[I only conduct emails with book buyers at this point, thanking them for purchases and answering their questions, if any. The following message from a man who bought a great number of books hit this crackpot in the writing home.]

“Thank you for the email and the book James. I learn a lot from and appreciate all your fields of work but the history is some of the most eye opening and, when it isn't too sad, very enjoyable. It's a modern tragedy that the wider public hasn't picked any of it up en masse. I'm sure they'd discover a lot of neglected parts of history if they did and maybe even gain a slightly more human perspective from your empathy and wit. If that's too much to hope for maybe whatever picks over the corpse of our civilization a millennia from now will find some of your social history to see some of the forgotten people I'm thankful you took the time to archive.”

Take care yourself,

Fergus

…

Fergus, thank you so much.

I recently fielded a complaint from a family member about a historical article I wrote. There were three typos, which served as evidence that the content was nothing but trash. Further, she found the historical realities cited in that article to be false, opposite of her indoctrination as they are, and also told me that she was insulted personally, by my general observations concerning the immunity of the Modern Mind, from facts. Forget the truth, mere facts must ever, in an ideological thought farm, fall before fantasy doctrines.

I have asked my editor not to let my writing fall into the email boxes or mail boxes of my family members—my closest family members. Those of you who find value in my amateur historical research should keep in mind that my entire family assumes that anything I touch turns to mud, any observation I make is false and all of my considered opinions are mere outrageous media shock stunts. They recall me being unable to read until 5th grade, unable to do basic math or spell for life, having failed 9th grade thrice.

As my health fails across a broad spectrum, I am taking steps to prevent my family from erasing my work when I pass and doing what I can to get my journals in print. I do admit to being retarded. However, I suspect that this curse of mine, this casting out of the Garden of Lies, accompanied by the gurgling strangulations of my boyhood muses in the deepest precincts of my soul, has simply enabled me to observe reality with a clarity denied to the fully functioning, modernized, social mind.

I thought of this today in church, as once again I did not sing, cannot, am unable to recall a single song lyric, hearing every song as a brand new piece of music even after a thousand listens, knowing that there is no song in my soul, that I am defective by order of The Creator. I am made of the same flesh and blood as my family, though I alone have no song, have no ear for music, have never sung a note and never will.

I am unsocializable.

Today, the Captain’s Wife asked a question about the Major, which I could not answer, for I do not ever ask a personal question.

The Major’s Wife then asked a question about the Captain’s arrival time, and I had no idea, having never inquired. If he wants me to know when he arrives, he will inform me.

The pastor taught today that the person loves his body, that a man loves himself and should alike love his wife.

I do not, have always hated myself as a faulty thing.

Am I even a man?

I think not, rather suspect myself to be an incomplete cipher marooned here in this world to record a few facts about it, to make notes for some real thinker yet to arrive on the sorry scene.

These last two weeks I have had detailed dreams of dying every night, dreams I have been using in a novel, dreams that have been so consistent that I will be shocked if I return to these haunts next year.

My American curse, to be the last member of 8 families to be driven from our hometown, the city of my birth, and at the same time to be the only one of us that claims to have been driven forth, all of those ahead of and behind me firm in their belief that they sought greener pastures, not that they were concerned about the crime that drove me out. I alone was hounded from Baltimore, they, even the robbed and raped ones, ascended to suburbia.

This morning, the songs at church, that sounded nice, but which I could not grasp more than a single word at a time, forgetting word 1 when I heard word 2 and forgetting word 2 when I heard word 3, convinced me that it is more than my stupidity that cursed me to view the world through a trouble-cracked side-view mirror, when my companions in life see that world through the burnished and pristine rear-view window of hallowed perfection.

I have long known that my lack of any athletic gift, that my taking 15 years to get as technically proficient at boxing as it did for my brother to in 6 months, was one reason why I am such a good fundamentals coach. I had to learn the correct methods to have any chance of success. For this reason in general, the best top level coaches in any sport were rarely among the best mid level athletes, let alone the best of the best.

Similarly, I had to figure things out methodically where history was concerned because I lacked the ability to memorize the cause and effect doctrines taught in school, and then lacked the ability to go on to college to receive the crucial indoctrination. This process is apparently so effective that it causes the best brains in the world to misunderstand the past while permitting an actual retard who cannot write his name correctly to unearth numerous facts unknown to the experts.

I thought this to be the extent of the causes to what Lynn calls my gift of stumbling upon facts and predicting acts that elude my cerebral betters. But it occurred to me today, that it is more than that, that I have no song in my soul, only some strange ringing in my head, that I have no ability to join the human chorus and am marooned beyond society, a castaway on an island only imagined. Perhaps this is why I became so obsessive about archiving the lives of orphanage, bondage and disownment among olden runts and grunts, that I am a born loser like they were, nothing but the mud in the boot treads of our betters.

As for the bigger picture Fergus refers to eluding the mass mind. I am reminded of the latter books of Exodus, in which Moses, who questioned and argued with God, is counseled by The Almighty, to look only upon his hind parts and to never look into his visage. Moses’ visage is transformed from even this careful contact with God, so that he must go veiled among men.

Just as God protected Moses from his visage and Moses protected his people from his visage, I suspect that the civil society which we are raised to worship instead of The Creator, as it evolves into a thing of great power, offers through delusion and the beloved and hallowed lies that are the commandments of Modernity, a veil, a perception filter calibrated to save the fragile sanity of collective humanity from shattering on contact with Reality.

Detached as I am from society, having never for a moment felt its empathy, I seem to be able to observe horrors where others see only flowers, without harm, which, indicates to me, that I was never really alive, but am something else, something less, than human. For this reason I make no attempt to bring my findings to a larger audience.

That would be cruel.