Ron Cole's Personal Blog

It's on fire. I remember hearing that, and I remember a moment of time standing still. A paralysis came over me. As I try to relive that moment, I still quiver in spite of the time passed. A moment when everything I had ever known was about to pass away, people, things, hopes and dreams, to be replaced by something else; something dark, sinister, and unknowable. If I had been able to foresee the rest of that one day - say nothing of the rest of my life - would I have been able to keep living beyond the ensuing hour and a half? Since ignorance is such good friends with bliss, and because I foresaw nothing but a blur, I kept on living.  What began with a fire became worse, darker, and evil. When the world collectively decides to blame you for a fire that consumed not just a building, but 76 people, including 25 children, there is no healing process that begins in the aftermath for anybody. Plane crash survivors enjoy that sort of thing. Not us, and I was there in the middle of it all

"Don't go," she said, in a low voice so alien to me that I visibly recoiled. "They can send someone else. This isn't who you are anymore," she added in the same tone. She was staring daggers at me. I couldn't tell if she was angry or about to burst into tears. In either case it was more genuine emotion from her than I'd ever seen; my best friend and business partner who was not known for exhibiting emotion like that. I was actually speechless, another oddity of the moment. Of course I had to go, if they put me on a plane, precisely because there was no one else who could take my place. If lives were at stake, and they certainly were, I couldn't put her feelings above that level of responsibility. I'd told Carrie, my partner, about what was happening out of necessity. If I was going to be on the other side of the country for some period of time, she was the only one who could keep the business running in my absence. But, beyond that, no o

"Nobody knew who might be HIV positive.  The state had recently enacted a law, intended to subvert discrimination, that prohibited the staff from even knowing who's blood might be lethal. We'd been bleeding on each other since the first day on the bus, but never was this terrifying risk presented in such a dangerously obvious fashion - but still we were ordered to press on, with the drill instructor's boots on our backs to make us fall into the blood if we were strong enough to avoid it on our own." Sometimes everything just goes completely wrong.  When I married my first wife I was on supervised release from federal prison, where I'd spent over two years behind bars for failure to pay tax on some of my firearms.  My supervised release officer had denied me permission to get married because he claimed that it constituted a 'legal contract' that I was prohibited from entering into.  I knew that was an excuse. The truth was that the FBI, who I'd