THE EIGHTY-NINTH PAGE

While in hunting country, I also purchased a couple of guns and sequestered them away in the car tool department in the back of the Toyota. Dangerous up there; never know when a bear would attack the car--you bet, officer.

My return route took me through New Hampshire and Vermont ablaze with autumnal splendor. I found it highly inspirational and immediately began to figure out how to pop something into the mail that if it didn’t warm my editors heart could burn off every hair on his head.

As I rode past a fiery stand of maples and oaks, I vowed to dig out my internet downloads on old Ted W’s techniques and prepare an incendiary little riff on them. I have read every word I could find on the Unabomber and his techniques. His harming of innocent people is deplorable; happily, I was dealing with the guilty who were owed no mercy and surely tucked away in a moldering self-help section of a Yankee book barn I’d be able to find a bomb-making book. My editor was a burning issue for me, although I did not deem it explosive. A timid fire-bomb would do. Just enough to set his desk on his fire and wake him from his desk-side slumbers. That sounded like a nice project for a winter’s afternoon after I returned from my tour.