Q- You're something of an anomaly, well known on the Internet, not so much in print. How is that?

A- Simple. The big publishers were a closed shop, while the Internet was wide open.

Q- So you just started your own site and self-published?

A- No. My homesite gets a fair number of hits, but it was Michael Hart and Project Gutenberg who really put me on the map.

Q- For those who don't know, what is Project Gutenberg?

A- They can tell their own story best, and anyone who wants to can look it up online. What little I know is that when the Internet was first starting up, someone gave Michael Hart an ungodly amount of storage space, to use as he saw fit. He decided to create the world's largest library, and with the help of hundreds of volunteers, he did. Now three of my books can be downloaded from their main site, and countless satellites throughout the world. Most of these are Universities and international sites, which makes me feel really good:  what the Internet is supposed to be.

Michael Hart and company, you rock.

Q- It doesn't bother you that you're not rich and famous?

A- Not really. Would I like to see my books on the shelves of bookstores, my picture on the back, have film versions made of them, live the high life? Sure, but there are other ways, and living in the real world keeps you grounded, able to write about what really matters.

Q- Online publishing is enough for you now?

A-  Yes.  To me electronic publishing is the future. While there will always be books, more and more people are getting their information and entertainment online, on laptops, cell-phones, etc. And when we move off into Space, that's the only way books efficiently go. And through the necessary combination of self-assertion and those who gave me a chance - gotta have it, and anyone who says they made it all on their own is a liar - I'm in on the ground floor.

A- So would you call yourself successful?

Q- That’s not one of my favorite words. ‘Success.’ A lot of people who are called that, end up destroying themselves and those they love. I'm the writer I want to be, have stayed true to myself, and the future is (literally) an open book.  If people are still reading my stuff in fifty years, I'll call that successful, though the people I care about are far more important to me now.

Q- Who are the people who've helped you?

A- When I was in my twenties, I had the honor and priviledge of corresponding with Ray Bradbury for ten years, nicest guy you'll ever meet. His stuff was great, lots of people were reading it, but he never forgot his roots in the Midwest, or the struggles of his family during the Great Depression. My only criticism, as I told him toward the end of the ride, was that as he got older his books were losing focus, and the average ones pushing the great ones off the shelf. But it’s his life, his writing, and I think “Farenheit 451,” “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” and all those amazing short stories will last in any case.

Q- He couldn’t help you with the print publishers?

A- He tried, but when you’re that high up the ladder, you’ve really lost touch with people at the entry level.

Q- Are you bitter about those years, pouring yourself into your writing and not finding publishers to put you out there?

A- No. And I don’t want to give the impression that they never gave me a chance. I’ve had some people in big publishing houses read my work. The problem was they wanted to change me, and my writing, which I couldn't, wouldn't do. Lou Aronica, then Editor-in-Chief of Bantam Spectra, liked “Within a Crimson Circle,” but wanted me to completely rewrite it based largely on his idea. I’d sweated bullets on it, gone over every word, sentence and paragraph thirty to fifty times -

Q- No exaggeration?

A- No. So the idea of starting again from page 40 or so….. I just couldn’t do it. And a junior editor at another big NYC publisher read it, but thought I had tried to do too much with it. And so it went, no one saying I couldn't write, but that I had to be more like others, if not writing formula novels - gag - then at least those that could be easily marketed within an established genra.  I just couldn't do it.

Q- No compromise?

A- I don’t want to sound like a hard-ass or a Don Quixote, but if you’re going to spend your entire life trying to master a difficult art-form (the hardest one I know), and base every major life decision on it….. I write what I write. It’s what moves me, what matters to me, and if other people don’t like it, okay, don't read it, or write your own.  Don't try to change mine.

Q- Did you try the smaller publishers?

A- Of course. But at the risk of sounding negative - God, I hate that word - let me give you another example. I had earned a decent chunk of money, so found a good company (there are a lot of bad ones) and self-published “Highland Ballad,” which sold out in local bookstores, but the publisher's couldn't care less. I sent copies to every single reputable publisher in the United States, and got one meaningful reply.

Q- What was it?

A- A very sincere young woman from one of the larger houses liked it, and passed it on to her boss. Completely unimpressed, this fat spider wrote back saying, “It’s obviously self-published,” as if that was a crime, followed by, “What are the sales figures, demographics, reviews?” What she was doing, in essence, was brow-beating her subordinate for not being as cynical as she was, and actually reading something that didn't come from an agent, an agent they knew, someone without an extensive publishing history (how do you get one to begin with?) and on down the long list of things she wouldn't accept, and that made it impossible for a newcomer to break in.  The stone silence of the other two-hundred and forty-nine publishers will tell you they more or less agreed.

Q- There's a contradiction here.  You're saying it's not that you never had a chance, but that in time no one would read your stuff?

A- It's a paradoxical world.  Both are true.  In the beginning, when I was feeling my way, people were open.  Once I'd found it, they weren't, at least not the big boys and girls.  Later, I actually signed contracts with two smaller publishers, but they were so amateurish, wanted to make the same kinds of changes, thought because we had a contract that gave them the right to, and I had to back out of both deals.

Q-  What kind of changes?

A-  The first was an online publisher, who must have spent a week on the manuscript, suggesting all kinds of changes.  I guess that's what she thought an editor does.  It's not, at least not a good one.  Again, if you want to write, write your own book, not mine.  The good thing to come out of it was that I realized I could do the same thing myself:  publish online, and have my writing exactly as I wanted it.

Q- And the second?

A-  This one was absolutely exasperating.  My best book, ARIEL, and they tried to tear it to pieces.  To make a long story short, it was a small print publisher, so I went along with it as far as I could.  But they kept questioning the most basic historical truths about the Roman Empire, the invasion of the Nordic barbarians, until I finally had to say the hell with it, find somebody else.  They gave me a lecture on their superiority, and folded six months later. 

Q-  Is that when you decided to self-publish on the Internet?

A- I was already leaning that way, but finally realized it was the only way I could be myself, have complete creative control, and stop pounding my head against a wall of stupidity.

Q-  Was this an act of faith or desperation?

A-  Both, and neither.  The Internet was a true human miracle to me, a way to bypass the middle-men and go straight to the readers. My stuff is out there, the way I want it, for anyone to read, and if I’m as good as I hope I am, it will be for a long time to come.

Q- How good are you?

A- I honestly don’t know.  Obviously I have confidence in my work, or I wouldn't have stuck at it so long.  I just happen to think an artist isn't the best person to judge his or her own work.

Q- Why ?

A- Because you get too close to it, and only know what it is to you. Don’t get me wrong, what it is to you is the only way you can judge it, but only for yourself. There have been writers who thought the sun rose and set on their books, when it really didn’t, and others who thought they had failed, but in fact had succeeded brilliantly.

Q- Can you give us an example of both?

A- That’s a tough one, because I don’t want to put down any writer who another reader dearly loves. On that note, the 'all-time greatest writer' is the one the individual reader loves best.  It's not a contest, and there's no way to rank them.  Beauty, including literary beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. 

But to give you an example of someone who undervalued his work, Tolkien, in his own introduction, thought “The Lord of the Rings” full of flaws, and too short. Was it? Fifty years and fifty million readers later, I’d call that a big No.

Q- Is he a favorite of yours?

A- Favorite writer, favorite person, literary father. His writing gave me hope when all seemed black, and I don't just mean writing, but life, health, and the bane of my generation:  drugs, and the sometimes irreparable harm they do.  I still go back to "Lord of the Rings" when real life becomes ugly and mean.  There's nothing wrong with escape if it helps you to survive.

Q- There are people in the literary world who say he wasn’t a great writer because he wrote fantasy. What do you say to them?

A- Nothing.

Q- It doesn’t bother you?

A- Of course it bothers me. But his success, in this case real, speaks for itself.

Q- About your own books, you wrote science fiction when you were younger, and historical fiction later on?

A- Yes, and the science fiction novels are actually what I’m best known for.  At least so far.

Q- These are books you wrote when you were how old?

A- “The Mantooth” I started when I was twenty-one, and finished when I was twenty-eight. “Oberheim (Voices), a chronicle of War,” I began at twenty-five, and finished around thirty. Of course there's an overlap, as I later went back and rewrote them both. Still, they’re a younger man’s books, in a genra I had more or less moved on from.

Q- Not the ones you would have expected to do well?

A- I wouldn’t go that far. I’ll always love “The Mantooth” because it was my first true novel. It was also begun as I was slowly escaping from my personal hell. And there’s a naïve wisdom in youth that I never want to lose. As you get older you become disillusioned, rightly or wrongly, and your work tends to become darker, more fatalistic. Maybe more realistic, I don’t know. But I never want to lose the beautiful dreamer I was at seventeen. And that may in fact be what appeals to people about it. Like Tolkien, there’s such hope and yearning. Does everything come up roses? Of course not. It doesn't in "Lord of the Rings," either, though a lot of people miss that.  But I love Kalus, Sylviana, Akar and the rest.  And I love the story, which is so pure.  Whenever I need a pleasant surprise about my writing, I go back to "The Mantooth" or "Highland Ballad."  "Oberheim," too, though in a different way.

Q- Do you want to give us a brief synopsis of the two for which you're best known.

A-  Sure. "The Mantooth" is set on Earth, 10,000 years after nuclear holocaust.  While other animals have evolved forward (and I think they've always been a lot more intelligent than we give them credit for), man has regressed, de-evolved into a Neanderthal state.  But the main character is born fully human, and is therefor made an outcast.  Then he meets a young woman from the Twenty-first Century, as much out of time and place as he is.  Any more than that would be giving the story away.

Q- And "Oberheim."

A-  "Oberheim" is about a war in Space, which begins when a rogue nation starts its own sick form of ethnic cleansing.  But it's quickly taken over by the larger galactic powers, including the United States, who try to wipe out the last vestiges of socialism, including the resurgent East Germans.

Q-  So the normal good guys, us, become the bad guys?

A-  Exactly.  The whole point is that every nation or group of nations have at one time or another worn the mantle both of hero and villain.  It's human nature, not nationality, that keeps us killing each other.

Q-  Sounds pretty controversial.  Have you received a lot of negative feedback?

A-  No.  In fact it's my most popular book.  The readers seem to understand that I'm not bashing America, only showing what we're all capable of. 

Q-  Want to talk about your historicals?

A-  Absolutely.  "Highland Ballad" may in fact be a novella, and the thing I like, which other readers have observed, it that it takes you right to the time and place.  Doesn't really need any other introduction.  "The Dark Trilogy," soon to become "The Dark Quartet," will be my life's work, spanning twenty years.

Q- Why so long? 

A-  Tolkien spoke of familial and other duties he did not ignore.  Neither did I.  Kids take work and money, but most of all they take time, and if you don't give it to them - I don't care for what reason - then you've failed as a human being.  There was a big gap in the middle of my career when I did little else, writing screenplays to keep my hand in, but not really able to tackle a long and intense novel such as "The Dark Trilogy."

Q-  You consider it a single work?

A-  That's for the reader to decide.  Don't mean to keep coming back to Tolkien, but "Lord of the Rings" was never meant to be a Trilogy, though it reads brilliantly either way.  Again, I'm just the writer.  It's the reader who's got to meet me halfway, bringing his or her own ideas, images and interpretations.  That's the beauty of reading that you don't get from movies.

Q-  How so?

A-  In films the audience's work is mostly done for them; all they have to do is sit and watch.  They're led through the story rather than exploring it, never have the chance to create their own imagery, and essentially (with few exceptions) told what to think and feel.  Don't get me wrong; it's a beautiful medium, combining all the art forms at once.  But for me there's not that miraculous communion between reader and writer.  That's why I hope books will last, so long as there are souls who don't need to have their art set before them on a silver platter.  Life and meaning take work.

Q-  But people are definitely reading less, aren't they, watching films, TV, doing things online.  Do you think the novel will survive?

A-  I sure as hell hope so.  Kurt Vonnegut said he felt obsolete, that words on a page were no longer needed or wanted.  I hope he's wrong.  Beautiful man, though, and ironically, the film adaptation of "Slaughterhouse Five" is among the best films I've ever seen.

Q-  Shall we take a break, come back later?

A-  Absolutely.

*

Q-  Back for more?

A-  I guess. 

Q-  You seem less than enthusiastic.

A-  I wouldn't go that far.  But I am bipolar.

Q-  Good time to talk about that?

A-  An honest time, maybe.

Q-  All right.  What's the difference between bipolar and split personality?

A-  There's no comparison, and the one doesn't evolve out of the other unless it's severe to begin with, and the person refuses to get help.  As my brother says (hi, Paul), two percent of the population suffer from Bipolar Disorder, and ninety percent of the battle is admitting there's a problem and getting help.

Q-  Did you have trouble admitting it?

A-  Are you kidding?  It was one of the most awful and terrifying moments of my life.  No one wants to think they're mentally ill, or face the terrible stigma that goes with it.

Q-  But you did admit it?

A-  Yes, after years of not understanding my behavior, seeing the world as a dark and terrible place, not being a good husband and father for a time.  That's what really hurts.

Q-  How did you finally know you were?

A-  I'd been depressive, at times severely, since high school.  This was temporarily alleviated by anti-depressants, which put me into a euphoric state instead.  It couldn't last.  They began to make me very irritable, and a doctor, another bipolar, said almost angrily, "Maybe you're bipolar."  Of course I mentally flipped him off, but it got me thinking.  I knew other bipolars from an anonymous program I belonged to for a time.

Q-  Can't tell us which one?

A-  I'd like to, because they help a lot of people.  But that's their rule.  All I'll say is that if you're suffering from any kind of addiction, there's probably a twelve-step program out there that can help you.

Q-  Like AA?

A-  Like AA.

Q-  So an irritated doctor said you might be, and you knew some people who were.  Surely that wasn't enough to suddenly convince you you were mentally ill?

A-  Back up for a second, and then I'll answer your question.  My prescribing psychiatrist says bipolar isn't mental illness, but a biochemical imbalance of the brain.  My psychologist says it is.

Q-  Who's right?

A-  Both of them.  Medically, your brain chemistry is unbalanced, which can be treated.  Psycologically, there are definitely steps you have to take, and things you have to be aware of.

Q-  Such as?

A-  You've absolutely got to see a psychologist, and tell the truth about your symptoms.  Someone I loved very much wouldn't, and goes crashing through her life like a rogue elephant, alternating between rage and despair.....  Well, that's one person, and a negative example.

I'd suggest to anyone who isn't sure, who alternates between depression and euphoria, despair and mania, that you enter 'Bipolar Test' on any major search engine.  There are good ones and bad ones, but that's how I finally knew.  Then, thank God, I already had a psychologist from years back, and she confirmed the diagnosis.

From there you've got to get educated, take a few classes, find the right medicines - which is frustrating because it takes a long time to get the right balance - and not be too proud to see your psychologist when things get rough.  I must admit, I probably don't do that as much as I should.

Q-  So there is no Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde?

A-  I want to say absolutely not, and I will say it to my lesser case:  Bipolar II, non-delusional.  While I have strong moods, and they can carry my thoughts along with them for a time, I no longer act out.  Thank God.  But a Bipolar One who refuses to get help?  There might as well be.  Because you're going to be dealing with someone who is one way one day, and completely another the next.  That, along with behavior you completely can't understand, are to me the definition of mental illness.

Q-  What's the hardest thing about being bipolar?

A-  Being bipolar.  I'm not being sarcastic, that's the honest answer.  Every day you have control your moods, not give in to destructive, or self-destructive impulses.

Q-  Sounds dangerous.

A-  It can be.  I'm not.  The worst thing I would do at this point is say something I shouldn't, hurt someone I care about.  Then I usually ask for their forgiveness, and try to do better next time. 

But I don't want to give people the impression that bipolars are completely harmless.  Some are sweet as pie to others - like Jimi Hendrix - but terribly destructive toward themselves.  Hemingway was bipolar, and despite being a great writer, depending on the novel, seems to have been rough with his wives and indifferent to his children.  And of course he killed himself.  A lot of bipolar suicides.

Q-  Why?

A-  You just get so worn out by the constant mood shifts, from everything seeming black and hopeless one day (one hour, or one anything if you're rapid-cycling), and euphoric the next, from having tremendous bursts of energy, followed by complete lethargy, even stupor.  Try writing novels under those conditions.  It's hell sometimes.

Q-  How does it affect your writing?  Thematically I mean.

A-  Man, that's a tough one.  You can easily become dark and fatalistic, like Hemingway and Joseph Conrad were (severe depression in Conrad's case, I think, and at the time incurable).  What I try to do is present both sides:  life isn't hopeless, but it's no bed of roses, either.  It's hard as hell, and you'd better be willing to fight off the assholes and tyrants who try to make your life a living hell.  Or, in historical context, who made life a living (and dying) hell for their 'enemies':  the Inquisition, the Holocaust.  Forget about them and you don't know anything.

Q-  Okay, a way to connect directly to your writing, if I may.

A-  I wish you would.

Q-  Why?

A-  It's really hard talking about your own problems.  I'm sure when I read this back I'll be dissatisfied.  It's just too big a subject to be reduced to a few words.  I've often wondered if that's why I write novels:  to have a lot of words, a lot of time, and hopefully characters people can relate to who are going through such trials.   

Q-  A little more serious than our previous discussions.

A-  Yup, that's bipolar.

Q-  And on that note?

A-  Goodnight, sweet prince. 

*

Q- Shall we try again?

A-  Sure.

Q-  Stick to literature this time?

A-  Works for me.

Q-  So.  Looking over your books, who would you say are your most powerful characters.

A-  Hard to say on the earlier ones, because they're like children who've grown up and left home.  Maybe the one I like the most is Mary Scott, from Highland Ballad.

Q-  What makes her special to you?

A-  I think that though we try not to, just as we try not to have a favorite child, men writers tend to have an ideal woman, and women an ideal man.  I wanted Mary to be very human, and I think she is, but her courage and her loyalty are everything I've ever sought in a woman.  Maybe, like Ayn Rand's Howard Roark, this makes her a shade unreal.  But only a shade.  I knew someone like her, loved her for the best part of a lifetime.  But in the end she couldn't live up to expectations, and more to the point, she wasn't mine.

Q-  And Michael Scott?

A-  Absolutely, and for many of the same reasons.  He lived in physical reality what I live every day with my various illnesses.  His back is against the wall, everything and everyone he loves in danger, he is pushed to the last extremity, but has to hang on.  And he loves Mary so purely, so passionately.  Though surprisingly (to me) I don't get as many downloads of HIGHLAND BALLAD as I do of my science fiction, I think it's definitely my best love story, and in many ways the best that I am.  It wasn't long after life got cold and rough beyond the point of romance and poetry, and you have to write what you're really feeling, thinking.  The short word for it is disillusion.  I'm glad I wrote HIGHLAND BALLAD before that happened.

Q-  And now you write historical fiction?  Why?

A-  A lot of reasons.  For one, if you think about it, it's the one kind of fiction that can never be dated.  Also, the secret to human nature doesn't lie in the future, bu tin the past.  In the present, too, of course, but in order to understand where  we're going, it's important to know where we've been.  I write some contemporary fiction, too, but it doesn't take me there the way history does.  Just imagining what the people in the Dark Ages had to go through launched me well into the Dark Trilogy, someday, I hope, the Dark Quartet.  I've been writing it over a twenty year period, and never once grew tired of it.

Q-  All right, then, same question:  most compelling characters, and why.

A-  I don't think there's any question that Cassius is the most powerful character I've ever created.

Q-  The disillusion Roman soldier.

A-  Yes.

Q-  Why?  Because he's the most like you?

A-  No, because he's the most unlike me.  He's everything I wished I could be, and everything I'm glad I'm not.

Q-  Everything you wished you could be?

A-  Aggressive, unyielding, forceful, the consummate survivor.

Q-  And everything you're glad you're not?

A-  Understanding that he mellows with time, he was a terrible husband and father to his first family, and lost them because of it.  While I won't be that hard on myself, I made some of the same mistakes, and have sworn never to be that way again.

Q-  Then why create a character that is, or certainly was.  He reads (my opinion) like the classic anti-hero:  not a good man, but the only one who can save his friends and family from the vicious world around them.

A-  It's interesting.  I wrote HIGHLAND BALLAD as a Gothic novel, without knowing what a Gothic novel was.  And I created (I agree) a classic anti-hero without knowing what an anti-hero was.

Q-  His foil, I suppose, or simply someone completely unlike him is the eventual narrator, Gaius.  Would you agree with that assumption.

A-  Yes.  And just as Gaius is so permeated by Cassius' opinions and hard commands.....  It's hard to explain.  It's like one part of me trying to deal with the other part.  Gaius is young, naive, a dreamer.  But for all those same reasons he is beautiful, and the best character I could find to tell the tale of the company as a whole, because he feels so much, struggles to understand it, and is in constant conflict with himself.

Q-  First person vs. omniscient narrator:  what are the important differences.

A-  Now you're getting down to it, what writer's do, and the choices they make.  An all-knowing narrator can see everything, both inside and out, and thus bring more detail, more all inclusive story.  But a first person narrator sees thrings from the inside out, the reader with him if he's done it well.  He doesn't have all the answers, struggles to understand, to love and survive, and thus speaks to the individual reader in a way that can be more intimate.  But boy do you have to do it well, because the reader's going to be right there with him for a long time.  If he's not interesting, not multi-faceted, doesn't see and feel things in a lot of different ways, the reader will just lose interest.

Q-  Gaius is bipolar, as you are?

A-  Yes.  Yes.  Yes.

Q-  And so struggles with a lot of the things that you do?

A-  Absolutely.  He's the beautiful dreamer I used to be, slowly disillusioned, trying desperately to find some underlying meaning to it all.

Q-  What meaning do you find?

A-  In my writing, obviously, in my children, though they're mostly grown.  It has a lot to do with what you leave behind because, I don't care who you are, you're not going to achieve everything you want to.  And even those who do, brilliant artists, athletes and historical figures, it's not going to be the way you expect it, and you're still going to age and lose everything in the end.  Except what you leave behind.

A-  So our own lives only exist for those who come after.

Q-  Of course not.  I had such beautiful dreams there was almost no way life could ever live up to them.  But some of them came true:  writing, family.  I got the things I absolutely needed, and had a wonderful childhood I can always look back on when things get bleak.

What I'm trying to impart, though it may not be a popular lesson, is that dreams and goals and ambitions all have their place, but it you miss love and family along the way then you've wasted your life, no matter what you achieve.  And it's often the things that happen along the way, while you were looking beyond them, that mean everything in the end.

Q-  You seem to speak of the end a lot.  Is that due to your age, 52.

A-  Yes and no.  I've always had health problems, and so never know how long I've got.  It brings a different perspective.

Q-  Did you ever nearly die?

A-  Yes.  Not to sound morbid, but death and I are old companions.  When I was five years old I was breaking open milkweed stalks outside and nearly died of asthma.  If it wasn't for a stubborn as hell paramedic kneeling over me in the ambulance and forcing the air into my lungs as I cried.....  I owe that man my life.

Q-  Pretty intense for a five year old.

A-  Yes, and I was a pretty intense five year old.  I still have an old photo taken of me in kindergarten, a portrait, in which I'm staring down the cameraman like I'm going to kill him.  Not sure where that was coming from, but it's there.

Q-  Talk about childhood?

A-  Sure, that's the good stuff, with the notable exception of the nuns beating the crap out of me in Catholic School.

Q-  No exaggeration?

A-  None.  I committed mortal sin in fourth grade, kissed a girl on the forehead.  The horrible old mother superior came down and slapped me so hard my head bounced of the cinderblock wall behind, snarling, "Monster!"  You don't forget a thing like that.

Q-  So it's not just the priests molesting boys?

A-  No, and may they all rot in their own self-created hell.  The nuns were a terror to my father, to myself, and one psychotic bitch kept my sister after school, told her God had chosen her, and kissed her on the lips.  It's sick, unnatural and unforgivable.  So if I seem like I give the Catholic Church through history a hard time, do a little research.  Most of them wouldn't know Jesus if he kicked them in the ass, which he probably would have done.  "Suffer the little children," means love and indulge them, not make them suffer.

Q-  Pretty serious stuff.

A-  Yes.  The ones I really feel for, both boys and girls, are those who were completely under the power of the priests and nuns, who looked to them for God's love, and instead were raped and traumatized by them.  It happened so often in the Spanish Philippines that there's a name for them:  'daughters of the confessional.'  And between the priests and Conquistadores in the New World, not only were entire civilizations wiped out, but an entirely new race was begun.  It boggles the mind.  So the next time a Pope or Bishop or Priest or Nun tries to act virtuous and self-righteous.....  Well.  You won't see me inside a church unless there are major changes.

Q-  Like letting priests and nuns marry.

A-  Exactly.  It's unnatural for men and women to live alone, apart, with no children, no family.  Only a sick institution would even think of such a thing.  And lest that sound completely negative, my uncle was a priest, very unhappy, and met a nun, equally unhappy.  They both left the church, married, and though they're in their seventies, are two of the happiest people I know.  Come on.  Give life a chance.  Nature isn't evil, only twisted human nature.

Q-  On that note?

A-  Yeah.  I'd say that's more than enough for one night.