I think I'm burning out.

[WilliamPitt]

I had to write this yesterday:

http://truthout.org/docs_03/111003A.shtml

You want to know what it does to someone to write something like that twice a week? My boss compares me to Pedro Martinez; I can throw the 98 mph fastball, he says. I can, too. Damn straight I can.

I haven't slept in four days thinking about "transfer tubes" and 7600 wounded soldiers and 400 dead soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilans splattered in the street. I have to decide tomorrow between these headlines for the truthout edition:

Machine Takes One Vote In 100 From Candidate
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6291-2003Nov5.html

So that's the end of our democracy.

Not enough soldiers for Veterans day
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=519&ncid=519&e=1&u=/ap/20031108/ap_on_re_us/veterans_parades

Don't even get me fucking started.

31 US soldiers killed in bloody week
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2003-11/09/content_1168102.htm

I wrote a good book over a year ago saying this war was not necessary. It became a bestseller. It was translated into 12 languages. I did three interviews a week to get the word out. I did this while teaching seven classes a day and serving as a dean. It wasn't enough. Amusingly, my publisher went bankrupt so I haven't seen a dime of royalties in this. Fuck it. It wasn't for the money. It was to see that these guys didn't wind up dead. Failure was not an option, but is my reality.

'No President has lied so baldly and so often and so demonstrably'
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=461946

My friend Ray McGovern speaks some truth no one will hear, because no one in this fucking country reads.

Extensive Report Tragic Injuries to Soldiers
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/la-na-wounded9nov09,1,963909.story?coll=la-home-headlines

I literally threw up in my mouth reading that.

Rumsfeld retreats, disclaims earlier rhetoric
tp://www.starbanner.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20031109/NEWS/211090375/1003

You fucking warmongering bloodthirsty lying fucking bastard, motherfucker, asshole, pray I never meet you in an alley. About the WMDs, you said "We know where they are. They are in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad" on March 30 2003. That's the tip of the iceberg, cocksucker. I have it all written down. Pray they never call me into a courtroom to testify about yor war crimes, fuck. Wanna tell me about the Office of Special Plans, you fucking vampire?

Talk of a draft grows despite denials by White House
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/147483_draft08.html

Another generation into the machine.

Speech By Al Gore Nov. 9th
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/WO0311/S00068.htm

The President speaks, and on my fucking birthday, too.

...

So, I have to read all that, and 50 more stories like it, and absorb the input from the other editors, and put ten stories together for truthout again. I swim in horror every day like a fish whose environment is blood.

On Monday night I have to give another speech, like the ones I've given in Philly and Delaware and Nantucket and New Hampshire and Phoenix and Denver and Boulder and San Diego and San Francisco and Missoula and Seattle and New York and Austin and Houston and Greensboro and Chapel Hill and Boone and Asheville and Evansville and Boston and Amsterdam and Antwerp and the Hague and Berlin and Oxford and London and Paris, over 40,000 miles, and this weekend I'm off to Albany and Bloomington and Indianapolis for more and more and more.

On Tuesday I have to speak at a Veterans rally in Boston and tell them how I failed. Afterwards, I have to wade through more blood to put another edition together.

I was supposed to get married last May, but the wedding blew apart in April because I learned some things I should have known a year ago. I've been living in one room in Cambridge, pretty much totally alone. My friends are the bartenders at Charlies and the sandwich-slingers at Darwin's. I've been drinking too much and smoking too much. My hands started shaking a couple of weeks ago, and I have a cough that hurts my back.

I'll get up tomorrow and do it again, and if it all fucking kills me, then so be it. I don't matter in this scheme. The mass of Americans who choke on lies every day without even fucking knowing that they are choking is what matters, and if I can make a dent before I drop, then you can carve that on my tombstone.

If I have been an asshole to people on this forum, you have my devout apologies. I'm thinking of madfloridian on the one hand, and Skinner on the other. I'm sorry. People who know me will tell you I'm not actually a raging asshole in real life, and I'm sorry I put my fist through your windows. I'm hanging on by a thread.

DU keeps me sane, and fucking rapes me. I've written three books on the strength of what people post here, and have reached millions of people, and that's not enough yet, and so I'll grab my shovel tomorrow and keep digging. Bury me where I fall, and call the ground America while you can.