Ideas Come from Somewhere

When we first got into that Vietnam thing, I guess I was trying to fight the war all over again, but at some point I changed my focus on the issue. I became interested in how it looked from your perspective. I'm sure that somebody who was actually in the combat zone would have a different perspective than either of us, but most of those guys don't want to talk about it very much. Anyway, I began to see how you could believe what you believed about it and wondered, had I gone to college instead of the army, if I might not have fallen in with the same crowd and came out differently than I did. Last night I compared it to a couple of old vets, who had been in different theaters of operation, swapping war stories. Actually, it's more like two war veterans, who had fought on opposite sides, getting together years later and comparing notes. If they could do that without getting mad at each other, they might both come away with a different attitude than they had during the war. All we can do about the past is talk about it, we can't go back and change it, but if more people talked to each other like we do, it might help prevent the next generation from making some of the same mistakes, assuming they would listen to us. Ha! Ha! Who's living on Fantasy Island now?

Most ideas come from somewhere. We may think that we have a totally original idea but, if we think about it for awhile, we can usually trace the inspiration back to some outside source. We may toss it around in our minds and put our own spin on it, so we think of it as our own creation. In a manner of speaking, it is, because the end product might hardly resemble the original inspiration but, in another manner of speaking, it's not, because, without the original inspiration, we wouldn't have been thinking about it in the first place. When I say that I read something somewhere, it's just my attempt to trace my thought back to it's original source so that we can have some idea of where it came from. The original source might have been full of shit, or my memory of it might be imperfect, or I might have drawn a totally illogical conclusion from the original source, even if it was true. It seems like it would be easier to decide those things if we had some idea where the thought came from.

Speaking of enemies, you seem to imply that people like the Koch Brothers are part of the reason that we don't seem to be getting anywhere on this alternative energy thing. I have also heard you say similar things about the "gun lobby". While there may be some truth to that, how is it different than me blaming the government or "they" for all the troubles in the world?

Truth be known, we, or they, have actually made some progress with alternative energy. If you can believe anything on TV, windmills are sprouting up all over the country like mushrooms, and vast areas of the desert are being carpeted with solar panels. Nuclear has been kind of a disappointment, but that's largely because they haven't perfected the fusion thing. If I remember correctly, the original plan was to have fission and fusion reactors burning each other's waste products. I think they should decide once and for all if cold fusion is attainable and, if it's not, move on to something else. But that's just my opinion.

Okay, this a fiction story, I'm just telling it to illustrate a point: On the "Big Bang Theory" TV show, Sheldon, who is a theoretical physicist working for a university, recently came to the conclusion that he has been wasting his time all these years trying to prove String Theory. He confided this thought to one of his colleagues, who replied: " I don't think I'm wasting my time. They are paying me good money to work on this stuff, and I spend that money on booze and broads." Nevertheless, Sheldon, who has more money than he knows what to do with and has no interest in booze and broads, approached his boss and asked to be reassigned to some different field. His boss refused, saying that Sheldon is being paid from a grant that was issued specifically to study String Theory. If he doesn't want to do that, then they don't have any other work for him. The season finale left Sheldon, having taken a sabbatical from his job, boarding a train with no particular destination in mind. He plans to ride the rails indefinitely unless he can figure out what he should do with the rest of his life. (Sheldon really loves trains.) Hopefully, he will resolve his issues over the summer and inform us of his decision at the beginning of the fall season.

All I wanted to say about smoking was that I make my own cigarettes for about $1.50 a pack. It's not just that I don't want to spend the money, I don't want them to have it. In this case, they are both the government and the big cigarette companies, who are probably in it together. My supplies come from smaller companies which, I hope, are not in league with either big government or big tobacco but, of course, you can never be sure about things like that. I have gotten used to not smoking in buildings, even in my own house. I smoke less than a pack a day, which is bout half of what I used to smoke before all this foolishness got started, which is probably for the best. I'm not getting any younger, you know.