WHOA

POSNER, Circuit Judge. John Veysey appeals from his conviction, after a jury trial, and sentence of 110 years in prison for mail and wire fraud, arson, and the related offense of felony by fire. The facts are amazing, but we shall resist the temptation to recount them at length. In 1991 Veysey set fire to his house and inflated the claim that he then filed with his insurer. The insurer paid, and the house was rebuilt. The following year Veysey married a woman named Kemp, increased the insurance on the house, removed the valuable contents of the house, along with himself and his wife, and then cut the natural-gas line inside the house, causing the house to fill up with gas and explode spectacularly, utterly destroying it. He grossly exaggerated the value of the property allegedly lost in the explosion--some did not exist and some he had removed before the explosion. The insurance company (a different one) paid, and he used part of the proceeds to buy another house. The next year he tried to kill his wife by driving his van with her in it into a river. When that failed he killed her by poisoning her, and collected $ 200,000 in the proceeds of insurance policies on her life. He placed personal ads in newspapers, seeking to meet women. He became engaged to one of the women he met through his ads, named Donner, but broke his engagement after failing to procure a $ 1 million policy on her life. He then took up with a Ms. Beetle. This was in 1996 and the same year he burned down his house, again submitting an inflated estimate of the loss and receiving substantial proceeds from the insurance company (a different one, again). He then married Beetle, and they moved into a rented house. She insured her life for $ 500,000 with him as beneficiary. One night in 1998, after drugging her, he set fire to the house, hoping to kill both her and their infant son, on whom he had also taken out a life insurance policy and who was in the house with her. They were rescued, and soon afterwards Veysey and Beetle divorced. The house was rebuilt and Veysey persuaded a woman named Hilkin to move in with him after she had accumulated some $ 700,000 in life insurance and named him as the primary beneficiary. He apparently intended to murder her, but he was arrested before his plans matured. There is more, but these are the highlights.

assuming a certain kind of blowback

Thing is, it may just matter, in the end, how you procured the necessary calories to make tomorrow something more than a hoped for occasion. And, if it does matter how tomorrow comes, it may also matter which calories, by which means, you made available to yourself. I had a resident advisor who eventually became a roommate who entertained vegetarianism as a kind of challenge. I don't think that counts, in terms of what THIS is. I eat a lot of meat. Used not to. Five years, never did. Then, did. I tend to trust the notion that to the extent you pledge yourself to avoid a certain kind of activity, you become fettered to that conduct, through opposition to it. in some instances, that's what should happen. in others, you spend so much energy avoiding what disgusts you, what disgusts you controls you. And that's not freedom, whatever that is. An ongoing discussion . . .

Candidates, buggered by hubris and the provisional security provided by the passive voice, don't want it all to end like this.

Moment

Sitting in the basement of the building where I learn my craft, every cubicle seems to house hand sanitizer and the books from the early 1800s behind me leave rust streaks on my jeans when I read with the goal of understanding how it came to pass that street urchins stealing from the pockets of passing clerks and candlemakers were punished by men in wigs.


Word

Palladium - looked that one up today.

Letter

Dear Eli,

It's like the braces finally came off and you stopped humping the pillow at night when you thought everyone was asleep. Don't get too excited - a different kind of sullenness looms.


Poem

At 45, Carver is a large man,
with hair in the throes of going gray, a pudding face,
the beginnings of jowls. He's wearing a patterned polyester shirt,
with an oversized, way-out-of-style collar,
blue jeans and slippers that are coming apart.
More than anything, he looks kind




Event


McCain, the provisional "if it's gonna be a Republican" choice of the disillusioned and cynical Democratic wing, was in Vietnam. Just wanted to remind people of that, b/c it is an election and sometimes we don't spend enough time rehashing the war. It's terribly important to establish bona fides vis a vis references to the late 60s and early 70s, lest we fail to acknowledge the terrific importance of the generation who lived during that time. That generation also gets overlooked a lot.

Baseball, Though Lacking Brett Favre and Tom Brady, Does Have Its Own Gestalt

Paean to Todd Stottlemyre, in the form of his obscenity-laden rant, as poached from that great bastion of baseball partisanship, firejoemorgan.com

Influenza of My Mind, Or I Still Believe In Art God Damn It

Influenza of my mind begets its own sort of logic. I have some ultra sharp cheddar cheese but that won't (obviously) be enough. Here's a sample of the local, which by definition can't translate (forgive me that) -

Skyforce Eruption Saddeninglyy Deadening
Solipsism Enthralls Sudden Determination
Standard Entropy Statistics Department
Stellar Evolution Studies Development
Strafing Emblems Stifle Dwarf-Stars
Stupefied Excellence Still Devolves
Sam Extends Sodden Darkening
Strange Effing Situation, Dude
Simple Eels Select Embolism
Slit Eagles Soaring Endlessly
Stop Ending Slipped Dark
Slick Edges Sadden Dens
So Earlier Stars Decide
See Every Solid Die
See Every Solid Dead
So Each Senior Dwells
Slick Errors Soar Down
Stop Entry Signs Dented
Slit Emblems Soak Doors
Simple Ears Sear Dividends
Strange Elk Summon Drivers
Sam Equivocates Sorry Dental
Stupefied Engines Stop Driving
Strafing Eagles Simply Downward
Stellar Elucidation Stifles Declension
Standard Efforts Suffered Denouement
Solipsism Entwines Southern Desperation
Skyforce Exacerbates Sanfordite Dennyism

best of times, worst of times

this is part of our universe






as is this





I went back to the second layer of firmament this weekend, soldiered through the dirty gray slush where the sidewalks become streets, resurrected feelings that outstrip my power to apprehend, told stories about times I had forgotten, ate the shit out of some dank pad see ew, encountered revelations in forms I had unconsciously sequestered to the outer edges of awareness, existed in that slipshod passage of time made possible by a train ride surging past artless but authentic graffiti scrawled on the side walls of 3-flats and endless iterations of signs for Mexican restaurants, slipped dollar bills solicited by destitute HOMELESS ON CHRISTMAS HAPPY NEW YEAR signs, and sat in a library whose arched ceilings and intricate Gothic characters made me feel at home and absent from home at the same time. Happy new year and all that jazz, good eventful times underwritten by good eventful times and strange compassless times. And I read me some Charles Dickens – on the plane from Omaha, the train, the cabs, and the couches of apartments on which I could lay my slightly addled head for four or five hours.

Dickens is basically voice-over, the kind of reading that goes off in my head. Add to that viewings of Planet Earth and the sonorous narration of Charles Attenborough (“It’s like God’s narrating to you after you’ve died) and I was very voice-in-head-struck. Plus I met my Sidney Carton, in the flesh, capable of manifesting that dark night of the soul at four o’clock in the afternoon as the wan light of Windy City winter sun streamed through the windows of a hipster bar with a stripper pole and passable meatloaf. In his Charles Darnay incarnation, my Sidney was all wit and Camels and snide remarks made in the face of authority and helping people across the street and not giving a shit if the thrift store clothes were exactly the kind the cool kids didn’t go there to buy, but just the functional cheap things that provided the requisite amount of warmth and non-police intervention, and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason at 17 and nanotechnology because the least you owe yourself is a search for moorings, and if you find none, then that blossoms into something – five or six years later – that begins to feel like a blessing to let it all just go. I kind of am thinking of that scene in the Usual Suspects when finster’s dead and baldwin’s character spits (literally) into Pollack’s character’s face: “We pulled more scores, and stole more money, than you’ve ever imagined . . . so FUCK you!” That’s not an exact quote, just the way I remember it, which is in spirit with the general drift of where I want this all to go, b/c he’s the smartest and most haunted person I will ever know and if I ever go to the city again who knows what possible incarnation I may encounter and that's that that's that that’s that.