Category Archives: Kent Ballard

Night of the Living Dead Relatives

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by Kent Ballard

Sure, you’ve heard of “The Walking Dead.” You’ve probably also heard of “The Talking Dead,” unless you’ve been hiding in a drainage culvert for a few years. I have a different problem with the dead, and I can’t rid myself of them by popping them in the head with a crossbow. I’m besieged by the Annoying Dead. Thousands of them. Literally.

My wife got into genealogy a few years ago. She was dimly aware of some family spat over fifty years ago that caused one side of her family to split away from the rest. Most would consider that a blessing nowadays with the high cost of Christmas cards, but not her. Never one to let sleeping dogs lie, she began tracking them all down. From that it was a natural step into genealogy, I suppose, and within months she was figuratively digging up dead relatives everywhere in the county.

She’s traced them back to Europe, back through the centuries. I think Ancestry.com must have at least three Internet servers dedicated to her by now. They’ve actually made her an “arbiter.” When two researchers can’t agree on what ancient Uncle Clem’s third daughter’s second married name was, they hand all the information to one of their arbiters and they look at all the records and have the final say.

She began to research my relatives too, but I think she’s given that up as a bad job. Every so often she’d rush into the room and breathlessly announce that I was a direct descendant of King Richard III. “Oh great,” I’d say, “how much did he leave me?” At first it was difficult for her to accurately measure my lack of interest, which was total. “How’s old Dick doing these days? I haven’t heard from him for a while. Oh wait—he’s dead, isn’t he? Too bad, the old despot.” It was the same on the night she traced my ancestry to Charlemagne. I smiled widely and said, “Well, sure. I told you about me and Charley before. We used to get drunk and go swimming in rock quarries, bobbing for catfish.”

This may sound cruel, but believe me if it happened to you five or six times a week over a period of months you’d do the same or worse. For all I know she’s traced me back to Moses or Buddha and won’t tell me just for spite now. Or maybe she just became depressed finding so many horse thieves, gunslingers, and train robbers among my kin. Whatever, she seems to have stopped hunting down my side of the family.

Even so, she’d be beside herself with joy at finding one of her own lost relatives. “Honey, I found William Pratt!”

“Who the hell is William Pratt and what did you find him doing?”

She’d launch into some long tale about an old geezer who died before the Civil War. When she gave the date of his death, I’d look at her grimly and say, “He’s dead, Jim,” and go on about my business. Then, helpfully, I’d stick my head back into her office a few minutes later and ask, “1858? You say he died in 1858? Hmm…yeah, that makes sense. There was an epidemic of syphilis that swept through the Dakotas in ’58. Killed thousands of pioneers. That was before penicillin, you know…”

I never should have taught her how to cuss. Her language can be awful at times. That was a mistake on the same level as teaching my first wife how to shoot. Sometimes it’s advisable to think things through first.

She’s not into spiritualism or mediums or trying to contact the dead. That explains why I haven’t had her locked up. But otherwise she lives and breathes dead people. She knows stories from their lives. To her they’re not merely names in an old census report, or faded faces in ancient photographs or tin-types. I believe she could sit down with most of them and in ten minutes be talking merrily with them, swapping old family stories. That is, if they weren’t dead. I’d wonder about her mental health, hanging around all those family members who have joined the choir invisible, but I have my odd habits too. Running the pros and cons through my mind, I came to the conclusion that the strange things I do far outweigh her quirks and if anyone was to be taken away in a straight jacket, it’d be me. Best not to risk it.

But I’m serious about her hobby with the dead. She has collected birth and death dates, plus any information and available photos of gravestones, on eleven thousand, seven hundred and some odd of her relatives. She’s printing these into hand-bound books. The first one has 420 pages. She figures on making ten more before she finishes. I told her I didn’t think it was physically possible for one person to have that many relatives, but she just laughed. “Well, some are in-laws, some are children. Then there are the grandchildren and great-grandchildren and their spouses…”

She’s traced tombstones through “Find-A-Grave.” I used to think that was just a kinky site for Elvis fans or old stoners who still believe Jim Morrison is alive. Nope. They have a large and active group of graveyard detectives scouting in every state. My wife has taken cameras and traveled an hour or so to different graveyards to photograph stones for people who have requested them. Go figure. If someone asked me to go a graveyard to take pictures I’d claim that I did but they all turned out black, just to freak them out.

I guess love allows us to simply get over another person’s odd habits. As long as she doesn’t start floating around the house, I can deal with her armies of the dead. She doesn’t complain when I can’t sleep and take an hour or two’s walk through the forest that surrounds our house in the middle of the night. Some folks might find that creepy, too. I’ve listened to her explain the importance of all her research several times. I still don’t understand it. She just does that. And I love her.

But…I will have my vengeance.

When I have ceased to be, when I have left this veil of tears, I’ve made arrangements to donate my skin and vital organs to anyone who can get some use out of them. That won’t leave much, and the remnants will be cremated. Out in our woods, there’s this certain hill, and on it this certain tree, and my final wish is to have my ashes scattered there. No tombstone, no marker of any kind.

My family has all agreed to this, but asked why? I told them if any of my descendants become genealogists, they’ll find plenty of records that I once existed, but they will all go mad looking for my gravestone.

Far Worse Than We Thought

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by Kent Ballard

There’s not much I can say about parents who insist on their children wearing crash helmets and body armor when they ride bikes while neglecting their childhood immunizations. Sure, piling up a bike can dent your head or scrape your knee. But the diseases stopped by safe and routine immunizations can kill a child, and not only that child but everyone else he manages to infect. Typhoid Mary (or Timmy) took a stroll through Disneyland recently and the butcher’s bill has yet to be calculated. Kids can ride out the measles. They’ll be sick, have a nasty fever, itchy spots and all that. But measles can kill any adult who’s never been exposed to them. It’s a safe bet we’ll be hearing more about this in the near future.

I don’t know about you, but if I had to forego the advice of medical professionals and trust, say, somebody’s wise old grandmother or a B-list TV personality, I’d probably go with grandma. Jenny McCarthy may have started the anti-vaccination movement which has now been discredited several times over, but without the sheer stupidity of many thousands of parents who listened to her it never would have become the problem it is now.

The parents who refused to have their children immunized should be tied into chairs and forced to watch Penn and Teller’s brilliant YouTube explanation about childhood vaccines. Leave them tied there for a week or so, however long it takes for the truth to soak into their cement skulls. Forget medical journals and hundreds of thousands of written words of research. What Penn and Teller did in around three minutes is the strongest case made for having children vaccinated I’ve ever seen.

But while McCarthy’s advice was both ridiculous and deadly, she did have the laudable goal of reducing the number of autistic children born in the United States. It’s hard to knock her for that, even if she inadvertently created another deadly public health problem. More children are born autistic every year. For some time the reason for this was a mystery. It certainly wasn’t the fault of the children themselves, and study after study could find no fault with the parents or anything they had in their environments.

Until now. And what has been discovered is beyond worrisome. It’s absolutely terrifying.

Stefanie Seneff is a research scientist for MIT. She worked in the fields of computer science and artificial intelligence before turning to biology. She’s had papers published on everything from cardiovascular disease to Alzheimer’s. In layman’s terms, that woman knows her stuff. Not too many people can be accurately described as brilliant. Ms. Seneff is one of those people.

Around seven months ago (June, 2014), Stefanie Seneff was asked to address a wellness organization in Groton, MA. No one was certain what her topic would be, but anything coming from her would be well-researched, timely, and highly interesting. But with her opening sentence, a hush fell over the assembled throng and she had the riveted, undivided attention of every soul in the room.

She said, “At today’s rate, by 2025, one in two children will be autistic.”

They said there was dead silence for a moment, then a murmur raced through the crowd. Surely they had misunderstood her. What did she say? Is she joking? No, no, no, this can’t be real…

It was. Those were her professional projections. Half of all kids will be autistic in ten years. And she went on to identify the real culprit behind this.

The Monsanto Corporation’s flagship weedkiller “Roundup” began to be heavily used in 1990 and has become more popular every year since. Seneff produced a chart showing the use of Roundup overlayed against the rising incidence of autism. They match almost perfectly. Even a mere glance at the chart indicates a dramatic correlation. She went on to describe MIT’s findings proving Roundup’s active ingredients were far more deadly and long-lasting than Monsanto’s claims, and that even what they referred to as “inert ingredients” in Roundup were anything but. Not only that, she proved exposure is cumulative. We’re all exposed to it daily, regardless of where we live, and we’re exposed often enough that we can’t shake it, can’t rid our bodies of it. It accumulates within us.

“But I live in the city”, you say. “I haven’t even seen a farm since my third grade class trip.” Okay, I have a few questions for you—Do you eat? Do you drink water? Do you have any bloody idea how many products contain corn and soybeans? Your pet’s food even contains both. Any meat you eat (and feed your children) was raised on corn and soybean meal in its feed, too. And after Roundup is sprayed on a field, where do you think it goes from there? It doesn’t just evaporate. The first rain will melt it into the ground. All rains after that press it deeper into the earth and spread it through the nations aquafiers. Millions upon millions of tons of grain are planted, grown, harvested, and sold from fields sprayed with Roundup. Helpfully, Monsanto sells a wide variety of seed to farmers that is “Roundup-Ready,” meaning it can be planted in a field that’s just been soaked with Roundup and will be immune to the poisons therein.

This isn’t the farmer’s fault. Monsanto assured everyone—including the FDA—that Roundup was perfectly safe. To the farmers, it’s just a great weedkiller, no more, no less. Their advanced knowledge of chemistry is probably on a par with any other profession. And you can “go organic” all you want. You’re still going to get thirsty sooner or later and the majority of all bottled water comes from a regular city tap somewhere. Or you might even take a shower or bath.

I live in farming country. Most farmers buy that stuff by the barrel anymore. Huge farms buy tanker trucks full of it. And very few involved with the sale, shipment, or use of that product knows what you know now…but word is spreading fast. Roundup is good, but not that good. And there are other weedkillers that can be used in modern agriculture. But Monsanto is not a humble mom-and-pop country feed and grain store. It’s a multibillion dollar industry giant with lobbyists, deep pockets, and heavy political clout. Roundup is their cash cow. They won’t go down without a fight. There will be investigations, more studies, hearings, and several setbacks before any kind of ban on Roundup and its satellite products can be put in place. But you’d better start supporting one now.

By the way, Monsanto was named “The Most Hated Company in America” several times. Don’t expect them to use their sense of public decency and the common good to kill one of their most profitable products. They’ll protect it at all costs. They will buy scientists, researchers, Congress if need be.

Here are a few things to remember: the number of children with autism has gone from 1 in 5,000 in 1975 to 1 in 68 in 2014. Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, has been found in the breast milk of American mothers at “dangerous” levels, 760 to 1600 times higher than the allowable limits in European drinking water. Americans have ten times the level of glyphosate in their urine than Europeans. Why the comparisons with Europe? They had the good sense never to legalize glyphosate for widespread use, only in very limited applications, most by goverment-trained and regulated agencies. And we are eating it, drinking it, literally bathing in it every day.

Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” brought an end to the use of DDT, but that took years. Roundup, in ten years, will leave this nation with 50% autism, and if that happens no one can predict the cost, or even if our nation could survive such a catastrophe. Think about that for a moment. Just think about that…and what it could lead a desperate and failing society to do.

Obsession

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by Kent Ballard

I accidentally came across a strange subject while researching another article recently. It was the Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine. I thought it was odd that the writer was still talking about it in the present tense. Damned stupid writers anyway. What do they know, I asked?

Quite a lot, in this case. I read a few lines and the more I read the weirder things got. I thought I knew all about the story but came to discover I knew almost nothing. I knew that legend was a big deal in the past, but figured everyone had sobered up by now and that we all looked back and laughed about the tiny blip it made on the American conscious a hundred years ago.

Wrong.

 Did you know there is an entire industry build around that legend? Do you know an estimated eight thousand people every year–most of whom have no business wandering around in a desert–still search for that bloody mine to this day? People have killed total strangers over it. They’ve dropped big rocks on them from above, set booby traps, or just shot them in the back and let them die face down in the Arizona sand. The only ones who have found untold riches so far are the dead people recovery teams drag out periodically.

I figured most of that nonsense went on over a century in the past. Nope. They hauled Jesse Capen out boots-first just two years ago. He’d told coworkers that he was going to spend another weekend hunting for the Lost Dutchman’s Mine and never reported back to work. The sheriff’s department searched for him, then a few relatives looked for him when the authorities gave up. Both parties asked all the other folks who were in the vicinity risking heat exhaustion, looking for the same mine. No one had seen him. It was around two years after his disappearance (when a professional rescue team was called in to helicopter yet another would-be billionaire to a hospital) that somebody finally found Jesse. His body was wedged into a crack running down the side of Superstition Mountain. The only way he could have gotten there was from above. They saw no reason to think foul play was involved. Apparently Jesse got tired of tramping around the mountain and decided the entrance to his mine was surely up along the side of it somewhere. He was not an experienced climber and did not have the proper equipment for it. They find people like Jesse every few years.

The article went on to explain that the legend of the Lost Dutchman’s Mine was just that to most of us, but for a certain percentage of the population it’s a curse. Because some people can take an interest in the very real Dutchman—his name was Jacob Waltz and he was actually German—and that interest will grow within them like a cancer cell. They want to know more. They read about Adolph Ruth and Dr. Thorne and the Peralta family and the more they read, the more fascinated they become. They read there are several maps in existence, all claiming to be the correct one, and they read over and over the verbal directions Waltz supposedly gave a nurse, and they come to believe not only does all that gold really exist, but that they alone can find it. Like any obsession, nothing can stand in its way. Divorces, broken homes, abandoned children, real fortunes lost, even the threat of death itself will not stop them.

A doctor once told me there are some simple rules in life. Never become too bored or too angry or too lonely. That’s pretty good advice. To that I would add never become obsessed—by anything. An obsession is not a keen interest. Many skilled modelers have built ships in bottles, but none have starved to death doing it. Or spent the family fortune. Or became unable to feed their own children.

Psychiatrists would argue there’s a great difference between an addiction and an obsession. But at some point that becomes immaterial. To my way of thinking they become the same eventually. We all know what a homeless street addict will do for his next fix. Anything. In darker moments we learn (and try to forget) that addicted soccer moms and upstanding businessmen will do exactly the same if need be. Unless they’ve seen it first-hand, most folks don’t realize the power gambling addictions have over people. I certainly didn’t until I met a man engulfed by one. What happened to him—and his family—wasn’t pretty.

Obsessions are damnably wicked, and on several different levels of wickedness. They can strike without warning and their victims never understand they themselves are being consumed by one. Most are temporary obsessions, like the guy at a party telling everyone over and over about “the best damned movie I ever saw in like, forever.” Yeah, sure, okay. In two months he won’t be so hyper about it. But other people will develop obsessions that will last the rest of their days.

I like most impassioned people. But a passion for a thing is not an obsession. An obsession will cloud a human mind to reality. Burt Rutan and Chuck Yeager are passionate about flying. Richard Feynman was impassioned with physics and his bongo drums. But the killers at the Charlie Hebdo offices were obsessed with images of Mohammed. The difference is not the strength of their feelings and convictions, but in the power of our own minds to warp themselves beyond reality and into the wastelands of vicious inhumanity. If you start dwelling on a subject and seeing things in it that no one else can see, it may be time to fall back and reexamine your beliefs. It’s possible you may be a pioneering genius but it’s far more likely you’re becoming a fanatic, especially if the idea of using force to make others see things your way becomes logical to you.

The prospectors searching Superstition Mountain as you read this are not terrorists, but I wonder what their families could tell us? Not all of it could be good. I’m sure there are folks who picnic on that mountain and laugh about Jacob Waltz’s legendary mine, but how many others have gone around that invisible bend where they can no longer see home? Or care about it and those they walked away from? Gold has always been mildly interesting to some people and a form of crystal meth to others. But unlike the faces of meth addicts, we can’t photograph people’s hearts and minds. We can’t see the gradual derangement over years, sometimes slow, sometimes with terrible speed.

There are worse obsessions than gold fever. Not many, but a few. Some obsessions are dangerous to everyone now. Hate and stupidity can travel at the speed of light thanks to computers and smart phones. If you don’t think it’s possible to lose intelligence, ask Jesse Capen what he was doing up there on that cheap rope before it snapped. Everyone said he was a nice guy, a warm and friendly man, a good co-worker. A guy just like us. He wasn’t born stupid.

He simply became obsessed.

A BRIEF SIDE TRIP

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by Kent Ballard

I read an article a couple of days ago about a study done on NDEs, near-death experiences. You know the stories some people have said. Looking down on their own body, being yanked through a tunnel towards a brilliant light, seeing dead loved ones, a flash review of their life, and all that stuff. This has been reported by agnostics, atheists, and devout people of all religions.

What the study concluded was there were too many people who came back when resuscitated, telling precise accounts of what went on around them after they died, where people had stood, what they said, what they did, the kinds of noises that medical machines make, to completely ignore. Science doesn’t know how they do this, but it’s now apparently irrefutable some small percentage do. I have a reason to give such articles a moment of attention.

I died in January, 1973. No this isn’t a Halloween story. It’s true.

With the typical perversity of the way things go in my world, I went in for a simple surgery to remove a cyst. I’d had one removed a few years earlier. That time the doc said a couple of shots of Novocaine would handle the pain and I would be conscious for a simple out-patient surgery. Once he started cutting, it turned out the “surface” cyst had wickedly grown much deeper into my body than he realized. Soon things started to hurt. Then hurt badly. More shots followed. Eventually the doc looked into my eyes and said I had to make a choice. I was bleeding out the Novocaine faster than he could shoot it into me. They could either slap a temporary patch on me and finish up the next day in surgery with me unconscious, or—if I could just hold out about ten more minutes—he’d be finished. It was my call.

I was fifteen and there were two cute young nurses assisting him. Naturally I had to be a hero in front of them. It would not be the last time attractive women led me to disaster. When he finished twelve minutes later (yes, I timed the bastard) I hadn’t made so much as a peep, not a whimper, but I was laying in a pool of my own blood and tears.

It gave me a much greater respect for survivors of Civil War surgery.

Nothing like that would or could happen today, but this was over forty years ago in a small one-hospital rural county. I’d had the same doctor all my life. He was our family doctor and knew us all. Medicine had its rough edges then, but there was also an intimacy that medical practice will never have again.

Four years later, another cyst developed and I had the same doc. Neither of us wanted to risk that awful experience again, so he scheduled me as a regular surgery patient with 20th Century advances like real anesthetics and not having to feel that scalpel cut through my living flesh. Cool, I thought. This will be a considerable improvement over the last time. Better living through chemistry.

I was cheerful and joking with all the staff in the O.R. when the anesthesiologist came up and asked, “Ready to take a nap?” He held a syringe in one hand and the tube already in my arm in the other.

Sure. Let ‘er rip. I was looking forward to that warm feeling everyone told me I’d have as the anesthetic coursed up my arm. As he slowly injected me, I thought something was wrong. Everyone said it would be warm, that it would feel good. I felt as if my vein was turning to ice. It hurt. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I could actually feel the pain spreading up my arm and into my shoulder and he’d already told me as soon as it got to my heart that within two or three beats I’d be out. “Excuse me, guys, but I think something is wro…”

Thud.

We never would have found the truth about what happened had it not been for a woman my mother barely knew at church. She was a registered O.R. nurse and that day just happened to be assigned to help in my operating room. It was two weeks before she called Mom, and even then pleaded with my mother never to tell anyone where she got this information. She could lose her job, but she thought our family should know the truth. The doctors had killed her teenage son.

One minute for them, all was a normal minor surgery on a healthy young man in the prime of his life. The next was pandemonium. The EKG alarm shrilly gave off that long unending beep. My blood pressure dropped to zero. Another alarm went off indicating I had stopped breathing altogether. The surgeon had not yet picked up a scalpel. They first poked a few buttons on the machinery, wondering why they all malfunctioned at once. Then someone said, “Jesus, he just had a heart attack!” The surgeon started pressing my chest, almost lifting himself off the floor. Small town hospitals in ’73 had no defibrillators unless they thought they might be needed. They were the size of refrigerators and horrifically expensive. The anesthesiologist had a tank of oxygen, but not intended for me. He rolled it to my table, then found a hose and connected one end to the tank, the other to some kind of pipe he found laying around, and jammed the pipe down my throat trying to force raw oxygen into my lungs. Someone, the nurse said, pulled open my eyelid and shined a light. “No dilation!” One nurse was told to hold that pipe down my throat while the anesthesiologist went around the other side of the operating table, taking his forearm and leaning forcefully into my belly, causing me to exhale. When he let up the air pressure from the tank partially refilled my lungs. Someone took over for the surgeon and began hammering on my chest for all they were worth. He gasped, “No history of cardiac problems. He’s nineteen years old. Great condition. We’re losing him.” The surgeon and anesthesiologist looked at each other as if for ideas. The man leaned heavily into my abdomen again. A pause. Then again. My mother’s friend could not say how long this went on. She said it was too long and she could feel the others giving up hope. Someone shut off the alarms that were driving them all nuts.

The anesthesiologist yelled at my mother’s friend to take his place shoving in on my belly. When she stepped forward she looked at whatever monitors they had me hooked to. Still no heartbeat, and my body temperature was dropping. The anesthesiologist ran to a cabinet and began filling a syringe with something. Manual respiration, even with pure oxygen, was not working. Chest compressions were not working. She said my fingers and nails were a dead gray-blue and my and face was turning dark as she watched. She remembered me going to church with Mom a couple of times and felt so terribly sorry for her…

My mother later told me she was sitting at my bedside in the hospital the next day. She said I raised up, looked at her and winked, then my head fell back into the pillow. I don’t remember that. When I eventually came around again, my girlfriend was there. She said something and I tried to reply. Good lord! What was wrong with my throat? It felt as if I’d gargled a chain saw. The more conscious I became, the more I hurt everywhere. What was this? Why did I feel as if I’d been in a train wreck? I pulled the sheet down and my chest was one large bruise. More were on my abdomen. None were near the cyst, which apparently had not been touched. It was a little like waking up in a hospital at the beginning of a zombie film, confusing to say the least.

When the surgeon showed up, somewhat sheepishly, he explained the anesthetic given me was sodium pentothal, commonly used in those days. No one (including me) had any prior knowledge that I was among the roughly one in fifteen hundred people who were deathly allergic to that drug. I might experience some “discomfort” from the breathing “device” they used on me. Any danger? No, no, of course not. But they did want to wait a couple of days before knocking me out again, this time with something a bit different. And then he was out the door.

They might as have well have pumped me full of Mop-N-Glow. Boom. Gone. Wink of an eye.

The anesthesiologist knew he could do no harm at that point, so he played on a hunch. He shot me directly with an antidote to sodium pentothal, refilled the same syringe, and gave me a gorilla’s worth of adrenaline. The surgeon was still pounding on me. Several people had been by then. CPR is damned exhausting when you do it correctly.

Beep. A heartbeat.

Everyone looked at each other. Presently, beep. Another one.

A few more seconds and I coughed, choking on that damned pipe they’d jammed and scraped down my throat. Beep…beep…nothing. C’mon, kid. Come on back. Beep…beep…beep-beep-beep.My mother’s friend said she literally watched me come back to life. My color began to change. Blood pressure started to rise. Body temp was still alarmingly low, but they saw it gain a couple of tenths. I don’t know where I’d been but I wound up back where I’d started, and with the same nasty problem too.

When I found all this out I thought of myself as lucky. Looking back, I think I was cheated. I mean, if you’ve gone to all the trouble of dying and scaring the hell out of everyone, shouldn’t you be allowed to float around watching them pound on your dead body for a while? Is an audience with the Creator too much to ask at a time like that? I don’t recall the tunnel ride, but I paid for the ticket. I didn’t even get booted back into my body by an angel. Never saw any dead relatives, no brilliant white light called me, didn’t hear so much as a note on a harp. Bummer. Your average run of the mill death.

The next time I die, I’ll ask for the “A” ticket. Dead relatives, beautiful lights, the whole nine yards. Next time, I want the whole grand tour. Next time I’ll probably stay and not come back. But with my deranged luck I won’t make any bets. The next time I might wind up waking with a sore butt. Who knows what medical wonders they’ll come up with tomorrow?

Me, I don’t care to find out. If I have to pay for the ride, I want to take it. I intend to go careening through space and time and slam sideways into eternity, dust myself off, and have a look around. It sounds like a dandy place. I’ll probably see you there eventually. Look me up and we’ll go have a cold drink. Living through this life was problematic enough. Eternity will take some planning.

Jackboots In The Post Office

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by Kent Ballard

The Christmas season was never a time to go to the Post Office. It’s an annoyance at best and a dreadful, thankless chore at worst. But this season my visit became something much darker.

Friday was one of those days that hit us all once in a while. I was busy and pinched for time. I had to hit the hardware store, Post Office, and then rush back home to meet a friend who was coming to visit. They were widening a public sidewalk corner in the tiny little town near my home. With the forethought and planning of any small town the minor construction they were undergoing managed to not only tie up a major state highway but also a federal highway that often takes the spillover traffic from the nearby Interstate. I don’t think I could have done a better job of disrupting traffic if I’d been hired to do it by the governor. At least I’m sure they’ll build a sidewalk that will last for the ages, a sidewalk that will someday be measured as one of man’s enduring efforts like the Great Pyramids or Mount Rushmore. It’s certainly been taking them that long.

After plodding through the traffic backup I made the hardware store and was in and out in a flash. Then I had to negotiate the barricades and yellow flashing lights again, along with their amazing town construction workers, all expertly trained to sleep while leaning on shovels without falling over. I pulled into the parking lot of the Post Office and went in. I didn’t have a stamp for my letter. My wife had taken off with our stamps safely in her purse and all I had to do was tell the nice Post Office person I wanted to mail this envelope (a common letter), pay them, tip my hat, and come home.

The USPS has been going broke for as long as I can remember. I don’t know why they just don’t charge more and become solvent. I’ve read where postage in other countries is considerably higher, and often when visitors come to the States they remark about our low postage costs. An even better idea would be for the USPS to triple or quadruple the cost of third class mail. We’d then either get a lot less junk mail or they’d be rolling in money, probably both. Anyway, after waiting my turn in line I got to the sole woman behind the USPS counter who was waiting on the public. The counter was set up for two workers, but I’m sure you’ve encountered similar “conveniences” yourself, either at your Post Office or your bank, where they spend fifty million dollars to tell you how much they value your business while cutting workers and lengthening your time in line. Few people will change banks and where ya gonna go for another Post Office?

When it was my turn I stepped forward and put the letter on the counter in front of the woman. While digging in my pocket for change I said, “Hi. I just need to mail this. My wife has the stamps and I want to get this out today.”

The woman did not share my sense of urgency. Fair enough. She didn’t need to. All I wanted her to do was her job.

“You don’t have a return address on this. You need a return address.”

Did you ever feel like a bumblebee that just flew into a brick wall? The woman gestured to the counter along the wall, indicating I could go over there and temporarily be out of her hair for a moment while I wrote my return address on the envelope. She was only working at one speed (glacial) and processing customers as if they were all putting her to extreme difficulty. If I’d taken my letter and done as she said it’d be another ten or fifteen minutes before I worked my way back to her. I’m not normally rushed, but those minutes were more important to me than the normal creaking flow of her day. I did not have a pen on me, nor did she offer me one.

“Is that a law? Can’t you mail this without a return address?”

“Hmm. I could mail it. But you need a return address.”

“Well, if you can mail it without one, go ahead and do that, please.”

“You don’t understand. I could mail this, but you really need to put a return address on it.”

“Is it a federal law now that every letter has to have a return address?” And then I caught her expression. For no understandable reason this civil servant was now glaring at me with something akin to suspicion. What was this woman’s problem? Something changed in the air. I was not sure what. Was she just overwhelmed by her own bureaucratic importance of having the only USPS public window in twenty-five miles? Had she finally exhausted her ability to wield such astonishing power?

I didn’t know. It finally dawned on me that I didn’t care either.

“If there’s no federal law requiring a return address, I’m going to mail this as is without one. I don’t have the time to…”

BAM! She slapped a meaty fist on the counter, snatched up my letter, spun around with surprising speed for someone of her size, and marched back into an office behind her.

Behind me, a housewife waiting in line softly said, “Well, what’s wrong with her…?”

I kind of shrugged and said, “I don’t know. It’s just a letter.” Then I looked back in line and offered, “Sorry to cause a hold-up. I don’t know what her problem is. I just need to mail one letter.”

Presently the squat woman came out of the office followed by a man. She pointed an accusing finger at me and said triumphantly, “He’s the one!”

The one WHAT? I wondered. What had I done? Nothing. Nothing at all.

This was interesting. Had I broken some obscure federal law? Could I expect an FBI SWAT team to launch grenades through the door and club me into submission? Whadda hell was going on here? The man looked at me as if I was a Nazi paratrooper just dropped in to conquer his portion of America. This made no sense at all. And whatever their dog and pony show was really about, they were hindering every postal customer there. Including me. I didn’t know what raised their hackles, but it was now evident that whether I liked it or not I was in the middle of some kind of Twilight Zone game. Did you ever surprise yourself and decide you’d had enough?

“You need a return address on this.”

Wrong thing to say, Homer. “You need to train your help. I just asked her if that was a law. She said it wasn’t.”

He laid the letter back down on the counter. Trying a different tact, he said more pleasantly, “No, it doesn’t have to have one. But if it doesn’t have a return address it could get lost in the mail and we wouldn’t know who to return it to.”

“I’ve got faith in you.” This was becoming a pissing contest.

“It’s for your own protection,” he deadpanned.

“I’ll take my chances.” I was on the verge of becoming…postal.

“It could get lost.”

“I’ll write another.”

I found myself engaged in an silly exchange over…what? Why were these two government time clock punchers behaving this way? Why were they very strongly trying to get me to comply when there was no law to comply with? Were they vaguely threatening me? It sure seemed like it. But why?

Nope. I wasn’t playing their game, whatever it was. I had a dollar bill crumpled in my hand. I tossed it onto the counter and stared back at the Postmaster.

He said, “It’s really for your protection…”

I didn’t say a word. Just stared at him.

He bent down and literally whispered something to the office penguin. Whispered, mind you, as if saying some loathsome, despicable thing. She looked back at him. He nodded. She stepped ahead and picked up my dollar and–as if nothing unusual had transpired–she rang me up and handed me my change.

I muttered thanks and turned for the door. Once past it I looked back and they were still staring at me. What in the world? It seemed as if they were doing their barnyard best to memorize my looks, height, weight, my every feature.

When I came home I was still mystified, still wondering what had taken place in such an otherwise obscure place like the local post office. My guest arrived and I told him, “Dave, the weirdest thing happened just a while ago…”

I told him about the little mystery I’d encountered while in town. He chuckled and said, “Yeah, leave it to you…”

That only turned my fires up. “Leave WHAT to me? I ASKED them if it was legal, or if a return address was required by law! Hell, by their own admission I wasn’t breaking any law! Why all the guff over something as unimportant as that?”

Dave made a mocking frown at me. “You disappoint me, Kent. I thought you kept up with all the news about our heroic war on terrorism.”

“Huh?”

He sighed. “You ever hear of the Patriot Act? Do you remember when that wacko sent powdered ricin in the mail to a few congressmen? You won’t get a cell phone because you don’t want spy agencies pinging you every five minutes,” he laughed, “but you didn’t know about some of the other ways they track you?”

Terrorists? Ricin? Congress? I stood there blinking.

The U.S. Post Office is nearing the capability to photograph every piece of mail it handles. They say they only photograph some of them now. But they have conveyor belts they can place mail on and it shoots them through a camera very rapidly. They have software that can read and store names and addresses. That way, if the FBI, the Department of Homeland Insecurity, or even a local cop gets interested in someone they can call the USPS and ask them, “Where is this person’s mail going and who mails them?” And you will never know anything about it. The NSA didn’t ask your permission to read your emails and search engine queries. They didn’t ask how you felt about them listening to your phone conversations. The USPS didn’t ask you about this, either.

They can track everything you send and everything you get in the mail. They can tap the same information from FedEx and UPS too. Law enforcement requests for USPS information are skyrocketing (see below). It costs them nothing. You pay for it. And that’s why the people in one post office wanted me to put a return address on my letter so very damned badly and why it looked suspicious when I refused. At least to them. I suppose they saved every minute I was there on videotape and flagged that, too. I should have combed my hair.

This business has gone on long enough. I’m tired of every government mouthpiece constantly screaming TERRORISM! TERRORISM! at me when I’m in far greater danger from bee stings or tripping over my own big feet. I’m tired of secret judges on secret courts handing out surveillance warrants like Life Savers on Halloween. I’m tired of my own government using the weak straw man of TERRORISM! to shred my Bill of Rights more every day.

I’m not the first to write about this. You’ll find the links below quite interesting. I’d hoped that maybe, somehow, I’d blown this out of proportion in my mind, that a bored clerk in a post office merely wanted to do something to break her monotony, or perhaps even that I was rushed and came to an incorrectly harsh judgment. I hoped that right up until I read these.

http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/28/7084135/usps-mail-cover-surveillance-wider-than-thought-49000-pieces

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/snail-mail-snooping-safeguards-not-followed-108056.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/us/us-secretly-monitoring-mail-of-thousands.html?rref=us&module=ArrowsNav&contentCollection=U.S.&action=click&region=FixedLeft&pgtype=article&_r=1