I used one of those Magic Erasers on my laptop today. The Magic Eraser is made of melamine resin foam, and it works like ultrafine sandpaper to get rid of crayon marks, grease, Sharpie markers, and that sort of thing... none of which were on my MacBook Pro. It did remove fingerprints, and that should help my mind. So why I'm writing this, I don't know. Maybe it helps to scrub it out with glass-hard micro-foam, and maybe even more when it is set into words. The WORD. It is all-important, all-serving, all-conductive, like water. Zappa said 'the ocean is the ultimate solution,' then went on to write an instrumental about it just to prove that he had nothing more to say on the subject, so figure it out yourself. But as I was just lying here on the demon couch, words roiling up over my head like an insomniac's chained cigarette trail, I imagined it was something less than what I knew it to be. And I had to write it down, quickly before I was either caught or accused of being deranged myself:

The Unabomber is an Eskimo.

She is a redhead, five feet ten inches up from the tundra, fifteen stones and counting. She detests men, not in a lesbian dalliance kind of way but because they are the root of all evil, best she can tell. She has one daughter, whom she cruelly named 'Taint' to remind her of what she did with that bastard one November night when her igloo needed heating oil and she was willing to provide for her late dog, Hutch, in any way possible. But who knew you could get pregnant that way? He promised, didn't he? Of course he did, but she would bend over backwards to keep Hutch warm, and that bastard knew it. That evil, horny bastard. Or, in her own script:

tHAt EvIL & hORnY BAstArd!!!!

She was the only woman in Labrador, Newfoundland to have a typewriter hooked up to the internet using some arcane coax cable and a discarded Jiffy Pop container. God Himself frowned upon such things, but she misread it as a smile turned upside down and continued to suss out inappropriate screeds against the 'mAn' in 'HUmAnITY' upon this unholy device, venting her spleen upon good, upstanding citizens like Mr. G__ N___ W______s, Quaker Friend and Poet Luxurious:

pREMeer FAshISt bAD gUy!!!!!

Should any of you think there is a tenuous connection between the target of her ire and our own Guy Neal Williams, please do not despair. In spite of his aleutianophobic tendencies and vague misogynistic allegories, Mr. Weeyums is as innocent and free from wrongdoing as the day is lung, not only in this case but in many others, including anything he lies about in his fascinating scribbles on [LINK REF="http://www.brink.com/user/Guy+Neal+Williams"] www.brink.com </a>. Those of you who have met Mr. Weeyums know that he is as mild as watery ginger beer, and only slightly more memorable, and that he is incapable of any crimes against his fellow man or fellating woman. This is why he is Poet Nobel Peace Prize Lariat of Winston-Salem, county seat of Western Civilization.

But lest I stray from the Inuit at hand, let me return to her with caution, for I know her wrath to be worthy of the fear it inspires. When she was an unsavory worm in her mother's belly, she caused a streak of gray to appear across the woman's dark brillo area which kinked horribly and scrubbed her man so uncomfortably that he left on the evening of the longest day of the year, never to return to meet his unborn spawn or sign the lotto release form he'd inadvertently left behind. When his child was born, jagged lightning spake from clusters of low-lying, greasy black clouds that frightened any kind-hearted Newfie into their homes until the calamity was over. But it has not ended, no. The calamity grew into an unloved teen whose wild eyes and matching red hair guaranteed she would never know the loving touch of another human without a surfeit of spirituous drink to weigh him down. Her mother moved to an apartment in St. John's because the harsh winters made her shit blood. And she continued to grow, holding fast to the unclaimable lotto ticket her father never bequeathed her, swearing vengeance once she'd learned how to forge his signature, and becoming lugubrious and unkempt as the unbefuckenlievably long days wore on into her late twenties, then early thirties. She was 33 when her womb filled with Taint, the age her saviour found himself killed by

fILtHy mEN!!

He was a man Himself, but her revulsion against His gender was turned in this special occasion by His Father, who Had Plans for her. Oh yes. One day, about 23 weeks into her illegitimate daughter's gestation, this unhappy female heard a message from God, who Told her:

GO fOrTH aND dO YuR wORsT. yOu HaVE mY pERMiSsiOn!!!!!!!

She claims to have a signed note from The Almighty, but she won't let any man see it, and without the usual bevy of female friends to gossip and swirl like she read about in Redbook (October, 1953, page 88: 'Find Your Bevy of Female Friends to Gossip and Swirl!'), that is one memo that won't ever be read by anyone other than this crankcase of a woman. Did I mention her name? Can I? If the world ends as I type these twisted letters, let me apologize to all the orphans out there without whom we might never get any work done. Her name:

sHURlee MAdCOWsky

I will now pause to see if I regret loosening that black secret upon the world. She might be crazy, but she will find me, and I am ready for her. I have a supply of beef jerky and dry towels, enough for a fortnight of her onslaught, maybe more. I also have barricaded the door with cinderblocks, her only weakness. Furthermore, I have taken the precaution of forwarding all of my mail to one Neil Lemerise of S________o, C________a. He knows what to do with it: refrigerate it, then submerge it, then irradiate it, then fondle it with the green mittens until the threat has subsided. He has dealt with her before, and has lost the use of his all-important pinky toe as a reward. Imbalance is his legacy, thanks to her handcrafted madness.

The feds had it all wrong, you see. She sent the first package to Northwestern U, back in '78. She had just birthed to her precious Taint, and she had plenty to be riled about, so why not send a package to kill a man, any man. She thought it was to a man who had

yOUseRpED CHrIstS nAMe IN vAiN

But it was Buckley Crist, a professor, who had done no such thing. She then inspired Theo. Kaczynski when she tried to bring down

tHOsE JInT bIRdS IN thE SkY

Which were only Boeing 727s. Kaczynski took it from there, using batteries as she'd ran out of match heads. Taint was growing into quite a handful, and sHUrLeE MaDcOwSKy'S breast milk was drying in her bitter, unkempt boobs. She needed to do something to raise money, so she began writing a book about her feelings, which were all black and menacing. And as she wrote, it mutated into a mission statement about

thE SOsIEty mAN hAtH cREaTED IN hiS DIRty hANdS!!!!!!!!

We were all guilty, except her and her oft-pissing Taint, and as a result we were all responsible and ultimately fucked. Except for her virginal Taint, who was slowly evolving into a soiled block of fearless, windburned and stupid granite, ultimately an inch short of seven feet and fluctuating around three hundred pounds of joylessness. For that matter, SHurlEe mAdcoWSkY's maidenhead had fused back together due to malicious neglect, she noticed during a rare self-examination for anything amiss. The confusion reeled her mind for weeks: she was pure again, and that meant she was innocent, but she was still mother to a great Taint, or was she? If yes, it was retroactively immaculate, and if not, then she could make Taint pay rent. Somewhere there was elegance, and if she could only clutch it she could ignite the world. She wrote more, changing the title from

1962 Ford F-150 User's Manual

to

mAN;s LUStfUL SObrIETy aNd it'S FUtChEr (written on the back of the manual of her father's forgotten truck)

to

guILtY: FIlthEe mEN aNd tHE HELL aWAitIng (written on hardware store receipts and bound in a hard, waterproof crust from Taint's boogers)

She tried to have it published by sending it to Redbook, but they sent her 355 letters of rejection at once due to a computer error. That's their story, anyway. She tried Woman's Day, but at the time they were not accepting unsolicited manuscripts and was working on its acqusition by Hachette Filipacchi Médias and didn't want any controversy. She then tried Oprah, whose rise to power was awfully close to shURlEe MaDCoWSky's, chronologically speaking. But it was the 80s, and the late 80s at that, and freaks were not the chosen ones in daytime media... yet.

And then, fortune smiled a hideous grin upon her when she found a canceled check her father had written in their only copy of Dr. Spock's Baby Baboon Child Care, bookmarking the chapter titled 'You Know More than Your Baby Thinks You Do.' She studiously copied the signature over and over some six thousand times, resulting in a messy and befuddling chapter in her manifesto, 'AlOYiCioUS rENsHAw MAdCOwSkY aLOyICioUS REnshAw mADCowsKY ALOyiCIous rEnsHaW maDCowSky,' and also resulting in the belated claiming of her inherited lotto fortune. And oh, the monstrous days that followed!

Witness this laundry list of social felonies attributed to, but never evidentially linked, to shURlEE maDcoWskY:

> A giant carrot erected in the middle of the night near the hardware store where she (allegedly) purchased her bomb-making materials
> Snowblowers in the community painted military white, making them virtually invisible to their owners and rendering them useless
> Three thousand Swanson Hungry Man Loin of Pork TV Dinners purchased, only to have the 'hEAtHEn' loins discarded in a pile near the mayor's house and all the apple slices in delicious sauce gobbled in haste
> Eleven trips to the Holy Land bought and paid for, only to be unrefundably canceled at the last minute because 'tHAt mAN BuS DrIVEr eYYed ME sO!' (see page 422 of the aforementioned 'guILtY...')
> The investment in 35 complete and incomplete 1962 Ford F-150 pickup trucks, most of them set up on cinderblocks that she refused to touch and left to rust in the freezing salt air
> 400 gross condoms, burned in her front yard to MAkE tHE sINnErS wEEP aND DEspaRE!

Other atrocities have been connected to her, but many are far past the statute of limitations in Canada. It will be a cold day in Labrador when these abominations are forgotten, but most days in Labrador are cold. Also, many of her neighbors simply moved away or, even more simply, died. In any event, her excessive lifestyle depleted her unspecified lotto winnings, and she was left with a loonie, a toonie, and lots of Taint. The daughter had ballooned into what most people would have thought to be a bear, had they been unfortunate enough to have encountered Taint in the wild. But her mother restricted Taint from public view, and in that modest igloo, they found themselves sleeping in a single woefully undersized double bed, a row of dominoes set up between them for privacy.

And then, one cold day after another, the internet was born. sHUrLee MAdCOwSky was entranced by its power and omnipresence, and she conned a neighbor into cobbling together a portal to the INfoRmAChine suPErMaRKEt using a discarded Olivetti, an RCA television, and a mysterious black box connected to her neighbor's telephone line. With this, she made herself known to the world, first on Prodigy, then American Online, then on her own website, www.FIltHymEN.ca, then back to AOL. She toiled in gleeful anonymity until joining an online group of what she thought were like-minded selective thinkers, but later turned out to be 'FrEAKs aND DEspICiBle mEN' (her term; the actual group was a refuge from tyranny who prefer to go unnamed as of press time). It was here that I enter the story, for it was in this group that I reached out and touched her, and my hands will not come clean.

She had always been a strange person, and her grammar was questionable, but at that time on the internet, spelling and punctuation fluctuated with the lawlessness of the Old West, and no sheriff was riding into town to straighten things out. For a brief moment, I thought she was receiving undue flammatory comments from a post she'd written titled tHE CAuSe OF IT aLL, which mostly laid the blame of socioeconomic woes and discomforts upon the masculine sex (never once using the 's' word), and called upon all good feminist luddites to bust a few heads and supercomputers (this is simplification of what was, to my memory, a poorly-written argument in a crude and pitiable hand. I would post the original message here, but the server upon which this group's data was stored found itself inexplicably destroyed by a crude and pitiable handmade bomb consisting of a Swingline stapler, loins of pork, and smokeless explosive powders). The reaction of the group was swift and brutish, with a tone of harsh delight. I felt it was unwarranted, especially toward someone who seemed, well, retarded. Not 'developmentally disabled,' but actually retarded. Little did I know I was establishing a connection with the devil's daughter (officially, she is Aloyicious Renshaw Madcowsky's daughter, but after years of search, the former Lieutenant-Governor refuses to acknowledge her and spends his days staring at the cold, cold sea from a lawn chair near the shore at Cape Chidley).

She appreciated my kindness, and I believe it is my unisex forename that allowed her to drop her major suspicions and confide in me her plans. I thought them to be recklessly stupid: melting Nunavut to DrOWn tHE mEN OF tHE wORld, setting fire to the Northwest Territories to bURn tHE mEN OF tHE WOrlD, and other schemes that involved devastating actions to parts of Canada that inexplicably would bring retribution to the entire male population of the planet. It seemed like so much twaddle until she imparted a hijacked truckload of rock salt she had stockpiled to carry out tHE nUNaVUt DIreckTiVE. At that point, I felt it necessary to report my suspicions to the authorities. As they investigated, I continued to feign friendship with her, but one fateful day a certain Mr. G__ N___ W______s wrote a post to the group in which he innocently called me a 'crazy bastard,' which prompted a message from sHUrlEe MaDcOwskY in brutish, uncharacteristically laconic words I shall never successfully erase from my mind:

yOU ArE A fiLThY mEN, YOu lyER!

And with that, I was cut off from her admissions and confidence. I feared for my life. I attempted to enroll in WitSec, but they had a waiting list thanks to the 2000 election. I appealed to the Canadian government, but my contacts mysteriously disappeared in a long weekend, later found in shallow graves beneath the giant mayoral carrot in Labrador. Finally, I took a train to FBI headquarters (the real one in Mexico City, not the fake storefront on Pennsylvania Avenue) and made my case with a set of printouts of our communications and newspaper clippings depicting the vanished Canadian Councilmen. Somebody finally believed me enough to take a look, and the next thing I knew, SHUrlEe maDcoWskY had disappeared. The FBI couldn't find her, and she had unsubbed from the group. Using her IP address, the feds shot down her neighbor in accidental blood, but she was never found. And I lived in fear for eight years, until I managed to bring the paranoia into a reasonable cloud of doubt and defeat and was able to resume my internet activities without looking over my virtual shoulder.

Until tonight. I received a [LINK REF="http://twitter.com/mrizek"] Tweet </a> from a [LINK REF="http://twitter.com/sHUrlEMadCoWsKY"] sHUrlEMadCoWsKY </a>, and my heart crapped out of my chest. Her message: lyER! tHE eFF bEe eYY tOOk mY tAINt!!! yOU WIll PAyE!!!!

I know now that my only salvation is the kindness of www.brink.com and anyone who reads this. If you find a wild-eyed, red-headed Eskimo who reeks of burnt condoms and has a seven foot sasquatch who bears an unpleasant resemblence to her, please call the authorities. I ask this not for my sake, but for your own. shURlEe mAdCOwSKy is not only dangerous, but capable of anything, including further reproduction. Please, be careful, and help!

And just in case, I have cleansed my computer of her using magnets and Magic Erasers, and the eFF bEe eYY cannot touch me if she tries to connect me to her madness. I will be in hiding. Mr. Weeyums will now how to get in touch with me through a series of unmanned drop boxes and secret signals, so leave all messages of encouragement here and he will pass them on. Thank you, and God Bless... who is that at my door?