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.