Death by Haggis.

Mojo City, July 4, 2003 - Cody Barstow, a contributing editor to this paper and a damned good friend took a wrench to the head from a mugger about a year ago and disappeared. As a result, it's been a while since we wrote a story in The Mojo City News.

Frankly, we were devastated when he went missing. So we drank a lot of beer and wandered around for a while (about 15 months) and just generally pissed off a year or so. Cody's one of those people you think will live forever. Be there to kind of put things into perspective. You know … when you've got seven guys coming at you in an alley and they've got knives and they're getting closer … Cody's the one who'll notice that their leader has an untied shoelace and begin making nasty comments about the guy's dressing habits, distracting him (Hey, your momma was on drugs when she dressed you … cheap drugs) and while everyone's stopped, looking at the shoelace, Cody's reaching for the pistol in his ankle holster and he puts a round into the bad guy's thigh where there are no serious arteries wandering around and everyone kind of stops, stunned, and you all just look hard at each other and then kind of just turn and walk off in opposite directions. Finished.

See, Cody was the guy who took the time to dis someone's momma with real purpose behind it while all the rest of us were freaking. And aiming for the fleshy part of the thigh so the guy would survive … he hated killing. Done enough of it in the war, he'd tell you over too many beers late at night. And a few times in the States for the government. Some bad people who needed killing, was all he'd say about that.

We got to know the Cody you could trust to not kill you. But help you. He spent time with the kids in kindergarten showing them how digital cameras could capture their worlds. He wanted a world filled with art, he'd say. And for college students … when everyone on campus was scraping money together for a "digital darkroom" to appear real cutting-edge, Cody donated enough money to build an old-time darkroom with old film technology and actual printing using light and dodging and burning. Like Ansel Adams. That old-time photography. That was where the art took place, he said. In the darkroom. Digital gives you pretty pictures. Darkrooms, film, and paper give you art.

Anyway, we found him a week ago teaching college in some southern coastal town. A new-age place. Very high-tech, with a huge dose of the spiritual thing. He was teaching a course titled, The Tao of Quantum Computer Development. It was the only course he taught. Four classes per semester. Always an overflow in the class registration. The thing about the course is that no one could tell him he was wrong. No one's really got a working model of a quantum computer in place yet (a few strange projects exist in some physics labs that have a strange tendency to quietly implode and disappear, however). So there was no one to challenge what it was that he was teaching.

And that thing he taught? It was all in one word. Believe. Believe it will work. And it will. Just ... believe.

Go figure. Pure insanity, right? Mixing the very central element of religion ... belief ... with science. And yet, some of those students of his were building things on their desks that would quietly implode and disappear later.

It's too messy recounting how we found him there in the first place. Let's just say it involved some gin and tonics, $37.37 in cash, an historic pair of WWII nylons we stole from the Smithsonian, and a lot of Googling. Anyway, he was suffering from amnesia.

The slam of the wrench (it's a last flash-thought he had of that night) alongside his skull had jarred some of his memory loose. He apparently picked himself up later that night, wandered for a while, got a job in New Orleans as a fish gutter, then after three months of that, wandered east along the coastline until someone hired him as a college professor.

But he's back now. Together. Seeing us kind of jolted his neurons into action and within a week, he was Cody again.

Except he's acquired this taste for haggis for breakfast. A Scottish dish of goat stomach stuffed with unmentionable things. At least that's what tradition says. But it's not so much the haggis that's got us worried. It's the fact that Cody insists on playing the bagpipes for half-an-hour afterwards.

He's not good at it.

Birds are dropping from the sky. Dead. There are reports of zombies in the cemetery singing Madonna tunes.

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