Stuck In Stowe

These guys have to pee sooooo bad

By Kevin McElroy

Before this acclaimed blogumn, I sprinkled my thoughts libertarianly throughout the Internet.  No website with a comments section was safe from my rantings.

It’s kind of embarrassing, but I admit: I am an Internet bully.  Whether it’s as a faceless, nameless “anonymous” on some one’s blog, or as myself on facebook or the Wall Street Journal, I used to frequently and mercilessly make dumb people feel stupid simply for posting their awful opinions on the Internet.  Okay, so I still do…

Am I force for good?  Or just wasting my time?  Yes.

But sometimes, even the most irrational labors can yield fruit.

In mid-July of 2008, I posted some comments in a Wall St. Journal story about an army doctor being investigated by the FBI in the anthrax case.

The comments section of the Journal, if you’re not familiar, is only subtly more mature and less filled with racism, misspellings and truly terrible sentiments than the comments section of any given Youtube video.

I don’t encourage anyone to ever read the comments on a Youtube video because any one of them will ruin your day.

But to make a point, here is one small sample of the comments on a Youtube video about Barack Obama:

No we can tell you about Insane Hussein’s Government that is corrupt!!!!!
Osanba Care is so Corrupt that they had to Bribe Senators & then Osamba Paid off Andy Stern & SEIU!!!!
Oh and we need the Spending & New Taxes that go with it….No Way We don’t need or want his Socialism!!!!

So, the Journal’s comments are usually just a little bit better.

In any event, the doctor in question, I felt, was being unfairly railroaded not just by dimwit commenters on the Journal, but also by the author of the Journal story, and perhaps most egregiously by the Government and the FBI.

It seemed to me, that they weren’t looking for the perpetrator, but instead were seeking out the most convenient suspect.  I’m not an investigator, but I do recognize that those two qualifications might frequently go hand in hand.

However, it didn’t seem like the doctor was guilty of anything except for being in the wrong places at the wrong times.  And given that he hadn’t been convicted of anything, or even tried, arrested or indicted – it seems to me that he was getting screwed over by the FBI and the public.  His life, even before being arrested, was already ruined.

So I defended him on some comment boards on the Journal from the developing witch-hunt that inevitably happens whenever more than two people get together with zero intelligence and heads’ full of bloodlust.  For many people, revenge is more important than justice.

(That’s part of the reason I won’t bring up his name here.  If you’re curious and you know how to use google, you can find out for yourself.  I will delete any mention of his name in the comments section below, though. )

So back to July of 2008.

I was living in a ratty old apartment building in Baltimore’s illustrious Mt. Vernon neighborhood: The Preston.  It is a prestigious neighborhood, if you have a time machine.  The area was creme-a-la-creme during the Guilded age, and until recently it was mierde-a-la-mierde.  Gentrification is slowly snaking back into the area, but The Preston is still in the militarized zone.

Here’s a picture, to give you an idea:

tenancy requires prison tattoo

Of course, I was not “living” there.  Most of the time I spent with my then-yet-fiancee.  I pretty much only went back to the Preston a few times a month to do laundry, collect mail and fill the sink back up with soapy water.  When you’re a bachelor, dishes have to soak for upwards of 2 months before you can wash them.

And you might be wondering how I could have stayed on top of my bills if I was only getting my mail a few times a month.  You might not be familiar with the billing option most companies offer now, called the “Cicada option.”  You only pay your bills in irregular, prime-number days every few months.  It’s another bachelor thing.

Not a perfect system, but when I did get mail, it was like Christmas!  I’d always have a few really interesting packages from relatives,  or a forgotten book from Amazon I ordered weeks prior.  Strange and exotic magazines?  Single dosages of OTC medications?  Samples of products I’ll never use?

You can kill an exciting afternoon opening your mail if you drink enough and have your credit card number memorized.

Besides the usual junk mail, I also received lots of junk mail “seeded” to a fake name.  I started doing this when I began my new job as a copywriter in Baltimore.  The idea is to see what your competitors are putting out there.  So you subscribe to one of the bigger “lists” of names that get passed around in the newsletter business, and then you have access to a never-ending flood of your competitors’ ideas.

So I still have lots of unopened mail from those days.  When I moved out of that apartment and into Elliott’s place north of the city, I pretty much threw everything into big wire-framed boxes I borrowed from my employer at the time.

24"x20"x11"

These boxes are big.  I STILL have unopened mail in this one.  (And don’t worry, I’ll bring it back to the UPS some day.)

The other day, Elliott implored me to either carry this box up to the scary attic that’s filled with pink insulation and dead mice, or to go through it and keep or dispose of its contents.

In it, I found a lot of regular junk mail, and literally hundreds of pieces of junk mail from my seed name.  To look important, these guys send out legal sized manila envelopes filled with their copy.  Tucked in among the dozens of “important” looking manila envelopes, I found one with a handwritten address to my REAL name.

So, that leads me to a manila envelope with no return address I have in front of me now.

I’ve already opened it, and read the contents.

I believe that it’s from the now-deceased army Doctor.  But I can’t be sure.

I’ll post some more information tomorrow.  In the meantime, I’ll see if I can find some more details about the doctor, why he was being investigated in the first place, and what he might have been trying to tell me.

Tags: anthrax, FBI, government, investigation

This entry was posted on Monday, January 25th, 2010 at 3:28 pm and is filed under The Manuscript of Dr. Anthrax. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.