The Walton Firm Memos

May you always have a buckle on your hat,

a wind at your back,

a new world to sail to,

and a desert beach to wreck upon.

May all your friends’ graves be loitered by cure fans of the purest heart.

May your juice be loose,

your smiles unhidden,

your styles un-bitten,

your gardens lusciouse,

and your crushes smitten.

Fascinating article in the Guardian today on the Swiss assisted Suicide organization, Digniatas. Most astaoundingly:

Since Swiss law allows assisted suicide, but not euthanasia (the difference being that the person who wants to die must actively take the dose himself), the act of voluntarily drinking the drug, mixed with 60ml of water, and the subsequent death is videoed by the Dignitas companions, who stay behind to deal with the police and the undertakers in the hours that follow.

Not to cheapen the discussion here, because these are people in real pain and it is a contentious issue with a lot of strong emotions that come up, but placing those emotions to the side for a moment: videoed? I take the above to mean that a lofty (are all Swiss organizations lofty or is that just the way those of us near sea level percieve them?) non-profit has a secret catalogue of videotapes of people drinking poison. I find this to be way gnarlier than even the choice of ”assisted suicide guy” as a professional calling. More importantly: How long before this footage is leaked? and in what context will it first appear? will it be a Geraldo segment? extreme-underground-video? pornography? home movies? Only time will tell, but my pessimistic impulse tells me that the first venues for these things will either be undergraduate art shows or the YouTube accounts of synth bands. The two most awful venues for exhibition of anything.

The water rolled down with our reflections in it. It was foamy for a second and then nothing, just dark out. I can remember the shape of him. He had a soft jaw and eyes that were darting off, and he held a gun that seemed to me like it was on video. It was a movie thing or a TV thing. It was scrambled, snow and fading out. It was not made of the steel he claimed. As he held it, the weight belonged to televised men.

“c’mon man, he’s a fucker”

“yeah but….”

“c’mon man … Navy seals, motherfucker, you all waist deep in that skunk cabbage and shit. Your mom was so mad …”

“yeah but…”

“and don’t give me any of that we were just kids. seems like the way people tell me that … it must’ve been shit-near everything happened when were just kids … well did he crash your family easter and then make your mom go shopping with him afterwards when we were just kids?”

“we’ll, yeah …”

“thats not what I mean, what I mean is we were kids and he was a fucker, and now were adults and he’s a fucker, so why be such a baby about it?”

“I don’t know if…”

“What, you dont know that we’re adults? Fuck you. Katie had to got those tests and I paid full price for a movie ticket, and that means we’re adults. Plus your dad died.”

“Please gabe he had nothing to do with …”

“and when you tricked him into eating that shit and he … ”

“I don’t really want to get into…”

“no, remember… his face got all white … and he held your arm and just kept punching you, and made yo say that the dog shit tasted, like, really good. You didn’t want to do it, but he was really serious: This tastes delicious! remember he was screaming that, and like say it! He told you to stop laughing but you were really crying. Like, hard. Don’t laugh you fucker, this shit tastes great. Say this shit tastes great! say it’s like the best fucking thing ever. ”

“allright man, your right, he is kind of a choad. He made me say that shit about that shit.”

“so then we definetly shoud get his ass”

“we’ll honestly bro, right now im kind of just happy we had a chance to talk about that whole thing. I’d never really figured it out you know?”

“so what, your sitting down now? c’mon man that is not exactly the way to crush a man, what are you thinking?”

“maybe im thinking that the way to crush a man is to get over yourself and show the choad what a grown up you can be? like that I have better things to get concerned about?”

“you don’t have any better things. and now Im starting to think that it’s no wonder you said that shit about that shit”

We had been younger and were rocking against each other on the school lawn. We were making fists around one anothers’ shirt collars. It was a fight going nowhere. We each could put up barely enough to keep one another at bay. Our wrestling match had never reached the ground.

Five days after the above conversation though, he was denied bail and I had given up looking for work. Different strokes.

…and after that, fuck role-play you can have it back.

Dragon Age is the Dre 2001 of RPG’s. It is not about new flash like casual or online play (WOW, Torchlight), but rather rolling heavy with some classic fantasy tropes. There are three races. Guess which ones? The classes are also traditional staples, no death knights round here, and no fucking pets. Steampunk elements? don’t make the producers of Baldurs’ Gate laugh. You better believe there is a blight upon this land son. It’s good and evil and the dwarves are stubborn, so hurry up and roll yer fucking guy. I was a little worried when there was rock music in the trailer. I thought some post-Dragonforce self-awareness might be seeping into the genre, but when I played the thing I was happy to find that all was well in the land of whatever.

This wellness makes it kind of a dissapointment when Patrick Weeks gets all flustered when people mistake games for (gasp) something fun. Something deep inside me wants him to cut the lengthy defense and just show some backbone. Be like, “yeah kid, I love myself a hero from humble origins, you dont like a dwarven underdog? well then theres something fucking wrong with you. If you can’t handle some fantasy shit, go play Bejewled on your cell-phone maybe” … and basically just leave it at that.

Slay beasts eve-ry da-ay.

Here is the second story in the ‘Nother Scorcher series. It’s about parents, enjoy.

I buy used books and sometimes they are books that have been read in high school or college and have other peoples’ notes in them. I never put notes in my books in school, I’m not sure how this goes. I imagine writing this and thinking: “yes. I will discuss this in class tomorrow”

Oh man, someone just reminded me that Halloween is coming up, and I have a couple of true-life horror story’s to write about. Today I’m going to write about something I came across in a history of homeopathy penned by William Harvey King and published in 1905 (yeah, I’m real fucking busy all the time):

… As is well known, at that time there was no provision for the supply of bodies for the dissecting room, consequently they were procured from various sources by outside parties and sold to medical colleges. A grave in one of the Cleveland cemeteries was found to have been opened and the body taken away. This act of vandalism created great excitement, and for some reason or other suspicion was directed to the homoeopathic college. It did not take much effort on the part of those interested to gather together a mob whose purpose was to force an entrance into the college building and search the premises for the body. In a very short time a riot was in progress, the college doors being broken open and the mob swarming through the rooms in search of the body. Not satisfied with simply entering and searching the building, the work of destruction was begun, and before the mob was controlled the windows of the building were broken, the extensive chemical laboratory was dismantled and the contents destroyed, and a very fine museum, the property of Prof. Brainard and the result of years of collection, was entirely destroyed. All the anatomical models, manikins and charts were broken and ruined, and every piece of furniture in the rooms was either thrown out of the windows or carried away by the mob. Several times the torch was applied, and it was only by the greatest efforts on the part of the fire department that the destruction of the building was prevented. Just when the mob was starting for Prof. Williams’ residence with the intention of destroying it, a force of state troops appeared on the scene and quelled the disturbance. It was afterward successfully proven that the body which had been stolen from the grave never found a resting place in the homoeopathic college.

Okay, so the main thing to keep in mind here is that the author is a really staunch defender of homeopathy and the college and the way he tells it, the college was falsely implicated in a grave robbing and then a mob went nuts and trashed the place. Fortunately the New York Times has a big archive of back issues online and we get a different (and gorier) picture:

…So I guess the part where a guy finds the hand of his daughter in a “dry goods box” full of a bunchof body parts just sort of slipped Mr. Kings’ mind while he was bleeting about the loss of all his precious charts. I’m not 100% sure of the newspaper account either mind you, not being sure I could pick a deceased loved one’s hand out of a corpse pile (i’m guessing, it being 1852 and all, that there wasn’t a tattooo on it). Maybe it was just sort of a Frankenstein thing where all the horror of the “science” just got to the crowd. What we can see is that William gives us the incredibly vague:  ”they were procured from various sources” which is a really ominouse thing, seeing as there seems to be a surprising amount of grave robbing going on, not to mention the final nail in his case, that the body “never found a resting place in the homoeopathic college”. Yeah, they dumped it in a cesspool.

Beyond the gory aspects here, one of the things that struck me was that Homeopaths don’t really dissect people in the pursuit of their “science” any more. For anyone wondering why, exactly, these homeopath had all these cadavers can check out the “Organon of Medicine“, by Samuel Hahnemann, which makes a brief mention that sometimes surgery is needed, for setting bones or removing foreighn bodies, or for the more ambiguouse ”…opening into a cavity of the body in order to remove an irritating substance or to procure the evacuation of effusions or collections of fluids…”.  This text is mentioned in Kings’ book as being the explicit guiding text of the college. It basically says, in old-timey grifter language, that diseases are spiritual maladies, and that trying to treat them as strictly physical problems is always wrong, (and that some things are cured by opium, smoking tobacco etc.). Nowadays Homeopaths mainly mix magical vials of memory water together, which is not quite medicine, but y’know, at least there isn’t any grave robbing involved. Happy Halloween everyone.

Here is a video I made of myself arriving several years late to the YouTube party. No, it’s actually me telling a story I like to tell. As you may infer from the title, I have more of these, probably like a dozen more, I plan on getting better at this, stay with me.

New label, about sleep. Text is from a book on witness testimony, which has a chapter reguarding sleepwalking. As usual, let me know if you want one, which reminds me…

… I also have a special sampling of labels originally meant for Whitney Ford-Terry in New York that came back. So if anyone wants labels and a letter I wrote to my friend Whitney, they can have that too (no juicy secrets, don’t get your hopes up)

I’m going to gloss over a lot of the stalking part. It’s mostly just making sure I’m always across the street from Sherri. And also I would need to let her know Im still around or whatever. Sometimes I would put something really cool together like pulling her car out from the parking spot and putting it back in backwards, taping little plastic boxes around the coax cables outside her house, but most of the time I would be so beat from the whole thing all I could muster was to just flip her doormat over and get home. This stuff went on for a while and I got to know her pretty well, like really, actually really well. I wondered what the jocks or stock brokers from spy camp were up to. I wondered what all the normal people I used to know were up to as well. Probably not memorizing the favorite groceries of a middle aged woman who wanted nothing more than to live an unmolested life, that’s for damn.

To really get across how this whole thing finally came to a close, I’m gonna need to see If  can put you in my shoes a bit. Imagine you are at a garage sale, not even a very good garage sale, kind of a shitty one in fact. Like, just a bunch of Jesus candles and badly re-sewn t-shirts and books that the art-school kids kind of dig on (although there are also some musical instruments that are completely untouched), and amongst this mess you see a perfectly good can opener. You have just moved in to your place and haven’t had to open cans yet. You think, deliberately “no, I don’t really open cans much, I don’t really need that”. You say these actual words to yourself and then you go about your day. Later that week you turn up in an emergency room with shards of a tomato can in your hand, and through the unbelievable, salty, aluminum, wincing pain you recognize the nice, neat, and kind-looking head of a woman you have been paid to follow. She is in obvious distress. Her hands clasp one another with evident nervous anguish, as her protestations are trounced by an unflinching gladiator or E.R. admissions. Her explanations unravel into fruitless babble, and her hopes are fluorescent-doused and drizzling like the countless other fluids to the hospital linoleum. The sight is poultregeisal enough for you to leave the place immediately. Crippling fear of tetanus be-fucked, you cannot see her in this state. not at all. you simply cannot stalk during a time like this.  Not ever.

What I’m trying to say is, I’m sorry.