John Bennett		The Promised Land Psychopath sociopath homeopath the root is path-- pathetic pathological path finder. Floating like free radicals in this toxic soup are the Regular Joes, not free not radical, but if you tell them they are they'll believe you. They are the salt of the earth. The world is run by Paths. Always has been. This would be news to the Regular Joes if the Paths were to bother to tell them. Psychopaths & Sociopaths are the higher echelon Paths. The difference between them is that the Sociopath has no feelings whereas the Psychopath is a cesspool of feeling, all of it malignant. Both the Sociopath & the Psychopath have no conscience, the tie that binds them together. The Regular Joe has no conscience either, that's just a notion spoon fed him by the Paths, along with all his other notions including his sense of right and wrong. There's another class of people that's invisible. Let's call them Stealth Bombers. Stealth Bombers cause uneasiness in the Regular Joe & paranoia in the Paths because they're so hard to put a finger on. They're the reason for the Thought Police who have been with us for forever. The more the Thought Police tighten their control over thin air, the more they drift into a state the Regular Joe sees as unhappiness & the philosophers in their ranks call Existential Angst. What the Stealth Bombers are best at is keeping silent. They see life as a waiting game. They're waiting for the whole edifice to come crashing down, at which time they'll step into the light & lay claim to The Promised Land.		Phantom of the Opera Every now & then he'd touch down long enough to sting himself in the head & cry out in pain. Each time he did this he wore a face mask fashioned after my photo in my senior-class year book, & within a few days the hate mail started rolling in. People abhor pain they don't know where it came from. After twenty years or so & countless trips to the emergency room I began to fashion a thesis which I called "Suffering the Consequences of Other People's Pain." It was five years in the writing during which time the Phantom made three more appearances, someone poisoned my dog, & my house burned to the ground. Homeless & without my one true friend, blind in one eye from an attack in an airport & still adjusting to the loss of a leg, I began making the rounds. Unable to find an interested publisher, I sat on a bench in Central Park all day until the sun set. A fat squirrel hopped up on my knee & held out an acorn in its tiny hands, & for reasons I don't understand, I wept.