The final manuscript is now locked at 622 pages, after adjusting for formatting, so that's everything, nothing removed, index included. I couldn't be more proud. There are no rules and there is no road map writing a historical account, there is only you and whatever wits you might possess. For even the most independent-minded of us, this is like walking a tightrope over a lava pit, and it is an excruciating, awful process writing about yourself. What's right? When you first start out, it goes well beyond writer's block. There's a natural hesitancy not to want to, not simply because we all tend to paint ourselves as better than we really are. I'm pretty certain that in the span of human history, there have been no people on this earth who were able to get around that problem wholly. No one's exempt.
That's not to say that people consciously lie--I haven't in my account in any place, on any page--but that we're all pretty much the same, and who wants to look at themselves as a piece of shit? No, the BDSM crowd don't count, sorry. Maybe it's part of the Cartesian-split, the mind-body problem, that we aren't always good at looking at ourselves because we've been taught how to look at the world incorrectly.
Unlike Jeane and a lot of people in America, I don't believe we live after death. What I believe is that mind came from body, and that we die with this body. Why isn't it obvious that our mind and bodies are one? Religion, but it's a problem also embedded in science, politics, culture, you name it, it's pervasive. I'm not a total materialist, or an atheist, but agnostic. Life has enough mysteries to be pretty bizarre. For some reason, this isn't enough for some people, I don't get it. Yes, dying isn't great--it's not supposed to be. Accept it or not, but we're all going to die one day, so live it up. Unfortunately, yes, some of us are going sooner than others. That's what will always bother me about this goddamned case. Jeane died before her time, it was avoidable. They let her die, we, let her die in our indifference, the same apathy that's given us the biggest police state apparatus in human history. The flaw in Western thinking is this weird idea that things are separate when they're not. We poison our water and believing we're removed enough from it that we don't need to worry about it, let the people downstream deal with it, fuck 'em. We've gone crazy enough to believe that we can now control the weather. We believe that people are separate from one another, when this is completely untrue--just watch how an outbreak of something spreads, just one example. It's some hippie crap to say that we're all interconnected, when it's the simple truth. The Occult tradition in the West produced this gem of wisdom: whatever you put out there comes back, multiplied. (Often in threes, justice found in mathematics no less.) Knowledge is power, but so is wisdom, and you learn the latter through terrible suffering, the kind that makes death look inviting.
I believe that I've overcome most of that tendency to recast myself as someone wearing a white hat, hence the pain, and brother, there is no pain like it. Nothing touches how deep it reaches inside of you and tears you apart. You cannot fault yourself for accidents or errors--mistakes--that no one could have had control over. It's not that I was self-deprecating in the writing of this book, it's that I and many other people failed someone, and so there it is again: We're all the same and are imperfect. That's what being a human being is, to be flawed, judged by the very standards we made up along the way, more often through habit. Talking can be addictive. Everything is an addiction. Reading is an addiction. Watching is an addiction. Food is an addiction. Drinking too much water can become intoxicating and ultimately kill you. Sex, as everyone knows, can be an addiction to the point that it becomes unhealthy. We all have a lot of habits to break. Whether I break the writing habit remains to be seen.
The book will, I hope, stand on its own legs, and that word will get out far and wide about it. That, of course, is up to me, but also you, the reader, to spread the word if you believe I've gotten most of the story right. I think it's going to be a mixed-bag: there are so many things in it that are simply factual, and opinions about facts mean nothing. Most of the book is my participation in the case. I will be writing more as the release date approaches at another location, probably copying to here as well, so either site will be a go.
There is not one thing, one line, one quote, anything, that was put into my account that I knew or believed to be untrue. I haven't included many things--you would end up with a book over 1,000 pages long, easily. The reader should come away from the book feeling that not only was this about someone's experience, therefore a primary historical document, but that it's a reference book. I can say with absolute certainty that there has never been a book like this, and that's not knocking Montgomery Blair Sibley's book, Why Just Her, just the opposite, I think they're complimentary of each other, one augmenting the other. While I didn't use quite as much legal language--legalese--I believe it will stand up over time as part of the case, its residue. A couple of centuries ago, writing on historical events was considered a form of literature. For that and the sake of readability, there is a literary approach to some of the book, but in the end, this is all my voice. I'm feeling a little hoarse now, and, oddly, that was the meaning of the French surname, Palfrey.
This was almost as bad as being the poor, dumb asshole journalist in Citizen Kane, looking everywhere to find out what all this Rosebud business was about. What were some of Palfrey's deepest secrets? With the CIA thrown into the mix, anything's possible. I cannot claim to know, her family might, and they should be left in peace. It should be taken into consideration that there will almost certainly be things that I'm wrong about in the text, misreadings of events and information, not just by me, but by the subject and many other players, it's inevitable, and none of it would necessarily be conscious. There's smoke down in Hell, which sometimes causes a natural occlusion. And, again, I could simply be wrong about something.
The DC Madam case is a mostly incomplete mosaic, and I make it clear in the text when I'm speculating. This is due mostly to the fact that whole swaths of the record aren't available to the public. There are also selfish motives by any number of people who communicated with Palfrey to sit on what they know, information they might have, but then there are confidentiality agreements. Most of this is understandable in an era where certain information has a very real world value, we all get this by now, even Ret. General Petraeus.
A late November release looks good, but no later than December, a blackened X-Mas present for the GOP to themselves, by way of me, a woman whose death they own.
