Nice glaciers Beagles. I love them. Maybe we can send Al Gore
over to inspect them.
Well I never, Gage Park, Gage Park high school, too avant garde for
Beagles. I went to my yearbook and there were two poems, and one of them was a
bit of a downer, oh and neither of them rhymed. Well that rhyming, I am not
that big a fan, sometimes it seems moronic to me:
Ta da da da, da da da, da, dum de dum, Moon.
Buh buh buh buh, de de de de, ram a dam June.
Know what I mean
Jelly bean.
Now there is a rhyming couplet that never gets old.
Seems to me that you might be a haiku kind of man. There is a form
that has strict rules, and an austere viewpoint, and there is something cold
about it too, the kind of thing you would write on a lonely mountain top during
a snowstorm, and never on the beach.
So amid the petty hurly burly of high school, the dumb clubs, the
rallies, the soul-deadening blather of the teachers, your mind was already on
Alaska, the eagles cawing, the fish rustling down the icy mountain
streams.
Well what was it about Alaska, back then? The isolation, the high
ratio of natural to manmade, the cold? I wonder about the cold. There is
something about it, even here downtown stepping out of the door to the horns of
traffic and the piles of dirty slush, there is something bracing about that cold
wind slapping me in the face. But I’ll be getting tired of that in a couple
weeks, and there will still be months of winter to go.
You know there has become a sissification of the American people
about cold, you know all those showbiz types living in LA, and probably all
those weather girls go down there to be discovered and when they aren’t, they
come back here to give the weather, and their thin limbs tremble at the sight of
that big white mass over Canada, heading right to the windy city, which is not
even that warm before the winds arrive. There is just something square about
cold, the galoshes, the hats with the ear flaps, dragging that dented shovel
behind you, when what you ought to be doing is lounging on the beach with your
buff bronze body, sipping on a mojito or a Bud Lite Strawberita, like all the
hip kids.
Not many people in Alaska mostly because it is so cold, but then so
is the desert, why didn’t you want to live in the desert? Maybe because nature
is kind of feeble in the desert? Maybe because in Alaska you always have to be
doing something, chopping wood and hunting animals mostly it seems, while in the
desert the only activity seems to be crawling along in a ragged t shirt looking
for water, seems more boring than chopping and hunting.
I think the official theory is that the youth culture began maybe
in the middle fifties when you had all these baby boomers sprouting up, and you
had tv just coming up with its commercials, and admen realized that they could
sell these kids stuff, and before that if you were a kid you were just waiting
to become an adult, but now with the admen wooing us, we began to see ourselves
as something important, and then the music. Seems like before us kids just
listened to their parents’ music, but now we were listening to our own music,
and making a lot of it too.
At first I think the admen were kind of running the thing with
their manufactured teen idols and all, but later, when we became older there
were drugs and the unpopular war, and the admen lost control of us, and that’s
when we had all that cool sixties stuff. Eventually the admen caught on and
recaptured all that, but that was later.
But back before the sixties, everything was still controlled by the
admen, everybody had to watch Ed Sullivan, everybody had to want a new car,
everybody had to believe this was the greatest country ever, and was getting
better every day. And the thing was you had to believe that, if you didn’t
there was something wrong with you, and indeed you were making trouble by
thinking things that didn’t need any thinking about, because everybody already
knew what was the right thing to think. I guess that was the part that bugged
me, not so much that everybody believed the same thing, but they wanted you to
too. A little exaggerated, but that’s how I remember it.
Here’s another story to go along with that commie factory story. I
remember hearing on NPR a playwright from some occupied country after the fall
of communism, and he was sort of complaining. During occupation all you had to
write was some subtle attack on communism, and all your countrymen thought you
were telling the real truth and being brave. But once communism fell, you had
to think of something new to write. And nobody knew what to think because
previously they had been told what to think, and they hated that, so they all
got together hating communism, but once they had toppled that statue of Stalin
in the town square, what would they be thinking about? And what would they do?
They used to complain about all the potholes that the commies let accumulate in
the street, but now they would have to fill them in, which was a lot more work
than complaining.
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