Levon Helm died last week and I got to thinking about how long his old and soulful voice has been part of my life. He was 71 when he died but Levon and I were young men with southern accents back then (he made music with his, I tried to get rid of mine; it worked out OK for both of us). He was singing and I was drowning in the mess I'd made of my life - and still more than a year away from pulling myself together enough to take a deep breath and swim for higher ground. Levon and I have gone through some stuff together.
It was 1968 and things were happening. The Summer of Love happened in San Francisco in 1967 and hippies were happening everywhere. Vietnam had happened, was happening and would continue to happen. The draft darkened my days because I knew being drafted would force some difficult choices about fighting or fleeing and both promised dire consequences (it was much easier to picture myself in a hippie uniform than an Army uniform). There were protests and they were growing. In March, Lyndon Johnson said he he would neither seek nor accept the Democratic nomination for another term in office (I watched the speech alone in a beer bar). LBJ was going (and we were glad), Nixon was coming (but we couldn't see him clearly yet). North Vietnam's Tet offensive happened in January. In March as many as 500 villagers were massacred at My Lai by U.S. soldiers (no one would know about it for a year but there was already a nagging feeling that terrible things were happening to somebody over there somewhere every day). Walter Cronkite turned against the Vietnam war (if he was against it, who could be for it?). Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April; Robert Kennedy was killed in June (a couple of days after somebody shot Andy Warhol). There was violence in Chicago and the Democrats nominated Hubert Humphrey to run for president. Jackie Kennedy married Aristotle Onasis. Nixon defeated Humphrey in November to become president.
And 1968 had its own soundtrack: Cream, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors; Marvin Gaye heard it through the grapevine and only needed Tammy Terrell to get by; Ohio Express had love in its tummy; Janis Joplin fronted Big Brother and the Holding Company in a world that was down on her; the Intruders sang "Cowboys to Girls;" the song said Otis Redding was sitting on the dock of the bay, but he wasn't (he was dead already); the Byrds released Sweetheart of the Rodeo and Gram Parsons was already rethinking country music (lots of Byrds fans hated it); meanwhile the Rolling Stones were playing let's pretend - fronted by Jumpin' Jack Flash and posing as street fighting men; and the Beatles sang "Hey Jude."
In 1968 there were music and mayhem aplenty.
The Band's Music from Big Pink came out in July 1968. I first heard it in a grubby apartment with a grubby guy named Bill and his pale, lank-haired girlfriend. They weren't dirty exactly, but they were unwashed and had achieved a sort of hippie-grubbiness that I admired, even aspired to, but didn't achieve for another couple of years (and then mostly on weekends because I was always a hippie with a good day job). Bill was a student from Antioch College who was spending a semester as a copyboy at the North Carolina newspaper where I worked as an editor - Antioch students had to do odd things like that as part of their education - and he brought the album with him from New York City, where he'd stopped off to visit friends in the Village on the way from Ohio to North Carolina (Bill intrigued me and words like "Antioch," "Ohio" "the Village" and "New York City" sounded exotic to a guy who had never been farther south than Myrtle Beach, SC, farther north than Culpepper, VA or farther west than east Tennessee). The record wasn't even for sale where I lived. I had never heard of The Band, but Bill wanted me to hear the album. He said they had toured with Bob Dylan; he said Dylan wrote some of the stuff on the album (I liked electric Dylan). Dylan even did the painting on the album cover. He said it was something I needed to hear. He hinted there would be drugs involved (I was a southern boy and my idea of a good time in those days involved large quantities of beer and the occasional bottle of Rebel Yell). "Come over after work," Bill said. I said, "Sure."
Bill was right.
The first song on side one was "Tears of Rage" and I knew from the beginning that it was something brand new that sounded like I had been listening to for a long, long time. The feeling grew as the needle moved to "To Kingdom Come" and "In a Station" and "Caledonia Mission." Richard Manuel sang; Rick Danko sang. And then the first accoustic notes of "The Weight," and then the drums, and then the voice of Levon Helm, taking me to someplace I might have been before but via a brand new route, a place of mystery and music and language gathered up in ways that were foreign and familiar at the same time. A journey to Nazareth, a message (several messages from "Miss Anny"), Miss Moses, Carmen, the Devil, Luke waiting for Judgement Day, a guy named Crazy Chester and a dog named Jack, freighted blblical-sounding words and mysterious meanings, not quite religious but hymnlike. A new song with the heart and soul of an old song. Folk music, rock and roll. Country music (but what country? Those were the days when Bobby Goldsboro was singing the smarmy "Honey" on the radio and it wasn't that country). All of those things but not quite any of those things.
We listened to the album over and over that day. I am not sure how many times because both beer and marijuana were involved, but now I have listened to The Band for 44 years - stoned, drunk and cold sober. I even saw them a couple of times in Atlanta (where I finally washed up on a slippery slope that I mistook for higher ground), once with their manager Albert Grossman in attendance. Grossman (whose wife is on the cover of Bob Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home and reminded every guy I knew of the woman he'd never meet) died in 1986 when he suffered a supersonic heart attack aboard the Concorde on the way to London, but that night (1971? 1972?) he was taking care of business, fussing around back stage in his black-rimmed glasses and his longish hair and The Band responded with the tightest, no-nonsense concert I ever heard. They were great. I figured it was because the boss was in town. On Jan. 22, 1974 I saw The Band on its tour with Bob Dylan. What I remember most about that concert was that Dylan opened the show with "Most Likely You'll Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine" and closed with a different version of the same song. I remember it being a good show, though both Dylan and the members of The Band remember that whole tour as dispirited and unhappy. I don't remember the details. Drugs might have been involved.
I was 24 years old in 1968 and my world was angry, noisy and confusing and things would get worse before they got better. The Manson murders and Woodstock (both in August 1969) and the Rolling Stones grim Altamont concert (December 1969) were in the future. A psychiatrist and a long hospital stay were in my future because 1969 was when I finally decided to save myself rather than keep sloshing around in my own private cesspool. And through it all, even in the worst of times, I could count on the voice of Levon Helm and the music of The Band to carry me to a refuge and a resting place. I still listen.
Remember polio? Texas is like that. Sometimes it cripples you, sometimes it sits on your chest and smothers you. But it always gets you one way or another. Ask Rick Perry. He just came limping back. And I have felt stifled nearly to death for a decade. In fact, Rick Perry and I suffer different manifestations of the same ailment: Too much Texas. I should never have come here and he should never have left. Now we are both in the process of curing our mistakes.
My wife told me the other day that I should not say things like, "I hate Texas." She said I partucularly should not say them in front of real Texas-loving Texans (like some of the people we know here). She reminded me that we had just spent a couple of days enjoying a friend's farm near Tarpley, Texas, and that the friend is one of those real Texans. She said I should say, "I am not a Texan" or maybe, "I will never be a Texan" and let it go at that. And while those things are true, after a decade here I am not a Texan and never will be because I really don't like Texas. But in deference to her I will not say I hate it. The truth is that she doesn't like it any more than I do, but she is nicer about it. We need to leave. We have known that for a long time. And plans were in place.
In fact, we figured we would be back in New Mexico by now. We were moving forward. The Austin house was on the market. It was ready for viewing (and some people came to see it). We had begun to pack. But things happened the way things do. My wife's mother had a heart valve replaced along with some unanticipated bypass surgery and never recovered. Sometimes she seemed a little better, but mostly she seemed worse day after day. Pneumonia, kidney failure, liver problems, circulation problems. She spent two months in intensive care in Kansas, a few days at a rehab center a long ambulance ride away in Nebraska and, after a long ambulance ride back to Kansas, one night in a hospice center where she died. My wife spent much of that time with her mother and was there when she drew her final quiet breath. It was a difficult time for Dauna, her siblings, her family, all of us. When we returned to Texas in October, grief and exhaustion filled our days and left little time or energy to prepare for the future - or for moving. We took the house off the market. We needed a place to call home and the way we see it our house and Texas are two different things. We settled in.
October became November became Thanksgiving became Christmas became the New Year. Even the happiest days were freighted with sadness of one sort or another. Living near tears is an exhausting thing. We decided a trip west might help. We put it off at the last minute. A little later we decided again to take a long drive west, but a blizzard between here and where we were going forced us to cancel our plans and sit tight (at least that is what we told ourselves). Entropy threatened to complicate inertia. Dauna still hesitated; I insisted. I reserved a motel room in Lubbock. We drove west on a Wednesday morning and arrived in Santa Fe two days - and 698.9 miles - later. That is where our old friends are and where our life should be. It helped to visit. We felt better when we drove 509.2 miles to Tucson to visit our son Nick and meet his girlfriend a few days after that. A couple of days later we left Tucson and spent two days driving 900 miles to Austin. We covered lots of bare and beautiful western miles. It felt good.
So we remain in Texas for now. And of course it is impossible to drive far enough or fast enough to outrun grief. But we have traveled 2,100 miles toward recovering the exhilarating momentum that carried us through last summer. We are not sure exactly how far we have to go to get there and get away from here. But we are back on the road again, 2,100 miles farther along than we were 10 days ago. That is a good sign.
"Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish...." James Joyce, Ulysses
Fruitcake was part of what Christmas tasted like when I was a boy. Dense, dark, full of nuts and candied fruit. To be more specific: Claxton fruitcake was part of what Christmas tasted like. We lived in North Carolina. The fruitcake came from Claxton, Georgia and I loved anything that came from anyplace else, even Georgia. My fruitcake dreams turned Georgia into an exotic place and I'd wanted to run to exotic places for as long as I could remember. I had maps and plans. But when I grew up and the time came to run I hesitated. Perhaps it was fear of going. Perhaps it was unfinished family business (there was lots of that and some remains as unfinished as I finally left it). Perhaps it was fear of coming back. Perhaps I knew that once I began to run I would never stop again (and I haven't, not really). Whatever the reason I delayed my departure until staying was unbearable and leaving was preferable to suicide or some slower more painful form of death. Finally I could stay no longer. By then I was a man in my 20s and hoping for someplace more exotic than Georgia, but Atlanta was the only place I could run to from the middle of North Carolina with $80 in cash, no job, a briefcase full of clean underwear and a bus ticket. Georgia never lived up to my exotic fruitcake dreams - and I never went to Claxton - but I stayed anyway. Until a few years later when I left for someplace else - this time without so much hesitation. And after that for someplace else - with even less hesitation. And after that - with none. And. And. And. And here I am, for now anyway (there is always someplace else), with another birthday a week behind me, another Christmas a week ahead and a couple of Claxton fruitcakes chilling in the refrigerator. I like to eat it it sliced thin accompanied by a good cup of coffee. But I no longer have fruitcake dreams of exotic places (I've been to some and Georgia isn't one). And the fruitcakes no longer taste like part of Christmas. I lost my taste for that long ago. But I've never quit eating fruitcake at this time of year. Dark, dense, crammed full of nuts and candied fruit. I particularly enjoy the bright red candied cherries. Nowadays it tastes a little like the dimming past and a few bright dreams of the future, but mostly it tastes like life right now and I eat it without hesitation, pause, and prepare to move on.
They read the Constitution on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives yesterday the same way Ann Coulter colors her hair -- making sure the dark roots don't show.
They left out the part about how one slave = three-fifths of a man (it was called the "three-fifths compromise," an article of the Constitution, not and amendment), which gave slave-holding southerners congressional clout by allowing them to count people they didn't really consider to be people, three-fifths or otherwise, as people for the purposes of setting up congressional districts. Slaves were property, which white southerners argued well into the 20th century was the reason they couldn't treat black people as their equals (or even as human beings) long after the 13th amendment set them free. The other amendment House members chose not to read ordered that slaves, even those who escaped to free states, had to be returned to their rightful owners. Both were crucial to the ratification of the Constitution. Leave out slavery? As we begin to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, no time seems more approapriate for including it.
The tea partiers (and their brethren the "birther" blowhards) -- who were meant to be appeased by the reading -- apparently like their United States uncomplicated by the messy realities of history (and the messiness of the Constitution). And my guess is that African Americans are a reality lots of tea partiers wish would retreat quietly back across the tracks to what southerners routinely called (offensive word warning) "niggertown" when I was growing up. It is a word I always hated, a place I always wanted to go as a child, but I was raised around white people who remained terrified of those freed three-fifths people living over there 100 years after the Civil War. Happily my southern family has become more integrated and colorful in recent years, becoming more and more a family I could be proud to belong to (I fled the south and the family a long time ago. I had my reasons but interestingly not one relative has asked me why. Ever.)
Which brings us to the N-word. And the upcoming publication of versions of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer without it. The books are being bowdlerized in pretty much the same way the Constitution was bowdlerized yesterday in Washington. I suppose everything becomes easier to understand with the dark parts left out. The N-word will be replaced in many instances in the books with the word "slave" (which ignores the message of "Oh, Freedom," the old spiritual that says: "Before I'd be a slave I'd be buried in my grave").
I don't use the N-word. Never use it in convsersation. Never have used it in conversation. Never was allowed to use it (my grandmother used it with impunity). Cringe when I hear people say it. But there is using it and then there is using it. When Mark Twain used it he had his reasons and they were good ones. I am not Mark Twain, but I am a writer and, as a writer, I would use it (and have used it) in my writing if the situation calls for it. I will use any word the situation calls for. That is what writers do, use the word that's called for, even the uncomfortable words. And they should not be removed, not even for children, especially not from Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.
Huckleberry Finnis not a book for children and it should not be taught to children or anyone else not prepared to deal with its darkness and complexities -- and its language, all of it. It is an adult book, an important book. Every word of it. How important? Ernest Hemingway said, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn." Why mess with a good thing?
I was reading a story in my old New Mexico hometown newspaper the other day. Who wouldn't read a story headlined: "Man Cursed by Spirits Indicted for Rape."
The suspect told detectives "he's followed by spirits that tell him to do bad things and it's possible that might have happened in this case." So did they or didn't they? How does he know? How does anybody know? It's a variation of the old devil-made-me-do-it defense that doesn't usually play to well in court, especially for things like raping a child. It was a dark and unsettling story with evil spirits demanding to be read.
Then I came to this sentence: "Sandoval was accused of digitally penetrating his niece Sept. 18 while he was staying in Espanola." I hesitated over the words "digitally penetrating." What exactly does this mean at a time in history when "digital" can mean so many things?
Digitally penetrating. Is it something physical or something numerical? Is it something real or something virtual? Does it involve hands or computers? Is it fingers or alogorithms? Did those evil spirits tell Sandoval to do something or simply to type something? Is it data or music or rape?
Not only has Sandoval's niece been compromised, the writer of the story has used compromised language as well. What happened between Sandoval and his niece is not clear at first glance because the word "digital" is not as efficient as it once was. Inefficient words die as they are starved of meaning. Or they evolve. Or they learn to keep more meaningful company.
We must be able to grasp the horror of what Sandoval is accused of doing to his niece quickly and completely. "Digitally penetrating" is "digitally" inefficient.
SPEAKING OF THE DIGITAL AGE:
I would like to repost something I posted on Facebook earlier today:
Jonathan Franzen's Freedom is the most aggressively boring book I ever read -- and I have read a lot of books. It is also aggressively well punctuated. Perhaps the two things are linked.
Solomon Burke died. He was 70 years old and on an airplane in Amsterdam.
The Philadelphia Inquirer describes him this way: "Solomon Burke -- preacher, funeral home director, father of 21 children, and one of the great, if chronically underrated, American soul singers of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s...." And it's all true.
The first time I saw Solomon Burke, the only white people I knew of in the arena besides me and my four friends were a bunch of bad-ass cops (they thought so anyway) armed with billy clubs (which they fondly called "nigger knockers" and still might for all I know). In those days black people went to black music shows; white people got to hear the Beach Boys. Some people still called Burke's kind of music "race music" (cops, parents, etc.) but my friends and I rejected that notion and we were out to prove it. So there we were. Burke was part of a much bigger show, a touring "revue" of black singers and acts, and I think James Brown was the actual star of the show. I didn't even know who Solomon Burke was, but once he hit the stage I never forgot him. He was not a small man even then, a thickish bundle of soul and energy who drove women into a screaming frenzy. There were girl-fights all over the place when he flung his jacket into the crowd in a moment of passionate showmanship. Driven by his music, I suppose I would have fought for his jacket too if he had tossed it in my direction. I bought his records after that but didn't see him again in person for about 40 years. By the time I saw him at Austin City Limits Music Festival, he had been rediscovered by Joe Henry, who produced the album Don't Give Up on Me with songs written by Dan Penn, Brian Wilson, Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, Nick Lowe, Tom Waits and others. Up to that point the festival had been a disappointment. The sound was bad for The Blind Boys of Alabama. There were 500 chattering women on cell phones between us and Neko Case. People were more interested in being at the festival than hearing the music. Phone yackers. View blockers. Scene makers. We set up early in a good spot to hear Burke (no race music, no cops, only a bunch of yacker/blockers standing in front of us and pulling out their cell phones). Up to then it had not been a good day. Then Solomon Burke came on (a giant of a man, 400 pounds or so, wheeled to his throne in a wheelchair) and made everything all right. He sat there and drove the crowd soul crazy. Of all of the great music shows I have attended, Solomon Burke starred in two of them. He made more albums in recent years, including Nashville produced by Buddy Miller on which Burke (who always understood how close country music and soul music are to each other) does a wonderful version of Tom T. Hall's "That's How I Got to Memphis" and a bunch of other country songs. A third album Make Do With What You've Got belongs on the 21st century Solomon Burke shelf along with the other two. Get all three and the old stuff too. Here are 10 good ones.
Solomon Burke died. I saw the news today, oh boy. Listen to him sing.
“I love beautiful women, and I’m not going to tell anyone different...Sam Cooke was packing out churches at the same time as me, but when he was singing sacred songs, the young girls were thinking, ‘Lord, Jesus, if I could just get with that Sam Cooke. Brother Sam, come over and pray for me one time!’ All of that was in the room, it’s what life is about.” -- Solomon Burke
I wasted a great deal of time and energy on a guy who called my wife on the phone a few years ago. When I answered the phone, he introduced himself as her former boyfriend, which immediately said to me: This is one of those creepy-crawly assholes who find themselves sad, lonely, miserable, sickly, aging, etc., suffer from an intense attack of the-way-we-were-ism and can't resist the urge to give an old girlfriend a call. He's married, of course, and unhappy, of course. They're always married, aren't they? And unhappy and/or lying. And this guy was married and lying about it even back in what he obviously recalls as the good old days (a REALLY long time ago) up in the icy north where the lakes freeze so solidly you can drive a car on them.
My wife, whose first impulse is not to be suspicious of people's motives (she's wonderful that way), took the phone and cheerfully caught him up on her life, her accomplishments (which have been many) and our wonderfully happy marriage (now 22 years long). That is because she mistook the guy for somebody who actually gave a shit about any of that stuff. I knew differently. And I knew it immediately. I knew it empirically; I knew it intuitively. I didn't even have to hear much of the conversation to know. Remember that old Rolling Stones lyric about being "practiced at the art of deception" from "You Can't Always Get What You Want"? That's him. That's the guy. I recognized him right away. I went to sit on the patio.
By the time my wife hung up the phone I was furious. Why didn't she hang up sooner? She was puzzled at my reaction (I don't ever act like that, never had before, never have since) and thought I was getting all worked up about nothing (which further stoked my fury). She said it had been years ago and she didn't go out with him but a short time, etc. And I was fine with that part. But I was not fine with the rest of it. She said she was "flattered" by the call. I knew he was manipulating her, playing her (and I suspect that's what he was doing even in the good old days -- he was married back then, too -- because this crap is not simply what he does, it is who he is). She couldn't see him coming (which stoked my anger even further). Or maybe she simply didn't recognize what she was looking at (which left me completely bumfuzzled).
The guy was a stereotype, somebody you could see coming from a mile away, the kind of smarmy and self-righteous creep a guy can see coming from here to California without looking very hard. He is the guy who is always out there looking for a way in. Any way in. Guys like that are dangerous.
I told my wife she would receive a heartfelt email from the guy very soon seeking another level of communication. Something warmer and fuzzier perhaps. Something secret for sure. She didn't think so. Or didn't want to think so. But an email arrived. And it didn't take long. And he sent it to her from an email account he secretly set up in his daughter's name (smarmy knows no limits).
His predictability would have been amusing if it had not been so infuriating.
DISPROPORTIONATE ANGER
But I could never have predicted the way my anger grew huge and unmanageable and would not subside. That took me by surprise. It surprised my wife. But I was not angry at her. Never ever. None of this was her fault. It was not jealousy. I am not a jealous guy. And I am intensely, happily and passionately married (the 'til death do us part kind of marriage). I love my wife and I know she loves me. This was something far more primal than jealousy.
The way I saw it, this guy was invasive, intrusive, malicious, dangerous, nearly criminal. He invaded our lives like a thief, a murderer, a rapist, stealthily crawling in through a quietly jimmied window and circling our bed on tiptoe in the dark. He was a threat. I had a reason to be angry. A guy who arrogantly identifies himself to me as my wife's ex-boyfriend, secretly sets up email accounts in his own daughter's name, is so clearly long-practiced in the art of deception, and won't go away is reason enough to be angry. But my anger was bigger than that. It was far beyond jealousy and deep into dangerous and unknown territory. It was a place I had never been before. My wife did not understand the immensity of my rage; I was beyond understanding. And I couldn't escape. That is what scared me.
My wife sent him an email politely telling him to go away and that helped for a while, but little by little my rage returned. I hated it but it happened. Then it consumed me. I did hours of research and eventually knew far more about this guy's life than my wife ever would have cared to know (I also had to wonder: What kind of narcissistic moron tries to mess with the wife of a former investigative reporter who works for an intelligence company?). I knew stuff, lots of stuff. I had enough knowledge and rage to become a destroyer of worlds and families (I won't hesitate next time). But I held it close and stifled the rage. If knowledge is power, I should have felt like Superman. But I didn't. I needed to DO something. I at least needed to speak for myself. My wife forwarded me his email address along with the email she sent him. I think she was a little nervous about what I might say or do. She asked me not to contact his wife and children. I didn't (It was my first instinct and I should have followed it. Not my problem).
So I fantasized about doing evil things, but I finally sent him a message that was remarkably restrained (except for the "fucking pathetic" bit I included near the end). It reads in part:
"... Both (the phone call and emails) were beyond insulting to her and to me. Neither will happen again, not now, not 10 years from now, not when it strikes your fancy.
“Never EVER contact my wife again. You will not call. You will not email. You will not write. Nothing. There will never be a circumstance, no matter how dire, that will permit it. As she made clear in her response to you, 'There will not be a time in the future when we can write or talk.' As she took some pains to explain, we live in a world from which you are excluded. Your exclusion is complete and permanent and we have agreed to work together to make sure it stays that way. She has made her wishes known to you; I have made mine. Any further attempts -- ever -- at contact by you will be considered both malicious and harassing. She took the high road in responding to your email; there will be no high road if you ever contact her again.”
I sent the email to his personal account AND to his daddy's-little-secret@ email account on May 17, 2005.
I felt better. Eventually my anger subsided then finally disappeared. I can't explain it except to say what he did probably touched some dark childhood fear of threats and betrayal (dysfunctional families hide all kinds of stuff in dark places). Wherever it came from, it was terrible. It was real. I hope never to visit that dark place inside me again. I can never apologize to my wife enough for what I became in those angry days. And I can never thank her adeqately for lovingly grabbing hold of my hand and not letting go until I escaped of the dark hole I was in. We came out of it together.
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT
That was five years ago and reading over my email to him its message remains perfectly clear. "Never" still means never. And "Never EVER" still means Never EVER. And "There will never be a circumstance, no matter how dire" still means not even if you are sick, dying, ecstatically happy, seriously suicidal, being held captive in a cave by Al Qaeda, nothing. The message still says what it was meant to say.
Now this.
A few days ago the guy ignored everything my wife said and everything I said and wrote to her again. He mentions reading both of our emails to him and declares himself laughing out loud ("lol"). But we aren't laughing. This time it's a private message to her on Facebook. A "five-year update" for people who don't want to be updated and tried to make that clear five years ago. But this time she sees him for what he is. She told me about his message last night. Did he think she wouldn't mention it to me? He seems not to have understood the "we have agreed to work together" to keep you out part of the email I sent either.
My wife is angry. I am angry. We resent the intrusion. We resent having to spend any more time on this. She says we will sit down together and deal with it. No time will be wasted. And whatever we do, or don't do, I hope he gets the message. Stay away. If it isn't clear enough, he should read through the email I sent him five years ago, especially the part that says, "there will be no high road if you ever contact her again."
The message is simple: Stop now. Bad road ahead. And bad roads can lead to dark and dangerous places. But the high road ends here.
*******************
Meanwhile, this one goes out to The Creep. You know who you are.
