blood
will be on my hands.
So
I came home early and went over to Adams's house when I knew nobody
was home, and gathered up his rifle from the basement and their steak
knives and also the butter knives, which could be sharpened, and also
their knife sharpener, and also two letter openers and a heavy
paperweight, which, if I was him and had lost all my guns and knives,
I would definitely use that to bash in the head of my enemy in his
sleep, as well as the heads of his family.
That
night I slept better until I woke in a sweat, asking myself what I
would do if someone came in and, after shoving down my wife and one
of my kids, stole my guns and knives and knife sharpener as well as
my paperweight. And I answered myself: What I would do is look around
my house in a frenzy for something else dangerous, such as paint,
such as thinner, such as household chemicals, and then either ring
the house of my enemy with the toxics and set them on fire or pour
some into the pool of my enemy, which would (1) rot the liner and (2)
sicken the children of my enemy when they went swimming.
Then
I looked in on my sleeping kids and, oh my God, nowhere are there
kids as sweet as my kids, and standing there in my pajamas, thinking
of Adams standing there in his underwear, then imagining my kids
choking and vomiting as they struggled to get out of the pool, I
thought, No, no way, I am not living like this.
So, entering through a window I had forced earlier that afternoon,
I gathered up all the household chemicals, and, believe me, he
had a lot, more than I did, more than he needed, thinner, paint, lye,
gas, solvents, etc. I got it all in like nine Hefty bags and was just
starting up the stairs with the first bag when here comes the whole
damn family, falling upon me, even his kids, whipping me with coat
hangers and hitting me with sharp-edged books and spraying hair spray
in my eyes, the dog also nipping at me, and rolling down the stairs
of their basement I thought, They are trying to kill me. Hitting
my head on the concrete floor, I saw stars, and thought, No, really,
they are going to kill me, and if they kill me no more little Melanie
and me eating from the same popcorn bowl, no more little Brian doing
that wrinkled-brow thing we do back and forth when one of us makes a
bad joke, never again Karen and me lying side by side afterward,
looking out the window, discussing our future plans as those
yellow-beaked birds come and go on the power line. And I struggled to
my feet thinking, Forget how I got here, I am here, I must get out of
here, I have to live. And I began to wonk and wonk, and once they had
fallen back, with Adams and his teenage boy huddled over the littlest
one, who had unfortunately flown relatively far due to a bit of
a kick I had given her, I took out my lighter and fired up the bag,
the bag of toxics, and made for the light at the top of the stairs,
where I knew the door was, and the night was, and my freedom, and my
home.
iii.
Our enemies will set among us individuals whose primary function is
to object, to dissent, to find fault with our traditional mode of
living, until that which we know to be right, begins to feel suspect,
and we are reduced to a state of perpetual uncertainty, a situation
our enemies will be only too happy to exploit. Who are these
individuals, really, and what makes them so vociferous in their
criticism of our ways? They are, if we examine them closely:
outcasts, chronic complainers, individuals incapable of thriving
within a perfectly viable, truly generous system, a system vastly
superior to all other known ways of organizing effort and providing
value.
— Bernard
"Ed" Alton,
Taskbook for the New Nation,
Chapter 5. "The Tyranny
of the Negative: Procedural
Methodology and the Pathology
of Dissent"
(93990)
A ten-day acute
toxicity study was conducted using twenty male cynomolgous monkeys
ranging in weight from 25 to 40 kg. These animals were divided into
four groups of five monkeys each. Each
Laline Paull
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