I've been away yet again for a long time, and I've been trying to figure out how to say all that I need to say here, but I heard from a friend today asking why I haven't posted... so here I am, a bit prematurely (as I haven't yet got all my words together) to satisfy the people who miss me. (There's at least one out there ;-) )

Best way is to just jump right in. In doing so, I'll have to cover, at a later date, all that's been going on in my life since I was last here. In brief, I had my 40th birthday. I threw myself a nice party. Amie, bless her soul, has sent me a couple birthday presents. Other than my sister (who got me a couple bad shirts) and the kids, (who, with the help of their mother, got me some cologne) Amie is the only one who got me anything for my birthday. My friendship with Amie continues to be an enigma which even I can't make total sense of. The bottom line is, I love Amie and I guess she loves me. She never says so, but I don't need her to, anyway. What else? I've been sick. Strange goings on in my stomach, that we're looking into. A friend died recently. And I found that one of the creators of my new FAVORITE show, The Venture Brothers, has a journal on here. More about all this later.

To get into it, then, the following is an email I wrote to Amie today.

Hey... well, had the ultrasound today, for my stomach/gall bladder. No idea what the results were. I probably should have asked. But they'll probably call me, or I can call them. At the very least, I see the doctor in June anyway.

I have an email I've been working on for you, about the rest of my birthday, and about Aurora... but I had to break in with this first.

Pete Lonsky was in town last month; I forget why, but it ended up being for a different reason than intended anyway. (Pete, if you don't remember, is a close friend of mine from college, who now lives in Palo Alto, California, with his wife Sophie, who's French, and their three sons). Pete called me up one night to say he was here, and I went to his mother's house to hang out for a while.

Now, the Lonskys are a huge family. 6 sons and 1 daughter. Mrs Lonsky is great, very nice---if very offbeat and bohemian... she and my mom were born the same year (1930). Pete's dad is long dead---he died when Pete was a kid.... so we share some things in common. The whole family goes its own way---the two oldest brothers are ultra-conservative survivalist types (but very nice people, if you can figure out that one) and the oldest brother is even a member of the John Birch Society, the only such person I've ever met in my life. This, of course, does not jibe at all with Mrs Lonsky's convictions, since she is ultra-ultra-ULTRA left wing and is heavily into astrology, meditation, self-healing, and is a licensed masseuse... and she used to own a health food store. The other sons vary in their political beliefs. But basically the whole family is what you would describe as VERY unconventional.

Before I go on and on about that, the point is that Pete's sister, the only daughter of the family, got sick suddenly while he was there. Then Pete went home to CA... and a week later, Anne, his sister, died. It was ovarian cancer, I guess. Apparently she'd had it and been treated for it (but how she was treated I don't know, since the Lonsky's aren't believers in modern medicine, and for all I know she was treated with home remedies of some sort) but the cancer had come back, and she went very quickly. She was 45.

Very sad. Especially since she was the only girl... Pete's mom was broken up, but by the time I saw her she'd recovered and was her usual self.

Well... they decided to cremate her, and then hold a memorial later. Which they did just this past weekend. So Pete came back in from CA, and called me up to invite me over for dinner afterwards. So off I went, and had dinner with the whole family. The Lonsky's have always been like a second family to me, and they are, despite their way-out quirks, the nicest people in the world. Talented, artistic, whacky, intelligent, resourceful... they're interesting people. One of the brothers is a religious guy who built this amazing log and stone cabin (they all, except for Pete, live in a tight area around the main house, a refurbished barn... but it's a vast tract of land, so some of the houses aren't even visible from the main house... and the view, by the way, is amazing, since the property is at the top of a sprawling hill) and brews his own beer, root beer, makes his own wine, etc. Another brother has a very successful R&B band---11 piece, with horns and all, and his own studio...

Well, anyway... the only fault they have is that their wild beliefs can sometimes spill overboard into the weird. Over the years, I've noticed an increasing and disturbing tendency for them to go in for lots of conspiracy theories. In fact, any conspiracy theory you can think of, they know about it and believe in it. Now, the only thing that redeems this is that they treat everything with humor----they're not proselytizers or anything.... they're not out to preach or get converts, and they're never serious... but they do, nevertheless, believe these things.

Since I've never heard them espouse anything really awful, like anti-semitic stuff or whatever, it's never really bothered me. I just blow it off and laugh at it.

One topic in particular came up over dinner, that they all decided to needle me with, because they know it galls me... and this is their passionate belief that we did not, repeat not, go to the moon with the Apollo program. That it was all faked.

Now, you can imagine, knowing me, that I find this kind of thing to be not only ridiculous but offensive. So we had a nice table debate about it... unfortunately with the entire family, including mom, ganging up on me. I tried to tell them that the Van Allen radiation belt was not dangerous unless the astronauts had *lingered* in it, which they did not... I tried to point out that alpha, beta, gamma, and x-rays are all different, and repelled in different ways... I tried to tell them that there is really nothing tricky about going to the moon... and that the reason we didn't go back is because no one cared about it once we were there. I tried to tell them that the so-called photographic anomalies are all easily explainable. That late 60's technology WAS up to getting us to the moon.... that, above all, IF the moon landings had been faked---it would have been a huge conspiracy, and SOMEONE would have talked... and moreover, the Russians would have found out, and made the US the world laughing stock for it.

They scoffed at everything I said and remained firm in what they believed in, because they'd been won over by crackpot non-scientists who think they know better than real scientists, who think they see falsity in the most easily-explained things, and dream up huge conspiracies instead of accepting the simple fact that we could and did go to moon. (I forgot to ask if the Lonsky's had heard of Occam's Razor).

Anyway, I thought I'd tell you about this, feeling you'd probably react the same way I did.

I came away wanting to make at least Pete realize how silly all this is, but part of me doesn't care.