Predator Press
[LOBO]
When people find out that I lived in Hawaii for something like seven years, inevitably the next question I get is "Well what the heck are you doing
here?" Very tedious. But don't ask me when it's negative five degrees outside and I'm chipping at a block of ice that might happen to have my car in it. Or when I'm waddling Michelin Man-like, overly-laden with twenty pounds of winter gear, terrified that I might slip and a squall of snow covers me up until Spring. Or even when the repair guy grins like a vampire at a Wes Craven movie as he tears out my lengthy bill after fixing my furnace.
Throwing gasoline on this whole issue is my beloved mother, who still lives in Hawaii. "What the heck are you doing
there?"
Very tedious.
But she sweetens the pot. She's got a nice live-aboard yacht I can live on for free. Her boyfriend runs a salvage business out there, and offers me a job ... one that pays about twice what I make here.
To illustrate the whole mess I've made of things, I'm going to have to be the first to break rank with my respected colleagues and offer some personal details. But don't start loading yer shotguns, gassing up your Humvees and polishing your mortars labeled "LOBO" just yet because I'm not going to make this easy on you jerks.
Hawaii was simultaneously beautiful, comfortably temperate, excruciatingly dull, small, opulent, expensive, and frankly not much fun overall. Don't get me wrong; I went through the whole beachy-keen surf punk phase for a while. The water is crystal clear and hued with blue undertones. And I mean BLUE ... not that creepy grey/green opaque thing the Atlantic has got going on. I guess all the sediment stays down because of all the coral formations and so forth.
But after a while I realized that this crystal-clear water makes for great visibility for the hungry superintelligent giant squid on the go. I have it on good authority that the Hawaiian waters are widely regarded as fast-food drive-up windows in the superintelligent giant squid community. It's a classic right out of the Superintelligent Giant Squid Playbook.
Landlocked on a tiny island surrounded by deadly predators. On property and bills so huge I got to the point that I found them laughable. In a community that has little but contempt for young white males mooching and trying to shoot their DNA all over the damn place. Clutched in a combination of mortal fear and mind-numbing tedium, I fled to the last bastion of idiots that would actually still have a washed-out chemically enhanced loser freak such as myself. Besides Scientology.
I went to college.
So skip ahead two years.
Graduation.
I discovered, quite by accident, that I like the academics. Ever since elementary school, school was all about "stand up, sit down, shut up, kiss The Ring" kinda stuff. But this was
college; a learning institution. College was less concerned about the whole discipline thing, and seemed much more a magnificent forum
for the free exchange of ideas --radical and otherwise. It was almost revered by myself as a
holy sanctum.
So I did the stuff you
do when in a holy sanctum: I chased lithe beautiful nubile rich girls hell bent on effecting Earth-shattering liberal hippie-type ideals and
really pissing off their parents. I posed nude in the school paper. I overthrew the student government in one semester, and then in the next became the Editor-In-Chief of the school newspaper to leverage the coupe [and also warn others of the superintelligent giant squids lurking about].
You know,
learning.
So I always liked this one magazine based in New York, and began to send them writing samples. I would make a 'hard' copy, plus send them the stories on floppies formatted on IBM
and Macintosh. And every single one of the damn things would come back unopened, with a form letter saying "Your shit most likely sucks, so we didn't bother".
I had about two thousand bucks saved up, plus another three thousand on the way (I was getting published quite a bit at the time). I didn't even go to the Graduation ceremony. Swear to Honest-to-God Truth I took my final exams, dropped my #2 pencil and was on a plane back to the "mainland" states within two hours.
I pit-stopped here in Pianosa, Illinois on my way to New York. It was an opportunity for the rest of my money to catch up with me before I bolted for "The Big Apple" for good, but it was also a post-college breather with the added benefit of seeing a side of my family I hadn't seen in over twenty years.
The money didn't arrive for
months. And by the time it did, my original two thousand had dwindled down to close to nothing. Of the twelve boxes I had sent from Hawaii,
three of them were in Pianosa waiting for me ... the train had wrecked, burning virtually all my belongings. No clothes. No books. No software archives. No
portfolio. Oddly enough, when that last three grand finally materialized I was already working for an insurance company trying to reconstruct all the claims that
they lost in the same train crash.
It was then that I started breaking out in frying pan dents in my skull. Turns out I got
married. Ill-fated as it was, it probably saved my life. Years later the deranged, hideously brutal cowardly act of an insane man named Osama Bin Laden wiped out the main office of that magazine, reducing the place to ashes and rubble and simultaneously taking out over four thousand innocent people drinking their lattes and trying to feed their families.
On September 11th, oddly enough, I was working for an explosives company. They called a special meeting about the security that night. Now, amongst my usual duties I loaded and drove a truck that carried blasting caps, boosters ... all kinds of really loud and fun toys. This required going to these remote locations at, like, 3am called
magazines, where they store the stuff. In the dead of night, with no security, you could spend an hour or two with a flashlight grabbing complex combinations of blasting stuff, charge delays, 55-pound boxes of stuff that'll put a rhino on mars etc. And at this "Special Meeting", I was informed that if there was any sort of confrontation, hijack attempt, whatever, that we were just to surrender the material without incident or challenge.
Shocked really isn't the word for it. I kept thinking that this was the 'company line' that they
had to say to cover some legallistic codicil in some liability defense. I kept thinking "Just let them have it? That's fucking
insane!"
Remember the level of paranoia on that day. We knew we were attacked, we weren't certain by who. And more importantly, we weren't even certain the attack was even
over. Frightened to death, I was stuck: "Keeping America rolling" seemed the best thing I could do as but a lowly patriot and citizen .. but "in the event of an event" I had to detonate all these materials on the spot, literally vaporizing myself and everything else within a few hundred feet, leaving an empty smoldering crater and a shitload of questions.
Well, let that be a lesson to all you little leaguers ... no matter where you are, no matter what you do, there's a superintelligent giant squid waiting to launch a tentacle out of the bathroom sink and drag you into a PVC oblivion.
