"the future never meets us in the ways we imagine."

the titular quotation is from a great piece on the relationship between the unabomber and his brother (ted and david kaczynski) by stephen j. dubner (via).

it's kinda surreal to read...you get this impression that they are each other's dopplegangers.

anyway, a great read, check it out.

Ted, as it turned out, was more than eager to talk about David. And about pretty much everything. The life of a notorious prisoner, he admits, has its advantages. He lives on "Celebrity Row," a group of eight cells protected from the prison's general population...Among them, he says, are Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing, and Timothy McVeigh. One can only imagine this bombing trio's conversations. Kaczynski says McVeigh (who has recently been transferred to another prison) lent him one of the most interesting books he's read lately...
[...]
When I ask Ted what he would say to David if he were in the room now, he answers, "Nothing. I just wouldn't talk to him. I would just turn my back and wouldn't talk to him."

David, who lives in upstate New York and works as a counselor at a teenage-runaway shelter, says he still loves his brother. He has written him repeatedly, offering at least one apology, but Ted has not answered. In order to gain forgiveness, Ted writes, David must renounce the "lies" he has told about Ted, leave his wife and remove himself from modern society. "If he does not redeem himself," Ted adds, "then as far as I am concerned he is the lowest sort of scum, and the sooner he dies, the better."

It is as awkward to face the gulf between these two brothers as it is difficult to overestimate the depth of feeling that once passed between them. Ted's life was steeped in rejection, isolation and anger; through it all, his younger brother was the only person ever to connect with him.

(pic is of an overturned, abused dumpster on upenn's campus)

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