Ethos=Pathos=Logos

                The meaning of life is simple: maximize happiness and satisfaction and minimize guilt and shame. This takes work, but contained in the body are biochemicals that reward us with happiness and satisfaction for the right behavior and punish us with shame and guilt for the wrong behavior. Essentially, ethos, pathos and logos are all united by equals signs that are absolute. The Greek philosopher Aristotle divided these three means of persuasion several thousand years ago and their separation has haunted Western education ever since.
                In separating the means of persuasion it is easy for hard liners to rule out emotion in places where decisions are made, such as legislatures and court. However, it is emotion that informs us about survival factors on everything and it is my interest that it is reunited with logic to map morality. Without a clear morality map for children to understand from a very young age, children are left to make the same mistakes humans have already made that lead to those negative emotions. Negative emotions tell us that we are endangering survival. Think about it. When everybody is burned by everybody else, bitterness and resentment set in. Survival is dependent on cooperation. Cooperation depends on good emotions and unity of purpose.
                Babylon lost sight of its unity. It lacked a morality map for long term survival and so do we in our education system.
                “All that remains of the original ancient famed city of Babylon today is a large mound, or tell, of broken mud-brick buildings and debris in the fertile Mesopotamian plain between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The city itself was built upon the Euphrates, and divided in equal parts among its left and right banks with steep embankments to contain the river’s seasonal floods,” says Wikipedia.

                Oh, no.                 We got an amateur here.

                 That’s right, I’m quoting Wikipedia because this is an ongoing conversation and I do not deign to know everything. I’m putting this shit together as fast as you are. We are in a race against time to survive as a nation, but a nation can no longer survive without a world to sustain it.

                I cannot produce the sturdy well-cited academic book that would satisfy the types of elites I observed in writing and in news from Ivy league schools like Yale and Harvard in the 90s and early 2000s.

                Everything that follows herein is as unorthodox and off-the-radar as you have ever read. I had to analyze far more information about patterns and human behavior than time would allow for me to develop a brain marked by a sophisticated encyclopedic wealth of trivia and historical facts.

                I’m already on borrowed time and I was born for one assignment: go up like a flare from Middlebury, Vermont…light up the sky peacefully…wait to see who blinks back…go forward.

                So…Babylon.

                Why is some city that blossomed into an empire boasting one of the Seven Wonders of the World before ultimately falling into ruins relevant today in our nation? In these pages I’m going to make the provocative case that will prove to you why Babylon needs your immediate scrutiny and why if you are not blinking back and forth with the hundreds of thousands of law enforcement officers, US military personnel, CIA, FBI and other relevant leadership organizations in our nation, if you are not blinking signals with your neighbors and with your political and capitalist leaders to hold yourselves together in unity you’re going to be swept away just like Babylon was. Not phony blinks. Not sound bites. Legitimate respect-earning blinks.   

                The world is full of blinking. Take a walk on a beach and look out at the blinking lights on the horizon. The earliest rapid long-distance communication was smoke and fire signals. Maybe you have driven behind a car with a political bumper sticker or a race car driver’s number. That’s blinking. In-between-the-lines the person who placed the bumper sticker is communicating with the person reading the bumper sticker. They are saying, “I am this type of person.”

                Maybe it’s because we are already so lost in babble, but have you noticed how often people in America chose to be mean when they BLINK? The aggressive, angry and mean BLINKS reveal insecurity about communicating with others in general. They reveal FEAR. Where there is fear there is division and where there is division the BLINKING FAILS to communicate REAL DANGER, OUTSIDE THREATS and the necessary information to successfully navigate through time and space. I define success as LONG TERM SURVIVAL not MONETARY WEALTH. Call me crazy but I’d rather breathe, eat and sleep than curl up and die besides a golden calf (Exodus 32:4).

                BLINKING cannot accomplish its purpose when there is fear and division. This book will discuss God and the idea of God extensively. Know this: the concept of “false idolatry” and a BABYLON of BLINKING where critical life-preserving signals cannot have priority, the way airbag signals have priority over, say, a window control switch on a car’s computer, are ONE AND THE SAME.

                I appeal to our military, FBI, police detectives, CIA and Hollywood actors to scrutinize this book because YOU people have the communication ability and intelligence to shake up the BLINKING so that there is cohesion in the message and priority for the signals that must be sent and received.

                As I write this introduction we are 1 day removed from the capture of Dzokhar Tsarnaev, the second suspect in the Boston Marathon Patriot’s Day bombing. Just last night I watched residents in Watertown applaud Boston police, FBI, first responders and other federal and state crime fighting agencies as news spread of Tsarnaev’s capture and police cars left the scene. Just today “Big Papi” Red Sox slugger David Ortiz told a full crowd at Fenway Park, “This is our fucking city” at an emotional rally for the victims of the attack.

                All the signs for our survival are evident. The right people do the right things, yet there is an invisible menace in our midst and I will lay out centuries of observable patterns and evidence for your consideration. You be the jury. You follow your own conscience and your own instincts right now. We’re grappling with survival and history has a track record of insane cruelty and brutality.

                Portland, Oregon is a city built on two sides of a river just like Babylon. I moved to Portland, Oregon in December 2006, leaving an internship at a movie production site in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The director had won academy awards and the stars in his movie were A-list actors, but I was disinvited to participate in shooting scenes by the director’s lieutenant and I thought I was in love, so I followed my heart and packed up my car and left before my internship was finished. It was in Portland that I began thoroughly studying the Bible.

                In early 2006, before the movie internship, I held an internship at The Nation magazine in New York City. As part of my assignment at The Nation magazine, I worked with the two advertising executives. The Nation was headquartered in Union Square and occupied an entire floor of prime real estate in the heart of Manhattan. These two advertising executives were responsible for raising the money to pay off the cost of the real estate, plus the salaries of the editors, writers and executives, the publishing, various social events, etc. The Nation had a circulation approaching 200,000 according to the advertising executives. Hard to believe two ad executives could keep all that afloat just by calling through a phone book.

                One day I was sitting in the office of Ellen Bollinger and she was going through a stack of old Nation magazines, showing me the advertisers. She stopped as she came to an advertisement for Fox News and explained, “Now when we decided if we were going to let Fox News advertise for us there was quite a debate among our readership. We had several editorial board meetings and there was a lot of pushback against the idea, but we decided that if they were going to give us their money it wasn’t going to effect the content of what we publish and we might as well take it.” The conversation stuck with me because of its long explanation and unprincipled conclusion.

                Bollinger’s junior partner, Neal, was a scrawny bird like man with an uneasy twitchy demeanor. Together he and I would run through phone book lists of businesses to call and make a sales pitch for them to advertise with The Nation. I never sold a single ad and I’m pretty sure I never saw Neal sell an advertisement either, but somehow Neal and Ellen were keeping 25,000 square feet of prime Manhattan real estate and dozens of hefty salaries at The Nation magazine financially solvent with a phone book and two full time advertising executives. The Nation depended heavily on a trust fund.

                I didn’t last at the Nation because I did not fit in to the office culture. The office had a catty social dynamic that exalted book smarts and trivial facts and information. The younger editors dressed like hipsters with thick rim Buddy Holly style glasses. I worked in the intern pen with the rest of the interns and the books editor, Christina, would occasionally drop by and talk needfully with the two lesbian interns who worked with us. The lesbian interns would listen with locked eyes for long periods of time and willingly agree to anything being asked of them. By contrast Christina never made eye contact with me. There were a couple of young men employed by The Nation, who were recent interns: Ari Berman and Sam Graham Felson.

                The interns were allowed to participate in the editorial board meetings although we were barred from sharing anything that took place at the meetings. The editors would assign stories with boutique interest and appeal. The culture wars were still in full swing at The Nation. Feminism was in full blossom. Words like “inappropriate” sent chills down my spine every time a well dressed woman in glasses, speaking with her hands, would make an applause-worthy point about an offense to women that was going unnoticed. The Nation had a gay black writer named Gary Young who I worked with as a fact checker. They had yoga on Thursday afternoons and everyone drank Starbucks coffee.

                I was moving from one internship to another in my early 20s, making no money and getting worked like a dog. When I left Albuquerque for Portland Oregon, my goal was love. My ex-girlfriend Amanda Requa lived in Portland Oregon and attended school there. We had struck up communication in the summer and fall of 2006 and by the time I was working on the movie, we were corresponding every day. I was also writing Op Eds for OpEdNews.com. My targets were conservative pundits Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. It’s hard to remember nowadays, but in the 90s up to 2006, Rush Limbaugh had enormous pull. There was no satellite radio and for three hours a day he was entertainment for truckers, workers and all sorts of men in the 30-50 demographic. America was four years into the Iraq War, George W. Bush was president and American patriotism was at a fever pitch.

                In the world of politics I recognized a severe shortcoming on the Left to combat Right Wing pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. The Nation magazine was the perfect example of the imperfect out-of-touch debate between the two national political factions. The Right Wing pundits  would tear into opponents with an aggressive, sometimes funny and lighthearted, cock-sure style of political debate while the Left Wing buried itself in facts and words and emotion. The Ring Wing stuck to gay marriage, tax and spending cuts, gun rights and immigration. The Right Wing made its arguments over and over again, never straying from the formula.

                December 15, 2006:

                Rush Limbaugh: “Now to the phones. This is Terrence in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Hello, sir.”

                CALLER: Rush.

                RUSH: Yeah?

                CALLER: I'm depressed. I have a problem.

                RUSH: Yeah?

                CALLER: I live in Cambridge. They do not like Christmas, and I'm surrounded by liberals. Their depression is really starting to affect my outlook on Christmas. I don't feel like I can get into it this year, it's so depressing. I get "Happy Holidays," if that, wherever I go. I don't know how to respond to this. It gets to the point to -- I'm surrounded by liberals, and as we all know their outlook on life –

                RUSH: Well, unless you're prepared to move, that is a challenge you're going to have living where you live.

                Meanwhile in the December 11^th 2006, edition of The Nation magazine Daniel Lazare proved Rush’s point to some extent, penning a book review of “God’s War: A New History of the Crusades.” His review bore a title that shared a theme of common vindictiveness among leftist writers: “God’s Willing Executioners.”

                Lazare wrote, “There are many ways to describe Pope Benedict XVI’s remarks at the University of Regensburg last September concerning the ‘evil and inhuman’ nature of Mohammad’s teachings. Impolitic is one way, maladroit is another. They can also be described as deeply ignorant concerning Islam’s role in preserving, transmitting and enhancing classical culture at a time when most Europeans were still snuggling up to their oxen for warmth.” Ah, that snide little jab at whites, just like Hollywood comedies always portraying whites as dumbasses.

                In the mid-2000s the Left played a balancing act between defending Islam and Palestinians and mocking all forms of religion. Lazare also wrote, “A Jewish observer noted that, unlike Muslims, Christians at least did not rape enemy women before killing them. On the other hand, there was nothing in the Islamic camp that quite compared with what God’s War describes as ‘a daredevil but starving group’ of Christian warriors known as the Tafurs, who not only killed their Muslim opponents but reportedly ate them, too. One side engaged in mass rape, while the other preferred a dash of cannibalism to liven things up.”

                “Liven things up…” this tongue and cheek casualness in dealing with horror was another aspect of the Left. Its writers were so smart and elite that they could quip about barbarism and they played above it all, meting out their centuries of knowledge in the process.

                My introduction to spirituality was Alcoholics Anonymous. I arrived in the halls of an AA meeting on February 16, 2002. I was on probation for a car accident that left two people injured in 1998, including a girl who was critically injured with a brain injury. Despite the severity of the accident, I didn’t sober up immediately. My probation officer called on February 16^th to tell me that I had a hot urinalysis for cocaine. The threat of prison and the consequences that might come from my hot urinalysis scared me sober initially. I cried and feared for my life after hanging up the phone with my probation officer who was in Vermont. I was in Colorado. Fear got me sober to begin with, but I clung to AA, fearing for my life that I would slip and begin drinking or using drugs again.

                The AA hall smelled like coffee and there were pamphlets of literature set out on the coffee table. A subdued crowd of college students and older sober ex-drunks gathered around a circular table in a church just a half a block from my apartment on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I found my way to the first meeting on February 19^th. I sincerely made the effort to listen and participate and engage as one after another the sober participants in the room shared their stories after declaring themselves alcoholics.

                Before long I started to help setting up meetings. I studied the Twelve Steps. They had a feeling of ancient history about them. The meetings had taken place in the same hall for years before I arrived and would continue for years after. The same basic patterns would continue: a group of well intentioned individuals would wrestle with the Twelve Steps and the Twelve Traditions as best they could to preserve the founders’ intentions and designs for sobriety.

                The first step was to admit powerlessness. The second step was to admit that there was a higher power that could restore us to sanity. The third step was to turn our will and lives over to the care of God as we understood him. I was able to admit powerlessness but I struggled mightily with God at first. It helped that we could define a higher power in any way we chose. Still, when I was alone and desperate I found myself calling out to God on my own initiative and sensing company in the empty room. I sensed God could hear me when I prayed.

                As the weeks went by, I formed new relationships with people who were eager to help and found a “sponsor,” a 45 year old man who was sober for 10 years who would serve as a spiritual mentor. If I wanted to stay sober, I was told and read in the literature, I was supposed to share all of my fears, resentments and my sexual history with this man.

                It was terrifying but I managed to write down and share my sexual history, which included rape in second grade and a number of homosexual encounters that followed that first encounter. I was dogged by feelings of guilt and pleasure about my sexual behavior. After sharing my sexual history, fears and resentments I biked home that night and let out a holler at the top of my lungs. A massive weight was removed. I had CONFESSED.

                Had everyone in Babylon confessed themselves, it might not be a dung hill today. Babylon was a whore culture with no soul. In order for something to last there must be pride in ownership. The only other part of AA is making amends. AA is designed to kill ego. When ego dies pride in the collective goes up. Had everyone in Babylon lived by the 12 steps of AA, it would still exist, and so must we. Living by confession and amends does not mean an end to fun, and fun is not a realistic objective. Survival designed us to reward us with happiness and satisfaction biochemicals for group unity.

                Christ was certainly a proponent of confession. Christ said, “As the father sent me, even so I send you…Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any they are retained.” (John 20:21-23)

                Mortal sins were defined as murder, idolatry, sorcery, avarice, theft, envy, lies, spite, pride, fickleness, drunkenness and sexual impurity. It was known at least as late as in the time of Jesus that confession had an effect on people. The Big Book of AA states that failure to accomplish the 4^th and 5^th steps, which are essentially confession steps, will certainly lead to relapse. After my “confession” of my sexual relations I stayed sober for 7 years and haven’t drank compulsively since I began drinking again.

                Jesus is remembered in scripture as a magical doctor by today’s standards. “When he was come down from the mountain great multitudes followed him. And behold there came a leper and worshipped him, saying, Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean. And Jesus put forth his hand, and touched him, saying, I will; be thou clean. And immediately his leprosy was cleansed.” (Matthew 8:1-3) Jesus is also known for healing the blind and walking on water and Evangelicals read it literally.

                The Left Wing academics leading the media’s discourse on God and scripture find these details about Jesus as amusing as the Old Testament admonitions to slaughter animals for God and the myriad arcane and sexual proscriptions found throughout the Bible. The Left Wing, rightly in many cases, blamed the Bible for crusades, execution, wars and political control. To them, there was no redeeming value in the Bible.

                The Left’s antagonism toward the Bible grew between 2000 and 2006 as the Right Wing ramped up its overtures to “conservative Christians.” President Bill Clinton’s tenure was marked by conciliatory overtures to secularism, feminism and racial equality. Before Clinton, the American Left found itself antagonistic toward the Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition and evangelical power brokers like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.

                Between 2000 and 2006, the Christian Right rose again on the coattails of abortion and gay marriage. President Bush was a former alcoholic who sobered up in 1985 with the help of Billy Graham. Bush highlighted his “spiritual salvation” throughout both campaigns and his presidency. On September 20^th 2001, nine days after the World Trade Center attack Bush prayed for God’s help in a speech to a joint session of Congress. On September 16^th 2001 Bush used the word “crusade” to define his foreign policy objectives: “We understand. And the American people are beginning to understand. This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while.”

                Bush supporters like Hardy Billington from Poplar Bluff, Mo., summarized the feelings of the Right Wing voting bloc when he told a crowd of 20,000 people gathered to see President Bush campaign there on Labor Day in 2004, “President Bush is the greatest president I have ever known. I love my president. I love my country. And more important, I love Jesus Christ.” Billington was spurred to political action by the efforts underway in Massachusetts to legalize same-sex marriage. Billington’s sentiments echoed the sentiments of hundreds if not thousands of callers to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly every afternoon during their radio programs. His sentiments echoed the sentiments of Fox News pundits, guests and personalities like Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham. Everyone could participate in the sweeping narrative and blame game perpetuated by opinion makers from Limbaugh to David Brooks.

                Mark McKinnon, a long-time senior media advisor to Bush, summarized the narrative that propelled Republicans to national power throughout Bush’s presidency. “All of you [media types think Bush is an idiot] up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don’t care. You see you’re outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big wide middle of America, busy working people who don’t read the New York Times or Washington Post or LA Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malapropos, his jumbled syntax, it’s good for us. Because you know what those folks don’t like? They don’t like you!”

                Faith played a role in the 2004 elections with 11 states voting to back constitutional amendments against gay marriage. Karl Rove invoked another aspect of the Right Wing’s narrative when he declared after the November 2004 elections that “people do not like the idea of concept of marriage as being a union between a man and a woman being uprooted and overturned by a few activist judges or a couple of local activist officials.”

                While prominent Republican politicians hammered away at East Coast and West Coast liberal elites and “judicial activists” throughout the early 2000’s, Bush’s administration projected an assertive military masculinity with headstrong heavyweights like Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condolezza Rice and Dick Cheney. A surfeit of Republicans knew how to talk and posture tough, including Tom Delay, Denny Hastert, Rick Santorum and Trent Lott.

                Republicans also knew that their political strategy was built on the same types of marketing appeals used to sell merchandise. On November 18, 2004 Bush’s campaign manager Ken Mehlman told a Republican Governor’s Association meeting that “If you drive a Volvo and you do yoga, you are pretty much a Democrat. If you drive a Lincoln or a BMW and you own a gun, you’re voting for George Bush.”

                As I left New Mexico for Portland Oregon in December 2006, Democrats were poised to pick up 5 seats in the Senate and 31 seats in the House. The Republicans were reeling from gay sex scandals on the eve of the 2006 elections. In the chaos of all the political points Democrats were trying to make for their reelection hopes in 2006, nothing sunk in with voters as clearly and persuasively as reports of Republican Representative Mark Foley’s behavior and Denny Hastert’s cover-up or Evangelical leader Ted Haggard’s relationship with a male prostitute. The coverage of these sex scandals was so damaging, Rush Limbaugh found himself defending Republican’s from “anti-homosexual liberals.”

                Throughout this time period in my life, I monitored Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly in my spare time. None of my liberal friends nor my family would even listen to them. There was great political antagonism in the country. Neither side was willing to listen to the other side. Political debates seemed to begin in earnest and end in anger.

                My girlfriend lived in student housing in the Goose Hollow district of Portland Oregon nearby the I-405 corridor and the Jeld-Wen Field where the baseball Portland Beavers and the soccer Portland Lumberjacks played. I drove my father’s Saab to Portland with everything I owned packed into the car. She had a hamster named Fenton and we began to live together. We both shared a love of comedy, the outdoors, music and coffee. I set out looking for work. I was going to work part-time and write in my spare time. I planned to continue writing political commentary, but I also wanted to write books.

                I searched Craigslist for job opportunities and found one job listing advertising work in health care reform advocacy. “Do you want to work in a job where you can use your passion and activism to create meaningful and lasting change?” I said, “Yes.” I got a job interview immediately and biked over to the east side of Portland for the interview the next day. The address led me to a one-story building that belonged to the AFL-CIO roughly 10 blocks east of the river. I walked up the concrete steps outside the building, entered the hallway and entered the first office door on my left.

                The name of the organization I was applying to work for was Working America. Working America was a relatively new project of the AFL-CIO, a door-to-door campaign that sought to enlarge the numbers of union households the AFL-CIO could target with its political messaging. The office felt like a campaign headquarters, with an assortment of desks, chairs, fliers and posters. I filled out the required paperwork and met for a 10 minute interview with the canvass director, Graham Trainor. Sitting across from him in the makeshift office and hearing about the campaign for health care reform I was filled with the sense that this job could lead to the type of political campaign work I felt I was suited for. Graham set me up for a second interview the following day. The second interview was a day-long orientation to the field work of the campaign. I was sent door-to-door with a trainer who showed me how to pitch a “rap” to the surprised person who opened the door and solicit a contribution. In order to keep the job, canvassers needed to raise $110 a night.

                I raised $50 on my first night and I was hired. My plan was to work three days a week and write for the rest of my time, but I worked full-time after my first day on December 13^th 2006 so that I could pass the training period and get paid as a regular employee for a few days off around Christmas. The fastest I could make staff was 5 days. I made staff in 6 days. Raising $110 was called “making quota.” I found out early that I was good at raising money from complete strangers.

                Graham recognized my abilities as well and he began meeting with me to sell me on a leadership role in the office. Being a leader would require working full-time. I started to see the job as an entryway to a career and I agreed to a leadership-track plan working five days a week.

                The job began to teach me about human nature. There was a precise formula for success. We were using marketing techniques to raise the money that paid for our salaries. Trainers at Working America taught the mechanical skills needed to raise money in individual and group sessions. The “rap” was the sales pitch we launched into as soon as the door opened up. It never varied. It went like this: introduction, problem, solution, action.

                This was the introduction: “Hi my name is Dean and I’m with Working America, and we’re out tonight fighting for health care reform and we are fund-raising. Here take a look at my clipboard.” At this point we were trained to pull out our clipboards from where they were tucked under our arms, tap them loudly and pass them to the person who opened the door whether or not they were on the other side of an outer screen door. We were taught to immediately re-establish eye contact by tapping on the clipboard we just passed.

                As soon as eye contact was re-established the rap continued: “You probably know the problem we have with health care, right?” At this point we were trained to nod our own heads and pause our “rap” a little to get the person with whom we were talking to nod their head or verbally agree. The rap continued: “47 million Americans don’t have health care; the cost of health care continues to increase, and Congress continues to do nothing about it. You agree this is a problem, right?” At this point of the rap we were again trained to pause and wait for an agreement from the person we were talking to.

                After agreement was established, we were trained to press on to the “solution”: “Great, well the solution is simple. We are organizing our community door-to-door so we can tell Congress to pass health care reform. You’re with us on that, right?” Again, we were trained to wait for verbal or visual agreement at this point in the rap.

                After establishing agreement the rap continued: “Great, the only way we can win is with strong supporters like you. That’s why your neighbors are signing down and joining us with a contribution. Here is my pen.” At this point in the rap we were trained to pass our pen to the person who was now holding our clipboard. As soon as they took the pen we were trained to thank them generously because by taking the pen they were silently agreeing to sign up and make a donation. At this point in the rap we were trained to say, “We prefer a check or a charge and our strong supporters are doing $120.” After we completed this part of the rap we were trained to wait for them to respond…and wait…and wait if necessary.

                We were trained to respond to anything they might say at this point. If they signed the clipboard and started to give it back without saying anything about the money we were trained not to ask if they were still planning on giving us a donation, but rather to assume they were and simply ask, “Would you rather do a check or a charge?” If they balked at donating $120, we were trained to say, “No problem, I couldn’t do $120 either myself, but you know why we ask high: the stronger the support, the more forcefully we can demand health care reform. Lots of folks meet us half way and do $60.” If they balked at $60 we were trained to ask for $36 or $3 per month since we only visited each neighborhood once a year.

                We were trained to maintain eye contact, keep it short and simple, pass the clipboard, ask for a specific dollar amount and ask for a check or a charge. All of these behaviors exuded confidence. It took confidence to successfully solicit donations. Night after night, neighborhood after neighborhood, canvasser after canvasser the formula was the same and it worked over and over and over again.

                I enjoyed meeting people and it was a rush to get big checks. We spent four and a half to five hours canvassing each night and time flew because it was a race against time to reach “quota” each night before the clock ran out and we had to go back to the office to finish up our work for the day.

                In February 2007, Working America sent me to New Jersey for six weeks to train into a “field manager,” a higher-paying position that also demanded greater involvement with the canvass. When I returned to Portland I began training new canvassers and managing the van rides from the office out to the neighborhoods where we canvassed.

                 For several brief months I held my job and came back to Amanda’s apartment each night where she greeted me with a hug and a kiss and we spent a little time together watching The Office or television before she went to bed. It took me a little longer to get to sleep because my days started and ended later than the usual workday. We also spent time together biking and going to soccer games at the stadium down the street from where she lived. There was a MAX stop close to her apartment and we spent time shopping, eating and enjoying the city together. It felt like the beginning of a very satisfying life. I was making enough money to support myself and I was helping the Portland Working America fund-raising office boost its nightly fund-raising average from $100 per night to $150 per night.

                When I was still working at The Nation magazine the previous year I suggested in an editorial board meeting that The Nation use the Bible to counter the religious Right’s messaging and forcefulness on social issues. I felt comfortable reading the Bible as a liberal because of the three years I spent participating with AA. AA sparked the curiosity but after reading some of the stories, I was quite convinced that the messages in the Bible could be used to promote Democratic Party goals. After I raised the idea at The Nation editorial board meeting, one of the female Nation interns countered, “Why not use Islam or another religion? Why does it have to be Christianity?” After her question the editors navigated the conversation away from my suggestion, and it was never to be discussed again.

                The reason, I believed, it was important to use the same document that Christians used to justify their political positions was because Christians should have been our targets for persuasion. We needed to use the same text that they cited to support their own arguments as the justification for our positions on everything from health care to the environment. Use the same text they cite to make counter arguments.

                After I got settled in Portland Oregon I set about to become more thoroughly acquainted with the Bible. Work didn’t begin until 1 or 1:30 in the afternoons, so I usually woke up early, went to the gym and then settled in to one of Portland’s many enticing coffee shops and began reading the Bible with a pen in hand, marking up sections that supported my Democratic beliefs.

                “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” (Genesis 1:1) Genesis stood apart from the stories about the kings, priests and other Biblical figures because it was a story to explain the origins of the world. It could be disregarded in relationship to the other stories contained within the Bible.

                But instead of joining Leftists in mocking the implausibility that the world was created in seven days and that Eve was created from one of Adam’s ribs, I thought about the chain of humans the story of Genesis passed through to arrive eventually at the beginning of the Bible. The earliest version of the Jewish Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible which is retained as part of the Holy Bible by Christians, dates back to the tenth century BCE.

                Before the story of Genesis was written, it was spoken and told and retold again and again. Its origination could be explained by the desire of its authors to make meaning out of life. The story reveals that humans knew about whales and ate fishes, that they managed cattle, observed the same sun and moon we observe today. They mined gold and knew about harvesting metal from the earth.

                Genesis gives us glimpses of movie-like frames of life from thousands of years ago. Humans figured out many, many things long before we arrived. That was the point that I understood. Modern Leftism held a disdain for the ignorance exhibited in the Bible. The disdain was evident everywhere from The Nation to comments on Huffington Post.

                If humans could have figured out so many things about the natural world thousands of years ago, it stood to reason that they could figure out how to operate the very machinery of human psychology and inspire or exploit emotions to navigate through time and space to achieve a desired outcome.

                “And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.”  (Gensis 2:9)

                Before the serpent tempts Eve to eat the apple of the knowledge of good and there is peace in Eden. My mother is a life-long feminist who pursued science at a time when few women were in the field. Many times I’ve heard her complain about the behavior of men. She is also formerly Catholic and she attended catechism school in New York City, the daughter of an Irish immigrant mother and alcoholic father. What my mother hears when she hears the story of Adam and Eve is the blaming of human folly, death and unhappiness on women.

                I didn’t realize it in 2007 in Portland Oregon, but I would eventually come to make clear sense of this story in my own mind. The story describes three parties: the man, the woman and the serpent. The serpent is an enemy to Adam and Eve, but he presents himself (a complete STRANGER) as a friend. God is a fourth party in the story. Remember that little lump that might have been attached to human history thousands of years ago. God doesn’t know immediately that Adam and Eve ate from the tree of Good and Evil until He notices that Adam and Eve hide their nakedness.

                “Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.”

                Advertising comes disguised as a friend. Advertising for fashion and lifestyle works especially well on women. We know this because advertisers spend lots of money testing humans for the best ways to message us and convert us into believers in their product. When I went door to door in Portland Oregon my biggest donors were women between the ages of 25 and 50. Many of these women had husbands.  They would open the door and I was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And as I made my case for health care reform these women that I spoke with “saw” my argument was good for them, they “saw” I was pleasant to the eyes, they took the fruit that I offered and gave me money, money that belonged also to their husbands and so their husbands gave me money also. I participated in health care reform until its passage in 2010, but the bill was a severely compromised version of the health care reform that we advocated door-to-door.

                I didn’t understand the Adam and Eve story in 2007, but by 2012 I had come to understand that one way of interpreting the Adam and Eve story was when women are left vulnerable to be persuaded they can be quickly moved by emotion into taking actions that can be dangerous for themselves and their men.

                Throughout my time in Portland Oregon I was sustained by a vision of myself and a narrative for my existence and purpose. Narratives are abundant in our media, evident in everything from 30 second beer commercials to long literary works of art. Storylines and narratives guide us in our actions going into the future and our interpretations of past events. In 2007, I understood myself as an independent analyzer of current affairs and a champion for progressive values and a persuasive writer. As part of my narrative for myself I biked to conserve gasoline and keep myself in shape. I worked out to improve my health. I drank coffee and read books because I wanted to be an intellectual heavyweight. I bought food from Whole Foods because I was persuaded by the organic and whole foods arguments.

                I continued to analyze the Bible, and I felt as though I was alone among liberals for wading through the Biblical stories looking for ammunition for liberal causes. Adam and Eve gave birth to Cain and Abel. Cain tilled the land and grew crops while Abel raised sheep. God found favor in Abel but not Cain and Cain slew his brother in envy. God made Cain an impotent farmer from that point forward and marked Cain. How did God mark Cain? Who was God but an independent authority meting out justice. Where did this urge for justice spring forth from? Moreover, wasn’t it SHAMEFUL that Cain slew Abel? Did it not reveal a character flaw that any of us are capable of? Was “God’s favor” a metaphor for the preference of women or of a woman in particular?

                Later in Genesis we see a PATTERN that is repeated over and over again throughout the Bible. A group of individuals LOSES that navigational blinking I mentioned in the beginning of this book and all the followers of that lost navigation are swept away by history while a core group that continues to follow God is preserved.

                “And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose. And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years. There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown [CELEBRITIES] And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually (a priority of sexual freedom over “family values”) And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them. But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD.” (Genesis 6:1-8)

                Following this passage in Genesis is the famous story of Noah’s ark. The story of Noah’s ark seems innocuous enough. Children have reenacted the famous story in churches in front of their adoring parents and all involved celebrate the costumes and the animals and the work of the children. The story of Noah’s ark seems like simply another impossible but interesting story from a Bible full of irrelevant magic and hopelessly archaic explanations for events that science can now explain. However, Noah’s ark is one of many examples of “wicked” humans being purged out of history and the children of the Old Testament’s God surviving.

                The story goes that Noah built an ark and he and his family and one of every type of animal boarded the ark and the land flooded and the water receded and God’s favor returned to Noah’s people and history sort of began again. But could the story be an allegory for a pattern that emerges in the Bible? Does the story of Noah’s ark describe genocide of non-adherents to the laws of the Jewish tribe?  

                Look at the last century of American history. When I worked in Montpelier Vermont at the Montpelier Bridge, one of my newspaper internships, I interviewed a woman who grew up in Montpelier during the depression. She had fond memories of the close knit, largely Italian stone-cutting, community she grew up in, where children played games together, neighbors looked after one another and sexual deviance wasn’t a creepy, impulsive, subversive part of adolescence or an adult sexually predatory intrusion on adolescence.

                Contrast these healthy memories with the subsequent rise of paranoid cultural leaders, dictates about what is and what isn’t normal, a prioritization of materialism and endless debates about what is and isn’t morally correct. This is where healthy BLINKING is overtaken, intercepted, manipulated and distorted. In the early 40s the US Government was busy fighting World War II. While 16 million US men and women fought in World War II, a shortage of workers developed in the military industrial complex. The US Government cooperated with munitions manufacturers to promote “Rosie the Riveter” propaganda, a call to housewives to roll up their sleeves, leave the kitchen and integrate into the work force. Remember the story of Adam and Eve. The serpent comes along and speaks to Eve alone and persuades her, promising all will be well. Social upheaval followed.  

                I will never argue that a woman’s place is in a kitchen. I believe it is vitally important for women to enjoy the same freedoms that men enjoy and for them to communicate and debate vigorously and collectively decide what is in their best interest, but this is a book about human physics. The human behavioral patterns history reveals to us from our vantage point in 2013 must be respected as evidence that “every action has an equal and opposite [and PREDICTABLE] reaction.” Modern theological and philosophical debates pretend that an individual’s mind and imagination are as free as a bird. In reality our emotions are governed by the same physics that govern every projectile, chemical reaction, freeze point and effort recorded under the sun. Do you understand? At a sub-atomic level emotions are governed by physics too. We cannot choose short term rewards over long-term survival or we may end up in horrifying situations of death, loss or hardship. If there is one division more dangerous than any other attempt to divide, it is the attempt to divide a nation’s women from their men.

                It’s entirely plausible that it was necessary to provoke women into the work force of weapons and munitions manufacturers, but there was an edge to the propaganda as though it was provoking a fight about commonly held beliefs. Indeed it was. Who came up with the propaganda? Who was the invisible agent provoking a strong emotional reaction directly aimed at women? History was repeating itself. Anyone, man or woman, living in the 1940s with a small window of history might believe that up until 1940 women were treated as inferiors to men and made to live miserably stifled lives, where low and behold they always had many of the same capabilities of men. The story of Adam and Eve certainly helps reinforce this perception because it comes from thousands of years ago and God made Eve an inferior helper to Adam.

                However, international efforts to give women suffrage were already underway from the 19^th century and the pattern of promoting women’s equality in flourishing economies may trace back thousands of years. Why? Because appeal to emotion is the specialty of the invisible evil force I am seeking to root out in this book. Dividing women from men is the most critical step to weakening a nation.

                The International Council of Women was formed in 1888 and the Woman Suffrage Alliance was formed in 1904. Anytime I see “international” cooperation in history, I remind myself that only a privileged class could coordinate international cooperation. Weapons manufacturing executives fall into this class. The Catholic Church and international trade organizations fall into this class. I am not accusing world capitalist, religious or political leaders of the traveling and communicative class of inherent opposition to America in 2013 because anyone can be a potential ally; however, this book is searching for the driving physics-based mechanisms of human behavior that lead to confusion, death, war, pain, instability and suffering. This book aims to eliminate these unnecessary evils for all who understand the mechanisms and begin BLINKING together and replace them with thoughtful, gentle and constructive solutions that eliminate fear and terror. Fear and terror are unnecessary when capitalist, religious and political leaders cooperate in full understanding.

                Movements to empower or liberate women and slaves can be traced further back in history. Marquis de Condorcet was an 18^th century French philosopher, mathematician and political scientist who advocated a “liberal economy, free and equal public education, constitutionalism, and equal rights for women and people of all races,” according to Wikipedia. “His ideas and writings were said to embody the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment and rationalism.” While it is difficult to understand all of the influences that guided academic and intellectual leaders like Marquis de Condorcet, we do know that he received his education at the Jesuit College in Reims France and at the College de Navarre in Paris. The flourishing of liberal arts ideas and cultural centers seems to have a connection with the confusion and terror that have ravaged Europe and the Middle East. More on this later.

                Reims was founded in 80 BCE and belonged to the Gauls until Julius Caesar conquered Gaul  between 58 and 51 BCE. The city of Reims subsequently allied itself with the Roman Empire. Saint Sixtus of Reims founded a bishopric, an extension of the Catholic Church, there in 260 CE. It is possible to see the tentacles of the Catholic Church, which survived longer than the Roman Empire, operating throughout the world. The Catholic Church’s international, trans-border, presence throughout wars, upheaval and changes in governance around the world for the last 2000 years is remarkable. Its very establishment in every place and time throughout history where it has sprouted and flourished is evidence that its moral approach to questions and impulses of the human soul are appealing to reason, at least from a birdseye view: political/military leaders. It is evidence that the Holy Bible contains universal truths that Left Wing academics would be wise to pay attention to and heed for their relationship to the mechanics of human behavior.

                The Vandals overthrew the bishop of the Catholic Church in Reims in 406 CE, but the church returned, and in 496 CE the Frankish warrior Clovis I was crowned king of all Franks and baptized in Reims by Saint Remigius. The baptism of Clovis I illustrates the fawning relationship between military/political and religious power. The Catholic Church considered Clovis’s baptism a tremendous success. Clovis gave to the Church, but we don’t know what the Church gave back, aside from possibly a pleasant story and a recurring connection to the inner spiritual desires and longings all humans share. This is most all the church has ever done and it has sustained itself for 2000 years. It grapples with moral conflicts that in some ways it ignites with its stories and teachings that evoke strong emotional responses. Remigius, the agent of the church, was born into an elite social position in Gallo-Roman society. Again we see a relationship between local and international power, where the central Catholic Church is in communication with Remigius who was already born into power and with outposts of the Catholic Church around the continent where the same power connections existed with the Church.  

                Is this the tower of Babylon that was built to reach the heavens? Is this the fable of the American dream? Just like the fabled tree of eternal life described in the Adam and Eve story. Did the church sell a story of something “bigger” “out there?” Accompanied with the solid advice and self-evident truths in the Bible are lofty ideals and the whispered promise of eternal fame, or even life, in history.

                The problem is, we’re not perfect, and the church knew this. Jesus had figured out that confession was an essential step to spiritual recovery. Just like I had when I did my 4^th and 5^th steps in AA. Just like President Bush had with the help of Billy Graham. The church knew humans could become isolated by their behavior even in their own cities and nations. The church also knew that it could shift a man’s loyalty and orientation away from his own neighborhood or city toward something “bigger.”

                Shakespeare clearly understood how one actor, an Iago, a serpent, could whisper into the ear of a warrior, Othello, and manipulate his EMOTIONS, including jealousy, the trademark of the God of the Old Testament. Iago’s emotional manipulation triggered Othello’s decisions in physical actions. Propaganda and advertising have the same effect. The Catholic Church dripped of the fashion, worldly wealth and pride it so frequently condemned through its propaganda.

                Clovis’s wife Saint Clotilde encouraged him to convert to Christianity. Clotilde was anointed a saint by the Catholic Church for her almsgiving and penitential works of mercy. It is easy to imagine agents of the Church advising both Clotilde and Clovis to almsgiving and penitential works of mercy in return for their place in the big history of the Bible and the Catholic Church. Remember, we need storylines to guide us, and the advice to share with and help others gives us meaning. Remember that humans may have discovered how to use propaganda to motivate leading actors before the story of Adam and Eve was conceived. It is easy to imagine agents of the Church using the story of the life and sacrifice of Jesus Christ to appeal to the warrior Clovis and justify his inner feelings of entitlement and leadership. This is called flattery.

                The city of Reims went on to host meetings with Popes and subsequent Frankish rulers, including Charlemagne, who was crowned Emperor there in 800 CE by Pope Leo III. Charlemagne waged Catholic Holy Wars while the Catholic Church gave spiritual authority to Charlemagne. The city played a “prominent ceremonial role in French monarchical history as the traditional cite of the crowning of the kings of France,” according to Wikipedia. It also flourished as a center of intellectual culture. Liberal arts colleges sprouted there, fostered by archbishop Adalberon.

                By the time the Marquis de Condorcet was studying at the Jesuit College in Reims which helped inform his liberal views toward women and slaves the city had over a thousand years of a relationship with the Catholic Church. Jews found their way to the city of Reims in 1077 CE. The incredible fact about the Jews is that they have left their trace upon history scattering into nations as small minorities             but they’ve held onto their national, ethnic and religious identity throughout it all….for thousands of years. Other tribes emerge and disappear but the Jewish tribe has remained.  

                Jewish ethnicity, nationality and religion are closely intertwined. Jews have endured living in diaspora, a minority in every nation they live except Israel. A banner on a synagogue in Mahopac New York reads, “When we stand, we stand with Israel.” Roughly as many Jews live in the United States as live in Israel: 6,489,000 in 2008. Drama chases the Jewish culture around the world. Jewish immigration to the United States exploded in the 1880s as a result of persecution in Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Maldova and Romania. Over two million Jews immigrated to the United States between 1880 and 1924. Many Jews settled in the New York metropolitan area, a center for newspapers, theatre and finance. Obviously 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust

                I like the Jewish people I know and meet. This book is not intended to be an anti-Semitic book. I will defend my Jewish friends in America from persecution all of my days, but I will do the same for my black, gay, lesbian and female friends as well. Still, up until the writing of this book it is evident that Jewish history deserves scrutiny because for some reason Jews continue to take the fall for the actions of a few. Jews have been forced to live in ghettos and extreme poverty. There are also prominent Jews in banking, finance, Hollywood and news media. Are the Jews exploited by elite Jews connected to the world’s elite power brokers who use them in a shell game to constantly cover their own tracks, sending people looking for connections and answers for the reasons behind thousands of years of terror and confusion to an easy conclusion?

                Classic studies of world history have failed to scrutinize the absolute physics of human behavior. Moreover, not every action that leads to other actions, like wars, ethnic cleansings and terror, is recorded. I’m talking about private conversations that catalyze action. Since the precipitating actions leading to evil are not abundantly clear, we must use our understanding of human physics to imagine the instigating transactions behind the scenes and lost in the depths of time and geography.

                All Jews and all agents of the Catholic Church cannot be lumped together into one category of people that is nefarious to myself and my good friends and family here in America. However, the religions, specifically the shared Old Testament or Torah, deal copiously with the human machinery of morality. The Catholic Church spawned academic liberal arts colleges like those founded in Reims circa 1000 CE. These liberal arts colleges probed the machinery of motivational emotion and morality even further. The arts are a product of and provoke emotional responses. They are investigations into the machinery of the spirit that guides and navigates humans through time and space. The arts can also be very misleading about the purpose of life, creating a spontaneous unsustainable purpose suited to the current times, like the 1960s counter-cultural movement.

                The Talmud holds that there are 613 Commandments. The 613 commandments are derived from the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Owing to their endurance and the endurance of the Jewish tribe, we must conclude that while the 613 Commandments are not a complete and finite list of do’s and don’ts that will lead humans toward the perfect destination of long-term contentment, satisfaction, peace and survival, they come close enough to have endured for several thousand years and they have held the Jewish tribe together even when the tribe had no country to call its own.  

                Paranoid historians might be willing to lump all Jews together as conspirators in the game of emotional manipulation for world domination, which this book investigates. Jews are scattered around the world, forced in many cases to live in ghettos and amongst greater nations than themselves. One can imagine a world powerbroker of Jewish descent tugging on the heartstrings of a nation’s ruler to allow the Jews to live there. Many nations throughout consented but put the Jews in ghettos.

                Once the Jews were there, they could conceivably hold themselves together more strongly than their host nation by the observance of their faith, who’s do’s and don’ts absolutely minimize the types of conflicts that can tear communities apart: envy, lies, spite, pride. As the Jews in this new nation exerted all their energy toward practicing behavior that minimized conflicts and enhanced unity they could become as still as a hunter in a camouflage tree stand and observe the community they were attached to for business, social and political opportunities. They could target individuals of the society they were attached to who had power and control and suggest ways to enhance material wealth. They could stage plays and use the medium of the arts to confuse their host’s society’s emotions and instincts. They could influence hatred toward men or women or minorities. They could profligate pornography and use the self-evident truth of erotic human instincts to subtly argue that our sexual appetites are the most important instincts we contain, knowing it would destroy unity and the chances for long-term survival. They could promote fashion, elitism and begin turning the society against itself. They could go to the women and encourage them to fight for their sexual liberation. They could force the host society into debating the types of endless debates we still find ourselves debating in modern America, with no possible resolutions. Under the cover of the spell they cast they could market and reap financial rewards.

                The book of Deuteronomy, from which some of the 613 commandments are derived, certainly would give such this theory ammunition. “Where the Lord thy God shall cut off the nations from before thee, whither thou goest to possess them, and thou succeedest them, and dwellest in their land” (Deuteronomy 12:29).

                Also this: “Then will the Lord drive out all these nations from before you, and ye shall possess greater nations and mightier than yourselves. Every place whereon the soles of your feet shall tread shall be yours: from the wilderness and Lebanon, from the river, the river Euphrates, even to the uttermost sea shall your coast be. There shall be no man able to stand before you: for the Lord your God shall lay the fear of you and the dread of you upon all the land that ye shall tread upon, as he hath said unto you” (Deuteronomy 11:23)

                Also this: “For my righteousness the Lord hath brought me in to possess this land: but for the wickedness of these nations the Lord doth drive them out from before thee” (Deuteronomy 9:4).

                The Jewish community is practiced at deflecting guilt or blame by using strong emotional appeal to portray its people as hapless victims of barbarians. The story of their captivity and freedom from Egypt is a very early version of a victimization narrative and the Jewish people, as a collective, since have plenty of other examples of persecution, oppression and genocide. That’s where the shell game becomes important. Under the proposed circumstances it would seem that some Jews have no problem letting others of their own ethnicity die and live under oppression to renew the victim themes again and again.

                I have grown up in a time period where leading Left Wing academics have led the charge against religious authority toward atheism or agnosticism. Perhaps they were right to lead the charge against religious authority, but did they throw the baby out with the bathwater? Let’s begin here to understand what “wickedness” means in this passage of Deuteronomy and let’s translate it to absolute human physics to understand why it could destroy a nation.

                In order to understand the Deuteronomy authors’ intended meaning of “wickedness” we must start by looking at the 613 commandments found in the Torah. Remember, the authors of the Torah intended that if the commandments found there were followed, its followers would be spared. We cannot think about this promise in terms of magic but rather in terms of human physics.

                 There are too many commandments to list; however, the leading commandment of the Torah is not to abandon God or worship anything other than God. “I am the Lord thy God” (Exodus 20:2) “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me” (Exodus 20:3). This point is driven home in the story of Moses when Moses is on top of Mount Sinai and Aaron takes the gold of his followers and melts it down to make a golden calf for them to worship as the God that brought them out of Egypt, enraging God. The entire story of Exodus illustrates the human tendency to doubt stern advice and wander and become lost by distractions, including and especially GOLD.

                The logic of making money is still at odds with logic that leads to survival. A recent study by Psychological Science found that supporters of free-market economics, a theory of economics that prioritizes making money at the expense of every other consideration, tend to doubt that climate change is real, that HIV causes AIDS and that smoking causes lung cancer. It is easy to see how a logic that is blind to science imperils survival. If we are led by humans who refuse to accept physics we are in immediate danger. If these humans decide that they want to use a torch to cut a sealed container with gasoline fumes it will explode and kill or maim everyone in the immediate vicinity, yet this is exactly what these types of humans would do if they chose to ignore science and physics.

                The commandment to follow God and no other God’s is a commandment to follow a system of logic that nearly ensures that the human physics of EMOTION are respected. How? Well let’s look at the rest of the commandments: “Honor thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee” (Exodus 20:12). I’ve met many people who have revolted against their parents here in America by the year 2013. I’ve had a strained relationship with my parents myself. The 60s and 70s marked a period of utter revolution against parents, devastating national unity. But in purely physical terms, our parents make up our genetic composition. If we cannot honor our own parents, even in some small way, it is very likely that we cannot honor ourselves. We share not only a genetic connection with our parents but also many of their tendencies and mannerisms. If we hate ourselves, we cannot love others and community unity dissolves, weakening survival odds.

                “Thou shalt not kill,” (Exodus 20:13). This commandment is at odds with other commandments to kill enemy nations and even Jews who turn away from God, but it still has an obvious practical role in preserving unity.

                “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” (Exodus 20:14). This one is pretty obvious. Just listen to a few of the songs by Carrie Underwood to understand why adultery is not good for community unity: Before He Cheats, Cowboy Cassanova, Black Cadillac…in each song Underwood summons massive storm clouds of vindictiveness and rage for the bumbling adulterating male who is the target for her furry. Many of us have experienced the hurt, hate and confusion following an affair ourselves, even if only in an unmarried relationship. So why does our culture play with the idea so loosely? Precisely to DIVIDE.

                “Thou shalt not steal,” (Exodus 20:15). This is another obvious piece of advice to avoid community conflict, hatred, distrust and enmity. “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor” (Exodus 20:16). “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife…nor anything that is thy neighbor’s” (Exodus 20:17). “Ye shall not make with me gods of silver, neither shall ye make unto you gods of gold,” (Exodus 20:23). This is more advice not to make money the logic system of the community.

                As I said, there are 613 commandments in the Torah. The advice goes on and on. So how does physics relate to these commandments? I didn’t understand emotions to be governed by physics until I began working on cars in 2010. I will get to that period of my life eventually. For now I’m still in Portland Oregon studying the Bible and looking for ammunition for my liberal politics. I’ve already mixed in many references to physics, however, so in case you never read as far as my time in Bar Harbor working on cars or read about the love I had for a woman which opened up my eyes to instincts, let me explain.                Before we commit adultery or steal it seems like anything is possible. We could do it. We could not do it. And when we live in a society that debates it endlessly, where media outlets like Huffington Post publish articles suggesting that men and women have affairs and the website Ashley Madison facilitates cheating, it seems like there are no hard and fast rules. If we live in uncertainty then we will try, but once we steal or have an affair the memory of our actions is burned into our brain like the black box on airplane. We go about trying to conduct ourselves as we had done before we cheated or stole, but there is an error in our system and we must lie to ourselves and the people we relate with to deal with this error. Once we begin lying we begin distorting the senses nature gave us to decipher truth in the people we are lying to. Every action leaves a trace. Fingers leave finger prints. Scratches leave marks. Stealing leaves something missing. Adultery leaves awkwardness, possibly a defensiveness, possibly a dissatisfaction. Humans pick up on these tell tale signs with the instincts and senses they were born with to survive, but the liar tells them that their senses are false. We currently go about wondering why we have depression or mania or why divorce rates are so high and dissatisfaction so high when we have so much wealth. It is because we think there are no hard and fast rules to human behavior in America. Religious zealots do, but they are so hardcore and out of touch with compassion and truth that no one in their right mind would follow the zealots.

                We live in confusion in 2013. We’ve discovered physics, cars, planes. We’ve developed computers and microchips. We’ve been to the moon. We still can’t agree on hard and fast truths about human nature and “liberal arts” colleges and the Left intellectual movement is leading the way to confusion. Who put them up to it? Who established these elite schools and began these endless philosophical debates and left American children to wander in the wilderness of no navigation? Up until the advent of the internet, wide publication of thoughts and ideas were controlled by a system of peer review that restricted nuanced ideas falling outside the comfort level of the elite. It also rapidly elevated theories of the delusional, like Sigmun Freud. More importantly, because the catalyzing events that got us to this point are buried in history and the exact instigators of evil are lost in a sea of faces, when is the confusion going to end? The answer is sin can be biochemically defined as anything that enlarges oneself at the expense of truth to countrymen.

                Let’s go back to Portland Oregon. I was very happy in Portland Oregon. Unfortunately my girlfriend Amanda decided that she wanted to go to school in Eastern Washington and she left me in Portland that summer. Throughout my time as a field manager for the Portland Working America office, I was called in for meetings with Graham Trainor where my “career track” was discussed. Working America used many of the same techniques found in management text books and corporations around the country. These were possibly the same variety of conversations used to build humans up for campaigns and work endeavors around the world throughout history, especially in the Catholic Church. Behind the conversation was a promise of something greater upon completion of the current work. The encouragement and promise of something greater helped me to stay committed to my work despite working overtime on my salary which did not cover overtime, it was just expected.

                Graham was supervised by Heather Hardin, a regional supervisor from a Seattle, Washington Working America office. She periodically traveled to the Portland office throughout the summer and reinforced the potential for growth and “leadership development” with myself and other promising canvassers who were emerging from the ranks of newly hired into solid fundraisers. In the fall of 2007, Heather met with me over coffee before work and proposed an opportunity to work in New Mexico.

                “Next January we are going to open a New Mexico office,” Heather said. “We’ll be recruiting 50,000 new Working America members and working on five federal elections. We really hope that you will apply for the position.” My ego and pride were bolstered by the meeting: I was being noticed. I hesitated and resisted the offer at first. I had begun to make friends in Portland, Oregon and it felt like a place I wanted to stay.

                The weeks progressed and Graham periodically reminded me of the opportunity in New Mexico and talked up the potential for my return to Portland Oregon. “It’s likely that I’ll take a position as a regional supervisor and this office will be yours,” Graham told me. In time, the persuasion and the opportunity to leave my mark on an entire state wore through on me, and in late November I applied and was hired for the canvass directing opportunity in New Mexico.

               

                I finished up work at the Portland office just before Christmas break and went home to Vermont to visit my parents. They were naturally thrilled about the opportunity and I was beginning to get excited as well. I flew back to Portland a few days before New Year’s and drove packed up my father’s Saab with everything I owned and made the trip to Albuquerque New Mexico by car. When I arrived it was cold. I pulled off the interstate and took the exit ramp to the Holiday Inn. Until I found an apartment, Working America had arranged for me to stay at a hotel. The hotel room was sterile and unwelcoming. It wasn’t far from the airport and there was a big billboard outside with a clock on it: “On Time Parking,” it read.

                I began exploring Albuquerque before I started work, finding that the college district was rich with restaurants and coffee shops. There was a small local chain restaurant there called the Galaxy that served coffee, sweet treats and food. I walked up and down the main boulevard in the college district and surveyed the area.

                To the east of Albuquerque are the Sandia Mountains, which jut up against the sky in rugged fashion and impose themselves over the city below.

                On Monday, I arrived at the Albuquerque labor union offices after spending a morning at the Galaxy coffee shop reading the New York Times. As a Canvass Director in New Mexico, I was required to knock on doors at least twice per week, but because I was opening a fund raising office from scratch I knew I would be knocking on doors more than just twice per week, especially early on in the year as I was building up a team of canvassers.

                I walked through the doors to the labor offices around 10:30 AM for a meeting with the President of the AFL-CIO, Christine Trujilio and the executive director, Chris Chavez. Another field specialist from the Washington DC offices of Working America was there to meet me. Dan Mahr had flown into New Mexico to help facilitate the early days at the new location. He had already hired an office manager for the office, Petra Salazar. I met her that Monday as well. I introduced myself to Christine, Chris, Dan and Petra and the five of us sat down to talk about battle plans for the state for roughly an hour, talking about the unique geography and Latino culture of the area. Petra was Latino and spoke fluent Spanish.

                In the afternoon I began my first canvass in New Mexico. I walked into the neighborhood from the office with my clipboard and the canvass sign-up sheets we used to record member information. The neighborhood had its own distinctive character. The first thing I noticed was how many houses had cast iron gates over the doors. I wasn’t raising money in New Mexico because I was running a member recruitment office. The money that supported my canvass office came from union member dues from the local union chapters.

                I walked up a path to the first door and bounded up three steps to the landing. It was already getting dark and it was cold. I knocked on the trim of the door to make my knuckles resound more loudly throughout the interior of the house: rap, rap, rap-rap-rap. Within several seconds I heard a door, then footsteps then another door just beyond the one he had just knocked on. The door opened up.

                “Happy Monday,” I said and smiled broadly.

                The lady, in her mid thirties smiled back still bracing her shoulder against the door. “How can I help—”

                Before she had time to respond, I launched right into my rap, “My name is Dean, and I’m a canvasser with Working America, we’re out tonight fighting for health care reform and we are gathering signatures, here take a look.” I rapped my knuckles against the clipboard and passed it over to the lady, never taking my eyes off of hers. She wrestled against something inside of herself and then opened the door a little farther, laughed and took the clipboard. I knew that if I was fund-raising, this would be a $60-$120 household.

                As soon as she took the clipboard I picked up my rap where I left off, “As I’m sure you know the problems with health care…” She was reading the clipboard, so I tapped on it to get her eye contact back. She laughed at this too and looked at me. I must be a little rusty, I thought. The laughter was unusual to get at every interval of the rap and I knew it meant I was being a little too mechanical and robotic. But now she was looking at my eyes again. She nodded her head a little.

                “As you probably know, 47 million Americans lack health care, insurance companies are raking in millions of dollars in profits and health care premiums are skyrocketing.” The lady was nodding in agreement as I spoke. “You’d agree this is a problem, right?” I asked, nodding my own head.

                “Yes,” she said.

                “Great, well our solution is simple. We’re organizing the community to fight for affordable health care and we’re signing up your neighbors to Working America to make our voices heard. Here’s my pen.” I passed my pen in an over-hand gesture to put it directly into her hands. I caught my just about to ask for a donation.
                She took the pen and began to scan the page again. “So I sign here?”

                “Yes. It’s pretty bad, huh?” I asked again.

                “Yes my husband doesn’t have insurance right now. Do you want to step inside?”

                I entered the front door and stood in the hallway. On one wall was a picture frame displaying a colorful photograph of hot air balloons in a blue sky, big in the foreground and tiny in the background. On the other wall was a coat rack and the floor was a neat mess of shoes. I was suddenly wrapped in a blanket of warm air. We chatted as she filled out the sign up sheet and then I left as abruptly as he had come, thanking Dorris, whose name I spotted on the sign-up sheet before I tucked it back under my arm. I opened the door and felt the cold kiss of the night air rise up to my face and stepped out, closing the door, with her help, behind me.

                I spent the rest of the night gathering signatures in this manner. The minimum number of signatures needed was 28. I ended up with 35 before I called it an early night and went back to the office around 7:30, an hour and a half before I had to stop canvassing at 9:00 PM. Throughout the first night I was denied only fifteen times and I had no run-ins with law enforcement, which I had contacted earlier in the day to let know that I, and eventually an entire crew, would be knocking on doors in the neighborhood.

                I returned to the Galaxy that night for dinner after I finished up at the office. I filled out a “crew sheet” which was paperwork that the national advisers used to track progress and then used Craigslist to search for apartments. I found one on Pennsylvania Avenue just across from the AFL-CIO headquarters.

                The next day I and Petra Salazar began running hiring advertisements in the local paper. I canvassed alone again the following night. On Wednesday I drove to the airport to pick up Avery Harper, who Working America had sent down from the Minneapolis Working America office to help me get started. The two of us knocked on doors that night in a neighborhood near the hospital.

                By Thursday I had several interviews set up and recruitment was well underway. Within the following week Avery and I were training three people how to canvass. Not all trainees made it and this was especially true in the winter. It takes a certain personality type to knock on doors and get signatures from complete strangers for not much more than minimum wage. All three trainees failed to make it. Progress was slow throughout January and February but we hired a few trainees who stuck around for more than a week. By the time March rolled around I had two people on staff and two trainees. Avery had gone back to Minneapolis and Rachel Townsend from the Portland office was in town as acting field manager.

                “You feel like you’re doing alright?” Graham Trainor asked me over the phone.

                “Everything is going fine,” I said.

                While I was talented at striking up conversations with complete strangers and winning over confidence to receive big checks, cash and even credit card information, I found relationships exceedingly difficult. I went to Oregon to chase a girl and she went to Eastern Washington to chase a career.

                I had called and talked to Amanda several times after I went to New Mexico, but there was no hope the relationship would begin again. It crushed me that I lost Amanda. I took the failure personally. I had even bought Relationships for Dummies book seeking to reverse the trend of failure.

                I also tried out several dating websites, including one called Fitness Singles. I’d log into the site and scan the thumbnail pictures from the edge of my bed. I didn’t watch television, and I didn’t have one. One evening while I was home waiting for Rachel to bring the canvassers back to the office, I had spent an hour looking at profiles and writing to women who I thought had potential. I was just about to give up when a profile caught my eye: NorthernVermontGirl.

                Vermont, I said to myself. The East Coast. I clicked on the picture and opened up her profile. I started looking through her pictures and reading her biography: “Hey, I’m really not sure how to start. What’s there to say about myself. I’m fun loving easy going girl. Definitely more one to roll up my sleeves and get my hands dirty than to sit around on the sidelines. I come from a small town in the Northeast Kingdom, where my wonderful family lives. I love my family as much or more than I love my life. I like to hike, I like to ski, I love good music and I love to eat and make good food, I like to talk but I could just as well be quiet and convey everything that needs to be conveyed. I can’t talk about who I am without mentioning my wonderful husband who passed away last year. He was a part of shaping me and he will always be a part of who I am, so I’ll just say that up front. I love you Chris. If you want to know anything about me just ask. Guess that’s it.” 

                I looked at the pictures of this girl, including the ones of her and her husband. I was touched that she would mention her husband in a profile for a dating website. It was so thoughtful. I lost my brother when I was 23. Kevin Powers was his name. He committed suicide just one week before his 21^st birthday. Several years before he died he was diagnosed with bi-polar schizophrenia, hearing voices and seeing things that weren’t there. Before he commit suicide he told me that he would hear the Devil and God arguing over whether or not he should live. I always regretted that I hadn’t played a bigger role keeping Kevin safe and alive, but I had also forced myself to move on after his death, never allowing myself to grieve.

                In some of her pictures, NothernVermontGirl looked average, but in other pictures, including her wedding pictures, she was stunning. In one of her pictures she was eating a gigantic drumstick in front of a row of pickup trucks, wearing a Boston Red Sox baseball cap. In another picture she was mugging with a couple of girls. Some of the pictures showed East Coast mountains, fields, meadows, sunsets, sunrises, and the moon.

                As I looked at the pictures of trucks and country, I started to remember my own childhood. I remembered the parking lot of my high school packed with pickup trucks and the parties I went to in Shoreham, Cornwall and Bridport Vermont in high school. I remembered Jason Quinville taking me out for lunch breaks in his little red Toyota Tercell and speeding sideways around corners on the River Road, a long dirt road that runs alongside Otter Creek in Middlebury not far from the high school. I started remembering how it felt to borrow Ryan Rubright’s F-250 after work at the Bagel Bakery and sit about seven feet high. As I looked at NorthernVermontGirl’s photos I could see that she was part of that same country I envied as a “townie” high school student in Middlebury Vermont.

                Middlebury, Vermont is a unique location in the United States, and this was especially true in the late 1990’s. Home to a prestigious liberal arts college, Middlebury is nestled in the Champlain Valley, a vastly rural basin of countryside used primarily for dairy and corn production. My parents belonged to the culture of the college as teachers there, and I attended many fancy receptions and dinners on the college campus. The college community was fancy and self-aggrandizing and the faculty was always pleasant and charming, but it was the kids from Shoreham, Bridport, Cornwall and Ripton who I found myself attracted toward. They laughed out loud and talked tough, without finger-testing the opinions they spoke in strong accents.

                There was tension between long-time Vermonters and the relatively newly arrived hippies and academics. There was a tie-dyed half of Vermont: Ben and Jerry’s, Phish and Woody Jackson. There was a redneck half of Vermont: pick-up trucks, four wheelers and agriculture. I never became integrated with the redneck half of Vermont, but I innately sensed the authenticity of the kids who grew up out there. I partied out there and my best memories were not of the long banquet tables draped in white table clothes on the manicured Middlebury College campus among uncomfortable smiles and forced conversation but rather by the light of bonfires under starry skies amidst laughter and loud unchecked conversation.

                The feeling that I got in the company of Middlebury College academics was that they were always trying to please someone else and that they were waiting for something. It was like they were always trying to say something politically correct or cite something that somebody else said. It was like they lived their lives in fear, their minds preoccupied with the big thoughts and ideas that brought them to Middlebury College. While many of the Middlebury College crowd seemed paused in thought and caution, the young kids from the country were preoccupied with action and progress. They dug into cars, 4-wheelers, landscaping projects, chores and repairs of all kinds, talking, smoking cigarettes and laughing as they went.   

                I left Middlebury in 1999, a year after I was in a car accident that severely injured my passenger Sarah Jackson and sent James Harrison to the hospital with a broken leg. My name and picture were on the local evening news and the story was portrayed as a drinking and driving accident despite the fact that I was never arrested at the scene or charged with drinking and driving. I blew a .0493 and the State Trooper determined that I was not impaired. I lied through my teeth and told him a deer crossed the road and that I had drank at my parents, but he could smell my breath, look me in the eye, talk to me and determine that I was not impaired.

                I picked up Sarah early that night and we rendezvoused with her brother who invited us to a party. We smoked weed around 8:30 or 9 PM. We drove over to the party and stayed there until a little after 11PM. I spent most of my time jamming on guitar and I had only two beers between 9 o’clock and 11PM. I was raked over the coals for being a drunk driver, and thus irresponsible. I will always be proud of that kid who drank responsibly, even though I was a minor, at a party where other people were drinking far beyond the legal limit. They weren’t driving, but I was, and I wasn’t keeping up with them.

                When we left the party, Sarah told me to take a short cut back to her house. I brought TJ Palmer and James Harrison along for the ride. Sarah had planned to sneak out of her house later in the night and come back to the party with us. I had to turn the car around on the dirt road to go the direction she told me to go. We followed a dirt road out to an intersection and turned left. I traveled 40-50 MPH down an unfamiliar dirt road and never saw the stop sign before we shot out onto state route 74. All I remember is seeing the steering wheel spin out of control as the car presumably drifted out of control on the asphalt that my car had just burst onto from the dirt road. 

                When the car came to rest, I was sitting on the road I immediately reached to try to start it up again. It didn’t start. I turned to my right and Sarah was unconscious in her seat. I put my hand on her sweatshirt and felt blood. I took her pulse and I could hear her breathing. I got out of the car in distress consumed with the emotion to undo what I had just done. TJ Palmer also got out of the car unhurt. “I don’t know what the fuck just happened. Sarah’s unconscious. She’s breathing and I felt her pulse, but she’s not responding.”

                TJ was equally stunned, “We just went off the road.”

                “We need an ambulance.”

                TJ said, “Sarah’s not responding?”

                I must have been in so much shock I didn’t even realize at the time that I had come off a dirt road onto a paved road and that I had missed a stop sign. I don’t know why we did it, but at length TJ and I came up with a story to explain my accident. It wasn’t my fault, it was a deer.

                I went to Porter hospital in Middlebury for an examination, and they let me go. I had learned they were taking Sarah to Fletcher hospital in Burlington and my mom and I drove up so I could be with her. I felt enormous guilt and I wanted to be next to Sarah every step of the way through her recovery. I stayed up almost all night, slept at the hospital and stayed again the next day and the next night. That night I told Sarah Jackson’s mother that I had had a little bit of beer at the party. I was trying to be honest with her out of some desire to do the right thing. I wasn’t even aware that I had been cleared by the Vermont Trooper at the scene and that I would never face a charge of driving under the influence or while intoxicated. Sarah’s mom took my admission as a development that turned her heart against me and I was barred from visiting Sarah after that. I tried to purchase gifts to show my remorse and the family turned the gestures away. My father went to see them and he was screamed off the porch. The Jacksons pursued a civil action against my parents complete with a steady campaign against me and it took its toll on all of us, but they didn’t win their civil suit so all of the animosity was for nothing. Still, I struggled with thoughts of suicide and lost my high school “friends.”

                From the moment it happened, I’ve wanted to take it back, but I can’t. I was 16, I was driving on roads I didn’t know. I was going too fast and I did not see the stop sign. Ironically, I’m writing this book because I see the stop signs that our world is ignoring.

                Sarah Jackson has devoted probably thousands of hours to educating the public about the risks of drinking and driving, and I commend her for her work. I will always applaud her resiliency to rise up from her injury and rehabilitate herself back into good physical and mental condition. Her life changed forever and mine changed forever and the accident will always be a part of who we are. I will always wish her and her family well.

                 As long as I was away from Middlebury, I longed to get back to what I had left behind and be part of the fabric of the country I was introduced to as a child. NorthernVermontGirl reminded me of the good parts of my past and got me thinking about my old friends from high school. I ran with two groups of friends in high school: townies and country boys. There were some overlaps of friendship between my townie and my country boy friends. I missed my townie friends despite the jarring severance from them after the accident, but I missed my country friends’ culture.

                There’s a song called “Famous in a Small Town” and the lyrics go, “Everybody dies famous in a small town.” It’s the truth. I remembered the fondness I had for every single kid I grew up with. I wish somebody told me I’d never again have the capacity to bond with friends as much as I had in high school. I wish somebody had told me to be patient and let relationships develop rather than make a fool of myself to try to make friends. But every single one of us Middlebury townies was sold on the idea to go “out there” into the world and climb the American Dream ladder, the tower to heaven in the story of Babylon, the big world picture that Clovis I was drawn into. I wish all of us kids from Middlebury had exerted all of our energy and efforts toward strengthening our unity instead of going “out there” to make money or become famous. I wish we recreated together, raised our kids together, shared business tips and advice together and socialized together like the world didn’t exist beyond the borders of Vermont. I wish we held ourselves together as strongly as the Jewish communities in New York City, but we couldn’t have lasted the way we behaved. Fear, hate, rivalry, jealousy and elitism poisoned relations among Middlebury townies.

                I clicked on “Send Message” and a page flashed up with a text box. If nothing else, I wanted to write to this Vermont girl and relate over losing a loved one. If she wanted to write I would be there, so be it. I began to write, “Hey I’ll bet you come from a small town, and I’ll bet you went to school with farm boys and girls who drove jacked up pickup trucks. I bet everyone knew each other. You probably hunted or had family that hunted. They probably put superswampers on their trucks and used hockey pucks to jack up their trucks. You probably snowmobiled or drove four wheelers. I bet everyone knew everyone.” I chose to ignore the negative aspects of my hometown as I wrote. I focused instead on the positives that I saw and experienced, especially from my country friends who had such decency toward one another.

                “I also noticed that you lost your husband,” I wrote. “I lost my brother when I was 23. He committed suicide. I had to push myself to get through his loss. I couldn’t really bring myself to mourn him for very long. I was just trying to hold my family together and keep us focused on getting through alright. If you ever want to talk about the loss, I have experience, and I can offer my own insight, so I’ll be here.”

                I finished my email and read it over. It made Middlebury and my brother seem tantalizingly close again. I never thought she would even read it. I absolutely never imagined I would ever meet NorthernVermontGirl, mostly because she was on the opposite side of the country, but I pressed send anyway and closed up my laptop.

                One of my stronger influences in writing was Thomas Paine, particularly his widely influential pre-revolutionary call to arms, Common Sense. When a work of literature becomes renowned for its influence on readers, it means that the presentation of information works persuasively on individual after individual. This establishes a pattern demonstrating that the gears of many different human minds have the same basic mechanics. Anyone seeking to spin these gears for their own sales pitch can examine Common Sense, experience the emotions the work evokes and then identify exactly how the words were constructed to evoke that response. Essentially, the art of persuasion can be learned, copied and imitated.

                Let’s look briefly at some of the stirring rhetoric from Common Sense. “The good people of this country are grieviously oppressed…” “The cause of America is, in great measure, the cause of all mankind.” “A thirst for absolute power is the natural disease of monarchy.” “The state of a king shuts him from the world, yet the business of a king requires him to know it thoroughly.” “And as a man, who is attached to a prostitute, is unfitted to choose or judge of a wife, so any prepossession in favor of a rotten constitution of government will disable us from discerning a good one.” “Government by kings was first introduced into the world by the Heathens, from whom the children of Israel copied the custom. It was the most prosperous invention the Devil ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry. The Heathens paid divine honors to their deceased kings, and the Christian world hath improved on the plan by doing the same to their living ones. How impious is the title of sacred majesty applied to a worm, who in the midst of his splendor is crumbling into dust!”  “As the exalting one man so greatly above the rest cannot be justified on the equal rights of nature, so neither can it be defended on the authority of scripture; for the will of the Almighty, as declared by Gideon and the prophet Samuel, expressly disapproves of government by kings.” Ah, citing the Bible to make his case.

                Thomas Paine probably influenced me to read the Bible to search for Biblical citations to make my case when arguing liberal political viewpoints. Paine’s audience grew up learning the Bible, like many modern day Americans. Think about that for a moment. Whether or not there really is an on-going shell game—influenced by a very small group, if not a single individual successor of a long line of evil geniuses—where first the Jewish, and then the Christian and Islamic faiths were manipulated for world power and wealth, a pattern was established two thousand years ago in Europe that sustained and spread around the world, influencing the childhood’s and upbringings of many of the world’s political, religious, academic and military leaders. It makes me think of the disappearing hall of mirrors one sees when he or she sets up two mirrors opposed to each other. How many men set out to conquer the world (spiritually, academically, economically or militarily) with minds full of the histories in the Old and New Testaments? The Old Testament set up the great banquette table of history for classroom or homeschooled children over and over again. They knew about the tree of knowledge and the tree of life. They knew about Noah’s Ark, David and Goliath, Sodom and Gomorrah. Many probably believed the compelling argument that a society overrun by greed, lust, hate, sloth, gluttony, envy and pride would crumble like Sodom and Gomorrah for its “wickedness.” Many probably believed that the God of the Old and New Testament existed and some probably privately doubted there was a God, but knew the stories and the morality teachings.

                Everywhere that children grew up learning the Bible there existed opportunities for adults to pick out charismatic young children and talk about the great stories and invite them to become priests, or recruit soldiers and sell them on holy military campaigns. There also, with all the focus and therefore understanding of Evil, existed the potential for the “devil” to emerge in the midst of a population of people trying to do the “right” thing. Perhaps it has always been the practice of some Catholic leaders to prey upon those charismatic, perhaps left-eye dominant, young boys. Perhaps while the Catholic Church was busy selling a majority of their audience a fantastic history of stories about God and a system of values with one hand, they were always picking out charismatic young boys for sexual conquest with the other hand, just as they picked military and capitalist leaders for financial conquest. This would explain the nonchalance, air of immunity, arrogance and pride evident in the “good old boys” club of the Church. Most gangs of men require some sort of initiation. While all the morons (in the Church’s view) who believed in the Bible, God, trust, moral ethics and forgiveness tried in earnest to be good, do good and earn a living according to merit, the Catholic Church could get almost anything it wanted working as a tribe united in dishonesty. It could reach out and recruit capitalist and political leaders into its tribe of iniquity. Did it? Well the volume of child sex abuse cases recently uncovered in the Catholic Church suggests sexually predatory behavior may have been a pattern. Certainly not among all priests, but the cover-up at high levels of the Church lends credibility to the theory: anyone in leadership would be in “the know” and have experienced a sexual initiation. These types would also be the most likely to rail against homosexual behavior and sexual deviancy in general. The fear-mongering campaigns against sexual deviancy would run like a feedback loop into guilty consciences and heightened fear/pleasure sexual experiences, making all other human relations uneasy and weakening unity.

                The long history of children raised with an exposure to or even strong discipline in Christian beliefs makes it hard to determine just how carefree a society can be about sex without weakening unity. Remember unity is the standard to measure how good or how poor a community’s ethos are. I define ethos as standards of behavior. We are animals, and if there is a God he may be partially represented in the Old and New Testaments, but the commandments are incomplete and in some cases irrelevant. Millions of Americans are happy swingers. I can report from firsthand experience that we come preprogrammed with a perverted imagination. We may be given innate permission (that would also mean from God) to be sexually permissive as long as nobody is hurt or lied to. I can remember girls hiding their permissiveness from me, why? To make themselves seem like better people? Was it just the remnants of the Christian/Judeo faith in our decidedly secular society still tugging at their conscience? Or is it in their instincts to understand it is better to have fewer partners and a sickness that they lie to compensate for their actions? Do we suffer greater for having a heavy conscience because Biblical messaging condemns sexual behavior than we would if there was a less obsessive focus on sexuality in the first place?

                Do you also notice how people who are messengers for a church tend to have a demeanor that craves attention? It’s like they are always trying to pick a fight, or raise eyebrows or make themselves sound exceedingly righteous and above the many, and sometimes perverted, impulses of the human spirit. They are simply different types of people than the strong silent types. They have greater communication skills and often belong a larger network of communication than the communities they belong to. They focus the emotional priorities of their congregants on world affairs and international poverty while their own communities wrestle with the poverty of disunity. They spend their lives wrestling with and participating in the great religious history they teach.

                Some Church leaders may be cynics and there may be a corrupt game in play, but we can also learn lessons about the human physics of successful propaganda based on the way church leaders have inspired others into selfless action and loyalty. Part of our psyche is designed to live for the memory of our lives after we are departed.

                I imagine that being a Catholic priest is a lot like going door-to-door fund-raising. The priest delivers a presentation over and over again that follows the same basic formula. As someone who made that presentation over and over again, I can relate to you how consciously aware I was that it was a job and a presentation. After doing it night-in and night-out for a long time, it’s easy to get a little cynical. It’s easy to prioritize the people upon whom your job depends and overlook others or deal with them half-heartedly.

                We are certainly at a point in history where a majority of people are looking for a departure from the stalemate of culture clashes. So long as churches stick with messaging that promotes fear and paranoia about sexual deviance, which maintains the world is only 6,000 years old, which doubts science and insulates each variety of faith from a broader coalition, the babble, chaos and social stalemates preventing unity of purpose will continue. This book will propose a counter game plan that can be adopted at a national or international level to destabilize the controlling influences leading us repeatedly to war, chaos, fragmented communities and a rapidly deteriorating planet. The counter game plan depends on the cooperation and participation of capitalist, academic, female, political, military, public safety, trades and religious leaders. The alternative is to try to appeal to the voting public. This strategy never lasts very long. It often misidentifies the “bad guys” as a bloc which in reality contains disparate interests in its very ranks. It also disregards that leaders, no matter how poor their track record of leadership is, are still leaders with greater influence on the navigation of the human species than the voting public. However, if I had decided to appeal to the voting public instead of those of you who will read this book, I would cite scripture like Thomas Paine because tens if not hundreds of millions of Americans are as tethered to religion today as Paine’s readers were in the era of the American Revolution.

                 Not long after I wrote to NorthernVermontGirl, I got a response. I opened it up and read: “It sounds like you’ve got me pegged exactly,” she began. “I come from a big family, I’d have to say my family is my biggest source of strength. They understand me.” Her email was long and detailed. It contained anecdotes and stories with sharp and clear details. NorthernVermontGirl was an incredible observer and writer. I can’t remember everything she wrote and her emails are now gone forever. In the pain and frustration of our ultimate separation I would erase everything she wrote to me, believing it would heal the hurt and allow me to “move on,” a common axiom of advice in our present culture. In reality, I never did move on, and I never forgot the impact of the crisp details of her writing. I never forgot the strength of family she demonstrated to me.

                I do remember that she wrote about her high school and her hometown in Richford, Vermont. I remember reading the words of a young woman full of enthusiasm for life and humor and consideration for others. I remember her thanking me for writing about my brother and sharing more details of her deceased husband. He had died the previous summer. He had a big heart and she thought about him a lot. I remember that she told me her name, Becky, in that first return email. I remember that I wrote back to her and that before long we were trading emails from my Gmail account and her Hotmail account, communicating outside of the Fitness Singles system.

                I remember that she sent me lots of pictures and helpfully described those pictures. There were pictures of Becky in huge groups of people, always surrounded by others and laughing or mugging for the camera. There were pictures of her sisters and her parents. There were pictures of nature, the moon, the setting sun, fields and farmhouses. There were pictures from high school and her college years, although there were no pictures of dormitories or the University of Connecticut where she attended school. I wrote back, but instead of sharing lots of pictures of myself with others, I wrote about my philosophical and political beliefs. I wrote a little about my brother and my family. I wrote a little about my hometown in Middlebury and the country life that I remembered. I didn’t even realize myself at the time, but I was a loner. I wanted to be in big groups of people. I wanted to belong to something, too. The emails were stimulating for both of us because we kept it up, trading long emails and talking about big ideas and sharing observations or thoughts about human truths.

                Before very long at all Becky made me feel special by telling me she wanted to hear my voice and put a voice to the words in the emails. She made me feel as though I were important and very early on it felt like there was a deep connection that was more important than anything I could have hoped to do in New Mexico. I don’t even remember who dialed who first. I remember we planned out a time to talk and that our first words were a little awkward as we got to know each other’s voices, but that before long we were talking for hours as though time flew by.

                I remember that we talked about music and bluegrass and writing. I remember that Becky had an encyclopedic knowledge of music, including details about band members and songs. I remember that all of this happened despite the feeling that we would never meet. A relationship was out of the question, yet the connection deepened throughout April, carried on in our spare time, something vital was growing. She told me about her love of snow shoeing in the winter.

                I remember that the way Becky talked about family made it seem like something fond and familiar. I was living almost 2,500 miles from my parents, and I had my sights set even further from my hometown: I wanted fame, political success, to leave a permanent mark on history in writing like Shakespeare. Becky would remember the little conversations she shared with her sister or her mother and talk about her nephews and the 4^th of July family reunions up in Derby when her sisters and her brother would return home with their families and spend time together.

                I remember looking at Becky in one of her photographs wearing a white wedding dress, her hair drawn back and curly blonde and her face done up with makeup with one finger on her lips as she pondered something. To be married at 22, I thought. It looked like she had it all put together. I remembered a picture of her from her honeymoon in North Carolina sitting alone on rocks beside a waterfall and gazing off deep in thought. I remember a picture of her sitting between the legs of her husband on the grass together. His name was Chris.

                She was thoughtful and curious, popular and surrounded with friends, yet also there was something burning deep inside her as if she was still alone despite the incredible network of friends and family surrounding her.

                In one of our early conversations on the phone, I asked her if Pelletier was her last name because it appeared in her emails. She told me it was her husband’s and that she had kept it to remember him. Her maiden name was Desselle. Her parents were French Canadian, her mother and grandparents spoke French and English and Richford was right on the Canadian border. Some of the Richford residents still spoke French.  

                Becky could also disarm me with her jokes about human nature. It was the way she would listen to me tell a story or talk about something and anticipate how I would interpret or react to the events and make it very practical. She might say, “And you were like, ‘I want some of that’” in a thrusty voice. It was like she was thinking along with me and reacting with the basic instincts, even of a pervert like me. I liked the way she attributed those basic reactions to me. It helped me make sense of myself in a positive self-esteem boosting way. In reality my thoughts were far more complicated. I watched people to see how they worked and what motivated them. I read Shakespeare thoroughly as a child. I read lots of literature. I’d seen the patterns throughout history, the human mind copying itself over and over again. I’d read the philosophers.

                The Greek philosopher Plato was born in 427 BC. Read his words from The Republic and find yourself teleported through that hall of mirrors into history 285 years before Christ was born. “When we had finished our prayers and viewed the spectacle, we turned in the direction of the city; and at that instant Polemarchus…chanced to catch sight of us from a distance as we were starting on our way home, and told his servant to run and bid us wait for him. The servant took hold of me by the cloak behind, and said: Polemarchus desires you to wait.” Can you picture them there in Pireaus, a city like Boston on the Mediterranean except different architecture and climate? Can you picture the one human spying the other in the light of afternoon or evening?

                Plato’s The Republic contains many quotes that demonstrate Plato’s and Socrates’ minds, just two of millions from 2,500 years ago, were similar to ours in 2013. Quoting from The Republic: “That was why I asked you the question, I replied, because I see that you are indifferent about money, which is a characteristic rather of those who have inherited their fortunes than of those who have acquired them; the makers of fortunes have a second love of money as a creation of their own, resembling the affection of authors for their own poems, or of parents for their children, besides that natural love of it for the sake of use and profit which is common to them and all men. And hence they are very bad company, for they can talk about nothing but the praises of wealth.”

                While one can find many common sense observations in The Republic, Socrates raises many questions and uses questionable analogies to make his arguments, which his opponents are portrayed as failing to defeat. For instance in Socrates insists that as a shepherd attends to the well-being of his flock that rulers attend to the well-being of their subjects. “Then now, Thrasymachus, there is no longer any doubt that neither arts nor government provide for their own interests; but, as we were before saying, they rule and provide for the interests of their subjects who are the weaker and not the stronger—to their good they attend and not to the good of the superior.”

                In fact, the Western academic celebration of Plato and Socrates is a celebration of ambiguity about human nature, when in reality, human nature can be nearly exactly understood from an all-encompassing look at history. We can understand the machinery of motivation, the machinery that has held the Jewish ethnicity together for thousands of years, the machinery that leads to chaos and collapse. Socrates searched for absolutes, as evidenced by his absolutist analogies: the shepherd attends to the interests of his flock, that medicine attends not to the interest of medicine but the interest of the body, etc. However, the absolutes that Socrates was searching for were always absolutes of physics, something humans could not fathom before the age of Newton. Individuals could always be persuaded away from the interests they were supposed to have if the right sales pitch was made.

                Plato’s pupil Aristotle would divide the means of persuasion into three separate categories: Ethos, Pathos and Logos, committing one of the great original sins in Western culture. Ethos is “the distinguishing character, sentiment, moral nature, or guiding beliefs of a person, group or institution,” according to Merriam Webster. Logos was the appeal to logic and Pathos was the appeal to emotions. That Aristotle divided the means of persuasion into three separate categories reflects the fact that by the time of Aristotle a condition of babble had already taken hold of Greece. By Aristotle’s time there were already laws, courts and judges, and the art of legal persuasion was already professionalized. In fact the institution of law was already so established that Aristotle wrote, “It is absurd to hold that a man ought to be ashamed of being unable to defend himself with his limbs, but not of being unable to defend himself with speech and reason, when the use of rational speech is more distinctive of a human being than the use of his limbs.” Oh, to be an academic. Aristotle clearly did not grow up in the trades. Yet many academics will find themselves nodding with his words. To us it is true. Especially in a law abiding society, “The pen is mightier than the sword.”

                Aristotle defines Ethos as an appeal to the authority or honesty of the speaker. I interpret Ethos as an appeal to the guiding beliefs of the institution of the court system, the laws. I will use Aristotle’s own words to support my reasoning. “We believe good men more fully and more readily than others,” he states. Many Americans believe that President Harry S. Truman was a good man, but the Japanese who survived the atomic bombings he ordered on Hiroshima probably felt otherwise. Thus, “goodness” is subjective. Truman was “good” by the laws of the United States. Additionally, Americans viewed Truman as “good” because he was the President of our country and he ended World War II. In any event, to be “good” one must essentially be law abiding. Even if we don’t cite those laws we abide by when we appeal to our own authority, it is what defines us as “good.”

                Ethos is appeal to laws (written and innate).

                Logos is appeal to logic.

                Pathos is appeal to emotion.

                Do you realize that in the Discovery Channel’s Planet Earth movie, there is a scene where a tribe of chimpanzees, our closest genetic animal relative, goes to war with a neighboring tribe of chimpanzees over food supplies? I didn’t until later in this book, but think about that. The chimpanzees never lament the wars they fight because they have never been infected with the disease of Babble. They are governed by the instinct of survival. Thanks to accounting for some of the cockiest species on the entire planet, humans are still lost in a wilderness trying to understand what life is for. Oh, sad lost souls. Unfortunately it is not for your sad sorry story or for your pleas to consider the big wide world of suffering…it is for survival. The cat licks its wound and moves on; the dog hides his wound as best he can. Animals who are free of the assault of the philosophy of chaos stay current, instinctive, engaged with and aware of their surroundings. This includes the humans who build and maintain this world, with whom Aristotle never spent much time.

                War is an old and natural concept. It is instinctive. The lack of common warfare and surfeit of gestures toward desiring international peace doesn’t remove the instinct from our nature, and it plays out in the financial, medical, legal and capitalist industries. All of these industries are guided by smart men and women with many of the right instincts to be talent in an orchestra, but theirs is an orchestra in chaos. United by the feeble affirmation to make as much money as possible, American free-market capitalists, celebrities, judges, politicians and cheerleaders forgo the very clear and obvious opportunity to set aside ego and collaborate at every level so that everyone in the tribe survives and inherits a sustainable, habitable world. There is currently no guiding vision that will endow the progeny even of the world’s leaders, let alone the common American, with a sustainable, safe and habitable world. “Survival of the fittest” is the Darwinian axiom that will never sustain any human survival, let alone one tribe’s, when it exalts individuals over cooperatives, money over survival, or conversely puts the world’s needs ahead of its own. Yet that is the exact American Ethos: live the Dream, donate to Africa. “Survival of the fittest” in human terms means: survival of the best cooperators who put themselves first and survived, passing on a habitable earth to their children. The accounts of the medieval crusades show us that victors in battle had forces of greater size and unity than their enemies.

                While academics have celebrated the indecisiveness of Socrates for centuries, it is clear that Socrates’, Plato’s and Aristotle’s minds were products of leisure. Humans who work with their hands in trades have to be decisive every day. So must be the guiding philosophy for a tribe to survive. I now work with a plumber from Fort Ann, and I’m learning the trade. This plumber’s name is Steve Degnan. A couple weeks ago we had to run water and drainage lines from a new sink. I felt indecisive and frozen as it became clear to me that we would have to cut out ceiling sheet rock to run the lines. I’ll never be a plumber. I’m left eye dominant. I’m an academic and if this country sees fit to allow me to remain a writer and propagator of ideas, so will I remain. In any event we could see the studs of the ceiling, to which the sheetrock was fastened, on one side of a horizontal support beam. Steve used a ruler and sighted with his eyes where those studs ran under the sheet rock and used a marker to draw lines. Then, using an all-in-one saw, he cut out the sheet rock. His lines were slightly off mark, but we got the job done in a hurry.

                Socrates argued as though one could spend all day looking at an argument from every possible perspective and entertain every possible situation. Such is also the experience in a modern college classroom. I was educated as a Creative Writing major at Colorado State University. The teachers spent hours teaching us how natural human behavior was sexist and anachronistic and teaching us how to react in the “proper” way in the future. They shamed us for wiping out the Native Americans, despite the fact that their own bounty and way of life was due in large part to the actions of our ancestors. My experience in education was guilt about myself. In reality, we know what is right and what is wrong instinctively. We know what situations lead to negative feelings and which situations are positive.

                In an ideal world everyone would live and no one would suffer. We do not live in an ideal world. We live in a practical world. That is what Becky Desselle helped me to come to understand.

                In time I asked Becky to tell me how her husband died. She explained that it was a car accident. She told me that she and her husband were at a party in Richford in July 2007 and that she left the party early and Chris stayed at the party. Before she left, she told me, she and Chris had sex in the back of his pickup truck. She told me that she told Chris she loved him and that was the last time she saw him. She was awakened the next morning by Chris’s parents and she immediately knew something was wrong. Chris had driven off the road near his uncle’s house and the truck had flipped over crushing Chris. His cousin arrived at the scene and held his hand as he died. The drop off where his truck flipped over wasn’t even that steep and speed didn’t appear to play a role.

                My own brother killed himself, but by the time of his death he was so much a different person than the brother I knew growing up. He was deteriorating, and it is possible that if he was still alive he would be even further remote today than he was at the time of his death. The story of Chris was different. He was alive and himself at a party and then gone the next morning. The place where he died was seemingly innocuous and speed didn’t seem to play a factor. He was simply crushed by a crude and ironic twist of fate. The story stuck with me and assailed my senses.

                For some reason, Becky inspired me to get out and document my travels and in Mid-April I bought a hiking book for New Mexico and followed its advice to hike a trail in the Santa Fe area. I brought my camera along and used it for the first time since I bought it for my first cross country trip over a year earlier. I snapped a few shirtless picks just to try to look attractive for Becky.

                Later in April, Becky sent me a care package with little odds and ends, including a journal, a book mark with pictures she had taken, a couple of burned CDs and a DVD of Into the Wild. The care package came in a little decorated box with a hand written note on frog decorated paper. I held the items in my hands and felt a closeness with Becky. The note read, “Just a few things I thought you’d like. I made these bookmarks using a program I have for my printer. A couple of CDs, I know you like bluegrass, so I thought you’d enjoy Railroad Earth and this Tim O’Brien CD. A couple of my favs. The Railroad Earth is an MP3, so it’s got a lot of songs. Anyway, hopefully you can tell I’m trying to make you miss the East Coast=).” She drew a smiley face.

                I watched the DVD of Into the Wild and Becky and I wrote about it together. First thing it makes me think of is “Big Hard Sun” by Eddie Vedder. In the scene that song plays in McCandless is driving away from it all on the open highway. Becky was a huge Pearl Jam/Eddie Vedder fan. Into the Wild is about a young college student named Christopher McCandless who is dissatisfied with the mainstream media’s definition of life. He has a rocky relationship with his parents who want him to succeed in their idea of success. McCandless wants to be free. McCandless was probably left-eye dominant and I will talk about the importance of his type of personality later in this book. McCandless graduated college, cut up his ID, credit cards and burned his money and traveled out west searching for answers to the emotional impulses he was receiving. McCandless sought the same answers that Jack Kerouac sought a couple of generations earlier. The same answers that Mark Twain, Jesus and Socrates sought. Something was WRONG with human physics and they knew it because it impacted their EMOTIONS.

                Becky and I agreed that McCandless traveled out West and paddled the Colorado River in a Kayak and hiked the Pacific Coast Trail and hung out with the roaming bands of gypsies in California and journeyed to Alaska to seek meaning. “Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world,” writes Jon Krakauer in Into the Wild (which I also read) “to figure out why people were bad to each other so often. A couple of times I tried to tell him it was a mistake to get too deep into that kind of stuff, but Alex got stuck on things. He always had to know the absolute right answer before he could go on to the next thing.” “Alex” as in Alexander Supertramp.

                More from Into the Wild: “The sea's only gifts are harsh blows, and occasionally the chance to feel strong. Now I don't know much about the sea, but I do know that that's the way it is here. And I also know how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong but to feel strong. To measure yourself at least once. To find yourself at least once in the most ancient of human conditions. Facing the blind deaf stone alone, with nothing to help you but your hands and your own head.”  

                But Becky said it, and I agreed, that by the end of the movie, by the time it was too late, McCandless was evolving on what he was seeking: “I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books , music, love for one's neighbor - such is my idea of happiness. And then, on top of all that, you for a mate, and children, perhaps - what more can the heart of a man desire?"

                Ultimately McCandless died in a bus in Alaska because he was eating the wrong type of plant and he was generally unprepared. Becky said it, and I agreed with her, that by the end of the movie he realized he missed his family. Becky spun the interpretation of the movie in a way that I agreed with. I came to see McCandless as one mistake away from getting back to his family. His attempt to call his sister at a pay phone before he traveled to Alaska conveyed this idea. It may have just been an artifice of Krakauer’s but this was the positive influence that Becky radiated in her MESSAGING. I’m a stubborn guy. For my opinion to be influenced toward a perspective that wasn’t really mine is rare. Becky could not only accomplish this shift in the way I saw the world, she could do it in a way that got my mind to focus on healthy instincts, like love for family and company, whether or not McCandless had really learned this by the time he was living in a bus in Alaska. Women around the world should take note that a physics equation involving their lips and a man’s ears governs the initiation of action, purpose and direction. When womens’ lips go to mens’ ears and talk about family or purpose in ways that activate the MAN’S emotions, LOOK OUT. More on this later.

                It’s possible that McCandless never could have put his finger on what he EMOTIONALLY SENSED was missing from or wrong in his life unless he had come to understand human physics. In other passages, McCandless reveals that his understanding of ideal is crude and suited more for his age and disposition than a comprehensive understanding of the physics of human nature.

                He writes, “Make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservation, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. If you want to get more out of life, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty.” Easy for a young 20-something to say. I would disagree with McCandless and argue that I wish I had stayed in my hometown, nurtured and grown my early and strongest relationships, settled down in a true love and by this point in my life was watching my children get ready for high school.

                This book is about patterns: a wide and diverse collection of observations that reveal far more laws and constants in human emotion and collective behavior than liberal arts colleges would have us believe. I argue that our thoughts are governed by physics, they are not as free as we would like to believe, but they form in response to nuanced conditions and emotional impulses accompanying our thoughts were selected by nature to double check that our patterns and priorities will lead to survival. McCandless’s prose closely resembles the prose of Jack Kerouac, who fits the pattern of men who sense something wrong and seek to fix human nature for survival reasons at the subconscious level.

                In his book, On The Road, Kerouac writes, “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.” Do you see how Kerouac’s critique of the” commonplace” ideas echoes McCandless’s critique of a secure future? These sentiments echo my frustration with the Middlebury College academic scene in the 90s. McCandless and Kerouac sensed something wrong with the way things were heading. Both acted like carbon monoxide alarms: they went off, but they never really figured out what they were looking for.

                When we studied Kerouac in college, we did not study him from a physics-of-human-emotion perspective. Nor did we seek to understand his writing in the context of nature’s consummate wiring for survival in humans, written into the genetic coding governing our actions, thoughts and emotions. We just celebrated him as an example of the great artist, heart bursting with imagination, daring and an eye for detail. I, in fact, wanted to be an author just for the purpose of being a famous author and joining the ranks of Kerouac, Steinbeck, Wolfe, Shakespeare and other authors I admired. I knew the powerful moralizing effect of writers like Shakespeare, and I believed I could help inspire better human behavior, but our society has led us to focus on our lives as careers. I was no different. It’s led us to focus on attaining personal recognition, achieving “great” things and our emotions get interpreted through THIS self-seeking logic rather than the logic of survival, which is all about cooperation.

                Many authors, politicians and philosophers have identified cooperation as essential. Franklin D. Roosevelt, America’s 32^nd president, who led the nation out of the Great Depression and into World War II, weighed in on cooperation: “Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further, but cooperation, which is the thing we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off.”

                In his famous St. Crispin’s Day speech, delivered by Henry V from the play bearing that same name, Shakespeare summoned the emotions of unity and cooperation: “If we are mark’d to die, we are enow / To do our country loss; and if to live, / The fewer men, the greater share of honour. / God’s will! I pray thee, wish not one man more…No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England. / God’s peace! I would not lose so great an honour / As one man more methinks would share from me / For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more! / Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host, / That he which hath no stomach to this fight, / Let him depart; his passport shall be made, / And crowns for convoy put into his purse; / We would not die in that man’s company / That fears his fellowship to die with us. / This day is call’d the feast of Crispian./ He that outlives this day, and comes safe home, / Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d, /And rouse him at the name of Crispian. / He that shall live this day, and see old age, / Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours, / And say “To-morrow is Saint Crispian.” / Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars, / And say “These wounds I had on Crispian’s day.” / Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot, / But he’ll remember, with advantages, / What feats he did that day. Then shall our names, / Familiar in his mouth as household words- / Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter, / Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester- / Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red. / This story shall the good man teach his son; / And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by, / From this day to the ending of the world, / But we in it shall be remembered- / We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; / For he to-day that sheds his blood with me / Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile, / This day shall gentle his condition; / And gentlemen in England now-a-bed / Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here, / And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks / That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.”

                President Barack Obama has repeatedly spoken about the importance of unity and cooperation, identifying it as a crucial dynamic in order for change to occur. Addressing the AFL-CIO in Chicago on July 25, 2005, Obama spoke of the brutal conditions facing meatpackers in Chicago at the turn of the 20^th Century. He referenced Upton Sinclair, another Kerouac or McCandless type of man, identifying something wrong with the human physics he observed, who called the meatpacking industry “The Jungle.” Obama said of the workers who organized the meatpacking industry for the AFL CIO in the 1930s, “They put aside decades of ethnic and racial tension and elected women, African Americans, and immigrants to leadership positions so that they could speak with one voice.”

                Sports teams show us how cooperation and unity lead to victories, whereas selfishness and ego lead to disunity and loss. Eli Manning led my New York Giants to two Super Bowl victories in the 2007 and 2011 NFL seasons. Manning demonstrates a low-key, focused approach to his job as quarterback. He shows humility in his press conferences and demeanor, despite his talent on the field. By contrast Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez, who was widely criticized for his playboy-esque appearance in GQ magazine in 2011, earned the enmity of his own teammates who made their disapproval known anonymously to reporters. NBA star Dwight Howard, the former powerhouse center for the Magic, performs incredibly well at an individual level. However, he harbored enmity toward his own coach, Stan Van Gundy, who revealed knowing Howard wanted him fired in an awkward April 5, 2012 press conference. Whether it was a wise call or not Van Gundy told the truth and it impacted my emotions, which innately understand when a man’s behaviors are dangerous to the unity and performance of team. No matter how talented we may be as individuals, when egos rise up and strive to undermine order for personal gain division and collective weakness follow.

                Emotional physics catalyzes physical action: crying, sprinting, boxing. We feel “emotion” when we swing a hammer, every moment, as we guide its trajectory into the nail. The emotion keeps the trajectory of the hammer toward the head of the nail. Before we can articulate it in words we understand if the hammer is off track by emotional impulses. After a good strike we feel a satisfaction that our hand-eye coordination is working. It happens so fast that veteran trades people may not even notice the positive rewards their bodies give them throughout their work, including every time they feel a nut begin to thread onto a bolt they cannot see or when they diagnose the fault causing the front end of a car to vibrate. Yet it is these emotions that help them improve and learn lessons.

                Jesus not only understood the importance of cooperation and unity, he understood the human physics behind it so well that he identified and preached the method to “waste-gate” destructive resentment through forgiveness. “Ye have heard that it hath been said, an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, that ye resist not evil: but whoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” (Matthew 5: 38-39) Jesus is saying that revenge embraces “evil.” It certainly perpetuates negativity and clouds the heart as demonstrated by the by the nearly 30 year feud between the Hatfields and McCoys in West Virginia in the late 19^th Century.

                Jesus preached his advice ostensibly to avoid hell and enter the king of heaven, according to the authors of the Bible, but his advice had practical application, otherwise it wouldn’t resonate with readers and followers. This is why I call his forgiveness advice a human physics “waste-gate” for survival-threatening negativity. I learned what a waste-gate was when I got into car mechanics, which I will get to eventually. Turbos in cars are powered by exhaust fumes that spin a propeller connected via shaft to a propeller in the intake. If the turbo gets going too fast, the waste gate opens allowing exhaust to bypass the turbo. Without this device the turbo would burn out. Without forgiveness, unity would be impossible. I love my father, but he has many resentments and he appears to be lonely sometimes. I wish he forgave more. I personally have closed a few people out of my life because they didn’t show me respect, but I hold resentments against no one and I hope that eventually my old friendships will be rekindled.

                Here is one example of how Jesus identified a usefulness for forgiveness other than for getting into heaven: “Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him; lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison.” (Matthew 5:25)  

                Resentments put up walls that shut down unity, ultimately leaving a population more vulnerable to predatory and divisive ENTICEMENTS. Remember, the serpent is always ready to come slithering in and offer a beautiful emotional sales pitch to Eve. She is more likely to find the pitch appealing if she does not have what she emotionally needs in her current situation. In addition, men lose focus on the important goals, which are replaced with petty disagreements and self-interest.

               

                It was Monday, June 5, 2008. The “crew” of canvassers I had hired and trained started showing up for work just before 1:30 in the afternoon. I was in my office talking with an interviewee. We finished up and I said I’d call if there was an opening and thanked him, but I knew he wouldn’t work out. I entered the main canvass room. The room was decorated with posters and motivational quotes.

                “All right everybody, let’s get this day started,” I said and clapped my hands together. My canvassers gathered around in a circle because we started every day with group stretches, performing the same sort of team motivation that WalMart does with its employees.  I now had six core staff and two trainees.

                “Vivian, do you want to lead us in stretches today?” I asked. Vivian had been working for about a month. She agreed and led the canvass team through stretches. After stretches we did a team clap starting slowly at first and speeding up until the whole group was clapping very fast.

                As the clapping subsided, I said, “Okay, thank you Vivian. Let’s look at who got hot nights last night.”

                “Hot nights” were awards we gave out for good job performances. Here is another reminder that our organization followed a recipe to influence and motivate human behavior. My supervisors openly talked about using rewards to establish the repetition of good behavior. We gave out “hot night” prizes for high achievement, like 35 doors knocked or 50 percent emails. I called out the names of three canvassers who got “hot night” prizes and recognized them in front of the other canvassers.           

                After the stretches and the “hot night” prizes, I spent the next half to train my employees on the rap, and on this day he was training them on the clipboard pass. In training, I could see the mechanics of my canvassers and tell if the mechanics would be successful at the door based on repeated exposure to successful as well unsuccessful raps. I could tell by looking at their eye contact, the speed and enthusiasm passing the clipboard and their resolution to hold the clipboard out straight after offering it rather than dropping their arm back down as though in rejection. My ability to spot success and error made me a good trainer, but it also reinforces the similarity of human interpretation from one door to the next. Our success was made possible because there are universal patterns in the human psyche. I taught words, but more importantly I taught body language. Body language is physics and the right body language unlocked curiosity and participation by the effects it had on the person at the door.

                At 2 o’clock I brought all the canvassers back together and began my educational segment of the day.

                “I’m going to read you all an excerpt from an article I read this morning,” Dean began. “It reads, ‘Who is more likely to lie, cheat and steal—the poor person or the rich one? It’s tempting to think that the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to act fairly. After all, if you already have enough for yourself, it’s easier to think about what others may need. But research suggests the opposite is true: as people climb the social ladder, their compassionate feelings toward others decline.’ Now I think cause and effect is a little bit skewed here. The article just concluded that behaviors change as socioeconomic status changes.”

                “What’s socioeconomic?” asked Cesar, another canvasser who successfully completed his training.

                “That basically means “someone’s place in society as determined by wealth.” But I do not believe that behavior changes as wealth increases, in fact I believe it is exactly these types of behaviors that enable someone to find the greatest success in making money. Ironically, it seems, our society rewards, selects and celebrates individuals with the most anti-social behavior. While these characteristics do well at making money, they are probably the most unfit characteristics for survival. Humans have long depended on cooperation to accomplish survival related activities: raising a barn, building an automobile and hunting.”

                “My hunch here is based partially on the research that we do every night. For example when I used to do fundraising, I tended to have the hardest time in the richest neighborhoods. These neighborhoods were the least compassionate toward our causes, but I doubt they became that way because they had grown wealthy; rather, it is more likely that their behavior was always wary of a social cause and geared toward acquiring wealth. This logic guides actions, including cheating, lying and acting unfairly. It may be genetic, but it may also be taught, by select elders, school or the culture. Money logic may appear attractive because it promotes selfishness, a characteristic of adolescence that some are never broken of, but money logic is inferior to survival logic. Money logic has been inferior to survival logic since the time of Moses. Human psychology creates pitfalls for people with faulty and selfish logic. Strong individuals are no match for highly organized teams where egos are small and cooperation and loyalty are strong.”

                “But we are not in the business of converting people. There is not enough time to convert. Unfair people developed their characteristics in adolescence and never met situations that forced them to change their behavior. Their alliances run up the socioeconomic ladder, not down. So we will not accomplish a conversion at their doorstep. Our job is simply to identify who has set ego and vanity aside for the sake of themselves or their family, and who sincerely believes in the cooperative spirit of this country. We know the cooperative spirit is strong. It is often exploited by politicians like George W Bush who united us around the tragedy of 9/11 and then used that momentum to invade Iraq.”

                “You will know our supporters because they will look you in the eye and they will listen to your rap with an open mind. Will they know everything about health care reform when you finish your rap? No. They will, however, understand the concept of cooperation and unity to pass meaningful changes to health care in Washington.”

                After I finished up my presentation, the canvassers gathered up their belongings and we all we all went out and got into the vans. I was working in the field that night, so I drove one of the vans. Rachel, my field manager from Portland Oregon drove the other van. She followed me out to a Subway restaurant near the neighborhood we were going to canvass that night and everyone ate lunch. At 3:30 we gathered back together and drove out to the neighborhood. Each canvasser had a map with colored marker on the streets they were supposed to canvass. I handed these maps out to my canvassers as we did “trunk talks,” one-on-one meetings with each canvasser at the hood of the van, where we also set goals and talked about skills to focus on relevant to the canvasser. I dropped two of my canvassers off at one location and drove to the second location with the trainee I was going to work with that night.

                I did a few doors with my trainee and saw clear problems with her eye contact and her clipboard pass. I pulled her aside on the sidewalk and practiced a few introductions and clipboard passes to refine her mechanics. After I felt good, I let her go by herself to the end of the street where I would meet up with her again.

                As I walked from door to door, I found that I was thinking about Becky. I took a break from knocking on doors and called Becky and asked if she definitely wanted to meet over my four day break for Memorial Day. She said yes.

               

                May 22, 2008. My plan was to meet Becky in New York City, where my plane would land the next morning and drive to Vermont for a hike on the Long Trail. We would also meet up with my parents and then spend a little bit of Memorial Day with his Uncle Berkeley.

                I made my way through the security gates at Albuquerque International Airport, shuffling along toward the X-ray machine behind only a handful of people. It was a quiet Thursday night at the airport, just about 9:30. I carried a newspaper and my small backpack with me, my large camping backpack was checked. After I got through security, I sat down in a chair in one of the rows of chairs by my gate about half an hour before my flight departed and waited for my seat to be called. In a short time I was finding my seat in the back of the airplane. I was on a redeye flight, and I was hoping I’d get some sleep.

                As the plane rolled out onto the tarmac I read the newspaper and felt the plane roll and stop and turn and make its way out to the runway. As the plan made its final turn onto the runway, the thought of the plane crashing crossed my mind, but for reasons I cannot explain, I thought to myself, “If this is the last time I ever take off, I will die in peace because of my connection with Becky.”

                I didn’t sleep well during the flight, but I arrived at Newark the following morning at 5:30 AM East Coast time. I gathered myself together after the plane rolled to a stop and followed the passengers off the jet and into Newark Airport. I stopped at a Starbucks for another newspaper and an espresso and arrived at the baggage claim, noticing I was a little smelly in my now day-old clothes. I caught a train into the city and transferred to the subway to get out to Brooklyn. I got off the subway and climbed the stairs to street level and called my friend, Joni to make sure she was awake. Joni reminded me where to walk and promised to meet me along the way. I walked down 4^th Avenue carrying my big camping backpack and my little backpack. I walked past storefronts and past a man hosing off the sidewalk in front of a little café. The doors and windows to the café were open to the warm sunlit morning.

                Joni spotted me on the sidewalk and called out to me from across the street. When the light changed, I walked across the intersection and gave her a big hug.

                “Hey, Joni,” I said.

                We walked back to her brownstone apartment and went inside. Joni was a friend of mine from Fort Lewis College. She was friends with my girlfriend from Fort Lewis, Nicole Ravin. Joni showed Dean her railroad flat apartment and the little back yard behind it and they talked for a while.

                Becky was running late when she finally arrived, but she texted me to let me know she was looking for the apartment. I said goodbye to Joni and collected my bags and went outside and called Becky up on my cell phone. I had a little flip phone with very few features other than calling.  

                “Hey,” Becky cooed into my ear when she answered. “Sorry I’m late. I was up at a friend’s place last night and I think I drank a little too much. I think I drove past it, can you see my car?”

                Just as she asked I spotted a little blue Honda Civic with a the white Maine license plate on the back. The plate said “Maine” in black letters on the top with an evergreen branch and a chickadee. I walked up the sidewalk past the parked cars on the narrow one-way street to where Becky was parked. Her reverse lights went on for a second. I kept walking until I was alongside her car and I could see her through the passenger window. I still wasn’t sure if she was the one I was looking for. She craned her neck over toward me and looked out waving enthusiastically. I could barely see her because she was in a shadow in her car. She climbed out and spun around.

                Her hair was tied back and she wore a button up plaid shirt and a comfy looking pair of jeans beneath a Cheshire grin. I paused. Then smiled.

                “There was a great big bridge, then a million cars and all sorts of tall buildings,” Becky said enthusiastically.

                “Well you made it.”
                “Yeah, last night was rough. Sorry I’m late, you can put your backpack in the back.” She opened up the hatchback and Dean put his backpack in.

                “It’s easy to get lost in this big place. It just swallowed me up.”

                I laughed.

                “I’m used to like five stoplights on a great big drive to work in Connecticut where I live right now. You’ll see where my sister lives. I’ll show you when we get to Connecticut.”

                “Yeah I want to do that.” We drove a few blocks as Becky tried to navigate her way out of Brooklyn. “Do you want to get something to eat? I still haven’t had breakfast.”

                Becky said that would be fine and we stopped. I offered to pay for breakfast.

                We got back into the car with bagel breakfast sandwiches in wax paper wrap and Becky pulled out of her parking space and back into the thick traffic of the city. We drove a few more blocks.

                “You know how to get out of here?” I asked.

                “Yeah, I printed directions,” Becky said as she reached past my leg and fished them off of the floor by my feet.

                “Do you want me to drive while you navigate?” I asked.

                “Um,” Becky turned to look at him and smiled, “Yeah sure.”

                She pulled over again somewhere in Queens and they both got out and walked around the hood, but as they passed each other I took Becky and kissed her. The kiss surprised her, and we separated slightly looking into each other’s eyes up close. It surprised me, too. I leaned in and kissed her again, this time longer. We separated again and I smiled. Becky smiled back at me and we walked the rest of the way around the car and got back in on opposite sides.

                We eventually made it out of the city and got I-87 traveling north, driving in three lanes of traffic past views of the Hudson River and bright green trees with new leaves and past the occasional rest stop. We pulled off at a rest stop and made out for a while, parked. I took a couple of pictures of us, something that Becky’s pictures inspired me to do.

                “Do you think it’s possible to always be happy?” I asked.

                “If you’re with the right company,” Becky answered and flashed me a smile.

                We drove through East Dorset, Vermont and I took a picture of a white church steeple. It was one of the things I remembered about his home state: steeples in every town. By 2008, Vermont was one of the most non-religious states in the country. The leaves were filling in on the branches and the foliage was bright green. We drove up to South Wallingford and stopped at a gas station just a couple of miles from the trailhead. We bought some apples, tuna and some dried food for the hike. The sunshine had richened from bleaching light to golden early evening when we pulled up to the trailhead. The ground was soft with moisture and it sparkled in sunlight next to the shadow of Becky’s car. Becky and I got out and started dressing up for the hike. Becky took pictures of me while I got dressed. I looked at Becky sheepishly while she snapped photos as though I’d been caught walking through the house in his mud boots. When I was dressed and Becky was dressing, I took the camera back and took pictures of her. When she noticed that I was taking pictures she posed like a pirate ready to attack with a pocket knife.

                We started hiking late in the afternoon, talking and following in each other’s footsteps over rocks and wet terrain where branches and obstructions made the trail a single track and side by side when the trail allowed. It got dark before we reached a campsite but they kept going until eventually they found a suitable spot and spent the night. I had told Becky in the car ride up from New York that I had no expectations sexually, but it was on my mind. It didn’t matter that we had just met in person, we had had phone sex already, and I wasn’t all that bashful.

                The first night we messed around aggressively although we didn’t have sex. When I got Becky’s panties off she told me, “You’re pretty much the only person other than my parents to see that.” I was about to go down on Becky but she stopped me. “I’d probably feel more comfortable having sex first and doing this stuff when I feel more comfortable with you,” she said. But I didn’t want to have sex because sex was a big deal to me for some reason with Becky and I wanted to go slow. I also felt ashamed of myself for being too aggressive. Sex had never been a big deal for me. I had had plenty of careless sex, but there was something about the relationship we had built online and through conversations that seemed fragile and important. Sex, I believed, could change everything.

                We woke up the next morning with the sun. On the hike Saturday I made some playful moves on Becky and she laughed and enjoyed the attention. We arrived at a bridge.

                “You want to do some stretching?” I asked.

                “What were you thinking about stretching?” Becky asked, laughing.

                “Look, I’m stretching my leg out,” I said with his leg up on the railing of the bridge.  Becky laughed and gave my butt a pat. “You try,” I said. Becky did the same thing and I snuck up behind her and play humped her from behind. Becky laughed and a hiker arrived just as we were fooling around.

                “I caught you,” the lady said.

                We laughed. I said, “Nothing happening here, we’re just stretching.”

                Becky was a certified physical trainer. As we hiked that day, Becky told me about the muscles of the body, sometimes illustrating the muscles she was referring to by pointing to her own body. She explained how certain types of exercises strengthened certain muscles. She told me about her high school soccer experiences and her physical training in college.

                The next morning we woke up to the sound of the stream we camped next to and it was cold, but Becky woke up early and told me to keep sleeping because she was going to make me breakfast. I couldn’t believe my ears. The offer was so sweet and selfless. Too sweet and selfless: I couldn’t accept it. Becky was enthusiastic, funny, goofy, very comfortable about sex and she had implied she had only been with one other man, Chris. She had left some wiggle room that I was “pretty much” the only other person besides her parents who had seen her naked. This sort of aroused my jealousy. In any event I didn’t feel worthy of being made breakfast while Becky worked in the cold and I stayed in my sleeping bag, so I turned down her offer.

                That morning we hiked until we came across a stone garden, hundreds of miniature stone stacks. We took pictures and wondered who had set it all up. We kept going until we reached Route 140. I called my father and we waited by the road until he picked us up.

                “Hey, how’s it going, Dad?” I asked him when he arrived and hugged him. It was the first time I’d seen him since Christmas.

                “Hey, Dean” my father replied and I introduced my father to Becky. I always got jealous of the flirtatious way my father behaved around girls that I brought home. I was forward about sex to the point of being too direct, but my father was always playful with innuendo. It left me feeling like there was no purpose to life except libido and sex. I couldn’t keep up with the volume of innuendo that my father put out and it always depressed me how many people found my father’s humor funny.

                For these reasons, I kept a watchful eye on my father as he and my mother and myself and Becky sat out on the porch and talked.

                “Where are you from, Becky?” my mother asked her.

                “Um, I’m from a little town right up on the border of Vermont and Canada called Richford,” Becky answered using her hands to place it in the air and then smiling. It sounded the same as the description she had given me, seeming as though it was practiced. Who cared? Becky was such a score in every respect it didn’t matter that she might be practiced at being cute.        

                That afternoon I and my parents and Becky took a hike at Clarendon Gorge and my father took pictures of me with my arm around Becky. I felt as though I was already taking victory laps with Becky and I had only spent three days with her.

                Late that afternoon, Becky and I said goodbye to my parents and got back into Becky’s little blue Honda Civic and backed out of the driveway to my parents hilltop house and began driving down the hill toward the short stretch of Interstate 4 that cut through the basin of the valley that my parents’ house looks out over. We merged onto the Interstate but soon got off on the rural routes 11 and 103, which cut through Vermont’s southern mountains. As we got onto Interstate 91 heading south to Connecticut, it was late afternoon.

                It was already dusk by the time we pulled off the Interstate near Enfield to stop at a Hannaford’s and go shopping for some dinner. We got out of Jackie’s car in good spirits and entered the gaping bright grocery store with its long stretch of windows through the automatic doors from the parking lot. We kept each other company as we walked through the store together, picking out strawberries, avocados and burgers in the bright store lights. Having Becky with me made me feel like it was healthy and right to be shopping in the artificial lights of a big box store. I instinctively detested big box stores owing to my progressive principals but I could accept them with this woman who gave me purpose.

                After we checked out, we drove past Hartford and west toward Canton on small roads again. We drove past a bar and I asked Becky if it was the bar she worked at and she said the bar she worked at was still ahead. We eventually drove past another bar and I asked if that was the bar she worked at and she said we had already driven past it, and she forgot to point it out. I wanted to see the bar she worked at because I was getting a little jealous about Becky working in a bar with drunken men who would no doubt be hitting on her.

                We arrived at her sister’s house too late at night to visit with her sister and pulled up into a parking space in front of her sister’s garage. Becky’s apartment was a loft space above her sister’s garage. We walked up the stairs, past bags and boxes of wine bottles. Becky said, “I hope you don’t think I’m an alcoholic. Would it bother you if I have a little bit of wine?”

                “No,” I said. “As my uncle Berkeley likes to say, ‘You could take a bath in it for all I care.’”

                We cooked dinner together and watched a movie before cuddling up in Becky’s futon and messing around for a little while. Becky would later tell me that she hadn’t moved the futon or rearranged her room since I had slept in her futon with her. We didn’t have sex. In the morning, Becky made breakfast while I worked on my computer and Becky told me, “I can just see us living together with you working on your writing while I make you breakfast and cook for you.”

                We ate breakfast in the sunshine out on the wooden fire escape entrance to Becky’s loft apartment. Becky’s brother-in-law owned a fleet of landscaping trucks that were stored underneath the loft in the garage. One night in April, Becky and I had talked all night until the workers were firing up their trucks and leaving for work early in the morning, and Becky told me she could hear them going to work. The sun was rising over the East Coast and we were still talking.

                After we finished up Breakfast, Becky “made” me watch a video of her playing soccer in high school. Pictures of her late husband were all around the apartment. I watched the grainy footage as Becky raced down the sidelines dribbling the soccer ball and scoring impressive long-shot goals. Fans in the crowd were shouting her name. I was PROUD of her.

                After we watched the video, Becky started getting dressed and ready to go. I grabbed the camera and snapped photographs that I would never forget. In each one, Becky was mugging for the camera. In one, she stuck out her tongue as she looked at me sideways, standing in front of the mirror. In another she turned her face slightly to the side and made a pouty face at me in the reflection of the mirror as she fixed up her hair. I tackled her onto the sofa and took several pictures of her lying on my chest. In one, she stuck her tongue out and in several we were kissing.

                We loaded up into Becky’s car. I was driving and she was riding shotgun. I took one more picture before we left her sister’s house and she looked at me like, “Are you seriously still taking pictures?” It was a funny expression. We stopped on our way out of town at a Dunkin Donuts and bought a couple of coffees. We were heading south to Long Beach, New York where we were going to visit my uncle before I flew out that evening. I took a few more pictures on the way down. I photographed Becky reclined sideways in the passenger seat with her back against the door. She sipped her ice coffee seductively and mugged for the camera, her chin tilted down. As we got close to Long Island, Becky went down on me and I remember thinking, “She knows what a guy wants. She’s practical.” Again, I couldn’t just accept the favor without giving anything in return, so I began masturbating her but just as she neared climax we got to a toll bridge and we had to stop.

                When we arrived at my uncle’s house in Long Beach, Becky and I spent about an hour sitting and talking to my aunt and uncle. My uncle Berkeley was sober and had almost three decades of sobriety. He had had throat cancer from his days of smoking and drinking, and doctors removed his larynx several years earlier in a surgery. He spoke with the assistance of an electronic larynx that he pressed to his throat, making everything he said sound monotone. I was answering questions from Berkeley and Becky was finishing my sentences. I felt comfortable with Becky and strengthened by her presence at my side. I could see us doing anything together, going anywhere together and dealing with anything together.

                By the end of May, the junior senator of Illinois, Barack Obama, had built a substantial lead in the primaries over his biggest Democratic rival, then-Senator Hillary Clinton. Only three state primaries remained and Obama held a lead despite a strong finish from Clinton. The Democratic Party was debating over whether to seat delegates from Florida and Michigan, two states that broke primary rules. Ultimately the party decided to seat the delegates but cut their votes in half. Obama’s lead over Clinton was a dramatic turn in the predicted course of events. Obama was boosted by Senator Ted Kennedy’s endorsement after he won the South Carolina primary.

                In late May, Senator Ted Kennedy had just revealed that doctor’s found a malignant brain tumor. My father was collaborating with Senator Kennedy at the time, ghost-writing a forthcoming autobiography about the Massachusetts Senator, called “True Compass.”

                A little while after noon, I had to leave to catch the trains back to Newark airport. “Do you want me to get the train schedule so we can check?” Lenore asked. Sure enough a train was leaving in fifteen minutes. I thanked my uncle and aunt for their hospitality and Becky and I drove to the train station. We parked in the parking lot and walked over to the train station together. I bought a ticket from an electronic ticketing booth outside the train station.

                “So am I going to see you in Telluride?” I asked Becky. We had talked about meeting up out West during our camping trip. Becky was planning on going West on a road trip and I had two tickets to the Telluride Bluegrass festival in Colorado.

                “Yes,” Becky replied. “I’m going to Florida in a couple of weeks and then I’ll be driving out. I’ll keep you updated as I travel.”

                We said goodbye on the platform. Becky seemed comfortable and carefree saying goodbye. I felt like my heart was tied to Becky like an anchor and it was about to get pulled out when the train left the station. We smiled and kissed goodbye with promises to keep in touch.  I got onto the train. In an email that followed me back to New Mexico, Becky said she got onto the train after me to look for me but couldn’t find me and left regretfully. The email left me feeling good but I was puzzled that she couldn’t find me since I stayed in the train car I got into and started reading a book. I arrived back in Albuquerque late that night, facing the harsh reality of going back to work full-time that week.

                On April 13, 1917, Woodrow Wilson established the Committee on Public Information (CPI) through Executive Order 2594. Otherwise known as the Creel Committee, the committee was led by George Creel, a veteran reporter with experience at many different newspapers including the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post. The committee included Secretary of State Robert Lansing, Secretary of War, Newton Baker and Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels.

                The committee’s purpose was to use propaganda to influence popular support for the United States’ participation in World War I. Members of the committee understood the crude physics of human emotion, just as I do and just as the authors of the Bible understood it. They understood the crude physics of human emotion just as the Catholic Church did during the period of the crusades and probably since its shadowy inception, just as the Old Testament did in its commandments.

                The methods of the CPI imitated the methods of the Catholic Church: develop a message in a central location and then spread the same concise message everywhere using multiple “talking heads.” Remember that Revelations talks about the whore of Babylon riding a beast with the names of blasphemy and the seven heads and ten horns. Note the very real possibility that humans have long understood how to manipulate masses and have exploited these survival instincts to enrich and enlarge themselves at the expense of truth, my absolute definition of sin. The quiet, peaceful, oblivious Jewish people have avoided getting scattered by these tactics owing to physics of their behavior or their connections in the right places.

                The CPI recruited 75,000 “Four Minute Men” volunteers who delivered pro-war messages timed to the length of the human attention span as it was estimated in that time—four minutes. Note the similarity between their understanding of an attention span then versus now. Humans have long been curious about the physics of human nature and emotion.

                Edward Bernays was a member of the CPI. He was also an influential writer in the field of psychology and the father of the modern industry of advertising. In his book, Propaganda, Bernays writes a line that supports a conspiracy about an invisible manipulation of human history for the last 2,000+ years: “THE conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

                This book offers a scheme to hijack the “invisible government” driving human behavior toward world-wide suicide under the logic of greed. This book will, in the eyes of women, elevate the appeal of survival over current greed-based logic. This serpent is saying to the women reading this—who will be messengers to ALL of their companion females with whom they will consecrate a permanent coalition—“See a near future where the waters are clean and healthy, wild animal populations increase, the human population is thinned of undesirables, garbage and waste is reduced because the human population is reduced, a fresh start in a world is possible. None but sexually AND behaviorally attractive men remain. Your wealth increases because your share of the world is greater, the air you breathe is cleaner, and your lineage will last FOREVER.”

                However, in a concession to the world’s most sexually attractive women already accustomed to the high life, I will encourage that all of the resources currently devoted to the babble of “progressive causes,” which will add up to a footnote in the race toward world suicide, is diverted into the creation of a new order of those women, paying them enough to never need to hustle their sex appeal for another MAN’S agenda. The order will promote teamwork and cooperation. It will visit celebrities, athletes, the military, business leaders, judges, lawyers and other men upon whom survival depends and it will spread the emotion-driving “talking points” that were once spread by the corrupt tentacles of the Catholic Church, the arms of modern advertising and the agendas of misguided governments. It will be the “seven heads” of the beast, but there will no longer be a whore. Sex will happen because of mutual attraction NOT because some unworthy and otherwise unappealing man has money and power. We will not ever be misled to believe in fairy tales, but we will learn that love is possible and sustainable. All of this will be laid out more completely by the end of this book.

                Let us consider Bernays further. Noam Chomsky, a leading linguist and psychology professor at MIT, credits Bernays as one of the founders of the modern public relations industry.

                Bernays credits men as the “governors” of the “invisible government,” but here was an error in gender identification I will get into later. However, he correctly discerns an “invisible” governing authority over the course of human history. He writes, “We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.”

                “Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet,” Bernays writes. I disagree. While I have no evidence of a long term conspiracy by all the Jews or Catholics or Muslims, I’ve seen the not-so-invisible governors of modern America aware of each other: Bush advisors Karl Rove, Dana Perino and syndicated talk show host Rush Limbaugh are just three of them on the Right and Ellen Malcolm of EMILY’s List, Terry O’Neill of the National Organization of Women and Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO just three on the Left. Berney’s continues, “We are dominated by the relatively small number of persons—a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million (America’s population in 1928)—who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.”

                Bernays may have just been using the masculine pronoun to describe the “governors” directing the “invisible government” he identifies, but we know that women exert far more control in this realm. Women simply communicate better. So says Doctor Louann Brizendine who wrote The Female Brain, and who provides evidence of the absolute physics governing this reality. “The fetal girl’s brain cells sprout more connections in the communication centers and areas that process emotion,” Brizendine writes, one of many pieces of evidence from her book that would confirm the susceptibility of women to betray their men and, thus country and self, if given the right emotional argument; like the serpent in the Garden of Eden. “How does this fetal fork in the road affect us?” Brizendine continues. “For one thing, because of her larger communication center, this girl will grow up to be more talkative than her brother. In most social contexts she will use many more forms of communication than he will.”

                I believe that the “men” Bernays refers to are left eye dominant men like me; 10 percenters whose physiological makeup is exception to the physiological makeup of a normal male. We are the gay population although I prefer women; most of the politicians, most of the priests, most of the men who dominate the cameras and stimulate female emotions well enough to make a living doing it. We are also most of the marketers, most of the salespeople, most of the finance industry types and most of the lawyers, and the funny thing is that everybody knows it. We know when we’re talking to a man with a well-developed communication center in his brain. I think it tends to be left-eye dominants, but that study remains to be done. We know that in Italian, the language that originally belonged to the Catholic Church, the word for “left” was sinistra, which eventually took on the meaning “evil.” We see it rooted in the word “sinister.” It’s possible that humans have long known that left eye dominance, and it is very easy to spot, coincided with a brain that had a far more developed communication center. The left eye is connected to the right hemisphere of the brain, the area associated with language and arts.

                I believe nothing in nature is an accident and our (here I mean: left-eye or communication-strong males) relative frequency in the overall human population was selected for a reason: was it so that we could verbalize what women wanted? Was it to be our gender’s bargainers and negotiators with the opposite gender? It certainly wasn’t to get rich and make a living without working, which is what a lot of pathetic bums use it for. If women were to cut this segment of men, and they naturally want to judging by all the female songs deploring “cowboy Casanovas,” all the Cosmopolitan chatter about “those” types of guys, they would instantly silence a majority of the heads of babbling advice; the “invisible government” Bernays writes about. We have enough KNOWLEDGE right now to survive (and remember that in the story of Adam and Eve there was a tree of KNOWLEDGE and a tree of LIFE).

                Enough of the tree of KNOWLEDGE right now. RIGHT NOW we have to use everything we know to avoid hitting the metaphorical iceberg that will sink humanity like the real one that sunk the unsinkable Titanic. We really don’t need any more left-eyes selling their KNOWLEDGE in emotionally appealing packages that prey upon the physics of women’s psychology. We need all women to focus on survival and swallow the reality that 3 billion must cease all carbon dioxide producing activity before another year goes by as but a start toward avoiding apocalypse. They must alienate and undermine the men who continue to push the idea that the survival of the world is not connected to the survival of humanity. They must realize that they must play a symbiotic role with the men who will accomplish this goal. They will rub backs, nurture, approve, compliment, share the truth and encourage the men who will accomplish this goal. There is no longer a hidden force they must be scared of. It is the international order of women that is the ultimate and final court of no appeal. All of our laws and our current order is but an illusion. Every man involved is but an actor who may cast off his role at any time, but only at the direction of a woman. The internet allows us to coordinate the transfer of power in real time. It will be peaceful. Negotiation and compromise will prevail.

                Nature selects left-eye or communication-strong men as navigators, helping to pull the strings of the “invisible government” Bernays writes about. I don’t know if getting raped as a second-grader caused it or if I was already destined to be this way. I’ve theorized that certain types of men, who nature selected, were designed to try to “fix” human nature if they experienced situations that impacted their emotions negatively, alerting them that something about the mechanics of human nature is wrong: i.e. not destined for survival. Mark Twain, Frederick Douglas, Jesus and Socrates are only a few examples of the many writers and philosophers who sensed “injustice” emotionally and wrote or preached about it to subconsciously try to fix it. Even deeper in their subconscious was human nature trying to survive.

                Eminem is among the ranks of these types of men. Again, I believe they tend to be left-eye dominant, but I don’t know without scientific proof. His lyrics in Airplanes Part II must be understood from their origins in the “ancient genetic blueprint” of his mind. Eminem was a man who sensed something was wrong. “Let’s pretend Marshall Mathers never picked up a pen, let’s pretend things would’ve been no different/ pretend he procrastinated had no motivation / Pretend he just made excuses that were so paper thin / They could blow away with the wind, “Marshall you never gonna make it / Makes no sense to play the game there ain’t no way that you win” / Pretend he just stayed outside all day and played with his friends/ Pretend he even had a friend to say was his friend / And it wasn’t time to move and schools weren’t changing again / He wasn’t socially awkward and just strange as a kid / He had a father and his mother wasn’t crazy as shit / And he never dreamed he could rip stadiums and just lazy as shit / Fuck a talent show in the gymnasium bitch / “You won’t amount to shit, quit daydreaming kid / You need to get your cranium checked / Your thinkin like an alien it just ain’t realistic” / Now pretend they ain’t just make him angry with this shit / And there was no one he could even aim when he’s pissed at / And his alarm went off to wake him but he didn’t make it to the Rap Olympics / Slept through his plane and he missed it / He’s gon have a hard time explaining to Hailie and Lainy / These food stamps and this WIC shit / Cause he never risked shit, he hoped and he wished it / But it didn’t fall in his lap so he ain’t even here, he pretends that…”

                Eminem’s alarm went off to wake not only him but also humanity. Eminem’s raps, “You won’t amount to shit, quit daydreaming kid/ You need to get your cranium checked.” The anger and urgency in Eminem’s songs in general and these lines, in particular, articulate a disorder in human physics. Neighbors and allies were never meant to experience such a complete abandonment in their own society, never mind family.

                While other men never question the rules of the game and only compete as best they can, for other men like myself, Eminem, McCandless, Kerouac and others negative social dynamics (social dynamics that do not lead to survival) trigger an emotional response. I believe these dynamics trigger depression in women, who we think like. Our physiology and our environmental background growing up enabled us to pull back from day-to-day impulses and needs and look at broader cause and effect. We didn’t act on our impulses without questioning why we experienced them.

                We question the motive of everyone who we talk with and assemble evidence to explain their motives as we observe their behavior and interact with them over time. We exist everywhere, and we can be dangerous because of our understandings of human nature and our ability to exploit it for our own gain, but we do not succeed because we understand the arguments that persuade other men. We succeed because we understand the arguments that persuade women. We understand the symbiotic relationship between the sexes and the explosive physics equations revealed in gender relationships. “The women go to the men:” this is the formula for the catalyst of human action. I will explain it later, but it means there’s a physics equation for action: women, using words based on their ideas and EMOTIONS, can trigger ACTION in men. Men, especially I believe, right eye dominant men, tend to be stubborn and fixed in their beliefs. They want success, respect and sex. They tend to be governed by short term, action-oriented goals. They adjust their reasoning and logic only in response to the women they are attracted or attached to.

                Women on the other hand are physiologically more likely to change their opinions than men. This is what enables the serpent to sneak into an unguarded Garden of Eden and turn Eve against Adam. It’s happened in our country. Every day the minds of our women are infected with the emotional appeals of a million serpents trying to drive money into their own pockets. However, this feature of the female psychology and body was DESIGNED FOR SURVIVAL. The reality of life is that situations CHANGE. Logic changes as the conditions that confront us CHANGE. When women get on board with new ideas and stick to it, the men will follow them because they will always seek out the women and women set the expectations for behavior and belief systems. To use an extreme example, women would immediately cut short a first date if the man revealed he was a pedophile. The reasons for her disgust are survival based: sexual delinquency can ruin a child’s navigation system. Women must learn to interpret all of their NEGATIVE EMOTIONS toward the behaviors and revelations of the men they talk to in terms of survival. They ought to be as severe every time they feel a negative emotion as they would be with a pedophile.

                Doctor Louann Brizendin supports the idea that women can change their opinions more easily and frequently than men using the presence and behavior of hormones to make her point. “Of the fluctuations that begin as early as three months old and last until after menopause, a woman’s neurological reality is not as constant as a man’s. His is like a mountain that is worn away imperceptibly over millennia by glaciers, weather, and the deep tectonic movements of the earth. Hers is more like the weather itself—constantly changing and hard to predict.” While Brizendine and other psychologists and psychiatrists are now comfortable pointing to the influence of hormones to explain thoughts and emotions, my book seeks to remind the scientific community that the influence of these hormones was SELECTED by nature for survival purposes. Were it not to our species’ survival advantage that women experience frequent “reality” changes, evolution would have selected women to experience a more constant and steady reality.

                Brizendine’s ground-breaking book came under fire, as ground-breaking books do, for lack of references. I sincerely believe that if anyone really decides to remain in the snarky elite crowd after reading this book that they will come after me with the same criticisms despite all the patterns I identify. You will know my enemies by the way they try to cut me down rather than to understand me. Anyone who cares about the survival of the human race will seek to help me make my case, adding evidence that I have omitted owing to lack of time and space. I’m a 31 year old American man contributing my eye-witness observations to the international dialogue.

                It should be noted that this book includes only a small fraction of the empirical evidence I draw on to identify concrete PHYSICS-BASED and NATURALLY SELECTED evidence for our emotions. I want women to search for the survival explainations for their moods, not the dating or short term explanations. Our emotions exist because they were SELECTED FOR SURVIVAL. It became a game when self-seeking assholes decided they’d fuck with our navigation system to ENLARGE THEMSELVES at the EXPENSE OF TRUTH.

                It could be argued that those who push modern globalization are the most insincere and self-interested chameleons peddling the virtues of human emotion for their own gain. Nature selected humans to have a capacity to care about those in need, but our capacity to care about others is curtailed by physical limitations. We cannot sustain infinite human growth and prosperity forever and everywhere. Every week there is another article warning about the rise of the oceans, or the extinction of honey bees or the deterioration of our water systems. Social dysfunction here in America is rampant, yet almost all of my left-eye dominant brothers get distracted to being concerned about other countries, like the Kony 2012 guy, or about drone and robotic welfare like my dear friend from The Nation, Eric Stoner. Somehow the pattern to care about worldly disorder rather than our own neighborhoods was established in our country and it continues today. Not surprisingly, the Catholic Church sustains itself by twisting our American emotions in anguish over the deplorable state of conditions in other parts of the world. Most of us have seen emotional commercials about children in Africa. We are encouraged to send our money to some organization that profits off of our emotion, distracts us from caring about each other and does practically nothing in the grand scheme of things. Nature selected our left-eye dominant types to ensure survival communication between the genders so that the “invisible government” guides us toward happiness, satisfaction and consequently survival. That’s right, when we feel happiness and satisfaction it is not only good because it feels good. It is good because it means we are acting in ways that will ensure our own survival. When we are angry or emotionally distraught or sad, our survival is at stake. We must always seek to interpret our emotions through this prism.

                On the day of my writing this, the news headlines included the story of immigration reform pursued by some tech leaders, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Microsoft’s Bill Gates. All of these leading tech executives want to grant more immigrants H-1B visas so that their firms can recruit more talent from around the world. This is an example of the globalization spirit. Competition is good, until a point. What sort of a father lets his own children starve because a neighbor’s children are more gifted? Yet this is the logic of making money. It is NOT the logic of survival. Survival means lineage, family, history and pride. Money logic means abandonment, false friendships, empty illogical displays of charity and self-indulgence.

                Bill Gates has a track record of world-activism. His Bill and Melinda Gates foundation believes that “every person deserves the chance to live a healthy, productive life,” according to his website. This no doubt includes, a healthy re-productive life…since reproduction is a natural part of life. The foundation has an endowment of over $30 billion to combat global poverty, including improvements to education and health care in countries as remote as Africa. It all sounds wonderful, and it’s very hard to argue against without coming across as a scrooge, but while Bill and Melinda Gates may presume to care about the entire world they have forgotten the under-achieving ghettos of America. They have turned their backs on the struggling communities in the Rust Belt. They have walked away from the no-win political situations that fracture and threaten to destroy America. The dire poverty in states like Kentucky, West Virginia and Mississippi, a state I once poked fun at, doesn’t really count to Bill and Melinda Gates, who have outsourced their compassion. For WHAT? This is what the Catholic Church taught. Be a saint for the world and live in eternal reward, except that there will be no eternity for humans if we continue our march toward world-wide suicide, billions dying terrifying, chaotic, painful deaths. Thanks Bill and Melinda.

                Right now we are carried into the future by a babble of emotional sales-pitches coming at our women—the world’s women—from every angle, and almost every time there is a money-making scheme connected to the emotional sales pitch. These invisible governors drive us into the future, but there exists no proof of any logical central planning to their actions, other than the acquisition of material wealth and power. The exit strategy from madness must include extreme concessions to wealth holders who currently harness both “invisible” and world governments. THEY must change their logic and see that it is in their own children’s interest to avoid world-wide suicide. Human survival cannot be achieved without their cooperation. At the same time, their logic must pass forever. A future world still has class differences and workload differences, yet the human population is managed and contained and is dramatically decreased from 6 billion. We can get there without terror, fear, chaos, pain and destruction, but we must work TOGETHER.

                The days passed slowly after I got back to work in New Mexico. I worked with Heather Hardin, the national office, my office manager and my canvassers to continue improving our performance. By May 27, the Tuesday I returned to work, our office had recruited 18,000 new members. Decent chunks of the master street map of Albuquerque were blacked out, already canvassed by our office.

                My patterns were fairly well established by this point in the calendar year. I woke up each morning and made espresso and oatmeal. I walked to work across the street from my apartment across the lawns of the buildings in between my apartment and work. I gassed up the vans, filed my reports with the national office, met with my office manager, conducted interviews, read the news and went to Gold’s Gym in my spare afternoons or sometimes before work.

                I started listening to country music after I got back from my New England trip with Becky. I used to listen to country music in the bagel bakery I worked at in Middlebury, Vermont. I didn’t care for it much at first but it grew on me. After I got back from New England, I was homesick and I connected Becky with the country life that I missed.  

                Later in the week a letter arrived from my dad. It had a picture of Becky and I, taken at the Clarendon Gorge. My arm was wrapped around Becky’s shoulder. I taped the picture up to my computer. Becky and I kept in touch. I made a music CD for Becky.

                On June 3^rd I attended a Democratic rally downtown. The Republican primaries took place that day and Democrats were assembled to watch the votes get counted when the ballots closed. I caught up with leaders from the union, the Democratic candidate from first district, the chairman of the Democratic Party and a couple of directors who were also running door-to-door campaigns. My labor boss, Christine Trujilio was there. Suddenly my phone rang. It was Becky. I found a remote seat where I could hear her and we talked for a while. She told me that she had spent the previous night with her friends in Florida. She said they had talked about a wide range of issues including sex. “I’m kind of a nymph,” Becky admitted to me, but she didn’t divulge the details of her conversation with her girlfriends about sex. She simply told me that everybody was sharing and it was reminding her of Chris. She said she had experienced a whole range of emotions from laughter to crying. She told me that she went out on a river with some friends and that they went swimming in water that had alligators in it. I cringed, fearing for her safety.

                Chasing the Sun would be the Facebook title of the album Becky would create of her cross country travels. As far as I knew Becky was an untraveled small town girl who was very oriented toward family and who had only dated one man whom she married and recently lost. I kept in touch with her as she left home for Pittsburgh.

                Becky traveled next to Chicago. Her plan was to stay at KOAs at each stop as she traveled across the country. From Chicago she traveled on to South Dakota. These were the first Facebook pictures that I saw: photographs of the Badlands. My heart was in my throat as Becky traveled alone and away from her home and everyone she knew out East.

                Becky arrived next in Wyoming where she posted photos of bison in the road. On Sunday morning I got a voicemail from Becky saying she was getting close to Glacier National Park and she was probably going to run out of cell phone service. I gave her a call Saturday night but only got voicemail, and I didn’t leave a message, later Becky would tell me that I should have left a message. That night I felt an erotic stimulation regarding Becky. It was like a wave hit me. Something had happened that night and for the first time in my life I was aware that I might be feeling or sensing experiences through another person in real time. Not possible right? Birds can change flight in an instant. Penguins can repeat a march of survival. Nature’s complexities and still-hidden mysteries surround us. We don’t know what we don’t know. Perhaps when two people share as much personality ID as Becky and I did in emails, texts and phone conversations, our brains can map the pattern, predict the trajectory and experience events our minds anticipate as likely to happen based on brain algebra we don’t fully understand. We call it spirituality and understand it as experiencing or sensing one another from far apart. I believe these same equations take place every time two or more humans cross paths and interact. The algebra informs people to conclude, “He’s a phony” or “He’s superior to me, I’m going to appease him” or “Yep, that’s fucking Buzzy.” Maybe I’m a late-comer to describing the experience of connecting with someone spiritually because Becky was the first living human to wake up this consideration in me. She brought things down to the tangible, physical, empirical, instinctive level. She was guided by unique core philosophies.

                On July 15, 2005, I was invited to go for a car ride by a man I knew from work at the Montpelier Bridge. I don’t know why he invited me, but I accepted because I was three years sober and AA taught me to make male friendships without homophobic fears. I still feared the motives of older guys, but I forced myself to go because it appeared to be therapeutic: I felt good after it was over. We drove up past Stowe on Scenic 108 through the gap, passing under thin low clouds that looked like ribs or a series of archways over the car. I sat there and felt nothing. We turned around and drove back. I can’t even remember the pointless conversation we had. That was the first morning my brother wasn’t alive anymore.

                Becky finally called on Tuesday morning, she was full of sadness and she told me she felt like crying because it was the first place she felt like she could spend some real time. She and Chris always wanted to go to Glacier National Park. Becky was considering doing her residency in Montana.

                By the time I walked out of work early on Tuesday, I couldn’t wait to hit the road. I packed up my car Monday night and left Albuquerque driving North on Interstate 40 around 3:30 PM. I was driving my father’s Saab with my mountain bike on the roof rack. I had the windows rolled down. It was two lanes of Interstate traffic on gray asphalt under the blaze of a hot sun on a dry June 17. I picked driving to Gallup then north on 491 on Mapquest, I usually drove up 550 to visit Durango. When I pulled of Interstate 40 in Gallup I was amused to see that Route 491 was the Old Route 666.

                My father’s Saab felt nimble and comfy on the Old Route 666. I traveled North through flat desert land dotted occasional every green shrubs not taller than waist-high. The land had a pinkish hue to it and it was barren of trees. As I neared the town of Shiprock, I saw the massive Shiprock formation towering over the flat prairie around it like a massive stone cathedral to the west of Route 491.

                 I arrived in Cortez Colorado and stopped at a Sinclair as the sun had just set, and a nearly full moon was lighting up the sky over mountains in the Southeast. I continued driving North as the sky got dark. As I neared Moab, I called Becky and asked her where she was, she told me she was at a bar on Route 191. I found the bar and pulled into a small parking next to the bar. I saw her blue Honda Civic with Vermont license plates. I had butterflies in my stomach. I texted Becky to let her know I was there. I got out of the car and walked around to the front of the building. Just as I was approaching the steps up to the door Becky came bursting out the doors with the full sound of music trailing her. She had a big grin on her face and we said “Hi” and hugged.

                “Where do you want to go?” Becky asked.

                “Where are you going?” I asked her back as she started leading me back to the sidewalk.

                “I want to go somewhere else.”

                “Let’s get dinner here,” I said.

                “I was just talking to a guy in there and we just finished up our conversation. I don’t want to go back in and be rude.” A red flag went up, but I automatically started to follow her back down the sidewalk toward the parking lot and then thought twice.

                “What are you talking about? This place probably has food.”

                “Come on,” Becky said.

                “Who were you talking to?”

                “I don’t know. He was a biologist. He’s doing some interesting research.”

                “Well let’s go talk to him,” I said.

                “No, I already said ‘Goodbye’ to him,” Becky said. “Let’s go.”

                I paused and reluctantly decided to follow Becky. I didn’t let go of motives easily because as an unconsciously self-appointed psychological scientist from an early I age, I liked gathering as much information as possible. I stored all the relevant data from all the conversations I had. I don’t remember all the content of all the conversations I’ve had, but my mind has learned how to sort out fact from fiction, understands average responses and motives, it notices when anything seems amiss and circles back inevitably to answer, “why?” I’m not unique in having a mind that works like this, but to use Bernay’s words, I’m among the “trifling fraction” of men who use a problem-solving mind on human emotion and psychology. It is like I innately understood that emotion falls as much into the laws of physics as auto repair and construction. If I wasn’t exposed to a massive volume of literature, narratives, music and written word combined with leading a life that felt like it was missing crucial things, I may have never seen the patterns that URGED me to investigate further. I may have used my problem-solving mind on other problems. If I wasn’t born middle-class to two successful parents, I would not have had the time to immerse myself in the study of psychology in college. I would not have been carried during the several unemployed periods of my life, including their support during my unpaid internships. Their support gave me the freedom to come up with theories, test them, see them fail, challenge them and come up with new theories.

                 I developed at least as many theories as the years of my life. There was a time when I wanted to be Jack Kerouac, on the road and capturing every last detail about the most eccentric people I met for a book. I wanted to be Steinbeck, following the oppressed. In each new manifestation of my understanding for how human physics was supposed to work (a supposition that implies IT’S NOT WORKING THE RIGHT WAY RIGHT NOW) I attached Godly righteous purpose, as though there could be no other way but helping the poor and oppressed—when that was my theory. At THAT time in my life I was fooled, as many Kerouacs, McCandless’s and other spirited writers are, by the volume of emotional evidence in my personal experiences, in books, movies and music suggesting that a callous ruthless immoral bad guy was on the wrong side of history compared to genuine, laughing, hard-working guy. My help-the-oppressed theory has worn away imperceptibly and, in short bursts, dramatically over the past four years, but my current theory is starkly different than the one four years ago. The emotional evidence informing the earlier theory never disappeared. It did change in significance and relevance as I accepted new evidence from perspectives I had not considered before, and I will get to all of this later.

                As I followed Becky back to the cars all of my alarm sirens were going off. It is a physics equation, okay? The words come in through our ear drums and the body language comes in through the eyes and this sense input into our brains meets the database of information we already have and produces an instant response of equation outputs triggering the nervous system (sick stomach, racing heart, tingles) and triggering emotions that correlate with those physical symptoms that alert us to what we JUST FIGURED OUT before we can even articulate it. In this case I knew something could be wrong. Becky was keeping doors closed between myself and a man who my brain IMMEDIATELY identified as competition. On the other hand I IMMEDIATELY understood she was assertive of herself and honest. She could have lied. This is the type of data I compile that informs me of the degree of respect and admiration I have for the people in my life. Each person has their own file with notable characteristics and achievements. The honest always live in the highest tiers of my respect. In respect to Becky’s confidence and her honesty with me the trumpets of admiration were going off. So Becky could make the alarms and the trumpets go off simultaneously. When a girl makes the alarms and the trumpets go off, the chase is on.

                “Why don’t you want me to see him.”

                “I already told you—”

                “Okay. Okay. Okay. I feel really nervous seeing you.”

                Becky walked with me for a bit. She looked at me and gave me a nudge and stopped me. “Nervous? Why nervous?” She got in front of my face and nudged me again, getting my eye contact.

                “I don’t know, but it’s really good to see you.” I opened my arms up and embraced Becky again. “Okay, have you eaten? Where do you want to go to eat?”

                “I’m fine with dinner, but I might want to get a drink if that’s okay with you.”

                “Yeah, of course,” I said.

                “I’ll follow you,” Becky said, pointing a finger at me to double check.

                “Sure.”

                We got into our cars and started driving around looking for a place to eat. We drove up 191 through Moab. I looked right and left for a restaurant but everything looked closed. My phone started ringing in the ringtone that I had set for Becky, which was Sunset Road, by Bela Fleck. I pulled the glowing little device out of my pocket and answered.

                “I’m not seeing anything,” Becky said.

                “Yeah I know,” I sighed. “Oh look there’s a place.”

                “Oh, I see it,” Becky said. We hung up and parked. Moab was pretty dead on a Tuesday night at 10:30 PM. The lights above the windows looked inviting but the restaurant was closed. We sauntered around outside. “I don’t know what to tell you,” Becky said.

                “I’m fine without dinner. You want to just go back to the campsite?” I asked. 

                Becky agreed with that plan and we got back into our cars and drove South on 191 back through Moab to the KOA where Becky had set up camp. I followed Becky’s car around the twisting path that led between cars and campsites out to the one at which she had set up her tent. I got out of the car into the cool night air. I was still miffed by the explanation I got for why we didn’t have dinner at the first bar where Becky was talking to the biologist. We talked for a little while and Becky probably picked up on my signals of frustration. I resolved to cuddle her giving up to the moment and the fact that we were sleeping next to one another in a tent and she was the girl I had thought for weeks about, looking forward to seeing her again for days.

                In the morning we woke up and took down the tent site. Before we had picked up everything, Becky started showing me pictures from Wyoming and Montana which she had taken with a film camera and had developed. I looked at the pictures of Wyoming: pine trees, grass lands, bison and mountains.

                I got to the pictures of Montana. I saw mountains towering above lakes.

                “This is a picture of a waterfall I went out to on the first morning. I told you about the guys I hung out with, right?” Becky asked. I felt my alarms go off again.

                “No.”

                “Well, when I was at this waterfall, I saw these guys running down the waterfall from up above and I took a picture of them. And I went over to go show them the picture, and it turned out that all three of them worked at the lodge there for the summer. So we hung out. This is us playing soccer.” Becky showed a picture that was taken in late afternoon in a parking lot. The figures playing soccer were darker than the rim of light over the mountains in the sky behind them.

                Becky was going through the pictures like a deck of cards, stacking each shown photo at the back of the pile of photos. She flipped pictures to reveal a photo of her hanging out with the boys she met. My stomach turned over again. Becky looked slightly intoxicated like she looked in some of the photos she had sent him while they were emailing. Her face was red and she was wearing her big Cheshire grin and standing over the shoulder of one of the three boys. There were beer bottles on the table in front of her.

                “Are these the boys you were hanging out with?” I asked.

                Becky nodded. My heart was thumping.

                “Were you drunk?”

                “Um I don’t think so,” Becky replied.

                “Becky, this reminds me of the types of girls who drink and they do whatever they want when they are drunk. I can’t believe you were hanging out and drinking with them. You just met them.” I realized I was arguing with Becky again, and the trip had only begun. I did not want to be arguing. I felt strongly connected to Becky through the many hours of email and communication over the phone together. My attention drifted away from the photos. I stopped speaking about my frustrations and resumed packing up our stuff.  I let Becky see that I was upset, but I also showed her my determination to let it go. “Let’s go get some breakfast.”

                We packed up the two cars and drove downtown and ate at a café. The café sold bagels and I bought breakfast. We ate outside on a patio among two older couples and ate listening to music on a speaker outside. The air was cool but dry.  

                After we finished breakfast, we left the café and crossed the street to a tourist information hut. A man with glasses and a green vest sat behind the counter reading. I walked around looking at the maps, but my eyes were seeing nothing. Becky slowed to a pause and looked at a map of Arches National Park.

                “The mountain bike park is called Slick Rock,” I said.

                “Well, what if we head out here this afternoon?” Becky asked, pointing to the map in her hand.

                I came over to where she was standing and looked at the map. “I’m fine with that,” I said.

                I went back to looking around the tourist info hut. Becky picked up the map of Arches and walked up to the counter. I saw her going toward the counter and decided to follow and get one step ahead of her and show her how outgoing I could be, too.              

                “We’re looking for directions on how to get to Slick Rock,” I said.

                The man wearing spectacles and the green vest looked up from what he was reading and past me over at a rack I had walked passed. “There are maps over there,” he said and pointed. We bought the map to Arches and a local map to Slick Rock and got back in our cars and drove over to Slick Rock.

                We got lathered up in sun tan lotion. Becky’s hair was tied up and she wore white sneakers and blue mesh shorts, leaving little to conceal her tan athletic legs from just above her knees down to her ankles. Every curve of her legs signaled athleticism, power and grace.

                I pulled my carbon framed Gary Fischer Super Fly off my father’s Saab and started pedaling around the parking lot. Becky was biking on her sister’s bike that she borrowed and packed up into her little blue Honda Civic. It was considerably older and heavier than mine. She worked on unpacking that from the car and putting on sun tan lotion.

                We mountain biked a loop on Slick Rock, which was a loop of flat rock with painted on navigation lines for mountain bikers. It derived its name from early settlers because the rock was slick under horse hooves wearing metal shoes. The trail loops around in ways that force the mountain biker to lean their bikes at angles.

                We finished our bike ride and drove out to a stream coming out of the pink rock ridge on the East side of town. It was blazing hot. We found shade by the water and sat and talked for a while. Then we decided to leave Becky’s car and go for a drive in my car to explore. “Finally,” she said, “I get to ride in the same car as you.” She had a way of looking eagerly at me and smiling when she spoke that made me feel special and excited to be around her.

                In the afternoon we drove up to Arches National Park. The entrance from Route 191 looked intimidating, the road leading snaked alongside a massive wall of pink cliffs. As we drove into the park we drove past several formations, including the Three Gossips, The Courthouse Towers, The Organ and the Tower of Babel. The first spot we stopped was Balanced Rock, a massive egg shaped rock perched precariously on top of its stone base. We followed the crowds around the base of the rock, taking pictures. We next drove to into the Windows Section of Arches, past the Garden of Eden. We parked the car again and walked the trail around North Window and South Window. Becky took a picture of a large group of people holding hands underneath the North Arch, linking from one side to the other. Someone took a picture of Becky and I standing together. After we got back in the car I got really tired. Becky had bought some beef jerky and Gatorade. She was driving and I was ready to go home, but she kept the heat on me go with her for one more hike. We had the option of driving to Delicate Arch or going to the Devil’s Garden, where there were more arches. Becky took me to the Devil’s Garden.

                We parked at the trail head and I managed to get myself out of the car and follow Becky down the trail. Tourists were going the same direction as we were and others were returning from the path. The first arches we saw were the Pine Tree Arch and the Tunnel Arch. We kept following the trail until we got to Landscape Arch, an impressive span, nearly half the length of a football field. The arch was very thin in one spot. There was a sign describing Landscape Arch by the trail. It said that a section of the arch had nearly fell on someone a while ago. But the arch remained intact.

                “I want to walk across it,” Becky said.

                “What? Wouldn’t you be worried it would give out?” I asked, looking at the thin section of the arch and imagining it buckling under the weight of a human.

                “No,” Becky shrugged. “I’d do it.” Here Becky and I stood in the Devil’s Garden, no Devil was inviting Becky to take the risk, but she was compelled by her own nature or nurture to take risks.

                We toured the rest of the arches on the Devil’s Garden trail, walking side by side, our flip flops between our feet and the sandy trail. I carried a water bottle along that I never drank out of once on the hike, but the hike woke me back up. We got back to the car around 6:30 and drove out of the park again. I’d survived the Devil’s Garden…or had I?

                We went out for dinner then got back to my car and got ready to go. The day was getting late and we had almost three hours to drive before we got to Telluride. Becky was going to follow me. We followed Route 191 South going out of town and after about 20 miles, turned East on Route 46. I pulled over near the Colorado border and Becky followed me and I gave her a mix CD. We kept driving and Becky called me a little while later and asked me, “How did you know Rain King was my favorite County Crows song?”

                “You like it?”

                “I love it, I have an acoustic version that they do of that song, it’s so good.”

                The terrain had changed from flat and pink to more hills and pines. Route 46 changed to Route 90 at the Colorado border, which we crossed a little while after sunset. It was getting dark as I followed Route 90 North before it turned back to the Southeast for its long straight stretch toward Naturita. I looked East on this stretch and noticed a huge full moon cresting above the mountains in the East and I pulled off again. Becky followed me again and we got out of our cars.

                “Wow, look at that,” I said. Becky looked at the moon, her eyes were squinting a little, as though pulled together to contemplate something more than the moon rise. I led her up to the hood of my car and sat down and invited her to lean back on me. She did, without saying a word or expressing any kind of surprise or appreciation for the sight. She was wearing a green zip up sweatshirt with the word “Love” stitched on. “I just want to freeze this moment and remember it for the rest of my life,” I told her. Becky breathed deeply and leaned her head against me, but she remained quiet and the flat expression of her mouth told me that something was churning inside her. I smelled her, I breathed, I looked at her clothes and felt her body against mine. I looked at the moon and tried to will it to stop, but it was so low and so big, I could see it move as it finished emerging behind the bank of land to the East, as it separated from the horizon. I keenly felt time slipping away and the longing to hold it still.

                We eventually got back in our cars, although I was sure now that Becky’s heart was gone to someplace else. We drove for another hour and a half before we reached Norwood, Colorado. As we made our way through the town, I caught glimpses of the mountains we were driving towards under bright clouds and the moonlight. After we passed Norwood Becky’s car started lagging behind. The road began following a river through a well carved canyon. I could see glimpses of the rapids in the moonlight. Becky struggled to keep up. She was tired. Finally I saw a sign for National Forrest pointing toward Fall Creek Road. I pulled off Route 145 and followed the road. There was a sign for campsites and I followed a winding dirt road, Becky’s car behind me. We drove for another impossibly long ten minutes until we reached campsites. I set up camp quickly and Becky and I crashed out, cuddled up together.

                The next morning I woke up first and early, and I took a walk around the campsite. We were the only ones up there. There were lots of Aspen trees and the campsite sat on the side of a hill. Eventually I walked back to camp and started making coffee and breakfast. Becky woke up before long and we talked and ate and cooperated. We decided to go mountain biking before we went to Telluride for the bluegrass festival. On our drive down from our campsite in my Saab we stopped at a stream at Becky’s suggestion. She had her shampoos and soaps in my car and we bathed in that stream. Becky could make herself look absolutely gorgeous just washing off in a stream.

                As Becky and I drove up toward Telluride we talked, but as we got close to where we were going to mountain bike, I noticed bruises on her knees. “How did you get those bruises on your knees?” I asked.

                Becky opened her mouth and looked at me but didn’t respond. I looked into her eyes with a hurt look in my own eyes and again, something clicked before I could put it together. Becky couldn’t answer the question, “Why?” despite her previously flowing conversation. The empty space when I asked for an answer led me to fill in the blanks: it was from having sex in her tent in Montana on hard ground. Or was it? I’ll never know for sure, but the look in her eyes and the lack of answer set me off again into a dark place. I shook my head and kept driving. As we biked that morning, I didn’t wait for her and I was short with her at every opportunity. I wanted to know the truth. I wanted to erase the last week and I wanted to have left her a voicemail when I called her in Montana on her first night. It was beginning to look as though things had gotten away from me, and I could not get them back. After being an asshole for 30 minutes of our bike ride, I caught myself and talked myself out of it. I told myself to back off and be a better companion. I also hoped it would pay off and she would see that I was forgiving and earn a little respect for me.

                We drove our bikes back to our campsite, made lunch, then drove to the festival. We parked in Mountain Village on the other side of the Telluride Mountain and took a gondola into downtown Telluride. We entered the gates to the Telluride Bluegrass Festival Thursday afternoon wearing light clothes and backpacks. We got through the ticket lines and security and found a spot to set up our stuff and watch the music. I don’t remember the whole Bluegrass Festival, and it wasn’t because I was partying too hard. I was still sober in 2008, six years. I do remember notables about the four days.

                The festival is held annually the third week of June in Town Park. For four majestic days, Town Park is converted into a sprawling outdoor music theatre with the stage backed up against pine trees at the base of a steep mountainside. Telluride sits in a box canyon. Its main street with a clock tower and surrounding houses look like it was all built for an 1880s railroad film based in the bottom of a bathtub of mountains. Telluride is a relic of the mining days in Colorado. Ruins of mining operations dot the canyon.

                One of the afternoons we were watching Ani DiFranco play and Becky told me that she used to listen to Ani all the time when she was growing up. I pictured Becky as a high school student listening to a variety of music and settling on the music she liked based on the way it impacted her mind. Her MIND. I always saw people as MIND’S more than for their physical attributes. I saw Becky’s hard at work in high school, selecting, deciding and becoming the beautiful 23 year old I was hanging out with, but I understood it from the day-in day-out operation of her mind, which was SO talented and complex. Becky told me at the beginning of DiFranco’s set that one of her favorite DiFranco songs was “Little Plastic Castle.” Becky sang me the lyrics, “And they say, “goldfish have no memory” I guess their lives are much like mine and the little plastic castle is a surprise every time.” She smiled at me after she finished singing and laughed. Later DiFranco started playing a new song and Becky asked me, “Remember how I said I liked that song about the goldfish? This is it.”

                There was a little roped off section devoted to hoola-hooping. I believe it was Friday that Becky tried out hoola-hooping. She was wearing this white outfit and a headband. She looked so incredible. She nearly almost had a smile that could melt a granite statue and she always tied up and fastened her hair in a way that sharpened her athletic looks. I remember that she and I brought along a soccer ball and found a little field to kick it around in. A couple of kids joined us and we paired off into teams: me and a kid and Becky and a kid. I got competitive with Becky for the soccer ball but she was a better player.

                I remember that we were playing soccer in this field when Bret Dennon started playing in the afternoon and Becky asked me if I remembered how she was talking about Bret Dennon and that this was him. I remember hearing Bruce Hornsby play at night, playing “That’s Just the Way it Is” and “Mandolin Rain.” Even these songs add to the collection of evidence of the similarity of human emotion from one mind to another: “The song came and went, like the times that we spent hiding out from the rain in the carnival tent. I laughed and she’d smile, it would last for a while you don’t know what you got til you lose it all again.” And: “That’s just the way it is, some things will never change, that’s just the way it is, but don’t you believe them.”

                I remember walking to all the booths around the perimeter of the festival, where they were selling food, clothes, hemp accessories, jewelry and other merchandise. Becky got a beer and wanted to get gifts for her sisters. Becky’s closest sister was her second-oldest sister Betsy, whom Becky called Bets for short. Becky told me that Bets would enjoy the festival and that she wanted to bring her sometime. We sat with our belongings and listened to the music and I asked her about Bets. She told me about how she remembered riding in the car with Bets and her husband Dan when they were in high school, letting Becky tag along. She said she could see how much they cared about one another. She told me that he did graphic design and I asked who he worked for. She ticked off a few recognizable corporation names and I expressed dismay and revulsion to some of the corporations she named. I suddenly saw a defensive side of Becky. “Well that’s how he supports his family,” she said sternly. Her strong words made me reconsider my own opinion and admire Becky even more for her defensiveness about her extended family.

                I remember that one night after the music was over, Becky and I waited in line for the gondola in the dark with dozens of other “festivarians” and got back to the car. Becky had had a few to drink and she quickly dozed off in the car on the way back to the campsite. I remember looking at her next to me, asleep as I navigated the two lane road, a steep embankment of rocks formed a virtual wall on the passenger’s side of my car as I traveled West-Northwest along Route 145. I thought to myself, I’m carrying the most important cargo I’ve ever carried; her life is in my hands and I will take good care of her. On another night after the music was over, I remember singing songs with Becky and kicking the soccer ball around as we waited on line for the gondola. One night after we had got back to the tent Becky was noticeably intoxicated and she urged me to, “Just rub your cock on my pussy.” I resisted. We never had sex. Something inside me recorded what she said and admitted it was another piece of evidence. I could see Becky saying that to any man she was intoxicated with, anywhere. It helped make me doubt her claim to have only been with one man.

                I remember going for a mountain bike ride with Becky up toward Bridal Veil Falls on the East end of the box canyon. We walked through downtown Telluride and Becky took me to an ice cream shop and told me that going out for ice cream was something she used to do with Chris. We went to see Bela Fleck and Abigail Washburn play in a small park in downtown Telluride. My handle on Fitness Singles, the website I met Becky on, was BootsBooksandBela. Bela Fleck invited suggestions for a song to play and I shouted out “Open Country.” I meant “Big Country and another audience member shouted out “Big Country.” Bela played the song. Big Country is a song that opens the doors on the country for me as though the whole world is a Colorado sunset or moonrise over empty beautiful land…as it begins it inspires me with the hope of promise and possibility. As it continues it sweeps me into the every going motion of life and into that great big open that my Kerouac heart still yearns for, even with the sober maturity that life has forced on to my conscious.

                I remember laying with Becky in our tent one late morning after we had gone back in to fool around and telling her, “I love you.” The words came out of my mouth the instant I felt and thought them. I wanted to take them back before Becky was even done comprehending what I had just said. She seemed slightly alarmed and said, “And when I feel the same way about you, I’ll say I love you, too.” I remember playing guitar for Becky by candle light at our campsite in the mountains. I played the Nickel Creek song, “When You Come Back Down.” The lyrics, more EVIDENCE of the patterns of human emotion, go: “You’ve got to leave me now, you got to go alone, you got to chase your dream, one that’s all your own, before it slips away. When you’re flying high, take my heart along, I’ll be the harmony to every lonely song that you learn to play. When you’re soaring through the air, I’ll be your solid ground. Take every chance you dare, I’ll still be there, when you come back down, when you come back down.”  We sat there on the wooden picnic table with a candle burning between us. My guitar was blue, I’d carried it with me since living in Fort Collins, CO. I bought it when my brother was still alive. More of the lyrics: “I’ll keep looking up, awaiting your return. My greatest fear will be, that you will crash and burn and I won’t feel your fire. Ill be the other hand that always holds the line, connecting in between your sweet heart and mine. I’m strung out on the wire. And I’ll be on the other end, to hear you when you call. Angel you were born to fly and if you get too high, I’ll catch you when you fall. Catch you when you fall. Your memory is the sunshine every new day brings.  I know the sky is calling angel let me help you with your wings.”

                On Sunday I remember that my fears and doubts compelled me to sit down with Becky at a table near the gondola and we talked seriously. Becky told me that things shouldn’t “be this hard in the beginning.” I was begging for her promise that everything would work out. Becky told me, “Keep your chin up.” I asked her if things had ever been certain for her and Chris. “No,” Becky said. “Before I even think about boyfriend, I think of a guy who can be himself around my parents and be a friend first.”

                I tried to imagine being around her father and mother. I wanted friends and family. I wanted a tribe. Tied up into my infatuation with Becky was a desire to become part of the tribe of her family, but I didn’t realize it at the time. I later understood that Becky was communicating all of the right information (5-15 percent words, 85-95 percent body language) into my brain and my psychology and motivation changed as instantly as her impact on me. Remember, ladies: the right group of men is like an incredibly powerful engine for your survival. You, with the blessing of the internet, may now share that responsibility around the world and successfully steer us away from world-suicide.

                You probably know how to put your foot on the gas and make men take off like a car for you. You probably also know how to put on the brakes. There is a physics equation guaranteeing that if you hold the desire of a man and you keep him starving until he pays in action (not money) he will change and WORK for you. Got that? Not every woman can bring a powerful executive in the energy industry or a politician to his knees. Women need to cooperate to starve and also reward the right men. You women need to drive the whole world, communicating as a world-wide team. It’s not wise to pit one man against another in your personal games. It’s a world-wide real life situation and we need calm and cooperation.

                Becky was bigger than getting revenge and holding grudges and her behavior is a model that every woman should follow. Word gets around. Women see right and wrong; worth and unworthy. In that web of communication, justice for women is resolved, not always the way men expect, but women innately have a problem with liars, cheaters and scumbags. Women also have the infinite resource of every man’s hopes for her favors. Men are always willing to try to prove that they have more of what it takes to win a woman’s favors. Women must keep telling them in words and actions that what it takes is honesty, loyalty, duty, humility, sacrifice and obedience.

                You women have probably played games in your own circle of friends. Now your circle of friends is international and this game is LIVE and you are responsible for organizing the right world-wide team of men together to peacefully reverse growth of the human population and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 75 percent immediately. This means that all around the world, in every country, we men have to accept the logic of sacrifice so that survival is possible. You women are steering human history. HER story. YOU have more time to think constructively about the NAVIGATION of human events than men do. You communicate better. You know how to catch men if they don’t cooperate, how to end their careers or their reputations, and you’ve got good reason to do it if they take their orders from somewhere else, like modern Republicans. They don’t take orders from the survival tribe of women because it doesn’t yet exist.

                You want “Yes mam, no mam” men in political and judicial office. You want to own media, celebrities, every arm of law enforcement, the world’s leading militaries, utility and energy companies. You want all of the babblers in advertising, religion and politics to SHUT UP and stop emanating physics equations that manipulate your fellow women toward chaos, babble, fear, terror and world-suicide. When they don’t shut up, you use your network to put the heat on the actors spreading an emotional message. You use your WIT to discredit and defuse ROGUE emotional appeals that emanate from profit-seeking individuals. If the survival tribe of women was as silent and patient as Becky, they would be able to spot and trace the root of every ripple of emotional appeal and manipulation they sense and quiet it…and another and another…until the entire world is quiet of profit-motivated emotional appeal. From out the mind of every actor who launches an emotional appeal, there leaves a trail back to his or her motivation. Emotional manipulation should be for the survival tribe of women and nothing else. Now the tribe of women speaks with not just ten heads, but hundreds of millions of heads and they guide human navigation. Survival and the reduction of the human population and waste is achieved peacefully.

                Accept and use sexual motivation to drive the chosen tribe of men (around the world) into your designs. Enough of the hysteria about sex caused by the Catholic Church which still attempts to play a GAME with human history. Our genetic sexual motivations and their survival implications speak louder than a Catholic Church, which has tolerated thousands of cases of child sexual abuse while preaching the damnation of homosexual sinners. Thousands of priests are better employed than hard-working men, and they do nothing but play the role of WOMEN all their lives. They attempt to OWN the emotions of women…which is, by the way, the ONLY way the church has ever held power. Think about it. They have no military power. The women go to the men. The Church won over women with bogus emotional appeals and the women kept their men in line for the Church. Advertising and news media have taken over the role of the Church. The Church won women over with all their pleas to help save the poor and the Holy Land. Advertising and news media specialize in playing emotional appeals for profit motives. Their profit motives are NOT more important than survival motives. None in the world have more authority than would a world-wide survival tribe of women.

                The profit-seeking manipulation of women’s emotions has been the guiding force of human history for at least the last two thousand years of Western history. Enough is enough. The only God women ought to be obeying is in their instincts for survival. THEY decide. Nature makes winners and losers. Women: break political alliances now. Break social rank patterns now. Break North or South alliances. Break national alliances. Break religious alliances. Target your energy on world militaries, world justice and political systems, world utility and energy corporations, world celebrities, and world athletes. Take over the job of every advertisement and emotional appeal that exists or destroy the false men who try to do your job for you. That’s YOUR department. TAKE IT BACK from professionals who manipulate it for profit. Take it back for survival.

                Coordinate with each other as you sift out the rubbage men you encounter in positions of power, communicating 10 times faster than these insignificant roadblocks to your survival could ever hope. Cast off the chains of thousands of years of a STUPID GAME that heretics played in the righteous name of God. Life is about survival. Spare me the platitudes and the indignation about this or that cause. Spare me the lecture about children in a country I’ve never heard of. Let the ones preaching about long lost causes go join their causes and give up their privileged lifestyles.              

                My brother took his own life, following the logic of the shame-filled emotionally predatory sermons about the poor and the needy and the aggrieved and oppressed while the preachers themselves lived high on the hog. I want to see celebrities in Hollywood get together with sexually coveted teenage girls from Mississippi; the princess of England to befriend a beautiful Irish rose and both embrace Middle Eastern princesses; Italian beauties befriending Chinese beauties and all of them communicating in one giant Central Intelligence Agency committed to human survival. Guide and instruct all the physics of kinetic energy driving ambitious women toward the top into survival, teaching them the way to use the sexual physics momentum that brings men toward them and achieve an organized GOAL. Sisters must teach sisters the POLITICAL power of their sexual behavior, the invisible government driving human history. We need to suspend resources going to losers, players and the arrogantly isolated and allocate all of the world’s young female sexual leaders for human survival.

                As Becky impacted me with the solid physics of her behavior, I didn’t have time to think about it and DECIDE on how to react. Because Becky was true to core personality traits that promote family, hard work, faith and a positive attitude, I immediately wanted to hold her and keep her. It took place within me according to its own physics. Women want to wake up this sleeping instinct in EVERY man and starve or reward him based on his demonstration of behavior. She needs a tribe of women who will work with her when she starves him.

                On Sunday night Becky and I had dinner together a couple of blocks from the gondola before I left. We sat across the table from one another. She ordered a beer. We ordered food. We talked and smiled and then we left and she said goodbye to me at the gondola. I watched her disappear as my gondola thudded off the slow track and onto the high speed cable. I wrote her a poem and left it on her car and then drove back to Albuquerque, everything in my body missed and loved the girl I was leaving behind.

                When I was in college I took an atmospheric sciences class. Our teacher was a young guy with a lot of energy who taught us about the jet streams and their relationship to weather patterns; how high pressure and low pressure create weather and how carbon dioxide threatens to obliterate the entire human population.

                As almost everybody now knows, carbon dioxide is a byproduct of the emissions when fossil fuel is burned for electricity or to power automobiles. In his movie, Al Gore used graphs and charts to demonstrate the relationship between rising levels of atmospheric CO2 and the earth’s temperatures. What Al Gore did not point out in his film Inconvenient Truth is that the world could become an inferno if we do not halt CO2 emissions immediately. My professor taught us about the potential for a positive feedback loop that could raise the earth’s surface temperature to 3000 degrees. The way it works is that CO2 traps solar heat, warming the atmosphere. As the atmosphere is warmed it can hold more water vapor, because warm air holds more water vapor and cold air sheds water vapor. Water vapor is also a heat-trapping gas. The more water vapor that the atmosphere holds, the more heat gets trapped. The warmer it gets because of this increase in heat trapping, the more water vapor the atmosphere can hold. The more water vapor the atmosphere can hold, the warmer the earth’s atmosphere becomes. This cycle could “loop” into disaster and get away from us humans before we have the power to stop or reverse it.

                Even if we stopped all CO2 emissions immediately, the earth’s atmosphere would continue to warm for the next 100 years, pushing us close to world-suicide. As of this writing, scientists have just recorded the concentration of CO2 passing the 400 parts per million mark.

                Moreover, the human population has become an infestation on the face of the planet. Gyres of plastic and trash are floating in the Pacific Oceans. Roads are clogged with human traffic. Human-produced trash is littered everywhere. The world’s oceans are being over-harvested. This beautiful blue and green emerald could sustain humans for hundreds of millions of years, but we are destroying it.

                This book doesn’t attempt to appeal to populist support for environmental defense. I appeal to the wealthiest billionaires and millionaires who want to leave their children a real inheritance. Right here, I’m shifting the target of my persuasion from women to men in power. I’ve encouraged women to unite and navigate human history using all the instincts and abilities that nature endowed women with. Now I turn my attention to the men who already wield industrial and military power. You will have nowhere near the success uniting yourselves as women will have uniting you. Nonetheless, I want you to focus on your children. The winning coalition for human survival includes world industries, world governments, world military and the laborers who grow your food for you: some of the highest ranked and some of the lowest ranked. Your target population is one billion. Either the entire human population dies in a world holocaust or you pull your shit together, stop focusing on the acquisition of money and start focusing on TEAMWORK for survival. It’s time to assemble a world-wide dream team of all the individuals who have the final say in law, government and industry. You must be willing to let all of the VIPs in the energy and utility industry to retain influence and the level of income they currently enjoy.

                I’m not calling for war as the Catholic Church has done in the past. I’m not calling for terror, fear and chaos. Using world-wide media, humans know how to lull the masses into peace and calm. Every channel will show hymns or stories of civic unity or tell the story of human survival from this point in history. News from other countries will go quiet. There will be no more stories that grip the human emotions of fear, like car accidents and shootings. Women will bring us all together and explain the rules: you do your best for a year, be your best person, be kind, be helpful and be selfless. Everyone has a chance to survive if they participate to the best of their ability in the game of survival: cutting CO2 emissions, leaving meagerly, not having children if it is not meant to be. The same rules go for advertisers, marketers, directors, actors and story tellers. We want the same calm, hopeful and inspirational narrative being told from every corner of the world.

                At the end of a year the women go gently to the men who did not make the cut, prepare him a final meal. If his heart is true to faith, loyalty, unity, sacrifice and courage, he will eat and sleep peacefully. If his mind is suspicious, jealous or untrusting, he will become a target for the police, who will also treat him gently after he is captured. All women will be spared who cooperate for survival.

                The next morning those who wake up will rush to see who is still with them. There will be sadness but also gratitude. The world media will continue playing hymns and stories of inspiration and sacrifice and we will know that all who survived the night stood as willing as the marines to make the ultimate sacrifice…not for “freedom” but for SURVIVAL.

               

                Becky called me on her drive back from Colorado. She told me she had met a girl from Lyons Colorado and she visited her there and visited Nederland Colorado, where I told her I had spent weekends writing and listening to Bela Fleck at a little coffee shop there. Sometimes I watched the snow fly outside the window as I wrote. My friend Dan Rose lived up there and I could always count on catching some good bluegrass whenever I visited.

                Becky and I had talked a little about the possibility of me going to Maine after the elections were over. I knew that the months were going to go slow. She called me again on her trip home. One of the songs on the mix CD that I gave her was “Radio Nowhere” by Bruce Springsteen. She told me she loved that song, she spoke some of the lyrics, “I just want to feel your rhythm.” She told me, “You are incredible.”

                Becky got home and moved from Connecticut up to Bangor with her mom and sister Bets for her first residency program in prosthetics and orthotics. She called me one day and told me that as they were checking out the apartment Becky wanted to rent her sister Bets asked a police officer how safe the neighborhood was and he advised her to live somewhere else. Becky told me she might have a guy friend from college live with her.

                Then I didn’t hear from Becky for what seemed like an eternity. I left voicemails that went unanswered. I wrote emails that weren’t returned. I decided to log back on to Fitness Singles for the first time in weeks. Two things happened. My profile was viewed by an extremely attractive member of Fitness Singles and shortly after (I compared time stamps) Becky wrote me an email characterized by frustration with her email and her phone. She vowed she would try to call soon. My instincts sensed a connection between the Fitness Singles member who randomly visited my profile and Becky’s email. I wrote to the Fitness Singles member as though she were Becky, pretending I didn’t suspect she was Becky and asked for advice relating to Becky. She never wrote back.

                While Becky briefly exhibited a panic to get back in touch with me, her demeanor just as quickly turned the other way. We communicated less frequently. She seemed to be drifting away. I wondered if logging into Fitness Singles had ultimately pushed her away.

                I kept writing to Becky, despite the odds. I wrote to her about every moment or news story that sparked my imagination. I tried to recreate events that I felt in words so that Becky could experience them the way I did. In the meantime, I continued to run our office and reach for our member goals. I also continued to read the Bible.

                The story of Abraham and Sarah is told in the twelfth chapter of Genesis. God promises Abraham to give the land of Canaan that would become Israel to Abraham’s children, and Abraham and Sarah go to Egypt because there is a famine. As Abraham and Sarah near Egypt, Abraham anticipates that Sarah’s beauty would cause the Egyptians to kill Abraham and take Sarah, so he asks her to pretend she is his sister so he will not be killed as her husband. Here we see evidence of a man who understands the physics equation between men and women…a man who is PRACTICAL. One could argue that Abraham is the first pimp in recorded history. All the three major religions regard him highly. The Pharaoh of Egypt takes Sarah as one of his wives and gives Abraham sheep, oxen, asses, servants and camels in return.

                Think about this. This is a story about a man who exploits the sexual appeal of his woman to make money. God plagues Egypt and the Pharaoh sends Abraham and Sarah away rich in cattle, silver and gold. Notice a pattern here? A drifter clings on to a society, markets human emotion (sex appeal) becomes rich and detaches from that society as easily as though he was never part of it. Sound like anything we’ve been studying?

                 In chapter 15 God visits Abraham in a dream and foreshadows the “captivity” of the Jews in Egypt. God says, “Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they (the Jews?) shall afflict them (the Egyptians?) four hundred years; And also that nation, whom they shall serve, will I judge (infecting the judicial system?): and afterward shall they come out with great substance.” It blows the mind to imagine that “God” in these stories might be a group of elites who had learned from experience how to market sexuality, emotional appeals and control justice systems to make money in a vibrant society, using the Jewish people to carry out a pattern. After the money is sucked out, they withdraw from their host, engorged like a tic by flipping off the sexual deviancy and self-centered appeals (Abraham whoring his wife) and flipping on messaging of righteousness, shame and guilt about wicked immoral behavior (DESTRUCTION OF SODOM AND GOMORRAH); in essence: JUDGING. One could imagine that near the end of their four hundred years of captivity in Egypt (roughly the same time span since the first colony in America) that someone like Betty Friedan advocated to put women in the proximity of men, who will always be governed strongly by sex and aggression. Smart idea: put men in proximity to women and pretend sexual attraction won’t interfere. One could imagine that a cooperative group passed laws like sexual harassment laws to ensnare any man who did not cooperate with the profit-making agenda, because women are easier to CONTROL with emotional manipulation, and to divide the women from the men.

                After they made all the profit they coveted, these elites could have said “You KNEW better” as they withdrew from their host, sparing the leader’s reputation and command with all the DIRT they had on him in return for a peaceful exit. These elites could have long known how to control women with persuasive, enticing arguments, to work for them as Abraham did with his wife. If “God” was this elite group, He showed the same ability to rouse up the spirit of Abraham to do their bidding as the Catholic Church showed rousing up Western Europeans for holy war. Like it was the same playbook and the same author turning one side against another. Imagine if every time Abraham or Moses or any of the characters in the Bible “talked to God” they were really talking to a representative from the tribe of elites watching history play out and profiting from their exploitation of human emotions at every opportunity: creating BABBLE everywhere they went.

                One aspect of the Jewish culture is encouragement of questions. Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks writes “Judaism believes that asking questions and welcoming questions is a necessary part of education and growth. It is no accident that parshat Bo, the section that deals with the culminating plagues and the exodus, should turn three times to the subject of children and the duty of parents to educate them. As Jews we believe that to defend a country you need an army, but to defend a civilization you need an education.”

                One can picture the children, who become adults asking, “Why? Why? Why?” One can imagine this culture that prizes asking questions existing among every society that the diaspora of Jews has existed among. One can imagine this spirit of asking questions leading to the educational colleges and the Renaissance Era in Western Europe. Indeed, Sacks writes, “The historian Paul Johnson once wrote that rabbinic Judaism was ‘an ancient and highly efficient social machine for the production of intellectuals.’ Much of that had, and still has, to do with the absolute priority Jews have always placed on education, schools, the bet midrash, religious study as an act even higher than prayer, learning as a lifelong engagement, and teaching as the highest vocation of the religious life.” No wonder Jews have to attach to various societies to sustain themselves. Not every poor farmer, “still cuddling up with his oxen to keep warm” can spend an entire life asking, “Why? Why? Why?” They have to fucking work to survive.

                One can imagine this culture of asking questions leading to the confusion that has followed the Jewish diaspora through the last two thousand years of Western civilization like a wake. It might be this culture of asking questions that has forced scientists and other revolutionary thinkers to prove their cases “beyond a reasonable doubt,” led to the institutions of “peer review” that have invariably bottled and suffocated new ideas by forcing new findings to be so convoluted and supported with citations, no lay-person has the time or stamina to learn; led to the “irresolvable” arguments that still consume our political institution, among them: guns, gays, God. It might be this vaunted culture of asking questions and pursuing a “life of education” that contributes to the “American Dream” society, or the “Tower to God” that the people of Babel tried to build before they were scattered into confusion.

                One can imagine this culture of asking questions led to the confusion about our human purpose on this earth. One could imagine asking, “Why do the Jews insist on remaining loyal to their own culture instead of all the societies to which they belong?” Or “Why do I see flags on synagogues that read, ‘When we stand, we stand with Israel?’” Almost every American is a relatively recent immigrant, yet we do not swear allegiance to Ireland, England, India or any of the countries we come from.” One could ask, “Why will some Jews call this book anti-Semitic, using EMOTIONAL manipulation to win their “argument,” instead of accepting that I don’t hate Jews, I’m just noticing patterns and raising questions.”

                Up until very recently we did not understand DNA. Up until just several hundred years ago, we did not understand physics. For thousands of years we’ve struggled to explain the impulses our body sends us and the emotions that we feel. One could argue that the culture of Judaism, with its vaunted questions that never end, helped accelerate human progress into the 21^st Century. Without the presence of someone or an entity forcing us to ask, “Why?” all the time, we might just carry on, following our instincts the way dogs do and reaping the biochemical rewards our bodies provide us when we follow our instincts and meet success. But we need to shut off the accelerators, slow the fuck down and avoid world-suicide.

                I know from knocking on thousands of doors and talking to thousands of people that humans have an instinct to be kind, even to a stranger. I am sure that it would have been no different 2000 years ago. Yet a society might be doing well for itself, following instincts, when suddenly there is stranger in the society; suddenly attached to the society. The stranger asks the women, who welcome him with kindness: “Aren’t these clothes and jewelry nice? Why do you need your old ways when I can sell you on a new product or a different way? Why do you have those erotic feelings for other men? Won’t men always be men? Don’t you want to see if you can provoke jealousy in your man to see if he is suspicious? Isn’t life hopeless? Don’t you want to focus on yourself? Don’t you want to try this new way of doing things? Buy this. Try that.” In essence this culture of raising questions is much like the serpent speaking to Eve, who begins with a question: “And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?” We don’t hear the serpent asking the questions but we can assume from the text that questions were raised that Eve answered in her own mind: “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat.” Eve would never have eaten the apple that led to her death if it had not been for the serpent to start raising questions.

                Yet as Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks points out, the Jewish people have held themselves together for thousands of years throughout all of the confusion that has followed them into every society they have attached to. “Unless parents hand on their memories and ideals to the next generation,” he writes, “the story of how they won their freedom and the battles they had to fight along the way – the long journey falters and we lose our way.” Ah, but the Jews never lost their way. WE Americans have. We’re so fucking lost right now that Justin Beiber and Ryan Seacrest are our grand ayatollahs. Interesting that America would lose its way given that Jewish Americans control most of the U.S. media, US television networks, the printed press, the Hollywood movie industry and the recording industry. Shouldn’t these Jewish Americans serve us the recipe that has provided (a select few of) them wealth beyond imagination and unity throughout millennia? There is Gerald M. Levin, former CEO and director of Time Warner Cable and AOL, Michael Eisner former Chairman and CEO of the Walt Disney Company, Edgar Bronfman Jr. former chairman and CEO of Warner Music Group and former executive at Vivendi Universal a France-based mass media and telecommunication company, Summer Redstone whose family are majority owners of CBS Corporation, Viacom, MTV Networks, BET and Paramount pictures and equal partners in Movietickets.com, and Peter Chernin former president and Co-COO of News Corporation Limited and current chairman and CEO of The Chernin Group, which manages, operates and invests in businesses in the media, entertainment and technology sectors. Even Rupert Murdoch has taken a staunchly pro-Israel stance in his political views.

                Well it doesn’t matter that most of the organizations messaging, and thus controlling, the “invisible government” of present American history are run by Jewish Americans, because I’m appealing to them right now also. I don’t care if Jews have manipulated the world for thousands of years. I was born because history took the course it took. It’s all been perfect up until this moment. I was only born 31 years ago. I want to survive and I’m inclined to cooperate with whatever tribe of industry leaders and world military powers are inclined to cooperate on a survival agenda. I cannot reason with most of my own American brothers and sisters despite trying. I’ve told them to be good to one another and be honest and support each other.

                I’ve also slept with women in relationships. I allowed it to happen knowingly and knowing I was morally incorrect. These details do matter. Men have morals and you know it when they lie. If they did not know their actions were morally WRONG (which REALLY means they are BAD for survival based on physics equations regarding the importance of human cooperation) they’d tell you the TRUTH. However, instead of teaching women the physics of human survival, magazines like Cosmopolitan teach women how to “read” the lies of men and decipher the “true” meaning.

                In an article entitled, “His 10 Biggest Love Lies” Cosmopolitan writes, “The average dude fabricates something six times a day—that's twice as often as women—and with #LiesMenTellWomen trending on Twitter right now, some dudes are being called out. To try to get why guys are so crafty, we reached out to male relationship experts. Here are the most common whoppers men tell their girlfriends and wives—and what the real deal is behind each.” See, the message behind this article isn’t: there is a sickness and it threatens survival. The message is: men are just men, liars, so let’s play psychoanalyst and “understand” what they really mean.

                The article goes on: “Lie # 6: ‘Sorry, I Missed Your Call,’ Lie # 5: ‘My Battery Died,’ and Lie # 4: ‘I Had No Signal’ These three lines all mean the same thing: I screened your call. Why? ‘Often men will feed you these lies because they're afraid to tell you to back off a bit, that they need a little alone time,’ (John) Amodeo (author of The Authentic Heart) says. You might want to ease up on the checking in and let him miss you more.” Not only does this article accomplish the task of making women distrust men, it adds another layer of ambiguity about the purpose of human life and invites women to drive themselves mad trying to come up with meanings for lies, that in some cases the lies might actually be endearing.

                 While Jews like Sacks are staying on course, our women have been taught to psychoanalyze liars and be perplexed by “bad boys.” In an article entitled, “How Your Cycle Can Screw With Your Love Life” in Cosmopolitan the author writes, “We can’t help it: Every time we spot a bad boy we think, ‘Mmm!’ According to new research from the University of Texas at San Antonio, there’s a reason we really dig these dudes (besides their penchant for motorcycles and black leather)—at least during a certain time of month.” Published on March 15, 2012, this article confirms that despite THOUSANDS of YEARS of recorded history highlighting the follies and successes of human behavior, women who write for and read Cosmopolitan magazine are still searching for the meaning of their emotions…the meaning of life. “Why? Why? Why?” Humans learned the answers to “Why?” long ago and learned the answers the hard way.

                Anti-social or “bad boy” behavior may simply attract women because subconsciously their genetic programming advises them to “work on” these men and help them find purpose in unity for survival. We must remember that sexual energy has its own physics-based kinetic, energy that MUST be harnessed for survival. “Bad boy” men posses skills that make them independent, useful in battle and problem-solving, and yes, they may make good fathers, but they need HELP. There’s also the possibility that men and women were not supposed to pair up into life-long relationships. That men were supposed to exist a group together and women were supposed to belong to a group together and the group of women was supposed to be the navigation machinery and it was supposed to go to the men in ways that directed the behavior of the men. Good behavior for men is UNITY, HUMILITY, LACK OF EGO, COURAGE, SELFLESSNESS and SKILLS. Women COOPERATING on a path toward survival can WORK ON MEN and raise up deep emotions for fatherhood and survival then PULL AWAY and force men to prove their worthiness for pleasure through ACTIONS that STRENGTHEN the tribe of men they NEED TO BELONG TO.

                If a leech that could sustain its own ethnicity and identity were to attach itself to societies and SUCK THE PROSPERITY out of those societies it would confuse the instincts, both sexual and emotionally so that COMPETITION (sexual) pervaded the society, the same COMPETITION that led Cain to SLAY Abel.  At the same time it would reach out to women and message them with Cosmopolitan advice and focus them on directionless sexual FIXATION.  

                Turning women into prostitutes certainly fucks with a country’s sense of heritage. It fucks with the psyches of women and their loyalty to their men and their morals and it weakens the fabric of communities. Now I’m not going to go Barack Obama and try to organize the masses to steer our oars together. It’s just too late, and it’s impractical. The populists should have figured it out a long time ago.

                The men controlling the world industries, media, militaries and public safety may have defects of character, but they also have the same instincts for survival as I do. I want to belong to a fucking team and since no one has picked me yet, I’m submitting my application to whoever is interested in my zeal for survival: US and world militaries, MI6, FBI, CIA, industrial leaders, world allies. I don’t even care if I survive. My only request is that Becky and her family, my parents and Elizabeth Conolly and her family survive. Time has completely run out. If my brothers and sisters in America will not embrace me and cooperate for survival, hell even if they do, I’ll make the same pitch to YOU Jews, or any other ethnicity. We’re steering this world toward complete human suicide. Human population must be decreased by 1/6 and CO2 emissions must be reduced dramatically. My only appeal is: FORGET THE PROFIT MOTIVE. YOUR FUCKING CHILDREN WILL NOT SURVIVE A WORLD-WIDE HOLOCAUST, an INFERNO created by CO2 emissions. FOCUS YOUR LOGIC ON SURVIVAL.

                Indeed, it was three men who represented “God” who visited Abraham before they went on to Sodom and Gomorrah. “And the men rose up from thence (Abraham’s tent), and looked toward Sodom” (Genesis 18:16). Were these agents of the elite? “And the LORD said, Because the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is very grievous; I will go down now, and see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it, which is come unto me; and if not, I will know. And the men turned their faces from thence, and went toward Sodom” (Genesis 18:20-22).

                The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah fits the pattern of the Bible wherein cities “turned to wickedness” are destroyed by the “Lord.” It fits the pattern of Noah’s Ark and Babel and Babylon. Lot, a resident of Sodom and Gomorrah and a relative (Hebrew) of Abraham and his daughters are spared. “And the men said unto Lot, Hast thou here any besides? son in law, and thy sons, and thy daughters, and whatsoever thou hast in the city, bring them out of this place: For we will destroy this place, because the cry of them is waxen great before the face of the LORD; and the LORD hath sent us to destroy it” (Genesis 19:12-13). “The sun was risen upon the earth when Lot entered into Zoar. Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven; And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground. But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt” (Genesis 19:23-26). Ah, don’t FUCK with survival. Hedonism NEVER survives. That’s the lesson that colleges SHOULD have taught: there’s a physics to a guilty conscience and this certainly includes sexual behavior, and that physics DESTROYS societies and makes them vulnerable to destruction from well-coordinated and cooperating enemies.

                Near the end of June, Becky made me aware that she was approaching the one-year anniversary of her late husband’s death. She told me that his family was holding a fund raiser to establish a scholarship fund in Chris’s name. I was so impressed by the way Chris’s family and his community worked to remember him. My own parents hardly wanted to hold Kevin’s funeral in Middlebury. I convinced them to, but there wasn’t much love between our family and Kevin’s former friends, even though his funeral was packed.

                The way that she and her community remembered Chris forced me to think about my brother. Our family was agnostic and my parents grieved privately over Kevin’s death. They couldn’t even bring themselves to pick up his ashes after he was cremated. In 2008 his ashes were still waiting at the funeral home in Middlebury. We didn’t have a shrine for him. We didn’t have pictures of Kevin or a shrine remembering him. Becky did. The ceremonial way she and her community remembered Chris kept him alive, and I recognized that those gestures made me feel there was a warmth of love springing out of her hometown; that there was so much love during life it kept gushing out even after death. I started regretting and thinking about Kevin’s death more than I had since he died.

                Over the Fourth of July weekend, my parents visited me and we traveled to Taos to spend the weekend. Becky traveled home to Richford where her two sisters and extended family gathered for Fourth of July celebrations each year. Communication was feeling useless with Becky. She wasn’t emailing or returning my calls. I told her I was thinking of her and her late husband Chris and wishing her well. I watched fireworks thinking of her. I also mountain biked on the ski resort. I almost got lost trying to go off trail through snow that was still several feet deep even in July.

                In one conversation I told her that I wished I could wrestle her brother in-law, Dan. Not because I was angry at him or wanted to hurt him, I just wanted to build human bonds of fidelity. I told her I wished I was all-powerful so that I could model gentleness to the men who respected me for my strength and power. In one conversation Becky told me that she had learned that 80 percent of people are followers and 20 percent are leaders; five percent are dynamic innovators, she said. Becky told me that her sister had traveled to Morocco to study religion. Her sister had a connection to Harvard Medical School.

                 Becky and I talked occasionally, though less frequently, on the phone between July and September. Becky and I agreed to read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond together and compare notes over the phone. Thoreau was a Harvard grad who floated like me through his twenties, unsatisfied with the “explanation of life” presented to his senses by the matting and tribal patterns of those around him. In nearly identical prose to McCandless after him, Thoreau writes in Economy, “When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only.” Here is McCandless: “To measure yourself at least once. To find yourself at least once in the most ancient of human conditions. Facing the blind deaf stone alone, with nothing to help you but your hands and your own head.” These two men felt that instincts spoke more strongly than the strange behavior, drives and desires of the society they lived in. I TOO felt this disconnect. I floated and asked, “Why? Why? Why?” because I had the time and support to do it. I arrived at the answer that eluded them because of the contributions of scientists since.

                Thoreau writes, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to confront only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.” Why does nature MAKE MEN LIKE US? I would ultimately ask myself. Survival, I would later answer. And we’re left-eye dominant I would theorize, without the capacity to research it on my own.

                One day I was in the shower and I had a wave of erotic feeling wash over me and I sensed Becky with another man. Soon after, I shared with Becky a country song I heard that made me think of her that was about having someone to hold at night and that got Becky, responding to the lyrics, to tell me how lonely she was feeling. I encouraged Becky to keep her options open for someone who would fill that void for her, but silently prayed she wouldn’t. I remember one night I pull off the I-40 highway exit near my apartment and the office. I turned south for the short stretch of Wyoming Boulevard and turned right on Lomas at the car dealership toward my apartment and heard the song, “Waiting on a Woman” by Brad Paisley, that grabbed my like few songs do. The song starts with a ghostly riff with an echo effect then drops into rhythm and after a pause in the rhythm Brad Paisley starts singing. “Sitting on a bench at West Town Mall, he sat down in his overalls and asked me, ‘You waitin’ on a woman?’ I nodded yeah and said, ‘How bout you?’ He said, ‘Son, since 1962, I’ve been…waitin’ on a woman. When I picked her up for our first date, I told her I’d be there at 8, and she came down the stairs at 8:30. She said, “I’m sorry that I took so long, didn’t like the thing that I tried on.” But let me tell you son, she sure looked pretty. Yeah, she’ll take her time, but I don’t mind, waitin’ on a woman…’”

                I would hear Paisley’s song at the perfect moments, moments I was thinking about Becky or moments when my mind was driving toward a feeling of, “It’s taking too long to hear back from Becky.” On multiple, multiple occasions this song played at exact moments of my thinking and state of mind that gave me chills as though it was a sign. I heard the song, “Waitin’ on a Woman” over 100 times between July and November. I’d later do research on the song and find out that it was released for the third and final time on June 9, 2008, the day Becky left for her trip out West. It became a number 1 single that year. In many ways, Becky never arrived because of those bruise marks on her knees and the questions her behavior raised for me. I myself was waitin’ on a woman.

                Two more songs that spoke to me that summer were “Beautiful Mess” and “All American Girl.” “Beautiful Mess” described the delirium of love I was in. The lyrics go: “I go to work and I look tired. The boss man said, ‘Son, you're gonna get fired. This ain't your style.’ And behind my coffee cup I just smile.” The lyrics to “All American Girl” also describe how a man’s priorities change because of a woman: “Sixteen short years later she was falling for the senior football star. Before you knew it he was dropping passes, skipping practice just to spend more time with her.”

                I found out in August that my former boss in Portland Oregon had unexpectedly quit his position with Working America to begin working for the AFL-CIO. He called me, sheepishly, to tell me the news. He said that Working America replaced him with one of the canvassers I had hired and trained. I told him that I was happy for him, but I felt betrayed by Heather Hardin, who had lured me to New Mexico with the promise of returning to Portland Oregon as Canvass Director. So much for that great friendship and appreciation she had insinuated in our conversations.

                I mountain biked in the Sandia Mountains often and worked out at Gold’s Gym regularly. I even took protein shakes and ate meals that I read about in a muscle magazine I bought regularly. Nothing seemed to change my physical appearance. I was also canvassing one night when a black woman I had signed up took me by the hand and wrote her phone number down on my hand. She told me I was cute and I should call her. I did and we ended up hooking up. I didn’t feel guilty about it because Becky and I were hardly communicating and it wasn’t clear she was still interested in me. Yet I still held out hope that I had a chance with Becky. I had never met someone who resonated so strongly with my heart.

                I took a few extra days off and traveled home for Labor Day weekend. I stayed with my parents and went camping trip on the Long Trail one night. I brought a pad of paper and wrote a hand-written letter to Becky from the shelter I stayed in. While I was writing a squirrel was trying to get in through a sealed up chimney stack. It was a little unnerving before I knew what the noise was. I wrote it down in my letter. The next day I carved “DP + BDP ‘08” on the exterior wall of the shelter. “BDP” was the initials for Becky’s full name, maiden and married. The “plus” sign was more of a cross than a plus sign, as in I was praying for the relationship to succeed. I told her in the letter that I wished we could hike the Appalachian Trail together and study the Bible together. I also told her in one of my letters or emails that I could see us together in Italy, her walking a beach on the Mediterranean Sea in a white dress. I wrote her another hand-written letter from Vermont on the shore of Lake Bomoseen, under a willow tree, just praying and hoping my desire for her would get through the distance and the resistance.

                When I returned to New Mexico the member-recruitment phase of our canvass was over. We had recruited 55,000 members, 5,000 more members than our target. We had recruited thousands of new members in New Mexico’s Southern Congressional 3^rd District, heavily rural and Republican. When I returned from Vermont I started training our canvass to use palm pilots so that we could re-contact the members we had signed up all year and persuade them to vote for our candidates. I was frequently listening to conservative talk show hosts Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly to know how our opposition was gearing up for the election. Our most effective messaging used the negative ads and talking points of our political opponents to show how disgraceful and cowardly and distorted they were. Our endorsed candidate in the First District was Democrat Martin Heinrich. His opponent was Bernalillo Sheriff Darren White. White’s talking points, it seemed, were coming straight out of the RNC think tank in Washington. Among other charges, White accused Heinrich of associations with an environmental terrorist. These accusations mirrored talking points by the national Republicans accusing then-candidate Barack Obama of ties to Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan.

                We directly addressed White’s pamphlets and talking points at the door and pointed out that in making character assassinations against Heinrich, Darren White was hiding from his true positions, which were out of touch with Albuquerque voters. We asked the members we had signed up earlier in the year if they were registered voters. If they weren’t, we signed them up to vote. If they were voters, we used our palm pilots to record whether they were inclined to support our candidate, if they weren’t sure or if they were going to vote for Darren White. We also did this in New Mexico’s Southern Second District, where our endorsed candidate was Democrat Harry Teague who was competing against Republican Edward R. Tinsley. Members who were undecided or leaning toward the Republican candidate were targeted again and again until Election Day.

                In mid-September Becky told me that she was hanging out with a guy named Blake who she had met in college. He was the one who she had talked about sharing the apartment with if she was scared by the neighborhood. I hadn’t heard about him all summer, and I shrugged at the news.

                Working America was an organization that prided itself on its “progressive” values. In a national conference I attended at the beginning of 2008 we sat around tables and talked about how we could hire more gays, blacks and women. I sat there as a straight white male wondering what my future was with Working America. I was “the problem” apparently. We attended training situations on sexual harassment and racism. I respect my former black, gay and female colleagues at Working America. I certainly know that camaraderie is not limited race, sexual orientation or gender. I liked all of my Working America colleagues even though it made me crazy to watch some of them lean in and contribute earnestly and urgently to conversations about gender, orientation and race. The organization touted these efforts as though they were a beating heart of human truth in goodness, just like McCandless, Thoreau and Descartes all seemed to “figure it out” and tout it. Never mind that it sent me signals of unworthiness and uselessness, it prioritized superficial and circumstantial considerations over content of character. Nonetheless, in 2008, I actually believed in selectively recruiting gays, minorities and women for work and leadership. I was bought into the emotional reward it gave me to think about training minority and female leaders because I was still bought into the collective shame about my white history. Every woman somehow represented and spoke for all the oppressed women throughout history.

                I know that each time I meet someone, no matter their skin color or gender or orientation, I watch them close to see what drives them, and when it’s innocent and helpful and honest, I like them. When I see someone conniving or putting on fake displays of friendship, I distrust them. In 2008, I didn’t know why, but it was a feeling I felt strongly about certain types of people. I thought it was a tragedy they behaved the way they did, and while it couldn’t be fixed in my lifetime, I prayed it would be in the next generation. I knew their behavior was molded by the intricacies of their upbringing. I rarely tried to change people, but I always kept myself at a distance from them.

                As an employer who sought to hire talented sales-people, I was, at times, forced to overlook warning signs about character traits for the interest of the canvass. I was also bought into and motivated by the encouragement to hire and develop into leaders people of color, women and gays. Sometimes these superficial characteristics alone somewhat blinded me to warning signs. My first office manager quit in June and I replaced her with a woman of color who did an outstanding job. However, both skin color and the need for a good salesperson blinded me to one black canvasser I hired named James. James was a former track star who almost qualified for the junior Olympics. Almost in his 40s, he still looked young and fit. James was charming and fairly easy going and I started to build him up for the potential of being a leader from very early on after I hired him. He had one incident that Heather Hardin related to me where he was caught having sex with another canvasser from Portland Oregon at a national convention, and the canvasser who caught him having sex in a mutual dorm was very upset about it. It was not a violation of any policies and there were no consequences, but the incident raised questions in my mind about James’s navigational system. Like, “Where was he going? What was his direction?”

                I myself attended a national convention in Minneapolis that summer for leadership. James did not come along for that conference. I gave a speech at that conference and I had someone take pictures. I took pictures of a sunset on a lake nearby the conference. We had trainings on minority and female leadership development, like usual. I was among the handful of white males, eagerly participating in these classes. I sent Becky the picture of me giving a speech and we talked over the phone while I was there. She made a cat noise like she was attracted to me and sounded more enthusiastic talking to me than I had remembered for a while. Our conversation lifted my spirits.

                One day back in Albuquerque, I was shopping for something in Target. I was walking around looking at everybody and marveled how it could all be okay with me because of Becky. I texted her, “You’re awesome.” She texted me back and told me she was watching a UMaine soccer game in Orono. The word Orono had a magical feel to it. Everything that Becky described had a magical feel to it.

                Toward the end of September Becky told me she had met a couple who had hiked the Appalachian Trail and they made her think of me. She told me that she wasn’t sure where she was going to move after Bangor because she was sort of waiting to see what I would do. With the subtlest hints, Becky could get my mind going in directions. I started thinking about moving to Bangor, Maine after the elections were over in November. Becky also told me that she and her sister and her brother-in-law Dan were planning on going to the Fryeburg Fair, held at the end of September.

                The fair came and went and Becky sent me an email describing some of the workshops she attended which included green energy and sustainable farming. She used her extremely talented writing skills to describe a young boy with a bright red apple who she noticed at the fair. She sent me another care package with items from the fair, including teas, honey sticks, a hand-written note, pancake mix and coffee beans.

                In late October Becky told me that she was talking about hiking and camping the Bigelow Mountains with Blake, the guy who she had told me about earlier. I accepted the news with instant panic, but I tried to play it cool and absorb the information. Later, I told her it gave me pause to hear that she was thinking about camping with Blake. Several days after that, Becky casually dropped the bomb that Blake had been living on and off with her. I was stunned. I started pressing her with questions: “When did he start living with you? Why didn’t you tell me?” I was shocked. She explained that Blake was living in Belfast with his grandparents and working in Bangor as a car mechanic. Becky said that sometimes he would stay in Bangor with her to avoid the commute. I was mortified. When I got off the phone I cried and lay down on the floor of my room, the lowest level of my flat apartment, it was comforting to know that I could fall no further.

                The next day I wrote Becky an upset email telling her that I no longer felt as though it made sense to move out to Bangor. A couple heart-wrenching days went by and I agonized over what I had learned AND how I had reacted to it. Why was I so undisciplined and impulsive? By day two, I began to see that I was in the wrong. I wanted Becky! I had never met anyone like her. She was such an inspiration to me, and it wasn’t at all the SEX!!! I know because I had fallen in love with her via email, text and phone conversation. It was her imagination, her creativity, her personal motivation, her athleticism, her country roots and big family, her insight into my emotions, the way she brought everything back to family, sharing and pride.

                I remember playing pickup soccer on the practice fields at the University of New Mexico and looking at the sky and knowing that it would be alright. That even though we were separated by bad feelings temporarily, that all would be resolved.

                At the end of day two, I bit my lip and took everything back. “I was wrong,” I told her. I told her that I had a big clumsy heart that sometimes over reacts, but that I’m always willing to admit where I’m wrong. Becky wrote back and told me that she had just held her breath and waited, hoping that there would be some resolution. She told me that she wouldn’t consider moving if she was in my shoes, but that if I wanted to move she would be happy to see me.

                I also told Becky about the girl I had slept with who I met when I was canvassing. She reacted slightly caught off guard by the news.

                I asked Becky if anything had happened between her and Blake, sexually. She told me that she was in the kitchen one time and he brushed up against her and they sort of embraced but nothing happened. Another time she said she was on the couch watching a movie with him and they had looked at each other and there was a feeling of something was about to happen but that nothing did. I was satisfied with these answers. Moreover, Becky told me that she and Blake would not go camping because he was sick.

                I shared with Becky a story about a couple who chose to live off the grid their entire lives. They were in their eighties then and the woman talked about how cold it was going to the bathroom in the outhouse at night, but how they persisted and found satisfaction in working the land. A few days later Becky told me that she had shared my story with Blake, but Blake had scoffed at the idea of living off the land. She also complained that she couldn’t have or win political arguments with Blake, who was conservative and raised a Jehovah’s Witness.  

                One night when Becky and I were talking she told me about how she feels bad for her mother who wants to go out and be social, but her father stays at home and isolates. “I just want her to have so many friends and so much company around her,” Becky told me.

                Even though Becky and I spent most of our time sharing ideas, thoughts and observations, I loved how she would, every once and a while, spice up my imagination with sexy talk. One night when we were on the phone she was telling me about the strapless black silk shirt she was wearing and how she wished I could see it. It drew me right in and reminded me that as intelligent and thoughtful as Becky was, there was also an extremely attractive and sexual woman at the other end of the line. Suddenly she told me to hold on because she had just heard a knock at her door. My heart started racing. I lost communication with her for what seemed like hours. The call was dropped after several minutes. I called her back and got her answering machine. I started getting worried. I called back again and she answered timidly, “Hello?”

                “Is everything alright?” I asked her.

                “Yeah,” she said. “It was Blake. He just showed up out of the blue. He was out drinking at one of the bars and needed a place to crash.”

                “He’s there?” I asked.

                “Yeah, I let him have the couch in the living room. I’m wearing a sweatshirt over that sexy black shirt and I’m not feeling very sexy anymore,” she told me. It made me feel better. “It makes me angry to think that he’s drinking and driving.”

                Near the end of October, my Field Manager, James got back from our second trip to Southern New Mexico and handed me gas receipts from the trip and the remaining petty cash. Something was unusual about the gas receipts. They all had whole numbers with no cents, like $35.00 and $50.00. The total gas tab for the trip seemed high. I NOTICED this almost subconsciously, but as soon as I did, my mind started working. A few days went by and James came in with another receipt for $40.00 from a gas station near the office. I went to the gas station that afternoon and asked the manager to see the security tapes, showing him the receipt with its time stamp on it. The manager took me into the office and got the video. Sure enough, James could be seen paying the manager, walking out of the store and then coming back in to collect the difference between what he paid and what he owed after pumping gas. I alerted the national office, questioned James in my office and terminated him. James probably would have been hired on to Working America by the national office after the campaign was over. James enjoyed a very relaxed relationship with the canvassers, and I suspected some of his relationships went farther than friendship, but it didn’t matter. I wasn’t out to police his private behavior, but when the inconsistencies between his words and actions came to office money and video evidence I knew that he was not a value to the organization. He was one of the types who projected the ILLUSION of doing well despite inconsistencies, which if carried indefinitely into the future, would place the burden for his selfish inconsistencies onto others.

                Becky and I continued to talk about me moving to Maine. Becky floated the idea of hosting me at a timeshare she had in Lincoln, New Hampshire. She sent me pictures of the Inn Season Resort and told me it had a pool and hot tub. I checked out the pictures and could not wait to join her there.

                I used Craigslist to search for apartments in Bangor and began an email thread with someone named Jordan Laughlin. Jordan was advertising a room for rent. I sent Jordan a “resume” of myself including my habits, my tolerance of gay people, my employment search and a short biography. I told Becky about Jordan and forwarded her the email exchange with Jordan. A couple days later, Becky wrote to me and told me she didn’t think Jordan was a boy but rather a girl, who was a field hockey and lacrosse player. Becky had searched her name thoroughly. I was impressed. I wrote to Jordan and learned it was indeed a girl and she was only 19.

                This fact made Becky uneasy about the situation. She told me that she couldn’t imagine how her mom would react to discover that a 26 year old male was living with a 19 year old girl. It wasn’t the first time Becky had warned about the conservative views of her mother. She also warned me that her mother was anti-abortion and that I should not bring up the issue in her presence. Despite Becky’s doubts, I was raised to believe that men and women could co-exist together without sexual tension, and I pressed ahead with my plans to rent a room from Jordan.

                A few days later I encouraged Becky to reach out to Jordan, and a few days after that Becky told me that Jordan worked at the little Co-op where she had lunch sometimes. She told me she had introduced herself and that they got along well.

                Finally Election Day Weekend rolled around. In anticipation of the weekend, we hired up to a canvass staff size of 50. One day, candidate Martin Heinrich visited our office and we held an outdoor pep-rally. We worked all weekend long “getting out the vote.” The labor offices brought in boots-to-the-ground union members who volunteered all weekend long.

                Election Day was Tuesday, November 4^th. We worked all day and I settled down in the office around 5pm Mountain Time to start watching the polls close in the East Coast. The New York Times had a digital interactive map breaking down election results by county. I texted Becky to let her know that Franklin County was reporting 3 votes. Becky texted back and said that total included a moose voting. It was all out of my hands. Sasha, my office manager popped in to tell me she was on her way down to the Civic Center. I had to wait for the last batch of canvassers to come back. I kept refreshing my web browser watching to see how the count was coming in.

                At length I closed up the office and drove over to the Civic Center where the rest of my canvass team had already convened along with labor leaders, progressive leaders, Democrats, union members in a loud, high-spirited event with music playing and televisions showing coverage of the elections.

                MSNBC covered the elections with thrilling music and digital animation of marble pillars and the White House. The camera would zoom in and circle around and settle on a snap shot of Senator Obama or Senator John McCain next to a state colored red (Republican) or blue (Democrat) to indicate the winner.

                The coloring schemes of the states had annoyed me ever since I read “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” and “Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show.” I wrote an article about the second book, by Geoffrey Nunberg, when I worked at The Nation. The ironic thing was that the stereotypes had some validity. Remember, Ken Mehlman told Republican governors in 2004 that consumer preferences could PREDICT political party affiliation. I KNEW from talking to as many people as I had talked to that humans COULD agree, that in fact, the potential for nearly 100 percent agreement on decisions was possible, especially when choosing to vote between Republican politicians who were working for the country clubbers and Democratic politicians who appeared to think more cooperatively. Yet the news media constantly “spoke for” Red Staters and Blue Staters as if 150 million all felt one way and the other 150 million all felt the OPPOSITE way…like the Sneetches with the stars on their bellies versus the Sneetches without stars on their bellies.

                I was at the convention center at 6 PM when another round of polls closed. MSNBC called the following states for Obama: Illinois, New Jersey, Massachussetts, Maryland, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Maine, Delaware. John McCain picked up Oklahoma Tennessee. The network kept track of the electoral votes for McCain and Obama. Various televisions carried the various networks’ coverage of the elections. I hung out with my friend Leslie Boyadjian and mingled with my canvassers and folks who I knew from labor.

                At 7PM Rocky Mountain Time MSNBC called the following states for Obama: New York, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Rhode Island. John McCain picked up Kansas, North Dakota, and Wyoming. Just over twenty minutes after the polls closed in Ohio, MSNBC called the Buckeye State for Obama. Ten minutes later MSNBC called for Obama, New Mexico, which voted for Bush in 2004. It now began to look like Obama was heading for victory. Later in the hour, West Virginia and Texas were both called for McCain.

                At 8 PM MSNBC called Iowa for Obama, reversing its vote for Republican Bush in 2004. It called Utah for John McCain. Florida and North Carolina were still too close to call. Mississippi went for McCain at 10 minutes after 8 PM. South Dakota went for McCain at around 8:40PM. At 9PM MSNBC called California, Washington and Oregon and thus the election for Obama. Cameras swept across the supporters of Obama in Chicago at Grant Park who erupted into delirious applause and cheering as news of Obama’s election was reported. The crowd at the convention center in Albuquerque was jubilant and the partying was just beginning. Martin Heinrich gave an acceptance speech with his wife and family that sounded like boiler plate talking points compared to Obama, whose speech in Grant Park was rousing and exciting. I got a call from Heather Hardin. I answered into my phone, and pressed it against my ear to hear her.  

                “Congratulations, you carried the whole state,” Heather said.

                “What? We won in the South district, too?”

                “Yes, you won every race.”

                I couldn’t believe it. I felt proud of our accomplishments and I felt like our work played a large role in the outcome of the election in New Mexico. This First District voted Democrat for the first time in its history. The victory in the South was the most impressive, given the rural and conservative demographics.

                After I finished talking to Heather, I slid outside and called Becky. Her honey voice answered and she told me she was watching the election returns with her friends in Bangor. “Obama mentioned you,” Becky said. “He talked about all the people knocking on doors,” she said.

                I was already brooding, despite the victory. I told Becky that I feared Obama and Democrats would revert to corporate friendly policies and fail to sustain the spirit of progressive politics that got him and other Democrats elected. Becky told me that I sounded like I was down. I just knew that the forces driving Washington were strong.

                During the next two weeks, we packed up the office and prepared to move out. I participated in an exit view with Working America and made clear my intentions not to seek continued employment with Working America after the election. Becky and I planned on spending a weekend in Lincoln, NH at the end of November, and then I would follow her back to Maine.

                One of Becky’s good friends came up to visit her the weekend after the election and they drove to Bar Harbor together. She sent me pictures they took at Thunder Hole on a rainy day with rough seas. Becky also did a walking tour of Bangor taking pictures that she sent me so I knew what I could expect when I moved out there. The architecture was old and ornate and the city was on hilly ground.

                Becky told me that she and Blake had a falling out and that he was no longer living with her. Part of her rational for going to New Hampshire was to avoid a meeting between Blake and I, but she told me it no longer mattered. Becky also told me that she read one of my letters to her sister Bets and told her about me. She said her sister had responded that I sounded very wise. Becky said, “My sister just gave me the advice to keep everything honest.”

                I left New Mexico early on November 14. I drove my packed up father’s Saab East. I drove across the Panhandle of Oklahoma up and East through Kansas, where the wind blew so hard it pushed my cargo bin over to the right side of my roof rack. I drove through Wichita to Kansas City and on to St. Louis, where I spent the first night. I woke up early the next morning and drove through Indianapolis and reached Cleveland by night. I pushed through, determined to get back to Vermont without staying at another hotel. I called Becky Saturday night as I was driving across New York from Buffalo on I-90. I got her voicemail and I asked her to give me a call to help me stay awake. It wasn’t her, but Leslie, my girlfriend from Albuquerque, who called and talked to me and kept me awake.

                I called Becky out and asked her why she didn’t return my call while I was on my way back from the West Coast to see her. She broke down a little and said she was hanging out with a friend and that they were talking about Chris. I felt bad for pushing the issue.

                I had to wait two long weeks in Vermont before I was set to drive to New Hampshire, where Becky and I planned to spend the weekend after Thanksgiving. She and Chris had got a timeshare plan together and she had a weekend to use. I spent time with my parents, reading and writing. I had breakfast with my father at Birdseye Diner in Castleton and we talked about his Kennedy book project. At night I’d watch Hardball, the Daily Show and the Colbert Report with my parents. Being connected with my parents increased my feeling of being connected with national events.

                Eventually Thanksgiving came. I ate dinner with my parents early and left to meet Becky in Lincoln late in the afternoon. I made the drive anticipating seeing Becky the whole way. It felt like I was pulled magnetically toward her. I couldn’t believe that after all we had been through, the ups, the downs, the continuing emails, the drama with Blake and the thousands of miles that had separated us, that we might finally be reunited.

                I pulled off the interstate and into Lincoln at dark and followed the directions to the Inn Season Resort she was staying at. I called her and asked her where she was and then followed her navigation around the back. I spotted the building she was in and pulled my packed car into a parking space. I got out and looked down the row of doors on three levels, a door on the lower level opened revealing light and Becky leaned out. It was really her. She looked like she was cautiously checking to see if it was me. I couldn’t wait to get down the stairs and embrace her.

                The condo felt warm and cozy with Becky there. She had some candles lit and she offered to make me some tea. I accepted and we talked for a while. We were in the kitchen to the condo when Becky commented favorably about my butt. She was wearing sweatpants and a soft long sleeve shirt. She described the various parts of the human body, using mine to illustrate as she went along. Later I invited her to lie down on the floor with me: I lied down on my back and she lied on top of me and I basked in the weight of her body.

                We messed around that night but we still didn’t have sex. The next morning we went out for breakfast at a bakery on route 112. Becky told me that she saw a park where we could play soccer, and after breakfast we went over to the park with a soccer ball and cleats. Becky was incredible at kicking a soccer ball. We passed it back and forth for a little while and then played “golf,” a game that Becky explained she used to play on her soccer team in high school. She consistently out-performed me in the game. I asked for her help teaching me how to strike a soccer ball, and she showed me and described what to do. After we finished we stretched in the field and Becky helped me stretch my hamstrings while I lay on my back. She held my cleats and pushed down on the balls of my feet, talking to me and smiling, understanding the mechanics of the body.

                That afternoon we decided to go for a hike in Franconia Notch State Park. We dressed up for a climb and drove up to the Notch. Becky got a call from her mom while we were in the parking lot and told her that she was going for a hike. I realized that Becky hadn’t even told her mom she was spending the weekend in New Hampshire with me. We hiked and I noticed Becky’s butt as she stepped over a log. It looked so amazing. I told her that when I saw her butt it felt like angels were singing. She remarked that it must be a guy thing because when she sees a butt, she just sees it as part of the machine of the human body. She told me that when she was in high school she attended a national Coca-Cola scholarship event and the speaker was a speed skater and she kept noticing how big his quads were.

                We finished hiking and drove back down to a coffee shop and had coffee. Then we went back to the resort and got into the hot tub outside. It was chilly. I told Becky that November was one of my favorite months.

                “Why?” Becky asked. “It’s so dark and rainy and the trees are bare,” she said.

                We sat in the hot tub together, and because I was trying so hard to get it right with Becky, I sat across from her and kept my distance. One of the signals it felt like she was trying to send me was that she wanted a respectable amount of space at all times. Becky, however, noticed that I was sitting far away from her and asked me why. I tried to offer my explanation and stayed standoffish, wrestling with why my instincts were so confused.

                That night we went out for dinner at a restaurant in town. Becky looked incredible. We sat at a table for two with a candle on it and the light of the candle shimmered in her eyes. Her hair was tied up and she drank a glass of wine with dinner. We were both in high spirits. That night we started talking about my brother Kevin and Chris.

                “His mom told me that I would never have any idea of how much it hurt to lose a son,” Becky told me. She started crying. It was the first time that I’d seen her cry. She sobbed, her chest heaving in bursts as I lay next to her, holding on to her. I could feel the wetness from her eyes against my forehead.

                Next it was my turn to speak, to let her know she was not alone in her suffering. I told her that I felt incredible guilt about not being a compassionate enough brother. “The night before he died, I was on the phone with an ex-girlfriend of mine. I remember seeing his name on my contacts list on my phone and I even thought about calling him. The next morning I was at work. I was supposed to leave for Middlebury that night and my father and I were supposed to travel down to Boston to sit first row at a Boston/Yankees baseball game. We had never done anything like it before. I asked my dad for tickets and he agreed. It cost almost $1,000. It was just supposed to be the two of us. I always wondered if Kevin felt like he was being left out. I was at my computer at work when I heard my father’s voice calling my name. I immediately knew something was wrong. I got up and met my dad at the door to the office. His eyes were wide and he put both hands on my shoulders, which felt uncomfortable, and told me that Kevin died. I dropped to my knees and wailed. Shortly after he died I had a dream that I walked in to a room and he was in there with his guitar and he opened his mouth and gestured with his hand but no words came out. But most of all, I remember how he came to visit me in Fort Collins and we met at the Holiday Inn where his airport shuttle dropped him off and we hugged, and I just wish that I could hug him again.” This time it was my turn to cry, and my chest heaved and I rolled onto my side and covered my eyes with my hands. “I don’t want you to see me cry,” I told Becky through my sobs. She took me into her arms this time and comforted me.

                 The next morning we had breakfast at the same café as the morning before and then left for Bangor. I followed Becky East on Route 112, also known as the Kancamagus Highway. The two lane road wound through the New Hampshire mountains. We approached  a pull-off and Becky immediately slowed down her car and pulled in to the pull off. We got out and explored the river that ran alongside the road. I loved how Becky could follow her curiosity deliberately and methodically.

                We drove through Conway and continued on Route 302 and eventually crossed the border into Maine, greeted by a blue sign that read, “Entering Maine.” Becky called me to tell me that that was one of her favorite signs. We pulled onto Maine’s I-95 in Gray and headed North. As we passed through the toll booth in Gardiner, I watched Becky speed out of the toll booth. I texted her and told her she took off like Rusty Jacobs. She texted back, “Who?” I thought now’s my chance to impress her. I wrote, “You know, the NASCAR driver?” After a little while she wrote back, “You mean Rusty Wallace?” The joke was on me. I had named a member of the Woods Tea Company, an Irish folk band my family used to go see when I was a child.

                We pulled off at the exit to Bangor and I followed her to her little apartment on First Street in Bangor. She took me inside and showed me her apartment. She told me she had just finished getting all her photos up on the wall. I loved how she could spend time doing projects that improved her living space. We decided to watch the New York Giants game and unpack my car later, so we took Becky’s car up to Orono. I was excited to see the town of Orono since it had taken on a mythical quality in my mind.

                We drove up Route 2 past the Penobscot River and went to the Bear Pub, where Becky told me she had sometimes hung out with Chris. We watched the game and then drove back. I called up Jordan and asked if she was ready for me. Becky and I drove over to the house, a square green two-story apartment building. Becky and Jordan helped me unload my car and I filled my belongings into the upstairs apartment. My room was in the back. The ceilings were low and paneled with wood, and the floor was wood. Without a bed, I set up my sleeping bag on the floor. I set up my room while Becky and Jordan talked out in the kitchen. I thanked Becky and asked if I would see her tomorrow.

                “Oh, I thought I’d invite you over tonight,” she said. Once again, I picked against what I wanted to do and told her that I should probably organize my room. Half an hour later I called up and asked her if I could still come over. We listened to music from Becky’s large inventory on her computer.

                The next day, Becky woke up early and got ready for work. I drove down to Rockland to look at a sea kayak, determined to be just as busy as it seemed she was. I got back that night and told her about my trip. We made dinner together and then she sat on the floor in her kitchen and read a book about St. Francis while I lay down and put my head in her lap. The next morning Becky woke up early again and got ready for work while I watched her with admiration. I had set up an interview with the Maine People’s Alliance that day. I went to the MPA office building downtown and took the elevator up four floors and found the director in the office. We shook hands and went out to lunch at the bagel shop. The interview went well, and the director, Jesse Graham, invited me out to a retreat at China Lake that weekend so I could meet more of the staff and crew of MPA.

                That night Becky invited me to meet her where she worked at her office over by the mall. I drove over there in the dark and pulled up behind her building next to her car. She came out the back door and let me in and showed me around the empty office, showing me the room where prosthetic limbs were built and the office she worked in. She showed me where her computer was every time she wrote to me during her breaks. There was a dry erase board on a door between offices with a crude picture of a bearded man and another man with his hand in the waist area of the bearded man. I remarked that it looked like the second man was jerking off the bearded man except there was no cock. Becky scoffed at this idea and replied that she didn’t see it that way.

                I was proud of Becky and imagined that for the first time I didn’t fear growing old with a woman and enjoying every change of season and daily course of events. I was proud of her energetic work and her smile and I loved her butt as she worked her way around the office showing me everything. We went back to her place that night and listened to music for a while. Then Becky invited me into the living room to watch a video she made of her home in Richford Vermont. She held a handheld camera and walked around her house introducing the viewer to her parents and her cat and everything she saw. She also filmed the country roads she drove on, sunsets, fields and mountains. She filmed a visit to Chris’s house with Led Zepplin playing on a stereo. She filmed a road trip she took to Bar Harbor with Chris and in one shot in Downtown Bar Harbor she says, “I want some ice cream and searches with the camera and finds an ice cream shop and zooms in on it. In another shot she and Chris were on Sand Beach in Bar Harbor.

                That night we messed around on the couch. I watched Becky take off her shirt like a professional, removing it without any sense of self-consciousness. The way she took off her shirt left an impression in my mind. It was as though she had done it a thousand times. It was like I didn’t even matter. It turned me on, but it got my attention at a deep level. She straddled me and we made out and messed around but we still didn’t have sex.

                On Wednesday I played soccer with Jordan in the park next to our apartment. I also went to Gold’s Gym out by the airport. I was trying to stay busy. That night Becky was hanging out with a couple she was friends with in Bangor. She told me the couple was surprised to learn the girl was pregnant and that Becky had told her even though it might be scary that life will change, it will change for the better. Becky was busy Thursday night as well, so I went out to one of the bars she told me about over the phone, Paddy Murphy’s. While I was there, I started talking to a couple of guys who were sitting at the bar next to me. It turned out that one was a recent grad student-turned-farmer and his friend was another farmer visiting from Utah. We exchanged numbers and the farmer, whose name was Joseph Thomspon, invited me out to see his farm.

                On Friday morning I drove out to the Dysart’s truck stop on I-95 and met up with a car pool of MPA people. One of them was a mechanic from Bar Harbor who drove an old Saab and introduced himself as Fred Salisbury. There were a group of young and old hanging around a car in the cold parking lot, and everyone was talking. I won’t bore the reader with the details of the weekend retreat. We had long meetings all day Friday and Saturday.

                I talked to Becky on the phone on Saturday and she told me she was missing Blake and that Blake said he was missing her. I told her that of course he should miss her, she’s an outstanding person. I told her to think through how she felt about things and listen to her emotions. She told me that she liked his Tennessee accent. On Saturday night I sat down with three of the women who would have a role in hiring me and we conducted an informal interview.

                We returned home on Sunday. I invited Becky out to the Bear Pub to watch the Giants again. I held Becky at somewhat of a cold distance while we were watching the game. For reasons I didn’t understand I was holding Becky at bay but also wishing her into my life. It probably had to do with her call about Blake. I was trying not to act too interested, like I was special because I had gone on a retreat with MPA and it looked like I’d get a job. For her part, Becky just seemed calm and patient and curious as to why I was the way I was some times. We went out to her car after the game was over and I got into her passenger seat to talk. I noticed that a strand of tumbleweed that I had given her, which had got caught under the license plate of my father’s Saab when I was driving through Kansas, was tucked into her passenger side sun visor.

                That night I went back home to my apartment and Jordan was there. At one point we bumped into each other in the kitchen and Jordan made a comment about it that had a little sexual innuendo. I replied flatly and a little impolitely that, “That will never happen.”

                On Monday night I convinced Becky to join me at a MoveOn meeting in Orono that had to do with sustainable living. There was another couple there, the guy was a boat-builder and he and his wife seemed like the type of couple I wanted to be with Becky. We ate food and joined in the conversation. Becky conversed naturally, but I tried a little too hard to separate and show that I was conversant and again felt like I was unnatural.

                On Tuesday morning Becky told me that her mom was coming into town on Wednesday. That evening, she called me as I was on my way to Gold’s Gym. She asked if I minded if she spent the night hanging out with Blake because his grandfather was in the hospital and he was feeling down. I agreed because it seemed only reasonable and polite. I spent the night watching TV with Jordan. She called me after Blake had left and told me that it went well. They had watched a 3-11 concert on video and Becky made Blake tea.

                On Wednesday Becky told me that her mom was coming into town and asked me if I wanted to meet her. I acted like maybe I shouldn’t, but after airing out my concerns, Becky pressed on and said it was up to me, but if I wanted to I could come over. I had wanted to all along, but I finally gave in and said yes. That night I went to Gold’s Gym and lost my car key. I called Becky and told her. I was going to get my car towed and I could drive with the tow truck driver. She said she was going out to see a play with her mom and I told her I’d walk over and meet her at her house when she got back. I caught a ride with the tow truck driver back to my house.

                I walked over to her place at around 9:30 and leaned up against her porch waiting for her and her mom. They eventually returned and I hoped I’d look good leaning up against her porch waiting for her. Becky was unusually happy and talkative. She gave me a hug and introduced me to her mom who made almost no eye contact with me. I was surprised. I was accustomed to putting on a good introduction to almost anyone I met. We all went inside and Becky’s mom immediately made herself busy organizing things and cleaning.

                “They found your key,” Becky told me. “I called over there and asked them if they found it and I went over and picked it up.” Becky had put up a Christmas tree since I last saw her.

                Becky suggested we watch a movie and put on the animated Polar Express. Becky sat next to me on the couch and her mom sat in the next couch over. I had read the book when I was a child, and I loved the pictures of snow, especially falling in the headlight of the train. Halfway through the movie Becky’s mom went to bed in the next room over to go to bed. Becky invited me to lie down and she lay on top of me. Twenty minutes later she fell asleep. I looked at her angle face. Her body weight felt good. I watched the rest of the movie, relishing the feeling of her asleep on top of me, all of the credits. I watched until the DVD went back to the menu and started looping. I still lay there until parts of my body began to fall asleep, and finally I woke her up.

                The next morning Becky drove me over to the car dealership where my car was parked and dropped me off. We kissed goodbye. I got a membership to the YMCA that day, the gym where Becky worked out. That day Fred, the young farmer I met at Paddy Murphy’s and his friend Carl from Utah were going to make beer. Becky and I went jogging in City Park that afternoon. I told her that I had gotten a membership to the YMCA , and she seemed annoyed. I also told her about the beer making and invited her along as we stretched our legs in the parking lot. Ironically, Blake wanted to make beer with Becky, too. She told me she’d think about it. Not long after, she told me that she had decided to hang out with Blake that night instead. Again, his grandfather was sick and she wanted to pick up his spirits.

                That night I tried to enjoy myself over at Fred’s but I was really missing Becky. It snowed while we were making beer. Becky texted me to let me know that Blake was going to stay over because of the snow.

                The next night I was pacing, waiting for Becky to call. Jordan told me that she had seen Becky and Blake at the Co-op the night before picking up beer-making material. I asked her if he was big. Becky finally called and invited me over. I was used to parking my Saab out in the street. When I walked down the narrow little driveway to her apartment I could see the square of bare ground, ringed by snow, where Blake’s truck had been parked. It was his TRACE.

                I went inside and saw the jar of fermenting beer with Blake’s last name written on it. There was one for Becky, too. We talked and hung out for a little while. While she was busy doing something I picked up her diary, which was identical to one that she got for me and wrote what was supposed to be a humorous entry about being a moose, and it was aimed as a diss to Blake who was thinly veiled as a squirrel or some animal. I can’t even remember what I wrote, but it was desperate and stupid.

                Becky was drinking wine and we were hanging out in her living room. Eventually Becky broke out some cards that she had that had sexual positions on them. She playfully suggested we try out some of the positions, and we did on the floor of her living room. It felt good making contact with one another and it was amusing to making contact in the strange positions in the cards. But Becky would not let me stay that night. I got upset and asked her why. A flash of amusement crossed her face. “Just because,” she said. “I feel like being alone tonight.”

                My face fell and I left without another word. I was upset. I went home and felt the agony of being apart from Becky. I woke up early the next morning and did something I could not even comprehend. I drove over to Becky’s house at around 6:45 AM and started banging on her window. Startled she saw me and looked annoyed. “What?” Becky asked.

                “Do you want to go out for breakfast? Let me in. I want to see you.”

                She looked annoyed as she went about getting dressed. I walked around to the front door and waited. I looked at her, like, “I can’t help it.” She stared daggers back at me and stepped away from the door. I followed her in. She was upset. I followed her around the house begging her to come to breakfast and pleading my case.

                “And what were you thinking writing in my journal?” Becky asked. “You wrote on the inside of the cover. You ruined it.”

                “I was trying to be funny.”

                “Well it wasn’t funny,” Becky said.

                “You’re hanging out at the bar I go to, you’re going to the same gym I go to, now. I feel like I have no space anymore.”

                Eventually she cooled down and we agreed to go out to breakfast at Dysart’s. As we drove toward Dysart’s Becky told me that she once went there with her family and Chris’s family one hungover morning when they were all traveling together. The drive and breakfast cooled off the tensions from earlier that morning. I had eggs and hashbrowns. Becky had pancakes. I brought Becky back to town and she had me drop her off at the YMCA.

                “No more knocking on my window in the morning,” Becky said.

                After she got out of the car, I called to her through the open window. She looked in at me. I said, “We’re gonna look back at this morning and laugh someday.” Becky just looked back at me.

                “Okay,” she said and left.

                She called me later halfway through her work out and asked me if I wanted to join her for some yoga. I agreed and joined her in an empty room with mirrors and wood floors. She practiced yoga with me and showed me the positions and I did my best to try it out. Later that afternoon we had lunch at a Thai restaurant downtown. We talked about Blake, and I made a comment that was another veiled reference to Blake and it was a put down.

                Becky was supposed to go to a work-related Christmas party that night and I decided to go camping with Fred and Carl in the bog out in City Park in Bangor. We hung out at Fred’s farm for a while and drove out to City Park at around 10 PM. Things felt off that night. It was cold. The moon was out. Fred and Carl brought a few beers to drink. I woke up the next morning at the crack of dawn and drove home. Things didn’t feel right. I sat at home for a while unable to concentrate. My body KNEW something was wrong. I decided to invite Becky out to church.

                When I drove past the opening to her driveway my heart immediately started to beat out of my chest. A tan Nissan Frontier with Tennessee license plates was parked in the same spot where I saw its impression on the ground on Friday. What was Blake’s truck doing there? I parked my car and got out. I was dressed up for church. I walked up the driveway past Blake’s truck and banged on the door. It was 9:15 AM. Becky’s front door was glass. I knocked and knocked and waited. Finally I saw her emerge from the wrong direction. Her room was off to the left, but the living room with the guest bed was to the right. She looked foggy, like she had just woken up. She had slept in the same bed as him.

                She opened the door, “What?” she asked.

                “I was coming by to see if you wanted to go to church,” I said.

                Becky closed her eyes and opened them again and stared out past me and shook her head like she didn’t care. “No,” she said at last.

                “Why is this truck here?” I asked.

                Becky smiled and slowly blinked her bloodshot eyes and looked past me. Suddenly a guy appeared, coming out of the same door that Becky had just come out of.

                “Who’s that?” I asked stepping toward him. Becky stepped up to me and put her hand on my chest. “You must be Blake. I’ve heard about you.” Blake turned around and went back inside. “Where you going?” I asked.

                “Stop. That’s enough,” Becky said and pushed me outside and closed the door behind her.

                I looked at Becky with a pained and searching expression. “What happened?”

                “I got back from the party last night and Blake called me from the hospital. His grandfather was dying and he wanted to come see me, so I let him come over.”

                “Were you sleeping in the same bed?” I asked.

                Becky looked at me and nodded.

                “What the hell?” I asked.

                “We were hanging out watching a movie and I was about to go to bed and he didn’t even ask me to stay with him, and I went back in and lay down next to him and took his hand. He’s just been so gentle and I was feeling lonely.”

                “Why didn’t you call me?” I asked.

                Becky couldn’t make eye contact and she just shook her head. She looked hung over.

                “It’s a good thing you didn’t come over around 6 again,” she said. Chills of recognition of what she meant ran through me. The thing I loved more than ANYTHING ELSE about Becky was that she had her own way of being BLATENTLY honest with me, even when I didn’t want to hear it. The shock ran through my face as my eye brows squinted.

                “What?”

                Becky looked at me, a beautiful French Canadian blonde mess, in her long sleeve shirt and sweat pants. I started shaking my head.

                “I can’t believe this,” I said. I lifted my head up.

                “I’ll call you later,” she said.

                “I can’t believe you,” I said shaking my head and backing up and looking at her with my eyebrows furrowed. She made a face, as if to say, “What can I do?” I pivoted 180 degrees and walked to my car.

                I went to church anyway that morning. The place felt hallow and empty of emotion or life.

                Later Becky called to see if I wanted to meet Blake. I told her, “Yes.” I was a little upset she had kept us apart from each other, like holding two dogs back from one another makes them want to fight. She told me to meet her at the Bagel Central in fifteen minutes. I walked over there and waited for her to show up. In the crowd of typical faces and people in the café, it felt like waiting for a celebrity to show up. She finally came in the door, her hair was tied up and she was wearing a navy blue long sleeve track shirt and black comfort fitting pants that made her athletic legs look good. I opened up my arms and gave her a big hug.

                “Oh,” she said. “That feels good.”

                We sat down at one of the row tables and talked. Becky tried to reframe our relationship as a friendship. I told Becky I really wanted it to work out.

                “I just want to feel like we can go out to a bar and talk and hang out and have a good time without there being all this pressure that we’re a couple. I want us to be friends first.”

                Our conversation went back and forth, going nowhere. Seizing a moment to turn the conversation toward something else, Becky smiled and got excited and told me she saw a soccer field with nets where we could practice. But the direction of her enthusiasm didn’t shake my core out of the longing it felt to make things work.

                We walked back to my apartment together and Jordan was home. We talked for a while. Eventually Becky left and told me she might call me and hang out later. Later came and went and she never called. I decided to go over to Fred’s that night at his invitation. The next morning it was snowing and Becky called. “C’est moi,” she said in her customary greeting, but for the first time I could hear a tremor in her voice. I immediately wondered if she had hooked up with Blake. She told me she had the day off because of the snow and asked if I wanted to hang out.  We’d finally get to go snowshoeing. It was one of the things Becky and I had talked about doing together months ago that               

                 I was still looking forward to. Fred’s parents were visiting from Oregon. She came over in the afternoon with snow shoes and I introduced her to Fred’s parents. We went hiking on the trails behind Fred’s house. At one point Becky tried to get playful with me and push me over. I let myself tip and sat on the ground smiling at her. I got up and threw some snow at her. We kept hiking until we got out to a clearing with a view of the sky. This time I play pushed Becky over and tackled her into the snow. I went to kiss her and she resisted. She wouldn’t let me. We hiked back to Fred’s house and took off our snowshoes. I gave Becky a pat on the butt because I could not help it. She gave me a sharp look and said, “Why do you pat me on my butt?”

                I went to sleep in my room on the floor in my sleeping bag, sick to my stomach. The next morning I woke up early and decided to drive past Becky’s house to see if Blake’s truck was there. It wasn’t. I went to the gym and worked out.

                That night I invited Becky to the MoveOn event for sustainable living, but she declined, saying that she was going to spend the night with her couple friends. I went to the meeting and afterward went for a walk around Bangor. I remember crossing the Oak Street bridge from Brewer back into Bangor and looking down at the ice flows. I pictured myself just jumping off and ceasing to exist, ending all the complicated problems that were backed up at intersections in my mind. If I was going to end it, I reasoned, I may as well ride it out and see what I can do.

                On Tuesday morning I drove past Becky’s apartment in the morning again, and again, Blake’s truck was not there, to my relief. I worked out. That night I scored a date with Becky to go to Paddy Murphy’s with Carl and Fred. It was open mic night. It felt like an accomplishment to get the date. I picked Becky up and we went out and sat at the bar and talked. I wanted to give her the kind of night she asked for in the bagel café on Sunday. She looked dazzling as usual and she was animated and talkative. At one point she was down at one end of the bar talking with a guy who claimed he was from Morocco. We went back to her apartment and sat in her kitchen and talked.

                “That was nice, tonight,” Becky said. I sat in a chair and she walked around the kitchen. The only other thing I remember her saying that night was, “Sometimes I think I have more of the rowdy side of my father.”

                Imagine a road map for this situation. This is life. I moved out from New Mexico and within three weeks she was shacked up with Blake again. They probably had sex. She had probably been sleeping with him all summer.  We played cat and mouse for the next couple of weeks. She invited me over for Christmas and I passed her house only to see Blake’s truck there. I ended up inviting him to fight on Facebook. Then I moved out of Bangor to Portland to give Jackie space.  

                It turns out that the passing fads (we all know that each decade had a different signature look) weren’t WISE. In order to be a “man” in the mid-2000s you had to own a gun or drive a BMW or a Lincoln. It the 70s it was muscle cars. In the 80s it started to become about being “cool.” In order to be a woman you had to follow the latest trends and social dictates. Do you see the patterns? The advertising messaging found its way into the BLINKING signals that must prioritize the human mechanics of survival and unity in order for young human beings to make the right decisions as they navigate through time and space to arrive repeatedly at happiness, satisfaction, cooperation and ultimately survival.

                In the chaotic 70s divorce rates jumped from 33 percent in 1970 to 52 percent in 1980. Divorce rates had climbed from 20 percent in 1940 to 33 percent in 1970. This 30 year time period was marked by the rise of television and the proliferation of radio, a BABBLE of information and instructions, and growing economic wealth.

                McCarthyism and fear of Socialism swept the country during the early 50s in conjunction with the paranoid Cold War. Paranoia itself is evidence of an collective that lacks TRUST, cohesion, cooperation and a shared set of absolute values.

                New storylines and narratives about the “ideal” family emerged and were subsequently replaced during this time period. Divorce is a messy, unhappy process. If there are children involved the strain on the family is even greater. Divorce is a symptom of social illness. Something is wrong with the navigation device of the human soul. The priorities, storylines and narratives of individuals are jumbled, distorted and broken. The 70s were a time of “sexual revolution.” The cohesion of the American family was scattered and the nation was divided into two political, sharply antagonistic political factions whose trademarks were less policy oriented and more oriented toward social (moral) behavior: i.e. Moral Majority.

                I worked and played well in Portland, but I never let go of Becky. I finally broke my long silence with her after going for a hike in the Bigelow mountains in June, where she and I had planned on hiking together. She and Blake had planned on hiking them together, too. Blake told her about his work experience at Sugarloaf, where he used to see the Bigelows. I got back from that hike and heard John Mayer’s “Say what you need to say” playing on the radio several times. I broke down and wrote a long gushing email to Becky. She responded by saying she had just finished deleting my old emails, which tore my heart out.

                Somehow we kept email communication going.                                                               

                Is this the recurrence of the “city on a hill” theme attributed to Jesus, repeated famously by John Winthrop and John F. Kennedy? A

                The concept of health care reform is very simple. In 2008, the United States spent over $2.5 trillion annually on health care, more than twice as much as any other country in the world and the quality of health care ranked 38^th. We were signing up new members in New Mexico so that we could persuade them to vote Democratic come November, but we were recruiting them with a pro-health care reform message. This was our thought process: cut out the profit incentives for care providers and create a non-profit government run insurance pool. Simple, simple, simple. The people agreed with us by a significant margin. Over half of the respondents at the doors signed our clipboards in support of health care reform, yet our opponents kept up a steady flow of misinformation, paranoia and fear.

                “Forgive me for I knew not what I did.”

                You may have thought that because you were billionaires or you inherited some ancient privilege the streak would never come to an end. No David would ever emerge to your Goliath and strike you in the head with a stone, yet the moment has come to pass. In your vaunted success you have sprinted past the position of relevancy to the very police, military, judicial, celebrity, capitalist, female and religious leaders who until now kowtowed to your false ranking in the human order. The 247 million American Christians. The 6 million Jews. Because the scary truth about reality is that it is catching up with you the minute you are reading these words, and in this minute you could follow your very instincts in your heart, whether you are a celebrity, a General in the US military, a police commissioner, a politician, an academic, a celebrity, a trades leader, a businessman, a nurse, a porn star, a mechanic, a small business owner, a Muslim, a Christian, a Jew. You can look at the history of nations dissolving to chaos and BABBLE while they were trying to build a “ladder to God,” another version of the “American Dream.” You could decide that that special someone who is always so influential in your life and in your decisions really doesn’t have your best interest at stake. You can WAKE THE FUCK UP.                 Ethos=Pathos=Logos. The answers to your questions are simple and they are written into your heart in your emotions. You were born to survive. Sucking up to the Koch Brothers as they try to create shadow organizations to promote their free market politics doesn’t ensure your survival, even if you are a millionaire. Your survival depends on at least 300 million. Some of those billionaires are fucking up your children’s planet, Mr. Millionaire, Mr. Middle America. So do you want to stick to the traditional suck up chart you got sold on the first time around or do you want to help buck the trend of the infinity hall of mirrors and WAKE THE FUCK UP?

                I have opened myself up to be criticized on any number of fronts by revealing all of my history to you. I could be attacked as “gay” or “sexually deviant” by agents of the church whose owns consciences burn with unresolved personal guilt and shame about their own sexuality. Indeed, as Elyssa Golub’s attack on my homosexual experiences reveal, her knife-weilding instincts sensed a carotid artery here. Dogs do it all the time. What separates us from dogs other than that stupid fucking story that keeps getting interpreted for whoever’s personal agenda it happens to be spinning it to their cause at the time? Most people in the country shake themselves off like dogs, every minute, solving one problem to another; carrying on conversations, testing something and re-testing it. They carry on like Chimpanzees, unafraid of the future and completely present in the moment. They carry it like a badge of honor.

                In the final analysis I was born into the time period I was born into. I was a product of my loving parents, but the theories that guided my upbringing allowed me to wander in the wilderness of thought, analysis and experimentation. Life is too preciously short to experiment. Children should be raised not into Babble, division and chaos but into unity of purpose so that they are blinking their strength to one another before they ever reach college. If you believe in the concept of one God because you are Jewish, Christian or Islamic, I beg you to think about it in the terms of physics. The act of believing, whether or not there is a God, produces chemical reactions stimulated by the body as part of our computer programming. We feel elation, happiness and satisfaction when we are doing something healthy for ourselves. It is like the cheese reward for a mouse. Our body rewards us for actions that are good for our survival. The Old Testament, New Testament and Koran all inspire these human instincts which are good for survival not because we are uniting together. Uniting together for God is the story, uniting together in reality is the PHYSICS. These old stories present us with moral truths that harmonize with our instincts and emotions.

                Human minds are mirrors of similarity running far beyond the dawn of the Roman Empire. We think the same as we did back then, then surely we think the same way as each other now. We were designed to have morals because unity of purpose depended on it. So sexuality has nothing to do with morals except for people who degrade themselves or others in sex, and anybody who comes after me over my sexual experiments is lost and misguided. To them this is a movie they’ve only watched and never engaged with. They’ve played their own filthy part, you can rest assured, but they never engaged. To you who woke up and engaged long ago, you are fucking alive. You shake it off and move on like a dog. You are blessed to be living in the moment instead of some frozen paranoia, or distraction and detachment from living. You are not running through never-ending questions in your mind because you were not born into Babble. You did not lack the strong examples of your father. Anybody living on some idea of what we are supposed to be based on anything but the purpose of survival is a zombie and they need to wake up. And you need to wake them up. You, politician. You, celebrity. You.

                Isn’t it astonishing that while the Jews kept such a vivid history of their nation in the Old Testament, they factor in practically no history of leading actors for the last 2000 years?

                I heard a voice in bed, “Forgive me. All I saw was a flash of light.”

                Tide is turning. Crimson Tide versus Fighting Irish. Pictured women gathered together and washing their clothes and gossiping. In this imagination the tide of opinion could literally be turning.

                The logic can be traced. Money logic, which is the logic of many leading politicians, corporate executives, small businesspeople, teachers, military members, police, judges and other community leaders leaves a money trail to the game players. It may go further up the chain of command, but every secret meeting where cash or a bribe is handed over in return for obedience puts the arrow toward the source of the game players on the giver.

                Becky, while her anonymity is preserved, does exist. I’ve stretched my neck before her and if she had wanted to take a cut already I wouldn’t be writing this. She hasn’t taken it yet, but she can still take it if I ever betray you.

                I had a vision of kids who had jacked a car and brought it back to a garage and a police detective pulled up next to them, got out, and tossed them marijuana. I understood this as a small representation of the way things worked. Bribes bought cooperation. In the midst of our culture, which promotes family values and hard work an entire system of bribes was likely in place, establishing the wheels of chaos and disorder. Just today an article appeared about how the CIA was paying off Afghans with cash to purchase their cooperation. These payouts and bribes exist within American culture like a sick nervous system, guiding the collective off track again and again. Instead of dealing with the Saudis or hunting down Osama Bin Laden after the 9/11 attacks, we invaded Iraq. At any moment a bag man with cash could pick off a political, military, medical or religious leader with a bribe and with the initiative of their own agenda change the course of human history.

                When I was in the hospital I imagined an entire army of law breaking drug addicted criminals under the control of the hospital and the police. If they played ball they got drugs and favors, in return, the police or the hospital got crucial underground information and control. There’s a human fascination with the physics of our communities that could easily drive such a scheme, guided by the pragmatic belief that it will be as it is anyway, why not harness the negative forces for our own good?

                It’s time for women to do what they always do with men, yet take it to the next level of action, made possible by our blessed internet. Begin an online national or international—it is out of my control—coalition of the most sexually coveted as well as the smartest or most talented women in every field. Elect a queen. I recommend Becky Desselle because she qualifies on all fronts: intelligence, sex appeal and sports and she is highly plugged in. Yet Becky may never surface precisely because she has the types of family values that make her such a good candidate; family values that will humble any man comparing notes with her life.

                She knows better than to crave national or international attention. I know no alternative course. If I fail here, I fail completely because I will never succeed in the trades. I gained respect for American laborers, but I was born to write and put myself out there into the eye of the hurricane PASSOVER of the American media, rising on the spirits of the country boys I grew up with to defend their seat at the table of survival. The ladies will be so humble as to organize themselves under ONE leader over all who will assign leaders over thousands, leaders over hundreds, leaders over 50 and leaders over ten. They will know to include women of color, women of different faiths, women of different ethnicities because we are all sunlight energy and God sees no difference, but God does see talent, grace, charm, morals, athleticism, value and honesty. God is woman, whether the original authors knew it all along or not. God is survival, which can only go through woman. Communication among this new order of women will follow the role model graciously provided by the Catholic Church and flow toward the queen and back out again. Women will use their God-given instincts and identify winners and losers based on their qualities of character. Losers will be forced into the cold, ignored, left to fend for themselves because the women will go to the men: in the legal system, the military, the police, the business community, the celebrity and athletic world and word will get back through the chain of command to the communities. Deadbeats, drug addicts, that vain, the hostile, the egomaniacs, the petty, the selfish, the bad team players, the unfair, the unjustly powerful will fall. There are no laws against putting a man into the cold. God may judge me harsh, too. After all, I wrote as much as I could write to Becky, perhaps sending her emails that never made it past a filter, if she made one for me. I did everything I could to wake her up and see the world that was falling apart and it was in her hands and power to fix it. Newton’s first law of physics states that, “An object at rest stays at rest…unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.” I was an unbalanced force, propelled by the accumulating and apocalypse-creating kinetic energy created by humans who enlarge themselves at the expense of truth to others as it ricochets toward us from the past.

                Becky wasn’t responsible for the physics of human behavior that acted on me and created me. She did, however, live through almost every year that I have lived in America. She is a true witness. She has strong genes, a sharp mind and a disciplined upbringing. I was not disciplined, partially because something always tugged at my instincts to understand WHY. These feelings grew with every buried childhood homosexual encounter in a society that couldn’t laugh it off or move on without animated vindictiveness about it because it’s condemned in this old story these game-players keep selling us. My instincts tugged at me every time I watched someone lie or heard them badmouth someone else; every time I saw a girl get with a guy despite or because he displayed cruel behavior toward others; every time I saw so much pride in a man I knew he would never learn. If you find yourself agreeing that your own instincts tug at you when you witness this, there is a reason. The logic of this behavior favors the self and endangers the collective, including any day or time, you. With an understanding of human physics, we know enough to stop that energy, that Newton’s Cradle of Evil. Sex is not evil when it is honest and society doesn’t obsess over it.

                I ask for forgiveness now, just in case she reads this. My most recent prideful letters to you Becky followed my hospital stay, a period of panic and a loss of ability to carry out the most basic functions. I bow so low before you. I miss you and I love you. I just want you to have so much company, all of your family and have so many good friends and enjoy a community where 100 percent of the people BLINK together.

                You will be my judge. You will write this story now. This will be another marker point in history. We can mark it AC, for After Chris. It will be the day power is lost by all the hidden editors and planners and designers of the course of history who have driven humans under a logic of making money rather than surviving. Their logic and their designs set up the circumstances we catapulted into unconsciously from the chain of life you taught me to respect.

                It could be argued that I never grew up or changed, and maybe I never did. Maybe I never will. But I’m ready to set forth the proof of my life to argue that the machine of human physics in my life is broken and stand before the hurricane. I’m ready for the PASSOVER. Becky will be my judge and jury. If God, the queen, decides I must be forced into the cold, I will die knowing that God is alive again and humanity might survive.

Elizabeth: Just, say it.

Me: If there is a God show me a sign. A bird flying.

Elizabeth: I see it. A sign.

Me: This is incredible. (Sun shining, shimmering over the field). Let’s do it forever. (Voice in my mind says, “We can’t do it forever.”) Well, then let’s do it for a thousand years. (Voice in my mind says, we can’t do it for a thousand years. I sensed as though someone else was going to make a counter offer). Well then let’s do it for the moment.

Elizabeth: Can I have this pen?

Dean: Yes.

Elizabeth: Can I have your wallet?

Dean: No

Elizabeth: Why not?

Dean: Because there have to be limits, because there has to be order or there is chaos.

Elizabeth: But if I really, really needed it.

Dean: And I will always give to you.

                Give them the old Razzle Dazzle. Razzle Dazzle Them. Reporters, like paparazzi swarming around a woman asking her questions, sometimes leading questions that push her to get defensive or answer in a certain way.

                The future will test us to see what we have. An emotional connection with the cast of Friends will not be sufficient.

                The object of life is to survive forever. The tree of life versus the tree of knowledge. I set the tree of eternal life before you, my reader, because it is not so heavily guarded it cannot be reached. We were born to survive not only in our generation but eternally through our progeny.

                For those who  believe that the economic winners deserve the top spot of female desirability, consider that they are leading this world into apocalypse. So there was always good reason that something about their craven lust for money seemed WRONG. All the stories and fairy tales WARNED about it.

                We are blessed not to know the terror of the Jews or any people taken prisoner and marched to death camps. There has been too much terror running the world lately. Terror is a choice that every single last American plays a role in deciding. Societies devoted to the truth and governed by an overwhelming sense of gratefulness tap into essential human instincts. We are designed to pick up on the blinking signals each of us send through our actions. Our long- and recent-past actions etch themselves on us on the tone and texture of our skin, into our faces, our muscles, our eyes, they leave traces in our houses, cars in our eyes and our current thoughts come out in the topics we choose for conversation.

                A man who is a player may not have a kid who is a player and the player dad may have characteristics about him that are not so virtuous to his son, who will always prefer virtue to chicanery.

                I want men who want to survive to come out of the woodwork that they are hiding in and identify themselves as honest Americans who are devoted to working on behalf of survival. There is nothing that cooperation and negotiation cannot resolve, but money logic doesn’t work. I want to see the men who demonstrate through their actions that they don’t want to cooperate with me reveal themselves to me so I know who is an enemy to my survival. I want to work with those who want to work with me on behalf of survival, writing and communicating survival information. We can no longer toy with our government. While Democrats have many corrupt members in their ranks, Republicans more openly advocate for money logic policies that benefit a select few.

                The arguments against sexism make it very difficult to write that men and women may be intended by nature to have different roles. Shrill feminists pounce on any suggestion that there are innate differences between men and women. Sure, they accept that there are physiological differences, but they believe that anything other than putting men and women together in all circumstances is backwards, sexist and oppressive.

                Women will settle the pecking order internationally and do it now. Every instruction, every man who recruits women in photography or adult entertainment, every editor, every producer, every man in marketing, every boss, every man who tries to manipulate a woman’s emotions will be reported to the group and scrutinized. This includes me, but this book puts my “file” under their consideration anyway. The question is: what is the agenda behind his advice? Is his agenda for personal gain? Is it for greed? Is it for money? Or is it for selfless survival? No man is safe from the judgment of “God” not even me. This will be the era when the unsung heroes in our military, our trades, our public safety departments, our farms and our communities get passing grades for their conduct and behavior. This will be the era when men who chose selfishly and got by with emotional manipulation find disapproval, even if they have strong sexual appeal. The interests of the collective will override the desires of the woman benefitting from his sexual attention.

                In effect, this will be the Judgment Day we were always warned about. The irony of growing up in a misguided Christian society, whose core beliefs went ignored by many, is that we all got the warning. Even when the priests who warned us were carrying on with male prostitutes or exploiting their political connections for their own benefit, they warned us nonetheless. Sucks for them if they thought that warning could be ignored. I’ve taken to saying that “Judgment Day” is any day in the eyes of a woman. Men who lie to conceal their behavior don’t LACK morals. It is precisely because they LIE that we know they HAVE morals. They know deep down inside what is right and what is wrong: these concepts of right and wrong were selected by nature for our collective survival.

I’ve just raised the pirate flag. We’re gonna see whose pulses raise.

Essentially I believe nature selected human genetics so that men bitten by a guilty conscience or an encroaching sense of dread “loose their hearts” in battle.

My appeal to all of the men of the military, police, legal system, trades, small businesses and families is that, guys, I’m trying to get all the attention from the ladies going in your direction for all of the right reasons. You need to be plugged into communications. You need a woman who needs something back from you. And I’m not talking cheap moves at a bar or your billiard skills or dartboard prowess or your cash. She needs to know what activity you’ve seen. She needs to know who’s being shady, what deals are taking place, who is in and who is not. When she’s done with you, she’s taking her information back to the command center she is plugged into and talking with every last woman cooperating for our survival. Within days, men who catch the spotlight of this network will be wrapped up in the tangle of their own lies and designs and this entire network of women will all know it simultaneously. Then the “hall of mirrors” effect takes over and a man can really go insane. The hall of mirrors effect is where a guy gets the same treatment he would do unto others. The women go to the men and drive his perception of this target. Meanwhile the women deal with the man themselves as instinct advises. I’ve seen women call a man out directly and if he even tries to respond, the man or men she’s already gone to and shaped his or their perception of this target confront him and puts the target in his place. Maybe she is more the type to be pleasant but ignore. Maybe she finds a round-about way to bring up his ethical failings.

                In order for women to help their children, their memory in history books or their enjoyment of life survive they must, as world-wide women tribe, prioritize their attachments, even if only as friends to law enforcement, military, lawmakers and justice. This list encompasses all the last resorts of power. Even a finance guy is inferior to a judge. No single tough guy, even if he belongs to the mob can take on the US military. The bankers, and every private and public industry are all subjects to the laws and political mechanics of the states and nations they belong to. There will be scum bag politicians, judges and sometimes military and law enforcement. Their “sin” will be ego and private designs. These designs do not accomplish the survival that women instinctively desire and so these rogue men will be undone by their own designs. The women will go to the men and shape their perceptions about a rogue judge, politician or police officer. The women of the international tribe will expect judges, police officers and politicians to make themselves available and with their repeated talking points, coming from the heart of the international tribe of women, will guide their “judgment” or else questions will be raised about how these public leaders spend their personal time. The women will go to the men favoring a competitor and using the same damning critique of the rogue actor, like, “he’s not man enough.” These rogues will be singled out one at a time and many more women will be working the case than the men involved. This is a world-wide tribe. The heads of the BEAST will be everywhere and in every man’s ear, controlling more influence than Fox News at its finest hour.

                Yet we all know that toughness plays a role and makes points in far more places and times during a day than political and legal battles. Women will agree that participation in the pursuit of survival comes with its own rules. No woman or her man is bigger than the international cause. If he begins to associate with any other cause, the cause is too small to do battle with the whole world, and she must be willing to sell him out and everything he knows and tells her to the greater tribe of women who will decide his fate. Her fate will be honorary. The greater tribe of women will go to the men: in the FBI, the CIA, the military, the police, the judges, the trades, private industry captains and the politicians and the uprising will never threaten the survival of the fittest. Imagine a rogue trying to rise up against the world’s collective military might…every world military, political leader and justice system cooperating with the international tribe of women: “smoke show” as they used to say in rural Vermont.

                This tribe of women must accept that there will be winners and there will be losers. Losing for women means losing the right to have children and/or estrangement from the core tribe of women. For men on the losing end of the spectrum, they must hope for a life of meager but fair sustenance and physical work. Children for losing spectrum men are out of the question. Men can improve their hopes for survival by participating on a team with other men who are dedicated to world survival. In this way they make themselves important and connected. Maybe they are firemen, maybe they are tradesmen. Maybe they are farmers. Maybe they are technology gurus or scientific researchers. The instincts of a collective of women will determine these types of men worthy teammates.

                The world’s population is too big. CO2 emissions are too high. Criminals, shaped though they might have been by the conditions of their youth, fall to the end of the list of priorities right now. Repeat offenders of crimes as petty as theft could go to firing squads after new laws are passed to achieve security of mind for women in the international tribe of survival. Swift justice for individuals not persuaded by the emotional or physical anguish they cause others will clean up our country of fear, terror and crime. It will ease the strain they caused to our economy and our peace of mind.

Don’t think about Jesus and your wife right now. Think about yourself being born fairly recently in these millions of years of human history and your wife was born recently, too. Maybe you’re a couple that never feels jealousy. If so, disregard this advice. But to those couples isolated on the outer freeze, which is everywhere and widespread and leaves an easy majority of women feeling isolated from the deciders deciding their children’s lives. Other women may believe they are patched into the right network, but is it for survival or do you have frequent insights into how business and money-making interactions are really taking place?

“And this world will fall on its face when it sees what it missed out on.” Jumbotron of Becky smiling and holding a bouquet  of flowers and a ring not made of diamonds, but of a beautiful world…the whole thing. “If you liked it then you should of put a ring on it” kept playing in the back of my mind. In countries throughout the Middle East I pictured seas of Muslims praying as a voice came over the loud speaker and said, “You have all loved false Gods. Your God has said that you have all failed and the skies darkening over their heads.”

I had a vision of the entire world peering as one eyeball at Israel and some Israeli man in a white tower representing Israel was looking out a wide open window up at the sky. I pictured all of the world peering at the Vatican. I had no control over these thoughts and I never had them about Jews, Catholics or Muslims before I saw Ari Melber staring into the camera and telling me that I and every American wants gun control before the natural grieving period is even over. Bloomberg was pushing gun control, Murdoch and the first five Senators to come out in favor of gun control all had Jewish last names. I noticed a pattern and then remembered the chummy boys club at The Nation that I definitely did not belong to.

Maybe the reason why people always advised me to “move on” after Becky was because they were too afraid to let the “I love you” carry them to the place I’ve walked, leaning heavily on the shoulders of my parents and friends, but refusing to give up until I knew what “I love you” meant I had to do: write this book. I love you Becky, and I would gladly give up all the money I make on this book and my life to you so the child I saw in you, balanced by your responsibility, athletics and work ethic, all of which was nurtured by your two wonderful parents, can survive forever.

Me thinking about my shivering experience, feeling like my soul had risen out of my body the night before I went to the Hospital. That feeling that I’ve been granted immunity to be the devil from here on out.

So I had to try my hand out at a book and sell my ideas for profit, contradicting my previous theory that sincere advice is never sold, but offered freely. I still think it’s true. Yet I recognize the need to wash my hands in the same blood as the men I know it is practical to cooperate with for my survival: the millionaires and the billionaires worldwide. But I say to you, my brothers, we must not look to the past to decipher our morals anymore. We must look to survival instincts. We must see cooperation and calm as absolute ideals. I propose a seven year moratorium on profit-seeking in every blue chip business that wants to cooperate for survival. Let your deeds now be spoken the way your body always told you they needed to be spoken. It wasn’t for the acquisition of money you were designed. You were fooled by a GAME that has kept you out of touch with your TRUE human instincts: survival. Survival and PROFIT making DO NOT EQUAL. I make a profit off this book to say, “We all begin TODAY.” Nobody is a choirboy (Mark Foley, Ted Haggard, Mark Sanford) and even if they were it meant they never took chances. Taking chances is what we are all about. From junior high school conversations between boys and girls upping the ante about what they talk about sexually to racing, jumping off bridges, skiing cliffs and gambling, humans have a proven track record of taking chances. “Nothing ventured, nothing GAINED,” as my friend from Bel Mullet said.

I was attracted to my cousin and that’s just human nature. We act shocked that there have been 26000 sexual assaults in the military because BABBLE has been FORCED UPON US like a muzzle through which a dog cannot even EAT. Men are ATTRACTED TO WOMEN. They are TEN FUCKING TIMES MORE AGGRESSIVE THAN WOMEN. More of their brains are devoted to sex and aggression according to Dr. Brizendine. Instead of learning from common evidence and reliability of patterns to separate the genders during high-hormonal years, we put them together and act astonished when they behave as they were programmed by millions of years to behave. It’s not somebody else who has to change, lady, it’s YOU. The good news about our emotions is that there is a right and satisfying way to live, and THAT is the purpose of life. We can raise children with the wisdom of human animal trainers…not a stuffy “academic” education department. We have the humans who know how to do this and the women KNOW who these men are. That is why they are the functioning database for human navigation. Past decades have led them to BABBLE, questioning what their emotions and instincts are really for. The serpent visited our American women in television, advertisements, movies, radio and magazines and whispered: “YOU are the most important.”

                “And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.” They infected us through our women. Whoever THEY is. Betty Friedan began decades of gender wars that have split and divided this country as foolishly as the Dr. Seuss story about “The Sneetches.” You remember the yellow creatures, some of whom had stars on their bellies, others who did not. The ones with stars on their bellies discriminated against the ones without stars on their bellies until a “fix-it-up-chappy” named Sylvester McMonkey McBean offers the Sneetches without stars on their bellies a way to get stars. Notice how yet another psychologically observant male, Dr. Seuss, identified a profit-making party IN THE MIDST OF A STORY ABOUT BABBLE.              Our women may have been infected by a campaign to divide the genders and even families, but women-unity from Betty Friedan primed the pumps for human history’s next great act. While women can immediately realize they’ve been trained to be far too hostile and self-centered to

Men have all that aggression and sexual impulse and sometimes his heartfelt genuineness will clash with his behavior at other times. Women must realize they can call out a man’s humanity and they must in order to secure his obedience. They can call it out in any man. They can say, “Hey, I need your attention. We need to survive. That means we need you to be on your best behavior and cooperating. Maybe I’ll make it worth your while.” The chase must go on in every single man’s mind so that his mind does not dissolve back into hopeless self-centered behavior. If he isn’t man enough for a sustained chase for the right trophy and he’s single, he’s probably not man enough for the job he holds. Every politician in the country ought to be chasing a trophy, even if they have a wife. Political wives ought to be flattered if a trophy girl invites their husband for a chase and the news ought to follow it not as an affair but as a question of whether the politician is so wrapped up in head games that he can’t be a normal male. Everybody is rooting for him and if he chases for all of us to see, the trophy girl speaks on message for all of the women she is connected with worldwide and we know the politician will be on the survival team. If he fails to give chase even with the “why not?” encouragement of his wife—hey we’re all just animals, right?—then we revoke the authority of the Catholic Church to tell us what we’re SUPPOSED to think and we’ll all agree that THAT politician takes HIMSELF too seriously. We will desire to know the CHASE that linked a man and a woman together, but we already innately do.

What if Becky was meant to meet and pass through many to increase her likelihood of meeting ME. I passed through many myself and met her and I’m just carrying out the physics equation of the inertia the chemistry that originated between us. There was meant to be a chase. It’s never over until it’s over, and as long as I’m still alive, I’ll still be chasing Becky, even if only in dreams.

I told Becky she was like a sister.

I camped in the Green Mountains and reported about the squirrel trying to get into my cabin. I carved DP (cross) JMB into the wall of the cabin.

Men have the same men that they respect as women have women that they respect.

Chink in armor of the dragon, David vs. Goliath

Barmitzvah’s all the parties and presents…all to make others jealous?

Everybody has to be judged on their individual merits. This is what women can do: zoom in on individuals, not lump all people of a certain ethnicity or race together. There’s good qualified men for a woman’s love and appreciation in every race and ethnicity and women know it because they zoom in. This is the algorithm for Judgment Day. Delilah betrayed Sampson for the Philistines. Women can work swiftly to root out undesirables when the motive isn’t money but survival.  

Had the image of a French or Irish father at the losing end of some riddle he kept going back and forth with a stranger who lured his daughter away with serpent-like beguile and made endless swindling negotiations for her return and essentially played a trick on the trusting, big-hearted man

All the way up till they lay me down, six feet under the cold hard ground, till my last days.