LET'S PLAY CHASE

air bellows drive thru art museum

 Throughout this lifetime I have studied how to live in this world. I've learned a lot about the world through reading history, fiction, poetry, knowing a variety of people, experience, paying attention, though have never learned how to live in the world. Yet I do live in the world, have never lived somewhere else. I always come to the best place for me is on the edge, the periphery. I'm like the cow, or any herding four-legged, that stays separate from the herd. Every herd has one. It is a part of the herd, just prefers more space around itself. I see this pattern in the varieties of herd behavior I've partaken of. I get in with a group of people with a given objective, I'm the one that stays on the outer edge, part of the group, just not so socially interactive. Every time I meet new people they take pity on me because I don't have a social life and tell me who I need to meet, what I need to do to pull myself back into the herd. It never takes. They get impatient with me for not following through on their advice and give up. They're trying to help me live in this world in an interactive way. I already know I don't want to. Many times I've had to remind self that I did not come to Waterfall Road to be a social butterfly. I left plenty of oppotunity for social to go to the mountains, separated self from a herd, the city herd, and fell into a smaller herd, the country herd.

air bellows drive thru art museum

First thing I learned, my idealizing mind had elevated the country herd outside realism such that when I found the same social principles applied here as in the city, I was surprised momentarily, though not really. I'm one who likes particular people from different herds, though cannot be a member of any of the herds. By herds, I mean social groups. Not motivated to elevate self to the country club set, I don't want the circle of people I know to be determined by something like belonging to a club. Again, I prefer individuals to herds. I had this in childhood, which made it impossible to belong to any one set of kids. One of my friends was a Mexican, which was not ok with the popular kids. During recess, my play was with one or two others, never a group. Getting into jr hi and high school gym class, dividing into teams to play basketball or baseball, I was always one of the last ones chosen. Just throwing the ball at the hoop, I could make it every once in awhile, though in a game situation, could never make a basket. To throw the ball for a basket was to give the ball to the other team. I learned not to throw the ball away, but to pass it to somebody who was good at making baskets. Those guys liked having me on the team. I passed the ball to them so they could score more points. I was a team player, peripherally, the one on the team that cared nothing for winning or losing. Everybody else wants to win, ok let's win.

air bellows outdoor art museum

I never took to running back and forth scoring points. Why does it matter? Why does everybody have to do it? What if somebody doesn't want to? Then you act like you want to for the C, the best grade I could ever get in gym class. I had to work and act hard to get the C. I hated having to climb a rope to the rafters in the gym, touch the beam and go back down. Hated it. Especially hated having to let go with one hand at the top to touch the beam. Hated parallel bars and the rings. Baseball was ok, because it was mostly standing around. I played right field because most of the fly balls went to left field. The only sport I was good at was running, track. Racing was a solitary thing to do. I could have been the fastest one in my school, but for the guy who ran faster than anybody in the city. He always took first, the fastest guy from the other school mostly took second and I got third, except the times I came in fourth. Though I preferred track to other sports, I was limited by short legs that could not keep up with the long-legged guys. I had some minor abilities, but never got right with the notion of competition, never took up tennis after learning the point was to make the other guy miss the ball. And love meant nothing. Big deal. Who cares?  

air bellows drive thru art museum

Football season is here. I care the same as I care when hunting season begins. Running a ball back and forth between goals, or, in the other kind of football, kicking the ball back and forth for points to win. Hot dang. I prefer a game the dogs and donkeys play, chase. One chases the other in a circle, then they switch and the one chased does the chasing. They take turns, they run around and around, eyes flashing a happy spirit, running as fast as they can go, and when it's over, it's over. They are measuring each other's abilities in relation to their own, sizing up the other dog, measuring self in relation to other, seeing what he or she can do in the game of chase. The four-leggeds like to play games too, though their games are not mental in the same way as ours. They don't organize and compete, unless they mean business, like when one tribe of chimpanzees raids a neighboring chimpanzee tribe to kill as many as they can. This behavior is awfully similar to Amazon Indian people, the head shrinkers. We humans imitate war in sports, train ourselves from childhood onward in military mind. I certainly came into this world with an anti-military mind. In the earliest years I mentally rejected training myself to kill and be killed for somebody else's corporate profit. This right here is key, why I can't get along successfully in this world. I have never wanted to benefit an economy that self-perpetuates by way of killing poor people. I'd rather learn in school how to help people having a hard time, not how to kill them. How the association came about, I don't know, but I connected competition with killing early on, and wanted to live my life in a way that contributes the least to the killing mentality. I refused to allow military mind to infuse my mind with a murderous dismissal of others. I can see this thread all the way back to first memories.

air bellows drive thru art museum

 

 

*

 



FINDING PEACE IN A WORLD OF WAR

This morning I finished reading Chris Hedge's book, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. A powerful read. Hedges was a NYTimes war correspondent in Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Rather than give accounts of battles, Hedges covers the lives of survivors, the trauma of war they live through for several years, their memories, losing children, parents, relatives, neighbors, friends, people they don't know. He writes specifically about the difference between the myth of war and the actuality of killing and being shot at. In the myth, killing is the glory of war. In actuality, killing makes the young have nightmares and memories they can't live with for the rest of their lives. Soldiers returning from active duty hear people say, "Thank you for your service," which comes from the myth of war. To the ears of someone back from the actuality of war, it sounds hollow to be thanked for service. Many kill themselves while involved in the military, and later. So many, it's another epidemic in a society that is overrun with epidemics, like cops killing three thousand American citizens a year and beating up multiple thousands more. Soldiers coming home with PTSD and no job prospects become cops, the citizen the enemy. And what do we do? We justify it. Growing up in a martial society is not easy for a kid who wants to live in peace. The war on drugs is a war on the American people who want peace in their lives. I saw a quip from DC chief of police who said arresting people for marijuana use only makes them hate the police. Half a century into the war on the American people, what can I say but: Duh. 

I talk with people I know who have been to prison about the epidemic of cops killing in such excess, the answer comes back, they're scared. Of course. They're scared from half a century of brutalizing peaceable people. They activate peaceable people into protest movements. The NYPD is now trying to make legal protest into an act of terrorism, full reign to kill, maim and arrest peaceable citizens. All the time reading Hedges' book, I was recalling my own feelings subject to the draft, hating being forced by threat of prison to be a part of the killing machine. It comes to a choice of taking my chances as a target or years in prison where I am a target for gangs and guards. I took my chance, fortunately between Korea and Vietnam, a small window. I've thanked God all my life that I've not been forced to take part in killing action. I'm of a mind that I think  I'd rather be killed than kill. The consequences of being killed amount to a shortcut to heaven. The consequences of killing is a lifetime of inner torment, justified by law or not. The problem I wrestled with under military duress was that I did not want to kill or be killed. Guys the same age as me on the other side don't want to kill or be killed. I don't want to kill somebody like myself who does not want to be there, but is there to stay out of prison, like me. I was on a WW2 destroyer in the early 1960s. The ship was sent to patrol the harbor at Santo Domingo. A communist cell was known to be in the city. The ship had orders to blow the hell out of the city if anybody shoots at us. I hated it. I did not want to be a part of the machine that would kill and maim random innocent people, children, people who wanted to live. 

My "general quarters"  role was to load big shells into the elevator that took them to the big gun fired by a young officer just out of officer training school, who had the same ability with one of those guns as I have with a handgun. None. Their targets were the only safe places. I saw them during practice shooting at sea. They hit all around their targets and never the target. It was the same with the big machine guns that fired shells that glow red flying through the air and skipping on the ocean surface like a stone skipped on a lake. They never hit the target. I remember my moral dilemma transferring the big shells from the racks they were stored in to the big gun. I would be as responsible for the damage done to the people and homes of Santo Domingo as the ship itself. I wanted to live a peaceable life and wanted to allow the people of Santo Domingo a peaceable life. The ship running back and forth outside the harbor for a month provided some interesting sights. Look over the side of the ship and see hammerhead sharks and other kinds of sharks, water I did not want to fall into or have the ship sink in. I was fascinated seeing the hammerheads. One time I saw a huge herd of sharks circle a school off bonito in the harbor itself. The ring of sharks closed in on the thrashing circle of bonito that shrank smaller and smaller until the last one stopped thrashing. An amazing event to behold. Not a good place to go in the water at the beach. On lookout duty at night, I watched the movie playing at the drive-in theater. They were playing The King And I, many years after it was new, a movie I never wanted to see, but was fascinated to see it through binoculars from a ship. There was still much child in self at the time, especially the wanting to live aspect of childhood. 

It pissed me off that government, parents, church, every adult in my world wanted me there. What could I think? Fuck all y'all. It felt like the entire society wanted me dead. I had a secret longing to be a communist, anyway. In childhood, daddy said to me out of the blue on one of the unfortunate Saturdays he was home from work, my second least favorite day of the week, Sunday the worst, he said, "If you ever join the Communist Party, I'll kill you." It was the McCarthy era. Of course, he didn't know what he was talking about, but he did understand the threat. This moment made me want to find a way to get with communists. Couldn't find any. In college, after the period of involuntary servitude, I read about communism and took a course in Soviet history. I thought Stalin was cool, because the adults of my world were so freaked out by his name. After a biography of him and learning about his time in power, I thought: shit, he's worse than what we've got. He killed millions of his own people, made the Nazi holocaust look not so bad. No. He's not my leader. American cops have killed well over a million in my lifetime. The latter, however, is hush-hush, so it's not as bad. Growing up, a kid in a world of adults that wanted me dead, I came up without much confidence in the adults around me, certainly not in believers of the myth of war. By the time I finished college and saw I could get a good job I'd probably like, I could not join the world of participation in the myth I did not believe. The time came I found that God, indeed, is, and then I had reason to live beyond automatic self-preservation. I realized I wanted to live in semi-isolation in a place where I  can follow my own light, avoid being swept by social forces not very well thought out. I have found my peace where I can look out the window and see donkeys grazing hay and lying down on it for a siesta in midday sunlight. 

*

WE

marilyn mao by yu youhan

Much talk on internet about climate change. It's here, it's now, it's disaster: WE can do something about it. WE. WE. We we we all the way home. Am I part of the WE? I don't think I am. I can't do anything about it. I live in a society that is dependent on cars. I am conscious of driving the least I possibly can, have been all my adult life. Pollution and Climate Change are the issues of my lifetime, can't leave out Racism. What can I do? What can anybody do? The mega-billionaires that rule us, whether we like it or not, don't give a shit about WE. WE, to them, amount to the pitchfork squad, the thick-necked proles that drag our knuckles on the ground. They laugh at us. WE are powerless against them, even WE in the form of 300,000 occupying NY for a day is nothing. All it means to THEM is we need more cops and prisons, which can be arranged, easily. Reach in pocket, pull out cell phone, push one button, done. I see cops are wanting to make it illegal to video them. It will happen. I know better, just from basic self-preservation. I saw an incident once that if I'd made video of it and showed it to anybody, I would not have survived the first week. Can't tell you what it was, because it was serious. It involved a murder that was swept out the door. I could have created a major stink with a video, but would not have lived very long. I don't even tell about it because I don't want anyone involved to know I saw anything. Self-preservation is important to me. Justice? There's no justice in America. Evidenced by the common knowledge that when you go to court you need the better of the two lawyers. It's a poker game at the law school graduate club. Since the Reagan Junta's "mandatory sentencing," the judge amounts to a referee. We talk about an American invasion of a new poverty-stricken country as WE did it. I wasn't involved. I am not that WE. 

on the road by he yunkai

I am only that WE because I am subject to a government at war with the world and everybody in it. This government is at war with its own people too; war on drugs is a war on the American people. Cops killing black people. They're killing white people too. That part doesn't make headlines. He had a gun. I am all the less WE by making so little money along the way I paid little to no taxes. I stay out of commerce to the best of my ability. I buy books, cds, computers, groceries, etc., all of which I pay taxes on. A local mechanic fixes my car that is 21 years old, legal. I buy everything locally, unless it's amazon and art supplies. I don't know of an art supply store within 75 miles. I've bought into the System the very least I could get away with along the way. I've believed the more money I make, the less my life is my own. I can't give my life to money. It's expensive even to live poor. Utility corporations bleed us the very most they can. Mandatory car insurance bleeds us further. However, I have no issue with that law. I resent paying it, but if I rear-ended a Cadillac, caved in the back bumper and trunk lid, I could never pay for it on my own, even if it were a third-hand Ford. I don't appreciate what the billionaires club is doing to us. What can I do, break into a rich man's house and steal something? Big deal. Halliburton wants to make 38 billion; they put Dick Cheney in charge of the White House, use him to start a never-ending war, call it WE and WE, everybody else, go ahead and identify with the travesty of murdering, torturing, humiliating Muslim people to keep the munitions corporations looking good on the bottom line. I cannot call myself WE over such as that. I cannot say in conversation, What are we doing in Syria? Who is we? We is police state under billionaire's club. I am not that. I may be subject to them in that they can give the nod to have me offed and never think of it again, but they care not the tiniest speck of gnat shit about me, as long as I pay protection fees. Makes it easy to stay under the radar. 

warriors by yue minjun

In my youth, I hated the draft, hated it that I was required to be involved in military for being born male in America. Hated it. Then they got me. Two years of living in uncut fascism. I hated it. I gave the very least, never made an effort to advance beyond swabbing decks. I bought a book of Mao's writings in a bookstore in Napoli, kept it in my locker with the other books. I never read it, kept it there for inspections. It was legal to have it. I loved it that it freaked out the inspecting officers. Every time. They already knew I was a weird son of a bitch, one of many reasons not to have a draft. I did what I was told to do. No more. I resented the military snatching me out of my life to put me up to kill and/or be killed. I knew it had nothing to do with anything but corporate boom time. The only thing it had to do with me was: sucker. The military was not about protecting my family's interests, nor my neighbors. It was the circle of wagons around the corporate towers. I had a very hard time inside self being a part in the misery and death machine. Only one close call. The ship went to Dominican Republic over a communist cell there. Upon command, we were to blow the hell out of Santo Domingo. I hated being on the ship all the more. The Ensigns operating the big guns couldn't hit a barn from twenty yards. I was thinking if they shoot into the city with this one address for the target, it will be the only thing left standing when the smoke clears. The guys following orders would figure the whole city was commies, so what the hell, punish the red emeffers. Santo Domingo was beautiful from the water. I saw moments of The King and I at a drive-in on the edge of the city through spy glasses on lookout duty one night. I hated being a part of the military machine, never was comfortable. I knew how trigger-happy the Pentagon is, and this was just a few years after Castro's headlines. Communist was the day's word for terrorist. 

by liu dawei

I will edit from my talking references to "we" when I mean the Pentagon operating with weapons manufacturing their purpose, congress and senate in place to produce for the highest bidder. I readily identify myself American. I'd like to see the American people a little kinder to each other. I can't say what it's like in other countries, more than likely the same, each in their own way. I hear that in Costa Rica you can feel it in the air you're in a place without a military. They're able to do it because they have nothing the international corporations want. This is how I have intended to live my life all the way along, have nothing anybody wants. I've seen just from knowing people that I did not want to be somebody with money or position. I pitied Elvis, the people around him drooling for his money and his fame that wrecked his life. I'd rather not know people than have fake relationships, fake friendships, fake acquaintances. I did not want to figure in any hierarchy anywhere but the bottom. Of course, it's said that when you're the bottom of the totem pole the weedeater whacks you in the face. It works out like that too. It's motivation to get on up the totem pole. I don't even want to be on the pole. I'd rather look at it from afar. Upon arriving in the mountains I found my true people. I went to a church in the first fourteen years to bathe my life in true people. No hierarchies of money and status that anybody pays attention to. That's the town people. The country people is just folks. The people held in the highest regard are people fair and honest in their dealings with a a fairly even disposition. I'm remembering telling friend Jr Maxwell, who died five years ago, about a meeting I'd been at in town where the people from Away worked themselves into a state wanting to find a way to get rid of those old rusted tractors in the field out on highway 93 toward Piney Creek. He laughed and said, They'll never do anything about it. Hugh is the best respected man in this county. He sells tractor parts and has every part a man could want. This is the kind of place I want to incorporate into my life, to float free like in a mosh pit and become it. These are the people who have been my teachers in the second half of my life. In the mountains of Alleghany County, North Carolina, is where I identify as WE. 

by ai weiwei

*

MY INNER CRIMINAL

jasper johns

Monday's and Wednesday's encounter with perceived authority has my nerves still rattled. Some inner stuff came to the surface I didn't see coming. It's still raging. I continue to see the dead eyes I looked at that were the same as a statue's eyes, eyes that are looking but don't see. I looked at his name tag, because I like knowing the names of people I'm interacting with. It turned out I was the only one interacting, meaning there was no interacting going on; it takes two to interact. When I spoke it was the same as talking to a statue of John C Calhoun, somebody from so far away in time and so high on a pedestal that I, meat puppet on the ground, have no relevance for attention. I had to remind myself this is how police state works. This is what 1950s propaganda told us the Communists were like. Be careful what you hate, because we become what we hate. After all the Cold War time of hating Communists (people without rights), here our side is, the Christian side, manipulating the population by propaganda, police state. In America now the cops give us attitude that they have power over us, that I can be put in prison by their whim if I give a smart-mouth answer to a smart-mouth question.

jasper johns

Yesterday and today, all day, I swam in my ongoing subconscious argument with authority figures, militarists who like marching, shouting orders, saluting, obeying. My time in the Navy was a time in hell for me. It was a culture totally alien to who I am. It was about killing. I am not. My childhood was spent dominated by a Jar Head who was proud of it. "I'm a marine!" I'd think: Hot dog! You're big an bad! Liked uniforms and badges and guns. I'd hear, "I want some respect outta you!" I'd think: Show me something to respect. I'm not an actor; I can't respect on command. These memories from the past came up in the presence of being looked at and talked at like I was automatically a criminal because I'm a citizen. I knew the authority figure could see absence of respect in my eyes. I saw stone deadness in his eyes, he saw disrespect in mine. Lack of respect really sets off obedience robots. In the place called home, I was beat into the ground to start showing respect, and never broke. I saw myself one of the tough guys on the pirate ships in 40s and 50s movies strapped to the mast being whipped, never showing on his face a wince of pain and never in his eyes a glint of repentance. You can beat me all the way to death and you will never see a split-second of respect in me.

 

jasper johns

 

Officers in the Navy saw it in me. The most authoritarian ones saw it on sight. They saw they would never control me, that my obedience was superficial. All authoritarians see me, on sight, the enemy. It has to be my eyes. My eyes don't brighten up with respect, nor do they show fear. They show indifference, because I know I am face to face with the same to me as a dead man, one who thinks manhood equals obedience to authority. I'm possibly as anti-authoritarian as it gets. I'm not a reactive anti-authoritarian who obsesses with contempt for authority. I totally ignore authoritarian figures. They have no part in my life, in my consciousness. I do my best never to attract the attention of a self-important authoritarian robot. It's why I wear what I call my old-man hat that says Farm Bureau on the front. Old people are past being regimented and authoritarians know it. I have a friend whose job requires a uniform, badge and gun, but he's not an authoritarian personality. He's not somebody who would stop you and say, "What's your hurry?" or another one I've heard, "You going to church?" No, I'm goin to a pot party; we're gonna have a orgy and play cards all night, might shoot beer cans off of each other's heads with a shotgun. Stuff came up from way far back, things I would think when threatened. Couldn't say anything, but nobody had any control over my thoughts. Not even me. There was, "I oughta hit you for what you're thinking." My thought: If you really knew what I was thinking, you'd kill me. You don't have a clue. That's what authoritarians see in my eyes. They want to hit me for what they perceive me to be thinking. They want respect for nothing and I don't have it to give. Respect is earned or not at all. And it's not that I'm devoid of respect, because I respect a lot of men and women and children I know. I lean toward the people I respect, and away from the others.

jasper johns

I know cops I respect. They've earned the respect. I think of them as good men. They don't use their uniforms to bully people. They're obviously not authoritarian types or I wouldn't know them. This week's encounter with obedience robots has unsettled my nerves like I don't remember happening since quite awhile. I don't like it when this rage comes to the surface. It takes me back to the part of the life I prefer never to think about. They say in old age we remember way far back clearly. I don't look forward to that. I don't want to get that old. This week told me that rage and hatred for authority is still burning in a furnace in my heart. Maybe it came up to be looked at before I fade into thinking I'm spiritual or something hi-fallutin when a blue flame of rage continues to burn in the deepest part of who I am. I don't even want to go there to deal with it. Can't even stand to watch cop tv shows or movies. In cop movies, I tend to pull for the criminal. Possibly this rage inspired identification with Plains Indians in childhood, enemy of the white man that speaks with forked tongue, authority in a hierarchy of obedience. Obedience is what it takes to make a good military. I am not military. I don't want to kill others who are every bit as uninterested in being killed as I am, nor be a part of the legion that does the killing. Like I don't want to be a mechanic who works on planes that drop bombs that kill many and hurt more, people who aren't even a problem, just anybody. The enemy? I'm the enemy.

jasper johns

That brings to mind a moment in the Navy that cracked me up at the time. A lieutenant talking to a bunch of the boys, talking every old star-spangled cliché there ever was, remember Pearl Harbor, Communists, the enemy. I stood there, "at ease," laughing inside, thinking: Hey man, I'm the enemy. But kept quiet. Didn't want to draw attention to my behavior. The enemy is not out there. He hated me too, for my superficial obedience. I didn't get in trouble, much, because I obeyed, but they all knew I was not converted to automatic obedience and never would be. I could not dedicate myself to murder and be proud of it. I was pist off at my country for putting me through mandatory warrior training. I'm not a warrior for anything or anybody until the threat is real. Then I'm in front, ready to fight. No matter what I may do to intellectualize my distaste for authority bullies, give it rational associations, it comes from childhood and has nothing to do with the US Navy or police or any other form of social authority. It came from daddy. There it is, the thing itself. Because I rejected his irrational unto arational authority controlling a child by fear, it is a deep down within rejection of what turns out to be his insanity. One day not very long ago mommy said in a light-hearted twinkly way she glosses over denial, "Well, you had your share of discipline." I couldn't stop it--it came out of my mouth bypassing my inner editor. I heard it at the same time she heard it. "Mine wasn't discipline. It was insanity."

jasper johns

All I could think was:  It must have needed saying. She didn't take it hard. She already knew I knew. She knew it too, just kept the denial lid on it. The blessing I derive from this neurosis is that I am not an obedience geek. I am happy to the very core of my heart this is the case. The only freedom in this world is in disobedience. It's why our prisons are so full. No matter where my rejection of obedience came from, I'm glad I have it. I'm glad I don't like having cops look me over like if they look hard enough they can find reason to put me in prison. I am a criminal at heart, and they know it. I don't want to steal anything from anybody, don't want to hurt anybody, don't want to kill anybody, don't want to kill a cop, don't want to run over a dog. I just want my American freedom to be who I am, suspect as that may be. I don't like it being expected that I should want to be an obedient warrior. In a world where war is ongoing, I don't want to be expected to kill teenage kids conscripted by the other side, like me, when American wars are about more money for the rich and less for the working people. Why would I even want to put myself in harm's way toward such a self-destructive end? That's how I saw it then and how I see it now. I'm guessing that what the men in authority positions see in my eyes is that furnace of rage flaring up, confronted by a man demanding respect for nothing. No wonder they dislike me so intensely as soon as we meet. I'm glad they don't like me. Keeps them away so I don't have to deal with them, except when the spider catches the fly.

 jasper johns

 

 

*

 

REBEL WITHOUT A PAUSE

Over the last couple weeks I've been idly looking at war films made in the field during WW2 and Vietnam. The WW2 footage is the tv shows in the 50s, Victory At Sea (Navy) and The Big Picture (Army) and You Are There, narrated by Walter Cronkite. Victory At Sea was my favorite. Saturday tv viewing in the time of b&w tv. Every time I see an episode or 2 now, seldom watch more than 2 in a row, I remember the time in childhood, 11 and 12, how seeing the war my daddy went through made me afraid there would be a war for me. Looking at American history, going to war has been a rite of passage. Discipline. The Army was the key to a young guy learning discipline. Discipline at home had nothing rational to it, becoming thus an anti-discipline. Mine was not the only home like that. Boys in America tend to be raised without guidance for being a responsible grown up man. Perhaps it is the ongoing war pattern that left discipline to the military the way parents leave teaching to the schools and reverence for God to church.



All through my teens I was afraid of having to be in a war, though by good fortune slipped in and out between Korea and Vietnam. There was no way I could know that in advance. By then I knew USA was about a war for every generation and I was next. Looking back from my late 60s, seeing these anti-war films at ages 11 and 12 made me all the more afraid of going to war. I knew by then I have no such thing as "good luck." I never won anything. If there were a hundred chances on something and I had 99, the o1 would get it. It taught me at an early age never to gamble. War was a gamble for your life. Everyone goes into it knowing the chance of survival or not being made a cripple for life is uncertain. It was the kind of odds I did not see worth betting on. But the draft gave me no choice. Like Bruce Springsteen, I was born in the USA. By no will of my own, I was an American boy and war is what you go through when you're American.



Now that generals are no longer presidential material, the presidents turn out to be men who didn't have to go to war. They are more ready to set a war in motion than the generals. Got an economy problem? Start a war. John Wayne, the great WW2 hero of the movies, was a draft dodger. I didn't have a choice. The draft was on. Daddy saw to it I was enlisted in Navy Reserve before high school graduation. By then, the military was about the same as absolute evil where I was concerned. Because I was born American I had to join the war machine and be an active cog. I was not a good sailor. Graded for my performance in those 2 years active duty, I'd give myself a D-. An F would be dishonorable discharge. I fell just short of that and going to the brig for incompetence and absence of interest. I was that guy in the 50s pop song, Please Mr Custer, I don't wanna go. There's a redskin waitin out there fixin to take my hair.



I didn't want any of it. Never wanted to wear a uniform. Never wanted to march. Never wanted to salute somebody just because he went to college and I didn't. Never wanted to kill anybody. Never wanted to live in hierarchy. Did not want my life to be about death. Did not want to die young. My desperation to live in that time is extraordinary to look back on from here. I wanted to live. Wanted a chance to see who I would become. Wanted to have a life. As far as I could tell, I hadn't had a life yet. In fact, I felt like the day I was released from military obligation for being born in the wrong country was the beginning of my life. Up to then, I had lived by other people's directions, had no idea of my own, except to be outside the constrictions of reliance on war and money, and the false religion that goes with it. It was like all that was sacred was my enemy. All 3 systems, plus, wanted me dead.



I'm not proposing this as rational thinking. It was the thinking of a teenager who felt no support from any quarter, but a grandmother, the grandmother who came from these hills. She taught me things I needed to know, like don't be looking around in church, how to transplant something so it would live. Parents never taught me anything but to stay away from them and church. By age 23 I was finally able to live by my own decisions, however poor and uninformed they might be. I wasn't going back. That's when I was released from involuntary servitude and decided that to live on I needed education, needed to learn something worth knowing besides how to hold a rifle or kill the enemy. The enemy was all around me, the whole system of servitude for bullshit reasons I'd grown up in. Everything around me was unreal. I wanted to be real, whatever that meant. Authentic, maybe. Sincere, maybe. I don't believe those questions ever got settled. Even today when I call something real or unreal, I don't know exactly what I mean. Maybe it's what we call gut response. I know it down deep, but not on the surface in the world of words.



One of my apprehensions, now, about growing old is they say memory of the distant past is present. I've consciously kept my mind out of that era before age 23 as much as I'm able. What memories from then jump to the surface leave me in a bad mood. I've spent my adult life reparenting myself, exploring in the mind, learning as much as possible without it being a fixation, unplugging mental / emotional logjams, staying outside society. Patti Smith's song, Rock & Roll Nigger is playing in my head, Outside of society--that's where I wanna be! Baby, Baby, Baby, I'm a rock & roll nigger. Patti didn't make no bones about it. Recalling at a Papa Roach concert ten or less years ago, when they did the song with the lines, I know my mother loves me, but does my father really care?, it became a male chorus. The crowd was louder than the band, and it was all guys singing. That moment, I realized this is not just my issue. It's a national epidemic. Born in the USA.



The overwhelming popularity of the song Man Of Constant Sorrow from the movie O Brother spread the song to the city audience of men that the men of the country listening to bluegrass have known very well since Ralph Stanley recorded it not long after WW2. We are a nation of men of constant sorrow. Of course, there are exceptions. Recalling the time I mentioned to Jr I'd found Man of Constant Sorrow copyrighted by Carter Stanley. He said, "It's older than that. That song goes a long ways back." Carter must have copyrighted his arrangement. The song goes way back, but the song before it was written probably goes all the way back. 6,000 years of patriarchy, this is what men have come to, constant sorrow, which we pass to the feminine via dependence and to the next generation via dependence. Authority is how men rule, and I never wanted to have authority, nor did I want to be subject to authority. I can only tolerate someone I respect having authority over me. That's why I've worked mostly for women. Didn't make much money, but respected intelligent authority.



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