FISHING WITH A SERIAL KILLER

Back in the early 1970’s I use to fish off a small pier behind Tom & Joe’s Sportcenter in Swansboro North Carolina. My dad, Tom, was co-owner of the bait and tackle shop. At the time, Swansboro was a quaint little fishing village set on the banks of the White Oak River.

Swansboro has grown, but it still is a small town by today’s standards. We now have a Burger King and Hardees. A stop light regulates traffic on the four lane highway which skirts the edge of town, and the Police Blotter in the Tideland News recounts four or five misdemeanors every week.

But the fall of 1974 was different. Several banks were held up at gun point in Jacksonville, a much larger town just twenty miles west of Swansboro. People were killed. Two teenage girls were found strangled, dumped on a rural dirt road on the outskirts of Swansboro. The girls had been raped before being brutally murdered.

On that same pier, the one behind my Dad’s store, as I took snappers from schools of small, needle-toothed Bluefish, the conversation usually turned to the crime spree. I remember one man in particular, Marcus, a Navy Corpsman thirteen years my senior, who always had fresh insights into the horrible deeds. We spoke at length on the subject as we fished. His teenage daughter, Debra Ann, a quiet, mousy slip of a girl, was always with him. She seemed embarrassed when her father mentioned the rapes and I figured it was partly due to her age and partly because it was her dad who spoke of such things.

Once, when a Snapper had cut his line,
Marcus tied on a new Gotcha-Plug and I noticed the holstered .45 in the bottom of his tackle box. I didn’t think much of it at the time. A lot of guys toted pistols, especially near the water where Rattlesnakes and Moccasins slithered.

Later, after the news broke, when they had that cold-blooded serial killer behind bars, I thought about that pistol. I saw it in my dreams. I smelled the cordite. I recoiled at the muzzle flash and clawed the sweat soaked sheets which bound me to the bed.

DON IMUS MUST BE PERPLEXED

A few days ago Oprah Winfrey said that white men can't dance.

And this morning the cast of The View was referring to other women as bitches.

I've been watching the news, the same networks who called for the head of Don Imus, but I must have missed the denouncements of these latest racial and sexists epithets. And the Reverend Al Sharpton has been conspicuously absent.

The Don Imus show averaged 361,000 viewers per episode. The View had over 3 million viewers last month. Oprah has the highest rated talk show in history.

I guess it's about numbers, not words.

But more troubling than the obvious double standard is the omission of these insulting remarks by television journalists; the same journalists who stripped the flesh from Don Imus in their moral fervor to eradicate bigotry and misogynistic comments from the airwaves. The talking heads are mute when it comes to reporting unfavorable comments made on shows which generate huge profits for the networks, especially when that money pays the talking heads.

YOU GOTTA LOVE THE SOUTH

A local man won the Powerball lottery a few weeks ago. $15,000,000. When asked what he was going to do with the money, he said, "I'm going to buy me a Moonpie and a R.C. Cola."

STARTING TO SMELL LIKE HORSE MANURE

If I could afford to, I'd beat my Compaq Pressario, with it's fancy-smancy Vista operating system, with a sledgehammer. And the same goes for Windows Live OneCare.

I bought a new computer a month ago from Circuit City. I'm beginning to really hate that town. The salesman installed Windows Live OneCare for me.
Three days after I bought the computer I started having problems with the hibernate function. Computer would wake itself up, the screen flickered, and my icons disappeared. I was told my computer was screwing up because it was never personalized. The salesman skipped that part when he turned it on for the first time to install virus protection and the prompt didn't come up again when I hooked this piece of garbage up when I got home. I ended up taking the computer back for a replacement. That was a battle in itself, but I prevailed.

This time I personalized the computer and installed One Care myself. The product key code was not accepted and I notified Windows support. They responded to email and gave me a phone number to call. Today is day four and I'm still unable to install.

I've mentioned this before, but companies in this country should consider hiring people who speak english. I spent half the phone conversation asking tech to repeat information. It took five minutes to get my email address right. I'd say j, he'd repeat k. I'd say b, he'd repeat z.

One tech discovered I was attempting to sign in with the wrong email address and password. He asked a security question-where was mother born-and my answer didn't jive. I was becoming more then a little confused and was starting to wonder if Spike was in the room. And then I had an epiphany. The salesman who initially setup OneCare on first computer must have created a hotmail account for me, and the dumb son-of-a-you-know-what didn't tell me.

So I let the tech in on my discovery and he says, "No problem, I'll transfer you to someone to reset password and you can activate OneCare".

I'm transferred. I wait. I'm disconnected.

Now I'm getting ticked. I email a nasty-gram. Five minutes later the phone rings. I accept the apology, wait while my call is transferred, and get disconnected. Again.

My next nasty-gram contains a request for full refund. This prompts another call. Another apology. Tech tells me someone will call back in thirty minutes to resolve my complaint.

I'm still waiting. With a sledgehammer.

VIRGINIA TECH SHOOTING

At last report, 32 students are dead and 22 more have been wounded by a gun wielding nut, making this the most deadly mass shooting in America, a country known for both nuts and guns.

And no doubt, political pundits will wage war over gun control in the coming months. They always do following a tragedy. Network newscasters will parade a host of experts whose opinions will cancel each other out and the debate, while cathartic, will end in a stalemate; the chess pieces will be put up and the talking heads will turn to other topics until the next mass shooting.

But they miss the point. Gun control is not the problem. What we have is a people problem. A pistol, sitting in a drawer, or on top of a table for that matter, harms no one. The gun is not dangerous until picked up, until it's in the hand of someone bent on carnage.

More people are prone to commit violence these days. When I was in grade school, the older students left rifles and shotguns resting on gun racks in the cab of their trucks. And they didn't even lock their doors. Forth graders carried pocket knives. To us, guns and knives were tools, and nothing more.

But this was before our national divorce rate was over fifty percent. And it was before the term 'latch-key kids' was coined. And back then we prayed in class. And we said the Pledge of allegiance each morning in front of the flag. And we sat down to supper as a family and we talked about our day. We knew all our neighbors. And come Sunday morning, we sat in God's house, took in the sermon and sang hymns.