Ftrain, by Paul Ford

Dear Mr or Ms 1/6,000,000,000th of humanity:

This piece was a rather bored impromptu letter about the war that resulted in me being bitched at by both lefty and conservative friends. I mean lots of people, none of whom got what I was going after. To be honest, I didn’t get what I was going after, either - I just felt obligated to write about the war.

One of the privileges of the Web is that I can erase and edit. So I’ve done a bit of that, buckling to pressure from outside and within. I couldn’t get behind my own words when I wrote them, nor could I defend them to the socialists, anarchosyndicalists, moderates, and right-wing pro-Bush supporters who questioned my writing.

My mind wanders back to little stories about guys with motorcycles and women buying dresses at thrift shops. Too much attention to politics pulls me out of the story, outside of the wild, chaotic confluence of variables of human emotion and desire, that big equation with “culture” on the right and people on the left. I want to be with the people, not the culture, on the ground, breathing the anthrax-laden air.

I’m gonna tell stories from here on out.

Good luck,

Paul Ford