Okay, not much news, so this may not be very long. Let’s see…

I registered for another Unemployment check today without any red flags popping up or sirens going off. Hopefully that means the check will show up by this weekend, or if Allah is especially merciful, be directly deposited into my bank account sometime sooner, and I can write a rent check without fear, and on time. We shall see.

I’m always hesitant about relying on Unemployment, because my experiences with it up in New York State, and my one previous experience with it here in Florida, show it to be so goddam ephemeral. Nearly anything (‘anything’ meaning, any kind of challenge or complaint from a previous employer) can shut down your benefits… it’s been my experience that, pretty much, all an employer has to do is bitch about anything at all and your benefits get suspended. You can ask for a hearing, but until you get one, you get no checks… and those hearings nearly always go to the favor of the employer anyway, even if she’s being insanely vindictive, as one of my past employers once was, back when I was naïve about how the system worked and didn’t realize I couldn’t refuse work, no matter how unreasonable her offer of it was.

(My ex employer at that time, a horrifying harpy named Sandy… not the Sandy who is now The Supervisor I Loathe The Most, another one, but that name does seem to be cursed for me… had consulted her attorney and knew exactly what to do… she called me up and offered me exactly enough work… I think it was about 20 hours… to qualify as a legitimate job offer… since I would have made about a buck more working for her than I would have on Unemployment. She was hoping I’d be stupid and refuse it, and, well, I was stupid and I did refuse it, not realizing at that time that I couldn’t refuse even part time temp work. And she turned me in immediately, and even though at the hearing I told them I hadn’t known, and I would happily take any work Sandy wanted to give me, and she admitted she no longer wanted to employ me, the presiding official said I’d obviously been in violation and terminated my benefits.)

Most employers, especially temp agencies, are very savvy and they will do whatever they can to get rid of your Unemployment claim. One of my previous agencies fired me and swore blind they would never hire me again (I’ve had this happen at about five different temp agencies since moving to Florida, and it had happened at a few in Syracuse, too, I have a Very Bad Attitude). As soon as my Unemployment claim opened, they called me up and offered me another job. I can’t prove anything, but the boss over there turned out to be a genuine psychotic (I swear to you… he had no direct supervisor due to an odd thing that had happened with his previous boss, and for over a year he had been getting a woman who worked in another city to do all his work for him remotely, while he came into the office a few hours a day, dicked around, and then went over to Clearwater and drank a lot on the beach the rest of the time). I suspect what happened to me had happened to several temps previous… he put me in contact with this woman, Robin, and had her train me to do some simple tasks over the phone… and then, ten days later, he got really jealous because Robin and I were getting along well (we weren’t dating or anything, just obviously had a good working relationship, Robin was very affable) so he came up with something out of the blue and fired me. I strongly suspect my agency sent me on that job figuring I’d get fired for cause, and it worked; I lost my Unemployment benefits.

Up north, I’ve had agencies call me up, offer me a day’s work in a place they know I can’t get to because the bus doesn’t go out there, and when I have to refuse, immediately nark me to Unemployment. I’ve had to go in several times and explain it to an Unemployment case worker. Fortunately, they see stuff like that all the time and if I can prove I couldn’t get there, and the job wouldn’t pay more than my benefits anyway, I am allowed to refuse. But in the Unemployment system, the burden of proof is very much on the worker... they will snatch your benefits away in a heartbeat, given the slightest plausible excuse. As a guy I once knew put it, 'well, you're just a lazy worker looking to score a free check, and you don't deserve one, and they hate the fact that you're getting one when they have to come into work every goddam morning and deal with lazy assholes like you'. And that pretty much sums up the whole attitude that the system has towards you when you're collecting Unemployment. If they can screw you, they absolutely will.

Anyway, apparently my current agency… the one I’ve worked for for the last three years… hasn’t made any complaints about me yet. Maybe, since times are hard and a lot of people are unemployed, and I know they really like me (someone working a temp assignment for two and a half years without a problem is rare, and I had several successful assignments prior to that for them) so… I don’t know. Maybe they aren’t going to give me a hard time, they’re just going to let me collect benefits until they can find something for me.

At the age of 41, though, and based on my past experiences with the system, that possibility seems awfully naïve.

It doesn’t matter much, since I can’t live off benefits alone… they’ll about cover my rent, but won’t keep the electricity or the phone on. I have to find some other source of income before July… and unless my agency comes through for me, or a job falls in my lap from somewhere else, I don’t know at the moment what that’s going to be. But… so far, due to the… um… due to the thing I don’t talk about here, I’m okay.

I guess this one won’t be all that short after all.

Some day, maybe soon, I should do an entry where I list some of the many, many jobs I’ve had and the many, many reasons I’ve been fired. Some of the stories are pretty hilarious. I will say this… while I do have a Very Bad Attitude, it does not arise from being late or leaving early or calling in sick a lot or picking fights on the job or trying to goldbrick or anything like that. I show up on time, I show up every day, I do my work well and it gets done on time. My Very Bad Attitude lies in the fact that I do not handle disrespect directed towards me well, and I am absolutely no good at kissing anyone’s ass if I don’t genuinely respect them… that is pretty much why I get fired so much. I have never been discharged from a job for anything I considered to be a valid reason that reflected poorly on my performance or, for that matter, on my character. My major difficulty is, most bosses are assholes (quit it, you know it’s true) and I simply do not suffer assholes gladly, especially when they think they’re going to mess with my life. I hate those types of people and I don’t hide it well. On the occasions I have good bosses, or even remotely tolerable bosses, I do well (as with my last job at the City Clerk’s Office; I had three supervisors there for a while, and one of them was horrible and hated me and did everything she could to make my life miserable without giving me grounds for an actual complaint, but the other two were professional and knew I could get the job done, so I was there for a very long time, until their needs changed and they no longer needed my particular skills any more).

Anyway, someday I may write about all that, but not today.

I had my usual holiday blues all day today. Holidays are very social occasions; today I made the mistake of going out to the pool in the early afternoon and it was very crowded and everyone else there was with friends and/or family and I was the only loner in the vast mob. I imagine I looked like some pathetic dweeb with no friends, which is exactly what I am. When I stick to myself I’m usually fine; it’s only when I mingle with people who are more socially successful than I am (meaning, anyone but, you know, rooftop snipers and homeless lunatics) in groups that I feel really left out and, well, kind of unwanted and worthless. I realize that means I should just stay inside all day and watch DVDs or cruise the Internet, but sometimes I just need to get out.

Don’t get me wrong. I generally get to spend Christmas with my family, and I enjoy that… it would be really grimly fucking depressing otherwise. But it’s a nuisance for them; someone has to drive into the city and pick me up, and then bring me back afterwards, and I always feel like I’m rather a burden… if Christmas alone didn’t suck so much, I’d probably beg off. But they do it for me every year, and I appreciate it.

Other holidays, though, often suck.

Anyway, leaving self pity behind if only for the moment, my major annoyance this weekend has been Angelfire doing weird and exasperating stuff. For most of this weekend, anytime I try to save something new, Angelfire seems to interpret the ‘save’ command as ‘devour everything in this file and leave it at 0.00kb’. Some of you may have tried to access this blog over this weekend and gotten a blank page. That would have been one of the occasions when Angelfire ate everything I’d input whole. Fortunately, I type this on Microsoft Word and then block and copy it into the web shell, meaning I still have an original to make copies from when this shit occurs. So eventually I managed to get Angelfire to let me put this page up and it stayed. But it was really aggravating.

Worse than that, though, has been Saturday’s archive. I archive by using the ‘Duplicate File’ feature, basically, and then renaming the resulting copy so it matches the dated archive link. First time I did this with Saturday’s blog entry, Angelfire copied it fine… but when I renamed the ‘copy of’ file to ‘052403.html’, Angelfire apparently interpreted ‘rename’ in the same way it had been interpreting ‘save’… and everything in the file went screaming to hell. That’s why yesterday’s blog entry mentioned that there was no Saturday archive. However, I found an auto-saved copy in Word (one of the things I very much like about Microsoft Word is this feature) and then spent much of yesterday and today trying to get Angelfire to let me set up another ‘052403’ archive page that would stick around. It seemed like that date, and Sunday’s date, were cursed… and believe me, one of the reasons there are some mistakes and typoes in Sunday’s page is that I went in and corrected them over and over again, and every time, Angelfire ate the corrected page and made me go back to my original template, which I had prudently copied. And eventually, when it let me keep a copy up, I just stopped trying to correct it.

Anyway, there is now a Saturday archive page, and hopefully, you are reading this and there is also a Sunday archive page. As I say, hopefully. If not… well then… life is a highway. I wanna ride it. All. Night. Long.

For a while I’d hoped I’d beaten my sleep curse, but it seems I’m back to only sleeping four hours at a time and being really groggy the rest of the time. I hate it, but the melitonin only seemed to break that cycle for a couple of days.

Scott Shepherd asked me to leave the essay on agnosticism and the importance of realizing that your subjective reality is not necessarily reflective of actual objective reality up for a little while, so it’s still there, below. Hopefully. Hang a comment on it fast, though, I’ll probably archive the bastard (yet again) and put up something else in a couple of days.

And now let’s see if Angelfire will let me post this mess…

WHAT YOU THINK YOU KNOW THAT ISN'T SO

I'm an agnostic. Maybe I should have front loaded with that yesterday. I should definitely bring it up today, since the delightful, but regrettably right leaning, Emily Jones has very kindly posted a link to my blog on her own deservedly popular blog. Ever since then, I've had a lot of traffic here, and I suspect it's mostly from the conservative side of the blogosphere... and I can't imagine those folks are enjoying what they're reading.

(RERUN EDITORIAL NOTE: Actually, that was a month ago, and most of the conservatives from Emily’s blog seem to have vanished, including Emily herself. But whatcha gonna do, how you do gonna do it?)

Maybe it's a good thing my chat threads haven't been working all weekend. ::grin::

Anyway. If a lot of conservative footprints are tracking across my blog these days, I should definitely get up front on the agnosticism thing. Most conservatives I know are at least somewhat religious. In the basic dichotomy as to moral and ethical social theories, there are two fundamental bases for all morality. One is 'it's wrong if it hurts someone else unnecessarily'. The other is 'it's wrong if it offends God'. The first is the basis of secular humanism, a moral structure that does not require divine authority to define write and wrong, but that simply assumes that all human beings should be accorded certain amounts of dignity and respect as a fundamental moral and social principle. The other... the 'don't offend God' model... is a much older one, and is based in the concept that humans are unfit to create their own moral codes, or really judge each other, and we require God's guidance to do so at all appropriately.

I'm a liberal, a secular humanist, and, as noted, an agnostic. Just so we're all clear on that.

Now, a lot of people confuse agnosticism with atheism. I just recently had a woman respond to my personal ad by telling me that I clearly wasn't right for her, because, while she wasn't a Christian, she had deep spiritual beliefs, and I was an agnostic. I strongly suspect she mistakenly believed that meant I was an atheist... someone who firmly believes there is no higher power in the universe. And I'm not an atheist, atheists have an amount of faith in their basic religious tenet -- God does not exist -- that I personally am uncomfortable with.

Being an agnostic means I basically admit, I don't know. I don't know if there is a higher power. Or if there is, what shape it takes. Or what it wants me to do, or if it wants me to do anything. I don't rule out the hypothesis that there may be a God... without convincing evidence, I won't rule out any hypothesis. I try to keep my mind open. As James T. Kirk once said, "I like to think that there are always... possibilities."

Oh, yeah, I'm a geek, too. Get used to the pop culture SF & fantasy references. We do that a lot around here. :-)

The phrase 'agnostic' comes from the Greek root word agnostos, which translates as, unknown, or unknowable. And that's what I pretty much said before: I don't know. And I absolutely admit that I don't know, and I try to keep my mind open.

I don't know that God created the heavens and the earth and all things within and upon them in six days. On the other hand, I don't know He or She or It didn't.

I don't know if the Earth is a crumb of dirt on the back of a giant turtle, which is on the back of a larger turtle, which is on the back of an even larger turtle, going down to infinity. I will note, as my extremely liberal mother once noted to me when I was in sixth grade and studying Iroquois mythology and making fun of it, that the Iroquois creation mythology is no more ridiculous, when looked at dispassionately, than the creation myth of any religion, including Christianity. If all of humanity came from one breeding pair, Adam and Eve must have had one helluva lot of genetic diversity in their DNA. And let's not get into talking snakes.

I don't know if reincarnation actually happens or not. I will note that the other half of the planet... the one we don't live in... takes reincarnation for granted, but, hey, they could be wrong, too. I've read some interesting material that seems to indicate there is some evidence for reincarnation, but hey, what I read could be wrong or deliberately deceptive. I don't know.

I don't know if the dinosaurs ever walked the Earth. Maybe Satan/Ahriman/Pluto/Astarte/Loki created all those fossilized remains and buried them in various strata of the Earth a thousand years ago, to confuse me. I. Just. Don't. Know.

Steve Gerber once mentioned a belief a few people used to claim to adhere to, that a cosmic entity named Fred had created the entire Earth, and everyone and everything in and on it, in the early 1920s. All evidence of any existence previous to that has been manufactured by Fred to hide the truth. I don't know that that's true. I doubt it a whole helluva lot... but it's the kind of thesis that, by its very nature, you cannot disprove. To state flatly that a Freddite is absolutely wrong requires a leap of faith, a jump into irrational insistence that you simply know how reality works to the extent that you know the Earth actually existed in 1919. Me, I was born in 1961, so I can't know that. And memory is highly subjective, anyway.

Being an agnostic is about admitting that you don't know. Personally, I think there is very little we can actually know about the world/reality we live in, and most of what we can know is very subjective. I know I love certain people, but that's a subjective feeling, so I feel safe in stating, with certainty, that I know I feel that way.

However, I do not know that, if I hold a hammer in my hand, extend my arm, and open my fingers, the hammer will fall to the floor. Now, I'd bet on it, pretty much any amount of money... it's always happened when I've done something similar before, and I see no reason it shouldn't happen again. Gravity seems to be a constant... but I don't know how gravity works. And I'm willing to accept that, since I don't know how gravity works (and as far as I know, no one else really does, either), it's possible it might stop working at some point, unpredictably. Or start working in a somewhat different way. I simply (boy, this is getting repetitive) don't know. As I said, I'd bet on it... statistics are always impressive... but they teach us that the most wildly unlikely things do, inevitably, occur, if you wait long enough. If the hammer has been hitting the ground when people let go of it for a few thousand years now, we're due for an anomoly. Maybe it will just hang there in the air next time. I don't know.

Religion isn't all about God. Religion is about that leap of faith... the willingness to jump beyond 'I don't know' to 'I do know, absolutely, certain basic truths, and I don't have to prove these basic truths because I know that they are true and I know it with such certainty that if you wanted to dissuade me, you would have to disprove them to me'.

Atheists are like this. If you wanted to prove to them God existed, you'd have one helluva row to hoe. In fact, I don't think it's possible. Atheists and agnostics alike enjoy talking about the 'invincible ignorance' of the fundamentally religious... how you can't shake a really devout religious person, because they can always answer "God did it" or "God wants it that way" or "God works in mysterious ways". But atheists have their own invincible ignorance. If God himself appeared in front of a really devout atheist, She or He or It could work all the miracles that She or He or It felt like, and SHeIt could not convince the atheist of anything except that SHeIt seemed to be some sort of entity who, apparently, had powers beyond the normally accepted human range. An atheist knows God doesn't exist. Therefore, that weird glowing being in front of them raising the dead and walking across the incoming breakers and turning water into wine cannot be God. It's irrefutable. Because they know God doesn't exist. That may be a clever hoaxster. Or they may have been hypnotized or drugged. Or SHeIt may be an advanced alien from another galaxy with an interesting sense of humor. But it isn't God, because the atheist knows that God doesn't exist, so it can't be.

As a side note, if I were confronted by a weird entity... or just, you know, George Burns (god spare me from Jim Carrey, please)... claiming to be God, I wouldn't take the 'show me a miracle' approach. That's how an engineer might think. I'm a scholar (well, I'm a geek, but we're all scholars) and something of a philosopher. I'd ask SHeIt for specific answers to specific questions. Tell me about the creation of the universe, God. What were you thinking when you did it? What's its purpose? Tell me about the origin of mankind... did we evolve from lower, more apelike ancestors, or did you just whomp us up full blown? Did you really blow up Sodom and Gomorrah? If so, don't you think that was a little homophobic on your part? Do you still find alternative lifestyles threatening? Have you thought of getting therapy? And, lastly, I'd ask 'God' to explain to me, you sonofabitch, why people who you know damned well are going to rape and torture kids are allowed to have kids... or, you know, walk around on my planet at all. And I'd evaluate SHeIt's answers, and go from there.

Once again... I don't believe in much of anything, if I have to take it on faith. I like evidence. As with the fabled Man from Missouri, you gotta show me. I do have a few things I take on faith, but I don't discuss them in detail because... well, I really don't know any details about them. I believe in an afterlife, but I don't know what it's like. I believe the universe is a created artifact, although I don't know who or what created it, or why. I believe there is some greater purpose to self awareness, but I don't know what it is. I believe these things because I feel life would be grim and depressing if I didn't believe them. But I don't know that my beliefs are true.

And that, essentially, is what this particularly long and probably unbelievably boring blog entry is all about: the rational, social necessity, it seems to me, to be willing to admit that you don't actually know that what you believe is true, and it might not be.

In philosophical terms, we'd call this the subjective/objective dichotomy. Some people absolutely insist that there is no such thing... that their beliefs about reality (which are subjective) are, actually, absolute and irrefutable truth (objective fact). The problem with this attitude is, those people all insist that any differing beliefs about reality are, flatly, false or wrong or non-factual.

This is, essentially, the basis of pretty much all human conflict... when one person or tribe's subjective view of reality is in some way threatened by a contrasting, incompatible subjective reality held by another person or tribe... and neither side of the conflict is willing to admit to the possibility that their particular view of reality might not be objective fact.

And now I have a few anecdotes to illustrate this, and then I'll post this, and get back to watching my NYPD Blue Season 1 DVD set.

I used to know an astonishingly intelligent and widely read guy named Dick Pero. When I first met Dick, he was, in addition to being incredibly smart and learned on nearly every subject (which is to say, I never hit on a subject, or saw anyone else hit on a subject, that Dick could not converse on knowledgeably, eloquently, and at any length and in any detail his listener might desire) also very open minded. He used to regale me with various anecdotes about paranormal phenomenon and the occult and he had some really fascinating theories about what the nature of reality might be like and why certain odd things seem to happen and, well... he was a fun guy to hang around with.

Dick also was a near hypnotic storyteller. He had an excellent speaking voice, a great vocabulary, and the ability to explain very difficult abstract concepts so that nearly anyone could, at least briefly, comprehend them. I didn't run into him all that often, and later on, our chance meetings became fewer and fewer... but up until the last year or so I knew Dick, I always really enjoyed interacting with him.

However, at some point over the ten year span I lived in Syracuse and knew Dick, something changed for him. I don't know what it was. But as time went on, he became more and more intellectually inflexible. The guy who had once told me a seemingly endless series of personal anecdotes about strange things that had happened to him over his adulthood working in various scientific labs that seemed to indicate that what we generally thought of as 'physical laws' only worked, well, most of the time, and if you really measured a lot of things really carefully, you'd have to conclude that a lot of 'physical laws' didn't quite always work the same way all the time... had turned into someone else. Someone much less open minded. Someone who... well, let me tell you a couple of anecdotes:

This took place during one of the last times I ever showed up at a Syracuse University Cinemas movie presentation. I was a member of the Cinema Board from 1979 (when I first got to SU) until around... hmmm... probably 1987, or so (I'm guessing)... but once the people who had been members when I first joined all graduated and moved on, the group largely changed. The Board had been full of fairly wild, chaotic, deranged and, well, outright bizarre people when I first joined... Steve Puchalski, John McDaid, Dick himself, a couple of guys named Rich whose last names I can't remember (but one of them dated the same girl as I did for a little while, and he and I and Dick went to my very first SF con in Albany together, but I cannot remember his last name), Mike Schaeffer, and all the really crazy people from what would become my own subclique of close college friends... Scott MacLeod, Kurt Busiek, Jeff Webb, Ann Huntington, Janice Westlake, Brent Burford, Rob Morrison... utterly unique and demented individuals all, who were a joy to hang around with watching Prisoner all night festivals or just Midnight Madnesses of Doc Savage: Man of Bronze until 4 in the morning. But after a while, the vast bulk of those guys were gone, and the kids coming in were 80s kids. They looked a lot more like something stamped out of cookie cutters than the kids I'd gone to high school and college with prior to that. They didn't like weird movies. They seemed disturbingly well balanced and healthy. To be brutally honest, they bored the shit out of me.

But Dick, who wasn't a student, still showed up occasionally, and so did I, for a while. (The newer kids on the Board never had any vague clue how to deal with us, but both of us could point to past Cinema Board Movie Schedule Posters at reviews for movies that we had written, so they had to accept that yes, we were Board members, just, you know, old, really weird ones.) And at one of those movies, Dick and I had the following conversation out in the lobby, taking tickets:

"Darren," Dick said, kind of smugly, because I'd been going on and on and on about some strange thing I'd been reading about UFOs, or something else Dick, the latter day, much more inflexible Dick, simply knew was rubbish, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

I just gaped at him. "What the hell are you talking about?" I demanded. "Evidence is evidence." I was kinda naive back then.

"No," Dick explained, more or less patiently. "Look. If you come inside and say 'it's raining', and I look up and see your hair is wet, fine. That's an ordinary claim. I can take your wet hair as enough evidence that your statement is true. However, if you come in and say 'there's a unicorn in the garden..." He paused, and smiled his annoying, Fu Manchu smile. "Well, that's an extraordinary claim. It requires extraordinary evidence."

I thought about that for a second (I don't think fast, never have, apparently, never will). Then I said to him, very deliberately, "Dick... first. If you're any kind of scientist, and whether it's raining outside or not is of any importance to you, then you absolutely can't accept my hair being wet as any evidence it's raining. I might have stood under a sprinkler and then lied to you. You have to get up and look out the window." I paused, took a deep breath, and then plunged on: "However. If I come in and say 'there's a unicorn in the garden', you'll laugh at me. You won't even put down your book. You know unicorns don't exist, so you know I can't be right. If I show you a Polaroid, you'll sneer and say it's trick photography. If I bring in a witness, you'll claim we're playing a joke on you. If I bring in three more witnesses, you'll call it a conspiracy, and if we all pass polygraph tests, then it's a mass delusion. But what you won't do... what you will never do... is get up and look out the damned window."

And we changed the subject, because obviously, there was just no talking to me. On certain subjects, anyway. I think we talked about Watchmen after that.

Sometime later, I ran into Dick at University Square Mall, which is a much smaller, shabbier place than you'd think from that rather grandiloquent name. As always, I was delighted to see Dick (it never really sunk in to me, emotionally, that he was no longer the fascinating guy he'd once been and I was always initially happy to see him when I ran across him). We talked about this and that, and then, as I am wont to do when I run into Dick, I brought up something that once would have launched him into a wonderful and fascinating discourse, but that this time around... well, see for yourself:

I'd brought up an upcoming Psychic Fair, wondering aloud if any of the 'psychics' there would be, you know, actually gifted in some way, or if they'd all be charlatans. (I don't doubt that most 'psychics' are con men using sleight of hand and various tricks to simulate paranormal phenomena. I just don't necessarily believe that means genuine psychic phenomena is absolutely impossible.)

Dick replied, shaking his head at my gullibility, "Darren, there has never been any credible, reliable evidence that any psychic phenomena has ever actually existed."

I was outraged at this, and sputtered something incoherent that probably had the words "Rhine" and "Duke University" and, I don't know, various other well cited sources from the paranormal literature in there somewhere.

Dick looked avuncular, and then he stated, quite sincerely, "Darren, any time anyone has done an experiment which resulted in data that seemed to indicate the presence of psychic phenomena... when they've studied those experiments later, they've learned that the controls weren't tight enough." (I don't know who he meant by 'they'... The Amazing Randi and Martin Gardner and those other fine religious zealots at CSICOP -- the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, that is -- I guess.)

Dick paused, and then went on, with a gentle smile, "And any time the controls are tight enough... the data... disappears."

Once again, I stared at him incredulously. This time, I literally could not believe my ears... that my personal Old Guru Dude, my veritable Yoda in human, goateed, balding, leather jacketed form, was spewing such obvious and idiotic nonsense with such a fatuous expression on his face.

But as I said, I don't think quickly. And this was Dick speaking. So I thought things through very carefully for several seconds (a lengthy period, in synapse-firing time).

Then I said: "Dick, do you realize you've just defined a perfect tautology? If there's any evidence you don't like, the controls, by definition, weren't tight enough? And when the controls are tight enough, you can tell they're tight enough because there isn't any evidence you don't like?"

Dick actually looked annoyed with me for a second, after I said that. And then we went on our separate ways, and if we ever talked again after that, it wasn't about the paranormal, and I don't remember the occasion.

And the Late, Great Jeff Webb often used to say profoundly wise things, at the most wildly unpredictable moments. I've always remembered one thing he once said, when Scott MacLeod was going on and on about how he was absolutely convinced that if I started a particular project (inking some Xeroxes of a comic he and Kurt Busiek had done in high school), I would never, ever finish it.

Jeff responded to that, "Scott, just because you're convinced... doesn't mean you're right ."

Now, I'd like to point out here that I eventually finished inking every single Xeroxed page that Kurt and Scott gave me. And that's true. But it's only true because Kurt was swayed by Scott's impassioned arguments, and they didn't give me any pages. And if they had, Scott would probably have been proved right. But still...