The Great Betrayal

That's what I called it when Bob Dylan went electric. What I learned from this was that it's not a good idea to get emotionally attached to celebrities because you never know when they're going to turn on you. I had embraced Dylan as the high priest of the neo folk movement of the 60s, which I considered to be an attractive alternative to the urban hoodlum rock culture. Don't feel bad if you don't understand that, most of the people to whom I have tried to explain it didn't understand it either, and some of them were professional musicians. As I have said before, I never claimed to be normal.

I remember that we were pretty profane when I was in the army. We used to worry about it in basic training, fearing that, when we went home on leave, we might casually say "pass the fucking salt" at the family dinner table. As it turned out, we needn't have worried. Mannerisms of speech like that are just a fucking habit that you pick up from the people around you. As soon as you find yourself with different people, you will quickly revert to their way of speaking. I think that's how languages evolve in the first place, you take a sub group and isolate them from the mainstream, and they quickly start to develop their own dialect. It must be human nature, some kind of social bonding thing. Sometimes a new person comes into the group and introduces a new turn of phrase that catches on and is assimilated into the local dialect. If it doesn't catch on, the new guy will likely drop it from his repertoire.

 I seem to remember reading something when I was quite young which predicted that colonies on Mars would be established in my lifetime. I don't think it was science fiction, more like a feature article in a reputable newspaper. At that time, it was believed that there was liquid water on Mars, and that the Martian climate, while harsher than ours, was livable. I thought it would be neat to go there, not as an astronaut, but as a one way passenger who would remain and help establish a colony. Some time after I read that, the Martian canals evaporated, the climate deteriorated, and the air became too thin to breathe. Now, after all these years, I hear that some people are reviving the Martian dream. I understand that they already have a growing list of volunteers for the project, if it indeed ever comes to pass. Well I wouldn't go, even if I was young enough. If I wanted to live in an artificial habitat, I would have stayed in Chicago.