This Blue Ball | Page 3

ever- changing series of zombie computers and
anonymizers.
But please do continue your fruitless efforts. There is no such thing as perfect security, or

true predictability in complexity, and some one of you may find a way in, may find some
distant trace of my identity and chart your way back to me. Nothing is impossible, and if
I were a betting man, I would have to go with the Vegas odds of my meeting a fate
similar to Craig Phissure's. But as long as it can, the show will go on.
No. 2 -- Gary Corinth was a man of some destiny: not that you would recognize it from
looking at him. He was non-descript in the way that overweight, balding, self-conscious
and arrogant men sometimes are, a face with pock marks and an assortment of pimples, a
dirty-looking, poorly shaved chin, blue- gray eyes disproportionately small to the jowls
and ears, glasses that bore the blue-green tinge of years of neglect. It's not a pleasant face
-- more spiteful than helpful, more vengeful than intelligent -- a pallid face that betrays
the softness of a life lived in air-conditioned spaces, but still bearing the weight of a
lifetime of metaphorical boots in the face. He did not enjoy life much, en gros, but there
was something driving him, something that his defeatism and anger and envy did not
engender and could not utterly vanquish. He may not have recognized it, but others did.
He worked for a software/hardware company as an engineer of some sort. Because he did
not excel at his trade, he tended to be fungible -- moved from one project or division to
the other in the expectation that he would see the writing on the wall and leave his
employer for another. Gary was nothing if not tenacious, well beyond what served his
career. He would retool grimly, come to work on time, clock his hours and go home, to
one knows not what. He did not socialize and was not expected to. In a defining moment,
he bragged to a colleague about having gone to Thailand as a sexual tourist over the
holidays. That little story made the rounds quickly, leading to wobbly Hula dolls and
blurry child pornography appearing in his cubicle, and a reprimand from his boss for
making the work environment difficult for nearby female coworkers. None of them
would admit to having made the report, and none probably did. While they seemed to
think Gary was an inveterate pervert, they doubted in more than one conversation that he
did more than jerk off in his living room. Gary never said a word about any of this,
including the reprimand, but he was quite sure it was part of the management campaign
to geld and pasture him.
Gary's plans tended to cross a certain threshold of respectability, and eventually got him
into the whole blue ball mess. One day, long after the Thai incident but not so long that it
was forgotten, both for its tawdriness and its allure, Gary decided to put a truism from
"Dear Abby" to the test. He resolved to go to a church to meet a nice young woman,
hopefully younger than he, svelte and attractive in an understated way, and just repressed
enough to find in him an unexpected savior from spinsterhood. This was an experiment,
in the sense that he often undertook experiments to see how his best intentions were
squelched and undermined by a cruelly indifferent life force that lay somewhere outside
of him. He saw nothing contradictory in the fact that he undertook this from the point of
view of a sexual adventure, not as an assay in love. There was precious little in Abby's
constant refrain that demanded more than a superficial adherence to what was good and
moral and just. And Gary saw no contradiction in reading her column regularly, even
religiously.
Much to Gary's surprise, it just so happened that Abby was right. At every church he

visited, there were groups with earnest young women, who were to a one surprised to
find themselves single at an age when so many of their cohort had married and bought
cars and houses, and perhaps even engendered offspring. Still, desperate or not, these
women were hardly interested in him. At one point, Gary figured they smelled something
of the impostor in him -- so he decided to practice authenticity. He volunteered for
committees, and showed up for bake sales and informational nights when no one but the
organizers did. He went to church every Sunday, and sometimes on a Wednesday,
without fail for almost a year. It was a monumental effort, and for a very long time he had
nothing to show for it but the occasional pat on the back, and