What you do with our your life is entirely your business. Just do your best. That's all any of us can do. After all, an asteroid or something we can't even imagine may wipe out humanity before we figure out what the hell we're doing here. Our individual mental health, our sanity, must always come before any contribution we try to make to history. But here's why I chose the warrior's way in my own life.

I hated being a child. You have to do what people who don't understand you, like your parents, tell you what to do. Childhood for me was experienced as a humiliating and depressing jail term, deprived of the things I needed, forced to do menial labor in schoolrooms, rewarded by toys I didn't want like a silver-painted lead cap gun that my father thought would magically turn me into a "real man" (like he was!) — not unlike Iorek Byrnison, deprived of his sky iron, forced to lift heavy machinery, and rewarded with whiskey. When I met Paul I got my sky iron back, losing many friends in the process who thought my new-found confidence quite intolerable. Here's what I told them: I know that I would feel ashamed to show less courage than that child! That kind of courage can get you killed. I will not live in shame any longer, Scoresby!

I've been an outspoken public figure for 45 years now — not that many people cared. I've been rubbing scandalous admissions about my beliefs and my behavior into their faces since I left college, including speaking out in public squares and starting my own organizations. I'm too old now to give up my freedom of speech.

In the early years of the Ninth Street Center we had some suicides. To those who've told me, "Sweep those failures under the rug", I answer that every social center has suicides. Some have more, some less. Every teacher and every leader has them too. Some may not involve death, but they are disappointing nevertheless. Social centers attract not only ambitious people, but also stragglers, wannabes, alcoholics and methadone addicts, psychic paupers looking for handouts, those who have been released prematurely from mental hospitals, and genetic defectives who can't find inner direction on their own and want a cult to tell them how to think and what to do. This is why I was so repulsed by Paul's giving in to his compulsive need to use our basement to waste hundreds of dollars of my money every damned week on Saturday Night Buffets. This kind of brainless do-gooding attracted all the social parasites the gay world had to offer. It gave us a little free publicity, but not one serious student. I only tolerated it because running a restaurant had been on Paul's bucket list for many years, and because he soon grew too sick to continue his folly.

Once you stand up to your full height you'll find lots of little frightened mice scurrying under your skirts for shelter, complaining the you have no right to be so tall. And you have to watch out for the really helpless and reckless ones. They're so lacking in imagination that when the last free meal fails to satisfy their non-negotiable hunger their only resort is to give up on life itself. Sometimes they ask to be thrown into an insane asylum, sometimes they don't want even to try this. If they choose suicide, sometimes it's "a cry for help", sometimes an just an ugly condemnation of anybody and everybody who has ever loved them, like Kurt Cobain. Usually it would have happened no matter what had been done for them by their family, friends and service agencies.

fell in love with a beautiful young man named Collin who was hell-bent on dying no matter what. His inevitable death weighed on Tony significantly and may have been a factor in Tony's own suicide a few years later. After Collin's first attempt I met his distraught younger sisters who had flown out from the West Coast, and I can tell you that he succeeded in damaging them much more than he did himself. He solved all his problems in an instant of selfish recklessness, only to give them a lifetime of remorse for something they would never understand. Suicides are happy to leave their shit for others to clean up. I hate people who commit suicide.

And once these people check out, there is simply no way to tell what the hell they were thinking. We never heard of anybody leaving a note blaming us for anything we taught them, but we were also aware that strong people make things hard for weaklings. But we knew that more people were finding our ideas useful than not, and that should be the bottom line for any teacher or leader. We weren't perfectionists then, nor are we now. Perfectionists can't get the job done that a world this sick is crying out for.

I couldn't care less about my "reputation" on Google, or in the mass media. Or a whole planet of hunchback rumor-mongers. Let 'em sue me! They don't have the guts for the kind of war I'm waging. My friend John , who used to be a Catholic priest, once told me that, even though I mock religion, God admired me and supported the good works I was doing. The s too are totally cool with what I'm doing — they've told me so many times in so many words. But many self-righteous finger-pointing social parasites used to condemn me in the heyday of the Center. I remember making appointments with many of them to meet me and go over their complaints, only to find that none of them had the courage to look me in the face.

At the Lesbian and Gay and Everybody Else Center, Bob used to complain that I was talking over people's heads and that I should only say things I could be certain that stupid people could understand. I would always answer that it's their responsibility to come up to my level, not mine to go down to theirs, and that using my intelligence to its fullest extent constituted an ad hoc I.Q. test that helped me eliminate those who would never be able to use Paul's ideas in the first place and who would only be wasting their own time by attending our discussion groups. And I'll go a step further here, if only metaphorically. I fully enjoy peppering my writing with tongue-in-cheek irony and snarky remarks that few can grasp. Why? I'm very clever. I'm trying to confuse my enemies to death.

I can assure you that no self-respecting American will ever indulge in self-censorship. Not if he values his freedom. Not if he values his self-respect. I will never pick up a weapon, true, but we still have a "land of the free and home of the brave" to defend and this is how I'm going to do it. I'm King of the Ice Bears and I'm not the only warrior on the prowl out there. Don't mess with us if you want us to do a good job protecting you. We'll set things right. We will. You, and me, and Iorek, and Serafina Pekkala, and Mr. Scoresby. And my father. We'll set it right, Pan. Just let them try to stop us!

— Lyra Belacqua

Just let them try to stop me. It will be the saddest day of their lives.