Rediscovered here:

I thought I was the only one who said things like this.

He's quite candid about what he doesn't know.  It is a hallmark of the loony conspiracy theorist to produce an explanation for absolutely everything, no matter how crazy, in an effort to bolster the theory.  Professor Griffin just raises cogent questions, no craziness. Chilling.

Given the continuing efforts of our government to stifle us, questions like this will soon become museum relics, entertaining our progeny with fond fantasies of the way we were.  [Thanks to r@d@r for the link]

I thought you were dead.

My lonliness really doesn't come from being alone, it comes from being estranged from my self.  Though it is true that such estrangement can be more easily accompished when no others are around who, with varying degrees of clarity, might reflect my own image back at me.  Even so, solitude can work either way; in alone times I can either avoid myself—or find myself. 

I thought you were dead, and I actually cried.  In fact, there were moments on Sunday, before I finally heard your voice late in the day, when I couldn't stop myself from crying.  If you were dead there would have been nothing I could have done but wait for the terrible news.  And then I would have wailed. 

I had a suspicion that something was wrong on Saturday night when you called me from your cell phone and you left a message.  I called you back within a minute, but your phone was already shut off; it didn't ring but went immediately to voicemail.  Your phone stayed off like that all night, and most of the next day, too.  When your mother called me Sunday afternoon wondering where you might be, worried that you were 'in trouble,' that's when my previously insignificant suspicion grew into a convincing premonition that you were dead.  And this is how it happened. 

Somebody hates you.  I know this because they have come after you with a bat in the past, and tried to kill you.  They hate you because you don't give-up like they do.  You've been through hell, in ways I won't detail here.  And the ones who hate you have been through hell, too—but there's a difference.  You have kept your heart.  As much as it sears and rips with pain, you have held onto it.  God knows why.  Most who have suffered, and been brutally injured, keep the pain at arms length, at least.  Those who hate you have torn the raging organ loose from their aching bosom and flung it clear away.  And they hate you for being proof that you don't have to trash your own heart, no matter what the pain.  And so, they want you dead.  Or at least somebody in my premonition wanted you dead.  And they found you, at 1:37 AM Sunday morning, right after you finished leaving a message for me.  Wherever you were—and I figured there was two of them, because one would never have been enough—they moved fast and silent, and the first bat, in one long accellerating swing stopped with a loud crack against your head, and the second bat, worse than the first, stopped your fall and lifted you back to an upright position so that, for just a moment, you looked like you were still alive. 

With the torment of imaginings like that, my solitude might never yield even a passing acquaintance with my self.  I love you more than I love myself, and that's the problem.  That has forever been the problem.  You are not the one who is missing—I am.  It is I, not you, who is absent from my life.  Once, twenty years ago, I was sure that you were the part of me that I needed, and I tried to make you participate in that irredeemable pretense with me.  But you resisted.  Somehow you knew better, despite your youth (you were seventeen), and despite my considerable efforts to persuade you.  You have always known better; you have always been the one I could trust, no matter what. 

And now we are friends.  I still get jealous.  Sometimes.  But our friendship is precious to me; I will guard it with my life.  Jealousy, compared to that, is like a tissue trying to stop a train.