Coleus leaves

someone offered me $350 for wsbj.com a few weeks ago. i ignored it, but get offers for it and other domains several times a year. those offers don't usually include a dollar amount, so the $350 figure was kind of curious. years ago i sold rockingchair.com to a custom rocking chair concern for $5000. they approached me, i never actively solicited a sale of that domain, and it's the only one i ever sold. i was about to type the whole story about Leslie Harpold and the weird way in which i discovered that she was once thinking of registering nocabal.com, but i remembered that i already posted that story here in another thread. i registered nocabal.com in her memory. i recently let that domain expire, partly because i'm out of money to spend on such things but also because my connection to Leslie was not so strong that i have an appropriate role in keeping a candle lit for her 10+ years on. whenever i set up my living trust i'm provisioning to have some trace of my web sites stay alive forever, or until they kill the Internet, the latter which i honestly believe will happen eventually... not necessarily a physical destruction. last year i'd been working with a really interesting dude from Hartford, CT, who wants to use UPPITY.com as his kvetch platform. such an interesting dude with whose problems i sympathize and even identify. he was nominated deputy mayor of Hartford, but a background check turned up that he'd been arrested several times as a teenager and in his 20s for gun possession and possession of cocaine (i think that's what he was busted for). a full 80% of kids who grew up in Hartford carried guns and dealt drugs, often times getting booked just on suspicion. it is so unfair to me that one's life has to be perpetually ruined for having made youthful mistakes, especially when they were part of the culture in which you lived. i remember my mother saying about Bill Clinton and that whole "didn't inhale" thing, she couldn't understand why you would want to vote for anybody who did *not* smoke pot in the 60s. anyway, the UPPITY.com guy, he seems to have lost his enthusiasm for using that domain as a pulpit (he's a busy guy, really likeable, wish i could get to know him better), so i'll probably return my psychedelic poetry to that site. reason i related to his situation is that my future was at the brink of being similarly imperiled when i just got out of college. i never spoke of it publicly because other people were involved and they have reputations now that could be tarnished if details of this incident got out. i'd be happy to talk about it because i think the case was pursued out of utter bullshit ignorance and paranoia, though in the end i have to say that calmer heads prevailed. it just took 2 years and then of thousands of dollars in legal fees to calm those fucking heads. i was on probation for 5 years. among my first memories of living in New York was the required weekly visit to a probation officer in lower Manhattan. i only had to do that for a year (he was very sympathetic to how overzealously the FBI and Secret Service pursued this matter) and then i was on limited probation for 4 more years, a span of time during which the charges could have been re-opened by the attorney general and/or the specific company that was suing us. while my attorney never considered this a serious possibility i still spent years under the cloud of worry that the bloodthirstiness that characterized the prosecution's pursuit of things would resurface. the charges involved phone phreaking and breaking into corporate voicemail systems. the court record is sealed, and should stay that way in perpetuity. i am not as tormented as i used to be by how close this affair came to sending myself and dozens others to 2 decades in prison. had we broken into a bank's voicemail or used computers with modems then we would almost certainly have faced a mandatory sentence. it's never really left me but i remember the day the limited probation period ended. i don't remember the day and date but i remember feeling the fog lift. all that is behind why i offered to give the aforementioned individual UPPITY.com for free, even though i get offers for that domain 4 or 5 times a year, one offer at $3500 but that was years ago and came from a very shady looking source. UPPITY was going to be a grousing ground for one whose ambitions and goals are thwarted at every turn by geophagic news reporters. i got away with a sealed court case and no criminal record not because i or my family had those tens of thousands of dollars to throw at legal fees but because the father of one other kid involved in this mess did. i have never felt morally good or clean about that. i was considered a leader or instigator of this nonsense but FBI and Secret Service interviews and depositions with some of the others involved went on for over a year before i was allowed to know anything. i'll never forget my college roommate asking me why the FBI was coming around asking for me. i forget what i told her but i probably made it sound like someone else had done something and i was a witness, or blahblah, i didn't know how that stuff worked and i guess she didn't either because she believed whatever i told her.