living in the country

For some years I have had a bit of a hankering for that poetry game, but there isn’t any money in it, nor fame, but I just thought I’d like to string words together to make something nice, or maybe interesting would be a better word. But I don’t know, that rhyming stuff sounds bland, and the current stuff like I see in the New Yorker, I don’t know what that is about, and from the little I’ve read about it, it seems that they like to have some kind of meaning in it, and I don’t have any meaning. I don’t believe there is any meaning in the universe, so what am I supposed to do, make it up?

You said you’ve written some songs. Did you write the lyrics to them? Have you written any lately? What have you been doing with that keyboard? What do you do this time of year, trembling under your glaciers? When is hunting season coming around? I think it’s in the springtime isn’t it? But aren’t animals fatter in the fall? Wouldn’t that be a better time? Well maybe it is. Just did a quick google and apparently it’s complicated. Seems like it was November. I seem to remember you telling me about wounding a deer.

While googling I see where Alaska became a state in 1958. I don’t remember a big hoopla then, but hell, I was thirteen. I do remember some kind of hoopla in the early seventies. It was like Alaska was the new west, kind of a wild land, but not dangerous, and not as onerous as the old west had been. Well I think it was chiefly Alaskan propaganda to get people to move there and some tourism too.

Land getting filled up, that is a bit of a problem for folks like you. If everybody felt the way you did, Cheboygan would be like Chicago, although anymore we get deer and coyotes and even the occasional cougar, so there is wildlife, but I guess hunting would be no fun in your own backyard. But then there are people like me who don’t mind, in fact rather like, being stacked up on top of each other, packing more of us onto less land, here in Marina City we have like a thousand people on a bit of land that is probably a hundredth the size of Beaglesonia. I would think you guys would be happy about us city folk taking up less land, leaving more for you.

So am I right in assuming that one of the things you like about Beaglesonia in addition to its remoteness, is the cold? Is that the reason the equally remote desert does not interest you? I have never seen the charm of the desert either, like living in a parking lot.

No floods around Beaglesonia? I would have thought a marshy place would have them. Is that maybe because the area is not all built up, that you have plenty of those wetlands that are lauded for containing excess rain the way a shopping center cannot?

The early youth culture was all about being popular and wearing a certain kind of clothes and Dick Clark, and 180 degrees from what the sixties were. The contribution of the fifties to the sixties was that the fifties made us think that we were important, and thinking we were important, we thought our ideas were important, and that gave us the power to disagree with, well, what seemed like the rest of the country.

Funny thing, at first the rest of the country really seemed to hate us, our drugs, out antiwar, our outlandish dress, and our attitude towards the common culture. But gradually they got used to us, some even thought we were a good thing. Remember The Greening of America? And then we got older, we got watered down, some of us became them, but with a bit of the old attitude still. Some things changed, some things remained the same. Oh I guess you could say that about anything.

You know I read your entry and then I write my response, and the response can wander, and I have forgotten what you wrote, and when I look back at your entry I sometimes see that I am saying something similar to what you have said, but I have forgotten. Yeah I think the winding down of the Vietnam war took some of the fire out of the hippies. Maybe it was the lottery. Before the lottery every young male went through a rite of passage in how they dealt with the draft, but once the lottery was drawn about half of them didn’t have to worry about that anymore. In a sense Nixon compromised with us, and we compromised with him. Wow, I never thought of it that way before, and now I am going to have to think of that some more.