"To add it all up, I'm probably going to die bitter and alone. With any luck, I'll die bitter, alone, and drunk."

- Why I Will Never, Ever, Get Laid Again by Mark Penman

Mark killed himself on July 2 of this year.

I'd been hipped to his stuff about three years ago, but after taking a quick look (Laissez Firearm -- "Locked, Loaded, and Liquored-Up") I bookmarked the site and put it in the brain-vault of about a ton and a half of stuff on the Web that I never get around to digging for what it's worth. You see, it's one of the vestiges remaining in a mind always child-like in many ways: I always fool myself into believing I'll have enough time for it. Meanwhile, I'd satisfied myself that Penman was out there swinging a cudgel for freedom in his own way, as I do. At least someone was doing it, goddammit, and it wasn't just me, alone.

(No peanut-gallery cracks, please. I'm not interested in comparative ontology right now except to point out that "The world began when I was born." Badger Clark knew what he was talking about. He was a real American.)

In light of the fact of July 2, I suppose a lot of people might find his "Never" essay a fairly scary portent of where the guy was headed, but he makes a hell of a lot of sense, to me. It was only three years ago that I had a discussion with an extremely bright woman busy at stealing my heart, who pointed out that no woman has any business in any voting booth over anything whatever. All this, mind you, while she was darkly plotting the outright theft of my affections and mapping her run for the border.

I might be the only person in the world impressed enough to remember net.fighter John G. Otto's Usenet post of January 10, 1996, in which he attacked a point that Penman develops in "Never":

"I'm not by any means old, but I'm not so young any more either. I'd like to have some free life to live before it's over. I'd like to build that productive business, meet that beautiful Objectivist genius with the necessary (under the current circumstances) streak of Maria Ludwig (a.k.a. Molly Pitcher), build a home amongst the hard-woods, plant a garden... I'm fed up with the federal, state, & local swords of Damocles hanging over us all for so long."

Otto himself might not recall that one, but it was a precise heart-shot at one implication of dealing with The Land Of The Freak And The Home Of The Slave, as a child of the pack of lies with which they drilled me in the orchid hot-houses known as "schools". You see, I really bought all that "freedom" jazz they were tossing, and it was really only after I got into the time when men would naturally do what most I see around me are doing, that I realized there was no way I could make it work because I am simply not constituted to live a lie to myself. Certainly not to that degree, and not while lying to someone I would ostensibly "love".

It's too damned bad that Mark killed himself, I think. Of course, I get to think so because I'm still here.

At the same time, and understanding the real nature of human life as few I know really do, I think about the old Plains Indian grasp of where it's at: "Today is as good a day to die as any I'll see." They were talking about battle, but I wonder if Mark was thinking about something like that, too.

Here's one thing undeniably true: he appears to have never belonged to the State or any other sort of bullshit a day in his life, certainly in spirit.

I wonder how many authentic men are out there in America dying every day -- in bits & pieces -- simply because they're really alive.