| esquire within |

Guns don't kill people, they just fill them full of small metal projectiles at high velocities.

Today on Morning Edition, I learned that the Internet gun dealer who sold a gun to Seung-Hui Cho, of Virginia Tech, is the same man who sold gun accessories to Stephen Kazmierczak.  Two devastating campus shootings linked to the same sonofabitch who had the nerve to say on National Public Radio that guns do more good than harm.

Are you kidding me? I mean, ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

Citing this "unnerving coincidence" as some sort of wake up call, Eric Thompson, who owns over 100 online gun-related stores, such as thegunsource.com and topglock.com -- websites of choice for Cho and Kazmierczak -- has launched a new forum, gundebate.com, to help us move beyond the "heated, polarizing rhetoric" and find a real solution to gun-related violence.  As a nationwide purveyor of rifles, assault weapons, semi-automatic pistols and host of gun accessories, Mr. Thompson experienced a "sickening feeling" at discovering the connection between these murderers.  But not so sickening, it seems, for him to alter his perspective on what he staunchly believes is the right for honest folks to arm themselves.  In fact, he went so far as to say in his interview that gun-toting, law-abiding citizens can prevent crimes, including these campus shootings.

I hope he doesn't take it too personally when the victims' families -- or the students who survived -- don't warm to the idea that more guns in those classrooms would have magically made it all better.

"Guns do more good than harm," he says, and hundreds of thousands of beatniks agree. Really? Sure, okay, then prove it. Show me their vaunted good works. Explain to me how the "good" a gun can do in the hands of your Average Joe is worth more than the lives ended with a bullet (81 deaths per day, according to figures in 2004). You don't even have to offer me a criminal or sociological study or anything (not that you'll find one). Nah, I mean, a simple PROs and CONs list ought to do it. Nothing fancy. Maybe something like this:

PROs                                     CONs

Hunting                                 Ross Abdallah Alameddine
Fighting Off A Dictator           Christopher James Bishop
Shooting Bad Guys                 Brian Bluhm
Playing Cops & Robbers          Ryan Clark
Feeling Like A Man                 Austin Cloyd
                                            Jocelyne Couture-Nowak
                                            Daniel Perez Cueva
                                            Kevin Granata
                                            Matthew G. Gwaltney
                                            Caitlin Hammaren
                                            Jeremy Herbstritt
                                            Rachael Hill
                                            Emily Jane Hilscher
                                            Jarrett L. Lane
                                            Matthew J. La Porter
                                            Henry J. Lee
                                            G.V. Loganathan
                                            Partahi Lombantoruan
                                            Lauren McCain
                                            Daniel O'Neil
                                            Juan Ramon Ortiz
                                            Minal Panchal
                                            Erin Peterson   
                                            Michael Pohle
                                            Julia Pryde
                                            Mary Karen Read
                                            Reema J. Samaha   
                                            Waleed Mohammed Shaalan
                                            Leslie Sherman
                                            Maxine Turner
                                            Nicole White

Of course, my CONs are a bit abbreviated. That's just a list derived from about two hours on a sleepy college campus back in April. If you want, we can add to it. 

Oh wait, I'm sorry, is that too much emotional rhetoric for you? 

And now for something completely different.

The Girl: I just sent you a photo.

Me: What is it?

The Girl: It's a picture of a sample we got today in the lab...

Me: [Opening the attachment.] What is it?  I mean, what would they send you that's so... green?

The Girl: Well, we don't know why it's green.
The Girl: But...
The Girl: It's semen.

Me: ?!?

The Waiting Place.

I didn't sleep well last night. It was some while after I switched off the light when I came to the irritated realization that I was still awake, mind racing in several directions. I tried to focus my breathing, inhaling deeply through my nose, exhaling slowly through my mouth, numbering my breaths in calm, steady procession, interrupting my thoughts and stemming my mind's growing momentum.

Forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight... I don't exactly recall when I decided this strategy wasn't working. One-hundred-eleven, one-hundred-twelve, one-hundred-thirteen... eventually my count was absorbed by a louder composition, becoming a sort of secondary theme, then lost in the background entirely. These were thoughts that would not be subdued. So I threw back the covers, grabbed my pillow, and shuffled to the couch.

You will come to a place where the streets are not marked.
Some windows are lighted. But mostly they're darked. 

High school had been effortless; Small Town Iowa was anything but a challenge. Graduating third in a class of 45 took virtually no work, nor did the accompanying honors and accolades. What I dashed off the cuff was received with praise, spending minutes where others spent hours.

This is not bragging; I was no prodigy. It was the tiniest pond, little more than a puddle. It was easy to stand out. Too easy.

Small Midwestern College was something bigger, certainly; but it rarely took much to excel academically. That is because I chose to study what came to me naturally. English and philosophy were as left and right -- and they were paths of least resistance. Though they provided enormous development, it was not difficult. I was a thirsty young man who was handed a glass. No surprise I would excel at quenching it.

I pushed hard in other endeavors, though, beyond the monthly curriculum. Learned a great deal about passion, and leadership, and resolve. Saw what could be accomplished when you poured your soul into your work; began to understand my capacities and push past preconceived limits. But what did require effort still came easily. Because I loved it. Because I loved all of it.

A place you could sprain both your elbow and chin!
Do you dare to stay out? Do you dare to go in?
How much can you lose? How much can you win?

East Coast Law School was different. I had grand but ephemeral visions of my future, ambitious but indefinite. I came without a plan, knowing little beyond a general sense that I did not want to grow up to be another dime-a-dozen attorney. I saw the J.D. as just another tool, as a challenging means but hardly the end.

I did well in law school. I did not, however, excel, and I did not excel for two reasons: a lack of effort and a lack of passion.  As to the former, I spent precisely the amount of time required of me to beat the curve, and not a split moment more.  And the latter, well, I suppose only in those precious months in London did I ever feel I was in the right place at the right time. So I floated through. Often bored, largely disinterested, stringing a few bright, inspired moments together with lines borrowed from my past.

And IF you go in, should you turn left or right ...
Or right-and-three-quarters? Or, maybe, not quite?

I don't mind saying I did just as well as so many of peers who spent most of their three years in the library, holed up behind a wall of casebooks and lecture notes as they whittled their outlines -- but I did not stand out on paper. Nor did I especially care to. Not this time.

I did not love law school, and I was unwilling to make it a priority. I wondered if perhaps I was beginning to burn out. In reality, I think, it was because I had very little sense of where I was heading and where I wanted to go. Even now I'm not sure I could answer a question touching upon my plans for the future.

Simple it's not, I'm afraid you will find,
for a mind-maker-upper to make up his mind.
You can get so confused
that you'll start in to race
down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace
and grind on for miles across weirdish wild space,
headed, I fear, toward a most useless place ...

What do I want? What am I good at? What are the world's needs? And perhaps most importantly: how do I reconcile the answers to those questions so I can set myself down the road? I still don't know. Seven years after leaving home, I Still. Don't. Know.

It is hard not to be disappointed. In those scattered nights when my mind, restless, throws itself from a higher vantage deep into the forest, it's hard not to be frustrated that many trees are not what I had hoped. That there are few tall, proud oaks. That my life taken form is not within the loose parameters of those vague, shifting visions I once held close to my chest.

For the most part, I think I do well at keeping my chin up, keeping the faith. But I'm tired of waiting.

Worse, I'm tired of not knowing what it is I'm waiting for.

Walked the Girl to Suffolk Superior this morning for her second tour of jury duty. She wasn't particularly thrilled to miss work. Not that fulfilling her civic obligation isn't thrilling, but there's an awful lot of twiddling one's thumbs involved. Exhibit A, the text message she sent just, about two hours into her day: "They just called jurors 21 to 48. And I am number 402!" 

Seems to me there might be a better way of administering the whole process, but what do I know?

Boston-by-the-sea.

My stomach still hasn't recovered from yesterday's five-hour excursion to the 2008 Boston International Seafood Exposition. Posing as the Health & Safety Officer of a now defunct fish farm (by invitation, I swear), I had the chance to sample all manner of restaurant- and commercially-oriented products by providers from all over the world. Kimchi cuttlefish, champagne caviar, and octopus sashimi; smoked salmon, turbot, and tilapia; king crabs, rock crabs, snow crabs, and softshell crabs; even oysters and clams from Cotuit. And a lot of other things I'm not sure I could accurately name (or frankly, want to think about).

But Jesus, I never knew eating could be so exhausting. I even suffered a 5-minute video on anti-bacterial, food safety laundry services just for the chance to sit down and digest. Not to mention the sporty, folding cooler-on-wheels they were handing out.

We finally cut ourselves off somewhere around 3:00. Total protein overload. Our passes are good through Tuesday, but I'm not sure I could stomach (hah, stomach) going back.

Seriously?

Hey! Ralph Nader!

Go fuck yourself.