Perhaps it was a moment when the subconscience broke through and made its presence felt.

I decided that my ezine would simply be one in which I would highlight my own work. So I put the announcement on my website and on some usenet groups. I made one issue and then people wrote in and began to send me work. I realized I needed to make a second issue, then a third. At first it was a text only, then I downloaded some HTML editors and went that route. Then more people kept sending me work and more and well, it's now been five years. In fact I'm putting the finishing touches to the fifth anniversary issue.

It's been a wonderful opportunity, I met some great people and poets. Like I mentioned above, one of the joys has been being introduced to all sorts of great poets from Australia. Another opportunity is that my work is now part of the National Library of Canada, so it shall live on in perpetuity. So this little ezine which has been put together from my home computer has been around the world and will be there for a very long time.

What is out there should encourage people to produce better and not accept what is the pap of this mass marketed culture.

To me Molech is almost a perfect metaphor for our modern pop culture. It swallows and destroys innocence, in so many levels. There is an inherient evil in our culture that is rearing it's very ugly head. Sometimes its globalization with the desire to swallow all culture and make it its own. Or just plant its own culture all over the globe, like a parasite without any feelings of indigenous culture.

Also, the end of innocence, it is a commodity to be used and abused. Look around, ours is a culture that's beyond sex saturated, there's a proliferation of the perverse. Just recently there was in Toronto the horrible murder of a ten year old girl. Terrible, the person who did this is a monster. On the other hand, fashion almost demands that 10 yr old girls dress like hookers. This is a culture that has no shame. It destroys all, it demands continual feeding and it demands our love, which we give. We give by buying into the whole logos thing.

One book that's been very influential in my life is the book "No Logos" by Naomi Klein. Here is the horror of our Molech Culture. One thing I do is go to a Gap Store and look at labels, I want to know where things are made. When a store clerk asks me if I want help, I just tell them I'm interested in what country is still be exploited by your company. Surprised I haven't been thrown out.

Molech is the symbol for our culture. Our pop culture needs a name to express what can be its sheer ugliness.

The part at the end about watering it, a joke at myself. When I was at Ground Zero helping out with the Salvation Army there was a couple of plants near our tent. For a few nights, and I always worked the midnight shift, I'd water them. Kept it going for about three nights when one of my team mates came to me and said they were plastic. I had a good laugh, so did they.

I know some may think there are so many voices and that's true, a person might be missed, then again all you have to do is connect with one person who will read what is said and say, 'yeah, that's how I feel', and the result will be shared feeling and reaffirmation of each other's humanity. I am all for people expressing their feelings. Our most precious gift is the freedom of expression. I know there are many who abuse this, but there are many more to whom it is the way to proclaim themselves. I remember the line from Walt Whitman's poem, "Walt Whitman", 'I too am not a bit tamed—I too am untranslatable; I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.' I think we need more barbaric yawps sounded over this world.

While not all the material produced is worth reading and trust me some of my material isn't worth reading, we have the freedom to read or ignore. But each work is the result of someone feeling strong enough to put their thoughts on paper.

Personally my ambition is to enjoy life, to seize it and try to make the world a little better. To enjoy my wife and children and try not to make a mess anywhere. I also want to live as Thoreau wanted to live to suck the marrow out of life. I want to be uncommon. At work recently, one of the staff approached me and told me I'm not like they would expect a person in my position. They said I ride a bike to work, read "Wired" magazine and run races in a Red Dress. To me that is a compliment. The Apostle Paul once wrote: 'don't let the world squeeze you into its mould', that is so true on so many levels. I strive to be an individual in a world that wants clones.