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Here’s everything I have so far that’s dry.

And here’s everything I did yesterday, which is still somewhat damp. That leaves the pokeweed when it’s ripe and all the walnut, when it’s in season.

My fight with the FBI, such as it is, has turned incredibly stupid and aggravating. Last year, when I asked them for the Looby bombing file, they told me it had been destroyed in ’96. Period. End of discussion.

That always nagged at me, but what could I do about it? I asked around over time trying to find anyone who might have gotten a copy of the file before ’96 or trying to find someone who could help me understand why the FBI would destroy their file on the assassination attempt of a sitting US politician.

Long story short, I finally talked to a retired US attorney about it, who simply did not believe that the files would have been destroyed. I asked for my U.S. Rep’s help.

Truncating a lot, the FBI recently sent me another letter saying files had been destroyed in ’76, but some had made it over to the National Archives.

And leaving even more out, for the sake of getting to my point of anger, the plan is for the book to come out in April of 2020. The wait time for getting a file from the National Archives that needs to be vetted for classified information is about twenty-four months.

So, if the FBI had told me there was a file at the National Archives last spring/summer when I asked them for what they had, I could have requested it and already been a year into my wait time. I would have had it by next year and had enough time to incorporate it into my book.

But by dicking me around, they’ve basically either ensured I won’t have the file in time for my book or that I’ll have to push back the pub date. Both of which suck.

I’m still hoping there may be a solution. (So fingers crossed!)

But it really pisses me off.

And the worst part is that I can’t even say that it’s some deliberate effort to sabotage my story. I truly doubt, before my Rep got involved, that my name or my project had even registered at the FBI.

They just dicked me over so fucking hard as a matter of course, as an impersonal non-deliberate side effect of how they work.