Gary Corinth was a man of some destiny: not that you would recognize it from looking at him. He was non-descript in the way that overweight, balding, self-conscious and arrogant men sometimes are, a face with pock marks and an assortment of pimples, a dirty-looking, poorly shaved chin, blue-gray eyes disproportionately small to the jowls and ears, glasses that bore the blue-green tinge of years of neglect. It's not a pleasant face - more spiteful than helpful, more vengeful than intelligent - a pallid face that betrays the softness of a life lived in air-conditioned spaces, but still bearing the weight of a lifetime of metaphorical boots in the face. He did not enjoy life much, en gros, but there was something driving him, something that his defeatism and anger and envy did not engender and could not utterly vanquish. He may not have recognized it, but others did.
Excerpt:
There won’t be dates in this weblog, for reasons of security and caution. Entries will appear no more than one a day, but not necessarily when I’ve submitted them. As we progress you’ll get a sense for why I am so obsessed. Perhaps it will suffice for now to point briefly to the genesis. I am dedicating this little website to the memory of a good friend, whom I never met, a self-designated hacker by the nom de raconteur of Craig Phissure. A small number of years ago, hacker Phissure came across what he thought was undeniable evidence of the existence of aliens – extraterrestrial intelligence. In an effort to publicize this discovery, Phissure established a website and founded a society with some dozen of his closest associates, a group which he officially dubbed the Society for this Blue Ball in a Big Black Void. I don’t think the other members thought much of this name, inasmuch as its acronym did not play on a sexual or scatological function, but they recognized and respected Phissure’s role as leader and dominant voice. The “Frequently Asked Questions” portion of the site was a monument to Phissure’s style and influence, and we’ll have occasion to return to it by-and-by.
What the FAQ won’t show is that within six months of its publication, a series of mind-boggling coincidences removed every society member from the surface of this blue ball. Each death in turn was deemed an accident, except one case involving a gunshot to the head in a dead-end room in a seedy hotel. They all had a certain plausibility – a single-car accident here, a heart attack there, a hit-and-run over there – if you did not tally them out and timeline them. Since these were for the most part virtual associates, spread across the continent, there was no one person left to do that work.
The website disappeared shortly after the untimely death of Craig Phissure, may he rest in peace. Not only did it disappear, but the fact of its existence became impossible to prove if one did not have the site mirrored locally, on one’s own drive. All the major search engines displayed no knowledge of the site. Whois and other registration sites denied any once or present ownership of thisblueball.org. Attempts to repost any amount of the original texts led to servers crashing, files disappearing and various forms of intimidation: identity theft, surveillance by investigators for who knows what imputed crime, and plain old threatening phone calls. This strategy, heavy-handed as it was, succeeded in isolating the Blue Ball doctrine, quarantined in the coffins of society members and in archived disks of a frightened few. And this effort would probably have succeeded without the dogged pursuit of one last blueballer. This gentleman was not a live friend of Mr. Phissure, but he, too, found his way to Phissure’s material and Phissure’s point of view, and one might say that he became a friend of Phissure, despite the fact that his friend was ash in a vase, languishing on a shelf until the day that sub-orbital spreading of ashes across the atmosphere becomes affordable for a mere mortal.