Comes the autumn, comes the winter, comes the drizzle and rain that is the Oregon coast. Through the overcast, comes once in a while, a day the locals say is why they endure life here. The sun exposed it’s glory this Saturday past. Such was the day that only a walk along the Pacific shoreline would satisfy.

The narrow path, a carpet of fallen pine needles, a lining of fern and Darlingtonia, known only to locals and the occasional fortunate tourist. At trails’ end I stood in that familiar awe, the unrelenting beauty of God’s nature spread before me. How blessed I was to walk beneath a sky more blue than the eyes of the prettiest girl in Wisconsin.

How blessed I was to be surrounded by a majesty I could freely embrace but never hold. A majesty stored within the pixels of memory, recalled another evening, near a warm fire, a then current storm heavy with the raindrops that make things beautiful. Nothing lay before me but miles of naked, abandoned coastline. How blessed.

A solitary path of footprints grew longer behind me. In these rare moments of solitude, these rare moments of escape, my mind free to ponder a multitude of realities. The mortgage, insurance premiums, what measures to vote for next week, who to vote for next week, is this the last of the broccoli in the garden, will there be another beautiful day to groom the dogs, will a ton of pellets be enough for this winter, will Florida beat Georgia this afternoon, what’s for dinner.

But those real thoughts were for another time, my mind waxing philosophical. What power there is in apology. What strength stands beside such humility. Is it pride that holds a person from admitting a wrong, an injustice? Is it a fear of appearing weak, a sliver of control relinquished, worse yet, human?

I made my way back stretching my gait to step where I had stepped before. I thought of an old poem, “The Psalm of Life”, by Longfellow I think. “Lives of great men all remind us, we can make our lives sublime. And, departing, leave behind us, footprints on the sands of time. Footprints that perhaps another, sailing o’er life’s solemn main. A forlorn and shipwrecked brother, seeing shall take heart again”

I mumbled those words along the trail back to my world. It came to me, then, that this ugliness of Blogstream could have resolved so easily with an apology. Through all my words I was searching only for an apology for a written untruth, a hurtful and demeaning unkindness.

I was told to forget it, I was told to move on. But they were the untouched, they could not grasp the hurt.

The unquestioning love of two little dogs met me at the gate. I petted their happy heads and thought of what had happened during my walk. My solitude, my reasons to feel so blessed, had been invaded by these goings-on. My real life had once invaded Blogstream; now Blogstream had invaded my real life.

The dogs and the cats and my life have missed me as I whiled away in front of this computer. Perhaps the time had come to step back, to take better measure of my life, to end my vigil for an apology never coming. To find solitude, to feel peace.

I miss Renegade. She was a good writer. She wrote from her heart and she wrote with her soul. Her final posting addressed her concerns about the dark underbelly of Blogstream. It was her usual post and the reader could feel her sincerity, her passion, her love of this Blogstream and her commitment. The tragedy, of course, is that she found it necessary to deactivate the next day.

Her blog was gone, the post was gone and she was gone. In her wake lingered only the dark underbelly that had broken her spirit, her heart. A dark underbelly that has ingrained this Blogstream as thoroughly as fat in well marbled meat.

It’s to that dark underbelly that I now choose to speak. It is that dark underbelly that I want to expose. It is that dark underbelly that I want to disappear and in so doing free us of the mean-spirited negativity it spreads.

October has been a month of great sadness, jealousy and suspicion here at Blogstream. Who can argue with that? If you believe that the pen is mightier than the sword; it has been a violent month as well. Starting at the beginning I would put this question to you. How did you learn of Lucy’s post about Squash? Did you happen by it or did you, like me, receive a PM recommending you go to the post?

The first 112 comments were within the first hour. How many bloggers have that sort of attention in so short a time? Not even Whit could stand in the face of such an onslaught. Beyond that, the comments were answered as quickly as they arrived and with an increasing vicissitude.

The evidence infers collusion while the actions speak directly to the very point Renegade was making. What happened that day was connived, orchestrated and carried out with efficiency and with a total, unabashed savagery.

Dear reader. Have you ever received a negative PM? Have you ever been asked, or told, to avoid this or that blog because the blogger is nasty to disagreement? Did you avoid that blog because you knew that to be true or did you avoid that blog because you were told it was true? Please grant me the indulgence of bringing this incident to myself.

I have been downright nasty twice. The first was on my other blog, CUBA: No Way Jose. It’s over there and I invite you to read the comments. Here, at the Factor, I have been nasty to BillsBullits. Mr. Bill showed up and began using profanity and obscenities. Obscene and profane comments are not welcomed here, ever.

This blog is not about argument and disagreement. It is about discussion on a wide variety of topics. From burying a loved one to legalized marijuana. From sex offenders to gun control to the foolishness of Bill O’Reilly. Nothing to be disagreeable about. Only open minded discussion. But the dark underbelly PM said nasty, so nasty it is. But the posts and comments are below, show me.

There is a third important event and I promise to make it short. A blogger posted asking for advice to tell her friend. As it turned out it wasn’t her friend at all, but her. I gave my advice and it wasn’t what the blogger wanted to hear. The comment was deleted and the blogger began a campaign of her being attacked. This single event, though seemingly trite, put Lagniappe directly in Lucy’s cross hairs. Didn’t it, Lucy?

Armed with no more to go on than the words of your friend, wasn’t that really when your negativity toward me began? And do you not carry it to this day as a revenge unsatiated?

Have you yet to exact a price for my post about the hypocritical Christians that pummeled junglejoe that night, with you ring leading that debacle as well?

Is there no end to your negativity, your spiteful ways? How long will you carry the hate this post will surely inflame?

Was not my “Forgiveness” post a step in the right direction? What have been your steps? When I posted “The Witches Of Blogwick” I was confronting Lucy’s accusation that I was a child molester. Would you, dear reader, not have done the same thing? And within that post there lay an important question. What ever gave Lucy that idea? Where did such a nutty, unsubstantiated thought come from?

Only two bloggers knew of “Mr. Q-tip Popcorn Man”. Only two. Richard Knowlton (Young, Broke, Republican) and prisonerofhope. Richard, I know you more than a little and I know what came between us. You do too. I am asking you now, as the close friend I once was, to comment here. Did you tell Lucy that I was a child molester? Prisonerofhope, I am asking you now, as the Christian you assert yourself to be, comment here. Did you tell Lucy I was a child molester?

POH, I have every reason to believe you did and your silence will confirm that fact. For you, even after you returned to Blogstream, continued your negativity in a weak attempt to explain yourself to your followers. Inspite of my complete forgiveness of you, you posted even more negativity and hatred.

Peeking out from behind the Scripture you profess to follow, you would not let it go. And that negativity carried on through countless PM to countless people. As recently as three days ago you continued your barrage toward me by accusing me of being the dreaded Lucifer. Is everyone keeping up with this? I am a nasty person, a child molester, househusband and Lucifer! How do you know? Lucy and POH say so.

POH, you were certain. You, and your not so subtle innuendo, pointed your finger directly to this blog. You have deleted the post and the comments but you know I am speaking the truth and you were satisfied; the intended damage was done. Once again you basked in having had the last word.

I am the non-Christian in your eyes. I am Lucifer and I am househusband and I am every other blogger who dare stand up to you and Lucy for the next 10 years. Your blanks are already filled in. How powerful you must feel that your words are so completely swallowed.

You knew it and your PM spread that hatred all over this Blogstream. As you have pronounced me a non-Christian, I am certain you would understand that I don’t see the Christianity in your actions. I am blind to Christ and I am asking you to show me what Jesus would have done. My guess was forgiveness but that fell short to your omniscient Eye.

In the post below I talked of the route Lucifer and househusband traveled to contact me. In the comments is an example of how the underbelly twists and plays with the facts. A commenter puts the words of Lucifer and househusband into my mouth. I said!

I can only wonder how many PM have been sent to Pioneer telling him that I accused him of a conspiracy. Intelligent people package a group of facts and arrive at a conclusion. The cunning arrive at a conclusion then try to piece together some facts.

Lucy. POH. You are people that endorse and perpetuate negativity on this Blogstream. You are two people who will not let anything rest. You are humped over by the weight of your bag of grudges. You will continue your dark underbelly in spite of anything that anyone can do. It feeds your very existence.

Within your public face you play games and preach. Within your darkside you also play games and preach. I have tried to make amends to you and have failed. I now turn to your supporters.

Dear readers, do you not see? You all leave comments talking about this being a Blogstream for all of us to enjoy. A Blogstream where we should all feel free to be here and to be ourselves. A Blogstream where even the lowest of the low can function without harassment, without negativity, without belittling, without the approval of Lucy and POH. I am asking you to stand up and be counted.

Leave a comment below and denounce the negativity that is secretly spread. Denounce the criticism of anyone who doesn’t play by rules set by others. Take a stand and free us all from this dark underbelly.

This is another post where my comments are inappropriate. My comments are above. I hope and pray for your comments below. Blogstream for everybody with negativity towards none.

Renegade, I miss you so much. I read your posting and you were so very right. I wish I could write with your passion. I wish I could feel with your soul. I wish I could tap you on your shoulder and ask you to read this post. But I can’t. All I can do is promise you that although you and your strength are gone, you will never be forgotten.

Have you ever worked in an office of twenty or so people? Or maybe a hospital? Places where there is a cross-section of varying lifestyles and interests. If you have then you have seen this scenario play out. There is one individual who occupies the bottom rung. They are the brunt of all the teasing, all of the jokes and all of the negative gossip. Whispers abound and eventually the person resigns or is fired.

The remaining employees bask in the afterglow. People bring in cookies and hang around the coffee corner talking about how proud they are to have ferreted out the weed, how much better they were, how warm and loving the atmosphere had become. Soon enough the cookies become stale and the coffee scorches. Soon enough another individual becomes the focus of their discontent. Soon enough another person becomes the brunt of all the teasing, all of the jokes and all of the negative gossip.

Have you ever seen that? Doesn’t it seem as though there always has to be someone we can look down on, someone we are better than, someone we can use to make ourselves look better by making them look worse? Someone that allows us to avoid our shortcomings by focusing on theirs?

Yesterday I received two emails. They were sent through third parties, copied, pasted, forwarded, etc. all in an attempt to prevent their tracks being followed by the power that be here at blogstream. The emails were from Lucifer and househusband and this was their concern. They had seen the comments posted by POH, about me being them, and wanted to know if I wanted them to stop because of her comments.

My response to them was that it was their decision but not to stop for no better reason than me. It wasn’t my call, you see, it was theirs. Undoubtedly the scathing words coming from the very seat of blogstream Christianity, POH, were unfounded. Last month I forgave POH her indiscretions and I posted that forgiveness right here, in public. The Christian that I am relentlessly accused of not being, found solace in the comfort of forgiveness. Forgiveness is the very foundation of the Christianity I am accused of not following.

In the light of that forgiveness one would think the matter finished. Sadly, and in the name of Jesus, it was not. When POH returned she posted a continuation of the conflict so as to better explain her situation, continue the belittling and get, as it were, the last word. The duty had fallen to POH to extract a blood atonement for sins committed against her, not God. Redemption was the business of POH, not God. Among the last words of Jesus were “Father forgive them”. Among POH’s last words were “I am always right”.

As it has turned out, I was neither Lucifer nor househusband. I would direct you to POH’s comments but they are no longer there; the damage done. When POH is right she pontificates and in those rare instances when she’s wrong, she deletes. And the Christian posts continue. The posts of one so wrapped in anger and vitreal. What difference can be seen in the rantings of the blogger Lucifer to you and the rantings of the blogger POH to me? Why should the one be condemned while the other praised?

Blogstream has many Christians and among them both good and bad seeds. There are Christians whose hypocrisy bespeaks their beliefs and there are those, such as I, who struggle daily with applying what we believe to what we do. We happily embrace that struggle as God’s challenge to us. It’s to this Christian community that I now speak, and I speak as loudly as I can from my perch on the bottom rung of your ladder.

Should I not try with all my heart to live as I perceive God may want me to live? Can I truly be a Christian with a heart filled with anger and vengeance and hatred? If I hide my hateful ways within a few scattered Biblical Scriptures do they then become hidden from your view, overlooked and, by omission, accepted?

How long can anyone flog a person before you turn your head away from the brutality and see instead the self-righteousness? Were His first twenty lashes for His sins, the next ten for the Pharisees and the last ten for Pilate? Perhaps you believe, as I, that even the first lash was unjustified. When, in the Christian heart of compassion and love, is enough really enough?

Once before I added a post in which I felt my comments would have been inappropriate. This, too, is such a post. I implore your comments but will not respond to them. I am not seeking a conversation but rather guidance. I ask that you refrain from negativity. How is it that a forgiving heart is so belittled while an embittered heart so thrives?

Here’s something I’ve been thinking about for quite a long time. I know what I want to say but I’m not sure how to put it in words. I survived Catholic School. That was a bumper sticker making it’s way around a few years back. It may still be around but I don’t know as I don’t get out much. But I did survive it. As I watch kids these days I wonder if some of the things I most resented about Catholic schools may have been a blessing in disguise.

In high school the boys were in one part of the school while the girls were across the street in another. Same campus, same studies, but boys over here and girls over there. I hated that. Here I was, blossoming into a screaming pile of adolescent hormones and the very focus of my life was across the street. How screwed up was that?

As it turned out, not screwed up at all. We still had plenty of time to socialize before and after school. There were no rules against that. There were Friday night football games and some kids would have parties at their houses after the games or on a Saturday night. It wasn’t as if there was no mingling of the sexes but being at school was all about being at school and we were there to study and learn. We were not there to socialize and show-off.

So maybe that was a good thing, I don’t know, but it seems as though it was. These days schools seem more a social event than a learning experience. The quest to learn has deteriorated to the point that schools lower test standards rather than raise expectations.

Corny stuff like multiplication tables, memorizing poetry, remembering historical dates, knowing the states and their capitals, art appreciation and music, spelling and syntax, all gone the way of the dinosaur. Teachers are afraid to challenge students but students don’t hesitate to challenge teachers.

I doubt I would have learned those things either if I spent my days being the class clown and chasing after the girls from one classroom to the next. Which girl was seeing which guy, who was going to be my next steady, all the things that school shouldn’t be about but seems to be these days. Learning has taken a back seat.

Having the girls in the classroom would have been an endless distraction. Speaking for myself, my every move would have been to impress the girls. No reason to try impressing the guys as most of them were as big a jerk as me. I always thought that the separation of boys and girls had to do with the Catholics being a bunch of prudes but it wasn’t. It was about keeping out the distractions. You were there to learn and they took that responsibility seriously. Think that would work today?

But wait! There’s more. I had another complaint and it was even bigger. It was right out in public and public school kids were relentless in their ridicule. It was those damned uniforms. I remember one year a friend of mine wanted to borrow one of my uniforms to wear out trick or treating. In grade school the uniform was dark blue trousers and a white shirt. The girls wore a white blouse and those pleated plaid skirts. In high school the boys added a tie. Remember ties?

If you are in high school these days and are somehow reading this post, I gotta tell you that you scare me. There is every chance that you are a nice boy or girl and wouldn’t hurt a flea but the clothes you wear are scary. Baggy britches, two or three ill-fitting shirts, untied shoes and the ever present chain dangling from somewhere, or something.

The girls aren’t much better. Pants with a waist down around, well let’s just say embarrassing low and grubby T-shirts with some unsavory comment silk screened on them. Oh yes, and tattoos. Lots of tattoos. More tattoos than even the gnarliest of sea dogs would sport.

In all of this let’s not forget the hardware. Metal stuck into and dangling from everywhere. Eyebrows, lips, tongues, cheeks, navels, ear lobes, every imaginable location. It’s like you have become the Shrapnel Generation. If all that regalia isn’t enough to impress everyone add the predictable shuffle. When you folks walk the halls of your school do you drag your feet like they are just too heavy to endure?

What if, and that’s a huge what if, what if school boards began a systematic introduction of uniforms? Kids can be awfully cruel and I’m sure there are many children teased about their clothes. I’m sure there is plenty of peer pressure to wear what has, somehow, become stylish. I can’t imagine the amounts of money parents shell out just to keep youngsters in scruffy clothes, tattoos and metal.

Maybe the catholic school had that in mind as well back in the day. There were no distinctions between rich kids and poor kids. Everybody wore the same thing. There were no gang emblems, no metal, no leather, no chains. Just kids wearing clothes that suggested they had some measure of self respect. Kids that seemed to know that a presentable image was a benefit to them.

Do you think it would work these days, or do you think the ACLU would be suing every school board in the country. What about free expression? Why can’t we be who we are? We have a right to look and dress like street urchins. What’s happening to our rights, don’t they even matter?

What’s happening to your education, doesn’t that even matter?

How idiotic is that? That’s like saying Ecoli doesn’t kill people, spinach does. I guess the gun toters could take that pragmatic attitude a step further and say that it actually isn’t the gun or the people, it’s the bullet. People shot with a gun don’t die from the gunshot wounds, they die of lead poisoning.

Just last week some kid went into a school and began shooting an AK47. By the grace of God the weapon jammed after a single round. But there are two important words in that first sentence; KID and AK47. What’s a kid doing with artillery such as that? Where would he have gotten it?

Well, you say excusingly, he misappropriated it from his father’s arsenal. So the bottom line is that an irresponsible adult has an AK47. That doesn’t make me feel any better. What I’m wondering is why anyone has an AK47. What is the use? What is the need?

Can any Rambo wannabe fill in this blank: All I want for Christmas is an AK47 because_____________. If your answer is self protection wouldn’t it be safer just to dig a moat around your house?

Last year a kid in Pennsylvania took a gun from his fathers’ cabinet of war and killed his girlfriend’s parents. The kids made it as far as Indiana where they wrecked their car. The most telling information to come out of that horrible and needless tragedy was that the boy’s father owned 56 guns.

56! What need is there to possess 56 guns? Does it fill some macho void like a puny man buying a big, noisy truck or a 65 year old sporting a Corvette?

This may surprise you but I don’t endorse any gun control laws. I support a gun elimination law. Aside from a Constitutionally mandated armed militia I fail to see the need for any guns. I can hear the NRA now, going on and on about the rights of hunters.

Well, what about them? They aren’t hunters at all, they’re killers. But hunter has an innocuous, politically correct ring to it; killer doesn’t. Are the NRA lobbyists asking me about someone’s right to kill?

Girly men may buy oversized trucks and Corvettes but real men have the head of a deer hanging on their wall. Talk about a fish out of water. What’s a deer doing in the den? When asked, does the owner of such an obnoxious thing say he hunted it? No, he says he killed it.

Oh sure, there are all the joys of sitting around a Coleman lantern and saying ‘guy’ things. Eating canned food, drinking, and laughing at gas passed. Telling stories about the one that got away. But in the end the only joy in hunting is killing.

It’s fun to kill. Deer, squirrel, bird, anything; just kill. So maybe the title of this post should be changed. How about: Guns don’t kill, people who want to kill do.

If I were king of the world, or had a single wish from the genie out of the bottle, I would attach a huge electromagnet to a helicopter and fly all over the country picking up every single gun. Every single one. John Lennon didn’t have the market cornered on imagination. Imagine a world without guns.