Quick update...

All is well with the move except that I have to be done by midnight and out of the old place; it will be close.  No internet in the new place yet but I'll try to work out something.

 Carry on; things will return to normal in good time.

eternal life in the big crunch

 You're right it does not say in that video that eventually all matter in the universe will be torn about atom by atom.  It stops short of that, but that is what will happen according to the current ascendant theory of physics, the big rip.  Videos tend to make my mind wander and knowing that the big rip lies at the end I falsely assumed that the video would get to that point.  Take it from our friend wiki:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe#Big_Rip 

I could never figure out what you are saying about time.  There is no such thing as the speed of time as I explained though I am sure that I have not convinced you.

But I was thinking about that big crunch thing.  Say it takes 20 billion years for the universe to begin to crunch, to become the singularity, to become the big bang, and then evolve into that point where I am again sitting here typing my post.  Actually the big crunch does not think that the universe will come back the same way every time, but we have eternity here so we can rest assured that it will come to those identical times where I am typing the post an infinite number of times, so, you know, same difference.

So let's just compare the current Uncle Ken with the next Uncle Ken.  The same guy down to the electric charges in his brain that guide his thoughts.  But is he me?  20 billion or more years from now when Uncle Ken +1 appears, will I be aware?  Awareness is the key (I think therefore I am).  My actions, my thoughts, could be different but I would still be me.  But shorn of my thoughts and my actions what am I?  What is left?  

On the other hand if Uncle Ken +1 (and +2, and so on) are me, then don't I have eternal life?  For long periods of time I do not exist but for every big bang I have around 100 years and since there are an infinite number of big bangs my life is eternal.  That is assuming that Ken +1 etc, are all me and not some other guy.

Pigs Don't Care About Time

"After awhile that galaxy formed from the superclusters will begin to break apart and eventually each star will be separated from the galaxy,"

I watched the video again, and I still didn't get that out of it.  What I got was that our local group would be drawn together while the rest of the Universe would continue to expand away from it.  Although the video didn't say it in so many words, logically, if the gravity in our local group is sufficient to eventually draw it together into a single super galaxy, it should be sufficient to continue drawing it together, ultimately resulting in something like the Big Crunch.  I have heard of the Big Crunch Theory, and I understand that theory is no longer in fashion, having been replaced by a theory of infinite expansion.  This video seems to contain elements of both theories, but that's just my take on it.

I was right about time dilation though.  Come on say it, say it, "Beagles was right."  Okay, when I say I was right, I am not saying that I necessarily believe in it, I'm just saying that's my understanding of what Einstein said about it.  Since I have no comprehension of the math involved, I'm not qualified to pass judgement on the correctness of it.  I don't expect to ever use this stuff in my life anyway, but I still find it interesting as a subject of speculation. This reminds me of a story:

A farmer had some pigs penned up on top of hill.  Every day he would carry water to his pigs in pails from the well at the bottom of the hill.  One day his neighbor suggested that the farmer either run a pipeline from the well to the pigpen or move the pigpen closer to the well.  The farmer replied, "Now why would I want to do that?"  The neighbor said that it would save a lot of time.  The farmer said, "Time? Time? Pigs don't care about time."

the draft six

 Did you watch that video all the way through?  After awhile that galaxy formed from the superclusters will begin to break apart and eventually each star will be separated from the galaxy, and then each atom in each star will be separated and then there will just be small packets of energy, each of them getting smaller and smaller, and further away in the cold dark empty universe, and this will continue for eternity.  Sounds plenty grim to me.  

That's what science thinks now.  Earlier, when I was younger there was a discussion between would the universe expand forever or would gravity eventually turn back the effects of the big bang and everything would begin coming back together in what they called the big crunch where we would eventually reach the point where everything was squeezed into a tiny space of no dimension and then there would be another big bang.

But would that big bang be exactly like the earlier big bang?  Would there eventually be another planet Earth where Uncle Ken would be making a post about it on a warm late summer morning?  And if so would I be all the Uncle Kens, or would they be separate people?

Quite a bit as it turned out.  We could smell the tear gas within a few blocks, here and there a car was burning.  There would be no cigarettes on sale on Telegraph Avenue that night.  As we started uphill we noticed some Oakland cops had set up a roadblock in front of us.  They were searching people and then letting them through.  Oakland cops were a legend in Berkeley for being big and mean.  They were dressed all in black and with their visored helmets they looked like robots.

 We approached them slowly, hands up to make it easy for them to search us, we don't want no trouble man.

 Bob approached them first and the next thing I knew they had whisked him away justlikethat into a paddy wagon.  I just kind of stood there stunned, and then they noticed me and then bam, I was in another paddy wagon.  One of the cops was asking another cop, "Are we taking prisoners or shooting them?"

 In the morning we were in jail.   Some of us were militants and some of us had just gone out for cigarettes.  There was this one militant guy I remember, bragging about all the Molotov cocktails he had thrown, but he was disappointed that none of them had stuck.  They had burst in a ball of flame alright but then they had just gone out.  They hadn't set anything on fire.

 Didn't you put in any soap I asked.

 Soap?

 Geez, if I had seen it once in the Berkeley Barb I had seen it a hundred times.  If you were going to make a Molotov cocktail you have to add soap flakes to the gasoline.  That's what makes it stick.  Not that I was any kind of street fighting man, but I thought that was just common knowledge, geez.

 We could see out to the street where there were cordons of police.  A rumor spread through our floor that there was going to be a march on the jail, and they were going to storm it and free us all.  The militants thought this was great, but those of us who had just gone out for cigarettes were a little worried.  Wasn't that likely to get us killed?

 The jail was not stormed.  We had hearings on Monday, and some of us were released but not Bob and me.  I used my phone call to call Marlene.  She bailed me out.  She had done that once before when I got busted for marijuana possession back in Champaign.  She may have dumped me a couple times, but she always bailed me out.

 For some reason Dottie didn't bail Bob out right away.  He got transferred to another jail where the guards made them run back and forth chanting, "We love the blue meanies."

 Eventually Bob got bailed out, and we went to some kind of hearing together and they set me free but Bob remained a person of interest.  It turned out that there had been a tall guy with a moustache throwing fire bombs at the Peoples Park Riot (upgraded from demonstration), and they had arrested a lot of tall guys with moustaches.

 Bob had this lawyer who whenever Bob asked, and he asked often, told him that things were going just fine, just fine.  I would tease Bob a little about the case because I was sure that he would never get convicted.  The reason I was so sure was because I knew he was innocent, and this was America.  I was steeped in all this New Left ideology, but still I never thought an innocent man could be convicted in America.

 The day of the trial, Bob turned to his lawyer to get the expected upbeat prediction and the guy just shook his head and said, "I don't know."  Bob got out of it by a hung jury.  It might have been just some lone eccentric holdout that stood between Bob and fifteen years in the slammer.    

A Bang or a Whimper

 That speed of light thing kind of distracted me from the original video to which Uncle Ken linked us.  I got to thinking about it today and, the more I think about it, I like the idea of our local cluster of galaxies sticking together while the rest of the Universe flies off willy-nilly into oblivion.  I also like the idea of our local group merging together into one mega galaxy.  The only thing that's got me worried is what happens after that.  The same gravity that brought us all together is just going to get stronger as we approach each other.  Things will start crashing into each other sooner or later and, ultimately, everything will be condensed into one big dense lump, which likely will start the Big Bang all over again.  I suppose that's better than flying apart until we lose all our energy and wink out like so many burned out candles, but not much.  

The best thing that could happen would be if we could control the process and stop it when we reach our optimal density, just close enough to keep each other warm but not close enough to get on each other's nerves.  Logically, if time stands still at the speed of light, it should go backwards if we could exceed the speed of light.  All they need to do is perfect the warp drive like on Star Trek.  Somebody should get on that right away.   

Does So, Does So, Does So.......Infinity

 

Special relativity indicates that, for an observer in an inertial frame of reference, a clock that is moving relative to them will be measured to tick slower than a clock that is at rest in their frame of reference. This case is sometimes called special relativistic time dilation. The faster the relative velocity, the greater the time dilation between one another, with time slowing to a stop as one approaches the speed of light (299,792,458 m/s).

Time dilation - Wikipedia

Uncle Ken is trying to use earth bound math to explain an interplanetary phenomenon.  Like I said, much of the Theory of Relativity is counter intuitive, I suppose because it's effects are not noticeable here on Earth.  Time dilation, for instance, only becomes apparent at greater speeds and distances than either of us is likely to encounter in our lifetime, especially at our age.

things the universe does not allow

 No it cannot be allowed, I cannot allow you to speak of the speed of time anymore than you can speak of dividing by zero or the merry witches dancing around their cauldrons on the other side of the big bang.  Speed = distance / time.  

If we multiply both sides by time we get speed * time  = distance

And dividing  by speed we get time = distance / speed

Substituting for speed we get time = distance / (distance / time)

And since when we divide by fractions we invert the divider and multiply we get time = distance * (time/distance)

Which is simply time = time.

Which proves that, well I am not sure.  It took me better than a half hour to get that all worked out because damn it multiplying and dividing by fractions is hard.  The problem is division.  When you multiply an integer by another integer you always get an integer, but when you divide a integer by an integer most likely you will not get an integer you will get a frozen operation, and you will have to allow into your peaceable kingdom of integers those unruly rational numbers also known as fractions.  I am already planning a Math Wednesday.

Anyway I was reading through Beagles' post about the ridiculous notion of time having a speed, and it got wackier and wackier and then I came across Cimrman, and where had I heard that word before?  Of course that was the name of Beagles's imaginary polymath.  Googling the man I discovered that other people had invented him and Beagles was just borrowing him which is perfectly ok.  And one of the pages summoned was actually from The Institute itself.  http://talkswithbeagles.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-legend-of-jara-cimrman.html

Can The Institute cite itself?  Can time have a speed?  Can you divide by zero?  What are the witches singing across the great divide of the big bang?

This being Friday I was going to post another installment of The Draft, but the computer is not complying.  So, be careful out there

Does So

 The reason that this speed of light thing is difficult to understand is because it's counter intuitive.  I guess it can be proven with math but, math being my weak subject, I tried to make logical sense out of it using words, which is my strong subject.  If we accept the assertion that the speed of light is absolute and constant to all observers regardless of their position or state of motion, then the speed of time must be variable.  If the distance varies but the speed of light does not, and the light arrives at diverse points at the same time, then the speed of time must vary.  No other explanation makes sense. 

Another way to look at it is, as we approach the speed of light, time begins to slow down.  I suppose that, if we could travel at the speed of light, time would stand still for us.  We can't travel at the speed of light, but light can, which is why we call it the speed of light.  Therefore, from the light's perspective, time is standing still, if light even has a perspective, but I suppose it depends how you define "perspective".  Then there's the Beaglesonian Corollary, which states that time speeds up as a moving body slows down, which explains why time passes faster for old people than it does for young people.  Then there's the Cimrman Corollary, which states that, unlike the speed of light, the speed of darkness is variable.  This explains why the light overtakes the darkness in the morning while the darkness overtakes the light in the evening.  Again, no other explanation makes sense.  

Fun fact:  Einstein designated the letter "C" to represent the speed of light in honor of his friend Jara Cimrman, who provided Einstein with the inspiration to formulate his Theory of Relativity in the first place.

the speed of empire

 Before the invention of the locomotive no man had ever traveled faster than a horse, well unless he fell off a cliff or something, and there were some that thought the speed would kill him.  I think there may have been something similar thought about the speed of sound.  So why the speed of light, sounds a little arbitrary doesn't it?

I always thought of the example of two spaceships blasting off from Earth headed in opposite directions and both reaching a speed over half of the speed of life, well then aren't they traveling faster than the speed of light away from the other?  Well no because while observing the two ships from Earth and adding them up it comes to oh, 1.2 times the speed of light, the view from each spaceship towards the other spaceship is not the same.  Then there is that thing about acceleration.  You can start from no motion and accelerate to half the speed of light, but then if you take your foot off the pedal for just one second and cease accelerating you are once again in freefall and when you resume accelerating you are not starting from half the speed of light, you are starting from zero.

Well like daylight savings time, the more I talk about it the less I understand it.  I feel like I had a pretty good understanding after I read that book forty some years ago, but it seemed to slip away after awhile and since then I have gone through it several times and walked away feeling like now I have a good grasp, but each time it seems to slip away over time.

Perhaps I need to watch another video, perhaps the one Beagles sent me, but I note that it is twenty minutes long, longer than I want to spend this morning.  In my mind that is the trouble with videos, you have to watch the whole thing to the end, whereas if you are reading something you can skip around.  A video is one dimensional, like a piece of string whereas text is two dimensional, like a sheet of paper.

I don't think you can speak of the speed of time.  Speed is distance divided by time, so you can't speak of the speed of time anymore than you can speak of the speed of distance.  The only way we know that time is passing is that we can see things move.  And even for the guru on the mountain, electricity is moving through his head.

Saw a cartoon lately of some American soldier firing away outside of a cave and inside the cave were the skeletal remains of a Russky, an Englishman, and a Greek.  Oh that's right the Greeks.  Alexander the Great conquered Afghanistan on his way to the rest of the world.  His empire didn't last longer than he did, but the four big chunks of it went on on their own for some time, but what exactly happened in Afghanistan.  I will have to look that up, after I watch Beagles' video.

More Science and the Graveyard of Empires

 That video was pretty cool, but I found a cooler one below it:

The Truth Why We Can't Travel Faster Than Light - YouTube

I don't really care about traveling faster than light, but I have wondered for some years now how the speed of light can be absolute and constant for all observers, regardless of their position or state of motion.  The answer is so simple that I'm surprised I didn't figure it out for myself:  While the speed of light is absolute and constant, the speed of time is not.  I knew that, but I never considered it as being relevant to my question.  Duh!

 The latest edition of National Geographic contains an article about Afghanistan.  There is some history in it, although the events of the last few weeks occurred after the issue went to the printers.  It seems that Afghanistan was ruled by monarchs from 1747 to 1978, when the last king was overthrown by a military coup.  During the monarchal period, Britain tried unsuccessfully to annex the country to keep the Russians from getting it.  They were only able to break part of it off and attach it to Pakistan, which was then part of India, which was then ruled by the British.  Five years after the 1978 coup, some local communists assassinated the coup general and seized power.  The Soviets soon moved in to support their comrades and, a decade later, were sent home with their tail between their legs.  There was some scuffling around after that until the Taliban clawed their way to the top of the pile in 1996.  The U.S. arrived on the scene in 2001, so the Taliban were only in power for about five years and have been out of power for 20 years.  This hardly qualifies them as the historical rulers unless you count the fact that most of them are of the Pashtun tribe, which has been more of less of a ruling class throughout much of Afghanistan's history.

 

Science Wednesday

 I think it was about sixth grade when a handful of us guys who thought we were the smartest guys in the class got together and were discussing school subjects.  Stuff like history and English got our scorn because there was something soft about them.  There were a lot of things in them where there was no single correct answer. unlike science and math where you were always right or wrong and there was no fuzzy inbetween.

I got a telescope and took it out into the backyard at night, and bought weird stuff at American Science and Surplus way out at the northwest edge of the city (still there). and I started reading Isaac Asimov, the smartest man in the universe.

So that's what I was doing when other guys were doing things like dating girls, but right at the end of high school I began drinking beer.  Which I continued to do at college where I discovered that most of the chemistry I had learned at Gage Park High was like thirty years out of date, and compared to those hotshot suburban kids with all their well-learned study habits, I was not as smart as I thought I was.

But then I got into this crowd of baby beats and that morphed into hippiedom, and this was pretty good, not the least because all of a sudden there were girls.  

But hippies were not big on science at all. It was square, it was dull.  They did not like that thing where everything had to be right or wrong, they wanted to let a thousand flowers bloom, astrology, crystalogy, drug addled gurus, this was their cosmic outlook rather than that stodgy, basically fascist, science which they scorned, and I kind of turned away from it myself.

Well hippiedom, we like to think that it ended the unpopular war, but probably those body bags coming back to America had more to do with that.  I will give us credit for one thing though, almost nobody has to wear a tie anymore, unless you're a lawyer and those guys probably want to wear a tie.

But by the mid seventies it had gone mainstream and there was nothing much to it.  I spent my Sunday afternoons riding my bike around campus scouting for yard sales where I could buy books on interesting subjects practically for free, and one day I came across a surprisingly thin book that explained relativity, special and general.  How could that be?  I had heard somewhere that only like a handful of people in the world understood relativity.

Not true apparently, and it was not all that hard.  I couldn't understand all the equations, but I think I got the general gist.  And from there on I read a lot of books on relativity, quantum mechanics, and cosmology.

Cosmology is a little fuzzy for my tastes, but it's like many things, interesting to discuss over a pot of coffee or a pitcher of  beer.  Anyway this buddy of mine, who was more into music and philosophy has now discovered science and the universe of youtube.  He sent me this video this morning and I thought I would pass it on to the silent dawgs to see if I can get a yelp out of you guys.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzkD5SeuwzM

the draft 5

 They called it Vietnamization fifty years ago.  Afghanization is what we did lately but we did not call it that because everybody remembered what became of Vietnamization.  Maybe Vietnamization lasted longer because they had more of a sense of being a country than the Afghanis do who never had much of a central government.  There was a lot of talk about the bloodbath that would happen if Saigon fell. but that never happened.

Hopefully that will not happen in Afghanistan, and the Taliban is saying they won't do that, but who knows.  Actually it is surprising how little we know about the Taliban.  What about our CIA, what about all those investigative reporters?  Well I guess it's hard to get a double agent imbedded in an organization like that.

And my guess is that it is a pretty loose organization. The Afghanis pretty much look alike to us Americans, but there are about six nationalities in the country and each of them are divided into different tribes who don't like each other much better than the different nationalities do.  When people are all working together for a common goal they can work together pretty well, but once they have accomplished it they look around and ask themselves what can I get out of this for myself, so I wouldn't be surprised if the Taliban begins to fall apart.

And now it's Friday and time for the draft again.  I suddenly remember that I never did respond to Beagles's comments about how unlikely it was that somebody convicted of murder in Texas would ever get to breath fresh air again.  I have to admit that I had never thought of that before.  My guess now is maybe he was lying to us.  That's the kind of place Berkeley was, that was the kind of lie somebody might think would impress people.

When I say Berkeley I mean the campus area, actually I mean the area directly south of campus where I suppose some students must have lived, but it was mostly dropouts and people like us who just came there to hang out because it was cool.  The main drag for us was the six or seven blocks of Telegraph Avenue which extended south from the campus.  Just off the end of Telegraph there was a vacant lot.  Whatever had been there had been torn down and whatever was going to up next hadn't gone up, and The People discovered it, and it became People's Park.

 They put in some vegetable gardens, and some places to argue politics, and some places to crash, and like that.  This didn't make the people who were going to put up the next thing too happy, or the city because to the upright citizen the place looked like an eyesore, not that a lot of upright citizens frequented that area. 

 But anyway The Man was going to take People's Park away from us, and the unpopular war was going on apace, and in France they were having big student uprisings, and were we going to let them show us up, and...

Everywhere I hear the sound of marching, charging feet, boy
cause summers here and the time is right for fighting in the street, boy   

 The demonstrations were to go on that weekend.  We went out to see them that Friday.  The police were on one side of Telegraph and the police on the other.  I don't remember which line approached the other one first, but suddenly bottles were being hurled at the police.  This was a recent escalation I didn't like.  It seemed to me that the role of the demonstrator was to get his head beat in, and then the people would see how brutal the police were and that would bring on change, you know like in the civil rights marches.  How the brutality of the police proved that the war was wrong (there were other issues from time to time, but the war was really what it was always about) was a weakness in my logic that didn't bother me overmuch.  So this throwing bottles thing, who was going to feel sorry for us when we got our heads beat in.  Note that my head was safely on the sidelines.

 Diane's father was visiting us, well her, but that meant visiting us.  He was a retired FBI guy.  We were all a little wary about that, but he arrived with boxes of beer and food and that won us over.  At some point, many beers into that night, Bob Bergschnieder and I ran out of cigarettes and had to go down to Telegraph Avenue to get more.

 There was probably someplace else we could have gone to get cigarettes, but we knew Friday night's demonstrations were to be just a prelude to Saturday night, and we wanted to see what was going on.

Who Pulled Out When?

 https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/lisa-curtis-former-trump-official-says-us-pulled-the-rug-out-from-under-the-afghans/ar-AANwdBD?rt=0&ocid=Win10NewsApp&referrerID=InAppShare

According to this, U.S. troops began withdrawing in early July, which sounds about right from what I remember hearing on the TV news.  I also remember that the Taliban was advancing right behind the withdrawing troops.  I heard that some people were surprised by this, but I remember saying to the TV, "What did you think was going to happen?"  The TV, as usual, refused to answer me.  At some point, Biden announced that he was sending a few thousand soldiers back in to help with the evacuation effort, so I presume that most of them had previously departed. The article also says that 16,000 contractors, who I assume were civilians, were "abruptly" pulled out, but it doesn't say when that happened.  Be that as it may, I still maintain that all of the civilians should have been evacuated before the troops were withdrawn.  

In comparing Afghanistan to Vietnam, several articles I have read said that almost two years passed between the the withdrawal of U.S. troops and the fall of Saigon.  Yet it was necessary to evacuate civilians from the U.S. embassy roof by helicopter as the Vietcong closed in.  A number of Vietnamese civilians were tragically left behind in the rush.  One might excuse the chaotic nature of the Afghanistan evacuation because the Taliban moved in so quickly, but there is no excuse for what happened in Saigon.

reasonable people

 I don't think we know in what order people are being taken out of Afghanistan. As a matter of fact I think more soldiers are going in.  That airport is the last little bit of Afghanistan that we hold and our intention is to get all Americans out, and the last I heard the Taliban was letting Americans into the airport.

A more difficult problem is getting out the Afghanis who worked for us who the Taliban thinks of as collaborators.  Yesterday I heard they weren't letting them into the airport,  but just now I heard that they expect most of them to get into the airport.  The Taliban says they will allow this, but who knows.  The Taliban right now is acting pretty responsibly, and it is in their best interests to do so, but again we don't know if their words mean anything.

And then there are the women.  We supported a corrupt government who did a lot of shitty things, but one good thing we did was get women treated a lot better.  That is likely all going to go down the tubes now.

I didn't get a chance to look up the Samaritans properly, but I know there were a lot of Jewish factions around the time of Jesus's birth, a lot of ferment, and then seventy years later the Romans came in and razed Jerusalem to the ground.  The Romans were pretty reasonable people in their fashion, but they did not cotton to rebellion. 

Women and Children First!

 That's supposed to be the rule when a ship is sinking.  The women and children have first dibs on the lifeboats, then the adult male passengers, then the crew members and, last of all, the captain.  Today it occurred to me that this should be the procedure the next time our guys bug out of a war.  I recently read somewhere that there are 15,000 American civilians that need to be evacuated from Afghanistan.  I have no idea what 15,000 civilians were doing in a war zone in the first place, but that's not the point.  The point is that those people should have been evacuated before the soldiers.  First the civilians, then the soldiers and, last of all, the politicians.  I'm surprised that nobody has ever thought of this before, but then I only thought of it myself today.  

I looked up those Samaritans.  I had previously not known much more about them than Uncle Ken, so this was and enlightenment.  Some of it sounded familiar from my Biblical readings, although I didn't know what they were talking about at the time, and now I sort of do.

Afghanistans and Samaritans

 Surprisingly I find myself much in accord with what Beagles has to say.  I had to look up that guy Diem, which I only vaguely remembered being a bloody corpse in the back of a tank.  Well it turned out to be an armored personnel carrier, but he was dead as a doornail.  I get the impression that the ARVN really didn't like him, and they asked the CIA if it was okay, and the CIA said Sure.

Folks don't generally cater to a total overhaul of their culture, particularly from an invading power.  We made the Japanese give up their colonies and their army and say nice things about America, but otherwise their culture was untouched.  There is a continual kerfuffle about them teaching their kids that Japan was a good guy in WW II.

The Taliban was and is a religious theocracy, but the only other one I can think of is Iran under the ayatollah.  Saudi Arabia professes to be one, but it's just the royal family dressing themselves up in the Koran like some American pols like to wrap themselves in the flag.

Maybe the biggest thing in common with Vietnam and Afghanistan is that in both cases we were fighting a home grown army of people who believed in something, while on our side, we had great guns for sure. but mainly we had the moolah.  Our guys, the ARVN and that highly-trained, well-armed, Afghan army were only it because we were paying them a lot of money.  As Americans we hold no higher belief than the American dollar, but other folks don't feel that way.

Freedom of religion is an interesting concept.  Most of the colonies were not tolerant of any religion other than the founders, but when they united they had to all get along, and I think the thrust of the first amendment (had to look that up, wasn't sure if it was in the constitution or an amendment) was to keep any of the varying Christian religions of the colonies from trying to impose their religion over the others.  There has been a lot of prejudice against the Jews and the Catholics, but nobody has tried to outlaw them.  The eastern religions are tolerated well because compared to the Abrahamic religions they are more like philosophy, they don't have a lot of hidebound rules that it is acceptable to kill for.  And the Muslims do all right except when they try to build a mosque in the burbs and their neighbors complain ostensibly about the parking situation.

Well this is a much more complex issue than I thought it would be when I first started writing it, so I am going to stop here.

As I have been writing it I have been using the google and the wiki to try to keep my ducks in a row.  I googled Abrahamic religions expecting something like Jewish, Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Muslim, and what I got was Jewish, Samaritan, Christian, and Muslim.  Well I can see lumping all the Christians together, but Samaritan?  All I knew of them was the guy who helped that other guy on the road.  But it turns out they were kind of a big thing, but not anymore.  Anyway I invite the dawgs to look it up.

Hindsight

 At the time, I thought that the only thing required to achieve victory in Vietnam was to overthrow the North Vietnamese government.  In hindsight, that wouldn't have worked because the South Vietnamese government was unpopular and ineffective.  I seem to remember that there was some kind of coup, probably engineered by the CIA, where the Catholic government was replaced with a Buddhist government, but the new government turned out to be not much better than the old one.  Not surprising, since the only way the Buddhists knew how to protest was to soak themselves with gasoline and set themselves on fire.  What was probably needed was a total overhaul of the Vietnamese culture as well as their government, like what was done with Japan after World War II.

I agree with Uncle Ken that our guys should have quit while they were ahead in Afghanistan.  It looked like the Taliban had been overthrown, but of course they had just gone into hiding, knowing that they could wear our guys down in 20 years or so.  They must have read a book or two about Vietnam, too bad our guys didn't.  Be that as it may, our guys still could have declared victory and gone home at that point. 

One thing I thought of at the time, was that our guys should have insisted that the Afghans put a "freedom of religion" clause in their new constitution.  All those Islamic theocracies would be better off with something like that, but then they would no longer be Islamic theocracies, which is precisely why they would be better off.

***********************************************************************

What was Fred's father doing out of prison when he had been convicted of murder?  That should have gotten him at least a life sentence.    

the draft 4

 I was going to begin this post with a riff on myself in Texas having left my heartland which had turned from the corn belt to the rust belt, Reagan firmly in the White House me doing a boring low paying pencil pushing job under the eyes of my red state overlords, and pondering the big question of the day, what was the lesson of  Vietnam.

Just to make sure I had my ducks in a row on this subject I googled the phrase and the first article was one day old and of course comparing Afghanistan to Vietnam. 

Oh hell I am not going to go through all this.  I offered history and an analysis, and all I got back was the Birchean refrain that the gummint is full of traitors.

We have been round about Vietnam many times and the discussion seemed to end whenever I asked Beagles what would victory in Vietnam have looked like.  I will ask it again and add a second part, what would victory in Afghanistan have looked like.  At what point could we have pulled out flags and heads high and called it victory?

And speaking of Vietnam:

And then it turned out one day that Fred's father was getting out of prison and had nowhere to go.  Prison, that was a little, you know, far out.  But this was Berkeley, we believed in prison solidarity.  Isn't that where many of our revolutionary heroes had gone to and come from and draft dodgers, and wasn't this where The Man shoved his enemies?  And wasn't he the father of Fred, our friend?

 The prison was in Texas which didn't bode well, and he was in for murder I believe which bode even less well.  As it turns out the father was not at all like the son.  He had a plan.  He was going to rent a camper, and pick up some woman who would look like she might be his wife and drive down to Mexico and buy a shitload of marijuana, and drive it back across the border looking like harmless tourists.  And we all cheered the plan.  There could be nothing wrong with bringing more marijuana into the country.  But we stopped cheering after he mentioned that once across the border he would have to kill the woman. 

 He looked up at our sudden silence.  What, and let her talk?

 So why didn't we kick him out?  I don't really remember why.  We may have been afraid of him, we may have believed that he was just a big bull shitter, but I think the main reason is that he was an adult.  He was older than us, and for all our overblown rhetoric about revolution, we still, when face-to-face with them, respected our elders.

Eventually he drifted off, him and his son and the bummer bummer guy.  I don't remember when or why.  I just added this little story to show how crazy Berkeley was back in its heyday. 

 

All Over Until Next Time

 I agree with most of what Uncle Ken said in his last post.  There are a few points that I could quibble about, but I'm still too bummed about this whole thing to be an effective quibbler.  There is certainly plenty of blame to go around, but the worst part for me is that those people didn't learn a fucking thing from Vietnam.  In those days I thought they were  a bunch of commie sympathizers who blew the war on purpose because nobody could be that stupid, but now I'm not so sure.  The current crop couldn't possibly be Islamic terrorist sympathizers, could they?  The only other logical explanation is that people really can be that stupid and, if they could be that stupid in the past, and they can be that stupid in the present, there is no reason to believe that they couldn't be that stupid in the future.  For it is written: "What has happened before will happen again, and there is nothing new under the Sun."

Here's something to chew on:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/biden-isnt-trump-hes-a-disaster-in-his-own-right/ar-AANozeH?rt=0&ocid=Win10NewsApp&referrerID=InAppShare

yes it is all over

 I was wondering yesterday if I should open with this, and pleased to see Beagles doing so, but I was expecting some opinions to go along with it, but I guess I will just go it on my own.

Watched this on the Sunday shows yesterday and it was mostly just politicians blaming each other.  Biden had some poor bloke,  Blinken, the secretary of state. on every show.  He basically said the same thing every time, and didn't respond much to questions as these blokes are wont to do.   If twenty years of building up their army didn't work, likely a hundred years more would not do that either, and there was no reason to pour any more of our treasure into a lost cause.  

True enough, but couldn't this pullout have been done in a better way?  Well I don't think anyone foresaw how quickly our US trained army would collapse, maybe they should have, or at any rate should have had some plan C or something if it should happen.  This is a bad on Biden and he should have, and maybe yet will, make some kind of apology.  Sure probably his advisors had all said this will work out, and what's a guy to do, but it happened on his watch and he should make some kind of statement, or admit that mistakes were made.

The Trumpists on the show were all over Biden, not so neatly finessing the way their leader had advocated this very thing for a few years, vaguely hinting that Trump would have somehow handled it better because many say he is the smartest man that ever lived.

Liz was there, reminding me of why, though I find her standing up to Trump fearlessly inspiring, otherwise I find her politics odious.  This whole Mess-O-Potamia is her daddy's work over the weak-minded W.  A big footprint of our power in the middle of the middle east with not much forethought other than to kill all of our enemies, of which there will be an endless supply what with our foot on their neck and all.

I remember just after 911 I was not overeager to get into the mideast, but I could see how we had to do it, most people wanted some kind of action, and we did take an awful blow, so let's do it.  Let's do it quick and let's get it over with and let's get out.  

I remember how good our soldiers looked on horseback in the mountains, so strong, so resolute, so capable, and it seemed like the people liked us well enough, that Northern Alliance looked like good guys out of Star Wars.  And we were successful and though Bin Laden escaped we drove Al Qaeda out, and it was time to dust our hands off and get ourselves out.

But suddenly, look Iraq, look Weapons of Mass Destruction.  They beat the drums, and got enough dems caught up in their cause including, I just looked this up, Joe Biden, and then bam, the twenty year war was on.  Did not go well in Iraq and we got kicked out of there but for some reason we hung in Afghanistan.

Big Obama man, as you know, but I always thought he was too hawkish.  It seems like he might have had better instincts but he did back a surge in Afghanistan.  I thought at the time that he kind of went along with it to please the generals, and maybe so that when that didn't work, he could shrug his shoulders and get out, but that never happened.

Trump was going to get out, the way for four years he was going to build that wall, and have infrastructure week, and announce his really great health care plan, and we all know where those went.

And now it's done.  The hawks, just listening to John Bolton are all like we should have left some force there, but this ignores the fact that all this time the Afghan army never got very good, and the Taliban kept getting stronger and it was unlikely we could have kept a small force there anyway.

It's done.

Well there are my opinions.  Anybody want to give theirs?  

It's All Over Now Baby Blue

 https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/kabul-s-sudden-fall-to-taliban-ends-u-s-era-in-afghanistan/ar-AANm2ti?rt=0&ocid=Win10NewsApp&referrerID=InAppShare

I didn't think this one would bother me.  We all knew it was coming, and it's not like nothing like this has ever happened before.  Nevertheless, it still sucks.  

Bob Dylan - It's All over Now, Baby Blue (Audio) - YouTube

the draft 3

 Well Friday, Friday, can't trust that day.  Normally I have some cud from a previous poster to chew on to begin my weekend, but today I guess I will just make do on my own.

My time in Berkeley was probably the most extraordinary time of my life.  We called it Berserkely, because for us, as far out as we might have been in the towns we came from, this was a bit too much.  We were the outsiders, the hangers-on, from somewhere else drawn by the flame of the sixties.  We weren't students, we had these kind of subsistence jobs, because really any more substantial job, if we could get one, which we couldn't, not that we tried that hard, was selling out to The Man.  

Below us were the street people that the Berkeley Barb idolized because they saw them as the vanguard of The Revolution.  They were just like us except that they didn't have subsistence jobs, they just spare-changed along Telegraph Avenue.  We, with our hard-working subsistence jobs, looked askance at them, why are they panhandling us who are just getting by?  Why don't they go up north of campus where the solid citizens are?  Well it was too far from home, and besides, being solid citizens, they were not likely to give money to the folks who were tearing down civilization.

That's what the local newspaper said, I mean, shouted, in big bold headlines, sometimes in red ink because what the fuck, almost every day.  Back in the day the students and the hangers-on were the revolutionaries, and the faculty and the solid citizens were the establishment.  Since then the former students and hangers on have become the faculty and the solid citizens, and the students have become the establishment, attending a high-class college and just wanting to get through with a high-class degree and start earning the big bucks.  

Okay, on with the story. 

Even after Bob Hill left his shoes under Marlene's bed, and after she moved me out to move him in, the three of us remained friendly.  It was the 60s you know, and what the hell.

 I ran into this girl, Dottie, who I'd known a little in Champaign and she had an apartment not far from Marlene's.  When I say she had an apartment I mean she and her friends had an apartment.  Also Marlene didn't have an apartment, she had a bedroom in an apartment where three or four other people lived.  The house I'd moved out of to come to Berkeley had several other people living in it, as did the one I moved into when I returned to Champaign.  That was just the way we lived in those days.

 And you'd have not just your friends who were supposed to share the rent and mostly did, but you'd have other people, friends of friends, people you just happened to run into, who were kind of passing through.  They wouldn't get a bedroom or anything like that, but they'd maybe get a couch, maybe some blankets on the floor.  They didn't pay any rent, but they were supposed to come through with what they could.  The thing is you're paying this rent and it won't cost you any more no matter how many people are living there, so if you can get a little cash or dope or food out of them, why you're that much ahead.  As for the loss of privacy; we were all young and our ethos was party, party, party.

 So when Marlene heard about Dottie's apartment she was very interested, as was Bob Hill I expect, though he was discreet enough not to show it.  Myself I was resigned.  I knew which way the wind was blowing.

 I got a closet.  Not bad really, it was a big closet, plenty of room for a mattress, and for my stuff which wasn't much, and it had a light bulb hanging by a chain that I could turn on and off, so really what more could I want?

 Dottie, who was paying almost all of the rent, was a practical girl among us potheads.  She was the proverbial slip of a girl, but she was strong, she had iron in her, she had a job.  We were all a little afraid of her.  Except for Bob Bergschneider, who I'll just call Bob from now on.  A big genial guy, dark hair, dark drooping moustache.  He didn't have a job, didn't pay any rent, and yet he rated a bedroom to himself, and he didn't fear Dottie, what was with that?  It didn't take long to figure that out.  She was madly in love with him and he was a cad.

 The only other person who rated a bedroom was Diana.  I believe she paid some rent, and she was actually a student so she was away a lot.

 Then there was the riff-raff, me and a couple other guys.  There was Edward who was just a stone cold hippie.  The way you sold dope at the street level in those days was you walked up and down Telegraph Avenue and droned softly, but loud enough for those passing by to hear, "grass, hash, LSD, mushrooms."  You'd make enough to get through the day.  That's what Edward did.  He never started a conversation, and he had only two responses to what you might say.  "Far out," for something good, and "Bummer, bummer," for something bad.  I think that's all there is to say about him.

 Then there was Fred who was a pacifist.  We all kind of shared the general politics of Berkeley the same way the neighbors I grew up with on the southwest side of Chicago believed in the Democratic party.  If you asked them about Mayor Daley they loved him, but if you didn't ask them the subject never came up.  Likewise if asked our opinion on something we'd give the New Left response, and we'd mean it sincerely, but otherwise we didn't talk politics. 

 But Fred did.  He spoke like Thoreau, or more actually like someone in the 60s would think Thoreau spoke.  He was always firm but gentle, adamant but soft spoken.  And he had gotten out of the army. 

 Sometimes when writing about things that happened in the 60s I wonder if younger people can really understand it.  Is it all that different from later times?  There is always youthful rebellion etc, maybe the 60s was just all that a little more publicized, a little more blown up.  But there is one thing the 60s had that no later generation did, and I don't think it ever gets as much weight as it should, and that is the draft.  There were two kinds of young men in America then, those who were awaiting the draft, and those who had passed through it, either by joining the army or avoiding it.

 So as a guy who had not just avoided the draft but gotten out of the army, he was respected.  But it wasn't pacifism that had gotten him out of the army, it was a psych discharge.  He had talked about killing himself, killing others.  When the shrinks asked him what he expected that to accomplish he shrugged his shoulders.  He was rather proud of that last move, not too much of a reaction, not too little, just the right amount.  He was a well regarded guy, though sometimes the look in his eyes when he told that story made us wonder if maybe he wasn't a little, well, you know.

the draft 2

 Monday all three local local affiliates had foregone the network news to bring us the fast breaking news of a big storm approaching Chicago spawning tornadoes in the distant burbs and heading to the city.  Naturally I went up to the roof, but after about half an hour of nothing happening I went back down.  But I did shoot this photo.  Those lights in the distance are Wrigley Field, and I am thinking that on a line of sight The Ravenswood should be maybe just a bit to the left, and the next crisp day we get I will be up there to see if I can get a shot of it.

I think challenging elections is a way of otherwise obscure politicians currying favor with Trump and his minions, so if they decide to run in some republican primary they can brag about that and be seen as the Trumpiest candidate.  You'll note in the latest revelations Trump was asking state officials just to announce that they were doing an election investigation, but didn't care particularly whether they actually investigated, just the announcement would be enough.  Like when they were extorting the Ukraine and what they wanted was for Ukraine to announce an investigation of Hunter Biden, whether or not they actually did one.  

In Trumpworld being accused of something is the same as having done it (Unless it is Trump being accused).  It's like the reason they give for these bogus audits is that there has been a lot of talk about the election being rigged.  Of course they are the ones doing all the talking and there is not a shred of evidence, but that doesn't matter because many people are saying it so it must be true.

I hate those restroom guys.  Harry Caray's had one of them when I went there maybe twenty years ago.  I don't know if they still have one because every time I have been there since then I have held it.  When a man enters the restroom he heads straight to the urinals, if some are in use he chooses the one farthest from the others.  Once situated he stares straight ahead with a blank face, and most importantly he says nothing.  If some wiseguy makes a crack about the weather only the slightest of nods, and maybe a quiet grunt are allowed in response.  Washing hands afterwards is allowable, and maybe even a brief hand to the hair, but pulling out a comb and preening like you are posing for Manly Man Monthly is certainly not allowed.

Meanwhile:

Late in the fall I moved into a house on west Hessel clear across the IC tracks from campus, a ranch house in a neighborhood of ranch houses.  Not a place for a bunch of hippies, but we had this plan so that we would look like a family.  We pretended we were two married couples, me and Cindy Cullop, and Slivon and Big Sue, and to make it seem more conventional we told the realtor that Cindy and Sue were sisters.  I doubt that we fooled the guy, but he probably just wanted to get a little rent out of the place so he let me and Slivon sign the lease.

 Big Sue had money in those days.  She had come into an inheritance sometime before, and with that and my Wigwam money and Slivon's grounds crew money, and what we could get from the three or four other people we moved in with we figured we could pay the rent.

 And then one day at a poker game Big Sue started losing, and when she ran out of the money she had in front of her instead of sneaking off to her secret stash of cash, she started borrowing, and she kept losing, and kept borrowing, and then we knew she had no more money.  Her inheritance was gone.  She wouldn't be paying her share of the rent anymore. 

 And as winter progressed people began moving out.  Eventually there was just me and Slivon and Big Sue, and it was just me and Slivon who were paying the rent and it was killing us, and there were months to go yet on the lease.  And then, I don't remember the circumstances, Big Sue and Slivon moved out and it was just me living in this five bedroom ranch house.

 After closing at the Wigwam I would buy a six pack of Ballentine Ale and walk the couple miles back to the house.  It was winter and dark and at some point on my route I would encounter this dog.  I never could see him in the dark, but I could hear him barking menacingly from behind me, in front of me, on either side of me, and I would hug my six pack and look around nervously, trying not to look scared, fearing at any moment sharp teeth biting into my legs.  When I finally got back I sat alone in the frontroom and drank my sixpack.

 But I was getting letters from Marlene in Berkeley.  Somewhere along the line she had dumped the mope.  Now she was lonely, she was sad, she missed me, why didn't I move to Berkeley to be with her?

 Well why not indeed?  There was that pesky matter of the lease.  Eventually Slivon and I screwed up our courage and faced the realtor to get out of the lease.  It was no problem.  He was probably glad to be rid of us. 

 And then I was flying into Oakland on a late night flight, and got some kind of shuttle bus into Berkeley and wandered around with an old letter of Marlene's until I found the address.

 She was kind of surprised.  She wasn't expecting me until the next day.  I put down my bags and we sat down in her kitchen.  Ah California, the golden state, faraway from wintry Champaign.  And Marlene, God she looked beautiful. But something was bothering her, and eventually she came out with it.  "Bob's in the bedroom," she said.

 Bob Hill, A Champaign guy who had moved out to Berkeley earlier.  You know at one time she had told me that she would like to have Bob Hill's shoes under her bed, but I had thought that she was just teasing me.  He was a skinny guy with glasses which is what I was too, but I was a real hippie and he was just a straight guy.  This was just something that happened and he wouldn't be any competition.  Sure enough she sent him home, and that morning I awoke in her bed.

 But then a few weeks later he was moving in and I was moving out.

No More Audits For Cheboygan County

 Remember awhile back when I reported that the Cheboygan County Commissioners sent a letter to somebody requesting another audit of the 2020 election results?  Well they got their answer, and the answer was "no".  This article covers some well trodden ground, but I found a few interesting tidbits that I didn't know about.  For instance, I didn't know that anybody can conduct their own personal audit anytime they want because the paper ballots are a matter of public record.  What I still don't know is why the Trumpists would want to challenge the Cheboygan County vote when Trump carried the county by a substantial margin. 

https://www.cheboygannews.com/story/news/politics/elections/2021/08/09/state-elections-director-

This link is kind of glitchy.  If, when you click on it, you get a page that says "Oh Snap!", just scroll down to this headline and click on it.  

Elections director denies Mich. county commission's request for audit 

*****************************************************************************

Okay, neither the restaurant, which was closer to Mackinaw City than it was to Cheboygan, nor the waitress was all that fancy, not like that place in Chicago we went to after my senior prom.  I think it was called "Magnum's" or "Maxim's" or something like that.  I ordered lobster thermidor, which I discovered is nothing like regular lobster.  I didn't like it.  The worst part was when I went to the rest room and was accosted by this colored guy who kept offering me towels and brushing me off with some kind of whisk broom.  I didn't know what to make of it until I noticed this fancy plate sitting there and surmised that I was expected to tip this guy.  I put a quarter on the plate, which was a lot of money in those days, after which the guy finally left me alone.  We have many fine restaurants around here.  I've been to some, but not all of them, and I've never encountered one where they don't let you piss in peace.

beards

 I have always been weak on my endings.  I like the writing well enough, but I am never thinking that far ahead and when I run out of steam, I don't know what to do.  For Catfish I just followed where all the subplots were going and wrapped them all up, which maybe didn't seem so sudden because there were so many of them.  In Great Wall I kind of had an idea running through it that the somewhat bitter bartender saw a goodness in Dawn that seemed so strong that he wanted to partake of it, to be a good man with a good woman, but then it turned out that she was pretty bitter herself, kind of a standard ending, but maybe too abrupt.  Perhaps there should have been some foreshadowing earlier in the story.

I did a blog search on The Draft and I found some interesting stuff, but not the particular story that I am posting now.  For about a year before the blog began we exchanged emails and perhaps I sent it to you in one of those.

Oh there is a fine story about the waitress at the fancy joint.  I am assuming it was in one of those resort areas just south of Cheboygan.  I have an image of her in one of those fancy nightgowns trimmed in fur, eating some snazzy chocolates while watching Christmas in Vermont on her tiny black and white tv, and noticing how the snow on the tv looked so much better than the real snow outside her window, and thinking how maybe she should ditch her honest and hardworking, but bullheaded boyfriend.  Bullheaded because he was for some reason too proud to shave off that messy beard and take orders from some foreman at the new and shiny papermill.

But wait, Christmas in Vermont was a tv movie made in 2016.  Geez I had this image in my mind of it being like White Christmas, some Bing Crosby vehicle that was popular when our parents were young.  I could not have even heard of it until five years ago, yet I feel like I've known it since I was about twenty years old.  Kind of spooky.

I'm going to give this story about the fancy waitress and the stubborn blockhead some thought.  What was your job before the papermill?

Beards.  Quick no googling. who was the last president to have any kind of facial hair?  If you said Taft 1909-1913 you are correct.  There were no hippies in 1963 when I started college, but there were beatniks, and often they had beards even if they were only those Maynard G Krebs goatees, and one of the exotic things I was expecting to see in college was guys with beards.

But there were almost none.  Four years later there were plenty.  I guess the hippies just wanted to stand apart from everybody else, and growing a beard was quicker than growing your hair:

long, straight, curly, fuzzy
Snaggy, shaggy, ratsy, matsy
Oily, greasy, fleecy
Shining, gleaming, streaming
Flaxen, waxen
Knotted, polka-dotted
Twisted, beaded, braided
Powdered, flowered, and confettied
Bangled, tangled, spangled, and spaghettied!

But of course Beagles knew way back when, way back before even the nightgowned waitress curled up to the black and white tv, that the real, the most sensible reason to grow a beard is that you no longer have to drag that sharp and dangerous razor across your raspy face every morning.

For Love or Money

 I didn't like "The Great Wall" as much as I liked "Catfish."  The only reason that comes to mind is that I found the ending of "The Great Wall" to be rather abrupt.  I seem to remember reading the draft story before, but it was a long time ago and I wouldn't mind reading it again.

Funny how emotional people got about clothes, hair, and beards back in those days.  People nowadays wear most anything and nobody seems to care.  When I grew my beard I didn't mean for it to be a political statement, I just got tired of shaving after three years in the army.  Nevertheless. one of my old army buddies, who came to visit me some time after we both got out, told me that I was a "disgrace to my beard" because my political views had taken a sharp turn to the right, as his had taken a sharp turn to the left,  since last we met.  

I had to shave to get into the paper mill, which I wouldn't have done if it wasn't for this woman who I had been shacking up with for a few months.  She worked as a waitress in a fancy restaurant that closed up during the winter, and she was planning on relocating to Vermont where she had a winter job in a ski lodge waiting for her.  I asked her what would it take to get her to stay here and spend the winter with me.  She said that the job I had at the time didn't pay enough to support both of us but, if I could get into the paper mill, she would consider staying with me.  I still wouldn't have done it except some guys I knew at the mill said I could grow my beard back after I completed my probationary period and joined the union.  That's exactly what I did, but the woman went to Vermont anyway, while my job at the paper mill lasted 23 years.  

the draft 1

 I was hoping for some comment on The Great Wall this overcast Monday morning.  Sundays I almost always have the blues, kind of drag myself through the day. telling myself this is just a thing, no big deal, it will be gone Monday morning when I will be right back with the crew ready to get things done, and I usually like to start out the day responding on the blog, but this morning there is nothing.  Well, very well then I shall continue.

So that story, The Great Wall, many of the incidents were ripped from my faded newspapers.  There was a Dawn Weaver and early on she came to work with her eyes frozen shut, and was the heroine of the morning.  She was always a steady hand guiding her huge heavy tray of bowls and dishes steaming with hot Chinese food through the crowded shifting passageways of the dining room and coming for a clean landing on the tray stand next to the table of eager eaters.

It was some years later that I was shocked to learn that she was helping herself to booze out of that upstairs bar.  I think I have already explained how that face in the bowl of Special Great Wall Won Ton Soup happened.  There was a Vincent who did paint a big mural of vaguely tropical things on one of the walls of the House of Chin.  

There was a time when George was arrested for drunken driving and me and a hostess and a dishwasher were delegated to bail him out, but we had to wait for him to get fully booked, so we sat around in our regular bar across the street from the cop shop with a wad of money and the keys to his Buick Riviera, and at the time in was in the back of my mind that we could, you know, just go.  Out of town where University Avenue ran into I 57, you hit a fork in the road where you could go to Chicago or Memphis.  Of course I always took the fork to Chicago, but it was always in the back of my mind that someday, on a whim, I would turn south and go to that mysterious city of Memphis.

Never happened of course, and I never kissed the devil in her stained red dress in a crumby bar while a blues song played on the jukebox.

Paths never taken.

But here is a path that I did take, from not graduating in June of 1967 and losing my student deferment to getting my CO in the late summer of 1969.  It is pretty much all true though some details may have been polished a bit.

I would have graduated the summer of 1967.  It was theoretically possible if I'd passed all my courses, but of course I didn't. My parents didn't find out I wasn't graduating until the last moment.  I'd known it for some time, but how did you do tell that to your parents who were planning on coming down for graduation?  Marlene and I used to joke about it.  How maybe we could rent some caps and gowns and get some friends to cooperate in a phony ceremony.  It was pretty funny, but even as I was laughing I would worry about how I would slip this dagger into my parents' hearts.

 Well I did it somehow eventually.  They did come down though, out of momentum, to try to get some kind of explanation or something.  I had been seeing this guy I called my shrink, actually a counselor in the Student Services building.  I'd written my parents about him and my mom insisted on seeing him.  These things happen was the only explanation he could give them.  On the way out of his office my mom bumped into somebody, or maybe they into her.  She gave them a raft of shit, why don't you watch where you're going.  She went on and on.  She was really pissed.

 But then that was over, and I was free.  I went out to the quad to hang with my friends.  It was a hot day and I had taken off my boots to walk around barefoot.  When I went back to pick them up I noticed that they were all scruffy, beat up and torn.  Well I wouldn't need them anymore.  I left them on the quad.  I was free. 

 Champaign Urbana in the summer is a wonderful place.  No hordes of students, the living is easy.  I slept on couches, wandered down to the union in the late morning and hung out there until it was time for the bars to open.  Everything was green and weedy under my bare feet.  There was no time, not really.  This would never end.

 I moved in with Marlene.  This was nice.  But a couple days into that I was brushing my teeth and she caught me using her toothpaste.  

 Well what was the big deal?  I didn't have any of my own so I was using hers.

 You don't have anything do you?

 Well no.  I'm free.

 Freeloading more like it.  Did I expect that I was going to just freeload off her indefinitely?

 That is what I had expected, but I knew better than to say that.

 Why didn't I get a job?

 A job?  I supposed I could try, but who was going to hire me with all my hair and my beard?

 Why don't you cut it off then?  

 Cut off my hair?  How could this be, the love of my life was asking me to cut off my hair?

 But that's what I did eventually.  Got a job at the Wigwam waiting tables and eventually moved into tending bar, working those eleven hour days six days a week.

 Marlene meanwhile had taken up with some mope.  A lump of a guy really, sat around reading philosophy or mysticism or something.  Was always depressed, didn't have much to say.  I don't know what she saw in him.  Maybe she thought he was deep.  I didn't see him as any real competition, just a stupid little fling of hers.  I could get her back at any time, whenever I decided to make my move.  Then she moved to Berkeley and took the mope with her.