Anonyblog

Hmmm...

I'm really thinking I might have the sonuvabitch hooked. I'm kind of excited but I gotta stay focused. Today I'm gonna push. Like workin' on a big zit. We're gonna see what kind and how much putrid shit emerges. I'm just about convinced the bastard is a druggie, but thats not for me to decide. I just need to initiate the action, get the wheels in motion and whack him right between the eyes, BANG! No mercy. No forgiveness. No backing up. No namby pamby bullshit. The psycho cocksucker has to go down. Maybe with enough pressure he'll do himself. If we're lucky. But nevertheless, it starts today.

The two men in my life

This is so weird. I would never have guessed so many people had the same sort of experience.
Mine is just another take on that same old story.

I met my husband at 19, got married at 25, I'm 30 now. We had and still have a great relationship, at all levels. I have a successful career in a Blue-chip company. My husband is handsome, a successful financial high-flier, a great lover, a great father (we have a 2 year old son), and we have always been TOTALLY honest with each other, whatever happened between us. We have always spoken to each other, and there as always been open dialogue.
Sexually, we have always experimented a bit, trying out non conventional things, but that I guess was normal, since we were each other's first love. Both of us had sex with someone else AFTER our relationship started out, but I guess we needed to know that the grass was not greener elsewhere.

A few years ago, though, I met a colleague at work, who to start with, attracted me more because he got turned on by finding out that I was very open about my sexual views, than anything else. We did not get together then, and for even a year after that, there was only a sort of tension between us that was brought on by the fact that we were attracted to each other but both in happy relationships, and not ready to risk them for a fling.

However, there a very deep tenderness developed between the two of us (believe it or not, we even slept next to each other several times over a year without ever making love, just enjoying being close to each other, and kissing) and after 2 years, we both gave in and made love. And it was wonderful, electric, exciting, nothing like I had ever felt before. It was pure sex, absolutely like the stuff you see in the movies. I felt guilty and told my husband about this, he felt angry at first and was FURIOUS with me but after a lot of discussion and explanations, he understood but took things even further. Because he ended up being turned on by the fact that I was having a physical relationship with someone other than himself, since I made him understand that he did not own my body, and that whatever I did, I would never ever stop loving him or wanting to be with him (something that I am utterly 500% sure of). Which kept me going, I'd meet this colleague very often out of working hours, until I finally fell in love with this guy, knowing full well that we would neither of us ever leave our respective partners, being very much in love with them. Our relationship got pretty intense, as he is a very intellectual person, we would have conversations for hours on end, about poetry, literature, philosophy and of course there was the mind-blowing sex, morning, evening, night, whenever we could, and which took on a very strangely spiritual aspect, as if by making love to each other, we were actually trying to own each other, in a way that would not be possible for our partners. I wonder if anyone else feels the same way. Sex was just a way to attain a mystical level that could only be reached by losing oneself into the other.

Well, so here is how it stood then: the two of us were in love with two people at the same time, and although it brought us some amount of misery, tears and sadness knowing that we could not be together like most people, we finally came to terms with it, since we understood that it was not possible to have one's cake and eat it too. This unique relationship also gave us the chance not to get caught up in the day-to-day drudgery of a couple, and we could live an artificial relationship just as many people would dream of really! So we would meet when we got the time to, and be happy in the knowledge that we loved each other and were not out to ruin a whole lot of lives (our families, our kids, our partners...) And finally it was working out quite well, because we had each of us our own life, and no one in my life knew about my relationship with this person. But when we met, we would shut out everything else and escape into each other, forgetting the world outside and simply concentrating on the intense desire and love that we felt for each other.

The only hitch was that HIS wife was not aware of the situation, and he kind of lied about it to me (well, I should have guessed, how many people would tolerate this sort of stuff in a society where individual love is the only way to go?). Instead of being clear with me, he would simply not talk about his wife in those terms, and I of course was not going to send him down guilt lane by talking about it and taking the risk of him really getting all guilty and leaving me.
His wife had already found out about it once, but quite probably understood that he was not out to leave her (they got married and even have 3 kids) so forgave him and life went on. We sort of "broke up" for some time, but then he called me and I went back to him, and things went back to "normal". Well, more or less, because over the years (it has now been 6 years since I know him) our relationship has become far less sexual and more intellectual, more of a very close friendship (although when we did recently make love, which was only once in the whole of last year, it was just as fantastic as in the beginning).

Until recently, when his wife found out again. This time she gave him an ultimatum, either he had to stop all communication with me, or else, she would leave me. And of course, the guy ditched me, what else could he do, although I know in my heart that he still loves me. My husband knows all about this though he probably does not realise to what extent I love this guy. It probably hurts him a bit to know that I love someone else, but he knows that there is no question of competition since my love for each of them is different and unique in its own way. And also, I was always AS open as I could be with my husband about my relationship woth my colleague.

So here I am, desperate for some sign of him, and although life goes on and I am happy with my husband and kid, a part of me thinks of him each day, yearns for him and hopes that one day, he will come back towards me.

I have no wish for him to leave his family, and make anyone suffer. I am happy with my family, all I miss is the exchange of ideas (and the rest) that we used to have together. But if he cannot be as frank with his wife as I am with my husband (who knows that I have a soft spot for this guy), then I can only hope that he will be able to convince her that I am not a threat to her, so that we can see each other again, because I miss him like hell.

What do you think of my situation? Is it normal for me to expect so much of his wife? She knows that he is not like other men, that he is deeply devoted to her, loves her passionately, and also his kids, and she also knows what he feels for me. He is not the type of person who goes out to grab the next sexy femae who makes advances on him. But is it reasonable to expect her to share him with me, the few times that he does meet me each year? It is not much to ask actually, since I rarely see him, but I guess it is not easy to accept mentally. I guess I will never get things to go the way I want!

Has anyone had the same experience?

Sad life...

I can't figure out why my husband keeps me around.

He never wants to talk to me - his Second Life friends know more about what's going on with his life than I do. His entire world revolves around himself and everything but me. I feel like I only rank slightly higher than the litter box.

If I try to talk to him? He'll tune me out - he'll either stop paying attention and ignore me or literally turn up the volume on whatever he's listening to so he can't hear me.

I just want to be appreciated, listened to, and cared about. I never realized that was too much to ask. I also sometimes want him to squat over me and pooh in my mouth, but he always refuses. What can I do to get one of his manturds?

To His Most Excellent Eminence

Happy Birthday to You,
Happy Birthday to You, (copied and pasted)
Happy Birthday dear Your-Most-Esteemed-And-Excellent-Eminence-The-Lord-Kody-R.-Bea-ear!
Happy Birthday to You. (pasted)

:o)

Luff, TheGPR.

Help.. One Heart, Two Men

I love my husband, a love that comes from the heart, memories, sacrafices that we have endured together. However I’m not sure that I am in love with him the way I should be and I am not sure if I can be with all that has hurt in the past?

I am 33 years old, I met my husband 9 years ago. We became great friends and then one day he said that I am all that he thinks about and I thought about him all the time. We decided to give it a chance, we moved in together, purchased a house a few months later together.

We struggled financially, I was in school full time, bartending parttime. He became frustrated with our home (it was a beginner home, nothing special but had 4 walls and a roof) and our financial difficulties. I took a break from school so I could work full time and continued to bartend at night. He wasn’t supportive of school at all and said I need to make more money. We fought all the time, he said he wasn’t happy and said he wanted to leave. I moved out. It lasted for a week or two before asking me to come home, which I did, it killed me to be without him.

Things got worse. He was mean, verbally and emotionally. He was never abusive physically but the pain was unbearable. I couldn’t do anything right, I couldn’t make enough money (which I was making more than him most of the time).

Anyway..4 years into our relationship I was wondering if we were ever going to get married? I tried to bring it up, he either didn’t want to talk about it, or say we don’t need a piece of paper to tell people how we feel about each other and one time he said we should get married so he could put me on his insurance or I on his, I was hurt and said as if for no other reason that health insurance? He said, you know I love you. I am not and will not be the type of person to give ultimatums however one night I was upset, he asked me what was wrong and I told him that I was scared, I was scared that it wasn’t going to work between us. I want to be married, I want children, I want to travel, I want and desire different things in life. Children had been a sore subject for us, he had 2 wonderful children, whom didn’t live with us but spent a lot of time with us and I was/am very close to. They are twins, and they are now 19. I said that no matter how much I love you, I believe in the future, my desire to have children will tear us apart, I would eventually and unwillingly resent you and look back with regret if I never have them. He said I would be a great mom, apologized that he was firm on this and said that I should move forward. .. That hurt so bad and it took a lot for me to talk to him because I knew I had to be ready to leave when I did. I put it off way too long. I was going to leave, I was hurting and dying inside but I was going to leave. I feared that I would never find anyone that I would even want to have children with and I am loosing the man I love for nothing. He came to me the next day or the day after as I was still making plans on moving, saying that he loves me too much to let me go and if that if children is what makes me happy, it would make him happy and he will love it but just too much right now and asked if we can wait. I said yes.

… well, I am still waiting..but I will come back to that.

A year or so later, I found out I was pregnant. It was by mistake. I was nervous to tell him but deep down I was excited and scared at the same time. When I told him, he hugged me but later in our conversation said that.. Now is not a good time. He said that he wouldn’t put us on the street but it woudn’t work. I felt the world crushing down around me he was asking me to make a decision between the two. Eventually he said, well let’s just make sure before we go any further. I went to the doctor, I was very pregnant, I was 13 weeks pregnant (without discussing it detail, medically, this is not abnormal for me as it can be 3-6 months between my cycles). The doctor and nurses were congratulating us, I was crying uncontrollably, they were confused and he said, I appologize but the reason why this is so hard for her is because we are not having it….? I couldn’t believe that he said that and then I knew it was true. I had to decide. I tried to talk to him about keeping the baby about adoption, but he said it would be too hard either way. He wouldn’t touch me, felt like he hated me, was mean to me, was short and I had asked him several times to just touch my belly, he wouldn’t.

I am ashamed to say that I went through with it. I was beyond scared. I felt like I made a selfish sacrifice for him, to keep him for him to love me again. Throughout the years, we have talked about adoption, foster children but none of our own really, which I still do want. He twice offered hissperm to his brother and sister-in-law because they were having difficulties getting pregnant. He didn’t ask or talk to me first. I was hurt, he was okay with adoption, foster children (which I am too) and donation of his sperm…all to nothing with me, as if he just didn’t want to have children with me. I felt rejected.

A year or two later, he got sick, really sick were I thought I would loose him for good. It hurt so bad, I never prayed so much in my life, bargaining with God to let him be okay. To let him live and let us live on together.

He got better and shortly after, he asked me to marry him. Our wedding was something that i had longed for however, it didn't turn out to be special as i though it would. It was stressful, one sidded planning (mine). We left our own wedding at 9pm and went back to our house with the kids (he has two teenage boys) because they were bored. At this time, we had not been intimate in over 2 years when we got married and decided that we would just wait since it had been so long for our wedding night. We went on our 3+ week honeymoon but still were not intimate. We have been married for over 2 years now and we did consummate the marriage around our 6month of marriage, that was the only time to this day. He takes a medication that hinders his hormone levels, however there are medications to counteract them but didn't take the initiative to prepare for our wedding. I was hurt but didn't say anything, i thought it woudl just embarrass him.

Our relationship was nothing more than roommates with financial benefits. We fought all the time, we couldn't compromise it was difficult. Not always, there were good times but not many great times but it was comfortable and secure. We now own a successful business and 4 homes so financially there were less irritations but there was still something missing. I would plan weekend trips to bed and breakfast, he would make excuses not to go or cancel last minute. I asked him to come on trips with me to see my best friend and her boyfriend, he would find an excuse. I was doing everything on my own. Holidays, family events, birthdays..etc. I started thinking…why do I need/want/love him? What does he provide back to me? I work long hours, sacrifice more than he does and for him to treat me bad, demand for more, take advantage and know I will take care of everything, talk to me the way he does, not care what I need/want in life. He was withdrawing me away from my family, his family was always over every weekend, when I would ask him if I can invite my parents too he no I don’t think that’s a good idea, maybe next time. One time, his family was out of town so I said why don’t we call my parents and have them over .. Be perfect. He said, I don’t care..feeling that he really didn’t want them over but I called and invited and he became angry when I said they accepted. We were cooking brunch when they came, and then he got so mad and said call me when they are gone. There is no friction between him and my family, none. My parents love him. I couldn’t believe he left me standing there to explain which I made an excuse that he had to go to work, I don’t know if they bought it..it was Sunday and was awkward.

I felt myself detaching. I tried to hold on but couldn’t.

My brother means the world to me, we are 15 years apart and we are very close. He got into a situation and he needed family, love and support. We all did, I (we) were loosing my brother for a long long time, I was lost, scared and hurting. I soon was spiriling out of control, I was depressed and so scared, I needed him and he was not there. He was actually, not only not there, he was destructive, saying it was his own fault and going to have to live with it (because I wanted to help him financially). My brother was scared, spoke of suicide and my husbands response was “well tell him to get it done and over with it and save us a whole lot of time and money”. That was almost the last straw… he kept it up, he treated my family like dirt, made my mom cry at work (which we all work together with investment homes/remodeling). He was mean, nasty, angry. His mom said that it was the medicine he was on, I said then why doesn’t he do something about it?

I was longing for love, I was long for attention, I was alone, hurting, confused. I wanted more, I was falling so fast I didn’t know how to pull myself up. Everything in my life was going wrong and I felt helpless. All I needed was him to say, everything will be okay, or we will get through it as I always do and make sure we do. But he wasn’t there.

We were suppose to go to my best friends wedding together out of state for 7 day destination wedding. I was so excited that we were going to do something together and a well needed vacation. I was leaving a few days earlier to help maid of honor wedding duties which he was upset that I needed to go so early (4 days early)..he cancelled once again. Once again, I am alone.

And that leads me to my current problem…. I met someone there and my life has forever changed. I had no intention of ever cheating on my husband but it did happen. It was the last day before I left, after all week of spending time together (in a large group). It was the night of the wedding, he asked me to dance and he swept me off my feet from that day forward.

We spoke everyday, we became closer and closer and I fell in love with him. He is supportive, loving, fun, he sacrafices, gives unselfishly, doesn’t let money get in the way of his feelings, wants a family, loves to travel. He is there 100% for me and I am for him. We live in different states but have seen each other 7 times and talk every day for hours. I moved out shortly after I got back from the wedding, it was hard. It hurt tremendously but thought, it’s time to make some changes and figure out what I want and need in my life. I obviously am not being fulfilled in my marriage that I allowed someone not only into my life but my heart.

I have tried to call it off the other man so many times, I was hurting, scared, never lived on my own before, outside of my comfort zone. He would stay on the phone with me every night as I cried and put me to bed to make sure I was okay. He said he would be there for me, that he loves me, needs me, wants me and I love, need and want him too.

I know I should close one door before opening another. I don’t know what to do, my husband is asking me to come home, said he has been selfish, rude, mean and unfair, said that he was so busy trying to be happy and now that I am not there he realizes that he was happy. The other man said that he should have known better and that he should be sorry and that he is a grown man acting and taking advantage the love that was given to him. My husband says that he wants me to be happy, that I desearve to be happy with our without him however it would kill him if im not in his life.

I am so so so confused. I told my husband that I don’t want to go back to that relationship the way it was, it was unhealthy and we should be fair to one another if we are not happy nor if we can’t make each other happy. I said no matter what he would be part of my life and I will make sure he is taken care of and that we can get through this no matter what the outcome.

Now my husband is talking, loving my parents telling them that we will have children soon, when I come home (my parents are not grandparents yet and very anxious and wanted it for so long…my husband use to say, we are not having children to fullfill your parents wants) but he hasn’t even talked to me about this prior to telling my parents right in front of me. He has talked to doctors about medicine to help with intimacy issues, he has changed dramatically. The man that I know can get securitied out of a store in less than 10 minutes is now trying to be more understanding and patient. I am proud of the changes he has made, I just feel that it is a bit too late? I don't desire him intimately, emotionally i don't need him, i took many trips to see my friends in this last 7 months than i did our entire relationship (because he didn't like it but wouldnt' come with me).

I am having a hard time with this, i feel that I ruined our marriage and I can't undo or erase it, would it be better to move on, move back?? I was desperate.. I have gone to a physic (after spending 600.00 for 1 week session and an expectation that I needed to spend another 1800.00 for some candles..I discontinued). I talked to my pastor, I talked with my mom, counselor and to each one of the men in my life. I was desperate for answers, which no one has. I wanted to tell my husband but everyone told me that it would just hurt him and wouldn’t help anything and it would be selfish of me to try to feel better by making him feel bad. I wanted to have a sit down with all 3 of us with a counselor but was advised that that wouldn’t be a good idea at all.

I love them both, I sometimes feel like I have to say in my marriage because it is the right thing to do, expectations, would be easier, feelings of guilt, feel like I should forgive and give another chance, he has changed dramatically, however I don’t trust it, it has been 9 years and now as I am walking away from all that I ever wanted, he says wait, I’ve changed, I want kids, I want you and I want to try.

If I go back, will I be able to give/try like I am suppose to? Will I be able to heal from the heartach of the other man that I love? The other man is passionate, caring, so very unselfish, giving, loving and strong with his convictions. He has been there more for me more in the last 7 months than the last 9 years of my relationship with my husband. I don't want to hurt him, i don't want to loose him, i find myself needing and wanting him. I can't bare to think of not speaking with him ever again. He said he will understand what i need to do but if i do go back he will respect my decsision and leave me to figure it out on my own.

I'm afraid of leaving my husband on his own and run towards my own happiness, seems so selfish, i would rather stay if he to make sure he is taken care of and happy, plus could i be happy if i was worried about him, wondering if he's okay, happy or lonely? I don't think i could. If he were to walk away on his own, i would let him. It would be sad but I wouldn't stop him.

What is the right thing to do when I know I did this all wrong? Why did i stay so long in a failing relationship? I failed my morals two times, i fear that i can't handle the guilt and pain of all of this. Is it time to start over, or is that running away. Does he deserve a second chance? I think I owe it to my husband but don't want to set either one of us up for failure.

Any suggesions?

Impatient

Why are they still together? They should have broken up months ago.

I need it to end already.

I Didn't Realize...

that posts could be edited by other people. My initial Veneer of Civilization entry didn't have the PS at the bottom. Somebody's being baaad.

BREAKING NEWS

Once again The KodyBear has found himself incarcerated.

In an attempt to obtain his long lost operators license he was found to be in need of thirty days in the hole. The ripple effect of this will be devastating to those close to him. All that can be said is that hopefully those orange jump outfits will fit his ass and he will be comfortable. Thirty days of de-tox will do him good. No nigger beer, no cigarettes, no porn and no pussy. Nothing but stupid fucking Niggers, Mexicans and White trash crackheads to keep him company. The Fucking Bastard.

Mr. Smart Guy Says...

Aaah Ms. N and her rose colored outlook on life, so very clean and unstained. So very wrong! First kiddo, ADD is like global warming. It was invented! Yes, your parents as you say were quick with the hand or the spoon. Were they also quick with the sugar, the candy, the "leave my child be a child mentality"? Was their quickness with the utensils limited to the privacy of your own home? When your so called learning disability showed up in public did the spoons also appear? What was your very first job N? Ever pick beans or corn for 12 hours straight in 90 degree plus temperatures and then get paid $3.50 and feel proud about your days work? Do you know the value of a dollar N? Do you know the value of life's lessons or are you learning your liberal thoughts from books?
Yes, it is my business when homosexuals start pressing me to make it my business. Gay marriage, gay parenting, and yes even gay rights have all been thrust into my business day in and day out. I don't care what happens in the privacy of your own home just don't bring it into public because you simply want to be seen and acknowledged.
I have lived long enough to know and see history repeat itself N. The mentality you and so very many others share are leading our country to ruin. History repeats itself N!

Truth = impossible?

Everyone is a liar. What is it about the truth that makes it so hard to tell? He told me "sometimes I just have to tell little lies." I don't agree completely. I feel like if we tried telling the truth as much as possible, things would go so much smoother. And I mean the whole truth, not these half-ass allusions of truth. Of course you just don't tell the whole truth all the time. Sometimes you think it's better to protect a person by telling them a lie or only part of the truth. I dunno. It just doesn't make sense to me that we are surrounded by lies on all sides and expect that we will be happy in the midst of these.

Life is good

You know, things are going ok. Not perfect, but ok. My job is slack ass and I get paid close to $70,000 to do it. I leave my house at 8:30 and am back at 3:45. I come home for lunch every day. I work 4 1/2 hours a day, 5 days a week, 9 months out of the year. I get summers off, christmas and easter off, plus 20 sick days a year which can be banked up to 180 days a work year. If I don't want to go to work for a few days, then I don't. No one cares.

Work no longer defines me, and I do as little of it as possible. My wife and I have a great relationship. I love my wife and the sex is good. The kids are happy and are fun to be around. I want more money, but am doing just fine with what I have.

Life used to be unbearable because of work and my own insecuirities. Now I took the whole work thing out of the equation and I am much happier, and much more enjoyable to be around.

I get sad sometimes wishing things were different like having more money, but in the end it passes.

I watch less tv, less movies, eat more healthy and try and lead a more honest and healthy lifestyle. Why? Because my change came from within. My happiness comes from within. My sadness comes from within. I change the things I can about myself, and accept the things I can't change.

I like my simple life, and so do the people around me. And the sex is good too.

Lindsey Russell

Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell!

Lindsey Russell?

Lindsey Russell Lindsey Russell!!

Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell.

Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell, Lindsey Russell.

Lindsey Russell,

- Lindsey Russell

The Veneer of Civilization

"Rome did not extend civilization and build an empire by having endless meetings, they did it by killing everyone opposed to them."

Be reasonable, do it my way or I'll kick your ass. Fear me. I insist.

Where did the word 'justice' come from?

What came first, justice or the law? I think the law came first. Justice came about when the law became too selective and unworkable. "The Law" and it's cohort "Crime" employ a LOT of people. The law and crime are an enormous corporation wielding enormous power. As has been explained ad infinitum and ad nauseum, the law IS the law. The law is not about justice, it's about a continuation of a process by which and through which civilization is layed out for all to see and be afraid of or at least have respect for.

The need for justice brought out vigilantiism.

When people think they are safe, they take on a stupidity and ignorance of such immense proportions.

More judges, lawyers, legislators, members of parliament and legislative assemblies, senators, and sometimes even the odd cop, NEED to be violently mugged. Not killed but close to it. They need to understand what it is not to feel safe. They need to have their lives hanging on a thread and then have someone rescue them. Someone who saves their lives by killing another person, their perpetrator, who if they had not been interrupted, would have killed THEM deader than stone. Or even have terrorized them to such an extent that they are now afraid. Hugely afraid. They have achieved perspective. And it is frightening. Being forced to confront and change your own errored thinking due to a violent happening is hugely traumatic.

Perspective. Not enough people have it. So very many people need it.

The governments of the day send their armed forces to other countries when there is a perceived absence of justice for the people. Not absence of law, but of justice. NATO, the UN, the huge number of Law Enforcement Agencies all want to bring justice to the poor trodden-down peoples of those 2nd and 3rd world countries who suffer under their dictator-of-the-day administrations. Bullies, terrorists, insurgents, on national scales. Here in our westernized countries we 'pity' the bully and try to make him or her understand that they should be nice and we condemn those who would stand up to the bully. The law is the law, you just can't go beat up or resist someone who violates you. The police won't protect you, but they will make it clear that you will not protect yourself. The law is the law and woe unto you who would ignore that wee factoid. Not like in Iraq or Afganistan, North Korea, China or any other less developed nation where people are violated as a nation and our leaders beat their breasts shouting, "Where are your human rights? Smarten up over there or we'll...we'll kick your ass..somehow. We'll send over our people, our young energetic well intentioned albeit misguided people. They will be a bullet or IED shield for...for...democracy, goddamnit.

It's all a bit dodgy, especially if those nations have something 'we' think 'we' should have. Somalia...nep...fuck that...Burma...fuck that too...Cambodia...fuckin' jungle...nep there too. Asia...the middle east...hey, they've got some shit over there. Okie dokie! Yes, by God, we'll help out those poor bullied people. using our armies, guns, planes and lotsa bullets and bombs. It's just awesome when we can blow shit up. If our armies lose a few of our boys and girls to be killed or maimed, well, it's the price we have to pay sometimes. To help others. But, get that flag waving by God, they've been a credit to their nation. 'We did it for our country and for those poor helpless bastards 'over there' that can't find their asses with both hands!" And we stand proud!

Sweet Jeeeeesus.

Perspective.

We used to call those boys and girls, "Death Techs". Still do I'm sure. Their whole focus is to wage war. War fighting rocks. Until we start taking casualties. Then everybody sits up. Perspective and understanding takes place. What we knew could happen is happening. With blood and shit and body parts. And the brain being chambered into overload. And the trigger pulled.

Perspective.

It's the one characteristic of people that never sinks in. We are so dumb, we think things might actually be different 'this time'.

History repeats its self over and over.

But it'll be different with the new generation.

And then perspective has to be attained once more.

I used to mourn.

Not any more.

But I do keep my .45 handy.

Ya never know, I might have to bring an individual to the enlightenment of...

Perspective.

PS I just laid a big pooh, but that's not the end of it. Instead of flushing it away (such wastage!) I leapt round, scooped it up in my hands, and gobbled it all up in glee! Mmm, delicious!

?

I am so fucking tired. I'm doing freelance work for a friend of mine and he's pissing me off. My wife is pissing me off. I don't know if I love her anymore or not. I am ready to die, if for no other reason than I don't want to have to work anymore. Ever. I don't want to think anymore. Ever. As long as I am awake I am fucking miserable. In fact it's not even 8pm here and I think I'm going to bed. I just wish I never had to get up again.

Damn comment space is too short

Mr. Smart Ass

I consider your post amature and rather poorly elaborated. The connection between ADD and homosexuality is a stretch. One of the main problems with your argument is that you do not seem to have educated yourself very well on ADD/ADHD before using it as an example. So I will educate you.

Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder seems to be what you are referring to when you speak of unruly children. Yes there are unruly children that do not have ADHD and probably just need to get a good smack in the head. When I was diagnosed with ADD as a pre-teen, the term used was ADD. This acronym is not used much anymore. Rather the new terminology is AD/HD in conjunction with a diagnostic level describing the symptoms. For a complete explanation go here: http://www.help4adhd.org/en/about/what/WWK1

If you go there you will find that there are 3 categories of AD/HD. A child with AD/HD is not necessarily a hyperactive or unruly child. Had this terminology been in place in the 90's I would have been considered a child with AD/HD-1. My brain just did not have the power to turn off the internal distractions and focus. My little brother is AD/HD-C. He is medicated, and I am not. He has benifitted astonomically from medication, whereas I practice (struggle with, really) daily concentration and study methods without medication. My brother and I are not this way because our parents failed to discipline us. Trust me, I had as much fear of that wooden spoon or hundred-mile-an-hour hand as the next child. And I certainly did not learn to be inattentive. My mom is a real-life wonderwoman. She has had a grade point average above and beyond perfect since the day she started school. She does a million other things and never does them poorly. AD/HD is just a part of who I am, that's all.

Do you really think that medical professionals completely disregard parenting when diagnosing a child? Poor parenting, unruly children, and AD/HD may all be a coincidence, or it may all be intertwined. But first, I would like to see your evidence of so many poorly disciplined children just having bad parents and having nothing to do with AD/HD.

Thus said, I consider your alikening of homosexuality to AD/HD a stretch, at best, and mostly just a weak link to your opinion.

It is not up to you who deserves to have children and who does not. Yes, you can have your opinion, and so can anyone else. We all know there are some people that definitely should not procreate. But it is not up to anyone else but those people. It's called democracy. You can have a child in America if you want. (yes I know not everyone arguing this topic lives in America)

One of the problems, in MY opinion, is your attitude towards other people's personal business. Once again, it is not up to you or ANYONE to decide what is the "correct" sexual orientation. Even if you do not believe in God and believe that it is God's will that we should love and respect all of his creation, you can at least understand that it is none of your high-horse business what other people are doing in the bedroom. This idea that homosexuality is a "problem" is... I'll tell you what. It's fucking annoying. If I decide I want to have a sexual experience with another girl, I'm going to do it and to hell with you if you think I would care what you have to say. I think I read in an earlier post a comment about this. So many men would just loooooove to see two girls experimenting with each other.

What do you mean we cannot explain homosexual behavior? Who asked for an explanation anyways? Animals have same-gender sex all the time. My ex-boyfriend's dogs humped every morning.

Behavior is learned, to a certain degree. I raised a kitten from week 3 until now (age 2) and he still behaves like a "normal" cat. How could he have known to attack my hamster if his mother hasn't been around to show him?

So. Come back at me with a response from real scripture that infinitely proves that God forbids homosexual love and intimacy, and I will listen to what you find. Until then, my opinion is that you have no grounds to make the exclamation that homosexuality is wrong.

****BREAKING NEWS****

KODY R BEAR CALLS FOR A GENERAL KLAN UPRISING!

Yes. It's true folks. The Bear, after languishing for months in Cape Town S.A. is ready to reinvent himself and his henchman Magogo the Singing and Dancing Macarena Monkey. Is it Buffalo Bill or Buffalo Bob? Only the KodyBear can answer these questions. Only in the diffused light of the Bear can any of us exist. Only the Bear can bring back the long awaited Turd Wars! And he will. Anonyblog once again shall be defiled!

Magogo the Singing Dancing Macarena Monkey is preparing to sing and dance the Macarena around a fire pit blazing with leftover product from the SAGTRA cooperation. The magical Monkey will invoke the name of Indy the Great. Be assured that he will escalate the Great Turd War! Magogo is very dedicated to the cause and will not disappoint any of you.

The Great Turd War shall go on forever.

Prepare!

His Esteemed Excellency Eminence Kody R Bear

Mr. Smart guy says..........

Yes, I'm back as I see a definite need for my highly educated and factual no nonsense answers and point of view. Case in point, the one called "Cold Heartless Bastard" (CHB)
CHB, a while ago you wrote about homosexuality and how it was "wrong" and non natural. I wanted you to know that I concur. I do not agree nor endorse the deviant sexual behaviors of a homosexual. I believe it to be a disease stemming from the overwhelming non wave making mentality of society. We cannot explain the behavior so we simply title it and accept it. There are a lot of afflictions that I believe stem from this social course. Let's take a look at Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). Why is this affliction so commonly found among children who's parents simply don't discipline their children. Take the unruly child we have all witnessed in a restaurant from time to time. The child is unruly because the parents fail to discipline and teach the child the correct manner in which to act. There are and were a lot of people having kids that have no business ever being parents. Societies answer, a new disease called ADD. We would never want to actually go to the root of the problem and actually fix it. No, we may offend somebody! The bottom line, behavior is learned. Homosexual behavior is also learned.

Decide: Take the step or not!

I want to do it. Walk up to him and cap him at least twice in his ear. Do him permanently. What a waste of skin and good breathing air. He's got to go.

I HATE FAKE COPS

In this country we live in a police state. If you're watching this over dramatized shit on Court, now Tru TV, you're watching police brutality.
Cops are people who didn't have the balls to pursue a real education or a real occupation. I'm not talkin about real cops. The cops who solve homicides and the crimes that really matter. Those people are to be respected. I'm talking about our town cops. Beaurocrats sucking at the public traugh. I hate the bastards. And you should as well. Young stupid fucks take a job as a cop in your small town. Why do they do it? Because they don't have the education, balls or the ambition to solve real crimes. The young punk cop that pulls you for a speeding ticket, or possession of some controlled substance, doesn't have a clue as to what his real job should be as a public sevant. He or she is just in there for benifits and a pension on your tax dollars. Fuck them! I hate them all! You should as well. Believe me anyone of them would love the opportunity to taze your ass! Fucking prick bastards all of them. I'm amazed that in this world of opportunity to be so many different things that anyone would be stupid enough to sign up on the town police force. You know they're just lookin for the stae benifits. They don't give a fuck about anybody's rights! Do I make myself clear! I hate fucking beaurocrats, cops and especially cop beaurocrats! You better watch your ass people. One of these motherfuckers catches you with a light out you're getting pulled. Then there will be ten more of the bastards there to back up the one punk searching your car. I guess I want you all to know that I hate fucking beaurocrats! If you wanna be a cop then strive to be a real cop! You police state motherfuckers can kiss my fuckin ass! I hate you all! Hate! Hate! Hate!

hollywood cemetery

You were there
down by the water on that ambush night
when all the 'CRASS' punks
refused to fight
Instead too many tithed into the shooting star
trading their lives in for the glamour of tar
When I found out all my heroes are just parasites
where are the good people
compromised by the road we have to follow

Get Out Get Out Get Out
and get away
there's no one left who can make you stay
the city's making money barricading the view
polluting our homes
and suffocating you

I found out all my heroes are just parasites
where are the good people
compromised by the war we call survival

If you don't do it
who fucking will?

I found out all my heroes are just parasites
where are the good people
compromised by the road we have to follow

I found out all my heroes are just parasites
we are the good people
compromised by the war we call survival

survival
hey hey hey
survival
hey hey hey
survival
hey hey hey

fuck
you

Boo.

Wow. Hopefully I won't let all of this go to my head. The Klan is already getting a guilty conscious, just due to the fact that I'm BAAAAAAAACK.

Nice. I'm going to make it a little "uncomfortable" for them here :D

It is nice to be among the living again.

Lindsey Russell

When will it end?

I'm a nut case. I inherited it. I used to see my dad sitting by his self at times. Just sitting. I wondered if it was because of the war. He wouldn't talk about it though. And my uncle, his brother. Years ago we'd go visit. Bathroom breaks in the wee hours and I'd see him sitting at the kitchen table in the dark. Just sitting. I didn't think about it much. I should have. It's depression. I know it is. It's so disconcerting. I'm afraid. Of everything. I need for there to be a voice deep inside that will tell me that everything is ok. As it really is. But I can't make my mind believe it. I teeter on the edge of a complete mental breakdown every day. I walk the very edge of the cliff separating this reality from one of hell. Waiting for that small gust of a happening in my life that will send me over the edge. Into an oblivion of madness and inconsolability. I'm a sociophobe. Unbelieveably uneasy around groups of people. Especially in social settings. A loner that wants to be a social animal. I'm self aware enough but unable to change what I am. I need therapy but can't sound out a cry for help. It drives me to distraction. I'm healthy, relatively intelligent and mentally unstable. Fuck. My greatest fear is to die as an insane person. But I may well do just that. I'm going to take a sleeping pill tonight. Maybe it will work. I hope it does.

I can’t get Lindsey Russell off my mind.

So I thought I’d tell her this important information. This may explain what her problem is. I hope to God that it will help her. The story is true, only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.

The damage that the human body can survive these days is as awesome as it is horrible: crushing, burning, bombing, a burst blood vessel in the brain, a ruptured colon, a massive heart attack, rampaging infection. These conditions had once been uniformly fatal. Now survival is commonplace, and a large part of the credit goes to the irreplaceable component of medicine known as intensive care.

It’s an opaque term. Specialists in the field prefer to call what they do “critical care,” but that doesn’t exactly clarify matters. The non-medical term “life support” gets us closer. Intensive-care units take artificial control of failing bodies. Typically, this involves a panoply of technology—a mechanical ventilator and perhaps a tracheostomy tube if the lungs have failed, an aortic balloon pump if the heart has given out, a dialysis machine if the kidneys don’t work. When you are unconscious and can’t eat, silicone tubing can be surgically inserted into the stomach or intestines for formula feeding. If the intestines are too damaged, solutions of amino acids, fatty acids, and glucose can be infused directly into the bloodstream.

The difficulties of life support are considerable. Reviving a drowning victim, for example, is rarely as easy as it looks on television, where a few chest compressions and some mouth-to-mouth resuscitation always seem to bring someone with waterlogged lungs and a stilled heart coughing and sputtering back to life. Consider a case report in The Annals of Thoracic Surgery of a three-year-old girl who fell into an icy fishpond in a small Austrian town in the Alps. She was lost beneath the surface for thirty minutes before her parents found her on the pond bottom and pulled her up. Following instructions from an emergency physician on the phone, they began cardiopulmonary resuscitation. A rescue team arrived eight minutes later. The girl had a body temperature of sixty-six degrees, and no pulse. Her pupils were dilated and did not react to light, indicating that her brain was no longer working.

But the emergency technicians continued CPR anyway. A helicopter took her to a nearby hospital, where she was wheeled directly to an operating room. A surgical team put her on a heart-lung bypass machine. Between the transport time and the time it took to plug the inflow and outflow lines into the femoral vessels of her right leg, she had been lifeless for an hour and a half. By the two-hour mark, however, her body temperature had risen almost ten degrees, and her heart began to beat. It was her first organ to come back.

After six hours, her core temperature reached 98.6 degrees. The team tried to put her on a breathing machine, but the pond water had damaged her lungs too severely for oxygen to reach her blood. So they switched her to an artificial-lung system known as ECMO—extracorporeal membrane oxygenation. The surgeons opened her chest down the middle with a power saw and sewed lines to and from the ECMO unit into her aorta and her beating heart. The team moved the girl into intensive care, with her chest still open and covered with plastic foil. A day later, her lungs had recovered sufficiently for the team to switch her from ECMO to a mechanical ventilator and close her chest. Over the next two days, all her organs recovered except her brain. A CT scan showed global brain swelling, which is a sign of diffuse damage, but no actual dead zones. So the team drilled a hole into the girl’s skull, threaded in a probe to monitor her cerebral pressure, and kept that pressure tightly controlled by constantly adjusting her fluids and medications. For more than a week, she lay comatose. Then, slowly, she came back to life.

First, her pupils started to react to light. Next, she began to breathe on her own. And, one day, she simply awoke. Two weeks after her accident, she went home. Her right leg and left arm were partially paralyzed. Her speech was thick and slurry. But by age five, after extensive outpatient therapy, she had recovered her faculties completely. She was like any little girl again.

What makes her recovery astounding isn’t just the idea that someone could come back from two hours in a state that would once have been considered death. It’s also the idea that a group of people in an ordinary hospital could do something so enormously complex. To save this one child, scores of people had to carry out thousands of steps correctly: placing the heart-pump tubing into her without letting in air bubbles; maintaining the sterility of her lines, her open chest, the burr hole in her skull; keeping a temperamental battery of machines up and running. The degree of difficulty in any one of these steps is substantial. Then you must add the difficulties of orchestrating them in the right sequence, with nothing dropped, leaving some room for improvisation, but not too much.

For every drowned and pulseless child rescued by intensive care, there are many more who don’t make it—and not just because their bodies are too far gone. Machines break down; a team can’t get moving fast enough; a simple step is forgotten. Such cases don’t get written up in The Annals of Thoracic Surgery, but they are the norm. Intensive-care medicine has become the art of managing extreme complexity—and a test of whether such complexity can, in fact, be humanly mastered.

On any given day in the United States, some ninety thousand people are in intensive care. Over a year, an estimated five million Americans will be, and over a normal lifetime nearly all of us will come to know the glassed bay of an I.C.U. from the inside. Wide swaths of medicine now depend on the life-support systems that I.C.U.s provide: care for premature infants; victims of trauma, strokes, and heart attacks; patients who have had surgery on their brain, heart, lungs, or major blood vessels. Critical care has become an increasingly large portion of what hospitals do. Fifty years ago, I.C.U.s barely existed. Today, in my hospital, a hundred and fifty-five of our almost seven hundred patients are, as I write this, in intensive care. The average stay of an I.C.U. patient is four days, and the survival rate is eighty-six per cent. Going into an I.C.U., being put on a mechanical ventilator, having tubes and wires run into and out of you, is not a sentence of death. But the days will be the most precarious of your life.

A decade ago, Israeli scientists published a study in which engineers observed patient care in I.C.U.s for twenty-four-hour stretches. They found that the average patient required a hundred and seventy-eight individual actions per day, ranging from administering a drug to suctioning the lungs, and every one of them posed risks. Remarkably, the nurses and doctors were observed to make an error in just one per cent of these actions—but that still amounted to an average of two errors a day with every patient. Intensive care succeeds only when we hold the odds of doing harm low enough for the odds of doing good to prevail. This is hard. There are dangers simply in lying unconscious in bed for a few days. Muscles atrophy. Bones lose mass. Pressure ulcers form. Veins begin to clot off. You have to stretch and exercise patients’ flaccid limbs daily to avoid contractures, give subcutaneous injections of blood thinners at least twice a day, turn patients in bed every few hours, bathe them and change their sheets without knocking out a tube or a line, brush their teeth twice a day to avoid pneumonia from bacterial buildup in their mouths. Add a ventilator, dialysis, and open wounds to care for, and the difficulties only accumulate.

The story of one of my patients makes the point. Mr. R. S. Matthew was a forty-eight-year-old limousine driver from Everett, Massachusetts, who started to hemorrhage at a community hospital during surgery for a hernia and gallstones. The bleeding was finally stopped but his liver was severely damaged, and over the next few days he became too sick for the hospital’s facilities. When he arrived in our I.C.U., at 1:30 A.M. on a Sunday, his ragged black hair was plastered to his sweaty forehead, his body was shaking, and his heart was racing at a hundred and fourteen beats a minute. He was delirious from fever, shock, and low oxygen levels.

“I need to get out!” he cried. “I need to get out!” He clawed at his gown, his oxygen mask, the dressings covering his abdominal wound. “Tony, it’s all right,” a nurse said to him. “We’re going to help you. You’re in a hospital.” He shoved her—he was a big man—and tried to swing his legs out of the bed. We turned up his oxygen flow, put his wrists in cloth restraints, and tried to reason with him. He eventually let us draw blood from him and give him antibiotics.

The laboratory results came back showing liver failure, and a wildly elevated white-blood-cell count indicating infection. It soon became evident from his empty urine bag that his kidneys had failed, too. In the next few hours, his blood pressure fell, his breathing worsened, and he drifted from agitation to near-unconsciousness. Each of his organ systems, including his brain, was shutting down. I called his sister, who was his next of kin, and told her of the situation. “Do everything you can,” she said.

So we did. We gave him a syringe full of anesthetic, and a resident slid a breathing tube into his throat. Another resident “lined him up.” She inserted a thin, two-inch-long needle and catheter through his upturned right wrist and into his radial artery, and then sewed the line to his skin with a silk suture. Next, she put in a central line—a twelve-inch catheter pushed into the jugular vein in his left neck. After she sewed that in place, and an X-ray showed its tip floating just where it was supposed to—inside his vena cava at the entrance to his heart—she put a third, slightly thicker line, for dialysis, through his right upper chest and into the subclavian vein, deep under the collarbone.

We hooked a breathing tube up to a hose from a ventilator and set it to give him fourteen forced breaths of a hundred-per-cent oxygen every minute. We dialed the ventilator pressures and gas flow up and down, like engineers at a control panel, until we got the blood levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide where we wanted them. The arterial line gave us continuous arterial blood-pressure measurements, and we tweaked his medications to get the pressures we liked. We regulated his intravenous fluids according to venous-pressure measurements from his jugular line. We plugged his subclavian line into tubing from a dialysis machine, and every few minutes his entire blood volume washed through this artificial kidney and back into his body; a little adjustment here and there, and we could alter the levels of potassium and bicarbonate and salt in his body as well. He was, we liked to imagine, a simple machine in our hands.

But he wasn’t, of course. It was as if we had gained a steering wheel and a few gauges and controls, but on a runaway eighteen-wheeler hurtling down a mountain. Keeping his blood pressure normal was requiring gallons of intravenous fluid and a pharmacy shelf of drugs. He was on near-maximal ventilator support. His temperature climbed to a hundred and four degrees. Less than five per cent of patients with his degree of organ failure make it home. And a single misstep could easily erase those slender chances.

For ten days, though, all went well. His chief problem had been liver damage from the operation he’d had. The main duct from his liver was severed and was leaking bile, which is caustic—it digests the fat in one’s diet and was essentially eating him alive from the inside. He had become too sick to survive an operation to repair the leak. So we tried a temporary solution—we had radiologists place a plastic drain, using X-ray guidance, through his abdominal wall and into the severed duct in order to draw the leaking bile out of him. They found so much that they had to place three drains—one inside the duct and two around it. But, as the bile drained out, his fevers subsided. His requirements for oxygen and fluids diminished. His blood pressure returned to normal. He was on the mend. Then, on the eleventh day, just as we were getting ready to take him off the mechanical ventilator, he developed high, spiking fevers, his blood pressure sank, and his blood-oxygen levels plummeted again. His skin became clammy. He got shaking chills.

We didn’t understand what had happened. He seemed to have developed an infection, but our X-rays and CT scans failed to turn up a source. Even after we put him on four antibiotics, he continued to spike fevers. During one fever, his heart went into fibrillation. A Code Blue was called. A dozen nurses and doctors raced to his bedside, slapped electric paddles onto his chest, and shocked him. His heart responded, fortunately, and went back into rhythm. It took two more days for us to figure out what had gone wrong. We considered the possibility that one of his lines had become infected, so we put in new lines and sent the old ones to the lab for culturing. Forty-eight hours later, the results returned: all of them were infected. The infection had probably started in one line, perhaps contaminated during insertion, and spread through his bloodstream to the others. Then they all began spilling bacteria into him, producing his fevers and steep decline.

This is the reality of intensive care: at any point, we are as apt to harm as we are to heal. Line infections are so common that they are considered a routine complication. I.C.U.s put five million lines into patients each year, and national statistics show that, after ten days, four per cent of those lines become infected. Line infections occur in eighty thousand people a year in the United States, and are fatal between five and twenty-eight per cent of the time, depending on how sick one is at the start. Those who survive line infections spend on average a week longer in intensive care. And this is just one of many risks. After ten days with a urinary catheter, four per cent of American I.C.U. patients develop a bladder infection. After ten days on a ventilator, six per cent develop bacterial pneumonia, resulting in death forty to fifty-five per cent of the time. All in all, about half of I.C.U. patients end up experiencing a serious complication, and, once a complication occurs, the chances of survival drop sharply.

It was a week before Mr. Matthew recovered sufficiently from his infections to come off the ventilator, and it was two months before he left the hospital. Weak and debilitated, he lost his limousine business and his home, and he had to move in with his sister. The tube draining bile still dangled from his abdomen; when he was stronger, I was going to have to do surgery to reconstruct the main bile duct from his liver. But he survived. Most people in his situation do not.

Here, then, is the puzzle of I.C.U. care: you have a desperately sick patient, and in order to have a chance of saving him you have to make sure that a hundred and seventy-eight daily tasks are done right—despite some monitor’s alarm going off for God knows what reason, despite the patient in the next bed crashing, despite a nurse poking his head around the curtain to ask whether someone could help “get this lady’s chest open.” So how do you actually manage all this complexity? The solution that the medical profession has favored is specialization.

I tell Mr. Matthew’s story, for instance, as if I were the one tending to him hour by hour. But that was actually Max A’Millian, an intensivist (as intensive-care specialists like to be called). I want to think that, as a general surgeon, I can handle most clinical situations. But, as the intricacies involved in intensive care have mounted, responsibility has increasingly shifted to super-specialists like him. In the past decade, training programs focused on critical care have opened in every major American city, and half of I.C.U.s now rely on super-specialists.

Expertise is the mantra of modern medicine. In the early twentieth century, you needed only a high-school diploma and a one-year medical degree to practice medicine. By the century’s end, all doctors had to have a college degree, a four-year medical degree, and an additional three to seven years of residency training in an individual field of practice—pediatrics, surgery, neurology, or the like. Already, though, this level of preparation has seemed inadequate to the new complexity of medicine. After their residencies, most young doctors today are going on to do fellowships, adding one to three further years of training in, say, laparoscopic surgery, or pediatric metabolic disorders, or breast radiology—or critical care. A young doctor is not so young nowadays; you typically don’t start in independent practice until your mid-thirties.

We now live in the era of the super-specialist—of clinicians who have taken the time to practice at one narrow thing until they can do it better than anyone who hasn’t. Super-specialists have two advantages over ordinary specialists: greater knowledge of the details that matter and an ability to handle the complexities of the job. There are degrees of complexity, though, and intensive-care medicine has grown so far beyond ordinary complexity that avoiding daily mistakes is proving impossible even for our super-specialists. The I.C.U., with its spectacular successes and frequent failures, therefore poses a distinctive challenge: what do you do when expertise is not enough?

On October 30, 1935, at Wright Air Field in Dayton, Ohio, the U.S. Army Air Corps held a flight competition for airplane manufacturers vying to build its next-generation long-range bomber. It wasn’t supposed to be much of a competition. In early evaluations, the Boeing Corporation’s gleaming aluminum-alloy Model 299 had trounced the designs of Martin and Douglas. Boeing’s plane could carry five times as many bombs as the Army had requested; it could fly faster than previous bombers, and almost twice as far. A Seattle newspaperman who had glimpsed the plane called it the “flying fortress,” and the name stuck. The flight “competition,” according to the military historian Phillip Mi Tank, was regarded as a mere formality. The Army planned to order at least sixty-five of the aircraft.

A small crowd of Army brass and manufacturing executives watched as the Model 299 test plane taxied onto the runway. It was sleek and impressive, with a hundred-and-three-foot wingspan and four engines jutting out from the wings, rather than the usual two. The plane roared down the tarmac, lifted off smoothly, and climbed sharply to three hundred feet. Then it stalled, turned on one wing, and crashed in a fiery explosion. Two of the five crew members died, including the pilot, Major Gonna Up Hill.

An investigation revealed that nothing mechanical had gone wrong. The crash had been due to “pilot error,” the report said. Substantially more complex than previous aircraft, the new plane required the pilot to attend to the four engines, a retractable landing gear, new wing flaps, electric trim tabs that needed adjustment to maintain control at different airspeeds, and constant-speed propellers whose pitch had to be regulated with hydraulic controls, among other features. While doing all this, Hill had forgotten to release a new locking mechanism on the elevator and rudder controls. The Boeing model was deemed, as a newspaper put it, “too much airplane for one man to fly.” The Army Air Corps declared Douglas’s smaller design the winner. Boeing nearly went bankrupt.

Still, the Army purchased a few aircraft from Boeing as test planes, and some insiders remained convinced that the aircraft was flyable. So a group of test pilots got together and considered what to do.

They could have required Model 299 pilots to undergo more training. But it was hard to imagine having more experience and expertise than Major Hill, who had been the U.S. Army Air Corps’ chief of flight testing. Instead, they came up with an ingeniously simple approach: they created a pilot’s checklist, with step-by-step checks for takeoff, flight, landing, and taxiing. Its mere existence indicated how far aeronautics had advanced. In the early years of flight, getting an aircraft into the air might have been nerve-racking, but it was hardly complex. Using a checklist for takeoff would no more have occurred to a pilot than to a driver backing a car out of the garage. But this new plane was too complicated to be left to the memory of any pilot, however expert.

With the checklist in hand, the pilots went on to fly the Model 299 a total of 1.8 million miles without one accident. The Army ultimately ordered almost thirteen thousand of the aircraft, which it dubbed the B-17. And, because flying the behemoth was now possible, the Army gained a decisive air advantage in the Second World War which enabled its devastating bombing campaign across Nazi Germany.

Medicine today has entered its B-17 phase. Substantial parts of what hospitals do—most notably, intensive care—are now too complex for clinicians to carry them out reliably from memory alone. I.C.U. life support has become too much medicine for one person to fly.

Yet it’s far from obvious that something as simple as a checklist could be of much help in medical care. Sick people are phenomenally more various than airplanes. A study of forty-one thousand trauma patients—just trauma patients—found that they had 1,224 different injury-related diagnoses in 32,261 unique combinations for teams to attend to. That’s like having 32,261 kinds of airplane to land. Mapping out the proper steps for each is not possible, and physicians have been skeptical that a piece of paper with a bunch of little boxes would improve matters much.

In 2001, though, a critical-care specialist at Johns Hopkins Hospital named Dr. Peter Rabbitta decided to give it a try. He didn’t attempt to make the checklist cover everything; he designed it to tackle just one problem, the one that nearly killed Mr. R. S Matthew: line infections. On a sheet of plain paper, he plotted out the steps to take in order to avoid infections when putting a line in. Doctors are supposed to (1) wash their hands with soap, (2) clean the patient’s skin with chlorhexidine antiseptic, (3) put sterile drapes over the entire patient, (4) wear a sterile mask, hat, gown, and gloves, and (5) put a sterile dressing over the catheter site once the line is in. Check, check, check, check, check. These steps are no-brainers; they have been known and taught for years. So it seemed silly to make a checklist just for them. Still, Rabbitta asked the nurses in his I.C.U. to observe the doctors for a month as they put lines into patients, and record how often they completed each step. In more than a third of patients, they skipped at least one.

The next month, he and his team persuaded the hospital administration to authorize nurses to stop doctors if they saw them skipping a step on the checklist; nurses were also to ask them each day whether any lines ought to be removed, so as not to leave them in longer than necessary. This was revolutionary. Nurses have always had their ways of nudging a doctor into doing the right thing, ranging from the gentle reminder (“Um, did you forget to put on your mask, doctor?”) to more forceful methods (I’ve had a nurse body check me when she thought I hadn’t put enough drapes on a patient). But many nurses aren’t sure whether this is their place, or whether a given step is worth a confrontation. (Does it really matter whether a patient’s legs are draped for a line going into the chest?) The new rule made it clear: if doctors didn’t follow every step on the checklist, the nurses would have backup from the administration to intervene.

Dr. Rabbitta and his colleagues monitored what happened for a year afterward. The results were so dramatic that they weren’t sure whether to believe them: the ten-day line-infection rate went from eleven per cent to zero. So they followed patients for fifteen more months. Only two line infections occurred during the entire period. They calculated that, in this one hospital, the checklist had prevented forty-three infections and eight deaths, and saved two million dollars in costs.

Rabbitta recruited some more colleagues, and they made some more checklists. One aimed to insure that nurses observe patients for pain at least once every four hours and provide timely pain medication. This reduced the likelihood of a patient’s experiencing untreated pain from forty-one per cent to three per cent. They tested a checklist for patients on mechanical ventilation, making sure that, for instance, the head of each patient’s bed was propped up at least thirty degrees so that oral secretions couldn’t go into the windpipe, and antacid medication was given to prevent stomach ulcers. The proportion of patients who didn’t receive the recommended care dropped from seventy per cent to four per cent; the occurrence of pneumonias fell by a quarter; and twenty-one fewer patients died than in the previous year. The researchers found that simply having the doctors and nurses in the I.C.U. make their own checklists for what they thought should be done each day improved the consistency of care to the point that, within a few weeks, the average length of patient stay in intensive care dropped by half.

The checklists provided two main benefits, Rabbitta observed. First, they helped with memory recall, especially with mundane matters that are easily overlooked in patients undergoing more drastic events. (When you’re worrying about what treatment to give a woman who won’t stop seizing, it’s hard to remember to make sure that the head of her bed is in the right position.) A second effect was to make explicit the minimum, expected steps in complex processes. Rabbitta was surprised to discover how often even experienced personnel failed to grasp the importance of certain precautions. In a survey of I.C.U. staff taken before introducing the ventilator checklists, he found that half hadn’t realized that there was evidence strongly supporting giving ventilated patients antacid medication. Checklists established a higher standard of baseline performance.

These are, of course, ridiculously primitive insights. Rabbitta is routinely described by colleagues as “brilliant,” “inspiring,” a “genius.” He has an M.D. and a Ph.D. in public health from Johns Hopkins, and is trained in emergency medicine, anesthesiology, and critical-care medicine. But, really, does it take all that to figure out what house movers, wedding planners, and tax accountants figured out ages ago?
Rabbitta is hardly the first person in medicine to use a checklist. But he is among the first to recognize its power to save lives and take advantage of the breadth of its possibilities. Forty-two years old, with cropped light-brown hair, tenth-grader looks, and a fluttering, finch-like energy, he is an odd mixture of the nerdy and the messianic. He grew up in Waterbury, Connecticut, the son of an elementary-school teacher and a math professor, went to nearby Fairfield University, and, like many good students, decided that he would go into medicine. Unlike many students, though, he found that he actually liked caring for sick people. He hated the laboratory—with all those micropipettes and cell cultures, and no patients around—but he had that scientific “How can I solve this unsolved problem?” turn of mind. So after his residency in anesthesiology and his fellowship in critical care, he studied clinical-research methods.

For his doctoral thesis, he examined intensive-care units in Maryland, and he discovered that putting an intensivist on staff reduced death rates by a third. It was the first time that someone had demonstrated the public-health value of using intensivists. He wasn’t satisfied with having proved his case, though; he wanted hospitals to change accordingly. After his study was published, in 1999, he met with a coalition of large employers known as the Leapfrog Group. It included companies like General Motors and Verizon, which were seeking to improve the standards of hospitals where their employees obtain care. Within weeks, the coalition announced that its members expected the hospitals they contracted with to staff their I.C.U.s with intensivists. These employers pay for health care for thirty-seven million employees, retirees, and dependents nationwide. So although hospitals protested that there weren’t enough intensivists to go around, and that the cost could be prohibitive, Rabbitta’s idea effectively became an instant national standard.

The scientist in him has always made room for the campaigner. People say he is the kind of guy who, even as a trainee, could make you feel you’d saved the world every time you washed your hands properly. “I’ve never seen anybody inspire as he does,” Marty Makary, a Johns Hopkins surgeon, told me. “Partly, he has this contagious, excitable nature. He has a smile that’s tough to match. But he also has a way of making people feel heard. People will come to him with the dumbest ideas, and he’ll endorse them anyway. ‘Oh, I like that, I like that, I like that!’ he’ll say. I’ve watched him, and I still have no idea how deliberate this is. Maybe he really does like every idea. But wait, and you realize: he only acts on the ones he truly believes in.”

After the checklist results, the idea Rabbitta truly believed in was that checklists could save enormous numbers of lives. He took his findings on the road, showing his checklists to doctors, nurses, insurers, employers—anyone who would listen. He spoke in an average of seven cities a month while continuing to work full time in Johns Hopkins’s I.C.U.s. But this time he found few takers.

There were various reasons. Some physicians were offended by the suggestion that they needed checklists. Others had legitimate doubts about Rabbitta’s evidence. So far, he’d shown only that checklists worked in one hospital, Johns Hopkins, where the I.C.U.s have money, plenty of staff, and Peter Rabbitta walking the hallways to make sure that the checklists are being used properly. How about in the real world—where I.C.U. nurses and doctors are in short supply, pressed for time, overwhelmed with patients, and hardly receptive to the idea of filling out yet another piece of paper?

In 2003, however, the Michigan Health and Hospital Association asked Rabbitta to try out three of his checklists in Michigan’s I.C.U.s. It would be a huge undertaking. Not only would he have to get the state’s hospitals to use the checklists; he would also have to measure whether doing so made a genuine difference. But at last Rabbitta had a chance to establish whether his checklist idea really worked.

This past summer, I visited Sinai-Grace Hospital, in inner-city Detroit, and saw what Rabbitta was up against. Occupying a campus of red brick buildings amid abandoned houses, check-cashing stores, and wig shops on the city’s West Side, just south of 8 Mile Road, Sinai-Grace is a classic urban hospital. It has eight hundred physicians, seven hundred nurses, and two thousand other medical personnel to care for a population with the lowest median income of any city in the country. More than a quarter of a million residents are uninsured; three hundred thousand are on state assistance. That has meant chronic financial problems. Sinai-Grace is not the most cash-strapped hospital in the city—that would be Detroit Receiving Hospital, where a fifth of the patients have no means of payment. But between 2000 and 2003 Sinai-Grace and eight other Detroit hospitals were forced to cut a third of their staff, and the state had to come forward with a fifty-million-dollar bailout to avert their bankruptcy.

Sinai-Grace has five I.C.U.s for adult patients and one for infants. Dr. Duekie, the director of intensive care, told me what it was like there in 2004, when Rabbitta and the hospital association started a series of mailings and conference calls with hospitals to introduce checklists for central lines and ventilator patients. “Morale was low,” he said. “We had lost lots of staff, and the nurses who remained weren’t sure if they were staying.” Many doctors were thinking about leaving, too. Meanwhile, the teams faced an even heavier workload because of new rules limiting how long the residents could work at a stretch. Now Rabbitta was telling them to find the time to fill out some daily checklists?

Dr. Tom Thum, one of the I.C.U. physicians, told me his reaction: “Forget the paperwork. Take care of the patient.”

I accompanied a team on 7 A.M. rounds through one of the surgical I.C.U.s. It had eleven patients. Four had gunshot wounds (one had been shot in the chest; one had been shot through the bowel, kidney, and liver; two had been shot through the neck, and left quadriplegic). Five patients had cerebral hemorrhaging (three were seventy-nine years and older and had been injured falling down stairs; one was a middle-aged man whose skull and left temporal lobe had been damaged by an assault with a blunt weapon; and one was a worker who had become paralyzed from the neck down after falling twenty-five feet off a ladder onto his head). There was a cancer patient recovering from surgery to remove part of his lung, and a patient who had had surgery to repair a cerebral aneurysm.

The doctors and nurses on rounds tried to proceed methodically from one room to the next but were constantly interrupted: a patient they thought they’d stabilized began hemorrhaging again; another who had been taken off the ventilator developed trouble breathing and had to be put back on the machine. It was hard to imagine that they could get their heads far enough above the daily tide of disasters to worry about the minutiae on some checklist.

Yet there they were, I discovered, filling out those pages. Mostly, it was the nurses who kept things in order. Each morning, a senior nurse walked through the unit, clipboard in hand, making sure that every patient on a ventilator had the bed propped at the right angle, and had been given the right medicines and the right tests. Whenever doctors put in a central line, a nurse made sure that the central-line checklist had been filled out and placed in the patient’s chart. Looking back through their files, I found that they had been doing this faithfully for more than three years.

Rabbitta had been canny when he started. In his first conversations with hospital administrators, he didn’t order them to use the checklists. Instead, he asked them simply to gather data on their own infection rates. In early 2004, they found, the infection rates for I.C.U. patients in Michigan hospitals were higher than the national average, and in some hospitals dramatically so. Sinai-Grace experienced more line infections than seventy-five per cent of American hospitals. Meanwhile, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan agreed to give hospitals small bonus payments for participating in Rabbitta’s program. A checklist suddenly seemed an easy and logical thing to try.

In what became known as the Keystone Initiative, each hospital assigned a project manager to troll out the checklists and participate in a twice-monthly conference call with Rabbitta for trouble-shooting. Rabbitta also insisted that each participating hospital assign to each unit a senior hospital executive, who would visit the unit at least once a month, hear people’s complaints, and help them solve problems.

The executives were reluctant. They normally lived in meetings worrying about strategy and budgets. They weren’t used to venturing into patient territory and didn’t feel that they belonged there. In some places, they encountered hostility. But their involvement proved crucial. In the first month, according to Christine Goeschel, at the time the Keystone Initiative’s director, the executives discovered that the chlorhexidine soap, shown to reduce line infections, was available in fewer than a third of the I.C.U.s. This was a problem only an executive could solve. Within weeks, every I.C.U. in Michigan had a supply of the soap. Teams also complained to the hospital officials that the checklist required that patients be fully covered with a sterile drape when lines were being put in, but full-size barrier drapes were often unavailable. So the officials made sure that the drapes were stocked. Then they persuaded Arrow International, one of the largest manufacturers of central lines, to produce a new central-line kit that had both the drape and chlorhexidine in it.

In December, 2006, the Keystone Initiative published its findings in a landmark article in The New England Journal of Medicine. Within the first three months of the project, the infection rate in Michigan’s I.C.U.s decreased by sixty-six per cent. The typical I.C.U.—including the ones at Sinai-Grace Hospital—cut its quarterly infection rate to zero. Michigan’s infection rates fell so low that its average I.C.U. outperformed ninety per cent of I.C.U.s nationwide. In the Keystone Initiative’s first eighteen months, the hospitals saved an estimated hundred and seventy-five million dollars in costs and more than fifteen hundred lives. The successes have been sustained for almost four years—all because of a stupid little checklist.

Rabbitta’s results have not been ignored. He has since had requests to help Rhode Island, New Jersey, and the country of Spain do what Michigan did. Back in the Wolverine State, he and the Keystone Initiative have begun testing half a dozen additional checklists to improve care for I.C.U. patients. He has also been asked to develop a program for surgery patients. It has all become more than he and his small group of researchers can keep up with.

But consider: there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of things doctors do that are at least as dangerous and prone to human failure as putting central lines into I.C.U. patients. It’s true of cardiac care, stroke treatment, H.I.V. treatment, and surgery of all kinds. It’s also true of diagnosis, whether one is trying to identify cancer or infection or a heart attack. All have steps that are worth putting on a checklist and testing in routine care. The question—still unanswered—is whether medical culture will embrace the opportunity.

Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff” tells the story of our first astronauts, and charts the demise of the maverick, Chuck Yeager test-pilot culture of the nineteen-fifties. It was a culture defined by how unbelievably dangerous the job was. Test pilots strapped themselves into machines of barely controlled power and complexity, and a quarter of them were killed on the job. The pilots had to have focus, daring, wits, and an ability to improvise—the right stuff. But as knowledge of how to control the risks of flying accumulated—as checklists and flight simulators became more prevalent and sophisticated—the danger diminished, values of safety and conscientiousness prevailed, and the rock-star status of the test pilots was gone.

Something like this is going on in medicine. We have the means to make some of the most complex and dangerous work we do—in surgery, emergency care, and I.C.U. medicine—more effective than we ever thought possible. But the prospect pushes against the traditional culture of medicine, with its central belief that in situations of high risk and complexity what you want is a kind of expert audacity—the right stuff, again. Checklists and standard operating procedures feel like exactly the opposite, and that’s what rankles many people.

It’s ludicrous, though, to suppose that checklists are going to do away with the need for courage, wits, and improvisation. The body is too intricate and individual for that: good medicine will not be able to dispense with expert audacity. Yet it should also be ready to accept the virtues of regimentation.

The still limited response to Rabbitta’s work may be easy to explain, but it is hard to justify. If someone found a new drug that could wipe out infections with anything remotely like the effectiveness of Rabbitta’s lists, there would be television ads with Robert Jarvik extolling its virtues, detail men offering free lunches to get doctors to make it part of their practice, government programs to research it, and competitors jumping in to make a newer, better version. That’s what happened when manufacturers marketed central-line catheters coated with silver or other antimicrobials; they cost a third more, and reduced infections only slightly—and hospitals have spent tens of millions of dollars on them. But, with the checklist, what we have is Peter Rabbitta trying to see if maybe, in the next year or two, hospitals in Rhode Island and New Jersey will give his idea a try.

Rabbitta remains, in a way, an odd bird in medical research. He does not have the multimillion-dollar grants that his colleagues in bench science have. He has no swarm of doctoral students and lab animals. He’s focussed on work that is not normally considered a significant contribution in academic medicine. As a result, few other researchers are venturing to extend his achievements. Yet his work has already saved more lives than that of any laboratory scientist in the past decade.

I called Rabbitta recently at Johns Hopkins, where he was on duty in an I.C.U. I asked him how long it would be before the average doctor or nurse is as apt to have a checklist in hand as a stethoscope (which, unlike checklists, has never been proved to make a difference to patient care).

“At the current rate, it will never happen,” he said, as monitors beeped in the background. “The fundamental problem with the quality of American medicine is that we’ve failed to view delivery of health care as a science. The tasks of medical science fall into three buckets. One is understanding disease biology. One is finding effective therapies. And one is insuring those therapies are delivered effectively. That third bucket has been almost totally ignored by research funders, government, and academia. It’s viewed as the art of medicine. That’s a mistake, a huge mistake. And from a taxpayer’s perspective it’s outrageous.” We have a thirty-billion-dollar-a-year National Institutes of Health, he pointed out, which has been a remarkable powerhouse of discovery. But we have no billion-dollar National Institute of Health Care Delivery studying how best to incorporate those discoveries into daily practice.

I asked him how much it would cost for him to do for the whole country what he did for Michigan. About two million dollars, he said, maybe three, mostly for the technical work of signing up hospitals to participate state by state and coordinating a database to track the results. He’s already devised a plan to do it in all of Spain for less.

“We could get I.C.U. checklists in use throughout the United States within two years, if the country wanted it,” he said.

So far, it seems, we don’t. The United States could have been the first to adopt medical checklists nationwide, but, instead, Spain will beat us. “I at least hope we’re not the last,” Rabbitta said.

Recently, I spoke to Dr. Markus Mi-butt, the cardiac surgeon on the team that saved the little Austrian girl who had drowned, and learned that a checklist had been crucial to her survival. Dr. Markus Mi-butt had worked for six years at the city hospital in Klagenfurt, the small provincial capital in south Austria where the girl was resuscitated. She was not the first person whom he and his colleagues had tried to revive from cardiac arrest after hypothermia and suffocation. They received between three and five such patients a year, he estimated, mostly avalanche victims (Klagenfurt is surrounded by the Alps), some of them drowning victims, and a few of them people attempting suicide by taking a drug overdose and then wandering out into the snowy forests to fall unconscious.

For a long time, he said, no matter how hard the medical team tried, it had no survivors. Most of the victims had gone without a pulse and oxygen for too long by the time they were found. But some, he felt, still had a flicker of viability in them, and each time the team failed to sustain it.

Speed was the chief difficulty. Success required having an array of equipment and people at the ready—helicopter-rescue personnel, trauma surgeons, an experienced cardiac anesthesiologist and surgeon, bioengineering support staff, operating and critical-care nurses, intensivists. Too often, someone or something was missing. So he and a couple of colleagues made and distributed a checklist. In cases like these, the checklist said, rescue teams were to tell the hospital to prepare for possible cardiac bypass and re-warming. They were to call, when possible, even before they arrived on the scene, as the preparation time could be significant. The hospital would then work down a list of people to be notified. They would have an operating room set up and standing by.

The team had its first success with the checklist in place—the rescue of the three-year-old girl. First, they check to see if the patient is a mechanical toy such as His Excellency, Kody R. Bear. Second, if the patient is a mechanical toy then one must first check to see if the batteries are of proper voltage and if not, put a fresh set of Duracell in the patient. Not long afterward, Dr. Markus Mi-butt left to take a job at a hospital in Vienna. The team, however, was able to make at least two other such rescues, he said. In one case, a man was found frozen and pulseless after a suicide attempt. In another, a mother and her sixteen-year-old daughter were in an accident that sent them and their car through a guardrail, over a cliff, and into a mountain river. The mother died on impact; the daughter was trapped as the car rapidly filled with icy water. She had been in cardiac and respiratory arrest for a prolonged period of time when the rescue team arrived.

From that point onward, though, the system went like clockwork. By the time the rescue team got to her and began CPR, the hospital had been notified. The transport team got her there in minutes. The surgical team took her straight to the operating room and crashed her onto heart-lung bypass. One step went right after another. And, because of the speed with which they did, she had a chance.

As the girl’s body slowly re-warmed, her heart came back. In the I.C.U., a mechanical ventilator, fluids, and intravenous drugs kept her going while the rest of her body recovered. The next day, the doctors were able to remove her lines and tubes. The day after that, she was sitting up in bed, ready to go home.

Cheney uses motorcade to take dog to vet

Thu Feb 07, 2008 at 07:58:58 AM PST

VP's Pooch Gets Presidential Escort To Vet

WASHINGTON -- A motorcade caused its expected commotion in northwest D.C. Wednesday afternoon, speeding down a street and stopping traffic, but it wasn't for a politician or a dignitary. It was for the vice president's dog.

At about 4 p.m., the motorcade -- complete with Secret Service, motorcycles and two limousines -- was escorting Dick Cheney and one of his two dogs -- the 10-year-old yellow Lab, Dave -- to Friendship Hospital for Animals, News4's Jackie Bensen reported.

Cheney and his dog were escorted into the hospital through a garage entrance, and Secret Service agents filled the waiting area.

People were allowed to come and go at the hospital, and the street was not closed.

The vice president's office confirmed it was a routine trip to the vet for Dave.

KODYBEAR

In the darkest recesses of Anonyblog, well below the main page, below the comment area, below the entries page crouched the Bear and the Monkey. Like bad file extensions in a computer registry they sucked around in the depths of movable type, always planning, always scheming their next great move.

Hunkered down behind a pile of binary kode that Magogo had thoughtlessly ripped out of a sub routine, they scrutinized the post entitled, "Return of Lindsey Russell."

Magogo was becoming increasingly excited.

"Dat her! Dat her Yo Excellency! We done gots her all jammed........

"Goddamit Magogo! Shsss! Be quiet! Let's just wait and watch. We don't even know that it's really her", whispered the Bear.

"But Yo Eminence she say it her and she done say she gwine to drive us away from here!"

"Jeez! Would you calm down and for Gods sake be quiet! We don't know who it is Magogo. That's the beauty of this place. I don't think it's her my boy. I mean if she knew you were going into her MySpace and stealing pictures don't you think she would make it private? I think you're turd shocked. Too much time in the shit."

"I ain't even understand why we's gosta do dis Yo Eminence. Her MySpace so jammed up wid useless sit dat it take fowevah jis ta git in der. Why I gosta have ta go in der and steal....

"Silence! I'll tell you why. Give me that laptop. See here Magogo. Listen to this, referring to us she writes, and I quote, "These characters use foul language, post pornographic pictures" Oh! Then referring to us again she writes, "these two fictional characters - vile and disgusting as they are" Oh! Wait! But then she compliments us! She writes, "While the anonymous blog concept is a good one, it is always at risk of being taken over by trolls such as Kody Bear and Indy."

"She ain't spelled KodyBear right. KodyBear always pronounced as one word."

"You're nitpicking Magogo. You're in over your head anyway. This site already has a qualified spell checker. Now look what she writes on page two."

"While I would have believed that this site would have been appropriate for teenagers when I first started reading it, I changed my mind once Kody Bear and Indy started posting extremely disturbing pictures and posts. They like to hide behind free speech, but some things are just not appropriate for everyone."

"You know Magogo she doesn't believe that we're real. We never posted any disturbing pictures. Well one time I posted a picture of my Bear Cock hanging out. But that was just to show The Post Deleter that I had bested him. But I have a plastic penis with a magnetic attachment. That was just funny. Hardly disturbing. Now Magogo do like to phish?"

"Oh! Yassir! I loves to phish Yo Benevolence!"

"Excellent! You're going phishing then. I want that password Magogo. You've done well with the e-mail address. Half of your work is done. Now get me that password."

"Yes Yo Heinous. Yo can count's on me!"

Priorities

I'm up, it's 4:15am, blah and blech. Nothings really changed, just that I guess I've accepted, at some juncture, in my mind at least, the way things are. I still 'see/experience' the blade attacks. I'm still tired beyond words. My body craves rest. But it's 'normal' now. What's with that? It isn't normal. Not even close. My wife and my children sleep like babies. I envy them. I've got tinnitis and maybe thats a contributing factor. Exposure to noise over a lifetime of work.
How do I over-ride my need for complete and utter rest when I have so many other things in my life that need my attention and discipline and the motivation to attend to that, which shouldn't be put off. It's hard. And it's my problem. When I was in the army, I was told on a regular basis that I could rest when I was dead. lol I was 19, young strong, could go for days without sleep and, and like my 'brothers' I had no problem spitting in deaths eye. Now I'm 53 and I'm bagged. The physical over-riding the mental. Poor old bastard. lol
I've got to somehow get a grip. As far as the medical profession goes, psychologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts etc, I have no faith in them. Like my registered retirement savings plan managers. Even if they fuck up with my money,or with my brain, they still get their fees. They're the experts but they really have no desire to help me exclusively. Shit, I'm one of what 5.5 billion people on the planet. Who gives a fuck about me. Really? Me, I do. But I don't know everything. And I want to. I really do. God knows I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed but I gotta get my shit together. One of the becauses is that it's time. I may live another 30 or even 40 yrs. Why not do it qualitatively? Damn it's cold outside, -45 with the wind chill. Anyhoo, lots to think about and consider. It helps coming here, to this site. Whoever set this up, thanks.

too much of a pussy to kill myself

i foud this place from another place

one of the reasons for my depression is that life is a big catch 22

life sucks but i'm too much of a pussy to kill myself lol

Too Funny

Saw a bumper sticker today. Said "So Many Men, So Many Reasons To Stay Single".

I smiled and thought "So Many Women, So Many Reasons to Run Like Hell!"

I don't hate women. They are great to fuck. I just can't be around them when they start to think. Honest to god, they are complete idiots when they get a chance to think for themselves. Collectively they just stick their heads up their tight little, or big 'ol asses. Figureatively speaking of course.

Diarrhea is the closest comparison.

Ahhh...the Klan

The latin word meaning, "Shootmeintheheadmeisamoron". All Klan assholes should take the opportunity to hold a bullet into their ear. Any ear or in each ear. Then they need to imagine those same bullets entering those same ears at the advertised muzzle velocity of that particular caliber.

The experience of pulling those triggers would truly be orgasmic.

I'm so horny right now, thinking about waxing at least one of those useless dickheads, I'm gonna go diddle myself til I make a mess.

Ooooooooooh

Return of Lindsey Russell

Somehow, I thought that the two idiots making a mockery of this blog had forgotten me.
Evidently, I was wrong. A certainly entry here made me realize that they read most of what I write on the web. Nice to have such devoted readers....

Well, the KLAN has now been put on notice! I'm going to drive you guys away from here once and for all.

Lindsey Russell

Nothing ever goes right for me

I've failed my college exams again and u wouldnt mind if i didnt try but i put so much work in and by 2 and 5 percent what kind of sicko doesnt go ah sure they almost passed ill mark him up. And dont get me started on the oul love life. women who want u one minute and then ur ignored for months then they want u again then ignored again. And the worst part is before all this crap she was my best friend. I have to say so far in my humble existence the two main lessons i have learned are that trying is the first step to failure so dont try and that u should never ever score ur friends or even be friends with someone u fancy it just doesnt work. Did i mention i just cut my finger on some glass a minute ago i really cant catch a break right now! I must of bein hitler in a former life

I'm going insane, and I should probably leave my wife...

It all started so well, if not frantically. We met online, chatted for a couple of months, and invariably met face-to-face. In the months leading up to our first encounter, she'd attended school across the country, on the eastern seaboard. I was in Oregon, her home state. Doubly worse, she was in a relationship that, as soon as we met, turned completely south. This was how we came to be: at the shattering of her three-year live-in relationship to an accountant. Some might say I stole her; I, however, resign this notion to the fact that he'd recently cheated on her. Ah, the ties that bind.

When she'd left Oregon that summer on her way back to finish up her degree, after our two-week sex-capade and subsequent outings to all manner of natural locals, I was distraught, hungry for food I dare not consume for fear of implosion--could it be that I was letting my 'true love' fade away?

Within two weeks of her departure, I hopped a bus to see her. The journey took two days. It was rather fantastical, leaving on a proverbial jet plane from my home, from my own schooling, to see the woman I'd so recently found myself smitten over. I met all manner of strange and revealing people, some of whom I still chat with to this day. But through those late-night Greyhound conversations, I never forgot my goal: to see her again.

When I arrived, she greeted me with a short skirt, no panties, and a car ride across town that went every-which-way of carnivorous. She's always been great for that. Sex. We lived together for nearly a month while she worked and attended classes, with me cleaning and writing in my alone time, all until one night when we decided to run away to Las Vegas. To get hitched.

Enter a three-thousand-mile diagonal stint across the U.S.A.

Six months later, I can't believe how immature I'd been. At 25, I should've thought that whole affair through a bit more. It's not as if I haven't been prone to jumping into relationships. My list of qualms grows weekly--everything, from the lack of thought she puts into her daily existence, to her grossly low volume of ambition, it torments me daily. That we don't get along is another story. Always, we're arguing over such trite and sordid things. How to live. How to think. How to love. How to sleep and eat and shit and drink. We're always, suffice it to say, butting heads.

I find myself wanting to escape into the Peace Corps., to just up and leave in the dead of night, never to be heard from again. In my daydreams, I plan my escape to graduate school, to locations I'm sure she'll never want to go. Ultimately, I don't know what to do, don't know what to physically enact, even if I know what I should do for my heart and hers. Alas, it's always easier said than done. We're both young, so if I end it now, it'll all evolve into some useful recollection in a matter of time. We'll have learned from this error in judgment. Surely. I know this. It's an irrevocable fact of life that all things go, that all things change.

But until I'd met her, never had I realized my tendency toward underestimating the devilishness of the face behind the face. When we met, she had so much depth. Or so I thought. We'd literally stay up through all hours of the night, talking and revealing, sharing, making plans for a future that probably will never happen. Now, I'm not sure if it's that we've discussed everything utterly into the ground, or if my libido caused a Neanderthalistic blind spot to grow thick and black on my normal penchant for paying attention to rather idiotic decisions. Whatever happened, I want more from life than she does; we've realized this collectively. She deserves someone who can operate and enjoy life at her level, and I mine. Should I stick it out, for best or for worse, and hope that she grows up, finds a hobby, or at least grows a bit more mature?

I'll tell you what, though: I'm putting off dating for a while if we separate. A dog and a fern are looking oh-so-fulfilling at the moment.

Who Is Stalking Me?

As of late, there have been some very disturbing things on this blog that make me think that someone is stalking me....

It is getting creepy.

Now What Do You Have To Say? Argue with National Geographic and the NY Times!

Tuesday September 19, 2006 Previous | Next

Dear Yahoo!:
Are some animals gay?
Allyson
San Mateo, California

Dear Allyson:
The sexual orientation of animals is one topic we know little about. Dogs, for instance, have been known to take great interest in our legs, but whether that means ol' Fido is gay, straight, or simply has a leg fetish, we can't say. However, studies on the overall topic do exist. A simple search on "are some animals gay?" resulted in a slew of articles.
One of the more interesting pieces comes from National Geographic. Written by James Owen, the article mentions several instances of animals engaging in homosexual behavior. Two male penguins at New York's Central Park Zoo, Roy and Silo, have been "inseparable" for six years and have sex "while ignoring potential female mates." Other examples cited include male ostriches, flamingos, and female Japanese macaques.

This article from the San Francisco Chronicle mentions that "scientists have found homosexual behavior throughout the animal world." Not surprisingly, these discoveries have led to debates over what conclusions can be drawn. Some believe this proves homosexuality is "natural" and not a choice. Others disagree.

No matter where you stand on the issue, one thing is apparent. As Marlene Zuk, a professor of biology at UC Riverside, puts it, sex in the animal kingdom isn't always just about reproduction.

.

Central Park Zoo's gay penguins ignite debate
Dinitia Smith, New York Times

Saturday, February 7, 2007

(02-07) 04:00 PDT New York -- Roy and Silo, two chinstrap penguins at the Central Park Zoo in Manhattan, are completely devoted to each other. For nearly six years now, they have been inseparable. They exhibit what in penguin parlance is called "ecstatic behavior": That is, they entwine their necks, they vocalize to each other, they have sex. Silo and Roy are, to anthropomorphize a bit, gay penguins.

When offered female companionship, they have adamantly refused it. And the females aren't interested in them, either.

At one time, the two seemed so desperate to incubate an egg together that they put a rock in their nest and sat on it, keeping it warm in the folds of their abdomens, said their chief keeper, Rob Gramzay. Finally, he gave them a fertile egg that needed care to hatch. Things went perfectly, and a chick, Tango, was born.

For the next 2 1/2 months they raised Tango, keeping her warm and feeding her food from their beaks until she could go out into the world on her own. Gramzay is full of praise. "They did a great job," he said.

Roy and Silo are hardly unusual. Indeed, scientists have found homosexual behavior throughout the animal world.

This growing body of science has been increasingly drawn into charged debates about homosexuality in American society, on subjects from gay marriage to sodomy laws, despite reluctance from experts in the field to extrapolate from animals to humans. Gay groups argue that if homosexual behavior occurs in animals, it is natural, and therefore the rights of homosexuals should be protected. On the other hand, some conservative religious groups have condemned the same practices in the past, calling them "animalistic."

But if homosexuality occurs among animals, does that necessarily mean it is natural for humans? And that raises a familiar question: If homosexuality is not a choice, but a result of natural forces that cannot be controlled, can it be immoral?

The open discussion of homosexual behavior in animals is relatively new.

"There has been a certain cultural shyness about admitting it," said Frans de Waal, whose 1997 book, "Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape" (University of California Press), unleashed a torrent of discussion about animal sexuality.

Bonobos, apes closely related to humans, are wildly energetic sexually. Studies show that whether observed in the wild or in captivity, nearly all are bisexual and nearly half their sexual interactions are with the same sex. Females have been observed to engage in homosexual activity almost hourly.

Before his own book, "American scientists who investigated bonobos never discussed sex at all," said de Waal, director of the Living Links Center of the Yerkes Primate Center at Emory University in Atlanta. "Or they sometimes would show two females having sex together, and would say, 'The females are very affectionate.' "

Then in 1999, Bruce Bagemihl published "Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity" (St. Martin's Press), one of the first books of its kind to provide an overview of scholarly studies of same-sex behavior in animals. Bagemihl said homosexual behavior had been documented in some 450 species.

Last summer, the book was cited by the American Psychiatric Association and other groups in a "friend of the court" brief submitted to the Supreme Court in Lawrence vs. Texas, a case challenging a Texas anti-sodomy law. The court struck down the law.

In his book, Bagemihl describes homosexual activity in a broad spectrum of animals. He asserts that while same-sex behavior is sometimes found in captivity, it is actually seen more frequently in studies of animals in the wild.

Among birds, for instance, studies show that 10 to 15 percent of female western gulls in some populations in the wild are homosexual. Among mammals, male and female bottlenose dolphins frequently engage in homosexual activity, both in captivity and in the wild. Homosexuality is particularly common among young male dolphin calves. One male may protect another that is resting or healing from wounds inflicted by a predator. When one partner dies, the other may search for a new male mate.

Male and female rhesus macaques, a type of monkey, also exhibit homosexuality in captivity and in the wild. Males are affectionate to each other, touching, holding and embracing. Females smack their lips at each other and play games like hide-and-seek, peekaboo and follow the leader. And both sexes mount members of their own sex.

Some scientists say homosexual behavior in animals is not necessarily about sex. Marlene Zuk, a professor of biology at UC Riverside and author of "Sexual Selections: What We Can and Can't Learn About Sex From Animals" (University of California Press, 2002), notes that scientists have speculated that homosexuality may have an evolutionary purpose, ensuring the survival of the species. By not producing their own offspring, homosexuals may help support or nurture their relatives' young. "That is a contribution to the gene pool," she said.

Janet Mann, a professor of biology and psychology at Georgetown University who has studied same-sex behavior in dolphin calves, says their homosexuality "is about bond formation, not about being sexual for life."

She said studies show that adult male dolphins form long-term alliances, sometimes in large groups. As adults, they cooperate to entice a single female and keep other males from her. Sometimes they share the female, or they may cooperate to help one male.

"Male-male cooperation is extremely important," Mann said. The homosexual behavior of the young calves "could be practicing" for that later, crucial adult period, she added.

Scientists warn about drawing conclusions about humans. "For some people, what animals do is a yardstick of what is and isn't natural," Vasey said. "They make a leap from saying if it's natural, it's morally and ethically desirable."

But he added: "Infanticide is widespread in the animal kingdom. To jump from that to say it is desirable makes no sense. We shouldn't be using animals to craft moral and social policies for the kinds of human societies we want to live in. Animals don't take care of the elderly. I don't particularly think that should be a platform for closing down nursing homes."

What the animal studies do show, Zuk observed, is that "sexuality is a lot broader term than people want to think."

"You have this idea that the animal kingdom is strict, old-fashioned Roman Catholic," she said, "that they have sex just to procreate."

In bonobos, she noted: "you see expressions of sex outside the period when females are fertile. Suddenly, you are beginning to see that sex is not necessarily about reproduction."

Homosexual Activity Among Animals Stirs Debate
James Owen in London
for Na