01/30/01

It was said that just before Claudius Smith was hung on the gallows in Goshen in 1779 he kicked off his boots, said his mother had predicted he would die like a trooper’s horse---with shoes on. Now with this final act of defiance, so goes the tale, he would prove his mother was a liar.

In school years ago they taught us Claudius Smith was an outlaw, a cold-blooded killer--- a 7-foot tall monster. Now some people are saying there’s no evidence found that he himself killed anyone. As far as the legend that he was 7-feet tall--- they say now the only document found listing his height has him only at 5’-9”. He was a little fucker!

Percy said if the British had won the war old Claudius would probably be celebrated as a great hero. He said they certainly wouldn’t be calling Claudius a notorious thief or Cowboy of the Ramapos. Instead they’d might say in the history books: “Smith’s daring confiscation of cattle and booty from the rebels of the Hudson Valley to supply the King’s army in New York City proved to be a major contributing factor in the crown’s quelling of the 1776 Rebellion.”

Percy said the Revolutionary War was really our first civil war. He said in Orange County during those times brother was pitted against brother and neighbor against neighbor much like folks would later see in the border states during the Civil War. It was time of high anxiety and paranoia. How could you really be certain your closest friends and family members weren’t conspiring against you as spies for the other side?

As we know, even the commander at West Point--- the hero of Fort Ticonderoga---couldn’t be trusted. Had Benedict Arnold succeeded in turning over West Point to the enemy, the British could have easily gone on to seize the full length of the Hudson to succeed in the goal of dividing and conquering the colonial territory.

Pretty wild shit really that the great struggle that resulted in the foundation of the nation played out upon the very soil beneath my feet here.

01/29/01

I never knew what people meant by “six degrees of separation” until one of Percy's geek friends explained it to me at Percy's Super Bowl Party last night. The idea goes that--- pick out any one person in the world---doesn’t matter where--- and chances are someone you know knows someone they know.

Well. . . give or take a few people more knowing people who know people in between.

I wondered later if 6 degrees of separation held true with dead people from a long time ago. . .

I’ve always let Percy on the place any time he cares to visit but I've always told him not to dig. The fucker is always sticking his head down woodchuck holes to do anything he can to get around my rule. Don’t ask me why I put up with the fucking nut. I guess I feel like I have to take care of him because that’s what Clara would want me to do. I never had much chance to do much for her in her short life. Seems she pretty much got the shitty end of the stick from the family. She was cut out completely from Dad’s will. I got everything she should have gotten. I suppose Percy knows this, but he’s never held this against me. He sure does love visiting the farm, does censuses of plants and wildlife on the place. Tells me he’s trying to be just like my cousin, Henry David Thoreau.

I said, as far as I’m aware, I’m not related to the dude---I do believe I descend from a different French asshole than him.

Percy’s not at all happy about my plans to sell. He keeps harping on the lore about Old Claudius Smith— the famous Tory cattle thief during the Revolutionary War— that Claudius had once used the old house on the farm as a hiding spot, that there’s a chest of stolen silver buried on the farm. Turns out my father--- Dowser Boy they called him for a time---proved that lore to be true, but I was never allowed to speak of it.

Dad’s family concealed the treasure find from Phebe’s family. The Noonan’s owned the place then, the Thoreaus only rented. Because the Thoreaus supposedly used assets that belonged to the Noonans to buy the farm from them, Phebe has this idea that the farm is more rightfully hers than mine. She thinks I should accede to her idea of preserving the place in the land trust for all time because it should be her say now.

Yeah.

My worry has always been if I let Percy start digging on the place he’ll dig up a fluted spearhead from the Paleo-Indian period and have the place designated as a damn National Historical Landmark or something. Lord knows I won’t see my pay day then. Dad gave me a beautiful Cumberland spearhead just like the one they pulled out of Mt. Lookout cave on the other side of Goshen. He told me to keep it hid and never tell anyone it came off the farm. Could be up to fucking 12,000 years old.

He said, you’ll have trouble selling the fucking place some day if anyone finds what I did here.

After my arrest from the plane incident, when Percy came to the Goshen mental hospital to sign me out, an investigator pulled him aside to ask him about his visits to the farm, and whether he was ever suspicious of anything going on there. Apparently Percy told them he always felt it was suspicious that I never wanted him to dig on the place, that I didn't even like it when people stuck their heads down woodchuck holes. I imagine they had the last bit they needed to make the application for the search warrant. Wouldn’t you know the fucker drove me all the way home and never once mentioned anything about being interviewed about me by the police. For once in his fucking life he finally manages to keep a secret, and it’s against me?

Peckerhead.

Dad never told me where on the farm he found the spearhead, but he said it was found together with some large bones that looked like that of a mastodon, which he covered back up in fear. He said he thought what he saw looked like a kill site. Archeologists would kill for a kill site. I know I put that point somewhere safe, but damn if I can remember where! I hope it doesn’t take 12,000 years to find again.

I was thinking 12,000 years ago is like the time of Jesus ago times 6 ---6 degrees of separation. So if Jesus had his own ancient Jesus as a savior, and that Jesus also had an ancient Jesus as his savior, he would still be about three ancient Jesus saviors away from hunting mastodon with a Cumberland spearhead.

That's some old shit we're talking.

01/28/01

I'm heading over to Percy's to watch the game soon. The fucker is rooting for the Ravens. He said he had to go with the team with the literary name. I didn't know what the fuck he was talking about. He said Baltimore named their team the Ravens because Edgar Allan Poe was from there and he had that Raven poem and all that. Percy said Poe also has some local significance to us because Poe was kicked out of West Point in disgrace and is probably the most important derelict soldiers we ever had. Percy forwarded this email from one of his Mensa buddies, Balthazar Rust, regarding all that Crypto-Judaic genealogy shit he likes to harp on:

----Original Message----
From: Balthazar Rust
To: Percy Tobiassen
Sent: Wednesday, December 6, 2000 6:15PM
Subject: RE: Celtic genes among Jews

Hello Percy,
I’ve researched this subject extensively. R1B, the classic “Celtic” haplotype, is one of the most common haplotypes among European Jews of Sephardic ancestry. Here is an overview:
Long before Christianity ever existed, Jews were settled in Europe and conversions of European pagans to Judaism were occurring all the time. This was like foreshadowing of things to come when the Christians converted the rest of the European pagans to their way of thinking. A lot of these pagan folks in the early game were impressed with the Jewish academies of learning that were being established around Europe at the time and they were eager to adopt the Jews monotheistic beliefs in order to take part in these education centers. These early converts apparently lost track of the fact that they weren’t really Jewish by blood and eventually the convert’s descendants were thinking they were truly sons of Abraham from a biological standpoint when they really weren’t. This accounts for the majority of Jewish people from Europe today carrying European genetic markers, known as haplotypes, rather than Middle Eastern ones. In fairness though, Middle Eastern genes have always been present in Jewish groups in Europe, and these are part of the genealogies of European Jews at large, but strictly from a haplotype standpoint you cannot tell the majority of European Jews from a person of Celtic or Aryan background because their maternal and/or paternal lines are standard European. European Jews were not so easily persuaded to convert to Christianity when Christians arrived as they were already settled on monotheistic beliefs and of course that created conflict since that time, but from a genetic standpoint the groups are not that significantly different.

Best Regards,
Balthazar Rust

01/27/01

Percy said the paternity tests they do today are scientifically sound and there was no reason for me to doubt the one done through the court that established Rocky as Moo-Shoo's father, but I still wasn’t so convinced by it all. Percy suggested if I wanted to put all doubts to rest I should get a DNA kit and take a swab from Mooky’s mouth and send it out to get a second result. Percy said that the Y chromosome that makes a male a male comes only from the male line, and the gene sequence is usually identical between father and son or even grandfather and grandson. So I gathered a sample when I took Mooky to the jail to visit Rocky at Christmas. I sent the sample off to a genealogy testing labs along with my own sample to see if Mooky has the same gene sequence as me. Well, I got the results from the test today and it says me and Mooky have the exact same 32 marker sequence. But I’m awfully perplexed by what I’m reading about our sequence being an E3B haplotype. This must be some kind of mistake because from what I’m reading about the E3B haplotype, it originates from Africa. I think what happened was they accidentally put my sample aside and analyzed Mooky’s sample twice or something. . .

On the web just now it says that E3b is observed in moderate amounts in all Jewish groups worldwide. This includes the Askenazi, Sephardic, Kurdish, Yemeni, Samaritan and Dierba groups. They say this pretty much proves E3b was part of the genetic makeup of some of the earliest Jews, that’s why E3b spread out in all the places Jews ended up spreading out into in time. . .

On the phone with Percy just now the lousy Peckerhead says he doesn’t think E3B is a mistake at all. He said he always suspected I was from a Sephardic family driven into France after the Spanish Inquisition and forced to convert to Christianity at some point.

He said, that’s why you look so much like Ted Koppel.

Ted Koppel! Where the fuck did he ever get that idea? The Peckerhead!

He said if it makes you feel any better, I have Sephardic origin too. Where do you think the name Tobiassen comes from? It’s not Dutch, it’s Spanish. It Sephardic. The Tobiases took refuge in Holland from the Iberian Peninsula, just like to Roosa and probably the Roosevelts too.

I ask, You E3b too?

He says, well no, I’m not, but I’m from a Sephardic family that went Christian at some point just like you.

I say, So what the hell Haplotype are you?

He says, R1B

I say, That Middle Eastern or something?

He says, Well, no. . .it’s kind of Celtic actually. It’s what most Irish people are, but it’s Sephardic too. It’s one of the bloodline of early Europeans who converted to Judaism--- or who raped Jewish women--- one or the other. You have the real deal Jewish genes, though, son of Abraham and all that.

So I’m the son of Abraham and Percy’s the Irishman? Boy oh boy, I don’t think I could be walloped harder over the head.

Good fucking gracious.

I have to find some fucking alcohol.