Dear Jackie,

Please know how grateful Edward and I are for the loving care you provide to Louisa and Will. Because their attachment to you is strong, perhaps even excessive, and because they believe that everything you do is the “right” way and ours by contrast is “wrong” or “stupid” and once even “for shit,” it’s important that we be on the same page in our childrearing practices.

ITEM: For a period of time, human extinction was not a foregone conclusion, particularly among certain humans.

At a period of time one hundred revolutions of the sun prior to now, a number of humans amalgamated as “Human Rights Watch” (HRW) created a piece of paper entitled “Losing Humanity: The Case Against Killer Robots.”

At the time HRW began printing this piece of paper, other humans were building machines independently capable of destroying other humans. They called these “drones,” now entitled Generation 1.1.

Central Junction City–Convicted gunman Wilbur Zeus Grindwell, serving a life sentence at Inman Penitentiary, is now suing his English professor for her role in his attack on fellow college students at Central Junction College last semester that killed 10 and wounded 7 students and staff. Grindwell claims the professor, Dr. Janella Rondeau, encouraged him to stage his assault on her Writing 101 class with a semi-automatic Ruger SR-556.

J doesn’t suffer all the comments laid down like bear traps to drag him down to their level.

J knows he is no Michael Jackson but enjoys the sound of his voice and the attention, even if it is in the form of ‘fag’ and ‘retard’ and ‘8====D~~~’.

J has learned to live with such people.

It’s quiet out there. Too quiet. Dust devils spin like drunken dervish dancers and scraggly tumbleweeds cartwheel through desolate streets. You lean back on your chair outside the front door of Miss Kitty’s and listen to the tinkling honky tonk piano, waiting for something, anything, to happen. A red headed stranger appears out of nowhere, riding bareback on a lean and hungry, spotted feral mustang named Cassius.