This morning found two caustic emails from dissatisfied visitors quietly bubbling bile in my mailbox. Not an everyday occurrence, but common enough. There's no telling when I'm going to laugh off an attack, and when I'm going to want to reach through the wires and electronically slap my assailant in their screenlit face. This morning I experienced one moment of each sentiment.

Sometimes when confronted by such criticism, I have the cowardly urge to take cover behind the dogooding in my life. Criticize me, and I think about how only a few days ago I was slick with blood and trying to save a life while you were watching fucking Leno. When I slept that night, it was in the "bunk room" at the squad, amidst the forms of my fellow crewmates lumped in their bunk beds. It is totally dark there. I slip off my boots and slide them under the metal-frame bed. Some time in the indistinct hour that follows, the room lights slam on and a buzzer smashes the fragile skein of dreams and I am pulling the boots back on without being fully awake and then out the door, down the steps, through the short hall to the ambulance bay, where I climb into the rear compartment of the medic unit and belt myself in. The vehicle bumps out into the dark streets, and I can see through the small windows as its lights cast festive reds and brilliant whites over the passing landscape. I hook my feet on the metal bar under the cot and brace myself against hard turns. Somewhere in there I have come fully awake. I sometimes allow myself to believe that all this insulates me from criticism. It's not why I do it, but is a convenient place to hide when the moral going gets tough. I despise this tendency because I feel it pollutes my motivations with the smell of ambiguity.

When I was nine, I came into possession of a device called the Pen Pal Machine. Its form and functioning are too complicated to fully explain here; I fully believe that its use was so complex and nonlinear that only a child, with the unrestrained impulse to play without fixation on the end result, could master it completely. I used my Pen Pal Machine to contact and talk to new friends that my rural environs and social ineptitude would have otherwise kept out of reach. I tended to correspond more with young women than young men, associating boys with viciousness.

The pen pals I contacted using the Pen Pal Machine were always as enthusiastic about our connection as I was at first. All of them had come into possession of their own Pen Pal Machines, and all understood somehow that this was something to be hidden from others. There were people from everywhere in the world: places where it was winter during my summer, and daytime while I slept.

Inevitably, my friends lost interest in writing. Changes in our lives and interests would leave us with little in common. Their letters would lag, and the wait between would grow to aching duration, until I would finally give up and use the Pen Pal Machine to find a new correspondent.

After this happened a couple times, I noticed that before my friends ceased writing to me, they would develop "older kid" interests, and they would start to talk to me like an older sibling instead of a friend. It was like they were growing up faster than me. I was envious and resentful of them, hating my own small size and apparent immaturity. I was exchanging letters with a boy named "Chad" on my Pen Pal Machine when I noticed that he had jumped a grade ahead of me. He was already 10 and was studying French. It was already fall where he lived. We kept writing about the things we wanted to do when we grew up -- study wild birds, or go to Africa, or hike the whole Appalachian Trail. A month later, summer came for me and school let out. I began writing Chad more, but it was past Christmas where he lived and he just wanted to talk about his new Sega. By the end of my summer, Chad had turned twelve -- he wrote me on his Pen Pal Machine on his birthday and it was all about the Sega games he got. He never wrote back after that. Although we started out the same age, Chad had ended up fully two years older than me. It was a problem, I guessed, with the Pen Pal Machine.

I soon figured out that if I started writing to younger kids, they would write back for longer before they got older than me and stopped writing. They'd seem stupid and childish at the beginning, but in less than a year they'd get older and their letters would dry up. Then I would use the Pen Pal Machine again to contact someone new. I started talking to Arla when she was only nine and I was eleven. She had just received her Pen Pal Machine and I was the first person she ever wrote to on it. Maybe that helps explain why she didn't stop writing like the others. She seemed childish at first, but I was used to that, and I knew she'd grow up quickly. Something about the Pen Pal Machine.

She grew up, and I watched. She said frightening things to me, late at night in the season in which she lived, about what it was like to be the age she was. She never talked to me like an older sister, even though she turned 12 before I did, and she was 16 by the time my next birthday came. She told me what it was like when she first kissed a boy, and I was cried with helpless jealousy as I read her letter over and over on my Pen Pal Machine. She was trying to get good grades because she had to think about college. She wrote me in secret on her Pen Pal Machine, late at night having come home from dates with a boy she liked, about how she was thinking about Going All the Way with him but wasn't sure. Things seemed to go more quickly then, the letters arriving so quickly that I often had no time to answer before another came. She complained that I didn't write her enough. She was graduating from high school and promising me she would take her Pen Pal Machine with her to college. She loved dorm life. She was majoring in Chemistry. She went on a long hike in the mountains one day with a young man and they went skinny-dipping and she really, really liked him. And then she never wrote again.

I was tired of the Pen Pal Machine. The relentless pace of Arla's letters had been exhausting. I watched her grow up from a child to someone I wanted, desired with childish need but could never have. I hated the fast flow of her life, her ability to leap over the embarrassment of childhood and go so quickly to what lay beyond. The stupid Pen Pal Machine didn't work right -- some flaw in it, or in my use of it, made me lose all my new friends to the heedless flow of time.

I didn't use the Pen Pal Machine again. I gradually realized that the problems I experienced were likely the result of my misuse of the device. Had I really only wanted a pen pal, perhaps I could have contacted someone who would have remained in my timeframe with me, someone I could grow up with. But that was not at all what I secretly, humiliatingly desired, and so the machine compensated as best as possible for my inappropriate instructions. As a machine, it could not effectively process this unfortunate and immature moral ambiguity. It's unlikely that the more advanced machinery of today would experience such a failure.