El Camino Real

Of course it  will be a simple matter for Kim Il Sung to execute some poor schlubs to mitigate the blame for the death of that poor guy.  Of course that will never happen.  Was Old Dog kidding when he called the guy reputed to have assassinated his uncle with an anti-aircraft gun (probably not true but it does give me a vivid image to start the morning with) politically expedient?  I don't expect he'll do shit.  Probably not us either except for a blaze or rhetoric since they are already sanctioned to the max. Of course one worries a bit about the spoiled child in the white house, but he has proved himself adept at the blaze of rhetoric signifying nothing.

You're asking me how long it took as a child to get downtown by the 55th street bus, that lumbering, noisy, smelly, bus jammed with people for the most part also lumbering, noisy, and smelly?  Two or three days maybe?  I looked up that peculiar L-shaped path.  It seems like it was the vagaries of the old private company buslines coming together.  In my early teens we discovered Archer Avenue which was about a mile north on Kedzie.  The petty nuisance of that crumbled transfer was a small price to pay to be soaring downtown on broad diagonal Archer Avenue, El Camino Real of the southwest side.

Kroch's was a great place, that big cool basement of affordable, even to a kid, books.  Paperbacks were so progressive.  Remember that spinning metal contraption of paperbacks in every drugstore in the hood, placed in a dark nook, but not so dark that the owner couldn't spot you and yell, "Hey buy it  or get out of here," to the kid scanning the lurid covers with his heart pounding.

We were deprived, we had no internet, we had to depend on lurid paperback covers, and the posters on the burlesque houses as the Archer bus sped past on State on the way to or from El Camino Real, and, of course, Debbie Drake.

I don't  remember, nor do I recall reading anything about the dems wanting to dump Kennedy in 1964.


I do remember growing up in Gage Park in the 50s pretty fondly.  I was never hungry, I was never really beaten up, the vast realms of bungalows intersected by busy streets with a bit of neon that I could traverse with my transistor radio tuned to the great Dick Biondi, suited me just fine.  I had a grandfather who raised chickens in Goshen Indiana.  The little farm was kind of interesting.  The chicken houses stunk, but you could chase the geese, but then they would chase you right back, which was fun enough also.  Getting there and back though took way longer than that lumbering, noisy, smelly, bus, and outside the window there was nothing but country and after you had seen a cow or two you had seen them all.

The Russkies had the Red Army which looked pretty impressive on May Day, along with that stirring music as the guys in overcoats on the balcony, all eyeing each other suspiciously, watched those missiles on tractors and those fleets of aircraft (later revealed to be the same damn planes circling back over and over) pass by.  I suspect the local music was replaced by something more menacing when the parade was played over the networks here.

But, as Beagles has pointed out, a paper tiger, and then one day poof, they were gone.  Remember the peace dividend?  All that money we were going to have now that we didn't have to spend it to defend ourselves against those awful Russkies where we could build schools and roads and repair the infrastructure?  Oh happy day.  Only that never happened.  They don't call it the military industrial complex for nothing.

And now the Russkies are back, sort of, I mean they look fearsome fucking with Ukraine and flying their jets next to ours and thumbing their vodka-reddened noses at us, and that thing in Syria. which
I'm not sure if that will turn out well for them, and the only kind of income (what does Russia manufacture besides vodka, most of which they drink themselves) is oil, the price of which is going down, down, down.

And for all that the Islamics have no army and no country.  They fight each other way more than they fight us.  They are no threat to us.