April 1st:

Listen to me, for I have been to the mountain, and it's... pretty high up there. I have lived by the sword and I must be killed with the sword. No woman can be two parts Joan of Arc and three parts W.C. Fields without drawing some flack.

Mademoiselle Jeanne speaks through me, and the voices tell me much what they told her. I must maim and destroy the unbeliever. No tolerance for the stupid. I have mercy for the weak, compassion for the lost, understanding for the beaten. The wilfully ignorant, those who wilfully persist in immoral impracticalities, those I have no pity for. In due course, I will become something finer and far more absurd than I am now, no mere Auntie, but Saint Dynamite, of the Last Stand.

First, however, I must bubble in the flame of my past, and oh my brothers, I've been doing that like crazy lately. I have spoken with Uncle Flog, one of the most significant characters in Auntie's past, for the first time in over three years. This was, to use Uncle Flog's phrase, "disturbingly pleasant". Auntie and Flog parted under exceptionally ugly terms about eighty years ago and had a truly hideous falling out about fifty years later. It now manifests that the latter was much grounded in misunderstanding.

What does this indicate, one might ask? I have no desire to warm Flog's bed again, nor does Flog wish Auntie to be in it. Even Auntie draws the line at sex with pus.

I recently scripted a huge biographical tract in email, in part to come to terms with some of it. Then it underwent pattiducking. Research Coordination Office take note! The corporate evil has me in its talons, but a big fat government grant would solve that lickety-split.

This is what I discovered:

My idea of a good time is not most people's idea of a good time.

That's about the size of it. There's a lot more grotty evil that I'm not going to go into, because it's my confessional and I'll absolve if I want to, but that is the salient point.

Auntie continues to wrestle with the degenerate lunacy of corporate America. If her voice is reedy and cracked, it's from too many liquid power lunches and pretenses of civility. My eyes are glazed from late nights in smoky rooms with big cigars and people who take completely alien things far more seriously than anybody out of the loop can hope to understand. It's April foolishness of the highest order. I promise that soon I'll go back to vague maunderings about how corrupt and yuppie I've become as soon as the flames drop below eye level.

When it's all over, when I'm standing in the middle of the charred wreckage that was once an old yet adolescent power, humbled by the ruins and unable to take pride in what had to be done, those who were with me all along will gaze about, cast their eyes upon my ashy visage, and say:

"Boy, did that suck."