textfiles/magazines/HOE/hoe-0610.txt

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   ooooo   ooooo  .oooooo.  oooooooooooo       HOE E'ZINE RELEASE #610
   `888'   `888' d8P'  `Y8b `888'     `8
    888     888 888      888 888           My Second Hoe Article by RottenZ
    888ooooo888 888      888 888oooo8
    888     888 888      888 888    "                by RottenZ
    888     888 `88b    d88' 888       o               5/6/99
   o888o   o888o `Y8bood8P' o888ooooood8
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        Despite being repeatedly told that there were no signs of an
 impending apocalypse contained within in my menstrual blood, Geoffrey
 insisted, upon the beginning of each of my cycles, to analyze it none the
 less.  This frustrating and, quite frankly, puzzling event had been going
 on for the last eight years, ever since the month that Geoffrey and I had
 begun dating, back in the spring of 96.  He was then as he remained until
 the end: polite, eloquent, devilishly handsome, with that bizarre twinkle
 in his eye that makes you wonder if he really is a genius or just
 completely crazy.  He had always seemed to be perfect in every way.  So
 when this one peculiar singularity, this one act so strange popped up, I
 could hardly break up with him for it.  I mean, for God's sake, it's hard
 enough in this life to find someone you can stand to be around for more
 than a couple of hours, much less a lifetime.  And I'd always possessed
 that feeling about Geoffrey, that he and I were meant to be together.
 Right from the start.  So when he began to request small portions of the
 "monthly discharge", I obliged with only a bit of trepidation.

        It was two long years of doing this before I got to the motive
 behind this exchange, and it was, in itself, almost as off-putting as the
 event itself.  Before, when I'd dared to ask him about it, he would become
 agitated and refuse to talk to me about it.  Finally, however, once I found
 the good sense to stop allowing him his samples until he "spilled the
 beans".  After a long bout of heated exchanges, where I even at one point
 believed he might strike me, he finally calmed down and came forth with the
 answer.  He claimed to believe that, contained within the complex chemical
 structure of this specific blood sample, there was some sort of code.  If
 broken, this code would help him determine when the end of the world would
 come, and how it would begin.  This is all he would tell me.  No matter how
 I begged and pleaded, he wouldn't let me in on how he came to this
 conclusion, or why my menstrual blood, in particular, was so key in this
 process.  He did assure me, repeatedly, that he loved me a great deal, and
 was not with me solely for the purpose of obtaining the samples.  He also
 admitted that he had not broken the code, as of yet.

        Of course, I thought the whole concept was madness.  At first I
 laughed.  For a long time I laughed.  Weeks and weeks I couldn't stop
 laughing about it, at the most unpredictable times.  And then the crying
 came; that lasted even longer.  Finally, after about a year of fretting
 over my fianc<6E>e's apparent insanity, I finally was able to get over, or at
 least, push aside, this lingering concern.  Life was going well; Geoffrey
 and I were married, he had accepted a well-paying job at a chemical company
 in southern New Hampshire, and our first child was on the way.  Geoffrey
 hadn't wanted a child, at least not so early in our marriage, and although
 he never admitted to it, I think that the absence of my cycle during
 pregnancy had a strong influence on his feelings.  Well, unfortunately for
 him, I became pregnant, and I was sure as hell not going to give up my
 child so that he could continue his experiments.  After little Samson was
 born, those experiments continued, as did life in general.  And life was good.

        Things went very quickly from good to bad, when Samson died.  He had
 been a bright, engaging child, with his father's strong curiosity.  This
 led him, at the tender age of three, to places he ought not go, and while
 we did our best to always keep an eye on him, Samson was quite good at
 weaseling out of our sights and protection.  On the last day of his life
 I'd left him in the care of Geoffrey while I went out to the store.  All I
 needed was a gallon of milk and some shortening so I could complete a
 recipe I was working on for dinner.  I was only gone for fifteen minutes.
 When I got back, Geoffrey was in the basement, working out of that
 make-shift home lab of his, and Sam had found a way to escape from his play
 pen upstairs.  I don't like having to recount that day.  Suffice to say
 that his body was found, downstream of the creek that runs by our house,
 several days later.  It had been running high due to a bout of severe
 rainstorms, and Samson, who must have gone down to explore the raging gush of water, more than likely did not have a chance against the undertow.  A
 grown man would have had difficulty remaining standing in the creek.  And
 Samson was only three.

        The sense of betrayal I felt after this event was crippling to me;
 we each had, on many occasions, gone elsewhere in the house when Sam was
 playing in his little pen in the upstairs living room, so it wasn't as if
 Geoffrey had done something unusual on that day.  Still, that didn't stop
 me from laying the blame directly onto him.  The next sample he took after
 that event seemed to shake him up, although he would not give me the
 details as to why.  A week later he left our home completely, taking
 everything that he owned, while I was out at my therapy session.  I haven't
 seen him since.

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 [ (c) !LA HOE REVOLUCION PRESS!    HOE #610 - WRITTEN BY: ROTTENZ - 5/6/99 ]