THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN EVERLASTING AND ETERNAL

(This being Sunday, I decided to go off on a esoteric tangent.)

It seems a cynical thing to say, but one thing I have learned in my time is that often the surest route to a complete debacle is to try to improve myself. My New Year’s Resolutions usually end in embarrassment.

Not that we should stop striving. I just had my seventy-first birthday, and I’m still striving to stop being such a moron. And I’m certain our efforts don’t go unnoticed in heaven: “No good deed goes unrewarded.” However we don’t live in heaven, which has led to the sardonic, earthy counter: “No good deed goes unpunished.”

Often our punishment is self-inflicted. Our vision of a better way involves a degree of arrogance, and pride is a dirigible just begging for a pin. Many times, when I became aware that my vanity was getting out of hand, I resolved to stop being vain. I strove in vain.

It turns out that, while egotism may be selfishness, it is a sort of necessary evil. The wild winds of this world would disperse us like a puff of cigarette smoke in a gale if we didn’t have some way of standing our ground. So we become like turtles, and our ego is our shell.

Living in a shell gets old. For one thing, it gets lonely.

Long, long ago, when I was a teenager, men were very tough, but perhaps some began wondering if there might be some way to escape the lonely suit of turtle-armor they were clanking about in. “Peter and Gordon” had a hit song called, “The Knight In Rusty Armor,” back in 1967, which, though in some ways risque for it’s time, typified an unspoken restlessness men felt with being turtles, forever tough and “macho”.

Personally, I wasn’t all that macho to begin with, and my sensitivity was worsened by the fact I had skipped a grade and was the youngest boy in my class. Consequently I went to great lengths to prove I wasn’t a weenie, doing things I didn’t much want to do, to prove I wasn’t a coward. For example, at age fifteen I hitchhiked from the coast of Maine up into Quebec to Montreal, and then southwest to the far eastern suburbs of Toronto. While in Montreal I spent 25 cents to take pictures of myself in a “photo booth”, (the equivalent of a “selfie” in those departed days,) putting on my toughest face, but when the strip of four pictures came out I was slightly horrified. I didn’t look tough, but instead terrified. (I looked like a fifteen-year-old all alone in an alien city where many didn’t even speak the same language.) I think I invested a second 25 cents to do a better job of looking tough.

Experiences such as this made me aware, early on, that there was a gentler, kinder side of myself. I wrote a slightly absurd poem at age 16 describing myself as, “a peach, but a peach in a gravel pit. I bruise too easily.” I recognized I wasn’t as tough as I pretended, and even acted. I could crash five cars, just about kill myself with drugs, be involved with drug smugglers and thieves, but another side of me could sob like a baby, when I was hidden within the dark of a movie theater, watching a tearjerker. Which was the real me?

By age nineteen my life was wreckage. All my efforts at being “tough” were a miserable failure. Therefore I went the opposite direction, and became a miserable failure at becoming a “sensitive male.” I studied all sorts of psychologies and religions, and joined “men’s groups” where we deflated our toughness by punching pillows and weeping about how Mommy was mean, and Coach made us run an extra lap. Beyond doubt this put us in touch with a side of ourselves which being “Macho” denied, and even (somewhat accidentally) connected us to the lower echelon of some sort of spiritual hierarchy which had a vague idea of an Almighty, whom one couldn’t see, far above. But this involved an added humiliation, for I had started to see myself as “religious”, but swiftly also saw I failed to live up to my new, high standards. In fact, when push came to shove, I behaved in a downright unspiritual manner.

Perhaps the worst, and most humorous, failure involved a time I was preaching to an elder brother that “peace is the answer,” and he responded that I was only saying that because I was a prissy little mamma’s boy with wrists too limp to fight. I then attempted to punch his lights out, which wasn’t too peaceful of me, was it now?

Now it is fifty years later, and I seldom try to punch anyone’s lights out anymore, for two reasons. First, my withered testicles are failing to produce enough of the hormones which fuel blind fury, and second, if I got into a physical fight I’d very likely get knocked out in fifteen seconds.

I still do enjoy a good brawl on intellectual levels, but an odd detachment seems to have possessed me. I have the awareness that we mortals lack the brains to find our way out of the mess we’ve gotten ourselves into:

Yes, there is a difference between good and evil, but they are of the same coinage. They need each other to be defined. Good is “less evil” and evil is “less good”, but neither achieves the Absolute. The only way to the Absolute is through the Absolute, which is why Jesus said, “The only way to the Father is through Me,” which was the Christ’s way of declaring he was not a mere philosopher of this world, nor a particularly zealous idealist willing to sacrifice His life for His idealism, (which was how I was brought up to view Jesus), but instead Jesus was from Beyond this world.

Beyond this world? What is Beyond this world?

This world is creation. Beyond this world is the Creator.

The Creator didn’t just create small stuff like galaxies; the Creator created time. The Creator is beyond time.

Can any of us imagine what life is like is without time? I think not. And this is one reason we cannot escape the trickery of this world. We require help. Our own efforts are doomed to failure.

As an optimist, it is hard for me to say we are all doomed, but we are, as long as we insist we can do it on our own. We use creation’s standards to envision what the purpose of life is, but the purpose of life is join our Creator, who is utterly beyond worldly imagination. Our minds create many mental tools which are helpful within creation, but they are of no use when it comes to getting out of creation. In fact the mind itself, like time, is a creation, and something short of the Creator.

Artists, when inspired, gain hints of glory beyond ordinary imagination, and strive to share this amazing beauty with their fellow man, and quite often wind up in some way crucified. They are in some ways like small children copying their father. Their creations are nowhere near as grand as God’s; are like a cardboard box is when a child emulates his father’s truck; but this world has a nasty response, when you in any way, shape or form dare say creation is merely a road, a passageway you walk upon, and that the real goal is the Creator. In a sense you are daring to tell the world it is useful, but like a Kleenex is useful; in the end it will be wadded up and thrown away. And none of us likes being treated like a Kleenex.

I could embark on a long digression at this point, describing in intricate detail the various ways this world insists it matters, and its Creator does not. I’ll skip that, and just say whatever your worldly goal is, it is not the End. You may sweat and strain and strive to be world champion, and even if your dream comes true and you become world champion, it is not the End. Your achievement of the pinnacle is followed by a decline. You get old, as I am now, and then you point out (to people who want to be world champions) that such a worldly goal is not the End, and how do people respond? It is as if you have spoken blasphemy. How dare you! How dare you say being world champion doesn’t matter! Are you trying to discourage our youth?

No, but as an artist I see that what really reaches “the people” is not worldly, but otherworldly. Most artists can’t explain it. They just do it. And when they succeed it is glorious, but besides the ecstasy there is agony. “You gotta pay the dues if you’re gonna sing the blues.” If you take on the role of creator you must also accept the crucifixion.

You may say this world does reward it’s best artists, with millions of dollars, and appreciative audiences roaring approval, and adoring groupies, but in my life I’ve watched how such great men suffer. John Lennon got shot. John Baluchi died of debauchery. And the delightful Robin Williams hung himself. If that is the reward success gains you, I feel blessed to be unsuccessful. It seems even in the small world of art, people prefer the creation more than the Creator. People will spend millions for a painting by Van Gogh, but if they ever had met the agonized man, they likely would have found him weird, and wouldn’t give him the time of day. And, if that is true in the small world of art, is it any wonder that, in the giant world of Absolute Reality, the Creator himself got crucified?

However the Good Book states the Creator bounced right back. Jesus rose from the grave. Creation cannot obliterate its Creator, nor negate the reason for being created, which is to join the Creator in “timelessness”.

And what is the punishment for refusing the Creator’s compassionate invitation? It is to remain in time, which is called the “everlasting.”

In other words, we are given the choice to leave creation and join our Maker in the bliss of Timelessness, or of staying stuck in time. Most chose to stay stuck.

The fact we are given free will, and tend to prefer the known to the unknown, is frustrating to some preachers, who want people to Love God, and accept God’s invitation, and therefore they attempt to bully their congregations into submission. Rather than “everlasting” they like to add horror, and say “everlasting hell” and “everlasting lake of fire.” They desire to scare the bejeezes out of you, which makes them quite different from our compassionate Creator, (and in many cases makes they themselves become candidates for hell). Our Creator does not bully; he gave us free will; He wants us to follow His advice because we adore Him, not because we are cowering in dread.

As a person attempting to be a poet, I have blundered into some inspirations that can only be described as “heavenly.” However they did not last. They obeyed the Law of time, which is that nothing in creation is Eternal. All created things have beginnings and ends, in terms of time. “This too must pass.”

In other words, “everlasting heaven” would still be within the traps of time, and less than the bliss of joining our Creator outside of the trap of creation called time. Therefore, as attractive as such heaven might be, it would still hold the pangs of separation from the Creator. Even as one reaped the rewards which the virtuous deserve, one would know they were still on the road; they had not shed the shell of a turtle and become absorbed in What We Cannot Imagine.

Seen in this light, a person enjoying “everlasting heaven” is not that far removed from “everlasting hell.” The former are experiencing enjoyment as the latter experience suffering, but they are stuck in time.

One of the most intriguing statements in the Bible is where Saint Peter states what Jesus did during the time between when his body was “dead” and when his body was “resurrected”. Peter states Jesus went to hell to “preach to the sinners of Noah’s time.”

(If Christianity had the eraser of “cancel culture”, this statement would be scrubbed from scripture. It has caused problems. Why would Jesus preach to the damned? Were they not “everlastingly” damned? Or is there an escape from hell? Jesus would not preach just to rub it in that the damned were forever doomed, but rather to save them from doom. So there must be an escape hatch from hell, which led to the concept of “purgatory”, which is “derived but not mentioned” in Christian scripture, and has led to one heck of a row.)

Personally I’ve tended to retreat from all religious squabbling. It has gotten out of hand. I study history, and know “the Pope”, (actually many Popes over 2000 years), has authorized the deaths of roughly fifty million Christians. Hitler only killed six million Jews, and he could claim they were “not Christian”. As the “Pope” killed fifty million he knew they were fellow Christians, but didn’t agree with Rome. God may have given such free thinkers free will, but the “Papacy” did not approve of freedom. In response Protestants have killed millions of Catholics. Likely their numbers are less, but only because Protestants have only had five hundred years to butcher within. And the peculiar thing is both sides insist they are not aggressive, but merely “defending” their faith.

Islam is no different. Millions have died in wars between Sunni and Shiite. They are no different from Catholics and Protestants. They took otherworldly Love and made it dirty and worldly. They used scriptures of Love to make war.

And if Christians can’t even get along with Christians, and Muslims can’t even get along with Muslims, it is little wonder that when these two supposedly spiritual groups meet the sparks fly, and our planet sees all the pleasantries of crusades and jihads.

That is why I tend to retreat from all religious squabbling. The “experts” so obviously miss the point. I want to use the free will God has blessed me with to be a free thinker.

What I have concluded, with my puny intellect, is that there is a big difference between the “everlasting” and the “eternal.” The “everlasting” exists within time and space, but the “eternal” exists in timelessness and spacelessness. And, around the time my thinking gets this far, there is smoke and the reek of burning rubber, and my brains burn out. For even the perfected mind of a mastermind cannot comprehend God, and therefore my puny intellect hasn’t got a prayer, (yet, oddly, when you haven’t got a prayer tends to be when you pray most.)

The mind too is a creation. It is the most useful tool of all (when it properly integrates the heart) for traversing creation, but in the end it is shed, like a useful knapsack is shed at the end of a long, long journey. But who can imagine this? The very idea of losing our minds tends to fill us with dread.

(I warned you at the start this would be an esoteric tangent. The definition of “esoteric” is “a subject few understand.” I am not one of the few who understand. I am one of the many who don’t. But I do like to look at Infinity, and be humbled by wonder.)

“O!” (Or, “You can’t Stomp A Star”)

When I was young my poems used the word "O".
(I dropped the "H" to make "Oh" poetic.)
Wind was my friend. I'd write, "O breezes! Blow!"
"O" spoke my heart, when life left me heartsick.
But though I loved heaven, down to hard earth
I came. I needed a job. My wishes
Made no money. In shame I lost my mirth.
Me, a great artist, had to wash dishes!
Yet God shepherded me. Against my wish
I learned to use "O" when things went wrong.
I could pick up a plate and say, "O dish!"
No circumstances could keep me from song.
Evil may snicker and try to destroy
But it can't stomp a star's twinkling joy.

“I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.” Philippians 4:12

TO STOP A JEEP FROM BEEPING

I’m sitting in a rocking chair by a window with the fire roaring inside and the wind roaring outside, watching the snow swirl. A squall is moving through. In the summer we’d be having thunder and a heat wave would be ending. This being January, thunder is unlikely, but the sharp drop in temperatures is the same. Thaw is ending, and a cold wave’s in the cards.

I prefer being inside, watching the weather. I might go out as far as the porch, just to sniff the wind and hear the pines roar atop the hill, and perhaps grab a couple logs for the fire, but my hot-blooded youth is around the bend in my rear view mirror. Once I’d be drawn out to stride through such storms. Now getting me out is like pulling teeth.

Not that I don’t remember testing the limits, for in a sense I’m still testing them, only the limits are a lot less. Limits hit closer to home, as you grow grizzled. Walking up a long staircase is my modern Mount Everest, and the second beer now like the tenth. Life has its troubles, all the way through; it’s just that the ordeals of the old seem a bit pathetic to the young, who bound up staircases three steps at a time.

And I must admit I like getting texts from my second son, who lives on the coast of Maine, and must escape his stuffy office when it storms. He’s still hot blooded, and will go out to walk in the screaming wind to witness the wave’s fury at Maine’s stubborn granite shores. His ordeal is actually the stultification of an office, and he experiences an odd envy towards those who push the limits, driving trucks through highway hypnosis, with the wipers lulling and the hurricane gusts shoving the truck towards the verge, or the fishermen out in a storm, rocked drowsy by seas that would make anyone else sick and terrified. `How can one be so exhausted they fall asleep at the wheel in a hurricane?

Think of that, next time you order broiled haddock at a restaurant. We are beholden to people who push the limits.

But age reels in the limits. I can’t push my luck to the degree I once could. The time has come to sit by the fire and write memoirs. I should be retired, but of course Bidenflation has people afraid to stop earning, myself included. I haven’t shut down the Childcare I run, though I don’t hike with the kids as much or as far, and rarely get on sleds with them and go screaming down hills. I may even finally act my age. When the winds cut like a knife, I increasingly find things to do indoors.

I especially didn’t want to go out yesterday morning. I was cozy, in bed, watching the black window slowly purple with the day. The wind was roaring, but from the south, as we were on the east side of the storm that’s now departing. Rain was pelting the window, and the daybreak was late due to the thick overcast, but I didn’t have to get up. It was Saturday, I didn’t have to worry about my Childcare opening. I could drift back to dreamland. I snuggled down into my pillow, and just then there was the loud blaring of a horn.

It went on and on unceasingly. My wife jolted awake and uttered the two words without the third, “What the…” I swung from the bed and lurched blearily to the window. “Guess it’s the neighbor’s car. I can see it’s lights flashing”. Then I collapsed back into thankful sheets.

The horn went on and on. My wife gave up and got up to get coffee, as I tried to hide under my pillow. As my wife left she looked out the window. “Their car’s lights are still flashing. Whatever they are doing with their remote, it isn’t working. They’re going to have to go out into this filthy weather.”

“Poor souls,” I muttered sleepily, nestling back down.

The horn went on and on. I could hear it through the pillow. Finally I said all three words, and whipped out of bed to drag on my pants and my tee shirt and angrily stomp to the front door. Out on the front porch I could see the neighbor’s car wasn’t flashing its lights any more. What’s more, the horn’s blaring didn’t seem to be coming from that direction. In fact…could it be…

Quickly I slipped on shoes without socks and a heavy, cloth coat, and hurried out through the wind and rain and, sure enough, my Jeep was the culprit. The wind must have driven rain through the grill and wet the wiring under the hood. I opened the door and tried putting the key in the ignition. The horn kept baring. I sat down in the car and turned on the engine. The horn kept blaring. I tried to think, but its hard to think when a horn keeps blaring. Desperately I tried opening the door and slamming it very hard. The horn kept blaring. I tried locking and unlocking the locks, turning the engine off and on again, and then even insanely tried the radio and wipers, but nothing would stop that horn. I was going to have to disconnect the battery.

I pushed the buttons and pulled the knob to unlocked the hood and the tailgate (where my toolbox is), removed the key, opened the door and got a face-full of cold, stinging rain. Wincing I swung from the car, and came face to face with my wife, who had come out in a warm, especially fluffy bathrobe, big boots, and a broad rain-hat, and was studying her cellphones screen. “It says you should try locking and unlocking your doors”.

“Tried that.”

“Try starting the engine?”

“Tried that.”`

“Tried…um…” she squinted against a blast of wind, consulting her cellphone, “…um…disconnecting the battery?”

There are times an ungrateful streak appears in me. During such times I find kind, helpful people annoying, even if they are my wife. One of those times is when I’m standing in a wind-whipped rain in a coat designed for snow and not rain, which is rapidly becoming drenched and heavier, with a horn blaring and blaring and blaring. But I fought off a wave of sarcastic replies (my wife has trained me well) and responded, “I’m doing that exact thing right now.”

I turned to get an adjustable wrench from my toolbox, and came face to face with my oldest son and his wife hurrying up in bright raincoats. Wryly I thought to myself, “At least they had the brains to dress appropriately”. My son shouted over the noise, “Hi Dad! We came to see if you had passed out over your steering wheel!” His wife shot him a glance and said, “Actually we thought there had been an accident. Often that is what gets horns stuck.”

“Nope. I haven’t a clue what gives with this stupid horn. Wet wires I guess.” I was fishing about in my messy toolbox at the back of the jeep. “Oh, here it is.” I walked to the front and busily loosened the cable from the battery, as my son looked on in interest. Behind him the two women were chatting, one in a raincoat and one in a bathrobe, in a howling rainstorm. Not a thing you see every day. Even in my bad mood I wished I had a camera.

Abruptly there was silence, blessed silence.

I had an odd and perhaps crazed hope that by stopping the horn I might have fixed the problem. Even twenty-four year old jeeps have computer chips, and maybe those newfangled things just needed to be shut down and rebooted. It works with my laptop, when it goes crazy; maybe it would work with a crazy Jeep. I touched the disconnected cable back to the battery in an exploratory manner. “Blaaa!”

Enough! I disconnected for good, and turned to go. Before I could slam the hood my son reached in to tuck the cable a safer distance from the battery terminal, which I appreciated. Then he withdrew to immediately begin chatting with the women about the abysmal weather.

My wife was quite merry, in her rain-hat and rapidly wilting robe, laughing about how we had thought it was the neighbor’s car, and how they likely thought it was their car as well, which was why we saw the lights in their car flashing. They were desperately trying to stop their horn with their remote, when it wasn’t their horn at all. How funny!

I decided some people have a peculiar sense of humor. Slamming my jeep’s hood, I muttered something sardonic about finding a better place to talk, and headed dripping back through the rain towards the house, the chatterboxes trailing along behind me

My son and daughter-in-law were heading home, but seemed to feel it would be impolite to depart without civilities, so they walked up the drive and climbed the steps and we paused on the porch. I had worked hatless in the rain, which is never a good idea, and I felt on the verge of shivers. The porch was not good enough, so I was about to invite them in, when apparently the civilities were over, and they turned to go. I thanked my son for checking up on me to see if I had died, and he laughed. But I saw him scrutinizing the shrunken size of my porch woodpile. Ordinarily between knee-deep and chest-deep, it was down to six logs. I had my excuses, but was in no mood to make them.

Stepping in the house, I immediately noticed it wasn’t much warmer than it was outside. The roaring south wind had us in a veritable heat wave, for January, and it was nearly up to fifty (ten Celsius). Meanwhile indoors the wood stoves had burned low, and I hadn’t restocked them first thing in the morning, because I was enjoying oversleeping. Inside the heat was nearly down to fifty, which is when the propane heat automatically kicks on. I walked up to the thermostat that controls the propane heat, and cranked it up to seventy. (Twenty-one Celsius.) I’d be darned if I was going to hustle about tending fires and then waiting for them to heat the house up. So what if the propane bill was ten dollars higher? Sometimes a man just needs to splurge.

I hadn’t even had my first cup of coffee. That stupid, blaring horn had stripped my life of any semblance of extravagance. Well, I’d had enough. No more Mr. Nice Guy. I was going to put my foot down, and, come hell or high water, have my coffee.

Problem with putting your foot down is that you, in one way or another, usually step in it. The coffee in the pot was cool, and, even when I heated my cup in the microwave and slouched to my armchair, the wood-stove next to my chair was barely warm. Far away I could hear the propane furnace rumbling to life, but it would take time for that heat to reach my chair. So it looked like I would have to tend fires, after all.

I put my coffee cup atop the stove, crouched down and opened the stove’s door and poked around, gathering the remaining coals to a small pile near the door. Then I fished around in the wood box for scraps of kindling and bark, lay them on top of the coals, and carefully, split side down, put three small logs on top as a triangle. Then I wheezed at the coals with what is left of my lungs.

Something about starting a fire always improves my mood. Maybe its only because I used to get in trouble for playing with fire, as a boy, and now I don’t get in trouble any more. Or maybe not. I still get in trouble, for getting ashes and dirt and bugs on my wife’s clean floor. And also, come to think of it, I enjoyed starting fires even when I got in trouble for it, as a boy.

Instead I think there is something very ancient, even Neanderthal, about starting a fire. It involves power. Once the fire was blazing, even the most wimpy cave-man could cow a sabre toothed tiger, simply by waving a burning branch in its face.

As I sat on my haunches watching my fire grow my mood improved. I stood up and took off my wet coat and hung it on the coat-hooks we have by that fire to dry clothes. I sipped my coffee. I could hear words collecting as sentences in the back of my mind, and a post growing, revolving about the power of a fire. After all, fire also has power as a spiritual symbol.

If our pride, vanity and egotism is seen as the wood, then the fire that reduces such wood to ashes can be seen as a Spiritual Master’s rebukes and/or suggestions, which, in a sort of spiritual “chemical reaction”, breaks down wooden selfishness and frees up the selfless power of heat and light.

Hmm. This could get interesting. I squatted back down to poke intently at the fire.

I toyed with weaving in an image employed by Persian poets: Heat and light has the power to attract moths to circle inward, closer and closer to the flame, despite the danger of their imminent destruction. What might that symbolize?

I reached out, took a sip from my hot coffee cup atop the stove, and considered weaving a more down-to-earth-power into my braid of thought:. Arabs can embargo your oil heat, governments can ration your propane heat, electric companies can cut off your electric heat, but the only way to stop you from burning wood from your own back yard is to step onto your turf, which often, throughout history, has proven to be a bridge too far, for busybody bureaucrats.

As I crouched down and again poked at the fire I sipped my coffee, and decided this Saturday might not turn out to be so bad after all. A really cool post was brewing up in my mind. Even if I flopped at getting my ideas into a cohesive form, it would be fun to try. If I just hurried to finish my chores in my Jeep….

My Jeep. That was one thing Neanderthals didn’t have to deal with. A burning branch might stop a sabre toothed tiger, and back off a gigantic woolly mammoth, but it wouldn’t stop a Jeep from blaring its horn.

I couldn’t make the weekly Childcare deposit at the bank in a Jeep with a blaring horn. I couldn’t drive the trash to the dump the recyclables to the recycling center in jeep with a blaring horn. That meant the only doable chore was to bring wood up onto the porch from the woodpile, before the next storm. I glanced over at the window. The sky seemed darker, not lighter, as the sun rose, and the rain fell harder than ever. Not a good day for an old man with bad lungs to work outside.

My good mood popped like a bubble. Was there nothing I could do?

I supposed I could take my inability to do anything as a “sign”, an excuse to retreat and withdraw from the challenges of life, and be a “poet”. However, after doing this roughly sixty thousand times in my life, I know it only makes my problems, if not worse, then just sit there, looking at me. And I’ve also discovered it is very hard to write well when a problem is just sitting there looking at you, waiting.

With a sigh I faced the last thing I wanted to do: How to stop a Jeep from beeping. I typed that into the search engine of my computer, “How to stop a Jeep from beeping.”

Initially I plodded through various websites cursing my cruel fate. Did Keats or Shelley ever have to face such indignity? The good die young, but I get dragged into my old age dealing with inanity after inanity, until now in my decrepitude I’m reduced to dealing with beeping Jeeps. To think that I ever complained about washing dishes!

Then, abruptly and to my surprise, I found myself enjoying myself. I chanced across a website holding garrulous geezers who were very fond of their old Jeeps, even when the vehicles qualified (like mine) as “clunkers.” With wonderful humor they talked about all the problems they faced, keeping their rusted hulks running.

It turned out I wasn’t the only one faced with a horn that started blaring and wouldn’t stop. Unlike most other problems discussed on the site, no one had a clear answer to the problem. The two solutions to the problem didn’t actually identify what the problem was.

One solution was to pull the fuse for the horn. A old Jeep’s horn apparently was on a circuit all by itself, and no other functions would be effected if you pulled that fuse. However this involved finding the location of the fuse box, and then involved finding the location within the fuse box of the right fuse, and lastly of extracting that fuse, which isn’t always easy after it has been in place for over twenty years.

Easier was the second solution, which was to let the engine dry. This would solve the problem until it got wet again. Usually this happened when the owner’s spouse was borrowing the Jeep, which led to lots of funny stories. However this solution filled me with hope, especially as the window abruptly brightened from purple to gold, and the sun burst out.

The warm front had passed, and we were in the storm’s “warm sector.” It was still humid, and wisps of snow-eater fog appeared and disappeared over the snow-pack, but I ventured to hope my Jeep’s engine might dry enough to stop the horn from blaring.

Waiting for an engine to dry seemed like a chore I could handle, and I sat back to do it. I figured I could multitask by considering my brewing post, “Neanderthal Fires”. But just then my wife came bustling in, and began to regard me in an evaluating way. I hardened my jaw. My wife doesn’t always approve of how I spend my time. Just the way she looks at me makes me fear several items are being added to my Honeydew List.

This is another thing Neanderthal’s didn’t have to deal with. It is very hard to write when my wife is just watching me, waiting.

I decided to head outside and stack a little wood, quickly, before she could add to my list. The effort would get me huffing and puffing, and its harder to add onto an old man’s list when he’s huffing and puffing.

However even as I arose I heard an approaching engine, growing louder and then pausing in front of my woodpile, followed by a clanging. I went to the window and saw my grandson throwing logs into the big bucket of his Dad’s front-end-loader.

The sight made me smile, and it wasn’t just because I like it when my son and his sons stack my wood for me. It was also because we usually use the front-end-loader to transport the firewood greater distances than the fifteen yards from the woodpile to the front porch. It actually would have been faster to carry it armload by armload by hand, than to load it and unload it, into and out from the loader’s bucket. But my younger grandson just turned sixteen, and just loves to drive anything he can get his hands on.

My wife came and stood beside me at the window, and I adroitly switched the subject from my Honeydew List to reminiscing. I far prefer reminiscing to doing actual work, (unless you define my “work” as reminiscing on paper). (As I do.)

In my most sentimental voice I sighed how it didn’t seem that long ago when that grandson was thigh high, and now he’s abruptly big as I am. In her least sentimental voice she said I should pay our grandson something for all his hard work, reminding me this was the third time he’d stacked wood for us.

A spasm of irritation hit me. Since when do you get paid for stacking a old cripple’s wood? I never got paid for stacking my Dad’s wood when he got old. If there is such a thing as “child support” then there also should be a thing called “grandpa support”. In fact, a decent definition of “family” is, “Hard work you don’t get paid for.” But my wife only understands the sacrificing part, and not the receiving part. Fifteen devils leapt onto my left shoulder, suggesting sarcastic replies I could speak to her.

I’ve been well trained. I swiped all fifteen demons aside, scattering them, and I did not speak a single sarcastic reply, but I’ll confess I did sigh. And my wife’s eyes narrow when I sigh, as if a sigh spoke fifteen devils. I sighed, but said, “I agree. He deserves an allowance.” I took out my wallet from my back pocket and opened it. It held slim pickin’s. “Do you have cash?” She went to her purse and returned with two twenties. I had extracted two rumpled fives from my emaciated wallet, and accepted her contribution. Then I turned to the window and reminisced, “I worked for $1.60 an hour, back in ’71…”

My wife didn’t want to reminisce. The front door closed, and in the view out the window my grandson looked up from the woodpile and smiled. My wife entered from stage left, cheerfully exuberant in the sunshine. Meanwhile the devils were crowding back back onto my shoulders.

I don ‘t know what I expected to happen when I reached age seventy, but I did think I’d somehow outgrow thinking crabby thoughts. No such luck. If you want to defeat the habits of a lifetime you’d best begin when you are young, before they become the habits of a lifetime.

A racket was going in my head, sort of like a Jeep’s stuck horn. Out the window a grandmother and grandson were chatting happily in the fits of sunshine, as clouds scudded over in a springlike breeze, but I was fomenting a gloom, thinking up reasons to be offended.

I looked down at the money in my hands. Why didn’t my wife carry it out? Because maybe my son wants my grandson to work for free, out of the goodness of his heart, and maybe we’ll get a lecture for tipping the young man. Or I will. My wife will escape because she didn’t hand him the money. So she doesn’t even have to think about such reverberations.

Nor does she have to brood about inflation, and how the so-called “elite” are screwing the hard working salt-of-the-earth, the people who actually do the work that makes comfort possible. It is as if the “elite” are “clipping” the edges of silver coins, making the coins slightly smaller, and thinking no one will notice. But that was the original reason for “milling” the edges of silver coins, to keep such sneak-thieves at bay. And for the first hundred-forty years the United States existed there was no inflation. A man worked for “a dollar a day”. But then came the taxing and the tax collectors, and money was “clipped” in a new and technically devious way.

I sighed. My wife doesn’t like it when I get all political, but in my life I’ve watched the sneak-thieves prosper. When my generous grandfather gave me five dollars for Christmas it could buy a hundred candy bars, but if I give my grandchildren the same bill, they are lucky if they can buy two. More than ninety percent of the value of a five dollar bill has vanished in my time. Where has it gone?

Basically it has gone into the power (and pockets) of politicians, who do not have to create wealth; they just print money. But the money they print actually has no real value, though people salivate over it and are able to be bribed and compromised. And this worthless money dilutes the value of the real money made by real work. Inflation is to work what adultery is to marriage.

Neanderthals didn’t have to think about such stuff. They had no reason to save, or to save for long, for if you don’t eat the mammoth meat it goes bad. Even a flint spear-point must be used to have value, and if you hurl a spear the flint tip may smash if it hits the rocky ground. They lived more in the Now than we do.

But what was my Now? It was a stupid Jeep with a malfunctioning horn. I went back to the website and glanced for the location of the fuse-box, and then headed out the door.

My wife and grandson were still merrily chatting. Not much wood was getting stacked. I handed my grandson the money, a bit gruffly stating, “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your help.”

His face lit up. Youth does like praise, and also money. But then I added, “And if you don’t want to accept it, give it to your Dad, to pay for the loader’s gasoline.” His eyebrows shot up, and he looked a bit anxiously towards the front end loader, which was idling. “Oh, Yes, Absolutely. Gasoline is important. Absolutely.” Apparently I’d touched upon a sensitive topic. What couldn’t I keep my big mouth closed?

Avoiding my wife’s eyes, I continued on to my Jeep, and looked under the glove compartment for the fuse-box. There was no sign of a fuse-box anywhere under the dashboard. With a sigh I opened the hood and dared to reconnect the battery. To my delight the horn didn’t come on. Problem solved.

I ambled back up into the house to see if the web could tell me where the fuse-box was in “certain models”. Or maybe I just wanted to get back to the Jeep website, and enjoy the faceless brothers who knew the joys of being garrulous. My wife was bustling about in her highly efficient manner, but paused in front of me, and inquired, “Should I wait to go shopping to drive you to the bank?” I dreamily looked up, and murmured, “Bank? No need. The horn is fixed.”

No sooner had she driven off when I abruptly heard, “WAAAAAA!” Leaping up, I hurtled out the door and down the steps, nodding at my grandson as I hurried by to stop the awful noise. It didn’t take long to bring back the blessed silence, but as I turned to walk back to the house I had things besides Neanderthals to think about.

Obviously the wiring hadn’t completely dried. However the engine had heated up, so perhaps the engine’s heat would hasten further drying. I just needed to be patient.

Walking back to the house I found I was huffing and puffing. I had hurried down to stop the blaring faster than the prescribed speed-limit for seventy-year-old men. At the bottom of the stairs I nodded at my grandson, and pretended to scan the sky for signs of the approaching cold front. In actual fact those stairs have recently become steeper.

It is taking me a while to get back in shape, after being hospitalized with pneumonia. I’m off the oxygen, and my wife has shifted all the bottles and tubes and other paraphernalia into a back room where it doesn’t disturb the aesthetics of her interior, but I still remain more of a weakling than I like. As I took a deep breath and labored up the steps I wryly thought to myself I wasn’t doing a very good job of, ` “gracefully surrendering the things of youth.”

For some reason that phrase has stuck in my head, from a poster that was on the walls of many college dorms and hippy communes fifty-five years ago. It was an old sage’s serene advice, from something called the “Desiderata”, supposedly written in 1692 and left in a church in Baltimore and only recently rediscovered, (but in fact written in 1927 by Max Ehrmann). In any case, when my father was crippled by polio at age 34 he did not gracefully surrender. He fought like hell, and I seem to have inherited some of his ferocity. There is a Dylan Thomas mood in me,

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

This tends to clash with the serenity I inherited from my mother, who understood rest is a great healer. She was a nurse, while my father was a surgeon and understood running laps is also a great healer. Little wonder they divorced, but I’m stuck with them in my head.

With a sigh I sagged by my laptop again, clicking back to the Jeep website, but my mind off with the Neanderthals. Judging from their bones, they lived brutal lives, yet cared for their injured, (and I suppose injuries are common when you hunt woolly mammoths without a gun). The cold was constant, and caused arthritis. Yet their elders lived after they were able to hunt, and when they died they were sometimes buried with flowers. They sat by fires that burned for decades in caves, talking about what? Jeeps?

How did Jeeps get into my thinking? Oh, yes, my laptop was open to that website, and some practical part of my brain was idly scanning comments the way some people play solitaire when midst deeper thought, and I was noticing something that distracted me from Neanderthals.

Here and there contributors had noticed that their blaring horn occurred in tandem with other electrical problems. Perhaps a radio quit or the heater’s fan quit. They could get by without a radio or fan, but when wipers quit the driver had to grab the bull by the horns and solve the problem, which apparently lay in something called the “wiring harness”. After a couple decades of jouncing across the landscape a Jeep’s wires frayed and then short circuited, and this might allow electricity to invade the circuit that supposedly was dedicated to the horn and only the horn.

I sat back with the serenity that comes from finding an answer. The driver’s side window of my Jeep had quit rolling up or down a few months ago, which was something I could live with, but I could not live with that horn. If drying the wires didn’t work, then I could….I glanced at the clock….

Yikes! The bank would be closing in 55 minutes, and I hadn’t even started on the receipts. And the dump recycling center would close in 120 minutes, and they’d slam the gate in your face if you were ten seconds late!

I’ll skip the details of the frantic rush that followed, except to say that when I reconnected the battery the wires were dry and I made it to the bank on time and without a blaring horn. Then I had to hustle to load all the trash from my home, and head over to the Childcare to grab that trash as well.

Having to hurry annoyed me no end. I like to saunter in and chat with the young ladies at the bank, but I had to fly in and out like the rudest capitalist. Then I always get irritated by how I have to spend time separating our trash for the various recycling bins, when it seems other, unnamed people could show some consideration and themselves do the separating, for an old man like me. Especially annoying are dirty kleenex in the paper bin, which is not allowed, and unwashed jam jars, which are not allowed, and so forth, which seems to indicate people are too prissy to dirty their fingers, and leave stuff to rot and become covered in maggots, for me to deal with. It’s not fair, and soon fifteen devils are on my shoulder, sawing away at the violins of my self pity, and my mind is soon blaring like a stuck horn.

Against all those devils is one sane angel on my other shoulder, telling me not to make a big deal out of minor offenses. I’d like to say this angel is the result of becoming old and wise, and that I’ve learned to be detached and objective, but to be brutally honest I think that angel has been there all along, even back when I was a wild teenager.

The comedian Bill Cosby once described a time he drank too much and became sick, and a conversation he had with a toilet bowl. Apparently we all have an objectivity within us, even when we are at our worst. Even Saint Paul describes how he knows what is good, but does bad things, (in the seventh chapter of Romans,) and I figure that, if a superman like Paul can blow it, it gives me an excuse to ignore the good angel and listen to the fifteen bad ones.

And I have to confess I derive a sort of pleasure out being crabby. I try not to be crabby out loud, or to hurt another, but privately, in secret, I need to express myself. I need to express how it sometimes feels like I go the extra mile for people who won’t go an inch for me. The good angel on my shoulder can remind me I’m not the only soldier in the trenches, and that millions die never thanked, never given a Medal of Honor or even a Purple Heart. The baked haddock I enjoy may involve a wrecked fishing boat. But they are not me. I’m the one suffering here, and therefore I’m the one crabby.

I was especially crabby as I arrived at the Childcare to grab it’s trash. Usually it is a quick job, but my younger daughter insists on living in a romantic novel rather than reality, and the current drama has her destitute with two small children. (I’ll allow you to fill in the details.) The State of New Hampshire, in a rare bit of legislative sanity, refuses to pay welfare for housing when family is available. Therefore rather than serenely retired I am a “support”. In some ways it reminds me of the Robert Frost poem where a hired hand returns to a certain farm to die, and the following exchange occurs between the farmer and his wife,

‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.’

                           ‘I should have called it
Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’ 

In any case, she has come home, which irritates me for two reasons.

The first reason involves the fact I have a surgeon and a nurse echoing in my skull, the first saying healing involves exercise and the second saying healing involves rest. Simply avoiding schizophrenia forced me to marry the contradictions, and see both are correct. Furthermore, doctors can’t function without nurses, and nurses can’t function without doctors, and therefore most quarreling between the two is a waste of time, and divorce is the greatest waste of all. Consequently all the drama of romantic novels, and most of the angst in pop music on the radio, bores me. It is all a waste of time, compared to harmony. (Which makes me look like a hypocrite for being so discordantly crabby about romantic drama.)

The second reason for irritation involves the fact a poor old man like myself has to deal with extra trash. Furthermore, because she has little free time with two small children and a job, rather than shopping my daughter orders much through Amazon, which means her trash includes an amazing number of cardboard boxes. However the dump recycling center will not accept boxes unless they are broken down. But did my daughter find the time to break down the boxes? No. And lastly, I had arrived at nap time, (not only for the two little ones but for the exhausted Mom,) so I was expected to work on tiptoes.

But what about the exhausted grandfather?

Externally I try to appear sympathetic, empathetic and magnanimous to a saintly degree, but internally the violins of my self pity were sawing so fast the strings were smoking. Did Shelley or Keats or Shakespeare ever have to break down boxes on tiptoes? I very much doubt it. How am I ever to write my great work about Neanderthals when I have to be nice, and nobody’s nice to me? Worst was that I had to work so fast I was huffing and puffing, because the recycling center was about to close. But did anyone pity me?

Right at this point a text came in from my ten-year-old granddaughter, asking me why the word “polka-dot” has an “L” in it. I had no time to answer, and the irony of the situation staggered the devils on my shoulder backwards. Even they were amazed by the language I used to express my exceptional ire.

The irony is this: For some reason my granddaughter does respect my opinions, (but my daughter has a mind of her own). My granddaughter got her first cellphone for her tenth birthday, and I immediately received a gibberish of imogis. With my replies I hoped to teach her there was such a thing as the English language, and therefore her latest reply delighted me, as it expressed an interest in the language’s peculiarities. But did I have time to dote on this delightful granddaughter?

Noooo. Instead I had to tiptoe at top speed and break down boxes quietly for a daughter who does not want my opinion, which may be a reason she’s housed in the attic of a Childcare. It was utterly unfair. I had to deprive one who cares for me to pamper someone who can’t even break down boxes for me?

It was right when I had achieved the highest state of high dudgeon that, “WAAAHHHH”, the horn went off. Anyone napping in the attic of the Childcare left dents in the ceiling. I, meanwhile, experienced a near instantaneous shift from abused to abuser.

I did some quick calculating. I had ten minutes to drive to a dump that was six minutes away. If I didn’t make it in time I’d have to drive around all week with my Jeep stuffed to its ceiling with trash. I came to an instantaneous decision. Fixing the horn could wait.

Off I drove, horn blaring, past friends and neighbor’s houses, through the town, gradually shrinking down in my seat. Past the mall, past the post office, “WAAAHHHH”. People turning to look at me, in my highly recognizable Jeep, “WAAAHHHH”! Past the doctor’s office, past the Junkyard, past old Widow Simpson’s, “WAAAHHHH!” The six minute drive took as eternally long as the final period Math Class, back in high school, but a last I pulled through the gate and made it into the dump. Once I was through that gate they were stuck with me, “WAAAHHHH!” I hopped out by the glass recycling bins and popped the hood open, and there was sudden and blessed silence.

It seemed odd I was huffing and puffing so much. After all, how much effort is it to drive a car?

While leaning against the hood I noticed a box over at the side of the engine that looked suspiciously like it might be a fuse box. I pred off the lid. It hadn’t been opened in twenty-four years, and looked surprisingly fresh and new inside. It had a clear chart identifying which fuses did what, and the fuse for the horn was number 23. It behaved like a fuse will behave after twenty-four years: It seemed frozen in its socket, and wouldn’t budge. The dump officially closed, and I still worked at wiggling it free. The dump workers regarded me with disapproval.

It occurred to me that, even without the horn blaring, I was a sort of unwelcome noise in their lives. Right then the fuse came out. I reconnected the battery, closed the hood, and in blessed silence went about putting the paper in the paper place, the plastic in the plastic place, the tin cans in the tin can place, all the while getting stern frowns of disapproval. (Gosh! You’d think they could be nicer. After all, my taxes pay their wages.)

I rolled my eyes skywards to the Big Man upstairs. If a superman like Saint Paul could get knocked off his high horse, I supposed a fathead like me could benefit from getting my obese ego trimmed a bit, but there are certain Saturdays when I think I will not mind departing this foolish world in the slightest.

Lord, you are eternal, but I am not.
I am less lasting than the mists of dawn.
I'm no mountain; I'm firm as a stray thought
And as lasting as an echo. I'm gone
To begin with, compared to Your power,
Yet I've endured dawn after dawn after dawn
Going nowhere. I've no fleeting flower
To garland You with. I look back upon
My life, and my name's writ upon waters,
But to You even mountains become beach sand
In the blink of Your eye. Sons and daughters
Of a thousand generations demand 
Less of You than a million galaxies,
So what am I, but some dust in the breeze.

 

It has stung me when my Lord's pointed out
How false are the false gods I've been fond of.
I don't like feeling like a fool. I pout
And sulk, but I needed to see my love
Should be for the Creator, and not for
His creation. Indifference has stung
When I sing, and never hear the crowds roar.
I feel a fool, for all my life I've sung
To earwax. Yet thus God has taught me well.
What good's Hollywood on the day you die?
Maybe the media can make this world hell
But death proves their judgement is a big lie.
When I die I shall see if I have been fake
Or if my Lord's pleased by the music we make.

ADVICE FOR YOUNG WRITERS

I chose to write because I enjoyed it, even as a little child. I didn’t think much about why I enjoyed it. That came later. It was later that I became aware that what I enjoyed might not gain me praise, and might in fact earn rejection.

I can still clearly remember the morning I first became aware of a sort of schism between my self and my society. It was when I was still in grade school. I was working on a book I called “My Book Of Indians”, which basically was a regurgitation of pro-Native-American attitudes absorbed from Earnest Thompson Seton’s book “Two Little Savages“, (1903). It was springtime and I think the clocks had “sprung forward” into Daylight Savings Time, and abruptly there was an hour less daylight before school. This cramped the time I had to write.

How I came to be writing before school I can’t say; perhaps the sun simply awoke me earlier as the days lengthened; but I felt a sort of golden serenity when I wrote, and one morning the golden serenity blossomed into a powerful intuition, “This is what I was born to do.” It was either when I was in fourth or fifth grade, which would make me between nine and ten years old.

On this particular morning I went from my pleasant euphoria to the horrible realization I had missed the bus. I was late to school. Fortunately school was only a half mile away, and usually when I missed the bus I could simply grab my books and run like hell, and arrive before the first class started. This time I was especially late. As I ran to school it was with a sense of dread, and I was wildly formulating responses I might answer the teacher with, when she asked me why I was late.

The joke is, it never occurred to me that, “I got lost in my writing,” or, “I got too absorbed in my research,” might be a good and even pleasing excuse, an excuse a teacher would be delighted to hear. Instead I was desperately attempting to come up with something involving escaped lions or runaway trains.

This highlights an absurd dichotomy which existed (and I myself may have created) between the writing I did at home and the lack of writing I did at school. You might think that my interest and pleasure might have made me a good scholar, but in actual fact my love of writing was more like a secret, which I tried to keep the school from ever knowing about.

At school I got bad grades, was the class clown, and nowadays I likely would be diagnosed with some sort of “attention disorder” and drugged. In earlier times I would have been whipped. As it was I slipped through a loophole, during a permissive time when neither happened.

Anyway, on this particular day I ran like crazy to the school and was horrified to see no buses. I was so late the last bus had already disgorged its load of noise and driven off. A terrible silence filled the air, as I approached the door. Outside the spring sunshine was golden, but inside I could see nothing but a gloomy hallway. At that point I felt a tremendous reluctance to walk through that door. I knew I had to do it, but every fiber of my body loathed it.

Many can relate to how I felt, if they ever had horrible job they hated, yet had to push through the door and punch the time-clock. Just remember the day it was hardest to push through the door, and that is how I felt going to school that day. Just as I had the golden intuition, “This what I was born to do,” when writing, now I had the dreadful sense, “This is not a place I was born to be.”

The juxtaposition of the two strong impressions is what I most clearly remember. A schism was created.

Likely the fact it was springtime intensified the schism. What boy doesn’t want to play hooky from school on a golden spring morning?

(Back in my day a boy wanted to escape the lousy lights, stale air, cloying chalk dust, and dreary drill, and instead be walking in the woods like a free Native American. Modern youth may seem different, but just because the woods they walk are virtual doesn’t mean virtual woodlands aren’t far preferable to a classroom.)

However I believe that, opposed to this schism, is an urge to be understood, (or perhaps to share the beauty one has found and deemed worthy of playing hooky for). Therefore a boy has a divided heart, with one half wanting to flee society, as the other half wants to rejoin society.

Skip ahead a decade, and the young boy becomes a young writer, on one hand loathing professors, editors, agents and publishers, and on the other hand desiring education, correction, help and a way to make money doing what he loves.

Skip ahead five decades and the boy is seventy years old. If he still writes at all, and still derives great pleasure from writing, (as I do), then the intuition he had as a boy, “This is what I was born to do,” has proven correct.

Such a verification is easy for people whose persistence paid off, who became successful writers and who can now sit back and regard rows of published volumes on a bookshelf on a wall. But what about me? I was (for the most part) never “discovered”, and have written most of my life without the encouragement of recognition. Was I not in error, when intuition told me, “This is what I was born to do”??? For that boyhood intuition has not resulted in fame and fortune, and is not that our criterion???

Actually, I reject that criterion. I think I was lucky. Why? Because if an artist finds success in a specific area, he tends to focus in on that area, which has brought him success. If a Saturday Evening Post pays well, then he may spend decades painting covers for the Saturday Evening Post, even if he had great potential outside of that narrow window.

My single success involved being recognized by Anthony Watts on his website, “Watts Up With That” fifteen years ago, and publishing seven articles there. But to some degree this placed constraints on my freedom as a writer. If you look back through this website, at my posts over the past eleven years, you will often see my heart wrestling to subdue my boyish love of freedom in order to discipline my writing and produce what might look scientific enough to be published on that website (which I do admire).

In the end my boyish love of freedom seemingly won. It’s been over a decade since that website has published anything I’ve written, so it obviously did not have the power of a Saturday Evening Post to make a Norman Rockwell out of me.

Don’t get me wrong. The match between Norman Rockwell and the Saturday Evening Post was in some ways a marriage made in heaven. If a young writer meets a professor, editor, agent or publisher who treats them with dignity and honor, they should understand such people are few and far between. Honor them back. For I have met some delightful rascals in my time, but I have never met a professor, editor, agent or publisher who I felt was on my side of the schism. When push came to shove, if I expected money for my writing, they always seemed to want to make a whore or gigolo out of me, and I chose to prefer poverty. (WUWT was an exception to that rule; in that case I simply tired of talking about Truth in terms of arctic sea-ice.)

I likely should provide an example, though it will seem a lengthy digression to some.

When aged 25, when I still had some shreds of faith I might meet a good professor, editor, agent or publisher, I was told, “It isn’t what you know; it is who you know.” And so it was I approached a friend of the family, who happened to be the editor of a small newspaper, with my most recent manuscript, which I thought was truly great.

The editor was a jolly, pink-faced gentleman, with silver hair, married and with a handsome, full-grown son, and I had no reason to suspect he was homosexual. In any case he completely misunderstood the message in my manuscript.

The message was that, if you deeply love your father, but do not get enough of his fathering, you might seek to make up for that deficit by seeking out father figures. I should have added that healthy fathers do not have sex with their sons. I failed to add this, and this jolly soul assumed I was in some way “coming out of the closet”, and that I wanted him to be my next “father figure”.

After an exchange of several letters, (his short, handwritten and terse, and mine many pages of half-space typing, with a typewriter that had both a black and a red ribbon), a meeting was arranged.

He welcomed me into his office with open arms, which seemed innocent enough, but his further advances shocked me. After a somewhat humorous retreat, involving me back-peddling frantically several times around his office desk, he got tired and also seemed to conclude I was terribly naive. I concluded I understood how innocent actresses feel when they want roles in Hollywood movies and are confronted with “the casting couch.” When I explained to the merry man that he misunderstood what I meant by “father figure”, he looked at me with incredulity, and then remarked, “No writer has ever made it without either fucking somebody, or being fucked.” I reared up righteously and replied, “Well then, I’ll be the first.”

It may have been noble of me to say that, but time seems to have proven the fellow correct. Here I am, after decades of writing, and also after never fucking or being fucked to further my career, and I’ve never “made it.”

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not homophobic. I actually liked the guy. Considering I recall his words after 45 years, he may even qualify as a sort of minor “father figure”. I just had no desire to have sex with him. However I did appreciate him. After I had rebuffed his advances we spent a cordial afternoon together.

It began by us sitting back down in his office, and him being charitable enough to read my 265 page manuscript despite the fact I had no payment to offer.

He read with stunning and slightly offensive rapidity, for he had the gift of speed reading. I watched him go through my manuscript so quickly it seemed impossible he was thinking about the hour’s worth of thought I put into each page. It took him two seconds to glance down the page, and put an X across the page with his pen. 250 pages got the X. But 15 pages slowed him down. Most were the pages that skipped philosophy and actually involved my interactions with my father. They got no X, and on one page he wrote “touching” and on another he actually scribbled a paragraph, commenting that my assumption was not true, bringing in a rebutting proof from his own boyhood. But for the most part, at two seconds per page, he went through thirty pages in a minute, and two-hundred-sixty-five pages in less than fifteen minutes.

Then he had things to do, places to go, and people to meet, but he invited me along. He didn’t do so to demonstrate how amazingly packed the life of an editor can be, but rather because he found me odd, and was curious how I came to be so weird. He asked questions which proved to me he had actually absorbed some of my manuscript’s ideas, despite the fact he turned pages so rapidly it seemed impossible that he could be doing more than turning pages and putting an X on most of them. He asked these questions even as he dashed hither and thither, talking to printers and advertisers and reporters, and drove from here to there in a small blue car. Most of the questions were asked as he drove.

One thing that baffled him was how I could say I preferred the company of men to that of women, and not be homosexual. I felt inarticulate and mumbled some clumsy rhetoric about how a man needed to learn how to be a man before he’d be worthy of a woman, and he just laughed and called me a hopeless romantic.

Another thing he was curious about was my idealism regarding Truth. I stated honesty was the wellspring of morality, and if men were truly honest there would no need for laws. He rolled his eyes, stated I was proposing anarchy, and then shot me such a significant, eagle-fierce glance that I instinctively knew the glance meant that I should think hard about what he had just stated. And I did think hard about it. I had heard that I was a hopeless romantic before, but this was the first time I heard I was an anarchist.

Then, as irony would have it, he zipped his little, blue car to a lurching stop at a curb, hopped out, and proceeded to hurry up a wide, marble staircase to a wide, green lawn. He moved with surprising speed for a portly man with silver hair, his leather shoes pattering smartly on the marble. Apparently we were late to some sort of press conference.

Ahead was a mansion with a pillared front like a Greek temple, and, at the foot of the towering pillars, a fat, well-dressed man was speaking to four microphones, and also to a bunch of reporters who gathered humbly beneath him at the bottom of a second wide marble staircase. Obviously the man was a mayor, or perhaps even a governor, and the irony was that I had only just discovered I might be an anarchist.

As the editor arrived, the politician by the microphones interrupted some windbag explanation he was giving to gladly greet him, and all the other reporters also turned to welcome him. He was obviously well-liked. He delighted in the attention, making jokes I did not get, but which everyone laughed greatly at.

I was struck by how swiftly he changed from a person I could talk to into a person very different, an actor on a stage playing a part. He quite obviously liked playing his role, but it made me uncomfortable. It seemed fake, and I was big on Truth. My discomfort grew worse when I noticed eyes shifting from him to me, and the reporters seemingly going wink-wink, nudge-nudge. They were assuming something I didn’t like. To make matters worse, the editor seemed to encourage them, looking back at me and then back at them, and going wink-wink, nudge-nudge.

I could see how it looked. He was a jolly, happy character with the known foible of cultivating proteges who always seemed to be young, male writers, and there I stood, a big, floppy notebook in hand, obviously the next young, male writer. Abruptly I wanted to scream, “This is not how it looks.”

Instead I had the strong intuition, “This is not a place I was born to be.” So, shortly after the press conference, I left that “opportunity”, after politely thanking the editor for his kindness, and drove off in my tiny brown Toyota from that fiasco to my next one.

I hope you can see I hold no grudge against the man. I suppose he qualifies as being what is now called a “groomer” or even a “sexual predator”, but I just saw him as someone with desires I could not fulfill. And he likely saw me as someone with desires he could not fulfill. But this reality was no reason to be uncivil, and we did share ideas which I can recall even after 45 years.

But why did I have that sense, “This is not where I was born to be?” What propelled me to seek elsewhere?

With 20-20 hindsight, I think I sensed the beginning of what is now called “The Swamp”. But back then the rot had just started, and was a mere blemish on the skin of an otherwise wholesome fruit. The good Founding Fathers had gotten something rolling, and the politicians of 1978 were rolling along on the momentum of that goodness, forgiving of foibles, yet seemingly forgetful of the fact that good, without further good, stops rolling.

Yet I wonder if I ran away from a problem I should have attempted to solve. Maybe I could have kept the goodness rolling, and single-handedly kept The Swamp from becoming a swamp. I doubt it; most likely I would have been seduced and sucked down into the mire like everyone else, but that is something I shall never know. One cannot undo what has been done, and the fact of the matter is that I turned away from situations when intuition told me “This is not where I was born to be.”

This ends my long digression, and returns us to the question I originally digressed from.

Was it worth it?

Yes.

Why?

Because most people live their lives without fame and/or fortune, and are the better for it. They are, in fact, beautiful people living beautiful lives, and are what the Bible calls “the salt of the earth”. And this fact (that such humble people often are more worthy of respect than the fatheaded rich and fatheaded famous are) was something I saw, early on, from my side of the schism.

It is also not something one should expect the rich and famous to want to hear. Therefore, if you write about such reality, you are in a sense insulting the rich and famous, and shouldn’t expect to be showered with their favors.

However one will be showered by the favors of those who have no money to offer, and no fame. In some ways all they offer is hard work; they offer blood, sweat and tears, but, in the end, after fifty years, the young writer may find themselves in my shoes, the grandfather of fourteen, (soon [God willing] to be fifteen, and, in seven months [God willing] sixteen).

Now I will freely admit young writers are not aiming to create grandchildren when they write. But, if pressed, they do confess to hoping some people will still be reading their work in in fifty years, or at least that their work will have such a powerful effect that it will uplift the unborn, even if their actual works are burned and don’t survive. Me? I actually did think about future family, as I wrote.

It had to do with my being from a broken home. I wanted to mend the fracture, and my childlike prayers often included, “And please God, get Mom and Dad back together again.” However it was also fairly obvious such a reconciliation was not going to happen. Their divorce was downright flamboyant in the grandiose levels of discord it attained. In retrospect my parent’s overblown drama seems downright laughable, but at the time they seemed to feel a need to be secretive about what was blatantly obvious. You weren’t allowed to talk about it. But me? I wanted to write about it, on the sly. If I had to be secretive, I’d do it, but, on my side of the schism, I’d be open and honest.

Most young writers are in similar slippers. They want to be honest about something which needs to be addressed, but which it is taboo to talk about. Because it needs to be addressed, some will respond to their work by saying, “You know, I always thought that, but never dared say it.” However the gatekeepers of cancel culture may repress such agreeable encouragement with their insidiously disagreeable discouragement, and so the honesty is not rewarded, most of the time, though there are exceptions to the rule.

Young writers want to be the next exception to the rule. (Even old writers like me confess it might be fun). Imagine what it must have been like to be one of four young men in an obscure rock band called “The Beatles” in 1962. Or what it must be like to be Oliver Anthony, and to have a heart-felt song leap from the obscurity of twenty views a day on YouTube to over a million views in a single afternoon, to six million a few days later, and, four months later, to over a hundred million views. (YouTube pays creators a reasonable amount of money, for a hundred million views).

Lots of young writers yearn for a hundredth as much money, for their writing. If they only got paid, they could quit washing dishes and devote more time to the writing they love. Sadly, for every four Beatles or lone Oliver Anthony there are countless other singers and writers who escape recognition, and never get paid.

To young writers I say this: Consider ye the salt of the earth. Are there not many good, young mothers and fathers who wish they got paid for being good, because if they got paid they would have more time to spend with their children? But they don’t get paid for parenting, and in fact it is often bad mothers who get paid (welfare). But does the fact good mothers and fathers don’t get paid for being good stop them? No. Many of them don’t even expect acknowledgement for their gracious behavior. They just do what they do. Why? Because the alternative is loathsome.

In like manner, young artists should avoid alternatives when they start to look loathsome. Or that is what I told myself as a young man. But I was also told artists were wimps, were terribly wounded by rejection, and were so prone to wilting that one sign an artist was worthy was that he’d keel over and die young. That didn’t appeal to me.

Before very long I knew all about both the agony and ecstasy of art, but the general opinion seemed to be artists had no stamina and couldn’t take it, and, if no one would listen, they’d get crazy and cut an ear off and mail it to a woman they felt unheard by, like Van Gogh did. I did not feel this was a wise way to behave. Nor was it how the salt of the earth usually behaved. Therefore I decided to make a point. And the point was? It was that a writer didn’t have to be a lunatic. He didn’t have to die young. He could live to be over 70 and be the grandfather of 14 (going on16).

“Yes, but…” young writers will say. “How can you call yourself a writer when you have never been published”?

Actually one of the first poems I ever wrote was published in the Manchester Union Leader in 1968. I was fifteen. It didn’t make me a red penny, and in fact misled me to believe it was easy to be published.

Since then I’ve written all sorts of stuff, and I haven’t a clue whether a single sonnet of mine will reward me beyond the pleasure I got writing it. So why write it down?

Well, in many cases the writing was read, and the reader found great pleasure. (O.K., I confess, usually the reader was myself.) However there were a few, rare other cases where people besides myself surprised me by expressing pleasure over what I’d written. In fact, fifty years is such a long stretch of time that I’ve even written a song or two which were small town “hits”, sung in obscure bars, in living rooms at parties, or at church talent shows. There was even one time, midst fifty years of obscurity, when I experienced a glorious evening where I had an audience of over a hundred singing my song’s chorus. But no song ever “went viral”. As far as I know, not a single thing I’ve written will outlast me.

In some ways I hope my writing doesn’t. Why? Because it makes me more pure, if my writing has nothing to do with fortune or fame. It is purer still if it has nothing to do with acceptance or even, believe it or not, with talent.

At this point I imagine some young writers are sitting bolt upright and saying, “Stop right there. Nothing to do with talent? You had better explain that one, Bucko.”

To explain I like to use the following analogy:

Suppose you were lacking in talent, but loved music. Suppose you were tone deaf and knew for a fact your singing made people wince. Would that mean you were banned from ever singing? Or could you not, when no one was home, sneak into the shower and bellow your discordant heart out, and actually derive enjoyment from your singing? The answer to that question is a resounding, “Yes”, for lots of people, with voices less sweet than a donkey’s, get great joy from singing in the shower. Why? Are they not singing to an audience of zero?

Here my explanation drifts into mysticism, and gets a bit weird, for I assert the people in showers are not singing to an audience of zero, but of Infinity.

Most don’t think much about why singing in the shower feels so good. If they think at all, their singing seems selfish, and only done for one’s own well-being, like doing push-ups in a gym. Even if the sour singer imagines a vast crowd cheering, as he (or she) showers, entertaining warm and fuzzy delusions of grandeur, enjoying a flooding fantasy that waves of encouraging applause are giving him (or her) permission to bellow out the wrong notes all the louder, the singer seldom sees that what actually makes them feel so good, and makes such showers so strangely healing, is a mystic mystery.

Said the singer to the song,
“It is for your lips I long
But I cannot reach the charms
Of my creation.”

The song came singing back,
“You are everything I lack
And we need each others arms
For celebration.”

Even after fifty years, I can’t fathom the mystery. But I think it has something to do with creative people entertaining the Creator.

As a young writer this caused me problems. I didn’t want to be a bit religious. To be religious was to be a copycat. It was to recite by rote. It was to be stale, and never think. I would rather be original. I wanted to say the things that stale people didn’t. I wanted to be reinvigorating, to be fresh and new.

However there came a day when I was attempting to write about some element of Truth, in a fresh and new way, when, while rereading my first draft, I saw it was pathetic. It was like I was trying to trace the flickering movement of a flaring, crimson sunrise with tracing paper, using charcoal. Once the sunrise had faded, and was no longer there to inspire me, I was confronted with how I had portrayed it. It depressed me. My work was just charcoal on tracing paper, stagnant and stale, and such a bad representation of Truth that few could look on my work and even imagine a shade of red.

It was a humbling experience, for it showed me my “originality” was not so original as I thought. Yes, it was better than the religious, who mumbled words by rote and never bothered to think about the Truth their words mumbled about. I was only “original” because I did bother to think. But it did not make me the Maker. I might be what some called “creative”, but I could not create like the Creator did.

I did not create the sunrise, and therefore when I tried to artistically show how beautiful the sunrise was, I was just a copycat. I might produce a copy of a sunrise better than even a camera could, but still it would fall short. After years of failure it occurred to me my sunrise could never match the sunrise the Creator had created; my best attempts were my poor copy of a Genius far better.

At some point you need to tell your pride to shut up. Even if you are far better than most at seeing the beauty of life, you need to confess you are not the originator of that beauty. You are not original. You just copy better than other copycats.

I’m not sure why it was so hard for me to hear I was not original, but it was. I wish I had understood earlier. I urge young artists to understand what it took me so long to understand.

One way to look at it is: The Creator is the father, and artists are his adoring children. They want to be like Him. So they emulate Him.

At my childcare I often see children emulate their parents. It doesn’t matter if their mother is a seamstress or their father is a surgeon, the child will stitch with a make-believe needle made of straw. There is such child-like admiration involved I would never scold the child, though the simple fact of the matter is that the child is not capable of being either a seamstress or a surgeon. (Yet).

In like manner, no artist is capable of being the Creator. At best, they are just copycats. Even the most heroic and magnificent art, such as Beethoven’s ninth symphony, is but a joyful representation of what the Creator’s already made, but which most ordinarily don’t see (or hear). It takes a deaf Beethoven to open their eyes (or ears).

In terms of the issue of “originality”, there is no danger of stagnation when attempting portray Truth, for Truth is, by definition, the opposite of sameness; no two snowflakes or fingerprints are the same; even identical twins are not identical; even desert sunrises hold something new in their cloudless daybreaks. The only danger of stagnation arises when someone attempts to tie the Truth down, to limit it in the manner religion often does.

Perhaps that is why young artists so often become atheists. Goodhearted preachers, in their attempts to steer their flock away from evil towards good, have accidentally limited Infinity. Infinity laughs at limits. Young artists laugh at goodhearted preachers, unaware they themselves are limiting Infinity by saying it does not exist.

I could have saved myself from a great deal of trouble if, as a young artist, I had not wasted so much time being “original” in ways that denied the Truth which, in fact, I was trying to copy.

However I suppose it is part of a process. It does not occur to one that the father-figure one is looking for is Truth itself, and so one first works their way through a whole series of lesser, inferior father-figures, over and over sensing, “This is not where I was born to be.” Such incidents are part of learning, even when they are fiascos. An acorn does not become an oak all at once.

Even if one has the good fortune to draw a get-out-of-jail-free card, (which I suppose would be a father-figure who confessed he was inferior and pointed one towards Truth, as the only worthy Father), one retains doubts. Atheism lingers. Even saints have a devil on their shoulders.

Hardest to shake is the sense Truth has no heart. One prays, but hears only silence. One receives no instruction, so what is one to do? One sighs and turns away. But what does one then see?

One is looking at silent blankness, when one opens a notebook to an empty page. It is as blank as a crystal ball, but it does not stay blank. Lines of letters appear like the footprints of chickens. Then a line is scribbled out. Then the page is torn from the notebook, rumpled to a ball, and sails through the air to a wastepaper basket.

What just happened? You say you received no instruction, but in fact you just had a conversation with Truth.

These conversations can be quite a battle, because besides the Truth there are other voices, sometimes louder than the silence of Truth. There is the sneering of every bully who ever belittled and the snickers of every Karen who ever backbit. Onto the empty page can spill the gatekeepers of cancel-culture, repressing all agreeable encouragement with their insidiously disagreeable discouragement. Even when one consciously scribbles these snide voices out, they remain lurking in the subconscious, poisoning the very springs of creativity. The struggle seems so unequal one wants to go mad, die young, and cut off their ear like Van Gogh, but then one remembers Beethoven had his ears cut off by life itself, and it never stopped him. That is a truth so amazing that one’s faith in Truth revives.

My advice to young artists is to revive your faith in Truth. Not truth, but Truth, with a capital “T”. For, in its Infinity, Truth has a power few expect silence to have: The power of Love. All the other voices that spill onto the empty page twist truths with a small “T”, and in that swirling confusion of lesser father-figures one needs an Absolute they can cling to like a child clings to a father’s pants-leg on a crowded city street. And Truth, with a capital “T”, will respond.

Even if a young writer is sick of priests and preachers, (and communists are the most preachy of all), and any hint of religion (even a godless religion) makes them want to vomit, and they have been made allergic to the word “God”, they should be able to recognize they are repelled from some things because others are more attractive, and that they need a word for what attracts them. I suggest they use the word “Truth”. (This entire subject is absurd, when you understand our choosing this defining word is attempting to encapsulate Infinity. It would be easier to stuff an elephant into your shirt-pocket.) I furthermore suggest young writers give credit where credit is due, confess attraction where attraction is obvious, and investigate being adopted by an Ocean. An Ocean? Well, truth, with a small “T”, may be a cruel truth, But Truth, with a capital “T”, is a sea of Love.

ODE UPON AN ARROWHEAD

I’m tired of the battle to get real information accepted, in a society ruled by people who have a strange belief there is some bizarre good in being wrong.

They call it “propaganda”, but it boils down to attempting to brainwash people into believing Fake News is real news. When people object and speak the truth, they get cancelled. People are told that the only way they will make money is to tow the line, to mouth the balderdash of political correctness even when it is absurd, or else face being fired, marginalized, excommunicated, banned from the perks of polite company; people must parrot inanities. So inanities are all we get. Then the general public gets tired of being treated like they all have IQ’s of 45 and believe the balderdash. I get tired as well.

The media, (whoever “they” are), thinks it has the public all figured out, and calls people the “market.” They think they have only to advertise and the market will succumb to whatever their blandishments are; stupid people will obediently buy even absurd and useless objects. If told hula hoops are desirable, the sheep will buy hula hoops.

What they fail to understand is that, back in the day, few “experts” thought hula hoops were likely to sell. Most “experts” likely deemed hula hoops a bad investment. The public did not make hula hoops a profitable item because “experts” tweaked peon’s brains into buying them, but rather because the cheap advertisements of those times made hula hoops look like fun. Inexpensive fun. And people tried them out and discovered that, yes indeed, they were a laugh. Word spread. The salesman had a hit, and made a bundle.

The same is true for music. Some think that, if they buy all the recording studios, they will control all the artists, and be able to have a say in what the public calls a “hit.” Instead they spoil what they control.

For example, when I was young Walt Disney was still alive, and his emphasis was upon optimism and wholesomeness and good overcoming evil. He was a “hit”, (although perhaps he was not as hard-hitting concerning the difficult issues of those times as other film-makers were). He understood people don’t always want to be confronted by hard-hitting issues. Not only do they not want that, but they often don’t need that, and Walt gave them a place where they could relax and be happy. He made bundles of money simply by being a breath of fresh air. He also had a certain power to motivate optimism and wholesomeness and good. Then…..certain people coveted that power. After Walt died they thought that they might “control” as Walt had “controlled”, if they only could take over his company. So they took over. But what they they then attempted completely backfired, and they have lost billions of dollars and are in danger of bankrupting what once was a “cash cow.”

In like manner the brand of beer called “Bud Light” was a “cash cow”, but certain people felt that spicing their idea with the beer’s popularity might woo the public into accepting their idea. This too completely backfired. The beer’s sales dropped so precipitously that hundreds have lost their jobs.

Country music singers didn’t much like it when such manipulative, propaganda-prone people bought up the big recording studios where they recorded their songs. They did not like being told what they they could sing about. It was a wrench in the works, and made a hassle where there had been no hassle before. The quality of music suffered. To some degree even country music was dropping precipitously in its popularity.

At this point one tends to become depressed. Those who think they control the “market” are destroying the “market.” They are attempting to sell what people don’t want to buy. They offer the Fake News of propaganda, but people don’t want to buy it. Furthermore, even if people attempt to buy it (in an attempt to be “correct”) they find simply can’t buy it, because it is repellent to people’s hearts.

It is as if all that is attractive has been removed from a menu, and replaced with items that make a person want to gag. If you argue such disgusting stuff shouldn’t be served, you are cancelled, (which I suppose would be, in this analogy, tantamount to being booted from the restaurant).

I’m tired of this, as are many others, which has resulted in the phenomenon of “hits” appearing from outside of the major recording studios and major Hollywood studios. Anthony Moody’s “I’m Just Sayin'” rocketed to #1, though produced by an inconsequential and independent studio.

And the low budget “Sounds Of Freedom” exploded to become the most popular movie of the summer:

This should be seen as evidence that the so-called “sheep” can’t be told what to graze upon. They know what they like. Sheep like green grass, and object when you try to feed them horseshit. This does not require a high IQ.

Rather than understanding this basic reality, what the “Elite” tend to do is to either crush the song-writers and film-makers who appear from outside their control, or else try to seduce the film-makers and song-writers with money, getting them to sign contracts that control them. The elite are addicted to “control”, for they are myopic and can’t see beyond power.

It never seems to occur to such people that they don’t control. The people and the popularity they seek to control was not their doing. They did not make them or it. It was all made by the Maker.

The most recent person to appear out of the blue and, without any advertising and promotion (by those who like to feel they are in control), to become a “hit”, is Oliver Anthony, who rocketed from twenty “views” to ten million, in just six days.

One thing interesting to me is that many describe Oliver’s music not as “country music” but as a “folk songs”. When I was young “folk music” was basically owned by the left wing, and even by communists. Now “the folk” have become what the leaders call “conservative”, which has the left wing in a bit of a panic. The new Woody Guthrie is not on “their side”? How can that be?!!

I actually am praying for the people who succeed “against the rules”. It bears repeating: What the “Elite” tend to do is to either crush the song-writers and film-makers who appear from outside their control, or else to seduce the film-makers and song-writers. They seek to regain control of something they never actually controlled.

In a sense the “elite’s” theory of control is like a person who thinks the way to control his boat is to control the river. They imagine they will never have to get their oars wet, if they control the river. But some laws cannot be changed; they cannot make water flow uphill, and as they entertain their delusions their boat is bobbing inexorably downstream into the rapids above a waterfall.

To tweak this analogy: In order to control the river the “elite” build levees, and, in order to to make the levee’s dry dirt pack down better, they add some water to the dirt so it won’t crumble, and sticks together and packs better, but this only works up to a point; after the dirt reaches a certain level of moisture adding water turns it into mud, and it no longer holds water back. (You cannot build a levee out of chocolate syrup.) In other words, what once worked doesn’t work any more.

Propaganda eventually loses its effectiveness. People develop an immunity. Like after the boy “cried wolf” too many times, people are no longer motivated. Towards its end, all the hoopla the Soviet Union attempted to generate about “five year plans” generated little beyond a complete lack of enthusiasm among its workers; they had heard it all before and knew the words were empty.

In conclusion, the public is not as stupid as the elite think they are. Ordinary people may be disdained as “sheeple”, “bitter clingers” and “deplorables”, and may be scornfully described as being easily brainwashed and manipulated, but they are underestimated, for no credit is given to the human heart, and to the heart’s innate ability to recognize Truth, and also to recognize balderdash. Propaganda ceases to be effective, and is actually the antithesis of what moves people.

This leads one to the immediate question: What, then, actually does move people? What makes a hit be a hit? The answer is simple: Truth.

This leads me to thirst for more of the Truth, for it is obviously far more nourishing than balderdash. Beyond a certain point all political debating becomes tiresome, for the deck is stacked against Truth, and speaking Truth to power only gets you hassled. Therefore I hope I can be forgiven if I just wander off from all the uproar into obscure corners of thought where one can look about for Truth without creating angst.

One such remote place involved the arrowhead pictured at the start of this post, found while excavating a Swiss village that existed roughly 3250 years ago.

This is a nice and far away place, about as remote from current affairs as you can get. Yet even in the haze of this distance one can see the powers of Truth, surprising and amazing people, and forcing them to cast aside their preconceptions.

One newer development in archeology involves the ability to trace metal objects discovered in such sites back to where the metal was mined. Different mines have different trace metals mixed with their predominant ores, and therefore it becomes possible to know, for example, where the tin, mixed with copper to make bronze, came from.

It initially was felt that most metals were mined locally, under the assumption prehistoric people were bumpkins who didn’t get around much, however increasingly it became apparent ancient peoples traveled more widely than we formerly believed. For example, an ingot of tin from Cornwall was found in Sweden. In fact, the more metals were studied, the more widely traveled the people of the past seemed to become.

I delighted in the knowledge which modern science was able to extract from corroded, old artifacts, because it always annoyed me that, when I was younger, archeologists and anthropologists so often took a rather snooty attitude which saw themselves as more evolved than past peoples, who sometimes were treated as is they were not much more intellectual than chimpanzees. I was far more inclined to see past peoples as residents of a Golden Age which fell, an Atlantis that was ruined, an Avalon we should strive to return to. I was told I was a hopeless romantic and must learn to be factual, and that the facts were the facts.

Which were?

The facts were we didn’t have many facts. Somehow people took this bare minimum of Truth and used it to have no imagination. Because they had never left the drab hallways of academia, they projected that world-view onto people of the Bronze Age. I, however, was never accepted into such hallowed halls and ivory towers, and therefore, despite not being a particularly courageous soul, knew of storms at sea, and finding myself in far lands among very different peoples, and therefore I projected very different possibilities through the haze onto the peoples of the Bronze Age.

So, of course, it tickled me pink to see a bumpkin like myself was right, and the learned academics were wrong, when it came to ancient peoples. They certainly were not chimpanzees, and likely knew things we don’t. They traveled more than we would think possible, considering the restrictions of their technology, and engineered things we are amazed by, considering the limits of their technology, but what fascinated me most was their metallurgy.

I was initially lured backwards in time by my discovery that the Viking colony at L’Anse aux Meadows actually mined and smelted bog iron, in order to make nails for ships. I was surprised such technology existed among such a small group of people, so far away from Europe, especially as I knew the smelting of iron took a long time to appear in world history, due to the higher temperatures required in the process. My mind was drawn backwards two thousand years, and then five thousand years, and then twenty thousand years.

The first firing of clay apparently occurred when the glaciers was still burdening the land in the last ice age. With sea-levels 300 feet lower, it is likely many of the best coastal sites are now hidden under water, however up in the mountains of Czechoslovakia weights for fishing nets were needed, and it was easier to make a weight with a hole in it from clay, and to then fire the clay, than to drill holes in stones. As far as we know, this is when firing clay began, and all knowledge of metallurgy came through the firing of clay, as a side effect.

The progress came about slowly, which some suggest demonstrates the people were not very smart. I think perhaps it demonstrates they were smarter, because the societies they formed were very stable, and untroubled by the trauma of change. Most of the advancements that came about were due to the retreat of the ice age glaciers. They were climate changes that occurred outside society, and not because societies were as neurotic as ours now are, or so I think as my wondering wanders.

The creation of pottery occurred because herds of reindeer vanished to the north, and people either had to follow them, or move towards agricultural lifestyles in the vast prairies the glaciers left behind. This agricultural lifestyle necessitated storage pots, and then, to make the pots more impervious to water, hotter fires were required, and kilns replaced open fires. As fires became hotter various combinations of clay were experimented with, with various results, and likely it was through such experimentation that the smelting of ores entered men’s knowledge. The first metals had lower melting points.

The mixing of metals into alloys was likely accidentally discovered; the first bronze was likely created because at one site copper ore occurred naturally with arsenic, and likely this discovery was soon followed by the discovery arsenic was poisonous, and led to a preference to bronze made with tin. This led to tin being traded over long distances.

We know much because pottery survives shipwrecks, and amphorae of wine and oil were worth trading over long distances. Metals do not survive the corrosion of seawater as well, (unless it is gold or silver), and tin “rots” in cold weather, but we do come across some ancient artifacts preserved under the right conditions, and are able to sit back and wonder.

To me it seems that the inquisitive members of ancient societies would have come to know of far away lands, and differing ways of making pottery and fabric and metals, and even have toyed with possible advancements, while remaining members of a very stable and happy society. Some advancements likely were not made simply because they were not necessary. Truth was there and people were happy, and therefore a particular Truth, such as the fact iron is harder than bronze, was not yet needed. It was there, awaiting a future day.

Iron was known about, because we have a few examples of ancient artifacts made of iron, for example in the tombs of pharaohs. Pure iron does rarely occur in nature, but most originally came from meteorites. The actual smelting of iron began to be seen as much as three hundred years before the catastrophic end of the Bronze Age around 1200 BC, so the Truth about iron was available when needed, but I don’t want to wonder about that particular catastrophe. I’m trying to avoid the topic of catastrophes. I’d rather ponder more peaceful and changeless times, and think about the subject of the arrowhead found by the lake in Switzerland.

It makes sense that an arrowhead of meteoric iron should be found in that area, for a meteor called the Twannberg Meteorite fell nearby; six fragments have been found, but it is likely other fragments were discovered by people of the past, and put to use, though no objects were found prior to the arrowhead. So the arrowhead was carefully tested, and to the astonishment of all it did not come from the Twannberg Meteorite. It came from the Kaalijarv Meteorite on a Baltic Sea island in Estonia, more than a thousand miles away. This meteor hit with an explosion like Hiroshima’s, burning forests three miles away, and it’s largest chunk left a sizable crater.

The question then becomes, why would a person bring an arrowhead made of rare iron from one source of meteoric iron to another source of meteoric iron?

This is a Truth we likely will never know, but into my mind’s eye drifts a man of long ago seeking Truth. A wonderful fiction I’ll likely never write is unfolding as a fantasy in my brow. An Ode to an Arrowhead sings softly in my imagination.

People are capable of far more than the “elite” ever dream, in their scorn, and such capable people have at their fingertips Truth the elite, sadly, may never know.

ARCTIC SEA-ICE –A New Chill–

The sun is still up at the Pole, but sinking towards the horizon, and at this point in the summer it starts to loose its power. When at it’s highest it makes people manic, for it is high enough to warm twenty-four hours a day. But those heady days are done. Now, if a cloud passes over the sun, a skim of ice grows on the water bucket.

Back in the pre-lock-down days, when people were free, there used to be whack-job college students out on the Arctic Sea every summer, supposedly documenting the “Death Spiral” of Sea-ice, but actually just having fun. They had feared they’d have to work a Real Job at a car wash all summer, but had written a proposal B.S.ing about the scientific value of being the first to reach the Pole by Pogo-stick, and to their complete amazement someone bought their B.S., and they abruptly had an amazing (to a student) $80,000.00 to play with. And then, through the wonders off satellite technology, I could sit back, click onto their website, and watch young clowns having the time of their lives.

It was always the same. During June and July the sunshine made them crazy. They were in no hurry. Then, right about now, it was like a shadow rose. All of a sudden they were in a great, big hurry. Summer does not last forever, and the Arctic Sea is especially clear about this.

Evidence is seen in the fact that temperatures dip below freezing long before the sun actually sets on September 20. Temperatures tend to dip below freezing around August 15, according to the Danish Meteorology Institute.

This year is represented by the orange line, in the above graph, and you can see that this year we actually first dipped below freezing on July 29. But today we have poked “above normal” for the fifth time since April 24, so I suppose the other 104 days of spring and summer’s cool will be ignored, and we can expect headlines screaming “Polar Temperatures Above Normal.”

In actual fact this site has documented for ten years that around this time of year, every recent year, temperatures have tended to move from below normal to above normal. I assume it is because this time of year the sun stops being a major influence, and temperatures are instead determined by the humidity of the air, which in turn is determined by the temperature of the sea water.

This blows a hole in the Death Spiral Theory. It blows a hole today, and it blew a hole fifteen years ago. The Death Spiral Theory has such a hole blown in it that it resembles a pigeon shot by a bazooka.

Why? Because the Death Spiral Theory depends on the idea of ice-free water absorbing sunshine.

This actually occurs in parts of the Arctic Sea which are ice-free when the sun is thirty degrees high in the sky. Along the coasts of the marginal seas, especially close to river deltas pouring out summer waters, water temperatures are sun-warmed and get far above freezing. However, further out, ice in the water makes the water be ice-water, and ice-water must be, by definition, at the freezing point (which can vary due to salinity.) By the time large parts of the Arctic Sea start to show waters that are largely ice-free, the sun has sunk down to ten degrees above the horizon, or lower.

At this point the water no longer absorbs sunlight. If you doubt me, and are at a beach, go snorkeling in the late afternoon when the sun dips down near the horizon. Above the surface it may still be definitely daylight, but underwater it is night.

This occurs because the “albedo” of water increases greatly when light hits it at a shallow angle. Rather than penetrating the light is reflected. In fact the “albedo” of glassy water is greater than that of dirty snow, when the sun is down near the horizon. And this blows a huge hole in the Death Spiral Theory.

Why? Because the sea-ice will keep right on melting for another month, (not due to warm air above but due to slightly warmer waters beneath), and yet any open waters exposed will not absorb heat from sunshine. In fact the waters will lose heat through being exposed, and will reflect heat because the sun hits at such an increasingly shallow angle. For the next thirty days any exposure of water will represent a net loss, not a net gain, of heat for the Arctic Sea. In other words, rather than a “Death Spiral” that endlessly results in less sea-ice, open water tends to counterbalance things, and increase sea-ice.

If you look back through millions of words on this blog, going all the way back to July 2013, you will see me being very patient with Alarmists. Over and over I point out the “Death Spiral” fails to verify it’s assertions. Meanwhile my observations, (if you dignify them to the status of a “theory”), over and over do verify.

Have we yet seen the ice-free Pole Al Gore promised us would occur by 2016? No. Instead we see what amazes me a little, considering the warmth of the oceans. Sea-ice “extent” is higher than other recent years.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I am under the impression that a “spiral” is suppose to move in a certain direction. In the case of a “Death Spiral” the direction is down. This is not down.

I would like to move on to the far more interesting topic of the warming seas, and what is warming them, for that is reality and what we should be attending to. However, sadly, we are ruled by some with a poor grasp of reality.

It is my understanding that next week Fraudulent Biden will declare a “Climate Emergency”, and will attempt to enact “emergency powers”, as if we were at war.

There is no emergency. The weather is what the weather is, and includes some extremes, but the weather is usually nice and boring. However to say there is no emergency may get me in trouble.

After all, simply saying there is no Arctic Death Spiral apparently got me “shadow banned.” (Or maybe it was some other honesty.)

If you look back in this blog you will see that, during the China Virus “emergency”, when they enacted “lock downs”, I refused to be locked down, and my Childcare never closed. True, I found a loophole in the law that made me look legal for not closing, but the fact of the matter is that if I’d had no loophole I likely would have broken the law, because the law was basically unlawful.

If the puppet president actually declares a “climate emergency”, and actually attempts to enact various “lock-downs” (such as rationing gasoline and outlawing gas stoves), I fear it may be “a bridge too far”.

The public has been very patient, (amazingly so), but it seems those who relied on distorting truth are cornered rats, because truth is exposing their distortions. To declare an emergency when there is no emergency is something only a cornered rat would do.

Things could happen very rapidly. After all the talk about “tipping points” involving things like arctic sea-ice, the actual “tipping point” might be the walls closing in on Fraudulent Biden and his “bag-man” son Hunter, about to be exposed for bribery. In such a desperate situation, why not declare a “climate emergency” and attempt to grab dictatorial powers? If you get away with it you rule America; if you lose you go to jail, which is what you may get if you do nothing.

Hopefully saner heads will work hard behind the scenes, but I have not seen much evidence of sanity this past decade. Therefore, though I hope for the best, I prepare for the worst.

What is the worst? Well, this blog may be judged “traitorous” for stating there is no emergency. Then I vanish, to join the ranks of the “disappeared”.

What does this mean, in terms of what I have long stated: “Stand by the Truth and the Truth will stand by you.”

Will it prove Truth is weak? After all, all I have been guilty of is a thirst for the Truth, because Truth is beauty. I have steadfastly refused to accept anything simply because it is politically correct to do so. At the same time, I have never fired anyone for their beliefs, nor struck anyone for their beliefs, nor burned down their business. My worst offense is to ridicule some for their beliefs, but that is justified when they are ridiculous, and started the fight by ridiculing me. And now they perhaps win the fight by cancelling me. So, did Truth stand by me?

Does it matter? In a battle those who fall don’t “win” in a worldly sense. In the Battle of Gettysburg 25,000 fell on each side. 50,000 didn’t “win”, though both sides felt they stood by some version of mortal truth, (without a capital “T”). However their sacrifice changed the course of human history: (Namely, for a while slavery was illegal, though it is now making a comeback.)

In the end Truth, I like to believe, is there to help those who fall in battle back to their non-physical feet, after they “drop their physical body.” Death is something we fear only until the door opens. Then? Well, William Blake’s final words were the exclamation, “The angels are tying ribbons to my toes!”

Truth is the only thing worthy of worship, and those who deem it wise to distort and pervert and mangle Truth are like those who crucified Christ. Any short-term euphoria they gained had a hell of a hangover.

Simply watching the untruthful, it seems to me they do a fairly good job of destroying themselves, without any help from me, or from thunderbolts from heaven. The rot must set in if you behave in a rotten manner. No perfume can cover the stink of your shit, if you shit in inappropriate places, like your own pants.

If his fraudulence does proclaim a climate emergency, it seems he is digging his own grave. But in the process I may vanish. In which case I assert: Truth alone is worthy of worship.

Stay tuned.

WRITING ABOUT WRITING

This spring I had to face the fact the decay of my physical body had reached a degree where I simply couldn’t do a big garden any more. As a man who refuses to age gracefully, I didn’t “go gentle into that good night,” but rather made a mess of things, starting a garden I could not complete. I was helped in this endeavor by rains that turned the garden into a swamp, and it is always soothing to the ego to have weather to blame, but deep down I faced a sad fact: I haven’t got what it takes, any more.

I was made aware this day would someday come long ago, when still a boy, when my father reached the limits of his athletic capacity as a surgeon. In his case the limit was highlighted by the fact he’d already pushed past a limitation many other men would have been defeated by: At age 34 he’d been cripple by polio, and was told he could never operate again. He refused to face this “fact”, fought his handicap, and came back so successfully that when he was 42, he was ready when a boy arrived at his hospital missing his arm; the arm lay in a separate ice-chest; my father, with fellow surgeons and nurses, successfully reattached the arm.

That example of superb teamwork was something he was most proud of, yet only a year later his world was crashing around him. He was like a great baseball pitcher who wins the World Series at the very end of his career, and yet during the next spring-training is dropped from the team, as he can’t throw a fastball by a single batter.

In a sense this created a conflict between a “never surrender” attitude and a “bow out gracefully” attitude. If my father had bowed out gracefully when crippled by polio, a boy would have lost his arm. However a decade later his refusal to quit seemed proof he had lost his mind.

One solution I came up with was to chose a career I wouldn’t need to quit, when I grew old. Fingers didn’t seem to give out as quickly as backbones and knees. If my brain still worked, I wanted to be able to work at age eighty-nine, like Rubinstein. (Perhaps I couldn’t play a piano with my fingers, but I could play a typewriter.)

A second reason to write was given to me by my grandfather. He bewailed the fact he hadn’t written. He was, I think, roughly 75 years old at the time, and had lived a fine life, but had little in the way of a written record of how fine it was. He had to rely on memory alone, when looking back, and apparently a fog had descended over certain details. “I wish I had kept a diary!” he exclaimed. I was impressed. The man was calm and mild mannered, and such a display of passion was unusual. So I kept a diary.

A third reason to write was because I read “The Real Diary of a Real Boy” (1906) during the winter of 1961-1962, and glimpsed something hard to speak.

What impressed me, as a boy, was that the boy-writer, (there is argument about how much of the book was an actual boy’s diary and how much was a forgery fabricated by a middle-aged man remembering boyhood), is often a fool, but steals your heart all the same. As the boy writes he himself has no idea why he feels the way he feels, but you as a reader do understand. Although the lad misbehaves and deserves his comeuppances, you are in sympathy with him every step of the way. Or, at least, I was.

I think my life lacked such understanding. I felt that perhaps, in some way I didn’t understand, I could gain such understanding if I kept a diary, like the “real boy” did a century earlier.

Well, here it is, sixty-one years later, and my garden is a mire full of towering weeds, so perhaps it is time to retire from physical work and to merely work my fingers like a Rubinstein, being “a writer.”

With these thoughts in mind I went to the attic, where I store my old writing, and was, to be honest, appalled. I have written an amazing amount in sixty-one years, and in some ways the prospect of rereading it all was (and is) not the slightest bit appealing. It is best described by the simple phrase, “I don’t want to go there.”

It is not the writing from times of stress that distresses. Usually the stress leaves little time to write, so there are but brief notes, and the most exciting parts of life are under-described. However afterwards a sort of PTSD sets in, and the writing is so tedious a stalactite seems more speedy, developing its point. In essence exciting times get ten pages, and boring times get a thousand.

I had a little talk with my grandfather, (who left this world nearly a half century ago), a few days ago, and I basically told him he doesn’t know how lucky he was that he did not keep a diary. There may be a very good reason for the amnesia that afflicts all.

However I am stuck with the reality I created, which involves keeping records. Considering I can’t garden, it seems I should make use of the capacity I still have to harvest some good from the records I kept, which very few other people have.

To be blunt, as I sat down in the attic and began to poke through the heaps of old diaries, I did not feel blessed to have what other’s lacked. I felt accursed.

To have been so arrogant as to collect such piles of yellowing paper seemed like taking “selfies”, hour after hour, week after week, year after year. Of what use is such a heap of photographs? In some respects is seems as cold as kissing a mirror. Where is the love of others, midst such a focus on self?

When I looked upon my life’s work, from that particular angle, it seemed devoid of goodness. The ego was seizing a crown it did not deserve, like Macbeth killing Duncan. The result of such gain is what Macbeth states at his end:

Tomorrow, and 
Tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace
From day to day
To the last syllable of
Recorded time,
And all our yesterdays 
Have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
Out! Out brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow;
A poor player that struts
And frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more.
It is a tale told by an idiot,
Full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

To be honest, without God, my life’s work truly is sound and fury, signifying nothing. I am no different from creatures of the swamp in Washington DC, who have seized the crown of power like a bunch of Macbeths, and who increasingly look like idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

However a small voice spoke to me, as I sat in the attic in my dejection. It nudged me, reminding me I hadn’t been totally selfish. I craved the understanding I glimpsed reading “The Real Diary of a Real Boy.” And understanding is not a thing which can co-exist with selfishness. It requires two people, one understanding and another understood.

When one keeps a diary much that one writes may be nothing one wishes to share with fellow mankind. It may be a rant, a prolonged outpouring of PTSD, full of unfair blaming and even hate, and one may wish to burn it when one is done, however this denies a secret fact: The diary is written to someone. Even if no such mortal exists, the diary talks to Someone who understands, even when the person scribbling doesn’t.

At some point, when feeling very misunderstood, and even agreeing with those who misunderstood me, when they opined that my writing wasn’t intelligible, I asked myself, “Who am I talking to, as I write this gibberish?” The only answer I could come up with was, “God”. For God alone could understand such gibberish.

I immediately felt better. That happens, when you feel understood, even if you yourself don’t understand yourself. Even if you are all wet, you find yourself singing in the rain.

In other words, even if you haven’t come up with the intellectual answers to whatever perplexes you, you can still feel understood. This is a darn good thing, for we are not Einsteins and there is much we all have to learn, yet we still can feel understood. We can rejoice in the pleasure of such understanding, and sing in the rain.

This sense of “feeling understood” is therefore a power, though we call it a “mood”. Even if one is an Atheist, being uplifted from Macbeth’s despair to singing-in-the-rain cannot be ignored. It must be accepted as a “factor in life”, even if not as a “Shepherd”.

I confess that, looking backwards through sixty-one years of tedious notes, I am grateful to the “Shepherd”. However, due to my great respect for Atheists, I will try to pretend blessings are merely a “factor in life.”

Looking back through my own tedious writing I often laugh despite myself because, midst two thousand words of blather, some imp within me speaks twenty words of very funny common sense. I think that, if I’m to be some sort of editor of myself, I likely should focus on such snippets of humor. Even if it is only a small part of my dreary prose, I think it is likely what kept me alive. (Also it will spare the reader much blather.)

However early in my life such wit could not find words, and had a habit of appearing as doodles. In grade school I got in trouble, as did my naughty peers, for cartoons. As I got older, such cartoons tended to appear about the edges of what I wrote, not to illustrate what I was writing, but for no reason I could see (but perhaps a psychologist could guess at.)

An example of such an illustrated poem dates from January 28, 1970, when I was still sixteen. It is such a confused mess I think only God could fully understand it, though some mere mortals will laugh at it in a semi-understanding way, (and some psychologists will make guesses and be wrong.)

The poem itself is serious (for a sixteen-year-old) and has to do with whether it is worth the wait. (Likely a young woman was involved.) However the surrounding cartoons fascinate me for they represent sidetracks my mind branched off onto as I wrote the poem. In the future I would often find my writing wandered off onto such sidetracks and got lost in a wilderness of blather. Cartoons are better.

It is fun to play the psychologist, looking through the cartoons. They are actually remarkably organized, in the way only a creative subconscious can manage. There seems to be a lot of trinities. Clockwise, starting at the upper right, we see a person is falling, and a trinity of responses. Two are indifferent, with the first fishing the depths

And the second a picture of nonchalance

But the third is rushing to rescue, though one wonders if the rescuer is capable.

Moving on, the next trinity also involves falling. We see three skiers, the standing, the falling, and the fallen,

Moving right along, the next trinity is divided into a loner, naked and plunging to the depths

And partners scaling the heights

The trinity is then examined from another angle, in greater detail

And the trinity becomes the devilish, the saintly, and the…um…the undecided? There then seems to be some thought given to whether the undecided is a “puppit” or not.

The idea of being a puppet apparently leaves the loner brokenhearted

It is worth running away from

However the partners fare better

My manuscript may not rival William Blake’s illustrated poems

But there is something wonderfully cheerful about making a cartoon out of sorrow. It seems to involve feeling understood without needing to understand.

After all, at age sixteen I misunderstood many things, and was under the illusion that masculinity involved being as promiscuous as James Bond, and that virginity was shameful, and therefore a poem about “waiting” cannot be expected to be dripping with deep spiritual understanding. In fact I was cruising for a bruising, and heading for The School Of Hard Knocks at warp speed. I had many reasons to be depressed, which is what you get when you think wrong is right. Yet I managed to feel understood.

This brings me back to the subject of who you are writing to, when you write a diary you want no one to see. For that matter, who was Macbeth talking to, in his soliloquy of abject despair?

I think it must be God, due to the healing that comes from it. It is what is good about having “a good cry”. It is what makes self-expression so refreshing.

Not that we don’t require some restraint. An abusive person likely will say his or her self-expression feels good. However if God is not within, a hole corrodes at ones heart, and one ends up like Macbeth, and life “is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

In any case, I’m through a page one in my attic……. 20,000 to go.

LOOK UP FOR UPLIFT SONNET

Sometimes it's futile. The more that you fuss
The more you get nowhere. The nose-divers
Insist they'll go down. Purple cumulus 
Beckons my eyes up, to where survivors
Float on life rafts. Fools go down with ships
They designed. They swim in lead overshoes
But I'm a barefoot boy. Song's on my lips
For singing uplifts. Even singing blues
Softens eyes. Therefore it is no surprise
That when blues are canceled by the elite
They become authors of their own demise.
They construct their Titanic. I see sweet
Lifeboats in clouds, when I uplift my eyes;
And where they know mud, I know the skies.

1969—HITCHHIKING TO FLORIDA—Part 5—

A continuation from

1969 —HITCHHIKING TO FLORIDA—Part 4—

The movie “Easy Rider” wouldn’t be released until later in 1969, so I’m not sure where my preconception that southern police were bad people came from. I know it didn’t arise solely from the other hitchhiker, who warned me, during the first ride of my adventure, to “watch out for southern cops.” It now seems like a northern and Hollywood snobbishness, likely partially derived from the civil rights movement and the idea all southern people were racists, which involved hypocrisy. Northerners and Hollywood certainly were not without sin. Boston had its own segregated neighborhoods.

The northern preconception that southern police were bad people may have in part been due to the simple northern sin of driving above the speed limit, which was not a wise thing to do through southern towns. It was said that some southern towns were quite poor, and ticketing northerners was a good source of income.

I was made aware northerners had their own problems by the fact one of my older brothers had a black girlfriend, which was rare in 1969 (or rare if you were white.) One time, while dropping her off at a bus station in Hartford, Connecticut, the police saw the well-dressed white college student with the well-dressed black woman, and immediately assumed she was a prostitute and he was a “John.” My brother did not appreciate their attention and wound up in jail. So I was aware that policemen could make mistakes. However I deemed the event a fluke, likely brought on because I knew that particular brother could be pugnacious, and I persisted with my belief that police, or northern police, were people we hired to take care of us.

Police were basically our employees. Why should southern police be any different? This was the question that apparently ran through my mind as twilight grew in Orlando, and as I discovered the small city had no YMCA. Spotting a policeman, I walked up to him and explained my predicament.

(I didn’t describe the event in my “Private Files”, so I am basing this all on memories 54 years old.)

The officer was immediately concerned and immediately his eyes sought their corners, as he sought his memory for places which might board me overnight for as little as a YMCA charged. ($5.00, back in those days when minimum wage was $1.60/hour.) An idea popped into his head, and he invited me into his police car. I sat in the front, not the back. We drove a dozen blocks down the quiet street and then pulled into a place without neon. He swung from the car, and I followed him across a dark parking lot into a lobby with a thick, stained carpet, where the policeman spoke with a clerk behind a counter, pointing at me often. The clerk nodded and the policeman left.

And that was my experience of southern police.

The clerk then took me to a small bedroom upstairs, pointed at a shared bathroom down the hall, and explained a dinner I could pay for would be served downstairs for another hour, but no later. I took a shower I desperately needed, donned my final clean shirt but kept my grubby jeans, and hurried downstairs to have a bland meal of chicken, tinned beans, and mashed potatoes with gravy, in a dimly lit and half empty dining hall, and then went upstairs to write my entry in my “Private Files”, covering Ride 13 through Ride 18 of my trip, and then concluded:

Round up  439 miles in 10 hours
43.9 miles per hour 73.2 miles per ride.
Pretty good job.

Sleeping tonight in an old persons home.
It is damp with cockroaches and
mildew on the bottom of the rugs.

I really pity the old people here.  
         wrote poem - in back

In the back of the notebook this appears:

I find the abrupt appearance of poetry interesting, because at this point in my life I had no clear aspirations to become a poet. In fact this abrupt poem suggests “being a poet” is not an occupation one trains for, but rather is an affliction.

The scribbled-out part, and a stanza on the next page (even more heavily scribbled out) rhymingly describes an old man who grabs the arms of his rocking chair, and wonders “does he dare“, and then others turn to see if he’s there, but he has hobbled down the stair. Where is he going? That apparently defeated me; the man’s escape seemed too what I called “corn-ball”, and I scribbled out the sentimental mush. However it indicates I felt the old people were incarcerated, much like I felt incarcerated by high school, and they wanted to seek like I was seeking. But what was I seeking? I couldn’t stretch my mind that far.

Guessing, fifty-four years after the fact, I would say that particular “old person’s home” was eking out an existence by serving those elderly who were reduced to eking out an existence.

The 1969 economy was booming, which allowed President Johnson and Congress to feel free to overspend, which may have not mattered much to the huge numbers of Baby Boomers entering the workforce and both earning and spending, for they could demand raises to their their wages, but did matter to old people on fixed incomes. Since LBJ (President Johnson) had assumed power every dollar an old person had saved had been taxed 15% by inflation, and was worth only 85 cents.

What does such inflation mean? In cases where the elderly had planned to spend 90% of their money getting by with 10% left over as “disposable income”, inflation’s cruel and secret government tax left the elderly 5% short of having enough to “get by”, with no “disposable income” to spend having fun. Retirement was ruined. And I was staying at a sort of flop house for these ruined retirees.

As I came down for breakfast I had no such economic awareness. Two years later, as I passed my “A-level” exam for Economics in Great Britain, I had a better idea of what a scam inflation is for unscrupulous politicians, but at age sixteen I was still innocent. Furthermore, I wanted a coffee. Once again I had stayed up too late writing, the night before.

In 1969 coffee cost ten cents a cup. Think of that. A person could make money charging you a dime for a coffee.

I hope the proprietor also made money on the two eggs, two strips of bacon, and two toasted slices of bread, with some butter and jam, which I had for breakfast. I would like to believe harboring a sixteen-year-old for a night helped that place stay solvent. However I wouldn’t recommend eating there. The old folk were certainly not looking “out the window”. I had the distinct impression that every eye was looking inward, at me. However they were all too polite to bother me, except for a lone old man, who shuffled over to ask me for my story.

I basically gave him my spiel by rote. I was writing a report for my English Class, “What I Did On My Vacation”, by hitchhiking down to see my Grandparents in Florida. I expected to get there by that afternoon. And that was all the information I chose to offer.

Now I kick myself a bit. I should have asked the old man for his story. I might have learned something. However I think in some ways I was suffering a sort of overload. I had too much information already, and didn’t want any more.

It is wonderful, looking back, that I should stay in such a place of incarceration on my final night on the road, because my journey was an escape from a place of incarceration called “high school”. In some vague way my mind was being forced to concentrate on what I was escaping, and what I was seeking. (I get no credit for this; it was the angels guiding me, and the Lord commanding those angels.)

It only took me three rides to arrive at my grandparents, but even these three rides seem strangely choreographed.

Tuesday April 22, 1969

Up late - at breakfast with all the 
old folk staring at me. God, do they
want to go with me! I feel like I'm
leaving them behind to die.

Ride 19 where to where Orlando to intercection
of 4 and 27 How far 26 miles who truck
driver who used to be a race car driver
but he hurt his back in a acident (he
showed me scars)

What are the odds that the very first person I meet, after leaving people stuck in a room, is a person who was paid to go as fast as possible? True, he went fast in a circle, but he seldom went less than 100 mph.

I remember something he said about “hitting the wall”, which, (to define it), was a crash that tended to occur at the end of a straightaway, as cars went into a curve. He said something along the lines of, “At first you are scared of hitting the wall, but after the first few times it gets so that you think nothing of it.” However apparently he got a little too careless, and “hit the wall” in a way that caused his car to tumble, and he was seriously hurt. His scars were impressive. And now he was driving a dump truck.

Ride 20   4 and us 27 to Bradenton 
How far 86 miles who fatish kid who talked about football
and how easy school was in florida.

This is a rather short entry for a long ride.

I already had a sense Florida was a watered-down version of the south. It was not so hard to understand the southern accents.

I remember now, with all the distortions memory produces in 54 years, that this fellow was enjoying a time in life where things go well. Good Karma. His parents had moved to Florida, and his life had become abruptly more enjoyable. The fact Florida schools were “easy” suggested it was not so “easy” where he had come from, which would be further north. In other words, where I came from.

As he described the fun of football I could not help but compare it with my own experience, which was not so fun. However I kept quiet, because for the most part the fellow was rejoicing, and my envy should be wise enough to avoid attempting to stick a finger in a fireworks display.

Ride 21 Bradenton to Longboat Key how far 15 
who crippled man with special car
friendly but I felt sorry. Gave
me ride right up to door of resort

What are the odds that the last ride of my adventure would be “a man with a special car.” A man who was rebounding from some sort of Bad Karma. A man venturing back into life, just as I was venturing out into the real world.

I definitely did not give the man the attention he deserved. To be honest, I was more concerned with how my grandparents would receive my venturing than in a fellow adventurer.

As I scanned the road ahead I was looking down a very different Longboat Key than it now has become. Now it resembles Miami Beach, but back then it only held single story units like small motels, only on the ocean side of the road. Even in the winter there wasn’t much traffic. Finally I saw the sign for their place ahead.

I remember that, as I disembarked from this good fellow’s car, the person who appeared in charge of my grandparent’s place rushed up looking extremely alarmed and disapproving. I obviously didn’t fit the norm of ordinary arrivals. I was some punk with a knapsack. Yet, so cozy was the place that news spread fast, and, down at the seaside end of a long corridor formed by two rows of comfortable units, my grandparent’s faces appeared, his happily beaming and hers enormously relieved. The person-in-charge collapsed from indignation to ingratiation, like a tire on a nail, or perhaps like a good dog.

I can’t think of a better bookend to a day that began with me at a far less pleasant “old person’s home.” Such bookends would seem contrived in a novel, but were real in my life. At the time I didn’t even notice the coincidence, but after 54 years I do, and it adds to a sense I have I that I was coddled by higher powers throughout my adventure.

But at this point my grandmother became a problem. She was a powerful woman, at times making my grandfather appear meek, though he was also strong, and quietly held the ropes even when she was the mainsail.

How did she become a problem?

My original plan was to only visit for a night or two; Thursday morning at the latest I should start back north to be in time for school the following Monday. However, as my grandmother prepared dinner in the unit’s small kitchenette, my grandfather drew me aside and informed me my grandmother had been sick with worry the entire time I was hitchhiking south, and he wondered if I could spare her further worry by allowing him purchase an airplane ticket and fly me back north.

In a sense this was cramping my style, and represented a sort of censorship, but I was tired after four days on the road, and he got me at a weak moment. I overheard him tell her I had acquiesced as they did dishes together after dinner, and he murmured, “I didn’t have to twist his arm very hard.” This was true. Just because a man finds hardship appealing doesn’t mean the same man can’t find voluptuously sprawling on a warm beach appealing as well.

Yet, considering she objected to my adventure, my grandmother was also very interested in it. She noticed me briefly scribbling into my “private files” after dinner, with my road atlas in front of me, and said she could hardly wait to see the paper I wrote for English class.

This brought me up short. It confronted me with the fact I never intended to write a paper for English class. The idea I was hitchhiking to write a paper was a ruse, to gain permission to go on my adventure. I never intended to write a paper, but now it looked a little like I might have to.

This immediately confronted me with the fact I’d have to censor parts, or imagined I would. Actually my grandmother was very down to earth, and likely could have laughed at even the “carier Navy man’s” crude comments about a woman’s “pussy”, however I couldn’t bear the thought of talking so freely. Much of the “Cancel Culture” I was running up against was self-imposed. However not all. My favorite TV show, “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour”, had crashed into a wall like a race car, and had been cancelled only two weeks earlier.

This in turn confronted me with a stranger question: If I didn’t want people to see my notes, who was I writing to? What was I writing for? This same question has reoccurred, in various forms at various times, for fifty-four years now.

However at age sixteen I had different concerns. I needed to work on my tan. To have a tan in April was a definite status symbol, back north in Weston. Keeping a diary was not. At some point I scrawled a brief, standardized, sort of false conclusion to my adventure, and then the “private files” goes silent.

Silence descended until May 6, when there is a prolonged wail of adolescent suffering. Apparently having a tan wasn’t enough.

1969 was going to proceed, and perhaps I’ll someday write more of what my “private files” reveal, but this work is about hitchhiking to Florida, so I’ll conclude it.

Besides describing an America far more safe and friendly than it has become, another thing this tale exposes is that, at least at the beginning, 1969’s search for freedom and its Summer of Love did not involve promiscuous sex or drugs, despite talk of such things. This surprises people. (I myself was surprised to learn some of Jimi Hendrix’s most “psychedelic” music (including “Are You Experienced”) was written before he ever tried “psychedelic” drugs.)

As a sort of postscript I should add my grandparents lived another ten years, and my grandmother never stopped saying how much she’d like to see my English paper. I hemmed and hawed and said I’d see if I could find it, though I knew damn well I’d never written it. Now at long last it has been written, and I dedicate it to her.

1969—HITCHHIKING TO FLORIDA—Part 1—

I found the old, yellowing notebook up in the dusty attic:

Please note it is not a “diary”. Diaries are for girls. Therefore it is called “Private Files”.

I had kept a journal since 1962 because I’d read “The Real Diary of A Real Boy” (Henry A. Shute; 1902) at around age nine, and enjoyed it so much I wanted to emulate the author. This involved not only keeping a record of my activities, but also having activities worth recording. Such activities tended to be few and far between, in the suburbs of that time, which were meant to be pristine areas of tranquility and beauty, but inadvertently involved idle hands, and created a devil’s playground, because I craved activities worth recording.

The fact the suburbs involved a freedom from work was not initially seen as a bad thing. Child-labor-laws were created in order to spare children the drudgery of working in factories, and suburbs seemed a refuge from such slavery. However children are in fact curious about work and like to see it. On a small farm the child trots behind his father and soon knows every chore, long before they are strong and able. But in a suburb the child often lives in a void, for often the father is gone.

Much ado has been made of poor children in the inner city growing up without fathers, and the harm it causes, however I believe harm was also occurring among the more wealthy people, able to escape the city for plush and yet fatherless suburbs. This was especially insidious in the 1950’s and 1960’s because people didn’t see the harm coming, until the children grew up and many expressed their loathing towards what they’d had to endure.

This is not to say all families suffered. Some fathers made sure to devote time to their families the moment they got home from work. However it was far more typical for a man to feel exhausted, and that he deserved a break, and for him to collapse in an easy chair, crack a beer, and watch the news. Many men were oblivious to the level of dissatisfaction their hard work was creating, and were blindsided when their wives requested a divorce. When I was in grade school divorce was rare, but by the time I was in high school it had become common.

This is not to say everyone experienced divorce. I greatly admire the families that remained strong through those times. They need to write books about how they managed it. But my tale is about a family that slid into dysfunction, and mostly about me.

I could (and have) go (gone) on at great length about causes. Whether you call it Karma or “the sins of forefathers”, actions have reactions, and it is perfectly logical that one winds where one wound up, even if it is an illogical place to be. One can justify being illogical, but why bother? So I shall skip all that. Instead I’ll just introduce you to myself on January first, in the year 1969. I was a junior in high school, but still fifteen years old. (I change names to protect, but all else is verbatim, including misspellings, from my “private files.”)

“Well, a new year has started, and so far it has been a blast. Last night I walked over to the Joyson’s house and had a little mental new years party.

Before I came I had 3 cans of beer so I was pretty happy. I got Izzy out of Bed, and we sat around listening to the radio waiting. Ruth came down and took my fire crackers except for one pack. I thought it was a joke and she’d bring them back but as midnight got closer I got worryed. We went outside and Izzy followed her tracks up to the Docport’s. It was too close to twelve to get them from her so I sat in the Glazier’s driveway and threw my one pack in the air. Then I had can 4 and can 5 of beer and went into the Docport’s. Boy was I drunk. Everything got blurry, well not that but sort of muffled. I said happy new year to Mrs. Docport and Mr. Docport and sat around there for a while. Then we went back to the Joyson’s and Ruth was there. We started throwing snowballs at each other. I jumped at Ruth and gave her a New Year’s kiss. We made a agreement that I’d let her hit me with a snow ball in the face if she’d tell me where my firecrackers were. She made a giant snow ball and hit me with it and then told me where my firecrackers were, then followed a snowball fight. It was great. I was so drunk I didn’t feel cold or hurt. Izzy and Ruth peppered me as I threw, pretty wildly, at them. Then Mr. Joyson told Izzy and Ruth to go in. Ruth did but Izzy stayed as I set off my firecrackers. The first pack I threw into the green. Bang Bang Snap Bnng ffffffftt Bang Snap fffftt Bang The second pack It lit, brought it back to throw BANG it went off right by my ear. Bang…BangBang I dropped (it) right by my feet, also by Izzy’s. I ran up to Izzy’s house, he ran, slipping and falling, into the green. Shit it was funny. I was laughing my balls off. We went into the house and talked. My right ear was ringing like anything. Nothing much happened after that, the snow had changed to rain when I walked home. I got sopped.

———-

Well, I got up at 7:30 but dozed until 11:00. For the rest of the day I sat around waiting for Izzy to go bowling with me. I had no hang over. Izzy called up at 5:00 but it was too late.

School starts tomorrow. Shit, vacation was a blast this year. I didn’t do much but what I did do was a blast.

That’s all.

Looking back fifty-five years from the future, I feel I should mention three things.

First, drinking five beers was not typical, and indeed this may have been a first, which made it worth writing down. Apparently I had obtained a six-pack, but I can’t remember how. I have vague memories of sometimes convincing older siblings to buy me booze, and there is even a slight chance my mother and stepfather, (being very liberal and not yet mugged by what permissiveness resulted in), may have bought me a six-pack with the understanding I’d spend New Year’s at home. I had a disgusting ability to bat my eyes innocently and agree to rules I had no intention of keeping, at that time. It now shames me but at the time I thought I was crafty.

Second, Izzy and Ruth were formerly next door neighbors, and our trio created a sort of awkwardness, for my best friend’s sister was “the girl next door.” Izzy could rhapsodize to me about some girl he fantasized was Super-woman, but if I said there was the slightest thing admirable about his sister he gagged.

In any case, when my mother remarried, the spring before, we moved away, and I should mention that “walking to the Joyson’s house” now involved two miles. Basically, when walking home after midnight in the rain, I’d pace from the start of Conant Road in Weston, through the town center, and then down Concord Road, up and over the Jesuit “Weston College” Hill, and then down Sudbury Road nearly to the Wayland border. It was roughly two miles to the Joyson’s house, and two miles home again, and I thought little of it. Oh, to have such strength again!

Third, the reason Izzy was unavailable to go bowling on Sunday may well have been because he was doing his homework, something I often didn’t bother with. He was subject to discipline I was “free” from, and of course he got better grades. His family wasn’t shattered by divorce, and had a stability that made it very attractive to me, yet at the same time I liked to brag about how “free” I was. The truth was I lacked guidance, and I had no one who I felt comfortable going to, when I needed help. In fact, when it came to discipline, I largely had to be my own sergeant.

This led to me doing quite a number of stupid things because, “it is something kids my age do.” It was as if I had a check-list, and read, “fifteen-year-olds break street lights”, and therefore felt compelled to go out and break a street light, even though it seemed like a stupid thing to do. Other things, such as drinking five beers, didn’t seem so stupid and instead seemed like “a blast.” Likely the most illegal thing I did was to go into Boston and buy fireworks in the tiny Chinatown and then resell them out in the suburbs. Likely the most dangerous thing I did was to go joy-riding without a learner’s permit or even a single driving lesson from an adult. Likely the most destructive thing I did was to smoke pot, but at this point I had only smoked a relatively weak marijuana once, hanging around with my older siblings the summer before. Yet all these things largely were “things kids my age do”, and a sort of “rite of passage”, and also were things I could brag to Izzy that I was “free” to do. I think I needed to brag because I felt inferior. In many ways I admired and envied him and his family.

How I felt about school comes across clearly in the next entry.

Thurs. January 2nd, 19689

Well, only the second day of 1968 and already I’m bored. I walked into school and bang! I was turned off. It is such a bore. I can’t communicate in school, for some reason I freeze up and can’t make too many friends.

After school in wreastleing I got killed. I really worked out. I weigh 146 right now. There are three weight classes I want to get in. 140 , pretty impossible, 147 probible, and 154 “if I get fat” wieght class. I’m sort of afraid of losing wieght because it might stunt my growth. As soon as wreastling is over I’m going to put it on.

Tomorrow I’m going to try to get in good with Ruth. I want to be a real friend of her but not realy a lover. I sort of want to wait with her for some reason.

Its pretty cold and dry out. Well thats all that happened today.

It is difficult to describe how boring school was, and also how schooling had a debilitating effect beyond mere boredom. I felt cowed. I was paralyzed. Rather than increasing my activity it decreased it. I hadn’t been encouraged enough, I suppose, and had been discouraged too often, and had reached a point where it felt like I myself was not allowed. To be myself I had to run away, find some other place outside of school.

There is a month-long blank in my “private files” at this point. I had decided there was something “phony” about my former discipline, which demanded I write in my journal every day. What was phony was that I would fall behind two weeks, and write “fake” entries to catch up. I had a discipline in keeping my diary I never displayed when it came to doing homework, but I became free of that self-imposed discipline when I decided it was “phony”.

“Phony”, as I recall, became a word which Izzy and I used a lot. In a rare example of scholarship I had actually read “Catcher In The Rye” in an English class I shared with Izzy, and the one thing we got out of it was the character Holden Caufield’s scorn towards “phony” adults. However I turned it back on myself and scorned any thing I did which appeared “phony.”

This story would rapidly proceed backwards through a series of flashbacks if I dwelt on what prompted me to become “more real”. Let it suffice to say I was troubled by opposing impulses, one of which loved to dream and fantasize, and the other of which loathed liars. At this point in my life school involved too much pretending you were someone you weren’t. You seemingly were suppose to swagger, but I couldn’t fake a swagger when I felt everyone would laugh if I did it. I had to get away.

When I got away I could do stupid things and humiliate myself and somehow the consequences were not so everlasting. For example, I liked to hang around with my older siblings because they were all out of high school, and I felt no word would get back to the hallways if I was a jerk. And one thing I felt I had to do, because “kids my age did it”, was to grapple and grope with the opposite sex to see “how far I could get.” I often felt very uncomfortable midst these experiments, because it was very obvious that no real romance and love was involved, but at the same time it was something you were expected to do.

A particularly absurd situation arose when I somehow included myself in a party involving my older sister’s friends, all around five years older than I was, and found myself in a dark room with loud music where everyone was “necking”. In other words, they were kissing, which is a fairly tame activity by the corrupt standards of 2023, but, by the puritanical standards of small-town1968, was practically an orgy.

And so it was I found myself “necking” with a woman five years older than I was, We boys called that “getting to first base.” I made several attempts to “get to second base” but the woman made it clear that wasn’t going to happen. Once that had been determined, I got bored. What was the point of all this slobbering? My chief desire then became to extract myself from the situation, even as the woman kept kissing. After suffering for what seemed to me like a very long time, I decided I saw an escape, and called out to my older sister, who was somewhere in the darkness, “Hey! Didn’t Mom say we had to be home at nine?” This was so obviously an uncool thing to say I immediately blushed, but it worked: I got the hell out of there, and no news of this debacle got back to the halls of my highschool. At the school such blunders seemed forbidden; no learning-experiences were allowed.

I couldn’t get away through the month of January, and after five weeks of school this entry appears on February 1, when I should have been happy because it was a Saturday and there was no school.

There then follows another long, blank period in the journal. Initially it was because school was proceeding through the dreary days of winter, and there was nothing to record but my paralysis. I seemed to have a complete inability to do homework. Now I can’t help but roll my eyes at myself. Why didn’t I just do the damn job?

Then I was rescued by the weather, and a miscalculation on the part of the town. Explaining their mistake will involve a digression.

On the east side of Weston, where Route 20 crossed Route 128, were two impressive quarries blasted five hundred feet down into solid granite by the Massachusetts Broken Stone company. The racket and rock-dust made by this industry annoyed the rather wealthy inhabitants of Weston, and therefore, when the company requested permission to start a third quarry on their land, the town fathers would not allow it. It was a death knell for the place, for the first two quarries had gone down nearly as far as it was possible to dig and still have the digging be profitable. They had a few years to go before they’d have to find a new place, but had no reason to be nice to the town fathers any longer, and it was at this point they stopped helping Weston snowplow its roads.

Up until that point there had been many snowstorms where Weston was the only town whose schools were able to stay open, to the smug satisfaction of grown-ups and the complete misery of schoolboys like myself.

I can remember many snowy mornings listening to the no-school-announcements on the radio, from A to Z. When they got to the “W’s” I began fervently praying, and then was devastated when “Weston” went unmentioned among the cancelations.

The disappointment nudged me towards Atheism, until someone suggested that the fact school wasn’t cancelled might not be due to God, but due to the fact we had massive quarry trucks rumbling around town, whereas other towns only had underfunded road crews and, in those days, rather pathetically small dump trucks with immobile blades in the front. Weston’s road crew had the most pathetic trucks of all, despite the wealth of the tax-payers, because the town could always count on the quarry for help. But then the town didn’t reciprocate, and help the quarry in return, and abruptly no help was forthcoming from the mine. Thrown back onto its own resources the town, (at that point one of the most wealthy towns in the world), did a pitiful job cleaning its roads, to my everlasting joy.

The first storm was known as “The Lindsey Storm” due to the chaos it caused in New York City, (“Lindsey” was the mayor.) The snow surprised the forecasters, and piled up in the Weston Hills more than in Boston, and measured more than twenty inches in my stepfather’s driveway.

My father had always insisted we shovel our driveway by hand at our old house, but my stepfather had a man come and plow his circular drive, and I had only to shovel the front walk and around the mailbox by the road, and tidy-up a place where he turned his car around. As I did this work it did seem odd to me our drive was far more clear of snow than the town road, but the storm had hit on a weekend, and I felt certain the roads would be clear by Monday. To my delight the roads were not clear enough for school to open until Wednesday. And that Friday school was let out for winter vacation, which meant there was no school for nine further days. As school reopened on Monday the 24th snow was starting to fall as a storm approached from the south, and this storm is remembered as “The Hundred Hour Snow.” It stalled off the coast and just dumped snow hour after hour. Many places received more than thirty inches. Most fell on the 25th, but it kept right on falling and accumulating until the 28th, and we had no school until Friday that week.

In essence, after February 7, we had a total of five days of school in three weeks. I was not inclined to be an Atheist any more.

I wish I had jotted some entries in my “private files” during that time, but I had gone from being too paralyzed to write to being too busy to write. Schools might have been closed, but that did not keep me from trotting two miles to Izzy’s house, or keep Izzy from trotting two miles to mine. We had turned sixteen just weeks apart, and were basically boys in men’s bodies, seething with energy. Often what we then did was walk fast together, peppering every telephone pole we passed with snowballs, and talking as fast as we walked, which was activity which likely would look boring in a journal, but had a satisfaction all its own, difficult to describe.

Only one of our shenanigans can I distinctly recall.

The combined snow of two storms was very deep, especially where it had drifted. The first storm’s snow had a thick crust on top, which made it possible to walk through the second storm’s snow, until you broke through the crust. Then the snow was up to your crotch and your feet didn’t even touch the ground. For some insane, adolescent reason this situation challenged Izzy and myself to jump three stories down from a roof into a deep drift. It took us a while to work up our nerve, but when we finally jumped we jumped together, and even from that height our feet didn’t touch the ground. However we then faced an unforeseen problem. We were stuck in snow up to our armpits like nails into a board. It took considerable struggle and time to extract ourselves.

That was the sort of “life lesson” we learned together. It was much more than I ever learned at school, however Izzy was different, because he did his homework and did learn from school. Also Mr. Joyson wasn’t entirely certain he wanted Izzy hanging around with me, learning my sort of “life lesson”.

It wasn’t until the end of March that another entry appears in the journal.

Sunday
March 31st, 1969
   Well its been 2 months since I wrote
last. A auful lot has happened. We had 
5 no school days with two record snow
storms. A lot of stuff happened but
I'm not going to talk about it.

...Yesterday was a blast. I went and
saw "The night they raided Minskies" , a C+
movie, with Izzy. After that we ate at a
a Italian place. When I walked in a
girl said "Hey, the barber shop is across 
the street", I said, "Well actually I'm to
poor get a hair cut". Another said
"I'll give you one for 50¢. I said, "O.K."
She said "Well, er, uh..." It was a real friendly
exchange.

   Later we got mildly drunk and we went
For a joy ride. It was sleeting and
the road was slippery. Once I almost
went off the road. Izzy scared my balls
off by pushing the button that makes the
garage door open automaticly. I thought 
It was my stepfather. He would kill
If he found out I was joy riding.

Today was beautiful but rather 
boring. Tomorrow is monday but I'm not
to depressed.

I should note that our interest in the movie was adolescent. Largely the theme was above our heads, but a woman did appear bare breasted, which was unheard of in movies we saw up to that time, which demonstrates how puritanical our society was.

My “long hair” likely barely covered the tops of my ears, and was more likely due to simple neglect than any desire to look like a hippy or make any sort of political statement. The fact I dared banter with the girls at the “Italian place” shows how I needed to escape my town and school, before I so much as dared to talk.

“Mildly drunk” likely means Izzy and I secreted a bottle of my stepfather’s beer from the refrigerator and shared it. It was typical of Izzy to play the sort of prank he did by hitting the button in the car that opened the garage door. I recall how horrified I was, and telling Iz to duck down below the dashboard, and him laughing. Lastly, the reason the following Sunday was “beautiful but rather boring” was likely (at least partially) due to Izzy staying home and doing his homework.

Two weeks of silence in the diary is then followed by the first mention of Florida. The journey is called “my third Take-Off” because the summer before I’d been on two adventures; first I hitchhiked to Nantucket, and later I hitchhiked to friends up in Canada.

The Beat goes On

Sunday April 13, 1969

   Well I took the first step on my 
third Take-off today. I sent a letter to
my grandparents telling them I might come
and visit and asking them if I could. If
I'm lucky they'll get the letter and send 
back a reply before friday. I plan 
to leave on Saturday but I can 
go on Sunday.

I'm wicked mixed up about going.
I sorta want to lie in bed all
vacation and have to forse myself
to go out and do something.

Today --- in fact this whole
 weekend I spent raking
the lawn. I think I might have
got a slight tan.

Shit thats all.

“The lawn” was a considerable area of grass inside my stepfather’s circular drive, holding four apple trees. I may not have done my homework but I was not without usefulness.

“A tan” was a status symbol in that wealthy town during the winter and spring. It suggested you had traveled to the tropics.

I became busier than I ever became doing homework, preparing for my adventure. I carefully packed several changes of cool weather clothes and warm weather clothes, meticulously plotted out my route in a road atlas, and also worked making an elaborate hitchhiker’s sign I could alter as I progressed southward. The top placard read “Florida” in large letters with “via” in smaller letters beneath it. Then, attached to the upper placard by two loose-leaf-folder rings, were a whole series of placards with the names of cities on them. Therefore my sign would read “Florida via NYC” until I reached New York City, where I’d change the sign to read “Florida via Philladelphia”. In Philladelphia I’d change the sign to read “Florida via Baltimore”, and so on and so forth all the way down the coast. On my way back I would flip the top sign over, so it read “Boston via” and the reuse all the bottom signs on my way north.

I hoped the trip would take three days each way but planned on four. If it took four days I’d only stay a day at my grandparents. On the road I planned to stay at YMCA’s, which cost $5.00 a night, and back then you could get a decent meal for under a dollar, but I wanted a little extra so I planned on $5.00 a day for food. I took $80.00 from my savings account to cover the nine day vacation, and hid $60.00 in my right shoe.

Friday, April 18, 1969
   Well, I'm going tomorrow and shit it pouring.
Its suppose to rain tonight and all tomorrow. I'm
wicked scared about having to stand in the rain
all day tomorrow. I have to get a ride far enough
south so I'll be out of the rain.

   I'm leaving tomorrow at 7:00. I want
to get to Richmond tomorrow. That's about 600 miles.

                    -------

   April 18
Izzy came over at 7:30 and I havent 
been able to get to sleep early like
I wanted to. Hell, its been fun as
all get out but I need the sleep.
While I've been trying to write he
has been playing my tape recording.
Also I strained my back today and I
want to soak it.

   Shit, its 11:45, I've got to get to
get to sleep. I hope it stops raining.

 Saturday   April 19, 1969
Right now I'm in Richmond  Va. at
the Y.M.C.A. I made a all time distance 
record for me today.

   I got up at 6:00 and talked with 
Izzy. (He stayed over night because it rained
to hard for him to ride his bike home.) I ate 
breakfast, said bye to Iz, and took off.
Pop drove me to the Mass Pike, gave me 5$
extra, and left.

   Suddenly I was alone, standing in the
drizzle, wondering what the hell I was
doing. It just didn't make any sence.
Why was I giving up a quiet restful
vacation for an uncomfterble stand in the
rain? I didn't really know

I went on writing until nearly midnight, stopping only for a sandwich, penning seven more pages meticulously detailing the 9 rides it took to reach Richmond, describing people and the landscapes, and calculating my miles-per-hour and miles-per-ride. But, beyond now pointing out, 54 years later, that this was the same self who seldom passed in homework, (and, when he did, seldom passed in more than a paragraph), I’ll leave the rest of the entry for the next part of this story. I prefer to end with the above because I simply like the writing. A different me had mysteriously appeared.

The post is continued here:

1969—HITCHHIKING TO FLORIDA—Part 2—