March 30, 2002

If I make it there by 5:30 I can actually catch the matinee showing, but then what will I do for the rest of the evening? I could just spend it on the phone with you. You know I can't get enough of that, but yet it somehow makes me feel like my life is empty. Should I be in a bookstore instead? Reading comic books? Maybe I'll even find one I want to buy this time.

Hope Toronto is all it's cracked up to be for you this weekend. Hope it was a bit better planned than our trip to Vancouver. It really embarrasses me how little we managed to see of it when we were there. At least you got a jaw-droppingly breathtaking hairstyle out of it.

Thank you for Fridays, that's all I can say. If only everyday were a Friday... on second thought, then we'd never have a weekend and it would be more like everyday being Wednesday. Well, in any case, let's ban Monday through Thursday and have three day weeks. That would be something.

At least it's Friday where I am anyway. It's already 7:48pm where you are. The day is over, but the night is young. My evening is just beginning. Pre-weekends are full of so much hope aren't they? Well, we'll see if we can manage to dash every single one of those hopes in the two days to come.

Hope you have a relaxing one.

---

I just found out noders aren't allowed to visit Vancouver without paying Pseudo_Intellectual a call. It's in the rulebook, page 16. Right under the part about orangoutans.

A day of trivialities, 'twas.

Spring, though nominally here, has yet to assert itself appropriately with the warmth usually associated with it. Spring is one of the few times you can actually appreciate living in Nebraska, because as the world comes alive again, the weather turns nice again, and suddenly, after a few miserable months of winter, you can go out and enjoy yourself.

It snowed, again, last week. It hit Omaha pretty heavily this time, dumping maybe seven or eight inches, most of which melted in a few days, but still, the buds were on the trees, the tulips were sprouting, it was too late for such a tantrum. But today, it was nice, kind of warm actually, and to celebrate not only the season "Spring" but the beginning of the biking season, I took out my mountain bike and went exploring.

All went well, for the most part. I don't have my biking legs back yet, but making sure I go as far as I can whenever it's nice has been helpful. All went well, but for a spill toward the end.

I had veered around a parked car while riding the sidewalk along a busier street, and, while righting myself, I shifted my weight and picked up the front wheel with a little flick. Unfortunately, I had forgotten Newton's Third Law, and the reaction sent my front wheel over the edge of the sidewalk into a shallow ditch carved by rain. So now, my front wheel was obstructed, my body was twisting, and suddenly, my arms were straight ahead in front of me, ready to hit gritty concrete Truth.

My bike is fine, I think, though my hands are suffering still, my thumbs almost useless. It's been interesting, living without opposable thumbs.

Meanwhile, in Israel:

I am reading with a deepening sense of dread the goings-on across the world. After the awful Passover bombing, it seems that the United States is standing largely behind Israel. It's a slight shift, really, a righting of one's self, from the position the administration seemed to have been taking recently, which was to chastise both sides of the conflict while sending in Gen. Anthony Zinni for peace talks. That position struck me as strangely, well, European. I remember thinking that there was something behind Bush sending Zinni in there, without being asked formally first, without waiting for peace talks to be even reasonably within reach. Now, I think I understand better.

I wonder if it isn't part of a plan to isolate Palestine from the rest of the Arab world. Make it look like you're actively working for peace, and when some crazy Palestinian blows herself up at a religious feast, you can throw your hands up in frustration and say, "We tried!" Make Palestine look like a bad guy, not only to the West, but to the Arab nations, who want peace just as much as everyone else. That way, when/if the U.S. attacks Iraq, we'll have a gold star on our side, making our position in Israel seem more like a position against terrorism, as opposed to a position against Islam, so when we go throwing our weight around the area, we won't as quickly find suitcase-sized nuclear weapons on our doorstep.

Because, that's the thing that really frightens me. I don't know if Arafat has any real control over his people, "his" bombers any more. It seems less like he does, though the U.S. is doing a mighty job trying to convince me otherwise. It's not like we're fighting a state, or even a philosophy. Terrorists don't need state support or philosophical unity. They can go just about anywhere, do anything, whenever they please. And as long as the U.S. is committed to fighting such an invisible enemy, we're going to see ourselves drawn in, further and further, destroying liberties within our borders and without, throwing bombs everywhere, while they throw bombs at us, the whole world consumed in terror and death, the whole world shuddering as it enters a new day.

It frightens me that the only way humans seem to learn not to kill each other is to do it until they can't do it any more. The only way to peace seems to be to blow up everything, so that the people who are left will look at the devastation and say, "never again." Until then, we seem only too comfortable with killing the other, playing this oneupmanship game, where we try to kill them before they can kill us, not realizing that we're letting Death to our doorstep, through the front door, to sit at our kitchen table.

Maybe I'll just go ride my bike. And hope that the next time, I won't fall.

Hey there, Lord.

It's me, Will Hoobler. I hope this letter finds you well and that Mrs. God and all the kids are doing great.

Now I know it's been a rather long time since you last heard from me, and that could be my fault as I have been busy with a large number of things that have taken a lot of my time and been quite tiring. On the other hand, to be frank, you haven't exactly gone out of your way to drop me a line, either. Keep your lightning bolts in your pocket, I don't intend to press the point any further. Enough said about that.

I figure that since it's been a while I should catch you up on a few things.

Generally, I've been having a good life down here. Did you know I got married? It was about twenty years ago that Charlene and I tied the knot and since then we've had little Mina, Bina, and Dina. They're not such rugrats anymore. Mina is 16 and nearly as tall as me. She brings home these lanky man-children who keep pawing at her nubile young body, and I was hoping with all the pain in my heart that you might turn a blind eye if I violate one or two of your commandments in sending some of these guys directly back to you. They're really hopeless creatures and I doubt mixing their DNA with these flawed Hoobler genes you were kind enough to bestow upon me would yield progeny that would do you proud. But I'll wait until I hear back from you before I take any independent action.

And on the subject of those commandments, let me just say that I think you must have been drunk coming up with some of them. I mean, let me state the obvious. Some of them are just plain fine. "Thou shalt not kill." I'm quite happy to say that I have never run afoul of that one and don't plan to with the exception that I hear from you regarding the issue I mentioned above. But then you've got this "Thou shalt not covet" bullshit, and, God, don't get mad but it's my very lowly opinion that whole notion is fucked, big time. Let me tell you why.

Have you heard of the concept of insanity? That's when one of us creatures down here can't make their brains work quite right. Honestly, I think that's just about everybody down here at one time or another. So when Archie Holloway washes his new fifth-wheel in the driveway three times a week, what am I to think? Are you suggesting I should be happy Archie is enjoying the biggest mother of a camper this side of Mars? Are you suggesting that when little Bina comes up to me with here eyes as big as moon pies and wonders aloud, "Daddy, why can't we go camping at Big Sur like the Holloways?" that I shouldn't have my guts leak out my asshole in shame? Should I just tell her the reason is because we don't have a fucking fifth-wheel to keep the redwood branches from braining us when they fall off the trees at night and that she should be happy that as an adult she can credit me for preserving her intelligence because her skull was never caved in by falling timber while she was sleeping in a goddamned pup tent? It drives me crazy, Lord. Insanity. Being driven crazy by women and goods is my excuse. I can't not covet, so just send me straight to Hell now without putting me through the agony of the rest of my life.

God, "covet" is just natural. If we didn't covet anything we'd never get anywhere in life. If I did not "covet" my neighbor's big screen TV, I might not ever have gotten my degree in engineering. If I did not covet my neighbor's hedge clippers, the neighborhood common-space committee would have had me run out of town because my hedges looked like cover in an Afghani war zone. If I had never coveted Frankie Dickie's wife, Clara, well, okay, that's a whole nother story and I don't want to go into it.

I still have Charlene's boot print on my ass from that one.

Lord, you made her a hellion. You did, pal. Next time I see you we're going to sit down to a few cold ones and talk this issue through. All the things that made me excited about the little woman when we were young have come back to haunt me in my later years as violence to my personal being. Dear God, could she give a great...well oral sex...well shit, God, am I allowed to talk to you about blow jobs or is that strictly the purview of the devil? I mean, did you or did you not conceive that people would invent oral sex when you gave us mouths and genitals at the same time? That's one of those conundrums we have down here. Lots of them.

Speaking of conundrums, let me change the Charlene subject slightly to something more philosophical. One of these days you have to tell me. You're omnipotent. Omniscient. That means you know everything and can do everything, and like time is no object. Am I right?

So why the hell do we have to go through all of this life? If you knew the whole goddamned thing up front, why bother torturing us? It can be downright sadistic at times. I mean, Jesus Christ, God, we have cancer down here. Do you know what that does to people? Did you see how you wrecked my father and my grandma with that shit? Fuck, God. What about my little cousin John who wasn't but thirteen when you decided to corrode his brain with a tumor. And then you whack my grandpa with a stroke and croak the other grandma with diabetes, and that's just my family. What about my friends at work? You make Anne with fair skin and kill her with melanoma at 32 years old for going to Club Med. Did you hang around to watch the pain you caused? Did you? Where the fuck were you when there wasn't enough morphine in the world to keep her from screaming from the pain, motherfucker? Where was your so-called infinite mercy when you give Rick a heart attack at 34 years old on his fucking way to work.

On the highway on his fucking way to work so he could keep a roof over his babies' heads you croak him behind the steering wheel at 60 miles per hour, you sick bastard. What's with you? Sometimes I just want to grab you by the neck and slap you silly. We love each other down here. We fall in love like you want us to, and then you kill us. So I want to ask you here and now--what the fuck is wrong with you? Are you sick? You're toying with us and I don't like it. That's why I stopped talking to you for so long, to be truthful. You're a maniac some times. Cut it out. Get a grip. Take a few deep breaths and then go back to work the right way. Okay?

Look, sorry about that "Jesus Christ" tossed in there. Didn't mean nothing by it, it's just a manner of speaking. But sometimes you really piss me off. Piss off me, would be the better English, I guess. Okay. So that had to be said. I'm just being honest here. Got a lot of pent up anger from all the crap you toss on me. If I don't let it out every now and then I'll get ulcers. It's not healthy, they say. Whew. I feel a lot better.

We can still be friends, right?

Man-to-man, I want to say this. You don't have to say anything, just nod if I'm correct. I know you've tried to kill me a bunch of times but I outsmarted you.

Look, I know you're not in control of every fucking thing down here, omnipotent as you may be. Hurricanes and earthquakes, natural disasters of every form, I realize those things are just the forces of physics at play. I'm not going to blame you for Hurricane Fran. After all, all's well that end's well right?

But you nearly crashed my plane, twice. It was when we were living in North Carolina and I had to commute back and forth to California. I saw the hurricane on CNN that morning from my hotel in San Jose, and I got on the next plane home. It was the flight from Chicago to Raleigh-Durham --don't think I didn't see it. Do you remember that one? Don't think I wasn't this close to puking from fear, because the G-forces were so strong I couldn't reach for the airsickness bag. We didn't crash. You took your eye off the ball and the pilot pulled us out of the downburst.

Then they landed us in Richmond, and there wasn't no way I was going to leave Charlene and the kids alone in that killer storm back in Raleigh. So me and that guy from EDS lied to National Rent-a-Car and told them we were driving to Washington DC, and instead we drove right into the eye of the hurricane. And I gotta say, that one would have been on me, not you. I was the one who put us into the flash flood. But there was no way on the earth I could have been anywhere else.

When the water came up around the doors of the car it looked like we were out in the middle of the ocean. I couldn't see anything in the dark but white caps and lightning flashes, the rain was going sideways and I figured you were going to have me over for coffee and english muffins the next morning. Kurt, he was smarter than both of us and he navigated us out. I owe my life to that bastard, and all I did was send him a fruit basket.

I did get home. And Charlene and the kids were safe, though there were some untimely deaths in our neighborhood. Again, I don't know who to blame for those. It's not personal when it's something like that. Not like rotting somebody's insides on purpose (please stop doing that, okay)?

I've got the cholesterol under control with drugs. The blood pressure is down so I'm not going to have a heart attack like you rained on Rick's poor head. I'm exercising regularly. It keeps me as slim as any Hoobler has ever been, and gives me a little more stamina, which makes Charlene happy on Saturday night, if you know what I mean. ;)

Oh God, this is a long letter I know. And I know you're very busy with all the sick who need comfort and miracles that need working. But I figured it wouldn't do any harm just to check in, to see if you're around.

See, nothing personal, but I've never been entirely sure you exist. Ive got a weird feeling you might, but that if you do, you're nothing like I think. If you exist then everything I get mad at you about has to be the inherent perfection of the universe and I just don't understand it for some reason. You didn't make me all that smart, God. And my advice would be that next time around bestow a little more brains on the people you make down here. Things would come out a lot nicer.

If you don't exist, well, I'm having a damn good life without you and I wish you could be around to see it. I love the kids. I love Saturday morning cartoons. I love science fiction and rock and roll and telling stupid stories. One part of me wants to say it would be a shame if all of this was an accident. On the other hand, a damn fine accident that makes such a great life is AOK with me.

One last thing. On the off chance you might be real. I had the opportunity recently to go somewhere on the Earth only about 30 people have ever been. It was a valley down in Antarctica. It's a place so dry it hasn't rained or snowed in two-million years. It's a place so remote it took 8 hours of flying in a Hercules-C130, two one-hour helicopter rides, an hour on an ATV across a frozen lake and a 6-hour hike to get there. It was so nowhere I might as well have been in outer space.

I got to stand next to a glacier the size of a city and watch it groan and calve in the warm summer sun. It was brilliant white and blue, speckled in volcanic rock. So mighty it radiated cold into the space around it. The sounds it made vibrated the ground like the earth was a drum, sound so big you feel infinitescimal in the midst of it. When it stopped it was so quiet and I was so alone my heartbeat was louder than the wind.

For a moment. Just a split second, I could swear I heard you call my name.

Yours,

Will Hoobler

Okay, I've come out here on Everything2 and admitted that I am a gay Republican. Everyone can find a reason to hate me because I string those two words together. It's an endless source of amusement to my college-aged roommates to introduce me to their fellow Democrat students not as a homosexual, but as a homosexual Republican ... the attitude is like "can you believe such a creature exists?" Bleah.

I've never cottoned to the liberal idea that throwing money at a problem will solve it. Sure, money helps, but you also require other things to get the problem solved. Like communication. Like honesty. Like integrity. Like patience.

Several weeks ago, here in my hometown, a man was doused with gasoline and burned to death by some fucknut who thinks Jesus told him to burn the guy because the guy was gay.

Trouble is, no one knows for sure if the victim was gay or not. Not the victim's family, not the local gay community, not the victim's co-workers. The only person making the assertion with any authority is the self-confessed murderer himself...and he seems to have obtained the information from a divine source. Hardly credible.

That didn't stop the gay media from stating the man was, indeed, a homosexual, and that this was a hate crime that was motivated by homophobia. I've never understood why crimes with hate given as the reason for said crime's commission should be treated any differently from the stated emotion behind the commission any other crime (imagine if we had stiffer penalties for "crimes of passion", please). I've never understood why someone, gay or straight, who expresses distaste for hearing a homosexual talk, loudly and in a public venue about the five hot cocks he sucked in a bathroom stall one day is immediately labeled a homophobe. There's a time and a place for everything, kids, and if you want to tell me how much you love to vacuum your girlfriend's carpet, I'll listen eagerly ... when it's appropriate to do so, and in public usually isn't the appropriate place to do so. Will you label me a heterophobe if I express this idea? I would hope not.

So these are the thoughts bouncing around in my head when I opened my snail mail yesterday. One of the pieces of mail I received was from my local gay and lesbian resource center.

Printed in large words at the top of the stationery was the following: "HE WAS BURNED TO DEATH SIMPLY BECAUSE HE WAS GAY". The letter then took a hand-wringing, agonizing-to-read couple of paragraphs to explain just how much the resource center wanted me not to believe that they were capitalizing on this tragedy in order to get some money out of me.

They then spent a couple of even more agonizing-to-read paragraphs about just how far my charitable donation would go to stopping homophobia, helping to prevent people from being burned alive in their beds in the future.

I have never been nauseated simply by reading a letter before, but this kind of moneygrubbing, this kind of faux-nobility is quite simply revolting to me.

First off, all the monies gathered by the center in the past did nothing to prevent the crime that caused them to send me this letter in the first place. Why should I believe that more money will make things better?

Secondly, nobody knows if the victim was gay or not, but that didn't stop the center, nor gay "news" sites like PlanetOut from claiming that the victim was indeed gay.

It's policies like this, manipulation like this, spin like this that really, really, really makes me ashamed to be part of the "gay community", and precisely why I don't take part in said "community".

A man died in one of the most horrifying ways several weeks ago. His killer was caught, will be tried and hopefully convicted and punished. It doesn't matter what moist concave surfaces the victim chose to thrust his penis into, onto, over, or around. Yet if I state this in homosexuals-with-political-clout circles, I get a pat on the head and dismissed. There's no money in the truth.

In my opinion, homophobia will never end as long as certain people and organizations evangelize people like Matthew Shepard. Homophobia will never end as long as gay resource centers send disgusting little pieces of mail to me begging me for my money with one side of its mouth while lying out the other side. Homophobia will only end when the legions ... legions! of men and women who haunt cyberspace in "married M4M" or "curious F4F" chat rooms stop their denial and come out of the closet so the world will be forced to recognize just how many people are having, did have, or have thought about having sex and/or romance with someone of their own gender.

Never underestimate the power of denial.

---

In other news, I just found out that both my goldfish died this morning. While I don't wish to capitalize on this tragedy, I need to make my neighborhood aware that fish need to be protected from Death, who obviously killed the fish because Death hates fish. So please send me some money. Thank you. Oh, and by the way, if the gay media is going to start claiming people who may or may not be homosexuals as actual homosexuals, then we gotta acknowledge that J. Edgar Hoover was a sistah. Good with the bad, and all that.

It is so beautiful out right now, the weather has been amazing for these past couple of days. This is suprising since I am in Ithaca, NY, home of the horrible weather that we like to call "Ithacading" -- a mixutre of snow, sleet, and freezing rain.

But, it's warm and sunny, well the sun's going down now, but boy, was it hard to work today!

My sister is up here visiting for the end of her spring break, so I'm having a lot of fun with her. We went on a couple of walks so I could show her the campus, and took her around to various classrooms and my favorite spots. She's here thursday, friday, and saturday nights, so of course we're going out every night.

I took her to Kappa Delta Rho on thursday night after attending a bar tab with my friend's sorority and a fraternity. We had a great time, of course. Then last night we headed out to ZBT (Zeta Beta Tau, I guess... not sure). We danced, I played beer pong, and hung out. Then went to Sigma Nu, which was having a dance party. By then I was pretty out of it but we were having a blast.

So unfortunately they expect you to work and study on the weekends here. Damnit. But since the weather has been so nice, I feel happier about working, even though it usually works the other way, that I can't work. But I'm being reasonably productive. I'll proablly screw myself over next week cause I'm not gettting much done this weekend. Eh, that's college, huh?

Happy Easter, too! A bunch of my lucky friends are escaping college and heading home. But I'm happy to be here.
Well, gotta go get some more work done. E2 has a way to help me procrastinate, unfortunately.