Chapter II: E-mail in the Sand
(February 2004 - March 2004)

"I hate systems that 1) Make no bloody sense 2) Work against me and 3) Won't allow me to follow its rules even if I try really, really hard. I'm fine with one or two, but the three link up together to form a circle - okay... fine, triangle - of doom."
-Zion "The Book" Cao Cao

In October 2003 I was informed by my employer that for work realted reasons they were going to have to ask me to do some traveling and that I would be living outside the US during the year 2004. At first I wasn't too happy about this, but with the Golden Shields dead and not much else happening in my life besides work, I eventually got over it and decided that I would be making a lot of money to do a very easy job that would be fun to brag about later. So it actully turned out to be a really good deal. While I was out of the country for that year I had a computer I brought with me to play games on and I had an internet connection. These two things weren't connected however, so while I could use the internet to check email, I couldn't use it to play any online games. That meant the Golden Shields was still out of my reach and had to remain dead for the time being. On the other hand I did get a fair amount of entertainment from Zion in the form of funny emails about stupid things happening in his life.

Zion was actually several years younger than myself, so while I was already out traveling the world and having wild adventures, he was stuck finishing his senior year of high school at a "special" school run by Denver University. By the time you read this the school in question may likely no longer exist due to the fact it was in the process of being shut down even when Zion was still there, but it was known as Denver University High School. Known as "DUHS" for short, the students unfortunate enough to attend this school had affectionately renamed it "Duh's" and made a point of using the word "duh" far more often in their daily speech than was nessary.

Here is an example of an email I received from Zion which describes a "normal" day at Duh's school. (Note that Zion makes several refrences to a person named "Bill" in this email. Because the internet connection I was using to view this email was maintained by my rather paranoid employer, I suspected that they might be monitoring my activity online. To be on the safe side I told Zion not to send anything he wouldn't want "Bill" to see.)

Although I'm reassured that things will not be deleted when I send I'm not sure I have alot of stories I want to share with Bill as well as you. At least until I have met Bill in some fashion. In fact, just about everything interesting that has happened is probably non-Bill material.

One thing that is particularly bugging me is Clayton, and I could care less if Bill hates Clayton. Clayton is a random freshman who is intimidated by me because I "nearly killed him" when he threw a cup of coke at my girlfriend, (and, luckily for him, missed. Does any of this sound too familiar to what happens at this BS school?) This involved running after him, while he decided to dart into the street into moving traffic, where I decided I didn't care enough to pursue him and he got lightly hit by a car.

He did make the mistake of handing his backpack to his friend before the throwing incident, so I claimed that property and came up behind him in the school five minutes later and put him in a strangle-hold. He was very surprised and suffered a minor nervous breakdown.

So anyway, this Romeo decides it would be just excellent to bring his date to school on Valentine's Day. Why this kid has a girlfriend I don't know, but evidently she looks like a horse and he hates her. Being a logical human being, however, Clayton bought her a $150 ruby necklace and tons of chocolates a few weeks ago, which is a hell of alot nicer than anything I've ever gotten for my girlfriend who I love and doesn't look like a horse. Moving on, because Clayton spent all that money, and then preceded to spend $60 on rose-petals, (which he probably got about three of with what prices are for flowers on Valentine's Day. I recommend chocolates but he has stupidly already done that one right before Valentine's day,) he didn't have any money for a hotel room.

So they decide to make the date at this room in the basement at school. This is disturbing for countless reasons. The first is how insanely romantic this concrete, rat infested closet is. There's no lights, no carpet, the brick is falling apart, there's about two inches of dust/dirt layering the floor, and the radiator has two settings. The first of which is off, in which case the room logically goes below freezing regardless of the temperature outside, and the second is "On like the inferno of hell" where the radiator will attempt, and usually fail, to explode itself in noise while it makes the room hotter than a confectioner's oven. The second reason this is great, (and the most important reason to me,) is that I periodically have uses for this room. I may have told you what we used this room for *my* freshman year. At the least it's a good place to have a private conversation with someone. And for some blasted reason it seems to be the only location for that in a four-square mile area.

So Clayton manages to steal a broken round cheap wooden table and two of those fold out aluminium chairs from somewhere, lay out rose petals, and get food presumably from some nearby fast-food place since he spent all his money on already dead petals. Not only is this the most romantic plan ever - but he has to top it off by locking the door with his bike-lock. I would imagine this arrangement would scare most girls, but to Clayton's credit he's about as strong as a weight-lifting ant, so there's not a hell of a ton of threat.

I then imagine he managed to have whatever malromantic date he was planning, (I don't think he could make it more impossible to have sex in there, and I doubt besides what girl - no matter how ugly - would still be interested, but I really don't want to think about that too much,) and left via the other door which is a fire exit that goes outside and locks behind you. Thereby managing to lock the room out for everyone, while leaving it stewn in the most bizarre arrangment imaginable when you look through the crack.

I come in to school yesterday cursing, "WTF is this?!?" and found out later when I put the pieces together. I intend to hit Clayton as hard as I can in the arm and then figure out where to procede from there. It's great that he also managed to seal shut a fire exit to the school in an even more thorough way than United Artist's sealed theirs.

Here is a bit of information that will come as a severe shock to some people and will be old news to others. Zion used that room to smoke marijuana on school grounds without being caught. Yes, thats right, Zion smoked marijuana. For the record though I believe that is the only drug he used at that time and he always told me the was aginst the use of ANY other drugs of any kind. I can actually name several occasions where friends of ours (namely Luke and Grant) were rumored to be using more dangerous drugs and Zion yelled at them for it because he knew how dangerous it was. The reason why many people may not have known Zion smoked marijuana is because, as previously mentioned, he lied to everyone. Zion would only admit that he used marijuana to people he knew also used it themselves or were trustworthy enough not to tell anyone what he was doing. If he knew someone didn't use drugs of any kind and/or would likely rat Zion out if they discovered he did, then he would go the exact opposite route and tell these people that he was also aginst the use of marijuana. Thus, only zion's close friends really knew what was going on and everyone else was under the impression that Zion was violently aginst the use of all drugs.

A difficult choice for some.

If you still have any reason to doubt that I'm telling the truth about this, then I'll convince you by telling you how Zion got away with it and thus prove I knew the full details about what was going on. In Zion's room in his parents house he had a trap door in his closet. This trap door passed through the attic and eventually opened up onto the roof. Zion's roof wasn't slanted like most roofs but was actually had a flat section on the top which was surrounded by the eaves of the house in such a way that it actually formed a short wall around this flat part of the roof. This meant that if someone was sitting down on this flat part of the roof then they would not be seen by anoyone on the ground or even anyone looking out of the windows of any other nearby houses. This obviously presented the option for a person to get up on the roof and do things up there that they might not want to be caught doing, eh? So Zion used the roof to smoke marijuana, drink alcholic beverages and probably do other things he didn't want to be caught doing. Any paraphernalia realted to these activites were stashed in the attic space between the two trap doors connecting the roof with Zion's room. Zion usually kept these items in a large garbage bag to expedite the process of moving them in the event he suspected they were about to be discovered. This actually worked well because when Zion would get into a large fight with his parents and have to leave the house for a few days, he usually didn't have the luxury of asking them to lend him luggage to pack his things in, so he would just pack as much as he could carry into garbage bags. The the bag full of asorted paraphernalia blended right in when it was time to leave.

To go even more in-depth on the subject of Zion's roof and the strange activity that took place up there, I'll tell you about the legendary "roof parties" that Zion would throw when his parents were out of town. These parties were exactly what they sounded like. Zion would invite people he trusted over to his house to smoke on the roof with him, then they would go back inside the house to act like idiots. In other words it was much like any other party a teenager would throw when his parents were out of town except that by having most of it take place on the roof Zion avoided getting caught. I don't smoke marijuana but I did attend one of the roof parties and even being the only person there who wasn't completely out of his mind, I found it quite entertaining. Grant wore sandals and burned his feet on Zion's roof (which had obviously been exposed to the hot sun all day). Luke somehow got lost in the basement of the house while he was looking for the kitchen. Zule jumped off the second floor balcony on a dare. And at one point Zion got this very strange "Bevis and Butthead" sort of look on his face right before he tried to stab me in the foot with a swiss army knife. A fun time was had by all. That was also the day we went to Brian Powers' house to kidnap him but failed because he apparently wasn't home. We did succeed in freaking his mom out when Zion introduced all of us by the fake names we used on the internet at the time rather than by real names. That caused a great deal of confusion.

Keep in mind, I'm not telling all of this now to make Zion look bad. Quite the opposite. I want to make sure everyone has ALL the facts available before they make a decision about exactly what kind of person Zion was and why he eventually made the choice he did. Of all the people I knew who used drugs, Zion was the most responsible about it. Atleast as responsible as someone using illegal substances can claim to be at any rate. A lot of my other friends who used drugs really mucked up their lives because of it. One friend of mine who would surely wish not to be named actually broke into my house while I was out of town and stole about $2000 worth of Paintball equipment and assorted electronics from me. A lot of others just generally fried their brains. I remember that the last time I talked to Grant to tell him Zion had died he didn't seem interested at all. I honestly don't think that guy is all there anymore and I've heard that he fell in with a bad group of people along with doing some very dangerous drugs. Compared to those people, Zion actually took pretty good care of himself and didn't let things get out of control as a result of drugs. Things DID eventually get out of control for Zion, but not as a result of drugs.

To get back on the subject of emails, Zion kept emailing me funny/stupid stories of things which happened to him at Duh's as well as stupid things happening with his girl friend, parents and some of our other old friends from Denver Academy. This inculded people wearing hot pants to protest a dress code, planning for the senior prank, disasterous "camping" trips, the school debate team making fun of Zion for being short and psychotic people going skiing. Finally on March 26th Zion makes his first mention of his evil plans for the Golden Shields.

Conor and I are probably going to launch a new Golden Shields at some point that will be a humor site. I'll admit Something Awful is a bit of our inspiration. Due to my time schedule it'll take at least a couple weeks to get off the ground, if it ever does, but I'll send you an email if it happens. You'd be welcome to write for it if you ever wanted to.

I knew this was a outstandingly stupid idea. Knowing Zion never listened to any of my advice however, I decided not to waste my time trying to convince him of that and decided to just go along with it in the hopes that when it failed he would be more agreeable to the idea of trying to get the guild started in another game again.

Meanwhile, Zion's crazy and somewhat slutty girl friend started getting uppity.

Ari basically proposed to me on Sunday. Actually, she did propose, there's simply no other way to put it. This is the fourth time that this has happened to me. I really don't want to be an asshole, but it's really friggin' irratating and I never know what to do about it. What the bloody hell am I suppose to say in response to that? I love her and all, but I really don't see how I'm suppose to marry her. She's a sophomore in high school, and still 16 for Christ's sake! I'm suppose to go away to college next year. Erk. I suppose I should tell you how this went, since I sure as hell can't tell anyone else about this.

For background we spent the entire day together on Saturday and I dropped her off at 12:15AM right after we had semi-accidently slept for two hours. (Literally as in eyes closed and asleep in this case.) Evidently her Mom, (although not her Dad,) is finially saavy as to the level of relationship we are at. I picked her back up at 9:30AM the next day. She told me that she couldn't sleep the previous night because she didn't have someone to hold, and then told me that something interesting had happened last night. She said her Mom had come into her room at three o'clock, thinking she was still out, woke her, and told her that, "I would be fine with the Moab trip if you and Terence were married."

I've been through this situation before, so that's generally when I got a quesy filling and realized the shit would likely hit the fan then or sometime fairly soon, (but that could be weeks away!) Ari pretty much stopped then and asked if I thought that was interesting. I gave some response asking about the Moab trip to avert the conversation of doom, but I wasn't fated to be so fortunate. Ari ignored my answer and asked me what I thought of that. I again turned the question away with an, "Oh, it is interesting that your Mom isn't so naive," and she asked me what I thought about marriage. At which point I did somehow manage to have a very candid conversation about it, but Ari also managed to directly ask me to marry her.

I guess we've been going out for over five months, so it's not a ludicrous thing to consider. She went on and on on Sunday about how she actually thinks her parents would give her permission, (Again, she's 16,) but today when I finally said the deadly words, "I don't know whether I'm ready for that committment," she said she'd rather wait until she was out of high school.

And those are deadly words. Relationship killers. But I don't know how else to put it. I don't know where I'm going to be in ten years. Hell, I have even less idea of where she will be. She's come up with half-crazy plans to generally follow me, but I doubt both their feasibility financially and my will to even consider allowing her to do that with her life. The other choice, of course, is to bail on my plans for life and go to DU or something. Bah, the pity is that I do love her, and I'm far more ready for that step than anyone since my preschool "girlfriend" Sinia.

Back to some form of reality, though. Okay, so assume I turn that down, which despite all my romantic principles is the most likely scenario. How do I a.) Continue a successful relationship with love and not just sex b.) When the time comes let her go without hurting her and c.) Go through the interesting stage with her when I decide to go to a college in anotherstate, (a choice I have to make before May 1st.)

Don't know why I asked you that, but I can't really tell anyone else because most my friends in Denver are fairly well acquanted with Ari. Or people like Grant or Luke whose opinion would work best if I did the exact opposite of what they suggested. I'm most worried about how to dump her so she can move on. She said alot of things to me today in a very condensed period like, "I don't think I'll be able to love anyone else as much as you," and "You are my whole life," and "I just can't sleep without you, and "I'm just so scared I'll lose you, do you understand how scared I am?" This is a major concern. Not, mind you, that I'll be unaffected by breaking up with her, but if I make that choice I'll find a way to deal with it.

Bah, this part of relationships suck. I can live in the moment, and drink myself to oblivion when the end comes, and feel better for having loved and lost and that whole thing. In my experience, however, girls aren't like that. I need to make sure that she can get over this, unlike some of my previous experiences. I don't think I told you about Elsa this summer, but I think I quite hurt her and I don't intend to repeat that mistake if at all possible. I just don't have any ideas. The problem with Ari is that she became a wreck right before I asked her out, and even tried to commit suicide, (although I personally doubt the validity of the effort.) I pretty much got her out of all that stuff, which probably explains to you why I thought she was a tad crazy one week and then quasi-refuted that later. I need to make sure she doesn't slide back into that, even if I have to break off the relationship sooner. Any ideas at all? Or am I just generally screwed?

Well, this is all very interesting I think. I'm also quite shocked that I somehow managed to overlook it when it was actually in progress. Granted I was on the other side of the planet from it but looking at this old email its hard to imagine how I could not notice my best friend was going out with a 16 year old girl when he was already 18 years old himself and a senior in high school. Besides the general level of stupidity involved with any situation that incudes a 16 year old girl, this situation managed to jump right off the stupidity meter to levels of stupidity unrivaled by anything else Zion had ever done in his life. We are talking statutory rape stupid here. But even that level of stupidity doesn't seem to be enough to describe this because he apparently asked this girl out for the first time only a week after she attempted suicide. If I had been in Zion's shoes at the time I would have known enough to stay away from this crazy chick as she no doubt had enough issues to fill an entire magazine rack with. Zion on the other hand made a point of getting involved with her apparently thinking he was doing her some kind of favor. Did he get dragged into this whole mess because of pity?

A standard 16 year old girl. Pictured here wearing a shirt she believes will aid her on her quest to generate as much trouble and drama as possible in the lives of everyone misfortunate enough to cross her path.

Zion had never had very good luck with women. That will actually become even more apparent for you as this story goes on. But I also remember his tale of his first serious girl friend (other than the one in kindergarden I suppose) who had broken up with him in what he felt was the worst way possible. Rather than actually telling him she wanted to break up with him she sent her clique of friends over to do it for her. They confronted Zion and said that he was some kind of pervert, that she hated him and never wanted to see him again. They then proceeded to tell the entire rest of the school this as well. Zion was quite pissed and later told me that he would have preferred almost anything else, inculding her trying to violently attack him in some form. I suggested that she could have possibly thrown a brick at him and Zion agreed that would have been better. There after it was a running gag among our circle of friends to make fun of Zion's dating abilities by constantly retelling the fake story of how Zion's first girl friend had broken up with him by throwing a brick at him. And as many of our inside jokes did it evolved over the years until the story eventually inculded Zion standing next to a window during the throwing incident which caused the brick to knock him out the window. This was later inculded in the "Crazy Things Happen to Zion" story and somehow managed to occour during a zombie attack.

Go to Chapter III, The Notorious Jackson