7:56 pm CST
It was June 1965. I was 12 years old. I had been living in Cleburne for four months and so far had made no friends.

In the mornings I would walk from our house on North Main Street to my father's newspaper office. My father would pay me to do odd jobs around the office—paste-up, proofreading, sweeping, emptying the trash, and so forth—which I would usually finish around noon. After that, I would go home for lunch, then afterwards lie around on the living room floor, drawing or reading, or sometimes just staring into space—but always, whatever I was doing, listening to the radio. Some of the hit songs that summer were "I Can't Get No Satisfaction," "Wooly Bully," "Dizzy Miss Lizzy," "I Can't Help Myself," and "I Got You Babe."

But, because it was summer, I could not stay indoors all the time. Thus, I spent many hours wandering the town.

I would start by walking around the neighborhood, which was mostly old homes occupied by old people, then would gradually make my way through the working class neighborhood to the east that bordered the Santa Fe railroad shops. There, I would walk up the viaduct and lean on the railing, watching the trains pass below. From that vantage point, I could also see the downtown buildings, the most prominent being the courthouse which stood in the middle of the square.

After awhile, I would get tired of the trains and would go downtown. I would not go to my father's office again, lest he find more work for me to do, but would instead stop by the Carnegie Library and wander through the musty stacks, looking for something to read. I would check out a book or two, then afterwards go upstairs to the Layland Museum.

The museum consisted of Native American, railroad, Civil War, and other artifacts collected over a lifetime by a local businessman, William Layland, who a few years earlier had bequeathed his collection to the city. It was rarely visited, so usually I was the only person in the museum.

The items that interested me most were saddles that had belonged to Buffalo Bill and Kit Carson, and—best of all—a petrified mermaid.

I would gaze in awe at this shark-toothed, monkey-faced, monkey-armed, fish-bodied fossil, imagining the days when the ocean teemed with these creatures.

It was, of course, a fake, created for some dime museum or carnival side show years ago. But I did not know that; I was as unaware of the deception as the thousands who had once paid to see it and, presumably, as Mr. Layland had been when he bought it for his collection.

Another favorite haunt of mine was the City Newsstand. It was located in a cavernous old building, dimly lit, and was packed with magazines, comic books, and paperback books of all kinds. In the back were the men's magazines—Playboy and its many competitors that featured eye-popping photos of women's breasts and bottoms—and behind the counter more explicit fare. You had to be 18 to venture behind the counter, however, and, as I was only 12, I could only imagine what was in those magazines. (Later I found out, but that’s another story.)

The proprietor of the newsstand was an old gnome of a man who wore an eye patch and sat on a stool behind the counter, chewing a cigar. If you hung around too long, browsing without buying anything, he would start glaring at you with his one available eye. Wherever you went in the store, you could feel that eye on you; there was no relief from it until you left the store and were safely on the sunny sidewalk again.

He was only one of many strange characters in that town, and not the strangest.

The strangest was the Tamale Lady. She lived several houses down the street from us in a large, white frame house, with columned porch, and a front yard that had no shrubs, no trees, nothing but grass—always neatly mown—and a small metal sign that read, "Hot Tamales 12 for $1."

She never set foot outside. At least, I never saw her until one day when my mother—who was too tired after working at the newspaper office all day to cook—sent me and my younger sister to her house to buy some tamales.

I knocked on the door. It was answered by a thin, pale, wraith-like woman dressed in black; she smiled sadly and said in a voice so faint we could barely hear it, "Come in, children."

We went inside. She told us to wait while she went to the kitchen to get the tamales.

We were standing in a large living room, which was adjoined by a dining room almost as large. There was no sunlight in those rooms, for all the windows were covered with heavy curtains, nor was there any furniture. But they were not empty—no, they were definitely not empty.

Instead of furniture, the rooms were filled with dioramas that had been created by the Tamale Lady. Each diorama was the same, with minor variations. The centerpiece was a small, hand-made coffin, ornately decorated with buttons, ribbons, and what-not, and containing a plastic baby doll with its eyes closed. Backing the scene was a piece of ply board upon which Bible scriptures having to do with Death had been neatly lettered; the ply boards were also trimmed with blinking Christmas lights.

While we waited for the tamales, my sister and I walked from one diorama to another—there were at least twenty of them—unsure how to react. One of us said something like, "These are, uh, nice"—but of course they were not nice; they were strange and funereal, despite the festive Christmas lights, and deeply disturbing.

After what seemed a long time, the Tamale Lady returned, smiling her strange sad smile; she silently took the dollar and handed me the tamales wrapped in newspaper. We left, and never came back.

Later, we learned that, years ago, she had lost a baby and ever since had made these dioramas.

As I say, when the summer started, I had no friends. This was partly because I had moved to town at the very end of the school year, so had not had time to get to know my classmates. Also, as I say, our house was in a neighborhood full of old people, so there simply were no young people my age to meet.

I did, however, get to know one of the old people, and before the summer was over he became my first friend in Cleburne.

His name was Mr. Barnes and he lived next door. We met like this: He was in his backyard clipping his shrubbery one day when he saw me in my backyard and said hello. We introduced ourselves and he asked me how old I was. I told him I was twelve. Then he said, "Do you know how old I am?" I shook my head. "I'm 85 years old," he said. "I was born in 1880 in a log cabin in Kentucky. We came here when I was five years old. I grew up here. I used to roam all over this town. ‘Course, in those days it was different. There weren’t any cars, it was horse-and-buggies."

I was impressed by Mr. Barnes’ age. "You were born in 1880?" I said. "That means you were a year old when Billy the Kid was killed."

"You know your Old West history," he said, chuckling. "Yes, that's right—I was alive when Billy the Kid was alive. Why, when I was your age, Cleburne was still an Old West town.  There were no cars then, just horse-and-buggies. And I knew old folks when I was growing up—folks as old as I am now—that were some of the first settlers of Johnson county—people that came here before Texas joined the Union. And I knew Civil War veterans, too—and ex-slaves—and cowboys—real cowboys, not the drugstore kind."

"Did you know any Indians?"

"No. By the time I came along, they'd all been pushed onto the reservations up in Oklahoma Territory. Or killed. But I do remember two old men that fought the Indians. They used to sit on a bench on the courthouse square with the other old men."

"What were they like?"

He thought a moment, then said, "They were sorry, no-count. Murderers—that's what they were. If they'd killed the Indians in self defense, that would've been one thing. But the way I heard it, it was cold-blooded murder. And they killed women and children too." He shook his head, and added, "I always thought the Indians got a bad deal."

I told Mr. Barnes about seeing Kit Carson and Buffalo Bill's saddles at the museum. "Oh, that's nothing," he said. "I saw Buffalo Bill himself when he brought his show here back at the turn of the century. They had a big parade downtown, with Buffalo Bill leading it. He had silver hair that was the longest hair I ever saw on a man. People think the Beatles have long hair, but theirs isn't long at all compared to Buffalo Bill's."

Mr. Barnes was a retired Santa Fe railroad engineer. He still knew a lot of people who worked at the Santa Fe shops and visited there often. Once I went to the shops with him and he gave me a tour. But, as fascinated as I was by the trains, I was even more fascinated when he took me on a drive in the country south of town. He took me to Bee Mountain, the highest point in Johnson County, and he showed me the place where the great Chisholm Trail crossed the Brazos River.

Mr. Barnes was remarkably fit and active for his age. Not only did he drive capably and work in his yard, he also spent a lot of time in his workshop making things out of wood and parts of things he got from the Santa Fe shops.

When we moved away to another part of town a year later, he gave me something he had made in his workshop. It was a sort of cushioned bench, with railroad car springs underneath the cushion. Forty years later, I still have it. I have carried it from one place to another in my various moves from one town to another, and one apartment or house to another, and have lived with it for so long that now I take it as much for granted as one of my toes, and in fact have gotten so used to it that most of the time I don't think about where it came from. But, once in a while, I look at it and remember that it was given to me by Mr. Barnes, the first friend I made in Cleburne and a man who could remember the Old West.

3:48 am CST
White House Reporter: More Whispers of Looming Martial Law

Draft Riots Feared: No Matter Who Wins in November, Draft Will Return

Correlation Between Bush Ratings And Terror Alerts

International team to monitor presidential election

5:10 pm CST
DREAM: On the television, election riots in Florida. I walk through the apartment, shaking my head over the chaos and destruction. I am walking to the kitchen, but to get there, I must pass through a large garage. In the garage, I see a man holding a knife and crouching over a lifeless form that might be a corpse. He looks up at me. I pass him warily, not turning my back on him. When I reach the kitchen I see him stick his knife into the form. It looks like he’s sticking it into a human head. I reach for the phone to call the cops, but in a second he’s in the room with me. We fight. I get his knife. I wake up, then go back to sleep …

A few hours later, I wake up again to start the day. Around one o’clock I go out to the apartment complex’s parking garage to get in my car to go somewhere and discover, as I’m loading some things in the passenger seat, that the entire passenger side of my car has been keyed. There is a long, deep, sickening white scratch through the black paint.

I look around and see that no other cars in the garage have been keyed. Only mine.

Why was mine singled out? Was it because it is new? If so, there are other new cars in the garage—most of them more expensive.

And, as I’m standing there, I remember the dream: The man in the garage with a knife, crouching over a lifeless form …

Later, my brother-in-law and I look at the damage. We try fixing it with touch-up paint, but after dabbing paint on a few inches of the scratch it becomes apparent the damage is too bad to fix it myself. It will require a new paint job, which will cost money I don’t have.

It is five o’clock as I write this. The weekend—an otherwise happy weekend—is drawing to a close and I’m trying to keep a positive attitude, lest the vandal achieve his goal of ruining my day. For, as much as it hurts to see my car—the first new car I’ve owned in years—vandalized, I will try to find joy in this day. Perhaps a good starting point would be to remind myself that far worse things can happen to you than getting your car keyed.

I’ve also been trying, ever since it happened, to remember the Gandhi quote which has been at the top of this website for the past week or so: “You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.”

I forgot those words in the first few minutes after I discovered the damage. I thought: This just shows how rotten people are. Why do I bother? They deserve Bush’s ‘New Freedom’.

But then, I thought of all the people who don’t deserve the New Freedom, and all the people who don’t deserve the Bush administration keying our country, keying our lives, keying our children’s lives, like the son of a bitch who keyed my car.

No, most don’t deserve the New Freedom. Most are not dirt.

And yet, it does seem like there’s more dirt these days. Human dirt—people full of hatred and stupidity—the kind of people who torture, the kind of people who key cars. In fact, there’s so much human dirt that something ought to be done about it. What we ought to do is—

But there I go again. I must remember Gandhi’s words.

9:59 am CST
Kenneth R. Smith (who contributed the piece “Bush Family Values” to the upcoming book The Bush Junta) wrote yesterday with these comments on Bush’s statement that his administration will “never stop thinking of ways to harm our country and our people” …

You could put Torquemada to work on George W. Bush with red-hot tongs for six years under the grueling sun of Guantanamo and never produce results like these. Sometimes, under the quirks of time-pressures and a sudden unaccountable slackness of the will-to-lie, absolutely the one thing that a gnarled little soul has devoutly been struggling to suppress will erupt into plain sight.

I heard this on the 11:30 PM BBC World News and nearly fell out of my chair. I stayed up until 2:00 AM to tape the rerun to confirm what I had heard. And I'm hacking this thing out at 2:30 AM so you won't wait to hear it from anyplace else—it is indisputably the Bushism of all Bushisms, and goes right to the core of what I have charged about this vile and unholy regime.

Our illegitimate usurper-in-chief, George W. Bush, said the following at the signing of a defense spending bill:

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful. And so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people. And neither do we."

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said of this remark later: "Even the most straightforward people sometimes misspeak."

Yes, Scott: but what about even the most MENDACIOUS ones, who by an utter freak of loquacity happen to utter the truth? I felt as if I had wandered into the middle of a Sophoclean tragedy, where Oedipus by utter irony speaks the truth in spite of himself.

Expect a sample from Ken’s contribution to The Bush Junta soon. On my To Do List this weekend is continued construction of the special section devoted to the book.

5:05 pm CST
Free speech on cable access television is endangered by a Time Warner plan to take over the (highly lucrative) access channels and transform them into entertainment channels. Yet this week the Austin Chronicle, the "alternative" weekly of Austin attacked activist/documentary filmmaker/talk show host Alex Jones for his efforts to fight this assault on free speech. You can read the Chronicle’s ugly little piece HERE.

After reading it, go HERE for more articles on the subject.

This is not the first time the Chronicle has shown itself to be anything but the cutting-edge alternative to the mainstream media it pretends to be. In 1998, the Chronicle libeled my friend, underground comics legend Jack Jackson by calling his graphic novel Lost Cause racist. When Louis Black, editor of the Chronicle, refused to print Jack's rebuttal, I posted it on the Internet, resulting in Black receiving a flood of angry emails from around the world. For more information about the Chronicle's shabby treatment of the legendary comic artist and Texas historian, read Gary Groth's Comics Journal interview with Jack HERE.

And now the Chronicle has attacked Alex Jones, proving once again that beneath the Chronicle's masquerade as the "cool" publication of Austin lies a poisonous political agenda.

If you would like to complain to the Chronicle about its attack on Alex and its failure to defend free speech in Austin, the number is 512-454-5766.

4:51 pm CST
SUMMER OF TERROR Update:

Terrorist Attack "Warning" in Denver; Cleveland and Dallas Also "Warned

Washington DC: No End Date Set in Code Orange Marathon

January Photos Said Used for Terror Alert

4:42 pm CST
Evidence of Pentagon Psychological Warfare Operations Against U.S. Citizens Surfaces in Want Ads

Welcome to the Matrix - Inside the Government's Secret, Corporate-Run Mega-Database

4:25 pm CST
DREAMS: Newly elected Mr. Smith goes to Washington. Two days later he receives a videotape in the mail, professionally produced by ABC News. Peter Jennings' face fills the screen, introducing the scene that follows: a party scene. It stirs a vague memory in Mr. Smith's mind. Then to his shock he sees a man at the party receive a particularly lewd lap dance from a stripper; it is in fact pornographic, the sort of thing that would never be shown on the network news, at least not without some blurring. So this can't be an actual excerpt from the evening newscast, he reasons. And yet there is no doubt this was produced by ABC News. Then, to Mr. Smith’s horror, the man in the video lifts his head and he recognizes himself. It all comes back now, the party he went to and later forgot. Someone must have slipped him a Mickey Finn--a mind control cocktail cooked up by the CIA that lowered his inhibitions to Zero and induced amnesia. Tears form in his eyes. On the tv screen Peter Jennings looking into the camera lifts an eyebrow, saying, "Now will you cooperate, Mr. Smith?" …

On board a flying disc, a midshipman notices that the hexagram in the craft's core engine has seven lines, not six. He brings it to the attention of his superiors. They check all the hexagrams. All have seven lines. "My god," says the Admiral, "they're not hexagrams-they're heptagrams. Someone has added an extra line to everyone of the damned things." They bring the Alien out of deep freeze. But the Alien's brain is damaged and it cannot help them …