"If you pull the chain on a toilet you can't blame it for flushing can you?"
-Charles Starkweather


On January 21, 1958 it all started. Starkweather(19), accompanied by his girlfriend Caril Fugate(14),murdered ten people in eight days. The first three were members of Fugate's family. This probably made them the most famous lovebirds to come out of my home state of Nebraska.

Fastforward it all, oh say, about fifty years or so. Just turn on the television. I do, sometimes, I'll admit it. Being a blessed victim of insomnia I'll usually put on the devil box while I'm scratching away these words. Just a few days ago some 28 year old opens fire at an after-rave party in the northwest. One of the victims(a 14 year old girl) was staying out past her 3 a.m. curfew. In the south a preacher's wife does him in with a shotgun blast to the back. A blonde preppy is still missing in mystery of Aruba. Pedophile monsters are strolling the dark playgrounds of America. A gazillion people a day are hopping our borders and milking our system and the gates of armageddon are opening somewhere over the sands of Iran. Do you want a front row seat?
And that's only in the first half-hour.

I'd like to call it TERRORISM FROM THE TUBE.

Just the past few days my lady and I took a quick getaway down to Colorado Springs. (Stay with me this is going somewhere). I stepped foot in a place where time stretched on forever and I was a mere speck along the road-The Garden of the Gods. Passing through its dizzying red gates I was looking at a much different scope of the world. Millions of years surrounded me , structures carved by time itself. Layer upon layer of permanent history.
And,perhaps just for the several hours I scuttled about inside, there was no border conflict. There were no missing kids in Milwaukee. No Good American boys died in the desert. And just maybe there were no fingers being pointed at anyone anywere.
Point? In the millions of years it will take to turn the mountains to bone will it really matter? Your life is your eyes and your soul. Your experiences and your loves. Husbands and wives will continue to kill each other. Our world leaders will always be
jackoffs. It can really get to you, this world around you, but you can't let it.
Don't let it win-ever.