First email I had sent to my best friend upon my return to USA

I thought I would share a copy of the first email I had sent to my great old friend Richard C upon my return to the United States

Hello Richard.  Sorry I have not written you recently.  Given the circumstances, self created though they may be, I hope that you will forgive me.  As soon as I came back to the States I was inundated by legal injunctions, demands depositions, subpoenas and no end of requests for documents and other information from the numerous “Trip and fall” lawsuits that have been my constant companion these past 25 years.  This is on top of my legal issues with the Belize authorities and demands from the way too many women in my life. I have not had a spare moment.  I do apologize.

I was glad to hear in your last email that you saw the visage of Jesus appear on you fresh out-of-the-toaster English muffin a few Sundays back.   I was curious how you recognized the image as belonging to Jesus?  No-one photographed or painted him in person, to my limited knowledge.   The verbal descriptions are scant.  The images of Jesus that formed the modern consciousness of the “Face of Jesus” were all painted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by massively egotistical and twisted artists, none of whom were able to get Jesus to agree to a portrait sitting, so they made shit up.  Eventually the paintings all merged on images by the most popular artists.  I think you actually  saw the face of Tim Cathway – the man who sells hot dogs on the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, and who has a face and beard identical to Rafael’s depiction of Jesus.  Meeting Tim was what made me believe in time travel.  Otherwise, how would Rafael have known exactly what Tim looked like?  I mean, Tim was not available for a sitting with Rafael in our existing Time Continuum. I’ve been watching Tim closely for a number of years now.  I hope to have a revealing report available soon.

Anyway, odd coincidences, conjoined with drugs and a chance meeting with a Hari Krishna, a Scientologist or a Baptist minister has changed many a life.  Don’t add yourself to that list unless your looking to part with substantial cash or other generally needed resources.

I was sorry to hear that the excitement index for you life has reached its max.  If you crave boredom I can assist.  I could buy you a copy of the congressional record for any given year and you could dive into it with full heart and mind.  alternately, I posses a book of Sunday sermons delivered  by a particularly banal Lutheran minister in Iowa that I could lend you.  It is my all time favourite cure for excitement.  I had it with me while on the run with Samantha in Belize.  It us a high value book with few pages – therefore very small and light.  The financial strategist in me made me bring it.  At one point, while we were hiding in a swamp,  the Federal soldiers were less than 20 yards away and looking for us with a vengeance.   After a few minutes of reading I was inclined to jump up and scream out: “Christ, will someone just shoot me please!”.  Samantha, possessing a cooler head than myself, sensed my imminent move and suggested that she would remove my balls and sew them to my ears if i “made a fucking sound”.  The image alone brought me to my senses.  In any case my friend, if you need assistance with this excitement problem let me know.

I was shocked, by the way, to read that you believe I spend too much time fucking, to the detriment of the rest of my life.  I see it differently:  the rest of my life interferes with my fucking.  We have to ask, my friend, “what is important?”  Is it a person’s job, their family, their hobbies, their pets, their obligations to the rest of humanity?  Is it their beliefs, their religion, their golf scores?  Are any of these more or less important than fucking?  I can find no proof either way.  If you can enlighten me I would be grateful.  Which brings me to your medical issues:

I suspect your doctors are of the typical variety and therefore should be treated as wayward, mentally impaired children.  Their diagnoses should be stored in a safe place so that future generations might marvel at the absurdity of this ancient science and gain some humorous pleasure at the reading of them.  But they should in no way be taken seriously.   I’m beginning to think you just need to get laid.  I’m positive that in Roanoke you can cut a deal with a hooker that will provide you with regular sex for far less than what you have been paying these idiot doctors.  In addition, most hookers, unlike doctors, actually have a heart.  This alone may be a healing factor.

Your final comment, that I “appear to be bending to the beliefs if others rather than standing, as you say I used to stand, on a platform supported by my own beliefs.”  I assure you that my platform is more mine now than it ever was.  I’m merely becoming more polite.

Other people’s beliefs rule the world and we have to make choices based on those beliefs.  If I choose to sell Bibles in the Bible Belt I will probably do well.  If I choose to sell bibles in San   Francisco I may do poorly.  If I visit a hard core Republican I will likely choose to not talk about a woman’s right to have an abortion – out of politeness if nothing else.  If I am in Shipyard, I always choose not to carry a camera, since Mennonites are offended by cameras.  Every thought, feeling and action in this world is moulded by someone’s belief, either our own or some other person’s.  We wear clothes because of beliefs.  We celebrate, or ignore holidays because of beliefs and we wholeheartedly join in on holidays that we do not believe in.  We curtail our language because of other people’s beliefs – abandoning the customary curse words in the presence of the devout.  We wear green on St. Patrick’s day even if we are not Irish.  There is no action in life that is not tarnished by other people’s beliefs.   Enough said.

I will leave with a letter that I sent to Carrie Levy, the photo editor for Wired Magazine a month before the magazine published Josh Davis’s now famous “McAfee’s Last Stand” article.  It was clear within the first few days of Josh’s visit that Josh did not have honourable motives in writing the article so I assumed my normal “fuck with me I make fun with you” attitude.

Here Is my email to the wired people

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________