(With thanks to Bacon Ninja on Twitter for that apt description).  I don’t know what it is, really.  I mean, I’m a real charmer when I wish to be.  And yet I seem to cause certain personality types no end of grief — and with each new attempt to counter me or wound me with their words, things just seem to get worse and worse for them until, at long last, they threaten my kids, wish me and my family death from cancer or fiery plane crashes, publicly accuse me of crimes based on hearsay and with no proof whatever, or — in this latest instance — threaten me with ricin poisoning.

Now, normally I wouldn’t be much concerned about such a threat.  I talked to a specials ops buddy of mine last night who explained how to guard against it — ricin being most dangerous when inhaled, and the likely means of delivery in the case of the threat against me being mail, which I almost never sniff aggressively — so it’s not so much the effectiveness that I fear as the attempt itself.  And honestly, the idea of opening my mail with full NBC/CBRN riot control canisters plugged into a mask just seems like overkill.

All of this started over a merchandise dispute.  To make a long story short, a guy out of Easthampton MA screwed me on a deal after having first reached out to me, out of the blue, to do him a favor. He’d purchased items from me before, and being the guy I truly am, kind, with a soft heart for sob stories (as opposed to the psychosexual, hyper-aggressive attacker of Good Men’s Honor I’ve been cast as), I agreed to help him out.

At which point the guy used my help to essentially steal from me a piece of merchandise that I valued greatly.

Naturally, this didn’t sit well with the ultra-violent part of me that has led to my having been so obviously ostracized by the more respectable racist, homophobic, misogynic wingnut nativists; and so I informed this lying shitbag that he had a choice:  return my merchandise and rely on my good graces to simply put the whole ugly incident behind us; or else I would tell his story and go from there.

He liked neither option.

And so his responses began to get bizarre before finally reaching their apex of escalated cuckoo.

First, he told me he had a net worth of $36 million, and that he’d use his legion of “corporate lawyers” to harass me with “frivolous” (his word) lawsuits that would bankrupt me and keep me in court constantly.  My head “would spin.” My life would disintegrate.  He’d done it before, he bragged, and to great effect.

— Which would have been terrifying, this threat of lawfare, had not (as I pointed out to him) he just confessed up front in an email in a plan to file frivolous suits against me in order to use his war chest to break me. I mean, I had the proof of his ill-intent, not to mention proof that his prior victims might find useful in counterclaims.

Not that I believed he was a Bruce Wayne type.  But it was nice to calmly humor him.

This seemed truly to agitate our multi-millionaire friend (whom as I say, I’d done business with before, so whose address I still had), and while I was wondering, via Zimio, why such a corporate giant with an army of corporate lawyers at his beck and call was living an a house built in 1900 and valued at $220K, he shot back an email that advised me to “Google Crooker and ricin.”

Which I did.

What I found was, a man named Michael Crooker from Mass had was found to have an illegal weapons cache and vials of ricin buried in various places around his property and his father’s property.  He was prosecuted for threatening a federal prosecutor with ricin and is serving 15 years.

So, being the curious fellow I am, I wrote back and asked if Michael Crooker was any relation to Peter Carey Crooker, the man with whom I was dealing, the man who had backstabbed me, and now the man who was making veiled threats about ricin.

Turns out, he is indeed.  Michael Crooker, a convicted weapons trafficker who was also cited for threatening a federal prosecutor with ricin through the mail, is the older brother of Peter Carey Crooker, who had made cryptic threats to me — what he termed “interesting reading” that I should pay close attention to — about ricin production and threats.

So.  Not good.

My next move was to contact the Boston bureau of the FBI.  Who, being the Boston Bureau of the FBI, essentially ignored me and told me to contact their department of “internet fraud and scams.”  Which seems strange to me, considering they’d convicted this man’s brother for ricin threats, and now I was receiving ricin threats from the same family.

Of course, I’m not a federal prosecutor, so maybe their interest isn’t so piqued.  But I am human.  And I’m pretty certain that I and my family can die from ricin exposure, even without federal legal credentials.

My next move, in between blogging and baby watching today, is therefore going to be to call the Boston office of the FBI and try to speak to someone.  And see where it takes me.

All of which is a long way of saying, stay tuned!  The saga of protein wisdom vs. Peter Carey Crooker of Easthampton, MA (with one brother in prison and another “2 miles down the road”), is just getting started, I fear.

I know: most people advise I just cut my losses and not wade into such a morass of hellish craziness.  And yet, as is usually the case with me, I have this stubborn desire to see bullying crazies brought to justice.  Or at least made to feel that, before they re-engage in their odious behavior, they should think through past consequences.

It’s a curse of mine.  I’m not terribly pragmatic.  I’m one of those True Believer types so out of fashion today, in fact.

But like parachute pants and skinny ties, we TBers will make a comeback one day.  Bank on it.

And when we do, I’ll be, like, a fucking guru.