don't stand too close to my urinal

College was a strange little interlude as I was writing to a friend yesterday. 

You know I had a vision a few months ago.  I was listening to a Natalie Merchant song and she was on an airplane and she happened to notice that the woman across the aisle had some old letter with her, and then it's revealed that it's postmarked Saigon, and here the music rises with a clang.  The song goes on and it has something to do with visiting the wall and probably the futility of war, but I am already set to thinking.

The names of those places in Vietnam, Saigon, Khe San, Ho Chin, how faraway, how exotic, how strange on the evening news.  These were the places that you ended up if you were a bad boy, if you didn't keep up with your studies.  We were living in a little bubble of nickle beer nights and love me, love me not, something between high school and the pretty good job and the pretty good house with the pretty good girl, but the nickle beer and the babes were distracting from your studies and before you knew it that final would be coming up and you could flunk it and end up in the mud of Vietnam.

I was thinking about some guy who maybe had a girlfriend, who was not a bad girl at all, but just feckless, and maybe dropping him for some more attractive guy, like buying a new pair of shoes, and the guy goes on a bender, flunks a final, loses his 2-S, and before he knows it there he is, in the jungle, in some bunker, in the dark, and all around him there are Viet Cong, or somebody has told him because he can't see anything, and all he can think of is she put me here, and he imagines the Viet Cong all looking like her, with her fancy blonde hairdo and wearing one of those little plaid skirts with the big safety pin that were all the rage, hauling military hardware through the mud, encircling him, coming to finish him off.

You know some of us college students were antiwar people but some of us were just Joe Sixpacks who didn't think much about whether the war was right or not, but they wanted to stay in the land of nickel beer nights and fancy blonde hairdos and short skirts. 

There was another thing about school that was nicer than the real world.  If you worked hard at it you would probably get good grades and do well, unlike the real world where maybe you worked hard but maybe the new boss didn't like you or the company went down the tubes and you would be out on the street, whereas some freeloader, the kind of a guy who barely earned a C, might luck into some dream job.  The school world is just more in your control, things are fairer.  I wonder if the same was true for the army with its rigid hierarchy. 


We certainly didn't have anything like it in Gage Park or Tonti or Sawyer, but apparently nowadays there are little boys who think they are actually little girls and vice versa.  It seems a little strange to me, i have never gone along with this girl in a boy's body and vice versa, but I'm a good liberal, if that's what they want to do, it's no skin off my back.

But then there is the problem of bathrooms (let me tell you as a substitute teacher there is a big problem with bathrooms in grade school, but like you say, that is a whole nother story).  Which bathroom does the boy who dresses like a girl and his counterpart go to?  Sometimes they want to have a special bathroom for these kids, but then do they need two, one for boygirls and one for girlboys?  And some think having separate bathrooms is discriminatory. 

It's a big deal.  Sometimes I think my ilk won the war for gay rights too easily and now the momentum is taking them into this transgender stuff, not that I don't think the little boygirls and girlboys don't have their rights and all, but it just seems like they are making too big a deal out of it.

These North Carolina laws are a reaction to that.  You have to go to the bathroom your driver's license says you should, but these kids are too young to have driver's licenses, and do we need a law for this?  Has there been an epidemic of men going to women's bathrooms and women to men's?  And even if there was women have those stalls and I don't think we men care as long as the person doesn't take the urinal right next to us, right fucking next to us, when there is an open urinal right over there.

And my ilk is all outraged over these laws and that's why they are kind of boycotting North Carolina, and I'm kind of ambivalent over boycotts because there is sort of a mob psychology behind them.