Michael Bolduc, one of my college pals from the University of North Texas, grew up to become a warblogger.
This was, of course, a source of distress for mother and I. You do everything you can to raise them properly, but ultimately all you can do is love them, cherish every day together, and hope they make the right decisions.
When Mike ventures into political subjects on his weblog, I'm pretty sure that we'll pick opposite sides whence comes the War of the Bloggers, then meet in a trench where one of us receives a gaping bayonet wound, the other a lifetime of guilt.
Until then, I enjoy finding things on his site that I missed because I am a let-the-gay-whales-marry liberal, such as an incredible essay by Gerard Van der Leun on the day he didn't kill anybody:
... as humans, we have an almost limitless ability to forget any hint of 'could' when it comes to horror. In those few moments when our forgetfulness fails us, we remain secure in our belief that we would never do such things to those we love. We know to an absolute certainty that anyone who could must not have been "in his right mind."
That's a common but still strange phrase -- "in his right mind." Everyone uses it as shorthand for things people do that are, large or small, somehow far outside what we normally expect them to do. Nobody that I know of takes it to the other side of that common phrase and looks at what a person does when he's "in his wrong mind."
It's a brilliant, honest, frightening piece, and I love the fact that he wrote it without a single editor pondering whether his thoughts merited a global audience.
Another mark in Mike's favor: He's riding Paula Abdul harder than a disqualified contestant.