I realize the protection of copyright is somewhat important.  Though it is not orange alert stuff, it is still significant.  But in America, if you are rich and don't need a tenth of what you possess, then your right to continued amassment of wealth will enjoy the protection of the US Justice Department, and other Federal lackeys, who once were not the errand boys of the entitled, but the servants of the People.  If you are not rich and powerful, and connected, then you can wail and moan, and though you are right, you not only won't win, you also won't get any assistance from Federal law enforcement. 

Isn't seizing a website a little heavy handed?  And doesn't anyone else sense in this excessive action the attempt to terrorize free-thinking and free-speaking people?  I don't even know the details of the case, and I never visited the site before it was seized, but these actions by the Justice Department are theatrical, and that scares me.  Why not just pull the plug on the servers, and be done with it?  Unless of course you want to 'send a message' to intimidate us uppity website owners and discourage not only unlawful activity, but unwelcome discourse as well.  John Ashcroft, in great discord with the freedoms he is charged to defend, has done much to discourage free speech.  Personally, I think he views that as no small dividend of this action.  I reserve no greater contempt than that which I hold for those who act unlawfully under color of authority. 

I would today wear the disapproval of John Ashcroft as a badge of honor, and it is tragic that I am compelled to say that of the Attorney General of the United States. 

There is a division of power between the governed and their government.  It is an intimate and delicate interface between the freedoms and responsibilities of the individual and those of the state.  In a perfect union, the state serves to preserve the individual's 'life, liberty, and pursuit of hapiness'.  But even a perfect union between the people and the state is only a marriage of convenience which must be abandoned when its benefits no longer justify its burden.  Recent events seem as harbingers to tell us that the once noble state has become an historic artifact.  Even abusive cops will likely find a warm place in the halls of the hidden breasts of Lady Justice. 

Seek not that which sustains.  Seek instead that which destroys—and stay behind it. 

This scares me.  I wanted to be a professional photographer—actually a photojournalist—even before I wanted to be a firefighter.  The first camera I fantasized about was a Pentax with a couple lenses.  I couldn't muster the courage, or the money, to pay what that cost, and eventually I began lusting after those beautiful Minolta SLRs with all their built-in electronic assistance.  Such electronics were new then, in the late seventies, and nobody had yet heard the term 'digital still camera'. 

A passion postponed goes into a dormancy of desire.  And it waits.  Some lusts are powerfully fulfilled, others miss their mark and flail against the wall as they slide to the floor.  But some never are allowed to make an effort toward consummation, and for those desires, their postponement may be right.  I can only hope that postponement will prove to have perfected the desire when finally comes the long-delayed launch of my ever patient urge to make a picture. 

Wish me luck. 

Just woke, too early.  Feel like Lazarus.  Have to meet Stephanie in a half hour.  I am cranky and miserable, and it is not just because of the moment.  I have venom running through my veins. 

Good morning. 

Fifteen minutes.  That's all I have right now.  Let's see how much I can say without slipping into nonsensical-ness. 

It is all OK.  It doesn't matter what you do, and it doesn't matter what I do.  Everything is perfect.  Tragedies.  Ecstacies.  All the shades of boredom in between.  Perfect. 

I get mad at stupid men with power who do stupid things with guns.  But I am no different.  I have done stupid things.  I get frustrated at all I do not know—the evil machinations and cowardly conspiracies that are concealed from me, like friends talking behind my back or shadow governments manipulating the electorate.  But I do not need to know the details.  This vague uneasiness is perfect just the way it is.  Even if absolutely everything is riding on it.  Just perfect. 

If we really knew, and stopped trying to impose our arrogant little intellects onto everything as if we knew, then we would see that it is all OK.  Just the way it is.  We could simply be, and thus relieve 'do' of all the angst we heap upon it.  In all of human history, when 'do' is so relieved, it has simply had no limits. 

I am so sick to death of everything that I think of to say, that all I can come up with is this stupid diatribe.  I ask the guiding entities what the fuck I should do, what should I write—or at least what should I write about.  And there is silence.  They do that well, the guiding entities; you probably don't even know they exist they do it so well.  But I have this stupid website, and what is one to do with a stupid website but fill it with stupid blither and infantile bellowing.  So here we are. 

I wonder why I do not have any interesting links to code-up for your viewing pleasure.  You know, like those fascinating links to really quite delightful sites which seem to only be discovered by the most intelligent and smooth-skinned, emotionally well-balanced young boy- and girl-geeks.  They're cool people, and human and witty and droll and ever ebullient within a bemusedly subdued exterior, and they have lives and they go to school and to work and they go from day to day as if everything is somewhere else and they are on their way.  Impossible for me to immitate. 

Some kind people seem able, on occasion, to identify something here of marginal value, some sort of decent or comendable quality which I, quite honestly, am at a loss to recognize.  But I like it when others see it, so I keep bumbling along, reciting doggerel and hoping to produce again by some clumsy accidental alchemy a bit of wisdom or truth in bright and gleaming gold—maybe platinum. 

And maybe I am just distraught.  It is a cold, dark night, with a crystal-clear black starlit sky, a moonless void, a vast impenetrable vacancy on what is for now the dark side of the earth. 

The memories acquired earliest in life are the most fond to us.  The feelings and emotions most familiar to us from our first experiences are dearest to us, and when they return they have greater access to our hearts than all the rest.  I have the blessing (or the curse) of just such an affinity for tragedy.  It touches me more deeply than any joy ever could; I am never so alive as when confronting anihilation and disaster.  No pleasantness, nor mild ecstasy, no sublime comfort nor trembling shaking orgasm can do as much to connect me to the juice of life.  To witness the extinguishment from this world of a little bit of hope eternal is, for me, to know beyond knowing—it is to understand without any question or doubt what truly matters. 

This is dull to you.  Disinteresting.  Predictable and obvious.  On a cosmic scale, emptied of time, nothing really matters, so why should this?  And it doesn't. 

There's six inches of fluffy new snow on the ground.  Snowflakes are sticking together as they fall, forming big snoflake-matrixes that hover and drift, then hesitate and fall. 

Depression is like snow on the poppy fields, like in the Wizard of Oz, only it doesn't wake you up.  Snow-depression wants you to stay asleep—and it wants to bury you.  It makes you want to be buried. 

My favorite was Willie McCool, the pilot of Columbia.  I didn't know much of anything about him until he was dead.  I have spent the last week scouring the NASA human spaceflight site, and all the images, videos and sounds archived there from the last days of these remarkable people and their remarkable journey.  Before the crash I knew they were up there, vaguely.  I wasn't even sure, before the end, that they had not already come home—until I saw the headline; Seven Die. 

Some TV news anchor interviewed some psychiatrist in 1986, at the time of the Challenger disaster, and the psychiatrist made sense, and I have always remembered what he said.  We, who never knew these people, and never tried very much to know anything about them really—people like me—we mourn because these events stir our own buried griefs and cause our own experiences of tragedy to re-emerge.  Our loss in the deaths of seven astronauts is not a conjured lament, nor is it a pretense of loss for something which was not our own.  It is our loss, for we recognize in the public tragedy an infrangible connection to our own, perhaps secret, tragedies, and we are helpless to stem the tide of tears.  The premature end of a life, especially ones like these, recorded with such intricate detail right up to their end, focuses in one aching spot in my chest the termination of all the hopes and dreams I once had, dear things which I saw killed, and precious opportunities which I allowed to die. 

There is an affinity of grief for grief.  Tears apart seek to join.  An unfathomable emptiness here nudges me to move closer to your unfathomable emptiness there.  I am bawling my eyes out because it is one of the saddest things this life will ever know. 

You have to read this. 

Is that Ruby Ridge property still available?