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You never know what is going to happen next around here. I’m sitting here at another one of the myriad of doctors appointments that I have to sit through when my father comes back into town, so needless to say you are going to have to forgive any punctuation or typo issues I have because it is nearly impossible to fix them all when you are typing on a cell phone. On that note it always seems to hit the fan when my father comes into town. It isn’t his fault it is just a rather large disruption in my new and improved “orderly” life that I had installed over the last 9 months. This said “orderly” life was installed because of the whole ordeal I went through going out to Florida and bringing him back here to recover last September, which had shown me how amazingly “disorderly” my life was.

This is how it works unfortunately when you add in another responsibility on my already taxed soul. I have 3 kids all with amazingly different needs. The combination that God threw me of a 15 year old girl, a 9 year old boy, and a 7 year old girl is pure chaos. One is in high school; the other two are in elementary school. The fact that girls are inherently born without a conscience and boys are inherently born needy for their mother doesn’t aid my situation, especially as it pertains to my time and energy. My son can’t have his mother because she is a total loser, and the daughters get on my nerves so fast because they torment the son and have no respect for anything outside of their own drama. It goes beyond that sometimes and I just can’t put my finger on it.

Yesterday I was busy, having to take my father to his doctor’s appointments. It’s not all that easy because when he is in town I have to sleep on the futon which makes it very hard to get up in the morning and getting up early and quickly is a large part of the task. It makes me grumpy to put it lightly and I can’t stand being rushed around. My father is good enough natured about it all, but nobody else seems to care about the loss of several hours every day for a week in the life of a single father and how damaging that can be to his psychological and physical nature. Why should they anyway? The smallest things can set me off though and unfortunately when I have little to no time and am falling apart emotionally and physically there doesn’t tend to be any small things.

I got through it all yesterday relatively unscathed and was home in time to make my breakfast and go off to work. My breakfast was interrupted by the phone call. There always seems to be that phone call when I am squeaking by, and this one was a doozie. It was the vice principal of the high school on the other end of the phone needing to talk to me about an incident. My mind started racing because my oldest had been home for over an hour and was trying to con me into letting her go on a church trip to Canobie Lake. This is her usual method of operation as she is totally devoid of conscience, she will usually try to lock in “promises” from the rest of us before the shit hits the fan and then fall on martyrdom when they are taken away from her. It was all falling into place quite nicely actually.

It appeared that my wonderful daughter had witnessed a student assaulting another student at school and recoded video of the whole thing. She then went around the school showing it to everyone and talking about how she was going to send it to YouTube. It wouldn’t sound like much if the police hadn’t been involved. Her camera was taken away as evidence, and she was suspended from school. Her completely devoid of conscience mind found no problem with anything she had done, and she even seemed to think that her version of the story was better than the vice principals and the police. I was LIVID because it was beyond anything that I could possibly accept in anyone much less my daughter. Her closed little mind didn’t even accept the logic from where I was standing, which would be that her vice principal was literally shaking as he talked to me on the phone. He was at a total loss for words, and for a vice principal to get like that is nearly impossible. Did I mention that I had to deal with all of this during the half hour before I had to go to work? I did lose my temper and will not be apologizing for it any time too soon, because in one stupid idea she probably has lost her summer job and her scholarships for college. Both of which were predicated on her being a role model, and I think they will check with the police somewhere during the process. What a wonderful way to head off to work.

While we are on that subject it always appears that work gets ten times more difficult when my plate at home gets too full. This week was no exception, and on top of that I appear to have a rather growing animosity between myself and my boss going on. He has been willingly not ordering the supplies I need, and we ran out this week, which meant that I had a lot of angry people looking at me for answers. The answers they got were “BLAME HIM” and now as I sit here dealing with my lack of time and typing on a cell phone, I also am facing the pending doom of him hanging around to “talk” to me tonight. I may get lucky and get fired tonight but I never seem to get that lucky. In any regards my level of “don’t give a shit” has lifted itself to an all new low there. This of course coupled with a poor night’s sleep followed by getting up to early and a back that always starts killing me with all the stress, I wouldn’t really want to be him tonight either. No matter what happens tonight, I have tomorrow off figuratively as I still have 4 children to take care of all weekend regardless. ;8o)

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It was a warm day for our favorite super villain turned super hero as he cruised down the streets of Megalopolis in the compact version of the Superdaddymobile. He managed to get a head start out of the gate from the Casa di Evils’s leaving behind the “Gimme Monsters” that all had their hands out expecting bribes and kickbacks for their silence as usual. The Caped Pervader was none too amused at the state of his kingdom as he had been on the road all day already transporting the Godfather of the Evils’s {GOE} from one medical argument to the next, and then a quick trip through hell to boot. In the end it was his own masterful skills of “acquisition” {the new Indiana Jones movie} that managed to rest the GOE from lurking over his shoulder, and allowing him the precious fifteen minutes necessary to do his super secret online espionage {downloading porn} and then escape through the Superdaddycave {the garage door} and head out to once again take on the dreaded Pink Mafia!

As is usually the case for our defender of the evils’s, the warm weather appeared to bring out the worst of the worst on the roads of Megalopolis. Many representatives of faraway lands {Florida} who find driving to be a harrowing and often scary task, have infiltrated the roads of the fair city hell bent on creating massive lines of cars travelling far under the speed limit. Like the GOE the coming of the warm weather often forces their pilgrimage north, merely to remind us that the snow {pronounced fucking snow} over the winter is simply the practice run for the art of truly driving slow and stupid that will haunt the lands well until the leaves become “pretty” and fall off the trees. This of course is again the training session for driving yet again in the snow {pronounced fucking snow} that will follow their exodus from the area back to the foreign nation {Florida} from which they came from to begin with. So much for the Superdaddyman’s escape from the Casa di Evils’s early in the hopes of being on time for his nightly infiltration of the Pink Mafia Headquarters {PHMQ} and perhaps the opportunity to enjoy the scenery {business skirts leaving work} along the way.

Without warning the radio starts playing one of the most corrosive, mind numbing, impossible to remove from your brain songs. “Summer breeze makes you feel alright .. Neon lights shining brightly make your brain ignite .. See the girls with the dresses so tight .. Give you love if the price is right .. Black or white .. In the streets there's no wrong and no right .. so forget all that you see .. It's not reality .. It's just a fantasy!” Oh yeah, that one is gonna stick, but the Superdaddyman will not allow the evil Aldo Nova to interfere with his important mission to bring down the Pink Mafia, as he stays ever vigilant to make sure that the Terrorist Organization Known as the Evils’s {TOKE} will never take over the world. Hey this isn’t any old super hero we are talking about here, this is the Superdaddyman after all!

Unfortunately the long cold winter {did we mention all that fucking snow?} had softened the Superdaddyman’s mind a bit, as he had forgotten about another vicious road terror that always seems to rear its ugly head whenever the God Like Yellow entity starts peering through the sky for longer periods of time. The fiendish, spandex clad, power aid swilling, alien helmet donning, bicycles have every right to ride in the middle of the road people are out there in force as well. You all know the type of foe to which we are talking about here boys and girls. “Can't you see .. What this crazy life is doing to me .. Life is just a fantasy .. Can you live this fantasy life .. Outasite .. Buy your kicks from the man in the white .. Feels alright .. Powder pleasure in your nose tonight .. See the men paint their faces and cry .. Like some girl it makes you wonder why,” oh geeze Aldo write another song. These are the very same people that will ride their bicycles down the middle of Route 1 during rush hour, flipping you off for not understanding their rights, and how they follow the rules of the road just like you. Of course their memory of the rules of the road or ownership of the center of it fail at every stop light when they cheerfully go around you on the right and then run the stop light to get in front of you again!

The bastards are technically only worth one point {roughly the same as that jogger who never seems to have a smile on their face, despite how happy they should be about getting HEALTHY as they run in traffic} if you mow them down and rarely justify the cost of repairing the Superdaddymobile, so as always he allows them to live. It’s progressively more difficult as Marge and Henry with the Florida plates could subtract 15 points from your total simply by slamming their brakes for imaginary animals running out in front of them as well. The Superdaddyman simply takes the wonderful stroll down memory lane as the particularly nostalgic couple in front of him slows down to about 10 and point out the window at just about every house they pass trying to surmise which one of their childhood friends died at each location they passed. “City life sure is cool .. But It cuts like a knife .. It's your life .. So forget all that you see .. It's not reality, it's just a fantasy .. Can't you see what this crazy life is doing to me!” Oh God kill me, 10 hours of this song will be the end of the Superdaddyman for sure!

Demonstrating the skill of a cat, the Superdaddyman finally leaps from the Superdaddymobile at the front door of the PMHQ and starts his sprint for the hand scanner, letting the fiendish Pink Mafia know that he has entered the building. He was forced {as usual} to knock many of the brainless hirelings of King George as they stared blindly at the Time God to which they worship everyday for the waning minutes before 6pm. As the scanner beeped it clearly stated 5:59 which meant that the usual 30 minute drive to PMHQ today took 59 minutes. It gets worse from here as all of Marge and Henry’s friends should be flooding in more and more, as the summer gets closer. The wicked voice of Paco Taco came over the PA system the second Superdaddyman had pushed his way past the Time God Worshippers and it brought a smile to the Superdaddyman’s face. “Life is just a fantasy, can you live this fantasy life .. Life is just a fantasy, can you live this fantasy life,” because this should be a fun song to butcher at the top of Superdaddyman’s lungs as he follows Paco taco around for a while ;8o)

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The Slammer – An Ever Growing Web Novel – Chapter 5.4

The man on his hands and knees screaming in pain was the scariest hitter the Yankees had owned in nearly two decades. Nobody on the Red Sox could tolerate the bastard, and Lily had warned him about questioning her sleeping habits the last two times he was at the plate. It was his own fault that he kicked dirt on her this time, and Jay took it upon himself to welcome him to the Major Leagues. When the hundred and four mile per hour fast ball hit him in the thigh it immediately knocked him over and he started wailing in pain. Lily could see Jack over in the dug-out gesturing to everyone around him, and she figured that he was explaining how that was a perfect hit. Lily was impressed as well because it was going to hurt like hell for weeks but wouldn’t do any permanent damage.

It had looked like he would have actually hit someone if he could stand up, but at this point the tears in his eyes were gathering the sand and dust flying around the plate while he squirmed. Lily only used retaliation as a last resort, so this wasn’t actually her idea. Goons had been calling her every name in the book from the first time she squatted behind the plate, but more often than not, the other players were very civil towards her. She was starting to like the players on the Orioles, as they were all very young, and usually asked her for tips after a strike out. The Rays were the same way, and even though the Blue Jays had a core of good veterans they were all journeymen who treated her with respect. The Yankees on the other hand were traditionally the spoiled rotten babies of baseball, and a new rivalry was forming rather quickly as the animosity of both teams was really coming to a head.

After McFeely limped down to first he collapsed again and was replaced by a pinch runner. Jay had just given up a perfect game again in the eighth inning to prove a point, and the players on the team always respect something like that. Even the pitcher on the other team tends to stand in awe of someone who takes care of the team above his own stats, but everyone is still in the dark about Jay so they don’t know that the game is everything to him. Jack who is still holding court over on the bench is probably the only other man in baseball who understands this as he has three no-hitters which were marred by hit batsmen. One of them he had had seventeen strike-outs and was actually thrown out of the game, thus forfeiting the perfect game and the complete game in one fell swoop. It was legendary as he walked off the field laughing and calling the Yankees a bunch of babies.

As the next batter timidly approached the plate Lily realized that it was up to her to make sure that the lesson had been cemented so she looked at the man holding the bat and asked, “You have anything smart to say?”

The batter didn’t even open his mouth. He simply shook his head and took his place in the batter’s box. He obviously knew what it was like to face a missile launcher with no regard for his own place in the game. The eleven to zero lead probably had a lot to do with his recognition of the dilemma at hand. Jay could throw the ball clean through him, leave the field, and the team would be pretty sure that they could get four outs without giving up eleven runs. That was another benefit of Jay and Barceló pitching complete games, and Jack getting seven good innings when he didn’t complete a game. The bullpen was perfectly healthy for the first time in years. Hell Lily even mused that she could waste a couple of relievers to break some knees and be safe in getting a win.

This kid at the plate is a much better second baseman than he is a batter. It was one of the few good moves the Yankees had made the last couple of years, actually taking skill over power, but he is a scrappy hitter that rarely strikes out. He’s faced Jay several times now this year, and had even gotten some rather commendable ground outs, and earlier in this game forced Jay to throw fourteen pitches to him before he popped up. Lily remembered this because it was the longest at bat anyone had had against him so far this year. The fact that he is a quite person probably helps on his concentration.

Jay looked in on Lily as she held down two fingers and twitched them to the right. Jay then stood strait up with his hand on the baseball protected in his glove at his stomach. His knee starts to pull up towards his chest while his impressive wing span opens up. The arming of the catapult is often one of the most romantically fictionalized items in any good fantasy novel, but as the catapult reels back here it is merely an object of terror to the man staring at Jay from beside the plate. Jay’s wind up starts so slowly, as he stretches every muscle in his body to get the most amount of force and recoil behind the pitch, and it is so obvious that he never seems to work with runners on the bases. The speedster on first had been alerted to this and started taking off towards second base, while at the same time Jay went from a complete outstretch to wheeling around and flipping the ball to second.

The runner was so trapped that he pulled up half way to second, and skidded around on his hands and knees to head back to first. The ball was casually flipped back to first, forcing the runner to wheel up and go back towards second. Jay instinctively took his place behind the first baseman to back him up as he finally tossed the ball back to the second baseman and then got out of the way. The second baseman executing a perfect pickle started off towards the runner who was now heading back to first with his sights set on Jay. In these situations a runner caught in a rundown will usually hope to finish the maneuver out on a weaker skilled pitcher and hope to pull a rabbit out of his hat.

Lily gasped as she was running over to first to attempt to back up Jay at this point. He had never been involved in a pickle maneuver before, and she was seriously concerned whether or not he would truly know what to do when he got the ball. The runner appeared to have other ideas, as Jay was in the baseline when he caught the ball. The runner crouched down to hopefully knock Jay off his feet when they made contact, but Jay appeared to be even lower, catching the runner clear in the shoulder, and knocking him off to the side about five feet. The ball was still firmly in Jay’s glove and the first base umpire signaled the out while the runner was laying off to the side screaming in pain, holding his shoulder. The benches started clearing immediately.

The melee didn’t start off very pretty, and the only thing Lily could think of was trying to get her brother out of it. Clearly he was one of the largest men out there, but he didn’t really understand violence, and it was probably the wrong time to explain it to him. Lily was beginning the process of pushing him off to the side when she felt hands grabbing her and throwing her away from her brother. Within a second of her hitting the ground she felt someone large stumble over her and hit the ground face first, and with all of the quickness that she could muster she rolled over to see her brother throw his fist into one of the Yankees face so hard that she swore she could see the skin pull away from the skull. Another player came running in and got the exact same. Two bodies laid on the ground clutching their faces, as the third came in and got completely flipped over Jay as he lowered his shoulder and threw him about ten feet up in the air. That was about all that Jay had to endure as the pile of fighting players started clearing a wide birth around the scary pitcher who seems to not understand the baseball version of “sissy fight” that the rest of them did.

Jay walked over to Lily and offered his hand to her so that she could stand up, but some boneheaded player decided it was the perfect time to strike Jay in the back of the head. The punch gleaned the top of Jays head, knocking his cap off since he was in a partial bend, and the force of his left hand as it struck the player full in the side of the face knocked the idiot back at least seven feet. Jay wheeled around and kicked the guy in the stomach after taking a couple of steps. The pandemonium stopped almost instantly around the field as players on both teams started staring at Jay as he kicked the player again. There was a certain look of terror to everyone because they finally noticed the four men laying helpless from what Jay had done to them, and it made it a lot easier for the managers to take control of their teams.

Lily cautiously walked towards Jay who had turned around after his third kick into the whimpering player who was now laying near third base. The Yankees who were still in the dugout were staring in horror at the young man who was hell bent on killing them every time he stood on the mound, and his demonstration that he would go even further than that if they ever over stepped their boundaries. “Are you done yet?” Lily finally asked Jay as he stood there staring at her.

Jay picked up his cap and carefully placed it back on his head. He walked over to Lily and patted her on the shoulder with his left hand and replied, “I don’t like this part of baseball,” and then he started walking her towards the opening crowd of players. As they walked through the parting throng towards the dugout he added, “I’m pretty good at it, but it doesn’t seem to add to the game at all.” … to be continued

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It was the early afternoon when I was forced to escape my own house. The insanity of what was turning into another hectic diatribe on my soul was wearing on me, and like a typical coward I bolted. Don’t get me wrong, I like roughly half of the kids in the house, and it would coincidentally coincide with the ones that will not be living here after tomorrow. The rigors of having a slumber party with both your son’s friend and you daughter’s friend at the same time can be summed up in on word, STUPID.

No matter how old your children are {in this case we will use a 7 year old girl and a 9 year old boy}, and how many oaths they take that kids of the opposite sex are “yucky” inevitably from the age of 2 on when you mix boys and girls together they undoubtedly will “show off” for each other. At the ages we used for this test experiment this involves getting louder and louder as the day goes on. I was nearly to the point of taking the two that the state of New Hampshire says I am allowed to beat, and cutting my losses at that. In the end I decided it was best to use it to my advantage. After all I like to show off to the girls too.

I used my patented 9 year old boy indoctrination device {an X-Box} and simply attached the two boys to the controllers. This works well as it quiets them down and glues them to a room far enough away from the living room that I am able to get Greektradgedius Inyiddish to listen for injuries while not completely driving her past the brink of insanity to which she currently lives. With that accomplished I am able to take the two girls {both equally as adorable even though Imtoocutus’s Indian friend hardly passes for one of my own} down town which I haven’t done in a while. While they play around on the fountains, and pass around sharp objects they find on the street or whatever else it is they do, I can partake of one of my long forgotten {but desperately missed} past times of skirt watching.

Now mind you, the weather is perfect this time of year for skirt watching. It’s just warm enough for the skirts to be rather short, and most of the ladies walking through downtown are taking advantage of having put their legs away for the winter. Sitting crossed legged on the bench, ice coffee in hand and gazing at the scenery as it saunters by is chicken soup for the soul, let me tell you. The evils’s creating chaos in front of me is the perfect cover for all of the perversion that my little mind can think up. Life is good right? Yeah well this is me we are talking about so I should have seen it coming a mile away as my ex-wife’s ex-girlfriend {try saying that really fast, it’s a tongue twister} comes walking over to share my bench with me. Realistically the only thing either of us have in common anymore is that we were both dumped by my near borderline ex-wife, but we have always gotten along rather amicably.

“So if God really is a man then she dumped you for a man and we can both wallow in our coffee properly,” I said to her as she was sitting down next to me. We must keep it in the proper perspective that this after all is the woman that my ex-wife left me for, so I do have certain inalienable rights to give her shit after all.

“No, I guess you still get the better of it. She left you for having the wrong equipment and she left me for not having good enough equipment,” she mused as she took a drink of her coffee. This of course was the woman after all who assured me that I had spoiled my ex-wife in the orally stimulated department and she had no other choice but to go lesbian which I never truly believed but would laugh about whenever I had the chance. I had always assured her that I was fine because it wasn’t like the ex-before her that always wanted newer and more exciting equipment, but simply wanted the equipment I wasn’t born with. In either way I found out too late on both of them.

Now since my ex’s ex lives in downtown I usually end up running into her when I am skirt drooling, and since we both have identical taste in women {a proven theory … oh God kill me!} she inevitably see’s me hanging out from her window and joins me. She had confided in me at one time that I was her first “male” crush but only because my ex had spoken so highly of me that it always made her a bit curious. How in the name of God did it get so confusing to be me, I will never know, but on this occasion she took an exaggeratedly long time convincing me that she had gotten over that. In either regards it had never really been a problem because this area has very attractive lesbians, and I have been friends and/or drunken fantasy of most of them. My advantage of logic had always dictated to me that that nightmare of waking up and looking at the woman laying next to you and screaming like a child in pain because of your drunken logic would be even worse if you were the one laying there with someone screaming over you. It has faithfully kept me out of drunken lesbian’s beds for the last 2 decades, and I felt it had applied to man crushes as well. She got a laugh out of that.

All in all any of the uncomfortable feelings that we might have had around each other were squashed the second she pointed out one of the women that was too young for either of us wearing a spandex mini and high heeled spaghetti straps. I think the only thing that we were missing was my ex and at the time her current skulking around pissed off because we tended to ignore her when we were in the pervert zone. In time it had become one of our better jokes, and as we were both sitting there perfectly single and without an un-amused audience of significant others we were forced to remember out loud some of our favorite lectures that we had gotten from our ex. In the end I am sure that we both got the better out of the whole deal, because I wouldn’t wish my manic ex wife on anyone, and the more I think about it, her ex-girlfriend is too cool for her anyway ;8o)

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The Twins of Kane – Leviticus 3.5

I really think that my mind could be taking on too much in too short of a time, or perhaps it is condensing the information that it gets, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember the whole conversation that Lou and I had had here before. My mind was fixated for the most part on how this was the place and about the time that I had realized who my beautiful friend truly was. Heaven forbid, that I actually have enough room in my poor little brain to store several weeks of information into one week of living. Perhaps what was starting to become the greatest strain was all of the parts that didn’t happen or I keep skipping over and of course trying to fill in what changed in the times that I seem to keep getting stuck in. This is one of those times. “That was a nice little trick that you played on your brother,” I said in a smug voice, like I finally knew something.

“I didn’t play any trick on him. He played a trick on you,” Lou said in a bored sort of voice. “Once you accepted that he was going to lie to you, you pretty much gave him permission to lie to you at will. You can never trust anyone who will outright admit that they will lie to you, because then they know that you will find it charming,” he sat down next to me and started to chuckle, “where he really had you was when you bought the whole thing about protecting you from me.”

Defensively of course I piped right up, “What is so silly about that? I mean you do have a bit of a reputation,” and of course it didn’t curb his laughter at all, it seemed to amplify it a bit.

“Let me help you here,” he started when the laughing subsided, “I’m going to tell you the things that were true, and then you can add the other parts together. I have no reason to lie, but I think you need to learn a bit about what seems to be going on here, ok?” and as sick of all of these games as I was, I nodded, but very curtly. He started with a far more serious voice then I was used to from him, “The instant you jumped I felt it, and remembered where you were and what had happened, so I simply modified it a bit by coming to you as Jake before Jake came to you.”

I couldn’t help the need to feel smart so I interjected, “I figured that out because you didn’t get everything he had said right.”

“I did that on purpose, hoping that you would figure it out, but that is beside the point. Darius fell for it, which was startling to me as well, but it is a blessing in disguise that for some reason in this plain I can trick him if I am clever enough, and the timing is right,” he stopped for a second, “Your new friend’s ability to talk too much appears to be contagious, sorry,” he grinned, “Ok, I did take Mary, which you had seen before, even though it hasn’t happened yet,” I gasped as the realization that Walter is still alive as time is going right now, “and I did scream to the heavens that I quit because as far as I am concerned if I just keep Darius from hurting anyone then my time will expire, and I will disappear.”

“Wouldn’t that just leave Darius to run amuck throughout the world?” I had to ask even though for some strange reason I think I knew the answer.

“If I don’t exist anymore then I never existed and every littlest thing I ever did would simply never have existed as well,” he smiled, “and this is where you new friend decided to lie to you. He knows full well what it means, and he is one of the sworn guardians of my existence along with any of my other brothers, and that is what makes me a little bitter at the moment. He had no right to tell you that I bound him to you. He is bound to you because of who you are, and what you mean at the moment to all of this,” he put his face in his hands and continued, “I’m the little guy around here you realize?”

I started piecing together what he had said so I needed a little confirmation, “I understand how he lied to me about protecting me from you. It didn’t sink in at first, but it has something to do with the souls that you can take like Mary or Walter,” I tried to think about it for a moment but gave up and just asked him, “What do you mean by ‘I’m the little guy here’ anyway?”

He laughed again, “I’m like the corner market. I run the register; stock the shelves, pay the bills, open the door in the morning, and lock the door at night. I don’t have time to expand the deli, or install a new bakery,” his laugh started fading away, “and across the street is the huge mega market. It has several competent employees, and an owner that never has to get her hands dirty. All she has to do is keep lowering the prices until I go out of business,” with a bit of a start he added, “oh and my clientele isn’t exactly the cream of the crop either.”

My heart was actually filled with pity for him as I said, “You can’t go out of business, because the store across the street won’t let you,” he nodded and grinned a little, “my jumping in and out of time is making it so that you never cross that imaginary line that destroys you isn’t it?”

“It appears so,” he said back to me in a voice that was breaking up, “and that is why he saved you, so that you can keep me enslaved here until I get Darius and then life goes on,” his expression changed like someone who would be trying to cover up their emotions. In his case it works absolute, and with that he said, “it was a moment of weakness that I saved your life from Mary, and in that instance I knew that I should have let her kill you, so in a way your new friend may have been protecting you from me, because I may not make that mistake again,” his face changed even quicker than it had become normal as he had a look of panic on it, “don’t get me wrong, because I know that your life in this body ends, and you will be going somewhere else. It’s a nice place actually. I used to like it a lot, but it appears that the circumstances that Mary had left you in would have taken you there with or without my help, so he interfered with that.”

I was honestly upset about all I had just learned but as usual the insanity set in and I started laughing again while staring at the sky, “so I have, God, the angels and the devil dedicating all of their free time trying to keep me alive. I should think about trying bungee jumping and skydiving since I am guaranteed a safe trip.”

“Trust me, it isn’t as much fun with all the certainty,” he blurted out under his breath, “you also have an angel of Satan that now thinks killing you is the key to everything. He also has a tendency to be unstoppable, even by the standards of God, the angels and the devil,” and what he said there came out deadly serious but at the same time with a bit of sarcasm in it. “There is also something that appears to be forcing you in and out of time, which absolutely none of us knows anything about, and that piece of parchment in your pocket of course.” … To be continued

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Well I have been reading the usual tirade of whining that follows the latest service pack to the OLD version of Microsoft Windows operating system, and as usual found it amusing. I also found it to be the perfect time for me to say some horribly mean things about large quantities of people with no regard for feelings or emotions involved with doing so. It is after all one of my favorite hobbies and I can’t always point my fingers at Macintosh users. There really aren’t enough of them to begin with, and most of them don’t read anything that isn’t approved by their indoctrination tool of choice, so sometimes I have to go after the “other” computer users out there.

This one actually is a hoot, to be honest with you, because it involves another company that I love to trash whenever I have the opportunity, and that would be my friends at Hewlett Packard. Now I can’t insinuate that everyone that owns a Hewlett Packard computer is an idiot because I happen to own many of them, but I can say that those that use them out of the box might be a bit brain damaged. Four of the computers in this house actually are Compaq computers, and I purchased them all for the exact same reason, which is price. In reality they are horribly overpriced considering that they use sub standard equipment and are so loaded with spyware that I can’t recommend them to anyone, but if you are like me, and have access to certain resources, then they can be a steal.

The trick with Hewlett Packard’s is to first understand what they are {functionally useless out of the box}, what they are truly worth {a HELL of a lot less then what they are released at}, and are willing to shop at Wal-Mart {they are after all a big conglomerate, out to screw the little guy by charging better prices yanno?}. The translation for all of this is, the computer can NOT be sustained using Hewlett Packard’s preloaded software, you can’t run out and buy the newest one, and you have to wait 6 months for Wal-Mart to realize that the computer won’t sell, and mark it down to cost. All 4 of the Hewlett Packard’s in the house were bought new for under 300$ and all but 2 were brought into the house and immediately formatted, one was simply cleaned out of it’s software except for Windows XP, and the other was whipped of all of it’s software except for Windows Vista.

Ok now with all of that behind us let’s talk about the newest round of whiney little bitches cluttering the internet with their “holier than thou” reports of XP Service Pack 3 failings. For the most part it is a typical shmoz perpetrated on everyone by Hewlett Packard, with the aid of their “useful idiots” in the “look at me I am so smart” faction of cyberspace. It appears that {and I have seen it on one of the computers here} that if you load service pack 3 on a Hewlett Packard computer it “could” go into an infinite loop of rebooting which is very annoying I can imagine. Hewlett Packard can’t come right out and tell you what the problem really is and they are holding Microsoft hostage by its “preferred partner” status, since it buys so many copies of Windows software licenses a year. I am not beholden to either of them so I will tell you that it is simply one of Hewlett Packard’s own “exploits” that they built into your computer, and Service Pack 3’s security enhancement fixes it. The Hewlett Packard engineered version of Windows Boot gets pissed off about it and reboots until you put its marketing exploit back in there.

I read all of the stories talking about how it has to do with the AMD processor and Windows XP, and a myriad of other excuses, that don’t add up in my scenario. I have two HP computers running Windows XP and have AMD processors that worked flawlessly the second I installed Service Pack 3. The only difference between them and the other two is that they were formatted and a clean copy of Windows XP {that was never touched by an HP technician} was installed instead. I wouldn’t have even put two and two together if it weren’t for my own knowledge that 99 percent of Windows failures {dating back to version 3.1} are caused by compatibility issues, and Microsoft has spent billions of dollars over the years doing anything they possibly can to correct these things. We’ve all been blindsided by every self proclaimed genius complaining about it all forever now, so most of the time people just go along with the flow. Windows wouldn’t have gotten to be such a kludge over the years if software and hardware vendors were simply forced to conform with the platform, but on the other side of the coin, that would make it a Macintosh, and worthless every other year.

It gets to me when I am forced to be a free tech support guy for people that call me friend when they need something. The obvious answer to a lot of the problems that I get from people is UPGRADE. This happens with everything from Incredimail, to Paint Shop Pro, to Windows, to even the antique that they are calling a computer. I tell people to put 10 dollars in the bank each week, and call it the “computer fund” so that they can buy a new Acer each year, and never have to worry about the “old and slow” compatibility issues that they have. I tell my friends that are using a 2 year old copy of Incredimail that somewhere along the 75 free upgrades they have offered since then, there probably was something changed in the compatibility, and they always go on a rant about how “such and such” told them that the upgrades were crap. You can’t convince them that companies stop producing revenue if their upgrades go down hill with each and every incarnation, and that applies with Windows too. I personally love Windows Vista, and have from the moment I looked at it.

Now for the bad news about Windows upgrades, which will take a bit of self exploration for some to accept it, but after Bill Clinton taught everyone that anyone with more money than they had stole it, Microsoft has been beholden to everyone. Those nasty “government funded” lawsuits to try to take Microsoft’s money away from them has forced the company to bend to the lowest common denominator at every turn. I personally do believe that everyone on earth deserves to own a computer and I hope that they all find some sort of joy or productivity out of the thing. I don’t happen to believe that everyone is entitled to be protected from themselves at the expense of everyone else. If someone is far too stupid to use a computer then they are far too stupid to use a computer. All of the security fixes that Microsoft installs into its operating systems so that a million nitwits won’t file a class action lawsuit because they refuse to learn about anti-virus, and purchase the best one before they surf the internet is a bummer, but it is what it is. The biggest problem with Vista that I can find is that it is far too secure, and requires a lot of software upgrades to do what XP used to. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t do it better when you invest a bit of time and effort.

The Macintosh commercials slay me when they point out how a person who is too stupid and lazy to figure out Windows Vista goes back to XP, and in their opinion should try a Macintosh. I mean let’s get real here, but if someone is too stupid and lazy to get the XP to Vista jump, then Macintosh is betting all of their money that they will be too ashamed to admit that the XP to Leopard jump is like trying to figure out Latin. I mean why not try the XP to GNOME jump for free and skip the OS that stole all of its code from it? It still comes down to what people have been told and what they heard to begin with. I happen to follow my own lead, and get from point A to point B by the most direct route. Bucking the norm doesn’t always mean that you follow a different route than everyone else, and sometimes it means that you follow the same route, but simply learn to do it your own way ;8o)

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I had to have one of those kinds of talks with the kids yesterday and I really hate that. Parenting is the most annoying cabal on the sanity of everyone involved, and the fact that my family is a bit more fucked up than most complicates it all that much more. I imagine that the credit should go to the former in-laws though in this one, as their level of fucked up far outweighs that of anyone I have ever met. I’ve come to the conclusion that I couldn’t beat common sense into any of them with a baseball bat, and perhaps they truly have crossed over that line of usual evil that most of us with former in-laws know as common. I can’t even pretend to analyze this logic anymore as anything more than infantile and greedy.

Yesterday {meaning the day before Mother’s Day} the answering machine is full of messages from the kids other grandmother. She wants to pick them up and have them overnight, take them to church the next day and bring them back that evening. Now let’s keep in mind that this is the first time we have heard from anyone on that end in about 2 months. My grandmother has already heard these messages and has left me a note for when I get up explaining her opinion of this, but of course it is “my decision” because after all it is my job to punish, and deal with decisions that will make me miserable. In all of my years of dealing with these people I can honestly say that this was the angriest I have ever been with any of them. What was worse was that all of the kids knew that this offer was on the table because they heard the answering machine messages, and their minds {like any kids} went straight to “cool we get absentee relative gifts and anything we want to eat!”

Kids don’t think of these things. I never did as a kid and I know nobody {who’s honest anyway} that thought of these things either, but my life is based on submission by guilt and two women who use it like a cannon. Greektradgedius Inyiddish was already constructing the cross for herself in the front yard, and I don’t know if Greektradgedius Intraining had heard it yet but she would have simply inverted it all until the very sight of her would make me wish I was dead anyway. In any regards, I wasn’t playing any of the games because I had already spent 150 bucks on Mother’s Day gifts for the both of them from myself and all of the kids, and that alone made me crabby already. I don’t deserve the extra bullshit to go along with what should have been an expensive, but relatively peaceful day.

I call my former mother-in-law and explain the situation to her answering machine, and then of course still get a call from her later and have to explain it again. If that wasn’t bad enough I had all three kids come downstairs to ask me “why?” which by that time could have added more cost to my life by having to pay for the lawyers and the funeral arrangements. I decided with a very firm voice to give a history and etiquette lesson to the kids. I asked them what tomorrow was, and they all understood that it was mother’s day. The youngest thought she had the answer to that one by pointing out that they could see their mother if they went to their grandparents. I controlled my temper and asked them three simple questions, “Who wakes you up in the morning and gets you to school?”, “Who gets you to bed at night after helping you with your homework?”, and the grand finale, “And who washes your clothes, feeds you, picks you up from all your activities, and makes sure that you are safe whenever daddy isn’t here?”

It was the boy of course that broke down first. He’s an emotional cripple thanks to the family disease of being a scratching post to all the women just like his father, but I think the girls at least saw an opportunity to gain advantage by doing the right thing and in the end agreed that they had the wrong opinion of what a mother is. The youngest one of course had to rationalize it all {any excuse to talk after all} and pointed out to her mother when she called to give a guilt trip, “I haven’t seen you since Christmas, and I have to be here, you understand right?” and then she handed the phone to me. Needless to say her mother never understands, and after about 10 minutes of hearing how this was all my fault, I had to hang up on her.

Now don’t get me wrong, I understand the concept of people wishing mothers a Happy Father’s Day because they have been “The Mom and the Dad” or whatever other crap concept they all tell themselves, but I actually get a bit angry when someone tells me to have a “Happy Mother’s Day” like I earned that title. I have never been the children’s mother, and never intend to. There are things that I do which closed minded people would consider “Motherly” or even “The Mother’s Job” but that is necessity because the kids don’t have a mother. I picked a really bad one and I accept that, and all of the “Fatherly” responsibilities of making up for it. I am blessed {and sometimes cursed} to have family surrogates that do some of the more “Motherly” things for my kids, and when they can’t I do. It’s the coffin I built to lay in. In general I have understood the trend to familiarize the distinctions, but I have known more women that have chosen not to have a father in their children’s life then women that have been robbed of it. That doesn’t mean that I don’t know many women that have been the father by necessity as well. I have one friend that gets really riled with me when I downright refuse to wish her a Happy Father’s Day, but let’s get real here, she has 3 kids by three different men and never once chose well, or actually considered keeping any of them as a father because she was looking forward to the state being their father. I won’t share my day with her, so she can keep Hallmark’s idea of her day ;8o)

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The Twins of Kane – Leviticus 3.4

People started crowding around me as I laid there on the ground gasping. I could hear concern from several of them. One had said something about insanity, and another had said something about a “heart attack” but for the most part it appeared that most of them had seen Mary go nuts and attack me, and then die in the middle of it. The person that started cradling my head touched my shoulder and the pain went away immediately. I didn’t recognize the person at all, but he said to me, “Don’t speak, your ribs probably can’t handle the pressure,” which he didn’t have to tell me twice. Breathing was killing me enough at the moment, and I didn’t want to even try to get through explaining this crap to people with this kind of pain, even though my shoulder was feeling better.

The young blonde man holding my head was quite beautiful in his own rights which made me feel the need to hold my hand up to touch his face. For some reason my mind told me that if it was Lou, I could reveal that simply by touching his face, but it didn’t change other than the smile that appeared to be more broad when I touched it. With that he reached down and pressed two fingers into my abdomen which made me flinch expecting to feel the searing pain I have heard is associated with broken ribs, but my ribs felt perfectly fine as his fingers went into my stomach. He then lifted his fingers to his mouth in a “shhhh” gesture before he whispered to me, “Tell your friend he owes me one and I don’t laugh because his priest joke isn’t funny,” and then he helped me to my feet.

I didn’t get up too easily, because my mind wouldn’t let me simply accept that I was fine. It hadn’t appeared to catch up to the actual scenario and was still mired in the defensive posture of trying to protect a thoroughly broken body. I knew the need to get up and get out of here before all of the awkward questions like, “What the hell happened here?” comes along from local law enforcement. Most of them would be more concerned in checking out my body to make sure that it isn’t damaged, which would be the only real tragedy to any of them. The man walking beside me, who I pretty much knew the name from his comment as I got to my feet, but still feel hard pressed to speak it, was ushering me away from the scene with a bit of haste. “Aren’t they going to come looking for me when the witnesses tell the cops what happened?” I finally asked him when we were out of clear earshot.

He looked at me a bit puzzled, “I never liked the limitations that are placed on me when I come to your plain of existence,” and then he sighed, “I am not used to using the subtleties that are afforded to me here, so I am just going to assume that you know too much already,” he added while still walking me away from the scene. “Unlike my brother, I lie quite frequently, and I could lie to you right now. He doesn’t seem to think it is a valuable tool in dealing with mortals, but then again he doesn’t have to stand over a dying child and try to give them hope, even when a new life is staring them in the face. It’s not in his nature, so he actually has less opportunity I suppose,” again he sighed again in a bit of a melodramatic overstatement, “he does things that could be considered ‘good’ by the unconcerned mind, but he usually does it in the hope that he will get something out of it, and he is far more passionate than the rest of us. It does play into his nature after all.”

I started wondering if he was going to answer my question instead of rambling on about other things. I was about to ask him when he suddenly stopped in front of the bench that I had appeared at when I had jumped out of the time I am in now the last time. He sat down without a second glance or even asking me to sit beside him. I did anyway, and then he continued on, “You are an amazing woman,” he then chirped up. “I can see why Lucifer can’t avoid you, because you are the total opposite of him,” which actually hurt a bit when I considered what I saw in Lou which was a beautiful man but he continued, “Ah, I see what they mean about reading faces and expressions, now. I don’t mean on the outside my friend, you happen to be a very beautiful woman. God would be quite jealous of you, if she were prone to that, but I mean inside you are so strong and rational that my brother probably spends every free moment he has when he is not hunting Darius to try to understand you,” and he smiled at me. “I can’t change time either my friend but I can do certain things to change the present, and nobody there will know you were ever in the vicinity. I am just hoping that I didn’t overdo it like I did that time back in the time most people call ‘the dark ages’, because everyone there will forget you even existed.”

Without even thinking I mused out loud, “I would hate to see how Homer would explain my life,” and looking at the smile on his face, I could see that he did have a sense of humor. “Why am I involved in all of this?” I asked him hoping that his ability to lie wouldn’t come in handy at this particular moment.

He smiled somewhat gravely and said, “I don’t know,” he took in a deep breath and then said, “I forget to breathe sometimes because I don’t have to do it when I am not here,” but he definitely saw me looking at him like I wasn’t dropping this. Again he took another deep breath and said, “You actually wouldn’t be involved in all of this right now if my brother hadn’t decided to take his will off of Darius. He could have taken him back to hell, but his minion would have killed you,” he looked away from me, as if it was painful to continue but did all the same, “when he took Mary’s life, which he was entitled to since she unknowingly gave her soul to him through Darius, he let go long enough for Darius to get away.”

“Why can’t you help him?” I asked somewhat impudently, but then again, if they are all going to include me in on this crap they are damn well going to deal with me the way I am.

He started nodding his head with a very amused smile on his face and then said to me, “I can’t, or at least I couldn’t. I’m not supposed to, or at least I wasn’t,” he looked up like he was trying to get the answer out of thin air, “You’ll have to forgive me, I know what I am trying to say, but I am limited to this form to try to explain it. It goes like this, and you will have to try to put it into something that you can understand for me after I tell you, ok?” After I nodded my agreement he started explaining it as he could, “I can’t help him, we’ll just leave it at that, but when he lost Darius he started screaming to the heavens that he quit,” he started looking at his hands, “that could mean a lot of things, but I am assuming that he meant that he wasn’t going along with everything the way it is, and you just have to believe me when I say that that is the worst thing that could ever happen. In a moment of terror I called back to him, and told him that I could protect you, and he continued after Darius like he has to.”

I sat there mired in my own quagmire of crap that I have been locked in now for roughly one day, but seeming to last several weeks, and then started talking to him like a student who has solved a complicated physics project, “He was going to stop being the force of evil that un-complicates things by having a good and a bad separated.”

There was a look of shock on his face as he stared at me, “I never thought of it that way, but it appears that you understand far too well. I don’t even really know how to respond to that so I won’t, but if it makes you happy, I didn’t have to lie,” he then put my hand in his and started talking again, “For lack of a better term, he is extremely clever though, and he bound me into all of this, and I don’t know if he did it on purpose or not, but it wouldn’t be against his grain. He forced the hands of me and all of my brothers by my moment of weakness. I have sworn to protect you, so I have to keep an eye on you whether I like it or not, and I think he may have done it to keep you safe from him as well.”

I could feel that strange rustling of the piece of parchment in my pocket again, and with a sigh of my own I pulled it out and looked at it. The words etched on the paper read out “He talks too much doesn’t he?” and then as usual the words faded away to be replaced by different words, “He means well, but he can’t be trusted around people,” the words vanished again and in came, “Tell him that priest joke, he hates it,” which made me smile a little too obviously.

Off in the distance I could see that again familiar shape of Lou walking towards me as he had before when I sat in this place and time. Looking beside me I could see that I was alone again, and unfortunately as time has gone on, for lack of a better term, I didn’t even consider it strange. This whole endeavor had made me pretty jaded. The parchment in my hand made that familiar feel it does now as the words changed on it, “They don’t get along very well.” … To be continued

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There are certain advantages to being a pessimist after all. Take today for example, because I was checking out my bank account balance online and saw that Uncle Sam had left a gift in there for me. I had been keeping tabs on the whole “Economic Stimulus Package” that they had been talking about since Washington had come up with the scheme, and figured I was about as up to date as I could be. My life is regimented down to the last dollar these days as I had finally gotten sick of being poor and decided to do something about it. The first phase of eliminating my poverty was to stop whining about it. The second phase was to live at 80 percent of my income instead of living on the fringes. The third phase was to eliminate my credit card debt. The third phase was to start packing the money I would have wasted on interest and bounce charges into a high interest savings account.

Now there were phases before all of this started that are integrated into it as well, such as taking maximum advantage of my 401k at work. There are benefits in most 401k programs that go beyond the simple tax savings and the fact that your money is playing around in the stock market after all. My 401k program in particular has a company match which is 50 percent up to 8 percent of my salary, and that equals free money. I put 70 dollars a week in my 401k {which feels like about 40 since it lowers my tax rate and the taxes from it are gone} and the company puts in 35 which is a 50 percent interest rate immediately. I have been trying to explain this to all of the lunkheads at work who are complaining about a 6 percent loss this year in the market. My 401k also has a 6 week vestment period {which means after 6 weeks anything the company puts in the account is mine regardless of whether I quit the job or not} and that is better than most companies that have anywhere from 6 months to a year vesting on theirs.

This all just started the ball rolling though, because when I stopped whining about living within my own means, then I was happy to have money in savings and not in junk food and other things. It really was a lot easier than it sounds, and the over-all perspective of it all is hope. Slow periods happen and I would love nothing better than to run out and get that new widescreen television, but it isn’t in my budget so I don’t. I spend more time writing and creating things then I used to out of necessity to keep my fingers moving, but there are also things like tax refunds and stimulus packages to keep me going as well. I tracked it in my free time as well and kept my means within the conservative estimation of what I was supposed to get. It should have been enough to pay my car insurance for the next 6 months, pay off my fuel budget {credit card} and maybe even get me a couple of hundred dollars closer to my get out of New Hampshire fund.

Now this was all predicated on what I was reading in the news. According to the news reports {from all of the reliable sources that get paid to study these things} I was supposed to get 900 dollars and based on my social security numbers I was supposed to get it in late June. I lived well within this and it was part of the hope that it would all fall within this model. Well aside from the fact that I already let the cat out of the bag that it appears to be a month and a half early, it also happens to be 1500 dollars instead of being the 900 dollars I had anticipated. This was such great news that I decided to write a blog about it, and share a few points that I had noticed while tracking the money and how much I was going to get.

The most important point of it all was that most of the news media spent a rather large amount of time doing whatever they could to make me feel like I wasn’t getting as much, or getting it later than I should. That’s obvious, but they also spent a lot of time trying to convince me that it wouldn’t help anything, and in the end it wouldn’t make anyone happy other than Wal-Mart. I am here to tell you right now that it made me very happy, and if it makes anyone out there miserable then it is because they are idiots. All of the yammering against the stimulus package always seems to be based on two factors. People who don’t work, or people who don’t need it. I’m happy that Warren Buffet doesn’t feel that he needs it, but I am disappointed that he once again decides that I don’t need it. I’m not even saying that I deserved it, but I am saying that I am grateful for it, and I have decided that after all of my penny pinching and responsibility over the last year, the extra 600 dollars that was in my deposit will most likely go towards that wide screen television. I did earn that, and if Wal-Mart is going to sell me the biggest one for the least amount of money than they deserve it as well ;8o)

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The Twins of Kane – Leviticus 3.3

“How did the window break?” I asked Jake, not really caring if he had told me before I came back, and feeling that it would be easier to just get answers and cover my tracks afterwards.

“Why are you asking me?” Jake retorted with a look of dread on his face. It showed me that this time around he wasn’t involved with the broken glass, so I was a bit relieved at first that it had nothing to do with a possessed, for lack of a better word, 14 year old that happened to also be my son’s best friend. When the reality of it being my problem, and I didn’t have a solution set in, I decided to stay quiet and act a bit dazed.

Jake continued to survey me as he put the glass down next to the window, but he went off to get a screwdriver and hammer I would assume to replace the pane. The wonderful Kansas weather is why you always have extra panes in the house and everyone over the age of 8 knows how to fix a window. I looked down at the parchment which had “Give me a minute” written on it, so I was hoping that it was searching for the answer to what had happened in the time shift this time. It did start to stir in my hand as I saw the words change to, “The glass broke when you were fighting with Mary who was waiting for you when you got home,” and I wondered if it really was Mary this time, or Darius like it was last time. The Parchment didn’t change.

Before I could start rambling into stories, Jake asked me very simply but with a bit of apprehension in his voice, “What made Mary attack you like that,” he glanced over at the window and then back at me, “I mean she is usually pretty gentle no matter how weird she is?”

My mind was racing around. How to lie? How to lie? Nothing was coming to me because I haven’t got a clue what happened. I resorted to a trick that I learned when I was a little girl, and all little boys and girls have tried to master for centuries, “I don’t know,” and then I let it stand at that. I knew at that time that I had to stay as calm as possible despite the raging headache that was coming on from trying to get my stories strait. Jake looked at me with a very peculiar grin. Looking back at it, I think he was giving me a look like any son would when he figured out that his mother was on to his greatest guilt cover up secret, but his maturity seemed to make it impossible for him to call me on it. Honor amongst thieves I suppose.

I wasn’t prepared for what he asked me next though, “Who was the big guy that threw you off Mary?” and my mind started screaming from inside. How the hell was I supposed to know that? I have two big guys plaguing my life at the moment, thank you very much. I gave him a curious look, trying to feign some sort of mystery about it all, and gave him the same response as I had given the last time, but this time it didn’t work, so he added, “Mom, that was the creepy guy that was stalking around the school, and I want to know why he is coming into our house?” His face wasn’t whimsical now; it was very serious and possibly even scared.

It was easy to lie to him actually because more than half of what I said to him was solid fact, “I don’t know who he is or what he has to do with Mary, and I don’t know what made Mary go crazy, but I am sure that he has something to do with it,” and then I trailed off while having a hard time looking him in the face.

He seemed to understand more than my over burdened mind could make up as I went along so he said, “You can’t call the cops around here either without them putting their hands all over you,” and with that he smashed his fist on the table. He got to his knees and then said something that still rages at my heart, “I’ll deal with it Mom.”

My racing mind was terrified as I fumbled for the words to explain it all away and somehow keep Jake out of this, and before I could I heard Jake’s voice again “Mom, thank God you’re ok!” and there he was again running to me as I was standing in the street again by the shattered diner. I knew what was coming next as I heard him whisper in my ear, but this time it was different, “That’s the man that threw you off of Mary,” I still remember the words from the last time when he had said, “That was the man that was at the school,” so immediately I started assuming that time had shifted and things had changed.

Slowly I turned around to see Darius standing against the Grant building looking smug and very proud of himself all over again like he had the last time. I started wondering if he knew that this was a different scenario. I might have changed my own behavior if I had the chance, knowing full well how stupid it was to run strait at him, but I didn’t have that luxury this time. Hatred again was boiling in me as it had the last time, but for a more obvious reason then I had before. It was Jake running at him this time, and his terrified mother, meaning me, running behind him furious. Furious and terrified actually because I knew my son was running towards the very incarnation of evil created by the standard bearer of evil.

“Jake! No!” I was yelling from behind him which was fruitless because he wasn’t listening. The fact that he could run a lot faster than I could was forcing the tears from me as I helplessly ran after my foolish son. “Jake! Please! Stop!” the words were rolling out of me from between my sobs. My sanity was collapsing in on me, but I didn’t have the time to analyze this as I helplessly ran after my son.

I stumbled. My clumsiness, mixed with my emotional duress forced me to hit the ground hard, and looking up I could see the different scenario playing itself out, as Darius had now turned and started running strait at Jake with that same demented look of murder all over his face, as he had had when I had seen this before. All I could see was Jake’s back, and couldn’t tell if he had the same fury as I had the last time, and within that instant I reached my hand out helplessly wishing somehow to just force Jake to stop this insane quest to defend his mother from the demon Darius. What did he know?

My mind had already turned into an insane mixture, and desperately I started simply trying to will the time to shift so that the collision wouldn’t happen. I couldn’t help but wonder where Lou was, and why he wasn’t here to put a stop to this and deal with his great mistake, that is threatening my family for whatever damn reason it is happening. In that instant I started blaming God for all of this, the second I saw Jake hit Darius. Instantly my mind was awakened though as I realized that Jake hit Darius. He actually HIT Darius, with the force of an explosion, and the two of them flew about ten feet in the air easily, and hit the ground with Jake on top of Darius crashing blows down on him like sledge hammers that were creating thunder with every stroke. Darius didn’t look so smug any more, as his head lolled back and forth from the blows that were being showered down upon his head.

I struggled to my feet and started stumbling towards the two of them. Darius was desperately trying to defend himself from the onslaught of Jake’s furious blows about his head, but to no avail, he seemed almost powerless against him. I started walking instead of running because curiously my mind told me that I wasn’t here for this part the last time. I had fallen through Darius and ended up in the park where Lou had found me the last time. I didn’t understand and worse than that I can’t comprehend this in the least. Despite the curious way I had to relive all of these things when time shifted on me there was no comfort in knowing the outcomes, to say the least.

As I cautiously walked closer to the scene where Jake was leveling blow upon blow on the defenseless demon, I noted that Darius appeared to be sinking into the Earth. Jake’s knees even appeared to be sinking into the Earth along with him as they straddled him and held him down firmly. It was like Jake was taking him down to hell where he belongs, and the rest of the world was frozen in time to let it happen. I started moving quicker, thinking that somehow this entity was going to drag my son down into the very bellows of the Earth with him, and the terror was killing me inside. Now I was running and completely out of my mind and out of control. I couldn’t let that happen, despite knowing now as I do that I couldn’t have done a damn thing about it either.

I again stumbled and fell hard after suffering a blow from beside me like a car had struck me. My focus had been so fixed that I hadn’t even noticed anything around me, so despite the pain of being hit, the confusion might have actually kept me in the moment. I felt something hit me very hard and very square in my stomach which rolled me over instantly. Defensively I kept rolling and was barely missed by Mary’s foot which tried to kick me again. Even though I had seen Mary’s gnarled and twisted face, the last blow wasn’t that of an old woman, and I wasn’t about to take it again. My ribs were killing me from the last blow, and my shoulder was in extreme pain from hitting the ground. I had totally lost my focus on what was going on with Jake and Darius, and was staring at the lunatic I used to know as Mary the Church Lady.

I aimed a feeble kick at her, and she brushed it off with her hand before kicking me again hard in the desperately aching shoulder this time. It was all I could do to look over at Jake terrified more for my son then even for my own impending doom as I laid there on the pavement, knowing that I was going to be struck again and again until I probably died. My thoughts were completely focused on my son in that very instant, and I gazed over towards him hoping only to have one more look at him. I didn’t get it. Lou was all I saw there, pounding the ground with his fist in a form of a temper tantrum, so my mind immediately shot to my own dire needs. It wasn’t there either, as Mary was simply lying on the ground motionless. Looking back again to the other scene, Lou was gone and there was no evidence that anyone had ever been there. … To be continued

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Of all the things in life I’ve lost, I miss my mind the most. That has been one of my favorite sayings for the last 22 years of my life. It sums me up, or so I would try to tell anyone who meets me. The fact of the matter is, we all lose things, and when the mind is gone we tend not to care about a good majority of them. Most of the things I equate personally with losing my mind almost always has to do with things that aren’t even really equated with my mind. More often than not it is just whining about utterly unimportant things that have more to do with my vanity than anything else.

I think it’s rather amusing, my “enlightenment” over the last year about writing, because there was a time when I couldn’t even get myself to do it unless I knew there would be about 200 hits every time I published something. Walking away from it could have construed as losing my mind, and I think that it actually was. My own self righteousness has always been my worst enemy, but I was able to prove that I could get 15 minutes of fame on several occasions, and walk away from it as well. It all depends on someone’s definition of fame really, because I was never really anything to speak of on my best day, but somewhere along the lines I learned to like writing regardless of who reads it. Some would say that that would constitute losing my mind, and I think I agree.

The internet has become cluttered with social networking sites over the last few years, let me tell you, and each and every one of them has their good side and their bad side. Myspace is where almost everyone is, but it is the most user unfriendly and buggy site on the internet. Hell I have been trying to get my page deleted for 3 years and can’t, so I give up. I even resorted to filling the whole page with porn, and they just erased the porn and left the page. Yahoo 360 is a drama festival filled with retards who simply found it because they use Yahoo messenger. Most of the people using Yahoo messenger are doing so for less than “human” ideals and carry that to 360 with them. Live Journal became a overly monitored arm of the decency police, and the only thing worse than that is the way everyone using it cry about it. Blogger is the place to go if you need to steal content for your own blog, etc etc etc.

Not a day goes by when I don’t get an invite to some new Social Networking site, some Writer’s Site, or some other form of Hook Up site, and they usually just get deleted. Who has time for all of that crap anymore? I also have guilty feelings about all the people who have followed me from one site to the next, and the numbers have dwindled down to just about nothing. Who can blame them either? I use a site called Multiply now but it bores the crap out of me, and as always I have kept all of my writings on my own site for the eventuality that I will need to leave memories for the family after the funeral. Without a doubt though, it always makes me feel better knowing that it is there because nobody can tell me to do shit, make rules, delete me, or make money off of me there. It’s my little piece of serenity.

I finally got the mother of all invites to a site {sorry I don’t know the address because it was hard enough to click the delete through the laughter} that called itself “180 – Half of 360s Bullshit” which reminded me of why I left 360, which was all of the bullshit. I mean don’t get me wrong, they deleted my profile for being an ass, but I could have salvaged it all the same way all the stalkers do, and just create profile after profile, but it gets old to us that might not have actually lost our minds. This new site was simply openly advertising to those types that they can run amuck in 180 land. Let’s face it, but half of 360s bullshit is roughly 100 percent more bullshit than I need. I feel rather stupid signing up for Multiply because it’s advertising campaign was “360 is dying and they are all coming to Multiply” and why in the name of God would I want that? Needless to say I haven’t had the hoards of insane snerts hunting me down on Multiply, but then again I am not that popular anymore. That’s a blessing if you ask me.

You really have to think about it this way, but if it is a Social Networking site that you are trying to escape from, then it is the “social” that you are probably trying to get away from. I mean the rules that the site sets up usually creates the monsters that chase you out of there and all but once a monster has been made you usually can’t put them in a new environment, and expect them to adapt. Take it from me, I have actually had the same emotionally inept reject follow me to 4 different sites until I either finally ditched him or he finally realized that ruining my life was as boring as my life in general. That’s the price of 15 minutes of popularity within the reach of a self righteous jerk like myself. It doesn’t mean that I deserved it or even earned it, but more to the point, it just means that that is what you get when you hang out in an anonymous electronic world, so the best advice I can give is to especially not get into whims about where you hang out.

The worst part of it all was coming to the reality that more often than not, what I wrote wasn’t as good as I thought it was. I know that perceptions are far more than what one denotes as rules. This might have been where I lost my mind, but then again the one thing that makes a sane person sane is if they actually wonder if they are insane or not. This was the enlightenment of it all as I stopped caring about what I wrote and how it pertained to those that were reading it. I started living my life more on this end of the computer monitor, and updating the