Fandex:

Punkie: Yes, it does seem like it's overwhelming, and I think it still bothers me to a point, but part of the healing comes from doing this web site. It usually means, "I am tried of telling this story, look, here's a URL, you can read it if you want to."

That which does not kill us makes us stronger, right? That's what they tell me, anyway. Sometimes I feel battles in my life are so hard because I am still working on the battlefield of my past life (meaning childhood), so in my spare time, I try and work it out. The first 18 uears of my life were messed up, and now I am 33, so I figure I have until age 36 (2 x 18) to fix it. Well, it's a goal anyway.

I only get one shot at this life, so I guess to graduate at the end, I have to fix it. Maybe it's a test of some sort.

Thank you for your kind words. :)

Punkie: Yes, I am sure. I change some names and incriminating details in these stories for various security reasons, both mine and the people they have in them. I picked the names "Joel" and "Elliot" because they seemed like reasonable Jewish names, and I figured if I made them too ethnic, like "Schlomo" and "Saul," someone would SWEAR I was talking about some real people named Schlomo and Saul. Or claiming I say Jewish families have violent kids (which is so, so far off mark).

You know, I get so much mail saying Longfellow and McLean High were so terrible, I wonder if I should offer up a support group? "I was traumatized by Mrs. Brown's Wigs" or something. :-D

Punkie: You bring up some good points, and I am glad you decided to write me this, even though Hissyfit died a few months ago.

Being an American, I don't truly know what kind of hell you are going through. I could go on about how it will all work out, but history in your region has never been kind to the people who live in it. Reality in these kind of conditions are really screwed up. You have at least two sides who will see it differently, and then another side how other people see what's going on.

I used to know this Turkish guy. He told me, growing up in Turkey, he was told in school that Greeks are not humans, but half-breeds of devils, and that they eat babies, have glowing eyes that can see in the dark, and are responsible for most evildoings in the world. He believed this until he moved to America when he was 25. His perception of Greeks radically changed because America afforded him the opportunity to see how Greek and Turks work with a common struggle; that is, the struggle of being an immigrant. He deduced that Greeks were really no different than Turks, but his relatives in Turkey still truly believe that Greeks are not human.

My personal perception of a lot of the problems in Central Europe and the Middle East are due in part to centuries of warfare over viable resources (farming and grazing land, then later, oil). When some superpower takes over a region, like the USSR did with Yugoslavia and some of the Satellite countries (Latvia, Lithuania, and so on), they never actually solved anything, but kept it under the lid. Then when the USSR fell apart, the old battles that were simmering all this time boiled over again.

There is only one way, I think, to fix this whole problem: massive education. Start with the basics, like reading and writing, math and world history, health and social sciences. The biggest hurdle will be shattering the reality that the people on one side of the mountain aren't malicious baby-killers as your grandmother had always said. The trust is so hard to build, and so easy to destroy.

Nostalgia is one of the biggest walls. See, in America, we have a saying, "Remember the Alamo!" which is based on a fort we lost in a war with the Mexicans in 1836. We lost three great men in that battle, two of them legendary heros on their own (Davy Crockett and James Bowie). Now, while we no longer think the Mexicans are evil, that saying is still used to mean "Never give up, great Americans lost their lives defending the Alamo, let's succeed in their honor!" The anti-Mexican sentiment is gone, but the saying still survives in 2002.

The Great October Revolution was only back in 1927. It was the greatest victory ever recorded by the working class at that time, the labor parties and other generally oppressed people were led by the working class and their vanguard, the Bolshevik Party (please excuse my misspelling, it's been a while since I have studied Marxism). You can't forget a thing like that very easily, but is the reality of what happened truly clear? To the idealistic communists, it was an overthrow the bourgeoise (sp?) and the land-owners, brought power of the working people, and built a completely new society, in which there is no exploitation of man by his fellow man... in theory. But if this were so, I would fully expect the Soviet Union to be alive and strong today (maybe having socialism issues like France, but France is still going). I personally think it was a bunch of people, sick of the oppression, ruled by incompetent ninnies, who still remembered the overthrow of the Czarist rule a few decades back. But no one was watching the watchmen, so to speak, and the same corrupt politicians just changed sides, and ended up doing what they always did: vy for money and power. George Orwell wrote "Animal Farm" based on that very fact. It's a human instinct, which is why capitalism does so well (although, it screws you over if you are not tough enough, which is why we have laws in America about monopolies). I don't think the USSR fell because it was evil, I just think it was mismanaged and lost focus on what the Great October Revolution was really all about.

But, no matter what I think, I understand that as schoolkids under communist rule, you were probably told the Great October Revolution was really the most wonderful thing ever. And its success fueled the Chinese Revolution and probably a lot of other smaller, lesser-known revolutions. But were these really great times to live? As you mentioned, Russian poets felt ashamed to feel nostalgia for something as horrible as war. Over 20 million people were left dead and over 1700 cities destroyed when it was all over. Of course, that's nothing compared to Czarist rule and the previous fascist state, but as you probably know, war is hell no matter the cause you are fighting for.

So reality is formed at a young age. The Great October Revolution was totally great, and Greeks eat babies. When you are living under a system were personal growth is stifled by war and chaos, you will cling to absolutes. Black and white, no time to think about grays. When your village was attacked by the people on the other side of the mountain, you don't think that they have babies, kids happily running around, and they want to just have a good life like you do. They bombed your city. Bomb them back! Bomb them harder! What will they do? I think we all know that this kind of thing never ends without a horrible price paid on both sides.

There are a lot of stories about two enemies forced to survive together in some hostile environment. The moral is usually, "We're all the same underneath." This is the kind of education I want everyone to have, and yet it's one of the hardest roads to follow, the bitterest pill to swallow. That's what's so terrible about war: it removes our basic humanity; the ability to recognize thoughts other than our own. That is what reality is, a response to perceived stimulus. In order to have a different response, we need to change our perceptions, which is within our grasp, but so many fail, or even worse, never even try.

Punkie: A friend of mine had a saying which I ended up stealing, "Don't call me 'Sir,' I work for a living." Punkie or Grig is always fine.

Thanks for your info. I must admit, we were being all touristy, without care of real historical accuracy. I am sure a lot of stuff recreated in Williamsburg didn't all happen there, either. Isn't it funny how history changes over time for such mundane reasons as business? You can visit Hersheypark, but they never mention the fact ol' Milton Hershey made a labor town designed to keep his workers poor and dependent on the factory through "co-op" stores.

Well, I like the chocolate anyway.

Punkie: Hmmm... what is worse, the fact I was flamed, or the fact someone actually took the effort flame my page? Thanks for caring enough to send me your letter.

Punkie: Thanks! :)

I have to update that page someday. I have a lot more stuff to add. The tarot card reference might be that I was doing a reading for some party where the people left before I got there and didn't tell me where they were going.

Punkie: [being a smart ass]

Mr. Van Tee,

I got your album today, and you requested where I heard of you.

Well, I was on a fishing trawler in the Pacific, when we landed in a really seedy port somewhere just South of Singapore. I was gambling with some local outside of a abandoned warehouse. I had drunk some sort of homemade rum, passed out, and woke up next to a toilet in some tiny little cement building where they were cock fighting. I was feeling really bad, my wallet was gone, I didn't know where I was or how I got there, and I didn't even know what day it was. I was wearing a shirt that I know I never owned, and my shoes were gone. I stumbled down the muddy roads that made up this shanty town where no one spoke English, just some mixture of Greek and Portuguese. I managed to find the mayor, who also happened to own the town's only Pub and Laundromat. He laughed a toothless smile at me, called me "gringo," and before I knew it, I was in some sort of prison cell with two other drunken corpses that smelled of rum and broken dreams. For days, we were forced to drink some sort of watery banana gruel that tasted like a salty soap. I knew my ship had left without me by now, and I had nowhere to go. Just when things seemed the darkest, on the radio they were playing, "Greatest Hits of the American Capitalist Bastards," which seemed to be a mixture of bad Elvis covers and bluegrass. One of them was your song, "Open Up the Window," which was explained by the DJ in broken English as an "example of piggish American greed." I made this song my anthem, and when one of the drunks died, I used his belt buckle to scrape around the cell bars until one night, I was able to weaken them enough to escape. I hid in the jungle, being eaten alive by biting flies and centipedes as long as a child's arm. I sustained on local roots and occasional garbage scraps until I snuck aboard a steamer tramp named, "The Kevin Marie." From there I made my way to New Zealand, where I made contact with the American Embassy, and I was back home in a matter of days.

Okay, that was a total lie. But boy, it sounded inspiring, didn't it? Truth is, I was in Nepal, where my airplane had crashed into the mountains, when a Yeti by the name of Robert... okay, that, too is a lie.

Okay... now for the real thing. I was suffering the wilds of analyst reports at work, and to keep sane, I played an episode of the Doctor Demento show, available off his website. There I heard, "Squirt Gun," and nearly laughed myself to the point of consciousness. It sat in my head for days that turned into weeks, singing something under my breath about "Squishy Squishy." The good Doctor had mentioned your website, and I finally looked it up, and just the phrase, "the singalong part is: 'Squishy, squishy!'" hooked me. Just $13 for a CD that supports a small artist. I couldn't resist.

Thank heavens for small artists. Much better than the big guys with all the money. Keep up the good work!

Punkie: I'd love to help you out, but the lobster I have is made by "Angelitos" out of El Salvador, and the company went under in 1996, I think. It's too bad, because the woman who made them was trying to get her village to make a viable trade instead of running guns and drugs. I used to get their catalog with the stories in it. They used to have huge stuffed palm trees, sea animals, giant food, and so on. Really well-made stuff, really unique.

Your best bet from here on is to look on the web. There are a lot of places that sell "Giant Stuffed Animals" on it, but looking under "stuffed lobster" takes me to a lot of places in Maine, so you may have trouble there. "No, I want to display it, not eat it."

If size is not an issue, I found these links for smaller stuffed lobsters, like here: http://thisplaceisazoo.com/marine.html (12 inches long). Also try places like Ebay, or make a call to the people at big-stuffedanimals.com and see if they know a supplier. They may be able to special order you one, or at least know where you can start.

Punkie: The show was a dissapointment. The guy captured what he assumed were "baby giant squids," but they all died on the ship before he could get them to an aquarium.

I have always been fascinated by "sea monsters." The arciteuthis (giant squid) is very interesting because we know they exist, but no one has really ever seen one alive (except one guy who *thought* he did one night, because it glowed slightly). The sea is so vast and unexplored, and it's easier to get to than, say, the moon. Man, there could be mile-long serpents under there and no one would know.

Punkie: These are good questions, but you should probably contact the Swedish embassy in Poland to get better answers. They'll have maps and might find someone who has done sailing in just such a boat.

My guess is sailing to the Arctic circle upriver will be impossible. I know the Lule river has several dams, and the ones I have seen have no way for boats to cross upriver. The Torne river I have no idea.

If you do travel up that way, send me some pictures, though! The midnight sun can give some of the most spectacular colors in the sky.

Lycka till!

Punkie: No problem. Glad to have helped. What name did you pick?

[Ed Note: He picked "Komomo," means "little peach" in Japanese.]

Punkie: I can't really tell you without knowing the whole story. For the record, I *used* to work at a call center, first with the 3pm - 12am shift, then I worked as a call center programmer on call for 24/7. I am not sure what con you saw me at, and how long ago it was, but a few years ago I used to run an international crisis desk for a large ISP, so I was probably speaking about the people I worked with then. I said it then, and I say it now, some of those people were the coolest people on this planet Earth. They did goof off and fall asleep at 3am sometimes, but when the chips were down, they sprang to action. That ISP is still in business thanks in part to them!

Were they *better* than the day shift? Not really. We had a few flakes, but for the most part, we had it all together. So I wouldn't even know how the lying relates in comparison, but I know the people asleep in their chairs probably denied that, if asked (and sometimes bosses don't care as long as the work is done, and done well). I can tell you that other NOCs we worked with had liars like nothing else. Fairfax UUNet, for instance, hired warm bodies to stall and hopefully frustrate anyone calling them to ask about an outage.

You: How come the guys in Perth can't see anything in California?
FUU: We don't have anything in Perth.
You: Really? The IP address at [ip.address] says perth4.au.router5.uu.net...
FUU: Oh, that Perth.
You: People in SF can't see Australia at all.
FUU: The uh... trans-atlantic cable is flapping.
You: Don't you mean the trans-*pacific*?
FUU: Uh, yeah, sure. That one.
You: Which route? The Chilean or Singapore route?
FUU: Uh. Um. The first one.
You: That was a trick question, there is no Chilean trans-pac--
FUU: Hold please.... [click].... [dialtone]

Punkie: The questions I get... oy. :) Yes, it is called an "oosik," which is a bone that helps the bull walrus get his penis into the dark folds of the cow's vagina. Man, it's not pretty, but it works.