the booby hatch

 Ah, the booby hatch.  Reminds me of that pop song of my youth, They're Coming to take me away (Ha Ha).  Then there was Ms Hradec of our sophomore geometry class who constantly complained that we were going to end up putting her in Manteno.  

After I switched my major from Chemistry which was too hard, to Math which also became too hard, I switched it to Psychology.  You would think that psychology would be interesting because it was about people, but not at the U of I at the time it wasn't.  The followers of Skinner held sway of the curriculum and it was all about rats.  One button experiments, two button, three.  Stimulus/Response, in between was a black box and only an infidel would inquire as to what was going on inside it.  

Abnormal psychology was the only course that had people in it.  There were maybe seven varieties of psychosis discussed and as I read them late at night in my tiny room all I could think of was, hey that sounds like me, and so does this, oh and this one is really me.

There were counselors in the Student Services building and I started seeing one once a week.  While I was studying psychology I had an image of my future as working out of some dingy office likely some gummint program (see I was a commie even then), where I would see a different nut every hour, eight hours a day, five days a week, and they would tell me their story, and at the end of the harrowing, more likely boring, details, they would look up at me, and I would stroke my beard, and say, "Don't worry, you'll be fine."

And so it went with my counselor in the Student Services Building.  It was kind of nice, I could shoot my mouth off about myself for an hour and nobody would interrupt me to talk about themselves, and the counselor guy would at least look like he was interested.  And at the end of every session he would say, "Don't worry, you'll be fine."

My problems at the time were flunking out of school (which I did twice, but managed to get back in both times) and the draft, which I eventually got my CO for, and I did manage to graduate on the third try, and I remember seeing him one more time before I headed down to Herrin to start my CO and I told him, well I guess I came through this just fine didn't I, and he said, "I wouldn't be so sure."

Meanwhile consider what is going on at the White House, though I would by no means consider Trump as having gone crazy.  He is the same guy he was when he rode down that escalator, when he was on that stupid show, when he was a rich kid growing up among sycophants.  I don't see how anybody could not see this coming down the pike.  And now even those who watched him prance around in his new clothes and praised them until they got hoarse, agreed with every lie he told, and enhanced those lies by praising him to the high heavens as he took the proud ship of the Republican party and smashed it into that iceberg, backed it up and smashed it again, and again, and even now about half of them still pretend that he has won the election.

And now he is deep into the bunker surrounded by the crowd that the guys in the booby hatch would say belong in a booby hatch, and he has the atomic codes.  

I haven't talked about the guy for weeks.   It is forty days since I breathed that deep sigh of relief, but now it looks like there will be thirty more days until I can tell myself, "Don't worry, you'll be fine."  But even then I will hear the voice of that counselor fifty years ago, "I wouldn't be so sure."