Three Beautiful Things 01-11-2025: Donnie Rinaldi's Funeral, The Longshot Saloon and the Reception, Talking with Rosie and Deni

1. For as long as I've been conscious and as far back as my memory reaches, the Donnie and Rosie Rinaldi family members have always been present in my life. Dad and Donnie were born a month apart and grew up in Kellogg at the same time. They both went to Lewiston's  North Idaho College of Education (a.k.a. Tiger Tech). Mom was there, too, and graduated from N.I.C.E. Donnie and Dad worked at the Zinc Plant for several years at the same time. Our families visited each other. I remember in the 1990s, especially as Dad's health worsened, Donnie was an especially caring friend for Dad, tender with Mom, and helped out with different tasks around our house. I'll always remember that, as a way to thank Donnie for his kindness and assistance, Mom and Dad always tried to have a bottle of MacNaughton Canadian Whiskey on hand for Donnie when he came to visit and Donnie always enjoyed a smash. 

Donnie and Rosie's oldest son, Vince, and I were baseball and basketball teammates. Their daughter Deni and I are the same age. We "co-starred" in our kindergarten pageant at the end of the school year. Deni played Mother Goose and I played her faithful, ever-present cat. 

Deni and I walked together, side by side, by choice, in the procession and recession at our 1972 Kellogg High School graduation ceremony. 

Donnie was 94 when he died on December 18, 2024. 

This morning was his funeral at 11:00 at St. Rita's Catholic Church here in Kellogg, the church where Donnie and Rosie celebrated Mass and were active members for decades.

2. Family and friends from the Silver Valley and well beyond filled the church for the funeral, a solemn, dignified Mass combining grief and joy, the grief of Donnie no longer being with us and the joy of the promise of eternal life. 

Afterward, the Elks Club hosted a luncheon and reception and attendees packed the room. 

I have to be cautious about being in packed rooms -- especially ones like at the Elks with a fairly low ceiling, so I left after about ten minutes and joined Jake, Craig King, Bucky, Debbie, and Dood at the nearly empty Longshot Saloon. I strolled in and didn't actually see Dood, a disappointment -- he and Bucky and Debbie left shortly after I arrived and I didn't get to visit with them. 

I did, however, have a great session with Jake and Craig.

After some high quality yakkin', we headed back to the Elks and I could tell the crowd was shrinking.

All the same, I took a seat along a wall on the edge of the party. 

Shelley Church, Don Knott's sister, pulled up a chair next to me and we had a great conversation about life after Don and reminisced about good times we had with Don over the course of his life. 

3. Eventually the crowd shrunk some more and I could see that no one was visiting with Rosie, so I scooted over to her table and we entered into a wonderful conversation and, before long, Christy joined us.

This mighty day also had a running (or should I say a flying) drama going on. 

Deni (Mother Goose!) had booked a flight to Spokane, due to arrive on Friday. It included a flight out of Atlanta. 

Winter storms paralyzed Atlanta on Friday.

Deni waited and waited and waited and then waited some more to depart from Atlanta and finally flew out on Saturday, not in time for her father's funeral Mass, but in time to land in Spokane, rent a car, and rocket to the Elks around mid-afternoon and be reunited with her family and to see those of us who were still at the reception. 

I had at least two, maybe three, superb conversations with Deni, met her son Aaron, and Deni and I made tentative plans to possibly see each other back in the West later in the summer of '25. 

I gave Carol a ride home a while earlier and it was after 5 o'clock when Christy and I bade the reception farewell and I drove us back home. 

What a day.

What a sad and joyful day, a day of loss and uplifting reunions. 

Three Beautiful Things 01-10-2025: Little Green Cleaning Machine, Mouth Guard During the Day, A Fun Pasta Creation

1. When we lived in our apartment home in Greenbelt, MD and when the corgis were alive, they occasionally emptied their bladders on the apartment's carpeting. Debbie purchased a Bissell Little Green portable carpet cleaner and it worked perfectly to clean these small messes the corgis made. 

Well, recently, Gibbs has had a few indoor accidents near our front door on our living room rug. 

I decided it was time to bring a Little Green portable carpet cleaner back into our life and it arrived on Thursday. Today, I took the parts out of the box, executed a couple of small tasks and assembled it, and tried it out on those spots Gibbs left on the rug.

I enjoyed having this little machine back in my hands again and I thought it did a pretty good job of cleaning up Gibbs' problem spots and he has not repeated his violation of our living room rug. 

2. I am most grateful that my night time mouth guard also works during the day. The guard eliminates the discomfort I've been experiencing in my mouth. It takes some getting used to, wearing it while awake, but I'm accepting how it feels and am grateful for its effectiveness.

3. I got out the electric frying pan and cooked white onion, garlic, ground beef, bacon, red pepper, zucchini, and fire roasted diced tomatoes. We put this sauce over spaghetti for dinner and with the help of Everything But the Bagel seasoning and a few shakes of Trader Joe's Umami Seasoning Blend, I fixed a dinner that worked great for Debbie and me. 

Three Beautiful Things 01-09-2025: Post-Transplant Dental Quandaries, The Whisks Arrive!, Toasted Sandwich Heaven

1.  To protect extensive dental work I had done in 2018, I wear a mouth guard at night. Because of my transplant, I've had to put dental cleanings on hold. Recently, I've had some minor discomfort in a couple of areas in my mouth, but, luckily, if I wear my mouth guard during the day, it relieves me of the discomfort. 

From the outset, since I enrolled in the transplant program at Sacred Heart, my care team has always been concerned about infections post-transplant with some special emphasis on dental infections. 

I want to make sure that the occasional and minor discomfort I've experienced lately isn't tooth infection, so today I made an appointment to see the dentist on Monday -- the soonest I could get in. 

I had a good online conversation today with Nurse Jenn about my upcoming dental appointment and I'm going to write to her again on Friday and see if, with the help of taking an antibiotic before the appointment, it might be safe at this point, nearly eight months after the transplant, to schedule a dental cleaning. 

It might not be. 

Some post-transplant literature recommends waiting a year before having a cleaning done. 

2. I purchased an electric milk steamer in November. It comes with two tiny whisks that snap into the bottom of the steamer. One froths milk. The other creates a small amount of foam while the milk heats. Somehow I lost the attachment I used most often, the small amount of foam whisk. I ordered another pair of attachments and they arrived today. 

I paid heed to the warning that accompanied my order that these could be the wrong sized attachments, but upon examining pictures of the whisks I bought, I was about 95% confident that I'd bought the right ones. 

They arrived today.

They were the right ones. 

I'm happy they were the right ones and happy that I can make both lattes and cappuccinos, depending on which whisking attachment I snap into my milk steamer! 

3. I had a dinner tonight made possible by the gallivanting I do after visiting Sacred Heart for blood work. 

A while back, I bought a package of Colby Jack slices at Trader Joe's.

Tuesday of this week, I bought a loaf of Great Harvest's incomparable white bread and then when I went to Trader Joe's, I bought bacon.

Tonight, I got out my electric frying pan and made a toasted Colby Jack cheese sandwich with bacon on Great Harvest white bread. 

My only regret is that I forgot we had the dill pickle chips Zoe made and gave us as a Christmas gift. 

Next time. 

Those dill pickle chips would round out the perfection of this divinely delicious sandwich. 

Three Beautiful Things 01-08-2025: Ed and I Hit the Road, Relaxing at the CdA Casino, Pork Tenderloin Dinner

1. Another day on the road today. The wet snowflakes falling this morning didn't have much detrimental effect on the roads, so I had no problem zipping out to Kingston to pick up Ed.

I drove Ed to the Kootenai Medical Center's Cancer Center where Ed is nearing the end of about four weeks or so of radiation treatment. 

Everything went smoothly there and we headed down to the Coeur d'Alene Casino to spend some time taking our minds off of cancer and kidney transplants and other stuff for a while and just relax.

2. Upon arriving, we went straight to the Red Tail Bar and Grill for breakfast. Ed doesn't eat much in the late afternoon or evenings as a way to prepare for his treatments, so he was really hungry and, as it turned out, I hadn't eaten anything since dinner on Tuesday. 

Ed enjoyed his breakfast burrito and I was very happy with my half order of biscuits and gravy and a couple scrambled eggs and hash browns. 

The hash browns were especially fun for me because potatoes are high in potassium and, most of the time, I need to eat foods lower in potassium. But, my potassium levels were great on Tuesday and I knew I could enjoy these potatoes and then lay off of spuds again until my January 27th labs. 

I played some games I enjoy a lot, tried a few new ones, didn't have much luck, but succeeded in having a relaxing time.

I also protected myself the entire time on the casino floor by wearing a mask and putting on vinyl gloves. 

3. Back home, I browned and then roasted a Trader Joe's Peppercorn Garlic Pork Tenderloin and fixed a combination of onion, red pepper, and yellow squash with leftover basmati rice, heated up in the tenderloin's drippings. 

It was a simple and delicious dinner with a perfect amount of leftovers for Debbie to have for lunch on Thursday and for us to do something with at home.  

Three Beautiful Things 01-07-2025: Private Eccentric Pleasures, Great Harvest Pleasures, Multiple Coeur d' Alene Tasks and Pleasures

 1. I think it might have been a bit of self-aggrandizement, but back in around 1993-94, I used to encourage students to follow their lights and used myself as a possibly mediocre example. I told them about things I did, alone, that I called Private Eccentric Pleasures (PEP). 

I might have been overstating what I enjoyed by referring to them as eccentric, but they were personal and they always gave me pleasure. 

I frequented Eugene's WOW Hall to hear jam bands and other rock/jazz/blues music, almost always by myself, and joined other revelers and danced solo. I cocooned myself into a private dancing world, gyrated, perspired, grinned broadly, and enjoyed these nights while 100 percent sober. I never smoked weed or used hallucinogenic drugs and I abstained from alcohol from January, 1986 until October, 1996. This PEP was a natural high!   

Other Private Eccentric Pleasures I enjoyed included driving by myself to Portland just to see movies that often opened a week ahead of when they premiered in Eugene. I went to movies all the time in Eugene by myself, a pleasure I had first begun to curry in Spokane from 1982-84 and that continues to this day -- I just wish I went to as many movies in theaters in 2025 as I did all those years living in Spokane and Eugene.

But I really enjoyed the theaters in Portland, being in the city, being an anonymous person, and being able to think about and relive each movie I saw as I tooled back down I-5 to return home. 

Now my PEP is going to Sacred Heart Medical Center for labs twice a month and to visit the transplant team periodically.

That's what I did today. I was out the door around 5:30 a.m., drove to Spokane, glided into the parking garage I use, enjoyed the friendly greeting of the security guy I checked in with at the main hospital, went to the check-in area where I ran into and had a great visit with fellow Kellogg native Dave Macri, got checked in, and enjoyed the always friendly and efficient Angela as she filled vials with my blood and sent me on my way. 

Then, just because I enjoy the vibe there, I went down to the basement to the cafeteria, ordered a 12 oz double latte, and read more of Lone Wolf. I caught snippets of Sacred Heart personnel yakking about their work or giving each other a hard time or just relaxing on a break. 

I didn't listen hard. I prefer to mind my own business. Most of my concentration was on the book I was reading.

But I did catch fragments of conversation and caught the tone. I could tell some conversations were  earnest, others playful. The different tones created the good vibe I enjoyed. 

Eccentric? I don't know.

A pleasure. For sure. 

2. I left the medical center and cruised up Grand Boulevard to 29th and soon eased into a parking place in front of Great Harvest where I enjoyed an Oatmeal Blueberry muffin with a cup of coffee while reading some more of Lone Wolf. I enjoyed the vibe and energy of the people working at Great Harvest and the people, mostly my age or older, dropping in for food and drink, either to enjoy in the shop or take out. 

3. More Personal Eccentric Pleasures lay ahead in Coeur d'Alene. I stopped in at Supercuts for a haircut. 

PEP. I enjoy Supercuts.

I blasted over to Costco and fueled the Camry. 

PEP. I enjoy Costco. 

Then three major sources of pleasure -- are they eccentric? I sat at the counter at Breakfast Nook and read more Lone Wolf while dining on a Jack cheese and mushroom omelette, hash browns, sourdough toast, and coffee. I loved how packed it was, mostly with old-timers (including me), and the non-stop activity of cooks preparing meals and an army of mostly middle aged or older servers energetically and with friendliness and charm waited on customers with efficiency and warmth. 

Then I waltzed into good vibe central at Trader Joe's and picked up a few groceries for home and continued my waltzing in good vibe stores and bought raspberry kefir, freshly ground peanut butter, and a variety of delicious produce items at Pilgrim's Market. 

I returned home happy. I had bags of groceries. I was nourished. I had hardly any hair on my head! 

And, to my relief, the lab results looked stable, encouraging me that my body and my new kidney are doing pretty well together. 

Three Beautiful Things 01-06-2024: Return of Sibling Outings, Our First 2025 Outing, Digging Deeper into What Makes Eric Rudolph Tick

1. Christy, Carol, and I used to go on outings that didn't include anyone else. Just us. We did them in the spirit of the Sibling Assignments we used to write in our blogs. 

We hadn't been out of a Sibling Outing for quite a while and Carol took charge of getting us back into them via a Christmas gift. She made each of us a folder. Each folder has twelve monthly calendars for 2025. Carol assigned each of us a month and a place to go. The person assigned to the month decides what our activity will be, where we'll dine, and what our transportation will be. 

Carol assigned herself January. She chose January 6th as our outing date. She drove. She combined the activity and dining spot and told Christy and me we'd go for high tea at Inland Cafe and Tea. It's located on Government Way in a strip mall across from the Fairgrounds, just north of Nosworthy's Hall of Fame, the former Ground Round. 

2. The Inland Cafe and Tea menu offers four adult high teas (and one for children). For our outing, Carol chose the Sunflower Tea. It included the following:

• a bottomless pot of tea for each of us -- we had, I'd say, about eighty different teas to choose from 
• a cup of soup -- today's soup was split pea and ham
• a scone with our choice of topping -- the toppings are lemon curd, clotted cream, fruit jam, caramel or chocolate sauce, or a seasonal topping
• two tea sandwiches -- the choices are pecan chicken, inland ham, egg salad, or cucumber with chive cream 
• a petite sweet (ours was a dainty cupcake)
• garnishments of fresh fruit

We had a relaxing time sipping tea, yakkin' away,  and eating our fresh, made in-house offerings. 

I thought our year of outings got off to a terrific start. 

If you'd like to go to Inland Cafe and Tea's website, here's the link: https://www.inlandcafeandtea.com/

3. As I moved into the last third of the book Lone Wolf, the story continued by telling what happened after law enforcement captured Eric Rudolph and the high stakes legal maneuvering surrounding his case. With Eric Rudolph in custody, the attorneys and investigators, and we, as readers, came to know Rudolph much more fully. He turns out to be a complicated, complex, idealistic, and, I'd say, egotistical man on a deadly mission to save the USA from its own decline and corruption. Rudolph sees much of this decline and corruption embodied in abortion which he opposed with deadly force. 

Three Beautiful Things 01-05-2025: Debbie Returns to Kellogg, I Prepare for Debbie's Return, I Read More Deeply into *Lone Wolf*

1. Everything worked out this morning. Debbie's flight from Newark to Minneapolis worked. So did her next flight to Spokane. I arrived at the airport right at 12:30 and Debbie was at the curb. No snow or ice was on I-90 so my drive over and our drive back to Kellogg was wet but uneventful. 

Gibbs loves having Debbie back home! 

2. Before I left for the airport, I worked for around an hour getting gunk out of the bathroom sink drain and succeeded in getting it to drain well again. 

I spent the rest of the morning cleaning the bathroom and kitchen, vacuuming the living room, and clearing up any last bit of clutter in the house I hadn't taken care of earlier. 

I'm not a great house cleaner, but I thought things looked pretty decent for Debbie's return. 

3. I spent much of the evening, after roasting a Trader Joe's Spatchcocked Lemon Rosemary Chicken, reading more deeply into Maryanne Vollers' in depth book about Olympic Park, abortion clinic, and gay bar bomber Eric Rudolph. 

Through tireless interviews and research, Vollers could explain and tell the story of how Rudolph managed to escape being caught for five years, even though he spent much of that time not that deep in the Western North Carolina woods and made frequent nighttime forays into nearby towns to find himself food and other supplies in a variety of thieving ways. 

I found myself contrasting Rudolph's survival over those five years in the woods with the failure of Chris McCandless to survive trying to live off the land in Alaska in Jon Krakauer's book Into the Wild. 

Broadly speaking, the primary difference between the two was basic: Rudolph had had extensive experience over the years hiking and camping in the woods he hid out in and he positioned himself close enough to towns and people's cabins and other domiciles outside of town that he could plunder dumpsters, gardens, people's homes, and other sources for food and supplies. 

McCandless had no experience in the area of Alaska where he tried to live off the land and also, unlike Rudolph, he didn't devise detailed plans of how he would survive nor did he keep in contact in any way with civilization. Rudolph listened to a radio and brought newspapers back to his camp. He didn't fully isolate himself in the woods. 

He also devised ingenious ways to stay out of the sight of the armies searching for him on land and from the air. 

I knew the whole time I read about Rudolph's five years on the lam that he would eventually be caught. 

The book opens with his capture.

Like classic epic stories, Lone Wolf opens in the middle of the story, turns to events before his capture, retells the capture story, and moves on to Rudolph's incarceration and when I put the book down last night, he was meeting his original defense attorney for the first time. 

Eric Rudolph's trial is coming up soon in the book.

Three Beautiful Things 01-04-2025: Debbie Rebooks, I Spent the Day with *Lone Wolf*, Parallel Stories

 1. Debbie rebooked her delayed Saturday flight out of Newark and will be flying into Spokane early in the afternoon instead of after midnight Saturday night. 

2. I spent much of the day reading Lone Wolf, learning more than I ever had known about how law enforcement investigates bomb sites, work to reconstruct the bomb the perpetrator detonated, and how much they learn about the bomber from the details of the bomb itself. 

3. I enjoy books that have a main river of a story running through them and that develop multiple tributaries to feed that river. In Lone Wolf, the primary focus is on Eric Rudolph's bombings and the extensive manhunt to track him down, but Maryanne Vollers also develops smaller (in length) stories about other bombers (like the Unabomber) and other violent events, like Ruby Ridge and Waco, events in which the same agencies trying to track down Eric Rudolph responded to those situations. I enjoy learning how the Rudolph case was affected by what agents learned, say, in their search for the Unabomber and it's affected by the excesses and huge mistakes these agencies made on Ruby Ridge and at Waco. 

Three Beautiful Things 01-03-2025: "The Darkest Precincts of Idealism", Fueled by Disillusionment, Gibbs and Copper Are Untroubled

1. Today I finished Buffalo, NY journalists Dan Herbeck and Lou Michel's biographical study of Timothy McVeigh entitled American Terrorist: American Terrorist and the Oklahoma City Bombing. 

Once McVeigh was found guilty and sentenced to death, he decided to entrust his whole story to Herbeck and Michel. He submitted to countless hours of interviews, made all kinds of documents available to the writers, and asked nothing in return. No compensation. No book deal. Nothing. 

Timothy McVeigh lived by codes of idealism. He definitely entered what Maryanne Vollers  calls "a journey into the darkest precincts of idealism, an exploration of how things can go terribly wrong in the name of doing good." She's the author of Lone Wolf: Eric Rudolph and the Legacy of American Terror, the book I started this evening,

For the last, what?, two years or so, I've been reading books and listening to podcasts trying to understand what's commonly called right wing extremism. Much, but not all, of Leah Sotille's journalism focuses on this and Lone Wolf will, too, given the right wing ideals Eric Rudolph acted in service to when he bombed Centennial Park during the 1996 Olympics, two abortion clinics, and a gay/lesbian bar.

2. Today, reading Maryanne Vollers' phrase "the darkest precincts of idealism" helped me more than anything else I've read or heard in the last couple of years. 

My idealism and the idealism of many people I've associated with in church, in my work, and as a volunteer were not journeys into dark precincts of idealism, but into light ones, the precincts of alleviating hunger, studying compassion, exploring and practicing self-examination, pondering Socrates' insights into what it means to live a well-lived life, and more. 

Not one of these ideals ever even faintly suggested that in order to achieve them, I needed to do something violent in the name of good. 

I've also realized, especially as I've grown older, that the ideals I pursue can never be realized, that my reach will always exceed my grasp, as Robert Browning writes in his poem "Andrea del Sarto". 

Knowing this, I do my best, not always successfully, not to be disillusioned. 

The reading and listening I've been doing over the last couple of years leads me to wonder if the journey into the darkest precincts of idealism isn't fueled by disillusionment.

It was for Timothy McVeigh. 

His disillusionment with the U. S. Army, the federal government, the FBI and ATF (he was enraged by what happened at Ruby Ridge and Waco), and other agencies that he saw as waging war against Americans and against citizens' freedoms convinced him that he bombed the Murrah Building in the name of good. 

I'd say those who bombed ROTC buildings, burned down ranger stations, lit fires and destroyed property in cities, whether in the wake of the MLK's assassination or the death of George Floyd, and who have carried out other acts of similar violence did so in the name of good and were fueled by disillusionment. 

A lot can go terribly wrong in the name of doing good. 

This little blog post barely scratches the surface of how this can be true. 

3. You might wonder with all this serious reading I did today, with all this serious pondering the reading led me into, do I give myself a break from thinking about these conflicts and these acts of violence we live with now, and have lived with for decades? 

None of these troubling aspects of human life trouble Gibbs or Copper. 

With Debbie having been gone for two weeks, I've done my best to divide my time between the living room, Gibbs' domain, and the bedroom, where Copper spends much of his time. 

It's a comfort and a great help to my spirit to have Gibbs jump on my lap and relax, especially after he was so gloomy for the first couple of days Debbie was gone. 

Copper is always grateful when I come into the bedroom. 

I lie down to read and he inches as close as he's willing towad me -- within about a foot -- and purrs contentedly when I pet him, simply lay my hand on his back or stomach, and when he rests his face inside my hand when I shape it like a cup. This wanting to put half his face in my cupped hand is a new development, one that seems to transport Copper beyond contentment into a temporarily ecstatic state. 

Three Beautiful Things 01-02-2025: Family Reunion, I Delighted Leah Sottile!, Back to Timothy McVeigh

1. Debbie sent Christy, Carol, and me several pictures today, helping us see what a joyous reunion Debbie, Adrienne, Patrick, and Molly have experienced and how happy our grandchildren seem to be to see one another and be in the company of the family as a whole. 

I haven't experienced FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). 

I've experienced KOMO (Knowledge of Missing Out)! 

That hasn't been a bad thing -- not when I see what a happy occasion this reunion has been. 

I'll add that some time ago, Patrick and Jack began working together through electronic communications to help Jack build a computer. 

Now, with Patrick and Jack being in one another's company, they've finished this project and Debbie sent us pictures of them working together and connecting the computer to Adrienne's internet connection. 

I look forward to Debbie's return to Kellogg, but, at the same time, I wish her time with the family all being together could last longer and that it were simpler to make happen more often. 

2. As I've written several times on this blog, Portland free lance journalist Leah Sottile, back in July, posted on her Substack a list of books she admires in response to the New York Times' list of the top 100 books of the 21st century. Out of my admiration for Leah Sottile's podcasts and writing, I decided to read every one of the fourteen books she listed. I am almost finished with book number twelve, leaving me with two to go.

Today, I remembered that several days ago I'd received a notification email that Leah Sottile had posted a new article on her Substack. I subscribe to her Substack account and I checked out her latest piece entitled, "Some Very Good Writing". 

In it, she reminded readers of her July book list and she put a footnote at the end of this reminder paragraph. 

I read the footnote. 

It referred to me! 

Leah Sottile wrote: "It couldn't delight me more that one subscriber, Bill, has turned the book list into his personal reading list. Folks, be like Bill. Read more books."

I had commented a few months ago on one of Leah Sottile's Substack articles that I decided to read all of the books on her list. That's how she found out I undertook this project. 

I am happy to have delighted Leah Sottile. 

As I told her, reading her list of books has been unnerving, challenging, stimulating, and chilling. 

Now I look forward to reading the articles she listed in her latest article, "Some Very Good Writing". 

I also look forward to her next book coming out: it's an investigation of the New Age movement entitled Blazing Eye Sees All: Love Has Won, False Prophets, and the Fever Dream of the American New Age. 

3. I drove to Gladstone and Eugene and back again in the first part of December. Upon arriving home, I seem to have become caught up in other things and then I started watching Poker Face and I fell out of my reading routine. 

Today I returned. 

I picked up where I left off about a month ago in the book, American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh & the Oklahoma City Bombing.

Today's reading chilled me, not only because it detailed the logistics and the unimaginable carnage of the bombing itself, but it detailed the cold rationality Timothy McVeigh drew upon to carry out his mission.

It haunts me to read stories of people who possess the gift of superior intelligence and employ their intelligence in the pursuit of violence and destruction, fueled by obsession and a narrow and intense commitment to a particular ideology.

The killings at Ruby Ridge and at Waco and McVeigh's deep disillusionment with the U. S. military and his experience as a soldier in the Gulf War combined to fuel Timothy McVeigh's anti-government obsessions.

He wanted to pay the federal government back for the deaths and injuries its agencies had brought about and he had come to believe that doing so, by engineering a huge, unforgettable act of destruction, would trigger a widespread anti-government revolution. Timothy McVeigh either hoped or believed that once people understood why he blew up the Murrah Federal Building, that it would be the start of a movement to end, by whatever means, government tyranny and build up liberty.

The bombing did not have this widespread effect (although it did inspire a fraction of our population). 

The book then chronicles McVeigh's arrests, his indictment, and I put the book down later tonight,  still deep in Timothy McVeigh's trial.