From the mailbag:

From: Wayne Camp
Date: Wednesday, June 21, 2000 6:23 PM
To: seven @deadlysins.com
Subject: gluttony

"what is " gluttony, the reason why IM am asking is a family was murdered this way on the news and i wanted what to know

Once upon a time, the Deadly Sins site used to get a lot more random email than it does now. Back then, the site was so crappy and halfassed that I was surprised that people would respond to it as an authority on sin and virtue. Maybe it was unthreatening in its handmade construction, open for comment, unfinished and inviting help. Back then people thought the web was about community, about sharing ideas. I would get letters from school kids writing reports, morons with fixations on church symbology, and virulent atheists who didn't detect the persistent signs that it was all a joke. In response, I took great pleasure in posting the most inane letters for public jeering, a sort of late 20th-century newmedia stockade. Freedom and cruelty so often go hand-in-hand.

Now, though the number of visitors to the site has increased progressively, I get less mail than in those heady days. Maybe people have settled into the idea that the web is just a more efficient means of getting stuffed with ready-made goodies: exactly the kind of porn, books, stock updates, and other amusements you want, delivered through a widening pipeline to your hypertrophied pleasure centers. No one bothers to try to tell me how to run my site any more, or inform me that I will be going to Hell when I die, or convince me that I left out "Greed" in my list of Sins. I kind of miss it. If they disagree, they just switch the channel to any one of the umpteen other providers. It's the brightest triumph of capitalism, in which even people trying to give things away have to compete for the honor.

Basically I'm just in a foul temper because it's T minus five days to my aidman exam and I spend nearly all my waking hours contemplating various grisly medical scenarios. My first act upon waking up this morning was to lie in bed and run through a complete mental cardiac arrest. Just to make it harder on myself, I placed my hypothetical patient in a bathroom stall. I started from the moment I would arrive on scene and ran all the way through to handing over patient care in the Emergency Room. Then I got up and critiqued myself as I waited for the coffee to brew -- make sure to drop an oral airway first thing, and get a short board under the patient before placing him on the cot. It was a fairly depressing way to start a sunny day.

When not thinking about how I handle a working code, I sometimes lighten up and consider a breech birth, or an automobile extrication. Then it's back to pediatric trauma and a more bruised shade of the blues.

I'm spending every evening at the squad now, and at the end of the working day, I put on my uniform and feel absolutely wretched. Everything -- my relationship, work, and creative pursuits -- is taking damage from the time I have to spend at the squad. At some point in the drive my life undergoes a strange, Scroogelike alteration in priorities, and I can't think of anywhere I would rather be than on an ambulance. I feel like those tiny shrink-rayed little people in Fantastic Voyage as they bear down on the tumor they must vaporize. I feel like I have been placed inside a large, mysterious body, a maze of horrors and stunning vistas that I am only now coming to know from the inside.