I have read a few of those haikus, they don't do anything for me. I'm not into poetry all that much anyway. I figure that, if it's a decent poem, you might as well make a song out of it and, if it's not a decent poem, you might as well make prose out of it.
I believe I've told you about this before, but we never get tired of those old classics. When I was seven years old, I decided that I was going to live in Michigan when I grew up. By the time I was in high school, however, Michigan was filling up with people so fast that I figured it would be just like Chicago by the time I grew up. My error here was that I was only familiar with one county of Michigan, and I must have thought that the rest of the state was like that too. Well, there was Freesoil, where my dad had taken me deer hunting a few times. I could have lived there, but it was only a hundred miles or so north of Berrien County, and I figured that it was only a mater of time before that got filled up too. I did notice that, the farther north you went, the less people there were, so I thought that, if I went far enough north, I might be able to get ahead of the curve.
About that time, Alaska became a state and there was a lot of publicity about it. Most of the stuff I read said that Alaska wasn't as cold s most people think, at least not all over the whole state. They said that the summers were really nice, which was true, but they didn't say that the summers only lasted a month or so, which they do, unless you live in the panhandle where it rains all the time and you can't tell one season from another.
I flew up to Alaska, so I didn't get to see any of the country in between. I drove a car back to Chicago and, in the process, learned more about geography in ten days than I had learned living in Alaska for four months. I concluded that, where I really wanted to live was a place like Minnesota or Northern Wisconsin. I also concluded that, wherever I lived, there had to be plenty of jobs and women, both of which were scarce in Alaska at the time. When I got out of the army I went to Cheboygan because I knew somebody there. If that didn't work out I planned to check out Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Maine, in that order. As luck would have it, I found a decent job and some decent women in Cheboygan, so I've been there ever since.
Cheboygan isn't that much colder than Chicago, but the colder part of the year lasts a month or two longer. I can tolerate that, but not much more than that, which is what has kept me out of the Upper Peninsula. Since I've been watching the Weather Channel I have come to realize that Cheboygan actually has a better climate than a lot of places in the U.S. Our weather is frequently uncomfortable, but it's seldom life threatening. We don't have hurricanes, tornadoes, devastating floods or wildfires, earthquakes, or serious droughts. Truth be known, a little global warming wouldn't do us any harm but, the way we're making glaciers this winter, it doesn't look like that's going to happen any time soon.
I think you're right about the youth culture starting in the 50s but it was a different kind of youth culture than what emerged in the 60s. I didn't care for the youth culture of the 50s, and I thought I would like the 60s better, but I didn't, so now I ain't got no culture, and that suits me just fine.
Interesting what you said about how the Russian dissidents kind of found themselves out of a job when Communism went down. Didn't something like that happen to the Hippies after the Vietnam War was over? Like you said, it takes one kind of skill to complain about the potholes and a different kind of skill to fix them. One thing's for sure, them potholes ain't going to fix themselves, are they.
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