know most of that story anyway.

Why should I re-hash it all now?

I know she does and that's really why I am here. Don't get me wrong, I understand the value I do. I just am not sure I would be here now if it weren't for her. I'm happy.

Well, of course not. No one is totally happy. No one but an idiot I suppose. But I am certainly not consumed by unhappiness, not after that day.

I was. I will. I'll tell you about it. Let's see, where was I? Oh yeah, at the beginning I suppose.
It was freezing cold as I walked north along the sea wall on that last day. I pulled the beat up military surplus trench coat closer around my body and tried to ignore the biting of the wind. I bent forward into the protection of a palm tree and public trash can and finding that one calm spot I lit a cigarette. It tasted like shit. They all did, had for months. I moved on up the walk taking a few unenthusiastic drags on the thing wondering why I even bothered to keep smoking, except when I tried to stop it was just one more thing that nagged away at the corners of my mind. Without it there is just more empty space to be filled up by the longing.
I stopped at the top of San Juan Blvd. and look east over the town. What the fuck was I doing there? I'd asked myself the same question every day since I fled my old life back east. There was no reason to stand there focusing on it and just making myself more miserable. I needed to get in out of the wind, find something to eat, find somewhere to sleep where I wouldn't have to worry about anyone stealing my shoes.
As much as I hated living on the streets, the constant need to survive and look after that immediacy kept me from dwelling in the things that had driven me there. I was pretty much resigned to living out my days in that condition too. It could have been worse I suppose. Believe me, there were and are far worse cases than me out there. After all, I chose to be there. I set my own prison. Some of them couldn't function anywhere else.

What? Would I ever... No I don't think I could ever reach that state again. It took a pretty unique set of circumstances to drive me there.

Anyway, I was standing there at the top of San Juan trying to decide whether I was going to head inland toward the shopping mall where it was decidedly warmer or whether I would keep moving north alone the sea front and where it was cold but the pickings were better from the tourists and fast food joints. I paused there huddled in on myself against the wind and only raised my head for an instant to take a drag on that god awful cigarette when I heard tires scream as a driver stood on the brake pedal. You see a lot of odd things on the street and you get an inherent sense of danger like an animal in the wild. I didn't sense danger but I looked around because of the noise.

What? Oh, well sometimes people just flip out and kill homeless people. We had a rash of them during that time. Teenagers from some rich neighborhoods up in Escondido were driving down and just randomly stopping and beating homeless people to death where they lay.

Yeah, but that's the human animal for you. It doesn't make the news much. I think I saw a few newspaper blurbs about it but the people who actually buy the news papers don't really care. They just want the 'homeless problem' to go away and if a few get knocked off by teenagers, what the hell.

I agree, it is sick but that's not really what I am supposed to be talking about is it. You wanted to know about what brought me back. Like I said, I was standing there when I heard tires squeal and I looked around to see what was happening. I only mentioned the other because if I had sensed that it was car full of teenagers from Escondido I would have made myself scarce very quickly but, like I said I didn't have that feeling. And boy am I glad I didn't. One minute I'm standing there wondering where my next meal is coming from, not knowing where I am going to sleep at night and literally surviving hour by hour and the next thing I know she's standing there in front of my with tears running down her face and flicking back and forth between fury and relief and a bunch of unidentifiable emotions. She hugged me, kissed me and hit me and landed one good kick to my shin in about the space of thirty seconds. When I actually registered what it meant that she was there, I just lost my cookies.

Lost my cookies; I broke down. I had long since forgotten how to cry. I just stood there and couldn't breath and developed a massive headache because some kind of pressure tried to push its way up through my chest and neck into my head. All I knew was that some sort of miracle had happened and I could die right then and it wouldn't matter. She'd come.

Well, that is pretty much it really. I went with her back to her hotel and took the first hot shower I had had in months and ate the first real food I had had in months. She made me go to a doctor and it's a good thing she did because I apparently had a few nasty infections and hepatitis like A through F of something. And mostly we talked. We talked for hours and days and she told me about all that had happened since I left. I have to say that I felt like a complete bastard for leaving behind what I did and for tearing up the lives that I did but I didn't know anything else to do. Had I stayed I think it would have been worse over all. My leaving forced a lot of things to come to a head.

You already know most of it I'm sure. Hell, you probably know more of it than I do. After all, I was absent through most of it. You were hearing about it and I trust her perceptions.

Hehehe, yeah I am a bit biased toward her. She saved my life. I threw away a life and a career and a family because I loved her and when I was resigned to living on the street and looking forward to dying early and being forgotten, she saved me. If I wasn't biased I wouldn't have a heart.

I never said I wasn't a selfish bastard. I am. I'm sure that the healthy and righteous thing to have done would have been to suffer the pain of privation and live the good little moral lie and not disrupt anyone's charade. Sorry, but I couldn't do that.

What? No. I am not sure I understand what altruism is. I couldn't see spending the one life I have living a lie and was willing to walk away from life altogether and live on the streets with nothing before I would live a lie. But to be willingly sacrifice that one life to play nice and pretend every single day; I couldn't do it.

It probably does make me a terrible person. I am open to that and I don't think that I in anyway deserve to be as happy as I am, to have the most incredible woman I have ever known, to be loved. I don't deserve it I never could. Do any of us really? I did what I did to remain true to myself and to the fact that I love her. I am sorry to no end that it hurt others in the process but if I had stayed, the hurt would have been worse.

Do you really think that people who stay in dead marriages 'for the children' are doing them a favor? Do you really think that people who stay together when they desire with every fiber of there very souls to be with someone else are doing the right thing? I just don't buy that whole religious bull shit about self sacrifice.

I left. I walked away because I couldn't live with my wife and children when I constantly wanted to be with her. Do you understand that at all? I had no grounds for divorce, no reason from my wife, she was always wonderful and I loved her. I do love her, I just loved someone else more and it tore me apart.

Why didn't I try? What, to start a relationship with her? Ha! She was my best friend. Married to my best male friend, my drinking buddy, my fishing buddy, my business partner. You don't have an affair that way. It would have destroyed the company and the families. Besides, her family is old money and connected, I was an outsider. It was all just too insurmountable. One day I got up and it was like any other. The first conscious thought that ran through my head was her name. I got up and numbly went about making breakfast and heading to the office. I got behind a Volvo at one of the lights near the office and it had one of those 'Give Peace a Chance' bumper stickers. I read it and just started laughing manically to myself. I hadn't known what peace was for several years. I knew that if I kept going and went to the office, around 9:35 she would walk in and smile at me and rattle off some plans for the weekend and then I would have to endure watching as she crossed the hall and kissed him good morning. Then the weekend would come and we would go biking or canoeing or whatever and I might get a chaste kiss goodnight and then next week it would start all over again. I sat there and read that damned bumper sticker and then I just sat there ignoring the horns behind me for I don't know how long. When I snapped back, I just spun my truck over the median and head out of town.

No, not at first. I stopped and made a rather large cash withdrawal, changed vehicles, took busses and trains and hitched.

Not really, I suppose I knew I was heading for San Diego. I'd been out there for boot camp back in the early 90's so I knew it was about the best place to be homeless. Never a conscious thought really. You know she says I made a joke about that once years ago and that that was how she found me. Funny how things work out.

Strain J-3-16

He watched her across the room as she peered into her microscope, jotted down some notes, replaced the slide and repeated the action. She continued changing slides and making notes through the entire tray representing the last week's subjects. With each slide she seemed to grow more tired. When she finished, took off her glasses and pinched the bridge of her nose, he spoke."New strain?" She nodded her head in response but did not speak. "More compound dwellers? I had leaflets last week - under my door." "No," she said. "Just some mildly paranoid proselytizers. A few apocalyptic tendencies but nothing too volatile."
"Well, that's good I suppose." He said.
"Good? No, it's not good. I'm not worried about the exact characteristics of the strain. It's just that we're seeing a new strain nearly every week. Do you realize that close to 89% of the population feels the 'presence' now?" She sighed and visibly slumped on her stool. "I really think it's time that we act. I think it's time we look into adding anti-virals to the water supply."
He raised his eyebrows at the suggestion and looked at her over his glasses, but didn't say anything.
Her own worries and insecurities leaped to fill the silence. "We would have to do it with complete secrecy or it would be the fluoride scare again, only worse - much worse. But it's a much bigger public health concern than tooth rot. I don't see how we can keep from acting soon"
"They will not love us for it." He said softly.
"What?"
"I said, 'They will not love us for it.' Even if the anti-virals are completely successful as they seem to be in the lab, it will only be the next generation who will benefit. If we do this and it works, there will be chaos. 89% you say; that's probably a low estimate. That many people suddenly cut off from the presence..." He whistled a long low whistle. "Even if we eradicate the virus, the thoughts and the memories are still there, if they find out or even believe a rumor that's close to the truth, they will tear us down and any institution that protects us. Are you prepared for that?"She cocked her head to the side and mockingly replied. "Who's paranoid now?"
"Not paranoid. I just don't want you to have any delusions about what it means to remove the delusions of the god-spoken. When the presence is gone they will seek a reason. Most will assume they have been abandoned due to a lack of faith and zeal. A religious mind deprived of the presence will try to work harder, pray harder, to do something. Kill the viral body and you sow the seeds of zealotry. Some will claim to feel the presence returned and will lead the others. If god has abandoned our nation, our people, it must be because of 'them'. You don't burn your neighbor's house and kill his family if he looks like you and talks like you, he can't be the problem, but another neighborhood, another town... What if they look different, talk different, eat different food? Civilization will burn."
"Could you be more melodramatic? Have you no faith in humanity at all? You make it sound like we shouldn't even try. How many wars and genocides has the presence caused and you say that removing it will cause even more... Supposing you are right, what do we do?"
"You know my stance. We inoculate our children and those we trust and slowly spread through the world, a population of the immune. And there have been some promising results from trials just using rational argument to combat the virus. The team at Cern has indicated that under a certain weight of evidence the virus just gives up and leaves the body."
She laughed derisively, "You are walking paradox. First you see humanity as a volatile mob that can't be trusted with its own freedom from delusion and now you think they can be trusted to take evidence to combat a virus. Wow! You do never cease to amaze."
"Wish you were right, for my son's sake and yours, but I fear your way too."

Department of Defense Contractor Arrested and Charged With Improper Disposal of Classified Materials...

Fri Apr 24, 2008 3:15pm EST

Department of Defense Contractor Arrested and Charged With Improper Disposal of Classified Materials

The Individual Believed to Have Worked Alone

CHARLESTON, Apr. 24 /BSNewswire-FUBARNewswire/ --- A Department of Defense
contractor was arrested in Charleston SC on Apr. 24, 2008, and charged with
improperly disposing of U.S. Department of Defense (DOD)classified materials, the Department of Justice announced today. The individual is believed to have acted alone in an ongoing conspiracy to subvert critical elements of national security.


In a fifteen-count indictment returned on Apr. 1, 2008, and unsealed today in
U.S. District Court in Atlanta, Bubba McJunkin was charged with eating, over a period of five years, an estimated 1500 documents classified confidential and top secret. McJunkin then allegedly excreted the documents in an unclassified toilet.


"This case demonstrates that the DOJ will aggressively investigate and prosecute any who attempt to derail the efforts of the Department of Defense to keep the nation's secret. It is not so much that McJunkin consumed the documents in question but that he, with open disregard for his responsibility to his nation, went in an unsecured toilet. The DoD provides clear guidance on the proper use of high flow composting toilets that completely obliterate any readable material in the fecal matter," said Thomas L. Bland, Assistant Attorney General.


According to the indictment, McJunkin conspired to flush the nation's secrets into an unsecured sewer where Al Qaeda could easily retrieve them.

"Investigating corruption and unsecured toilet practices within the Defense Department is a priority for the Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS), and this case demonstrates that DCIS will expend the resources to investigate these sorts of allegations, no matter how anal it makes us seem," said Ignatius Patrick Freely, Special Agent in Charge for DCIs.




This indictment is an example of the Department's commitment to protect U.S.
from it's ever present enemies by keeping a tight reign on the bowels of those with access to privileged information. The National Defecation Leakage Prevention Initiative announced in October 2004 is designed to promote the early detection, identification, prevention and prosecution of improperly flushed document laced feces.


The investigation is being conducted by the Freedom Plotz Division's National
Criminal Enforcement Section and the Defense Criminal Investigative Service.
Anyone with information concerning illegal conduct in the passing and flushing document laden turds by DOD employees is urged to call the National Criminal Enforcement Section of the Freedom Plotz Division at 202-119-5555.