Posers
Last names may be changed. Which option is better, before or after?
Margaret Peppard or Margaret Dykehouse
Mary Seneca or Mary Peppard
Parker Seneca or Parker Peppard

Pete Winter, Kari Putterman, and Anya Kamenskaya remain their inimitable selves.

New ideas include: a story about Mary's daily attendance of Mass, "Merry Cannibals," and a story about the multi-layered web of lies that is Parker's life, "Blind. Stinking. Panic." Of course, before any of that I need to finish In Search of the Perfect Lesbian. Another new idea, "Whatever Happened to Red China?," but I haven't figured out if it's a Pete or Parker story yet.

Wilson
I keep waiting, searching for the perfect way to say this, but the end result is that I say nothing. No more waiting. Since 9/11, my dad had become a racist. He's a Nazi, only his Jews are Muslims. If asked directly, he denies hating all Muslims, but then launches into a tirade about how the Wahhabi sect - admittedly, a bunch of really bad guys - are secretly taking over every mosque in America. He claims not to hate all Muslims, but then he describes them as mindless tools of radical clerics. He believes it is only a matter of time before "the enemy within" tries to impose Taliban-style Islamist law (no music, mandatory beards, burqas, etc.) here in the U.S. I try to tell him the idea is absurd, that the Supreme Court just struck down a law that barred sodomy on purely moral grounds, that the people of Dearborn are not trying to take away my sister's right to leave the house unescorted by a close male relative, but he refuses to listen. My dad has always been an asshole, but at least he used to be smart. I tell him that his current beliefs are beneath a man of his intelligence, that a few years ago he would not have tolerated in his house the kind of hatred he now preaches, but he simply responds that now his eyes are open. He keeps our front door deadbolted because he thinks his persistant letters to the Flint Journal might someday make him a target for our local Muslim extremists. When President Bush repeats over and over again that we are not at war with Islam, my father scowls because he thinks we should be. Since 9/11, my father has become an unwitting accomplice of Osama bin Laden; both men see an inevitable "race war" between Christianity and Islam and are doing all they can to bring it about.

Until I was seventeen, I worshipped my father. There is a line from the movie Fight Club about our fathers being our models for God, and for the first part of my life this was largely true for me. Now my father is a Nazi. My father is everything he raised me to oppose, moreso now than ever before. I fear it is in lot of every Wilson to go mad in his old age. If this is so, it will be a mercy to die at sixty.