Arrr, despite th' fog across th' road this mornin', I sped on toward a destination me hearties could nere've imagined: How blind me luck, t' be deliverin` three one good eye t' four lasses in th' infirmary 'ere a terrible accident had rendered each o' them sightless an' one o' them th' mother o' me only lad, th' future Puffin' Knight o' Curiously Circumstantial Happenings. T' such shame, she`d named th' lad with th' moniker o' Kip.

Gar, wot a morn.

Arr.

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This morning, I awoke early to the blast of Armageddon. It was a deep rumble that shook the hotel for thirty seconds, so loud that I couldn't hear myself say "what the jesus fried christ is happening?!?" as I leaped out of bed. Groggy, I clambered to the door, but there was no scramble in the hall, and I could not smell smoke. In fact, the din ground my teeth to dust just a wee a bit less. Standing there in the grey pre-dawn light, I turned to the windows that overlook the Sauk Creek inlet and glanced down; two fishing boats rocked haphazardly on their moorings despite a seemingly calm morning. Rubbing sleep out of my eyes, I looked right over the town, then left over Lake Michigan as the blast shook me again.

I blinked three times before remembering to breathe. To say the freighter was massive would understate the term: it was massive the way one would think of a god's plastic bathtub playboats and submarines. It eclipsed my pre-dawn view of Lake Michigan, which was no small feat since my room was four stories up. It was that small realization setting in on my groggled morning mind -- that I was standing almost naked behind a large sheet of 1/4" thick plate glass about two feet south and fifty feet above the slowly churning green-gray surface of Lake Michigan's Sauk Inlet -- that redistorted my perceptions.

I suddenly -- and frankly, far too rudely for 5:17 a.m. -- found myself to inhabit an existence on a nearly infinitesimally small scale, and that was just while standing in a Holiday Inn hotel room. Had I been able to reach out a 200-foot long finger and touch the freighter at my eye level, I would have poked it in the equivalent of the sternum to the chin of its deck; or, had the freighter a mermaid on its bowsprit, I would have landed my poke right where no decent gentleman would ever poke a lady who was a stranger; or a relative.

My line of sight fell a good 10-15 feet below the surface of the vessel's main deck; and above me -- and most of Port Washington -- towered the ship's island, despite it being at the bow end of the vessel, which was pointed away from me, out toward the lake.

As a third clarion blast vibrated through what could no longer be a sleepy seaside town, the freighter began very slowly pulling away from its moorings. It took nearly five minutes for the bow to come about only ten degrees port; but as it did, the light of day broke across Lake Michigan. (Shouting gold trumpets, their crescendo immediately obliterating the low, suspenseful timpani rumble of the grey dawn light, is what the view would have sounded like.)

The vista before me opened up into a glittering horizon of blue as the ship, unmoored and cruising out to sea (out to lake?), no longer had the perspective ratio of the land to warp its true scale: with the shift, my perception twirled its finger around another brain tweak and pulled as the freighter suddenly seemed downright little compared to the body of water it was about to traverse. Not lost on me was the fact that had the boat begun moving toward me instead of away, I would have been squashed like a bug (and the Holiday Inn like a roach motel). While Lake Michigan mimicked the Atlantic, the ship and I hoped the day would remain clear.

It was then I noticed movement, a tiny motion. Barely discernable from my window was the figure of a man sitting on a small rock jetty between me and the departing ship. Despite being 100 feet away and still shrouded in shadow, I could see as he forward cast, puffed a cigarette, reeled, puffed a cigarette, back cast, and repeated with a motion and rhythm steady enough to have been set by an astrolabe.

I yawned and headed for the shower. By then my brain had done enough break-of-dawn backflips to be unsurprised when he began humming and, somehow, I could hear him:

"The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down, of the big lake they call Gitche Gumee; Superior, they say, never gives up her dead, when the gales of November come early...."

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Re-declare war.

Not enough people died, 9/8, 9/9, 9/10.

I know; I'm still here and writing.

It's a recession that's kicking in,
It's a bad time.

There's plenty of us, we're made of meat;
we're fuel.

All of us.

All of us,
already feeding a machine.

Life is a cycle, always has been,
just a grinder, circling away
perpetual motion,
perpetually circling
away.

Some have said, (and you may say)
I'm a dreamer,
but I'm not the only one --

Someday we'll start a real war
the kind undeniable

One when finally every nation's without a choice
but to spill the oxygen-starved blood of their neighbor,
one when tears aren't worth their ratings
because those in tears are everyone,
(and when everyone's doing it, it's not news)

and all the drama will make so little sense as our final worried, gasping breaths dizzy us,

and no one's there for you,

there's no electricity, no music,
your loved one is never going to make it home.

Dad is dead.
Mom is dead.

Your laughter is the only way to react to your dream,
but no one hears you,
no one hears me,

and finally,

the art, and the desire, and the love we worked on,
our race,
comes to an end, and

-- for just a few moments --

there is peace;

and after,

maybe,

the world will live as one.

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Why do I feel so badly that she's gone?

Four weeks ago, while I took my morning shower, a small insurgent -- eight legs gangly and no web -- crept up the side of the shower toward the corner, where four others had already staked out their cobby estates. When the insurgent tripped a wire, the largest of the incumbent bunch lunged, front legs flailing, and knocked the party crasher to the soap dish suctioned six inches above my head, gone from my view.

A rinse of Pert later, her gangly front legs appeared over the edge of the dish -- the edge that hung out over the shower, not that nearest the wall. She rose up, over, and fell.

Spinner-quick, she dangled just outside of the shower spray -- and four inches from my nose. I told her what I tell them all: "You're welcome to shack up your own space in here, but enter mine and you're drain gravy."

She clambered up her moistened thread, scrabbled over the soap, and made her way up the wall. Just before she reached the web that gave her approach away, she turned and made for the territories, the far corner where no other spider lay.

Five minutes ago, I took a piss. On the way by the shower, I glanced up, and noticed she wasn't there. It was not hard to notice -- over the last month, she had molted four times, and the skins of her maturity still hung about my shower like spectral warnings to All Ye Who Enter. (I'm not sure how she ate, or grew; I never saw prey in my shower...and I'm not sure if that fact is the chicken, or the egg.)

The corner where she'd hung for a month was bare. I looked all over the shower stall, above and behind the toilet, beneath it...then caught my face in the bathroom mirror.

I looked distraught. I was trying to find a spider that had taken up space in my shower, then spent a month GROWING and wigging me out...and I looked like I'd lost something precious.

Maybe it's the reminder of what's coming Monday; maybe it's just that I'm tired and sad today. Either way, that stranger spider, without a molecule of thought or intent, made me feel remorse; made me feel loss; and made me realize -- in a frantic search for the perpetuation of her short existence (that I am sure every reader is considering silly) -- that there is an arc of birth and life that is define by struggle, with a perhaps inevitable end; but with each conscious moment of survival, every living thing creates a resonance, a widening ripple, that extends throughout the universe around it.

My birthday makes me realize death. But a spider made me realize, really, I just want to ripple.

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Fuck Oliver Stone and fuck Paramount Pictures. Fuck them all, and fuck them with anger.

Fuck them for deciding to share their "vision of the American holocaust" with the rest of us, but made sure to release their fucking movie on Friday, September 8, so they could milk the box office as the five-year anniversary of the TRAGEDY nears. Hey, after all, according to the freak-fucks that bombed us, the WTC was destroyed because of our evil capitalist ways, right?

So why disappoint them!

Fuck all of you. But mostly, fuck anyone who harms out of bigotry or fear.

Fuck the terrorists, fuck them as hard as they can be fucked, then fuck them until they tear and let God lap up their blood.

Fuck you KKK, and fuck your children with every disease that rots them to save the rest of us.

Fuck you white man with one fist wrapped around your little dick and the other punching your wife's face. Fuck you white man for keeping her in second place. And fuck you mostly for making her think of you when she sees my pale face.

Fuck the non-whiteys, too, with your hatred that matches that of your enemy -- not only are you no better, but you're worse for demeaning yourself to the fuckstick white bigot's level.

To all of you, Fuck You, fuck your children, and fuck your genetic homocide.

This weekend, fuck Oliver Stone; but fuck Paramount first. Let them all be the effigies of your anger. Fuck every fuck at that company, and fuck them worst. Fuck them with every other fuck who can actually relate to the shit stain bigotry herein. Fuck them with every motherfucker upset at these sentences. If that is all of you, good -- fuck me, then -- but fuck them more, fuck them first, and fuck you too.

My birthday is September 11. But I have moved it to today, September 8, for the ratings.

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