Just go here.

People who are viewed as intellectually enlightened and informed are increasingly adopting the fanatical view that this conflict needs to become (or is already) a religious war.  The sane moderates maintain in a tragically diminishing voice that this is a political conflict masquerading as a spiritual imperative.  Not to diminish the extremity of the horrors which have occured, but unfortunately, framing this conflict as a merely political one offers only mundane, pedestrian benefits to the powerful elite compared to what they can gain through exploiting the frenzied hysteria of a patriotic American fatwa. 

Who will our Mohammed be?  FDR?  Lincoln?  Washington?  John Adams.  Benjamin Franklin?  George Mohammed Walker Bush?  And when it is all over how will we account for ourselves?  Will we bother to examine our collective conscience then?  Will we feel any need at all to do so? 

We are revealing our true selves as individuals and defining our nation by our response to this attack.  I daresay we are a nation of courageous individuals who, over the last thirty years, have abdicated arguably the greatest democracy (certainly the most powerful democracy) of all time, turning it over to an oligarchy of rich, mostly white, men who are using this crisis for their own narrow, selfish purposes.  They are the real fifth column in any battle brought today by true patriots and defenders of freedom. 

Freedom is not a prize to be awarded to either 'us' or 'them'.  Ideally, freedom tolerates no imposed distinction; there is no 'them', only us.  There will always be those who seek rebellion against society and who repudiate the inclusiveness of freedom.  The danger is to adopt their destructive view as our own, to descend into their brand of hatred and to adopt their posture of judgementalism, thus becoming not defenders of freedom's high ideals, but the petty custodians of some cheap imitation of freedom.  Let whatever distinctions there may be, be only the distinctions which others have chosen for themselves.  Let us not lose our grip on this precious gift of freedom in the tears of our grief, nor in the fever of our just rage. 

It is, least of all, a nation we defend; much more we defend the ideal of a free and open society which can exist anywhere but which, for a couple centuries now and to our great good fortune, has chosen to exist in America.  We are blessed.  Let's not blow it.

I do not support the so-called Patriot Act.  Since it is now enacted, I do support strict adherance to its 'sunset' provision limiting the life of this draconian act. 

I am embarrased to be a human today, on a planet where the dominant free society enacts a law that virtually criminalizes immigrant status.  This exceeds the shame caused by Bush-the-former when he blocked HIV positive people from entering the US. 

What is going on?  Callers to Talk of the Nation on NPR are actually advocating torture for suspected terrorists.  What's even scarier is that such torture is the scheduled topic for today's show. 

I lit candles, watched the clock, shutdown everything electrical and precious (read: computer and monitor), snuggled into bed and began to read by flashlight.  At 1:30 AM the electrical shut-down in my neighborhood, scheduled for midnight, had still not ocurred.  When I woke, the microwave clock and the caller-id box indicated that there had been no shut-down. 

The candles were nice.  Going to bed early was nice, as was getting up early.  Maybe the lights will go out tonight. 

A sobering excerpt from a speech you should read. 

There's more.  Go read it.  The truth hurts; in fact it hurts so much that it might -- just maybe, if we are strong and see with open hearts, and if we are brave and feel the full depth and breadth of our national agony -- it just might transform us for the better.  There is no question it will transform us -- the only question is whether that transformation will be for the better or for the worse. 

I used to write essays for my journal, things that took time and tears to produce.  It was not a 'blog' kind of writing, not given to the staccato pace of a good weblog.  My journal entries were introspective, reflective and, too often, preachy.  I wanted my writing to have a better perspective, a view not limited to the world of me, I wanted to create these words with a view toward the broader world.  A blog -- a thing perhaps best described as a narrative of websurfing, thick with links to and pithy comments about other fascinating websites -- seemed a structure that might promote extroversion in my writing (and maybe even in my thinking), a format that might help me get out of myself. 

Every soul did once experience greatness in one of its incarnations.  Every crippled creator today has, somewhere in its karmic record, an experience of flowing, lush, endless-seeming creativity which perfectly and appropriately expressed the contents of every void, and every shadow, and every humble hiding thing within.  And everything has happened already.  In the moment that is life, the moment of the soul, there is no past and no future -- all that was and all that will be, very simply, is.  My task is to give that creator, that god, an incarnation in this temporal plane -- this existential flatness upon which god has smashed itself, splattering godself into its component parts; you, me, time, space, life, death, love, hope...  I am called to transcend my existence as a mere speck in an enormous abstract stain, to knit from these tenderly intimate, yet infinitely distant parts a coherence of god.  I am called to reclaim from the surface of this canvas, a whole truth, to draw up out of the accidental randomness of that flat reality a real, honest-to-goodness multi-dimensional creation which will be my contribution to the ultimate reassembly of everything into One. 

Wallowing in the balm of self-abuse.  Bomb.  Sometimes only it soothes.  I let reams and reams of words float through my brain, through the day, words like lost waifs that beg with poignant eyes and broken-hearted hope for recognition, or acknowledgement, or even just for some evidence that their existence is not totally and completely superfluous to the world.  Words.  Were. 

Like throwing pennies away.  It's wrong.  It's a waste.  I discard the most precious thing that could ever come this way, and I feel powerful -- like the five year old who threw the Sunday roast on the kitchen floor.  I want to feel powerful, senselessly powerful in the way a drowning man in desperate panic attacks his rescuer.  I do what I don't want to do; because I don't want to die, and I don't like to cry, and I do not want the responsibility of these precious things, words. 

So I throw them away.  Oh, if you only knew the words from today, the stories they told, the fictions they wove more true than any fact.  Characters with breaking-blooming hearts, plots of universal significance, songs of hoping-eyes brightened, of unlived lives brought to glorious joyous life...  I trash them all.  Then in tears I go back, as now, to recover, reclaim, retrieve; to regain some fragment of that which I discard as the result of trantrums so very infantile -- as the result of agonies all too mature.

I must post this -- whatever this is -- before my electricity is shut off for the night (Mass Electric is doing upgrades in the neighborhood), and before I lose my fickle Internet connection.  The anxiety of the end is always the last reason to start.  Sometimes it is the only reason. 

Annoyingly entertaining.

My nausea at the fans of World War III is threatening to progress to projectile vomitting.  As if that is not bad enough, this from some idiot: "...it is now a commonplace notion that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged.". 

Come again?  I beg your pardon, but I am a liberal, and I have been mugged.  I was 35 and I briefly wanted my mother (who was dead) and then I thought I probably should want a cop -- but I recovered from that notion quickly.  Never, for an instant, was I even slightly inclined to any form of conservatism.  I did not, even once, want to scold myself for carrying things of great sentimental value while strolling alone.  I was not confused; I bore no responsibility for the theft of my possessions, the thieves bore total blame.  And though I did not want to see them again, I knew that the greater danger was to fear and hate them, and to engage in the pretense that I could prevent anything similar from ever happening again by who knows what absurd, irrational means -- perhaps by costuming myself as poor and destitute before appearing ever again in public. 

Furthermore, if the mugging of this liberal did anything, it made me MORE liberal, wanting to promote investment in more social programs which might have disabused those fatherless high school dropouts of the notion that success in this society was only for others unlike themselves. 

The above quote, speaking of September 11, says that "America has been mugged.".  Conservatism stockpiles, it worrys and reserves, and it keeps everything it can.  Liberalism casts to the wind, it invests in hopes and in insupportable dreams, and it seeks to give away everything it can.  Conservatism withdraws from what it fears -- behind unmatchable military force, expansive police powers, and more severe social stratifications, and it seeks to make greater distinctions between itself and others.  Liberalism embraces what it fears -- inviting its detractors to join its internal debates, refusing to make labels into badges of entre and even refusing to create seclusions which one might need entre into, and it seeks to minimize distinctions between itself and others; indeed it seeks to diminish all distinctions. 

A former liberal, become conservative, is a person who has learned fear.  A liberal who remains a liberal simply knows the difference. 

Insightful.

This will not help dissuade aggrieved Muslims from accusing the West of bias. 

Is there a real life?  I know others have lived one.  I do not know how they found it, though.  Was it a chance opportunity which presented a new trajectory for life, an illness that unveiled another door, a blockage which redirected the flow?  Or was there an irrepressible urging, unknown even to the one being urged, a force that in most lives never finds its freedom, which in one life did?  Sometimes real life seems to happen as the result of a choice, and sometimes it seems to never happen, no matter how much you try to choose it. 

Well, what's wrong with that?  I mean, there's been some things in my life -- like the longings I harbored for a straight boy or two when I was in high school -- longings which, if satisfied, would have left me terrified and dumb.  Indeed, on occasion those romantic longings might have been satisfied had I not been paralyzed by the prospect.  So maybe the longing is not so bad; it seems I may have chosen to continue the longing instead of accepting the longing's resolution.  But that's disingenuous.  The longing is bad if, out of fear, it becomes artificial and insincere -- a refuge from that which is ostensibly longed for.  If I choose to remain in the wilderness at the city's edge, though I profess to be on a quest for civilization, then I am lying.  And lamentable. 

So why am I afraid of the inspiration that lies dormant within me?  Why am I afraid to emerge? 

Lately, I have buried myself within an excess 40 pounds of cover.  I must be getting uncomfortably close to the edge of my wilderness. 

Earth Web Sites

On the other hand, fedworld.gov is still posting these images, which thoroughly invalidates the premise of my previous post. 

Nevermind.

I suppose if enemies of America want to know what the weather was (or more specifically, the cloud patterns, not the actual weather) on May 11, 2001, this photo will help.  If they want to know what the weather is today thay can still go here.  News flash to the government: Just because it's a satellite image doesn't mean it qualifies as intelligence.  And just because we do it out of fear does not mean it is intelligent. 

I am wide open for attack here; what possible benefit is there in having an image of my planet on my desktop, from a satellite in geostationary orbit, updated every 30 minutes?  None, of course.  There is no value to the comfort of seeing us as a single earth from an impossible altitude, no advantage to observing -- as if removed from it all -- the peaceful countenance of our strife- and hate-riddled world, and of course no gain in preserving (as much as possible) the way we lived our lives before September 11 -- including such frivolities as a desktop with panache. 

If they are looking for Florida or Texas, they know where to find them without this image.  Concealing information that might be useful to terrorists is not the purpose of removing these images from the Internet.  This image has a resolution of about a mile -- objects smaller than that do not appear as discreet objects, rather they are melded into their surroundings.  Furthermore these images remained available up until October 18, 2001, a full five weeks after the WTC attack.  Even as uncharitable as is my opinion of governmental competence, I think if these images mattered, they'd have been gone sooner.  There could be a lot of reasons that this view has been blocked, the misconception that it has a strategic value not least among them.  Forgive my cynicism, but five weeks after the fact is about when I would expect the newly assembled iron fist of Homeland Security to start tightening, and the place where oppression -- however well intentioned it may be -- first occurs is at educational institutions where free thought and dissent are nurtured and cultivated. 

Shame on the University of Wisconsin for not protesting.  It may be politically impossible to sustain such a protest in this case, since public access to satellite images is pretty much doomed these days, no matter how useless they might be to our enemies.  But the truth of the matter, both technically and morally, is that government should keep its hands off when compelling and legitimate government interests are not at stake.  The thing I fear is that the government today does have interests which are threatened by academic autonomy, as such those interests are illegitimate. 

Where did the free world go?

It represents only 1 ping every ten minutes, and in the space of ten minutes this DSL connection goes up and down more often than me on a good night.  In the time it takes me to write a sentence this link dumps me twice; that's means either that I write very slowly, or that this connection is infinitely frustrating. 

Yeah, I know, it's a free connection.  All that green on the graph represents free bandwidth -- how can I possibly complain, you might ask.  Well, for one thing, I am not sure it is free.  Somebody could show up tomorrow and hand me a bill for $2000.  Besides, I would have already found an ISP to adopt me if everything was not in flux -- i.e.: I am going to move this week, next week, next month, or the month after next, and apart from that, ISPs are dropping like flies, declaring bankruptcy and vanishing into the bit-o-sphere as fast as I can look up their phone numbers. 

The problem is not the spotty connection, though.  Used to be that green part of the graph was like a dense hedgerow; in it I hid.  Now there's lots of splits and gaping breaches and there's not a lot of bandwidth anymore to distract me from looking at myself.  You see, I don't have a TV -- right now, I don't even have a phone.  I do everything here, at this screen, on this keyboard.  I watch the world, I learn, I relax, I run away.  But it doesn't work so good anymore. 

I'm feeling kinda naked, and not in a happy sort of way. 

Bedtime. 

Thanks HMS.  I know it's not so, but sometimes it seems, on dark pre-winter nights, that no one sees these cobbly thoughts -- no one, that is, but the 'bots and me. 

Guten nacht. 

I wonder how many other lonely men -- who have little better to do than pore over their server logs -- were similarly reminded of a Daniel from their own pasts?  And I wonder how many of them wished him back again?

cache - ntc - ab01 . proxy . aol . com - - [16/Oct/2001:04:08:24 -0400] "GET /blog.js HTTP/1.0" 200 7040 "http://www.google.com / search?q=cache : Hu_VtCzWyBc : burgwinkel.com / blog.htm + boyfriend + gone + beg + cock + deep + inside + me & hl=en" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; AOL 6.0; Windows 98)"

Woke today in that confused state which precedes a seizure.  This condition was at one time difficult for me to distinguish from normal life.  Partly because at one time I enjoyed disjointed thoughts which disappeared in mid-thinking, and partly because at one time when these neurological electrical storms would rage inside my brain, it did not much matter to me whether they intensified into a seizure because at one time I could endure a seizure without any lasting effects.  But now I tend to dislocate shoulders, and such.

First, sleep flees; no matter how tired I might be, and regardless of how lazy I normally am, I cannot stay in bed when these storms come.  It is not that I want to be awake -- as if to greet the bright day, make coffee, and be alive -- oh no, I want more than anything to be asleep again, because just simple consciousness exacerbates the storm.  Every brain cell contributes to the propagation of incoherent energy across my brain, stirring my thoughts into a melee of memories, images, words, ideas, questions and disorientations; I have a pot of coffee and a near-empty container of dilantin capsules and it seems to make sense that I should pour one into the other.  But is it the coffee into the pill bottle, or do I put the pills into the coffee pot?  And why can't I seem to recall anything about how I always must have done this in the past. 

Sleep flees because when the normal neurological pathways of thought careen out of control, they tangle with and sever other pathways, sending them out of control thus spreading pockets of anarchy across my brain at the speed of light.  This intense random electrical activity sets off alarms in my cerebellum and brain stem causing the release of adrenalin and signalling the higher functioning levels of my brain to wake up and pay attention.  And so the cycle goes, until either I have a seizure, or I avoid it somehow. 

Today I avoided it by taking the emergency stash of Ativan given to me by my neurologist for such occasions.  It calms the panicking brain cells that are increasingly losing connection with other brain cells -- being isolated really upsets a brain cell -- and all the little fighting children and their broken toys are given a time-out nap, and when I wake up a few hours later, things are usually better. 

But I am nonetheless annoyed today because, seizure or not, this kinda crap takes a day right out of my life, crumples it up and throws it away. 

BlogBack is now in use.  Can't say why I switched from reblogger, I just liked it. :

I am having packet envy. 

Reblogger is back and reinstalled here.  Click on the '&' below and add your thoughts.  [Update: changed it on Monday already.]

Despite my cynical skepticism concerning motivations governmental, this story might well be true, that a shift in US policy toward Palestine was already planned before September 11, to be announced on Sept. 13.  Attacking the WTC after the US took such a pro-Arab stance would make bin Laden's efforts to paint America as an enemy of Islam dubious at best.  Though the proximity in time of these two events may be coincidental, still it raises the disquieting proposition that the terrorists' intelligence regarding the intentions of the US government was (and maybe still is) highly accurate and timely.  The timing of the atrocity on the day it happened was obviously precise, but the choice of that day in particular was, I thought, a random one, based on opportunism more than on intelligence from within the White House. 

I have always stood in awe of the story of the state of Isreal, while naively overlooking the human toll of the violence there, as well as overlooking the reasons which have given rise to that violence.  Human deaths -- whether Arab or Jew -- cannot be overlooked, and there have been many on both sides.  Likewise, the beliefs and free will of individuals must not be overlooked either.  But where to draw the line?  Surely, some things must be banned; murder, torture, terrorism, and abuse of power to name a few.  And some things must be preserved; life, the freedom and respect to live it with dignity, peace.  The difficulty arises between the extremes -- when the way I want to live my life imposes restrictions on the way you want to live yours.  (I know this is a vast oversimplification, but I don't have much time.). 

As much as I dislike the way Bush came to be president, he is.  And as much as I am loath to admit it, I think he is right to seek to preserve (or create) a balance between Isreal and Palestine. 

And while New York mayor Guliani may be right in principle, egos such as his will make these balancing efforts more difficult. 

What could the point of this possibly be?  Are they promoting Bert along with fanaticsm?  Is Bert a terrorist?  Have they even infiltrated Sesame Street? 

Maybe bin Laden's videotaped messages do not include any coded instructions to terrorists in the United States; maybe they get all their direction from Sesame Street, and Bert.

They don't, I know.  But they should.

The Most Rev Michael J Sheehan, archbishop of Santa Fe, said Ms Lopez had turned the Holy Virgin into a "tart".

I don't think Ms. Lopez has changed any dead people, saints or otherwise, one iota. 

Sleep, sweet boy, sleep and dream fretless dreams of desires quenched, and of hopes fulfilled; let the trembling of today's troubled world disturb not the restfulness of your dreaming, nor the clarity of your meetings in the day. 

Good night.

I want Tony Blair for president. 

Yeah, I know, he's got a job right now, and not a bad one, at that.  But as we all know, politics is fickle, and when they are done with him over there in bonnie old England, I would like it just fine if he'd come here to be president.  The fact that this would constitute sloppy seconds does not matter to me at all, in his case. 

Mercury is in retrograde.  Thus, push-button publishing, and specifically blogger are faultering.  Not a good time to start a high tech project.  Or a war. 

I know I've been offline for a while, but Office of Homeland Security for crissakes? 

An American blogger in Sweden, somewhat more alert than I, astutely asked, "why ever did they pick such an Orwellian name?".  Why indeed.  George Orwell's 1984 was fiction, but Rumsfeld and his boys are as non-fiction as good ol' American beef on the hoof -- and as morally dumb.  Problem is, they've taken over the abbatoir, and they've been running it for quite a few years now. 

I certainly do not want to sound un-American (the Committee on Un-American Activities may be revived any moment), nor un-patriotic; and I certainly do not want to allow any passion -- no matter how righteous it may feel to me -- to dissuade me from the only motivation I will ever want -- love.  Therefore, it is love for that man (whose image appears on the right) that makes me bring up a tacky topic like assassination at the awkward moment of a nation's self-vindication.  He was my hero.  I was five when he was assassinated. 

I don't like this topic; it gives me a headache.  It makes me cry.  I tell myself John F. Kennedy was probably just as crooked as the people who killed him; I mean there was the Illinois votes scandal, and there was his rum-running father -- or so the story goes.  And I use cliches like, 'you live by the sword, you die by it,' or 'you play with fire you get burned.'  Ugh.  Eventually, I do admit that I'm just trying to minimize the loss, to impose on the Fates some balance which makes them less unfair.  It is a touching effort but fruitless, and I cry. 

Or maybe the fruit of rehashing these emotions is the tears.  They uncover me; it is how I know who I really am.  Yes, even after 38 years, there are waves of saddness yet to spend themselves in sobs and blurred vision... 

He was ours, he belonged to us here in New England and, more specifically, here in Massachusetts.  He talked like us; they made fun of him for it.  And he was Catholic like me and my family.  He came from that heritage of veils and genuflections, of candles, rosary beads, and sad-faced statues, and he came from an era of Friday afternoon confessions that was emblematic of being Catholic in the Sixties.  Yet he lived playfully.  He lived on the beach, on Cape Cod, a place I have loved since before I was five -- it may be that I love the Cape simply because the Kennedys lived there. 

In the world I knew, President Kennedy was my remarkable incongruity, a saving grace.  My world was one in which everybody like me was defined by saddness and unfair suffering; by the age of five I had already spent two years in hell, but that is another story.  He was like me, except he was happy, always having fun, laughing, and never suffering.  Even when I was five, I knew, because of Jack Kennedy, that life didn't have to be the way I had known it, he was my proof that life really was better than I knew.  His assassination, the way it happened, and the lies surrounding it all, created in me that cynical little man you see in all these words.  The death of my President re-crushed my hope. 

The black operations conducted to assassinate John F. Kennedy were not the beginning of such activity inside the US government, but they certainly were the most ambitious up to that time.  That activity is continuing, which brings me back to the topic at hand; the trust of government. 

The plain logic, obvious to anyone who has ears is that Osama bin Laden is the best thing to ever happen to American domestic intelligence -- it frankly terrifies me.  The terrorist Osama, the homeless rabble-rousing waif, cannot terrorize me one tenth as much as the American government can, in its crimes and its espionage against its own citizens, set now to begin a new era of expansion, and folks like Rumsfeld will, despicably, use the September 11 atrocities to justify their excesses.  They can't let pass unexploited such a profitible opportunity to gain unreasonable power and centralize authority. 

Their eagerness is nauseating.  Instead of dashing to the fore to take their places in a new lineup of power-grubbing haters of civil liberties, it would be more appropriate to the realities of the day for them to at least appear reluctant as they advance, jack-booted, over the Constitution.  Come now, it is not as though our very existence as a nation were threatened, and forgive me if I think that a threat to our existence is the only justification for trashing the US Constitution.  So I would have thought these image conscious power-mongers would be more concerned about their appearance.  But why should they?  None of us are paying much attention anyway.  As long as they keep the gas flowing to our SUV's, and as long as they preserve 'our American way of life', whatever that is besides irrelevant, then we don't much care what they do, do we.  We just don't want to know. 

Have you ever seen Three Days of the Condor?  Quite dated, but relevant today, perhaps even moreso than when it was released. 

I go to the British very much in these last several weeks -- to those who survived Blitzkrieg, who emerged victorious from the Battle of Britain; to that nation of whom the world might one day say (using the words of Churchill), never have so few given so much for so many; to the historical parent of my own nation -- for reassurance and comfort in a time of impossible and gravely consequential choices.  And I go to them for nothing so much as the simple knowledge that I am not alone.  That is the cure for terror.  Whether we are right or wrong -- and I think we are both -- I thank you Britain; I daresay I love you. 

Here is Tony Blair's announcement of British support and participation in US-led attacks on Afghanistan.  In case that doesn't work, try this.

Read this, then this, and finally this, but especially be sure to read this.

I for one will be anxious on the tenth.  I love it. 

Current connection condition as follows (as obtained from DSL reports)

...to New Jersey:
** Speed 1294(down)/442(up) kbps **
(At least 25 times faster than a 56k modem)
Logging result
Finish.

...to San Jose:
** Speed 274(down)/436(up) kbps **
(At least 5 times faster than a 56k modem)
Logging result
Finish.

..to Los Angeles:
** Speed 545(down)/438(up) kbps **
(At least 10 times faster than a 56k modem)
Logging result
Finish.

I don't know what is up with the San Jose test results -- the upload is faster than the download.  But if it is connected at all lately, all I can say is 'tsawright. 

The DSL offerings out there are pretty awful.  WorldCom, despite their website propaganda, can't do anything for a Rhythms customer 'cept sell'em a new line.  No assumption of 'customer care' going on there.  Or maybe it is just an unscrupulous sales staff trying to maximize commissions -- the American way.  They want to discard the present connection, hardware and all, and have Covad install everything new.  Such an encouragingly inefficient business practice for lean times -- maximize cash flow without regard for the rest. 

I'm in a bad mood.

They want $150 per month for a 128kbps line (Synchronous DSL -- 128k both ways).  This price means nothing to me since I have not spent a cent on my present line.  But the service I signed up for was ADSL (Asynchronous) which for most of its life has provided me with 1.5Mbps downstream and 300+ kbps upstream.  The price for that was $49.95 a month.  Hmmm.  I think there is some shopping to be done here -- or maybe some strong words to be shared with WorldCom, like... well, I don't know exactly what they are yet.  But I'll let you know. 

No blog entries because DSL has been down.  Going down again any second, I am sure.  Just wanted to say hi.

Doesn't it just figure; I finally got a decent connection soze I can blog, and I gotta go to bed.  Fuckin' thing will be down in the morning, I just know it. 

On the other hand, it is 5 AM... 

Good night. 

This explains part of the story about my phantom DSL provider.  The line was (again) down most of the day, coming up for about a half hour every three hours, finally coming back up and staying at about 2:30 this AM. 

All is not hopeless.  WorldCom is buying Rhythms, or at least they're buying that group of access rights for Central Offices which include the CO for my particular line.  Maybe WorldCom will take me under their wing and send me a bill for this DSL.  Then at least I will know who to call when it goes down, or slows down.  Gawd, I can't imagine calling somebody just to tell them my bandwidth is drooping when I've lately gotten used to being wonderfully grateful just for having a connection. 

You know, when you really look at a person, you see them.  I said somewhere once this guy was 'way cute,' and he is.  But he's a whole hell of a lot more; he's a whole human being for one thing -- including of course all the appropriate appendages (not that I know personally -- just surmizing).  But he's also got a voice, and he's got a brain, and the scariest thing of all for me is that Mays has got a heart.  Not that I know personally -- just surmizing... 

Check out his blog entry for .:: Saturday :: September 22 :: 2001 ::..  There's pics.  If you look at them, maybe you won't see a person, maybe you'll just see a picture.  I saw a person, and I'm right back where I was running from: I'm afraid.

I'm not afraid of pictures. 

PS:  I really can't believe that Mays is only 5'2" like he says.

PPS.  He is not a child, as his appearance (at a stretch) suggests to some people.  He is a grown adult.  Once he even got laid-off from an adult-type job.  So there.