9-13-01 6:31 PM Th

Nigh school. Fucking work. My beautiful daughter was so playful when I left. She’ll be asleep when I get home. I’d like to go out for a drink and hear what the public has to say. Part of me is craving an apocalyptic change. Part of me wants to carpet bomb Afghanistan daily, until there is nothing left. Part of me thinks that if another Muslim so much as lights a firecracker anywhere, we should nuke Baghdad for starters. Part of me thinks, though, that they may be onto something—that this is the Great Satan, this fucked up unnatural way of life we call the American Dream.     Put me in a desert with a flock and an oasis and my wife and daughter and let me live life closer to nature and God. That sounds right and good. We Masons, we Americans, are builders of Towers of Babel; and so, they have come down—an act born of the hatred inspired by our own forked tongue.

Traitorous?

 Is it Freedom vs. Repression? Is it a lashing out against the female leg, miniskirt, bikinis, and “Baywatch.”

I talked with my brother this morning. He wanted sixteen dollars sent to some guy who had loaned him some cigarettes but was getting weird about the payback, and the prison had, as usual, screwed up his canteen order, he said.

A kid in my class today wrote that dinosaurs destroyed Africa. I added a few more lines to Jim and am now on page 165. Rochelle wants to go to the gym tomorrow. I want to go to happy hour. Someone needs to babysit. I think I know who loses this conflict.

I want a drink. I don’t want to work anymore. I want to be a hunter. And I want to grow marijuana. And I mourn the towers. I love to drive, but cars and freeways and cement are surely evil. Whatever. God and/or Allah can’t hold it against me because I haven’t any choice or say in the matter. The Garden was trampled when I got here. But Thou Shalt Not Kill. An eye for an eye. I’m starting to see the Koran as lame. Senorita Villa wants our classes to be pen pals. I read some more Chesapeake today. The Indians have been wiped out. The Choptank are all gone. Extermination has written history.