Funny, isn't it- none of the beats admitted to being beat. By the end, Kerouac couldn't keep quiet about his distaste for hippies. If the club has a name, maybe you might think twice about joining up.
Always told myself that I wasn't bothered about being picked last for the team. Here I am, still talking about it. Do I mind never having fit in? I'm probably not the one to ask.
Give us peace on earth and end this dreadful, dreadful war.
As I sit here and worry about the babies in Gaza, it's hard to consider that the world is a better place than the one that I came into. If you're not careful, they'll make you cynical.
Most of my friends agree that the planet would be better run by dogs. There are plenty of sweet, kind folks around. Not many of them serve in politics. I'll leave it to you to decide whether religious leaders deserve salaries with all those zeroes. Don't get me started on the art treasures in the Vatican and evangelical activity in American affairs of state.
It has taken me all these years to understand that rock'n'roll, like all popular culture, served as a distraction to a world of trouble. Somewhere along the line, some trouble-making kid took Chuck Berry's relatively harmless "Too Much Monkey Business" and sang about bad working conditions and income inequality and insisted that he wasn't going to work on Maggie's gol-darned farm.
Well, you still had professional sports and television to keep the public in that daze. With sex as the secret sauce, tastemakers around the world worked tirelessly to keep our noses to the grindstone. Once the internet paired with cell phones, the fix was in.
Cheaters still win. War is bigger than ever. Any notion of world peace seems quaint, naive.
Somehow I remain hopeful. I don't miss a moment. It's all about love. You do what you can. All you need is love. Maybe this stuff will catch on. It's come in and out of fashion during my time here.
Over here searching for proof of my existence and all I can find is lustful thoughts and memories of loneliness. What on earth causes folks to behave the way they do? When will the last soldier lay down his weapon? Certainly nobody wants to be the first.
The way I see it, my mind in the perpetual gutter has kept it off war.
Nobody has accused me of being a great thinker, but I don't believe I've done much harm. Maybe I should have had loftier goals, grander ambition.
Give us peace on earth and end this dreadful, dreadful war.
Oh, give me a home where the punks don't have guns and the skies are quite cloudy all day. Drivers wait courteously for oncoming traffic on narrow lanes where two cars can't pass. Road rage consists of a roll of the eyes and a muttered, "Blimey!"
Politics on television is, nearly as I can tell, what every Monty Python skit is based on. You just don't see any lavender turbans in the halls of congress.
Don't get me wrong- I'm not intentionally denigrating American culture. It's just that the sense that I've had over the last few decades that kindness and civility were disappearing seems to be well-founded.
Homesick? Ever? Well, I miss my friends and what family I have left, but Katie and Vera determine home. We share a snood. Can you believe it?
Home, as they say, is where the heart is. I'm home. By the way, who are "they?"
After a short visit to the good ol' USA, I'm back in Dorset. Home. It was surely sweet to see friends. Of course I missed more than I saw.
There are good people and there are bad people wherever you go. I really prefer to think that there are only good people, but some of them have been damaged along the way. At any rate, I seem to run across mostly the good ones.
We're gonna take the slow approach to Christmas this year. Since we lost our Sunny Jim, we're down to three for the holiday. I'll get our 2' plastic tree down from the attic when I get up the ambition and Kate and Vera and I will decorate as the mood dictates.
I wish for all of you the measure of happiness that I have. Give us peace on earth and end this dreadful, dreadful war.
