>From: tony <tony@catwave.net>
>To: 
><anne.barber@home.com;dan@dub2digital.com;dgould@musicmatch.com;janderso@ho 
>odoodesign.com>, <juicy_delicious@hotmail.com>, <k_martini@yahoo.com>, 
><dominique_ryder@hotmail.com>
>Subject: <runoff>, late-night delirium installment:
>Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2001 01:31:02 -0800
>
>11/14/01, 11:56 pm, writing in bed but pretending to be in an Amtrak
>sleeping car:
>
>    Want to know the problem with this whole thing?  I1ll let you in on the
>scariest thought I1ve ever had.  Hey, no big deal, if you1re writing a 
>scary
>book, you1ll run into some scary thoughts.  Right?  And if you1re afraid
>they1re true, you1ll pretend you can end-run them textually, just like
>someone defending a religion.  Who runs around yelling that the sun IS 
>going
>to come up tomorrow?  Only the nut who is afraid that it won1t.
>    So here1s the problem with this whole thing:  Picture two guys, and 
>tell
>me who's crazier:  The First Guy gets blind drunk and drives his car at 60
>miles an hour into a storefront window at 3:00 in the morning, smashing the
>place to hell.  (Okay, it's easy to tell I've been reading King and Straub,
>but stay with me, if you please...)
>    The Second Guy spends a year constructing an elaborate machine with 
>gears
>and handles and precise little appendages and great powerful booms with
>grapplers on the ends for picking up thousands of pounds.  Then he 
>purchases
>a car and a storefront in the little town where he lives and gets busy on
>them with his machine.  First, with saws and precise, shiny hammers, he
>deconstructs the storefront window (being careful not to drop a single 
>piece
>of apparently shattered glass) and places the shards on the ground in a
>seemingly random, smashed-up non-pattern.  Then he calmly beats the exact
>living hell out of his car that it would endure if it were to smash 
>headlong
>into a storefront window going 60 miles an hour.  He grapples the car with
>the brute-force end of his elaborate machine and carefully places the car
>mostly through the window, at an angle that exactly duplicates the result 
>of
>a crash.  It takes another month or so to get the details right: the milky,
>red-centered bullseye where the driver1s head hit the windshield, the 
>powder
>of shattered window on the hood, the bomb-blasted look of the store 
>insides.
>To the last tiny detail, it is perfect, and indistinguishable from a real
>disaster, right down to amusing touches like the shelf of aspirin and
>Band-Aids partially collapsed through the shattered passenger-side window
>and the truncated paper towel pyramid soaked with antifreeze and engine 
>oil.
>    Then the guy takes his machine to the junkyard and the man who runs the
>yard gives him about $100 for it.  Second Guy is neither happy nor unhappy
>about this transaction in particular, but it gives him great satisfaction 
>to
>return to the crash-site and put the finishing touch on his work: a small
>sign that says, in gold mailbox letters:
>
>    STOREFRONT CAR-CRASH MUSEUM: ADMISSION $1.00.
>
>    Okay, remember the original question?  Who1s crazier?  I1ll bet you ten
>bucks they1d throw Second Guy into the looney bin long, long before he ever
>got around to sticking those mailbox letters to the front of his intricate
>piece of horrible art.  The first guy, no matter his intention, would at
>worst die and at best probably get his license taken away, but might end up
>suing the garage that last worked on his brakes and coming out $200,000
>ahead on the deal.  Nobody would think to question his sanity.
>    In the blink of an eye, the most innocent stupidity can become evil.  
>Yet
>with years of sane and deliberate work it is sometimes still impossible to
>coax, prod and convince ambient evil (so much of it around, lots of raw
>material to work with) to become beauty.
>    I1m the Second Guy, and I'm barely on speaking terms with First Guy.
>Just on principle, of course, but especially if he walks away with that two
>hundred grand.
>
>    I hope they have the internet in the looney-bin.
>
>
>--------------------------------------------------
>Tony Smith
>Waveform Generator, catWave Project
>tony@catwave.net -- www.catwave.net
>--------------------------------------------------
>
>


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