I can't help you much with that modern poetry, never did understand it myself. The same with modern art. That kind of thing reminds me of that old fairy tale about the emperor's new clothes. Supposedly these clothes were invisible to anybody who was incompetent in his job, so nobody, not even the emperor himself, would admit that they couldn't see them. After awhile, some little kid blurted out that the emperor wasn't wearing any clothes. The kid couldn't be incompetent in his job because he didn't have a job, so this proved that the emperor's new clothes were fraudulent and didn't really exist. Meanwhile, the tailor who made the emperor's fake clothes had skipped town with the money he had been paid for his services and was never heard from again. So yeah, if you don't know what to write, just make something up, which is what I suspect the rest of them have been doing all along.
I haven't done anything with my music for a long time. I didn't actually "write" my songs, I just composed them in my head. The lyrics were my own and the tunes were adaptations of some generic traditional folk melodies. I did put some of them on tape once, back in the 1990s. I made it in a professional studio at my own expense, and I don't think I sold enough of them over the years to break even. To save money, I recorded the whole thing in one day, which was a mistake because my voice was getting pretty shaky by the end. If you're interested, give me your snail mail address and I'll send you one.
The hoopla about Alaska that you remember from the 70s was probably when they started developing the North Slope oil fields. Last I heard, there are now more people in the city of Anchorage than there were in the whole state when I was there. Of course, Alaska is a really big state, so I'm sure there is still plenty of uninhabited land there. It's not just the cold that keeps people away, it's the mountains. Mountains are pretty to look at, but they're really hard to live in that far north.
I'm glad that a lot of people still like to live in cities because, if you spread them out all over the country, the country would get pretty crowded. I don't exactly hate people, I just like them in small doses. When there are too many of them per square mile, they're not people to me anymore, they're traffic. Living like you do is certainly a more efficient use of land, if all you're talking about is living quarters. If you want to grow a garden, cut your own firewood, hunt and fish, or have a dog, it's better to have more space between you and your neighbors. Some city folks spend a lot of their time driving back and forth to the country, which is fine if you like to drive and can afford the gas. I'd rather just live here and save on the commuting. Of course, if all the things you like to do are in the city, then it makes better sense to live there.
I'm not all that crazy about the cold, especially as I've gotten older, but it helps keep the area from getting over populated. The desert never appealed to me, not enough vegetation to suit my taste. I like to be near water, but not the ocean. Even the Great Lakes are bigger than I need, but there are also plenty of inland waters around here, which are more to my liking. We don't get serious floods here because the land is so flat. Any rain or snow melt we get just spreads out all over and gets absorbed into the ground. You might have puddles in your yard for a few days, but that's about it. Of course we don't have as much paved area as you do, and what we do have drains into the ditches or is piped to the river. The local Wal-Mart drains their parking lot into a lagoon that is fenced off from the public, but most of our surplus water just runs down a ditch until it reaches a lake or stream.
I'm not sure what you mean about the lottery. I think the draft always was a lottery because some guys never got called up. I suppose that in war time, when they need more soldiers, they keep drawing names until the they get enough, which sometimes means everybody. It wasn't long after the Vietnam War that they abolished the draft altogether. Some years later they tried to get the guys to register, just in case they ever needed them, but I don't think that went over too well. I remember one guy went to jail because he wrote a letter to the president telling him that he refused to register, but I think that most guys just quietly didn't register and didn't do anything to call attention to themselves. I don't remember if they ever repealed that law, or just stop trying to enforce it, but I haven't heard anything about it for a long time.
I didn't know it was called a "youth culture" until I read about it in a book decades later. At the time, I was just trying to grow myself up so that I could leave Chicago. I had friends, and I'm sure that they influenced me to some degree, but I never was one who would do something just because my friends were doing it. Similarly, I never let friends or family discourage me from doing something that I had made up my mind to do. I wasn't particularly rebellious or defiant, I just did my own thing and, if other people didn't like it, well too bad for them.
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