"autobiographical sketches from a wandering jew" by iowablackbird

 

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thank you who d who for the inspiration, and to elizabeth for helping me collate my thoughts.

earlier in the week i posted personal comments about a few people i interacted with in the city i live in, olympia, washington - home of the evergreen state college. a person asked me if i was a professor, i said no. i wrote the following brief outline of my life - selected biographical sketches for several reasons.

first, to highlight the idea that we all have unique experiences as human beings that shape our perspective. occasionally it's easy to imagine that you understand who a person is without hearing their storys, to make assumptions on who/what they are, or to make pre-dispositions without having a broader context..

second, it's thanksgiving tomorrow, 11/23/23 (wow just noticed those two 23s). i wanted to take time to list a few of those experiences, people, and places that have influenced me from my childhood up until around 2005, to share, express gratitude and appreciation.

warning, the following writing is is autobiographical by nature, therefore it's very self-indulgent.

i chose an autobiographical sketch format because it's the simplest way to convey my story, at least 1/2 of my story. the sketches includes notes, links to articles, links to the encyclopedia entries, and to music videos.

feel free to jump around, or ignore, or just skip any of it if you're so inclined. the purpose was to share, not to assume a presumptive look down or up from any vantage poin

i overlooked many names and tried to not discuss my family members, lovers, or a few close friends in great detail. absent that,

Temet Nosce ...peace...

“How all this happens - how far is a man free and how far a creature of circumstances - how far free-will comes into lay and where fate enters on the scene - all this is a mystery and will remain a mystery.” - Mahatma Gandhi

"But his dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings were small." - Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

i am not a university professor. if i had to describe myself today, i would describe myself as a person who was influenced by a variety of eclectic influences including policy debate, alternative music, political activism, the circus, books i've encountered throughout my life, the back to the land movement, also by working menial manual labor jobs throughout my life. like many adults who identity as generation X, the influences that affected me are eclectic.

i’ve lived my adult life in poverty. i've been a vegetarian since i was a teenager, and i love learning and reading. i also harbor a great disdain for illegitimate power. i have never been intimidated by questioning people who have authority, anybody who has illegitimate authority. Perhaps because i was raised in a dysfunctional family (a topic not discussed in detail in this sketch), i was able to harness my inner strength and stand up to that which i perceived as unjust outside of the home. i wasn't timid.

i had a supportive mother growing up who actively encouraged me to read, and engage with the world.

my mom had taught me my letters, and word formations, a year - or a year and a half, before1st grade, and therefore the primers - especially the beginner books - i read in elementary school were books i had already been exposed to at home. my mom used the backsides of eggshell blue and faded pink sheets of mimeographed paper from my father's work - he worked as an accountant at a manufacturing company that produced bathroom scales. i still have samples of the scrawled letters written in crayon, and the cutout cats, dogs, cars, and trees, that my mother glued, taped and assembled to teach me how to read. the old office papers sit, along with the faded class photos taken year by year by mueller photography, in a plastic tote filled w/ childhood possessions.

i attended an elementary school with many pro-active, supportive teachers in the 1970s. the two teachers who had the most influence on me in elementary school were the oldest teachers in the school. my first grade teacher, mrs hillstrom, who - along with my mother - instilled with in me a love of reading. she was in her 70s when i was a student at highland elementary school. mrs hillstrom acted as a surrogate grandparent for me, and i suspect she served the same role model for many of the other six year olds in the class. my own grandmother resided 200 miles away from my parents house, and i saw her infrequently, perhaps once a month, and on holidays. perhaps this is why i appreciated having a supportive nurturing maternal influence at school. i suspect my mom did as well. we read the reading primers, dr seuess, and the little golden book series, the beginner books. the books became small adventures, and mrs hillstrom would read from the readers, addressing the class of 25 students.

she retired after i completed the first grade, so my younger brother, 4 years my junior, never had the good fortune of having mrs hillstrom as a teacher during the three years he spent at highland elementary. in later years, retrospectively, i realized that the matriarchal grandmother of first grade had been teaching children how to read in that classroom since before the second world war.

i started walking the 4 blocks home from school alone when i was in first grade. my parents coordinated with 3 other parents at first, and we would walk in a small cluster of kids, like goslings, first down st louis street, then down 2nd avenue, past rockford avenue, which i later learned had originally been called berlin avenue until the street name was changed in 1917 to avoid the inconvenient reminder that there were still germans existant in the world. at the corner of rockford ave and 2nd ave we would peel off in different directions finishing the last few minutes of our walk home by ourselves (and in later years w/ our younger siblings).

- side note, my mother became the cub scout den leader for many of these friends of mine when i was in elementary school.

by second grade we were walking solo, and i remember taking different routes, for example cutting through peoples yard (always secretly), or walking down rockford avenue then cutting to the left where i could find an alley between the streets, i definitely preferred the alleys to the streets. i was allowed to roam without supervision as a kid. my parents would often set a time - be home in 2 hours, and i could basically go to the park - 3 blocks away - or roam through alleyways. while on my adventures, i would occasionally go through people's trash in the alleys and collect beer cans, or climb trees, or go on crazy adventures walking as far as i could in a direction for an hour then turning around and returning home. by 5th grade, i had quite a collection of books and beer cans.

i was able to eat lunch with my mom for 3 years in my parents kitchen during lunch break in elementary school. she would make sandwiches or a hot meal, and i would watch bozo's circus on channel 9 for 20 minutes, while she would ask me questions about how my day was going, while assuring me everyday that she loved me. then i would walk the 15 minutes back to school, breaking the day in 2 pieces.

i experienced forced bussing in my elementary school in 1970s as a 3rd grader. my grade of fifty was european american - white. we had one chinese-american student in our grade. his parents were recent immigrants who ran the small chinese restaurant 3 blocks from the school. his name was johnny wong, but there were no african-american students in my school before 4th grade.

in third grade, i guess to prepare us for what was inevitable, each class of 25 students spent a week (very murky memory) being bussed to an african-american school across town, where we had to eat bagged lunches and attend school. i do not remember the experience vividly, except that was the first place i saw a library inside of a converted school bus parked in the school parking lot. even though we visited the other school for a week, we were kept separate from the other students. i remember the experience of visiting the other grade school in the context odf an extended field trip. then the following year, children from the other side of town, about 8 per grade, were assigned permanently to attend highland elementary school.

seven or eight african*american students arrived in each grade at my elementary school third grade of fifty students. these additional students increased the class size by four or five students per class, but there were other differences as well. the students bussed to the elementary schools from the opposite side of town did not have the same economic opportunities as the children who lived around the three story stone building that had been constructed by swedish immigrants in the early 1890s. the students bussed to highland were all african-americans, and they didn't live in my neighborhood, or visit the small branch library directly across the street from the school.

the librarians who worked in the small square brick building knew the faces of the students and the families who lived in the neighborhood, and also acted as guides for the children. it was the branch library, where i checked out the narnia books by cs lewis, where in 4th grade i read every book i could find about UFOs, and bigfoot the sasquach. i also liked history books and remember reading an adult history of the mexican american war, checked out from the branch library.

i recall one late spring day in 5th grade when i wanted to check out a book about astrology. i asked the librarian if she had a book about cancers. her face became a shade of grey, and she paused. she repeated the question slowly, painfully, cancer ? i was surprised by her response. so i said yes cancer. i thought she was going to pick up the phone and call my parents, then i said, like leo, and aquarius? my friend jimmy weston's mom was into astrology at the time and i wanted to learn more about the subject. her disposition changed, quickly, as she led me to a small metal rack of paperback books about astrology. the neighborhood library also was convenient for older people, as folks didn’t have to drive to the main library downtown (where my mother briefly worked as a librarian when i was in HS).

the newly bussed students didn't have the opportunity to frequent the local branch of the rockford public library. they arrived in yellow school busses, in the small parking lot near mrs kraft's kindergarten class, where my mom had picked me up in a car when i was in kindergarten. the kids would arrive 15-20 minutes before school, and were shuttled away immediately after school was let out, the same time the kids who grew up in the neighborhood started the journey home like ants filing in lines, older siblings watching out for younger siblings as they dispersed in the four cardinal directions away from the school, towards the sanctuaries of their working class homes. these differences were obvious, there was no need to discuss them, but i don't remember ever contemplating about what happened to those students as the buses disappeared down the busy street in front of the school. it wasn’t in my consciousness as a 10 year old.

my 5th grade teacher, also an older teacher who wore clear plastic cat eyeglasses, and wore skirts that were fashionable in the late 50s and early 60s, was also an important influence on my intellectual development. her name was mrs jensen. i took 5th grade twice, as my 4th grade class was a 4th-5th split taught by mrs hager.

the grade before me, born in 1966, was too small to sustain two separate classes in 5th grade, so 1/3rd of the 4th graders took classes with the 5th graders. this merger of the classes coincided with the policy of forced bussing, as i don't recall any african-american students in that class. we had few separate lessons, but most of our classes were taught in common. i remember first learning about the civil war in 4th grade. mrs jensen in 5th grade emphasized social studies, which was a subject i naturally excelled at. i learned my world capitals in 5th grade, and also how to create a functional outline. she was very creative about motivating her students. for example, she would break the class into groups of four (six tables), and then would hold trivia contests. name an animal that starts with the letter P. if the table, after collaborating, answered first they would receive a gumdrop, and the other students would receive 2 teenie tiny m and m's. that is exactly how she would say it, two teenie tiny m and m's. she also would have the class hide an object in the room, then have one student leave the classroom and upon returning students would say hot/cold/warm until the object was found. there were four totem polls in each corner, and by demonstrating a skill set - memorizing world capitals for example - a student would be rewarded with a chocolate bar.

mrs jenson also taught the class how to construct basic outlines, and that's the most useful skill i gleaned from her class. it sounds trivial today. but learning how to organize ideas: roman numeral I, capital arabic letter A, subpoint 1, sub-subpoint a. it sounds silly as an adult, but as an 11 year old i found the concept useful.

there was an incident in mrs jensen's class that i remember as if it happened yesterday. it was the week before christmas, and mrs jensen had excused herself from the class as we engaged in some kind of self study, maybe arts and crafts. i was a tall child, but there was another tall student who had recently arrived

in my class, on one of the yellow buses outside of mrs kraft's kindergarten classroom. his name was olen. i didn't have a lot of negative interactions with olen, in fact i had very few interactions with him as our classes were generally separated by reading levels or math levels, so most of my interactions with olen were in mrs jensen's group activates, or in physical education class.

regardless, olen also was a tall kid. the desks had been moved to make a square. as i was engaged with my craft project, he walked up behind me and demanded that i stand up. i was confused. before i knew it, olen had picked me up out of my desk and thrown me into the christmas tree, the exact moment that the teacher returned to the classroom. she grabbed us both by the arm and escorted us to principal sullivan's office on the second floor. the principal didn't ask for any explanations as she swatted both of us on the ass with a wood paddle - corporeal punishment.

the swat was a new experience (being beaten by an administrator at school, during school), but what i never understood then, and i now somewhat understand, is why olen choose to throw me into the christmas tree. there wasn't a personal reason for his act, tossing my into the tree was olen's means of asserting himself as a human being. i suspect miss sullivan understood this, but there were no explanations proffered by miss sullivan. mrs jensen's observations trumped any explanations, and nobody at the school was going to explain that dynamic to a 5th grader.

the encounters in 5th grade were not all filled with doom and gloom. i learned how to play chess in 5th grade from a student who was bussed into my school from the other side of town. i had to spend 5th grade lunch period in the school cafeteria (a new experience for me, as my mom had to work in 5th and 6th grade - basically after my younger brother was old enough to a go to public school, and it was in this setting where i was taught by a classmate who rode the bus across town how to play chess.

by 5th grade, i had quite a collection of books and beer cans. i became a member of the book of the month club when i was 11, and had subscriptions to magazines like MAD, and as i became older, eventually the national lampoon, then harper's weekly. i eventually aqcuired a small collection of used books harvested from independent bookstores in high school. i remember there were 30 copies of the harvard classics on my metal wire bookshelf in my room as a kid that my mom had harvested from a garage sale. occasionally, i would open the classics and randomly read from dante, or jefferson, or ben johnson. not that i understood what they were saying, rather i was familiarizing myself with who these people were. there also was a small black and white TV set in my room, and i remember many nights in elementary school, falling asleep to the sound of tom snyder interviewing a guest on the tomorrow show.

there were 2 other teachers at the school who deserve mention, mrs ewald, the music teacher, and mrs rooney the art teacher. we had art and music class for an hour twice a week with the same instructors in the same classroom year after year. these two teachers observed the continuous development of the students' creativity and social development more than any other person in the school. i remember getting into trouble in 6th grade, and mrs ewing the music teacher was the go-to person for the school for counseling, as she had known all of the students since they had been in kindergarten.

it was a very tight knit staff of 12-15 teachers at a small school that had continuity. even the janitor (one of the most important jobs at the school) had worked at the elementary school for over 25 years. there was a small stage off the gymnasium, and a kitchen that was only used on special occasions, as the school no longer provided hot lunches, although they had provided hot meals to students in an earlier era.


i delivered newspapers for a year when i was 12 until my parents took the route away from me as punishment after i was caught stealing cigars at the local supermarket. i enjoyed scanning the newspapers before the route - the rockford register star, the chicago tribune and the WSJ, before i dropped the news on doorsteps of sleeping neighbors at 6am in the morning. i enjoyed this activity, delivering newspapers, as i was alone with my thoughts without interruption. i enjoyed feeling the crisp air in the morning, even collecting the dollar bills and assorted coins every few weeks when the neighbors would pay their tabs, and i was able to open my first bank account at rock riverl savings and loan. i depleted the account in middle school buying bags of cannabis.

when i was in 6th grade, i participated in a mock trial put on at my elementary school. i was one of the attorneys (there were 2 teams of attorneys). the case was a civil case that revolved around a spectator at a hockey game being injured during the game. my co- attorney, my classmate hillary, was the daughter of the district attorney in my city - mr doyle, and he helped us understand and prepare our arguments. we won the case, and i made up my mind i wanted to be an attorney (something i had mulled over for at least a year before that mock trial).

my elementary school was closed 2 years after i finished the 6th grade in 1981, as the city could not afford to keep it open. the building sat unoccupied for a few years before it was purchased by a real estate management company and converted into office space. many of the old school buildings in the city were merely razed to the ground, a historical phenomena that persists to this day. i haven't been able to find a

photo of the school, but if you look at the office building today you can picture the school before it was retrofitted for another purpose.

there were several reasons the school was closed in 1981, city budget constraints, low birth rates, the high cost of using heating oil to heat the 87 year old, uninsulated building. Also, families were moving away from the core of the city to the shiny new sub-divisions in unincorporated areas on the outskirts of town, partially to avoid paying high property taxes. a year later, after the elementary school closed; the small residential branch of the local library that was across the street from the school also closed as a result of city budget cuts.

https://i0.wp.com/history.rockfordpubliclibrary.org/localhistory/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Highland-School-1954-sm.jpg

404600740_7201821356528594_8132062369645998589_n.jpg

i also remember during 1979/80, although the dates are murky, my congressman john anderson, who grew up in the same part of the city as i did, and also attended public schools, decided to run for president as an R, and then as an I. his older sister, daughter of swedish immigrants, lived on the same street as me, one block down the street, in a small brick bungalow, and he visited her during his campaign, with media in tow, during this period of my life.

- side note, the oldest person i remember encountering in my life as a child was the neighbor who lived directly across the street from my parents, also in a brick bungalow. he was 95 and was swedish. he would have crawled onto planet earth in the 1880's.

https://www.rrstar.com/story/opinion/2022/02/19/remembering-political-life-and-legacy-rockfords-john-b-anderson/6850977001/

When the Watergate scandal came to light in 1973, Anderson became the first House Republican to call for Richard Nixon’s resignation so he might spare the country the agony of a long and embarrassing impeachment process.

Anderson thought he was doing the right thing, but it rankled many rock-ribbed Rockford Republicans who came to think of him (as Anderson once colorfully termed) as “some sort of a Benedict Arnold.”

Anderson's principled stance often was unpopular at home. He failed to support defense proposals during the 1970s, including the B-1 and B-70 bomber projects. This also upset people at home since one of the prime subcontractors for these projects was the Sundstrand Corporation, which was the district’s largest employer.

also, i remember the following year lynn martin (future labor secretary for bush1) became our congressperson.

my parents were not staunch republicans, my mom voted for mcgovern; my dad voted for nixon. my mom also was intensely interested in watergate and took great pleasure in watching nixon being forced to leave the white house.

i'd say my parents were on the fence in 1980. all of their close relations (in central illinois around peoria) were democrats and most of their immediate relatives were members of the union and worked for caterpillar tractor, or the recently opened mitsubishi automobile plant in bloomington, illinois.

i attended a magnet school for gifted children when i was in middle school. the magnet school program was useful as it allowed me to interact with other students who ostensibly were like me. my elementary school, which closed the year i attended middle school (ceased to exist), had one of the largest representations of students in the magnet school. forced bussing was also occurring in the middle schools. out of the 80 kids in the 7th grade magnet school program, most of the students were white and middle class/upper middle class, although the student body as a whole was about 30% african-american.

i remember one of my classmates at the magnet school went to switzerland with her parents on winter break. another one of my classmates, his parents were indian, started 7th grade a week late because he had been touring in europe with his parents,. another classmate had a dad who worked for a defense contractor in qatar, and another had a father who had won a silver medal in the olympics for rowing, he was related to the dupont family.

there were a handful of jewish students, including one student who would become one of my closest friends in HS on the debate team. out of the 80 kids there were 2 african- americans, one whose mom was the head of the carniegie library in town, and another who did not like the vibe at the magnet school at all. she didn't return the following year.

the 7th grade magnet school was called 'company' and the 'company' ran a small store in the school where we resold pencils, erasers, pens, notepads to the general population of the middle school. we had separate classes for our core curriculum (english/math/science/history) plus one open period where all 80 kids would

meet with the four teachers who were in charge of 'company'. we were encouraged to submit historical essays for competition to the state historical society that was appropriate for our age. the remainder of the classes, our electives and physical education, were spent with the other students in the general population of our school.

the magnet school was embedded in a middle school that was on the other side of the city. the bus ride was about 45 minutes long each way. i did well in this school and became class president of the magnet program in 7th grade (80 students), and then president of the entire student body in 8th grade (800 students). my younger brother went to the same school four years later in a program for children who were academically challenged. he had dyslexia, and coincidentally he also became class president at that middle school.

the magnet schools embedded in public schools in rockford allowed the city to increase overall test scores for the economically disadvantaged schools, in addition to offsetting racial disparities. in exchange, african-american students were bussed to the middle schools and high schools on the other side of town, where they were placed in remedial programs, and not surprisingly, also not for any fault of the students themselves (economic/social forces determined educational achievement), brought the test scores of those schools down. rockford's sordid history of bussing has been compared to apartheid and has been documented by many historians and journalists, including the following article from the LA times in 1993.

here's an excerpt.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-11-09-mn-54817-story.html

All children in kindergarten were placed in an academic “track” that most of them would stay in for the rest of their student careers. One district official described the Rockford tracking as “a system of apartheid.” The whites went into

honors and college-prep classes; minorities--even some who scored in the 99th percentile in testing--were mostly consigned to the slow-learner sections.

Now the school district stands accused by a federal magistrate of operating for decades a massive shell game rather than a desegregation program, and of consistently undermining educational opportunities for minority students.

In a country where racism retains a stubborn hold, the Rockford case could reverberate among other American cities that have no doubt established their own creative “solutions” to integration orders. For the first time, a federal court has exposed how one such system worked, explaining how code words and special programs added up to a pattern of one educational order for Anglos and another, inferior experience for African-Americans, Latinos and Asian-Americans.

The Rockford School District “has committed such open acts of discrimination as to be cruel,” wrote Magistrate JudgMichael Mahoney in a report released last week, “and committed others with such subtlety as to raise discrimination to an art form.”

Those harsh words hurt, School Supt. William Bowen said in an interview, but he acknowledged their truth. Bowen, who plans to retire next year, ticked off reasons for the district’s tactics of isolation: pressure from white parents, officials who didn’t

realize the cumulative effects, even incompetence. He didn’t mention racism. But soon he paused. “None of it,” he said, “sounds defensible.”

Soon--perhaps by January--U.S. District Judge Stanley J. Roszkowski is expected to impose sweeping changes designed to make integration real for the 27,000 students here. Both the magistrate’s report and the anticipated remedies stem from a six-

week trial held last spring in a class-action suit filed by a community group in 1989.\

side note -

the person quoted in the linked story from the LA times above, william bowen, was my HS principle before he became superintendent of schools. i played football with his son who was a year older than i was. in my senior year, principal bowen asked me if i would participate on a commission created by the city (i was one of two students from my city to represent students on the commission) to provide insight from a student’s perspective about what was happening in our school district.

the commission (1984) was somewhat of a sham, and only i attended 2 meetings mostly because i was overwhelmed with other responsibilities (work, debate, school, football, personal relationships, and a fucked up family). i only attended 2 sessions before i quit.

by 1982, rockford, illinois had the highest unemployment rates in the united states -peaking at around 26% - as a result of small tool and die companies, and larger manufacturing companies leaving the city for non-union labor in the south and in the sunbelt. it was at this moment that my father lost his job in rockford. he found a job as an assistant controller in the western suburbs and would start his 90 mile commute on the expressway at 6AM in a renault le car, the first stick-shift that i learned how to drive when i was in HS.

https://www.lib.niu.edu/1983/ii830318.html

You work your whole life and your world falls apart," said National Lock employee Una Maples after learning she had been laid off after 27 years with the company. "It's all down the drain." The bad news came in August after months of negotiations with the UAW and unsuccessful intervention by city officials.

The fate of National Lock Co. is not an isolated incident. All over the city last year businesses were laying off workers or shutting down completely. In many cases employees were told on Friday not to return to work the following Monday. Business bankruptcies and home foreclosures hit all-time highs, and crime and domestic violence increased.

Last summer, the city was stunned when it woke to find its unemployment rate the highest in the country. The city held this dubious distinction through June and July, and residents began to see that the sluggish condition of the local economy was not

temporary. They saw that the bottom was ready to fall out of their way of life. Since then, the rate has increased: Unemployment in November topped 21 percent for the Rockford metropolitan area and hit a record 26 percent for the city itself. By the end of 1982 30,000 Rockfordians were out of work and the wages or hours of others had been cut back. The forecast for at least the first quarter of 1983 is for more of the same.

i debated in HS for four years, and for two years in college on a competitive circuit. debate is an adolescent activity but it had a large impact on me for a variety of reasons.

the greatest mentor in my life was my HS debate coach who was the most eccentric person i have ever met. he lived an austere life, wore torn clothes from the thrift store and drove a ten year old blue chevy nova with white house paint inadvertently splattered across the hood. his house was in a poorer, crime ridden neighborhood, and was filled w/ paperback books from floor to ceiling. he would often walk the 3 miles to the HS for exercise, carrying his archaic leather briefcase from one side as the clasp was broken. he was brilliant and in ways, and retrospectively, throughout my adult life, i've emulated his aesthetics to a T.

i didn’t go to an affluent HS. the HS was working class/middle class. yet because of KD’s incredible will and intellect, we were able to compete in state competitions. his real name was kim, but he hated his name and referred to himself as KD. he had won the state latin competition when he was a teenager. his grandparents were norwegian immigrants, and he grew up on small farm outside of dekalb, illinois. in addition to being the debate coach, he taught latin and remedial government in HS. in his mind being forced to teach remedial government was punishment handed down from the administrators, but it was required that he teach a remedial class. he was the debate coach at my HS for over ten years before i met him as a freshman.

our debate team was small (ten kids out of a school of about twelve hundred students), but we were able to compete against very competitive schools in illinois because of our coach's intellect and his dedication to his debaters.

he was extremely tolerant of our misbehavior (including drinking every weekend, smoking herb, and doing other crazy things that teenagers do), although he would make a raucous scene in front of us whenever he accidently stumbled upon our misbehavior.

one tournament, i remember my coach sleeping in one of the double beds in a hotel room we shared with KD. my friend and i had just finished smoking bongs made out of chemistry equipment in the bathroom and together we watched the smoke move across the floor like a small billowing white cloud towards his bed. when he smelled the herb, he jumped out of his bed and started smacking his head, as he was often apt to do, screaming "jesus christ, fucking jesus christ".

he never narced us out, ever, and he always overlooked things until he couldn't. i remember one tournament where he walked into the party, and finally just resigned himself to the situation. KD and his wife sat down with us and drank a glass of champagne (his preferred drink was unsweetened tea).

most coaches were not like KD, they were stuffy and pretentious. he wasn't, and we loved him dearly as a consequence. he would spend his own money to register us at tournaments. he would drive us to the universities on weekends when we weren't competing, and he would drive us in the summer to do research at the colleges.

i learned how to conduct research while finding evidence for my affirmative cases in law schools and medical schools in the midwest and in university libraries (NIU, university of iowa, university of wisconsin, university of illinois medical school, northwestern), before i went to college in 1985.

So we could compete, KD drove us around the state every september through april in a two hundred fifty mile circle (sometimes further) in either a "renta cheapie" car for $10 a day or a discount rental van. he was dedicated to his students and to fostering learning, more so than just winning a round.

the most competitive schools we competed against were clustered around the affluent jewish communities (skokie/northbrook/glenview/highland park) in the north suburbs of chicago.

these schools (for example new trier east, highland park) are also the schools that john hughes filmed in his iconic movies (ferris bueller's day off, pretty in pink, the breakfast club), during the same time I was attending HS.

the iconic films of john hughes defined generation X's aspirations (how rich kids lived), and i competed on weekends in those schools with my comrades. however, we didn't stay in swanky hotels on our travels, we stayed in flea bag hotels (dives) that KD could find for the least amount of money.

the entire experience was an adventure that juxtaposed class/race/ethnic differences. as working class kids, my comrades from rockford didn't see ourselves as poor, or even as having advantages over the less privileged kids in our own community, as our parents had shielded us from these realities.

the experiences that we shared among ourselves were completely unrelatable to our parents, to my other teachers in HS, or to the other 1200 students at the HS who considered the debate team to be total geeks. they also were unrelatable experiences to the debaters from the more affluent schools and coaches.

they - the fellow students and teachers at the HS - had no idea that the world of extreme differences existed, while the TV continued to perpetuate this notion that we were all the same. but it wasn't true, there were existent sub-cultures, and there were broader gaps in the disparity between classes than most were led to believe.

side note - jonathon kozol wrote a book called 'savage inequalities' in 1991 that juxtaposed these very schools on the northside with the poorest schools in illinois, in predominately african-american schools in east st louis. as kozol noted, the primary reason the schools on the northside had such an advantage was because the schools were funded by property taxes which gave affluent communities significant advantages over poorer urban and rural schools.

https://www.supersummary.com/savage-inequalities/summary/

it was in this environment where i developed a high regard for jewish culture - perhaps misplaced. this appreciation developed when i would compete, and at first lose, week after week against very intelligent kids my own age who had access to unlimited resources and unbelievable support networks that existed to foster their educations. i truly believe 'chosenness' and 'god' had little to do with the outcomes.

my senior year in HS, teams from northern illinois finished first in the USA at the national tournament (national forensics league), and our state made it to the finals at the TOC, the national tournament for the national circuit.

this later circuit, the national circuit, is a separate circuit in the USA (if you go to tabroom - a site for debate coaches, you will see it has a separate listing 'national circuit'). the national circuit consists mostly of elite private schools - boarding schools, and affluent suburban schools whose A and B teams fly to tournaments around america every weekend from september through april, tournaments at places like harvard, northwestern, and emory, etc.

we only competed against these highly competitive teams two or three times a year when these advanced teams competed at their own schools around chicago, for example at northwestern's tournament, or at glenbrook south's tournament a week before northwestern's tournament. here i competed against teams like the univesity of chicago's lab school, and the bronx school of science, among others.

by chance, because i lived in a debate district on the periphery of these high schools (also w/ the help of teachers from summer camps at baylor university for two summers in HS, and from the evidence that my fellow debaters at my school gleaned from other summer camps they attended at american university in DC, and university of kansas), we were able to compete and do well in greater illinois, there were four districts in the state. i had different partners for the six years i debated in HS and college, which is unusual in the activity

these six years of debate included extensive research (90% of debate is research), argumentation, the development of critical thinking skills, and developing camaraderie with other debaters. these formative years in my adolescence developed how i think, how i formulate thoughts, and how i express myself (where i developed my own bullshit detectors if you will).

policy debate (in HS and on the collegiate level) is a very esoteric activity that very few people are aware of. most people are oblivious to the rules of argumentation, or the amount of research that goes into the activity. most people imagine debate as it exists on television during the quadrennial presidential spectacle.

in my entire adult life, i have only randomly run into 2 or 3 people (an activist from 1997 and ironically my last x - partner of 4 years - who's sister is a debate coach in idaho) who have any notion of what policy debate actually entails. when my x attempted to judge a novice round a few years ago for her sister's debate tournament in idaho, she cried because she realized how much work the kids put into the activity, and how ill equipped she was to be judging the round, to make a determination or a mistake.

i read a statistic when i was in HS (from the 1980s) that 75% of people in congress had participated in the activity. although as an activity, policy debate wasn't as developed as it was when i competed in the 1980s, or as it exists today.

debaters speak at rapid rates of speech (called spreading) to convey the most information that they possibly can fit into a limited amount of time. the 4 constructive speeches are 8 minutes long in HS. constructives in college are 10 minutes long. there's 2 minutes of cross examination after each constructive, then the 4 rebuttals (1AR is the hardest speeech in a round because the debator has to respond to 12 minutes of argumentation in 4 minutes). rebuttals are 4 minutes long in HS, and 5 minutes long in college.

if you're curious about policy debate, whether your niece or nephew should participate, please take the time to listen to at least the first speech in the link provided below (the 1AC). i would encourage you to play the speeches at .75 speed so you can decipher what they're saying.

keep in mind that all 4 debaters and the judge (at least 3 judges were judging this round at the TOC) are all taking notes and flowing the arguments simultaneously determining the merits of the arguments as they listen and carefully map out the arguments on a flow (a chart displaying all of the arguments).

it’s very difficult to find videos of HS policy debate rounds in real time during a season, because of issues regarding privacy (kids under 18 competing), and because each team covets their arguments and evidence, and because so few people outside of the activity actually understand what the hell is going on.

some observers have noted that HS debaters conduct the same amount of research that a person pursuing a masters degree would conduct in a year just for their affirmative case.

teams have a different case each year. some competitive teams have multiple affirmative cases pending on who their opponent is in any given round. as the resolution changes every year (resolutions define the parameters of the debate), affirmative teams must present a policy option that fits within the resolution, word for word. teams/schools start researching their cases as soon as the topic is released in the early summer and continue daily until the end of the season in the late spring, always adding more evidence to their files. naturally this creates an advantage for schools who can pay assistant coaches to do research year after year.

negative arguments also are extremely developed, and because an affirmative team can run an obscure policy position that fits within the confines of a resolution, teams on the negative often will often adopt counterplans. teams will often have multiple counterplans in a season suited to different teams, counterplans that negate the entire resolution.

these negative arguments also require extensive research as they are essentially different policies or paradigms that compete with the resolution itself. for example, one year i remember running decentralized socialism like 20 rounds in a row on the negative, another year we ran reinstituting the gold standard on the negative. tournaments will have either six or eight rounds (each debate is about 1.5 hours long) in a 2 day stretch (fri/sa or fri/sa/sun) before out rounds (1/8ths, 1/4s. so on). debaters will spend 8 to 12 hours in competition during a weekend.

i first heard of noam chomsky when i was fourteen, when i ran across his name in the southeast asian economic review, when he was chronicling the atrocities committed by the indonesian army against the people of east timor (compliments of KD finding the article). my case that year was stopping all arms shipments to indonesia because of human rights abuses occurring in east timor. the resolution was Resolved: That the United States should significantly curtail its arms sales to other countries. (required reading that year included scanning the NYT's daily for evidence, plus being aware of what was published in foreign affairs/foreign policy mag, plus the congressional record, all sources we used during that topic), the next year's case was anti death penalty (law reviews from law libraries), the next year's resolution was a federal employment policy; we argued the federal government should hire people to remove lead paint in public schools (medical libraries), etc...

here’s an example (link below) of a competitive policy debate, the finals at the TOC 2013 at the university of KY (yes glenbrook north - one of the glenbrooks on the north shore - was in the final round in 2013).

2013 TOC - Finals - CK McClatchy vs GBN KS

because of my debate experiences, i was offered scholarships to various universities, i settled on eastern illinois because they offered me the best deal, and i would be able to be on a small team at a public school with a highly competitive coach, in ways similar to my experience in high school.

while i was at EIU, i became involved in political activism helping to found a student club called EISCAP (eastern illinois students concerned about peace), a group that still exists as a campus organization today. EISCAP, like other anti-war groups from the time, was primarily focused on anti-nuclear issues and the struggle against apartheid in south africa

activities at EISCAP included hosting speakers on campus who spoke out about the risks of nuclear war, participating in political theater - die ins, and living on the campus lawn in cardboard boxes for a week during parents week to draw attention to the crimes of the apartheid regime in south africa.

after i was expelled from the dormitories during my first quarter in college (for breaking a window on LSD - very long story, and strange), i moved into an old dilapidated 3 story victorian house half way between the campus and the square of the small town of charleston, illinois.

the house was called 'the wave of plague' and was managed (somewhat) by a former student, bob, who hosted punk rock bands that toured campuses across the midwest. i guess it was my answer to joining a fraternity. aesthetically it was quite an improvement from living in the dorms. here i had a chance to listen to alternative punk rock music, and meet others from the working class/middle class families who were outcasts from their families and communities.

it was at the wave of plague house my sophomore year, where bob took my TV away from me as payment for a $50 long distance telephone bill. i happily traded the TV for the bill, and i haven't owned a television since (jerry mander - four arguments for the elimination of television is a great book).

“If we take the word “need” to mean something basic to human survival—food, shelter, clothing—or basic to human contentment—peace, love, safety, companionship, intimacy, a sense of fulfillment—these will be sought and found by people whether or not there is advertising. In fact, advertising intervenes between people and their needs, separates them from direct fulfillment and urges them to believe that satisfaction can be obtained only through commodities.” 


- Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television 

it also was in this old victorian house, with a one hundred year old sycamore tree growing in the front yard, that i made the conscious decision to stop consuming flesh. it was a month before my 19th birthday, and it was a relatively easy choice for me to make, a decision that i don't regret. my mom was confused at first, but she quickly realized i was serious and accommodated my dietary needs accordingly.

“Animals are my friends...and I don't eat my friends.” 
- George Bernard Shaw

i would begin to describe myself as an anti-authoritarian at this point in my life.

over a 6 to 9 month period of time, i stopped attending my classes that i wasn't interested in, and in fact classes that i wasn't learning anything of substance in.

these classes were in rooms filled with students who also weren't interested in learning. they were attending classes often with 75 to 100 people sitting in boring lecture halls listening to a TA lecture, filling out meaningless scantrons, never developing personal relationships with their fellow students or their professors, all in the hopes of getting a degree leading to a job.

i had wanted to become a lawyer since i was in elementary school, but the thought of biding my time for 5 more years was starting to become overwhelming.

in 1987 my coach - bear (who had cleared a team to quarter finals, and two teams to octos at the NDT - the national collegiate tournament - an amazing feat as small state schools rarely advanced to out rounds at the NDT) left EIU. he was the primary reason i attended the school, passing up scholarships at more traditional private schools - including jesuit schools.

when bear left the program, i became more demoralized. this absence of a mentor coupled with my lack of interest in classes, and my increased interest in the counterculture (activism / music / art / drugs /literature), culminated in me dropping out of school in the winter of 1987/88 because of poor grades. my grades were good, but they were offset by the zeros which counted as double negatives resulting in a poor GPA, and causing me to lose my scholarship.

i lingered in the town for 2 to 3 months, and then had a nervous breakdown in february of 1988. the breakdown was attributed to an LSD trip, which caused me to be hospitalized for a month and to be pumped up w/ thorazine for a week. it could have been mkultra, who knows. the tab came from a ROTC guy, but honestly the bad trip (i tripped for three days on one tab) but it likely had to do with very deep unresolved family issues, issues that still remain unresolved - another story.

the topic of burnout and debate, as well as debate as an adolescent subculture, is explored in the book, gifted tongues.

excerpt below...

https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691074504/gifted-tongues

Learning to argue and persuade in a highly competitive environment is only one aspect of life on a high-school debate team. Teenage debaters also participate in a distinct cultural world — complete with its own jargon and status system — in which they must negotiate complicated relationships with teammates, competitors, coaches, and parents as well as classmates outside the debating circuit. In Gifted Tongues, Gary Alan Fine offers a rich description of this world as a testing ground for both intellectual and emotional development, while seeking to understand adolescents as social actors. Considering the benefits and drawbacks of the debating experience, he also recommends ways of reshaping programs so that more high schools can use them to boost academic performance and foster specific skills in citizenship.


Fine analyzes the training of debaters in rapid-fire speech, rules of logical argumentation, and the strategic use of evidence, and how this training instills the core values of such American institutions as law and politics. Debates, however, sometimes veer quickly from fine displays of logic to acts of immaturity — a reflection of the tensions experienced by young people learning to think as adults. Fine contributes to our understanding of teenage years by encouraging us not to view them as a distinct stage of development but rather a time in which young people draw from a toolkit of both childlike and adult behaviors. A well-designed debate program, he concludes, nurtures the intellect while providing a setting in which teens learn to make better behavioral choices, ones that will shape relationships in their personal, professional, and civic lives.

sidenote - the author of the book's son - todd david fine - won the TOC, the most competitive of HS tournaments at the end of the season, while being coached by matthew whipple from glenbrook south. matt and i were acquaintances, and debated in HS at the same time, although matt travelled the national circuit. in fact we dropped LSD and smoked herb together one night in evanston, when i was judging a tournament at the glenbrooks. i also smoked herb with dallas perkins, the head debate coach at harvard while attending the university of massachusetts summer camp for college debaters in 1985 w/ my college coach bear. matt debated at northwestern and became the head coach at glenbrook south following in the steps of his coach/mentor ted belch (another person who was kind to my team and my eccentric coach when i was in HS).

after burning bridges in 1988, i wandered.

i was more or less homeless in 1988 after my breakdown. i did have a car and found a job in a pizza parlor. the car died, and i bought a bicycle and biked to champaign-urbana (home of the university of illinois) forty-five miles away. i abandoned hundreds of books in charleston for the first but not last time in my life. i stayed in champaign through the summer. at first i slept in state parks and on the edge of town.

i quickly found co-housing in champaign and held a few odd jobs including working at a 7-11 convenient store. oddly enough, while working at that convenient store for a month, a stream of people that i had known in middle school (from when i attended the magnet school in middle school) went to the convenient store and teased me for my menial position in society. i also randomly ran into another person that summer from my elementary school, in an elevator at ISU, who had been president of my senior class in HS, while visiting another friend in bloomington, illinois. it was the last time i ever saw anyone from my elementary school again in my life. i was twenty-one years old.

(as a side note, david foster wallace taught at illinois state at that time)

after a few months in champaign, i abandoned everything again; i bought a 400cc yamaha, a small motorcycle, with my earnings. i bungi corded my possessions, all stored in a very small suitcase on the back of the motorcycle and headed down I55 to new orleans where i stayed for five weeks with a friend from HS, with a person i had known since i was thirteen from the magnet school.

i couldn’t find work, returned home on the motorcycle and moved back in with my parents and three younger siblings. while I was in college, my family had left the city i was raised in and had moved to a large three story victorian house in a small town, which happened to be two blocks down the same street from the birthplace of ronald reagan. it was ironic considering the damage he had done by facilitating the offshoring of manufacturing jobs when he was president.

i stayed in tampico for 4 to 5 months finding work as a nurses aid in a facility that treated paraplegics (everyone in the facility was in a wheel chair, a few were quadriplegics). naturally it was a humbling job, seeing people - a few of them my age at the time - who for whatever reason were incapable of walking (often tragic stories - a car accident, one man broke his neck when his parachute didn’t open, others had degenerative diseases). i worked the night shift and serendipitously helped the patients who smoked cannabis smoke cannabis. in many cases they couldn't light the cigarette or pipe by themselves. we hid the smell using the many tricks of the trade that every pot smoker is familiar with, open windows, fans, towels, perfume, air freshener.

i wasn't unsatisfied with the job per se, but because of fucked up family dynamics (a common theme in my life), i had to leave after four months. i ended up moving to chicago as all of my three younger siblings eventually did as well. the city is like a giant drain that sucks people away from their families, as their communities are destroyed by neoliberalism. the city then serves as a lily pad for those transplants to jump off to different destinations, and so it was.

i ended up working in a bookstore in evanston and living in an apartment in the wicker park/bucktown neighborhood which was experiencing rapid gentrification at the time.

the neighborhood was historically a polish neighborhood, then became a mexican/

puerto rican neighborhood, then a neighborhood with poor artists, before it became completely gentrified - like lincoln park before it.

the train ride to work was forty minutes each way (blue line, then the red line). i enjoyed the commute as it was visually stimulating and provided unique experiences each day. i liked working at the bookstore. i was assigned the travel section (fodors/green books/lonely planet), and i would stock the section and recommend guides to customers.

i spent most of my time at home reading fiction, and i became very introverted. it was here where i first read hermann hesse's book, narcissus and goldmund - still a favorite of mine today. the staff at the bookstore in evanston was older. 3 of my coworkers were openly gay. their sexuality never bothered me as i had experienced many gay people in college. two of my co-workers made overt advances towards me. all and all, i found the experiences amusing, and the advances didn't seem to affect our friendships at work (in other words i didn't care too much about people's sexual preferences, as i'm not very obsessed about people's sexuality today as well).

i developed friendships with my neighbors, including a friend who worked with traders at the board of exchange who lived in a tiny coach house behind my brick three flat building my neighbor in the next building was an artist, a middle aged african-american man, who also was gay, and had the misfortune of experiencing vietnam. one of the paintings he worked on for months was of a historic catholic cathedral, st mary's, that sat directly across the street from our buildings. he also had cage less parakeets that he would let fly across his small apartment. we both had garden apartments that appeared sunken because at some point in the past the city had raised the streets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Mary_of_the_Angels_%28Chicago%29

for the first half of my stay in that apartment, i had a roommate, janna, a graduate student at the art institute (she now teaches art history at the new school). she moved to DC while we were roommates, requiring me to find another roommate. this move coupled with unemployment inevitably resulted in me having to move from the building.

i stayed in the city for about 18 months, and enjoyed it while i lived there especially the diversity of culture. every neighborhood in the city is distinct ethnically, especially the ukrainian village, a beautiful neighborhood close to where i lived. it's filled with ornate eastern orthodox churches. the accessibility by train/bus to other neighborhoods meant it was impossible to remain bored for long. many of the three flats in the neighborhood i lived in have since been converted into single family dwellings for rich people.

besides the rapid gentrification that was occurring at the time in bucktown/wicker park, there was another interesting cultural phenomena in the city i experienced in 1989.

i left the bookstore in evanston after i was offered a bit more money to work at a coffee shop downtown. my friend sam from college managed to get me a job as an assistant manager. the coffee shop was part of a new outfit that had opened up in chicago about 8 to 9 months earlier.

the coffee shop had 6 stores in the city at the time (primarily they were on the gold coast an affluent neighborhood in the city for ever). the coffee shop also had a few shops in minneapolis, portland, and in eugene (and yes in olympia). they were based out of seattle and had less then 20 shops outside of western washington when i started working for them - the coffee shop was called starbucks.

https://www.mbaknol.com/business-history/history-and-background-of-starbucks/

In August 1987 Starbucks Corporation had 11 stores and fewer than 100 employees. In October of that year it opened its first store in Chicago, and by 1989 there were nine Chicago Starbucks. Starbucks market was growing rapidly, in the United States sales grew from $50 million in 1983 to $500 million five years later. In 1988 Starbucks introduced a mail-order catalog; the company was serving mail-order customers in every state and operating 33 stores. By then the company’s reputation had grown steadily by word of mouth.

the starbucks i worked at was directly across the street from the board of trade in the financial district. the chicago board of trade traders would rush into the store wearing their multicolored trading vests and order 4 shots of espresso in a grande cup before they would rush back to the trading floor to sell commodities. they loved their espresso.

the job at starbucks also revealed examples of racism that i didn't want to see, but it was real nevertheless. specifically, i was hired immediately as an assistant manager because of a person i knew, while the lead clerk who had worked at the starbucks for 6 months knew everything about coffee, was very talented, and did not get the promotion. she was african-american and her name was carmella. she had a wicked wit and sense of humor, and she became my friend.

as a side-note, one of the clerks at the bookstore in evanston, named winn, also african-american, made several passes at me while i worked there, but he also was brilliant and was my friend. i've noticed that the working classes, although accused of being racist are often much less racist than the professional managerial class that seems obsessed with race and sexual orientation, at least that has been my personal experience.

side note - the owner of starbucks, howard schultz did visit the store once while i worked there.

one of the saddest experiences i had at the starbucks across the street from the chicago board of trade was recognizing how violence affected the african-american community in chicago. i remember carmella took a few days off to attend a couple of friends funerals. people who had been murdered and were the same age as carmella, the same age that i was at the time. i immediately understood that despite my problems, i didn't have to deal with the threat of being killed by gun violence in my neighborhood. again, seeing the expression on a coworkers face the day after returning to work, after a traumatizing experience like carmella's resonated with me; it lingers in a person's memory.

chicago is notorious for this dynamic. the downtown is where people of all backgrounds interact with each other during the day, and then the workers retreat back to different environments during the night, a phenomena that was oblivious to me in my youth, although it was present, but was more visceral to me as a young working person in the city.

after a few months, i was transferred as a manager to one of the new stores, store number 9, near city hall, near dealy plaza (near the picasso lion sculpture).

i only worked there for 2 months, however there were a few incidents that i remember while i worked at that coffee shop. one morning around 9:30 AM, a crowd gathered in front of the coffee shop. i was busy, and wasn't paying attention at first, but then i saw some cops in front of the store, and realized there was a commotion outside the building (like a 30 story building). a broker had jumped out of a 10th story window and landed right next to the front door of the starbucks. there was yellow tape placed around the body. nevertheless, people continued to walk into the store to buy their espressos. the suicide didn't deter people from buying their drinks; it merely offered a moment of reflection, a morbid topic to discuss w/ the clerk as they went about their affairs. that memory remained with me as well, the indifference to death in light of the necessity of commerce.

i lost my job at starbucks that spring by making a harmless mistake. i accidentally didn't open the store on st patrick's day because i thought it was a holiday (everything is closed in chicago on st patrick's day, everything). i got a phone call an hour after the store was scheduled to open from my district manager informing me that i was fired. it was an honest mistake, but i was axed.

after living in a concrete jungle for a year and a half, and after realizing i wasn’t happy, that i hadn't been in nature for a year and a half, minus a trip to a grateful dead concert at alpine valley in wisconsin which really wasn’t nature.

side note-

the weekend i attended the grateful dead shows was considered epic by grateful dead standards. there is concert footage of the shows, the last shows the band played at that venue (the only show i ever attended). i didn't plan on going. my friends were going. i literally only had 5 extra dollars in my pocket, but they persuaded me to go w/ them to the concert, reminding me that i would have a good time in the lot (alpine valley is an outdoor venue w/ camping), so i went.

my friends went into the venue, and i found a tab of LSD using my 5 dollars, and i sat beneath a tree, content as a clam in calm waters. then out of nowhere, three suburbanites (not deadheads) walked up to me and said, "hey how's it going, we noticed you were sitting here, are you going into the show". i said, no i was broke, but everything was fine, and i hoped that they would have a good time. they then said, "well we have an extra ticket, and would you like it." i reminded them i didn't have any money for trade (which was true). they said it wasn't an issue, it was a gift, then they gave me the ticket and disappeared into the crowd.

i took the ticket to the gate, walked through and w/in 15 minutes found 1, 2, 3, 4 different friends i had known from my time at university a few years earlier - 300 miles away from the venue. the show was amazing (it is noted as one of their best series of shows, for a band that toured for 25 years). i can't explain the LSD trip that day, as that would be difficult. however it did rain on the last song of the last set that day.

it poured the moment the band stopped playing, and as i made way back to the campsite, where the folks from chicago who i had travelled to the concert with had gathered, there were scores of people ripping off their clothes dancing naked in the rain. that's a true story.

https://www.dead.net/show/july-18-1989

Grateful Dead - Dear Mr Fantasy/Hey Jude - Alpine Valley - 7.18.89

Grateful Dead @ Alpine Valley - July 18, 1989 (Parking Lot Camping)

i opted to leave the state, region, and the family i was raised with and planned on travelling west (a classic american tale - right out of jack kerouak). by chance, while i was living in the city, an acquaintance at the cafe voltaire proffered some advice. the cafe was a small counterculture coffee shop that briefly existed in bucktown. it was owned by a 50 year old holocaust survivor with 6 or 7 ink numbers tattooed on his arm. his name was harry. my friend at the coffee shop told me that she believed the evergreen state college would be a good match for me (counterculture).

[...]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”


Jack Kerouac, On the Road 

i moved to my parent's house in the small town of tampico and found summer work de-tasseling corn with 12 year olds to raise money. de-tasseling corn entails removing the tassels between four rows of corn that are surrounded by 2 rows of corn on each side. by removing the tassels in the 4 middle rows, the corn is cross-pollinated to create hybrid strains.

it's laborious, monotonous work. the person willing to employ a 23 year old who wanted to work in the cornfields with 12 year olds was, drum roll...., named farmer white (seriously).

i worked for farmer white de-tasseling corn for 4 weeks, from 6 in the morning until noon and again in the afternoon from 2-5. i was able to raise $400 dollars, my grandmother gave me her old car (a red chrysler K car), and i set out on my adventure west. a friend of mine from HS accompanied me for the first 500 miles until he became insufferable, and he decided to hitchhike back home.

i had researched olympia and the college (reading college guides, and travel books) before i started my adventure, but i didn't know a soul there. nevertheless, i wasn't afraid; i was determined, and i remember a few of the details from that trip.

i remember first seeing the rocky mountains by myself as an adult in montana. i had seen the mountains once before as a 4 year old with my parents on a family vacation to colorado. i immediately pulled off of I90, found a campground, parked the car, crossed a stream and just walked in a straight line towards the first mountain i saw. i bushwhacked off trail and kept going, gradually seeing the campground diminish, the small stream, the background recede, getting smaller and smaller as i ascended.

it started raining with thunder and lightening, and i wanted to go further (although i already had reached the rock face), but when lightening struck close enough to me that there were no seconds between the sound and the burst, when the rocks starting feeling slippery because of the downpour, i turned around and descended, back through the trees, across the field, across the stream, to the car, next to the freeway. after the hike, i felt even more determined.

i found a campground outside of olympia at millersylvania state park a few days later. after setting up a PO box in a small town in rural thurston county, i found a job through a temp service working at a fiberglass factory making bathtubs in yelm, washington, right outside of fort lewis, a major military base on the west coast, and 30 miles as the crow flies from mt ranier. there is an amazing view of the mountain from the parking lot at the factory, and i watched the sunrise many days from that location. it was the third week of august 1990, and the iraq war was just starting, operation desert shield had started on august 2nd 1990.

the anti-war demonstrations had started before i arrived in olympia in august 1990, but i found them quickly. most of the core organizing occurred at the college, but there were community groups involved with the protests as well. there were many actions that i remember, including evergreen students occupying the state capital building for a few days. i did attend that demonstration, and it was powerful as there were still people from the anti-vietnam war demos participating as full fledged members of the resistance. one night i was there, i remember hecklers taunting the hundreds of people in the gallery of the rotunda, and the crowd remaining completely silent.

i also attended an event where a half dozen of my friends dug graves on the lawn of the state capital near the war memorials. there are several war memorials on the lawn. name a war and there's a memorial on that lawn. as the first spades went into the manicured lawns, the troopers threw on the cuffs, but as the demonstrators were put in the cop cars, wave after wave of people laid down in front of the car. they dragged away demonstrators one by one, until the cop cars sped away. 7 people were arrested. there also were marches, and a 24 hour vigil for over a month in sylvestor park in front of the old state capital building.

i saw the resistance, participated in the resistance to war, and participated in the resistance to war in 2004 as well. and although my memory is foggy, and there were a lot of numbers at the pro palestine rally that marched to the WA state capital a few weeks ago in october 2023 (3000 estimate), i would say the intensity of the resistance and the dedication of the anti-war demos was greater in 1990 than in 2004 (1000 on the streets at the most in 2004 - again foggy memory, but that sounds right), although i can't find documentation right now.

i'm pretty certain that the new technology has nullified the militancy in ways, although we've seen ports blocked in oakland and in tacoma, so maybe the militants will get more traction this time around.

besides the anti-war movement, the bars and coffee shops were where i met most of the people i developed long-term adult relationships with. most of those relationships no longer exist - death, people abandoning their ideals after they had children, people coming/going.

oddly enough - true story - one of those coffee shops in olympia was called "the smithfield" owned by a older man (he was 35-40) named SJ. it was the grunge scene. 65 cents for a cup of coffee, and a chance to get out of the rain. one of those people sitting in front of that coffee shop talking/sharing/writing was a person from aberdeen called, yes you guessed it, kurt cobain.

he lived in olympia in 1990/91 before he moved to seattle and fucked up his life, at least according to rolling stone, where his bassist claims that kurt would have been happy if he had just stayed in his apartment in olympia writing music.

https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/qa-krist-novoselic-looks-back-on-nirvanas-nevermind-42364/

Kurt later dismissed “Nevermind” as too polished. What was it about the punk aesthetic that was so important to him?

I don’t know how he could say that. That’s a cool part of that record — it has that slick sound. I don’t know if it was punk dogma. A lot of it was the attention. He was getting all this scrutiny, people putting their perceptions on him. He was a very private person. For being such an aggressive singer and musician, he really was a quiet guy. He never should have left that little apartment in Olympia. He would have been just fine.

kurt cobain was the same age as me, but i don't remember him at all because i wasn't devoted completely to the music. i was into the politics and the books, although that's where i was (in the same place, same coffee shop). a few of my friends years later said, "you don't remember that guy sitting near the coffeeshop on the concrete with his notebook" (all of us were sitting on the concrete with notebooks in front of the smithfield). i did see some amazing house shows (punk/grunge), but i couldn't recall who was playing or the name of the houses, or where the shows were (every house in olympia has a nick name) but it was a ubiquitous backdrop to that time.

i hitchhiked from olympia back to illinois in february 1992 with and a sheet of LSD, and with 2 duffle bags, including a duffle bag just filled with books, including a copy of george seldes collection of memorable quotes, 'the great thoughts', which still sits on my small book-shelf today. i had to abandon hundreds of books in a barn in olympia when i left. it was a 2000 mile journey (i only made it to rock springs WY because of a snow storm). the journey was one of four hitchhiking experiences greater than 1000 miles i've had in my life (actually besides hiking in the mountains alone, the freest experiences i've ever felt in my life).

on that trip i stopped and visited bear, he was coaching at weber state. we went into the wasatch mountains on a car trip and smoked some herb, and i traded him a strip of tabs (10) for a portable shortwave band radio.

listening to the shortwave radio was a hobby i maintained until i had reliable internet service in 1998. i would find different world radio stations on the short wave and listen to the english language broadcasts of different nations to receive different perspectives on the news. that trip to utah was the last time i saw bear.

he's still out there, but he was fired from weber state after he was set up - although he was clumsy. i was told that when the state troopers raided his hotel room while he was smoking cannabis, he took his arm and whisked the herb off of the desk in the hotel room onto the hotel carpet. i think he ate some of it as well; but this was in utah, and they are freaks about drugs in utah. he was fired from weber state, luckily he escaped without jail time. i believe he currently teaches communications at a school along the ohio river valley these days.

that trip home was crazy. there were a few more interesting stories, including getting stuck in downtown omaha, nebraska after a belligerent bus driver started giving me an attitude. i had been on the greyhound for 6 hours across nebraska and was headed towards the quad cities, across the state of iowa.

i tried getting on the bus after a scheduled stop, and he said, "where's your ticket" (my luggage was already stored on the bus). he said, "get in the back of the line", so i did. then, after standing in line, i showed him my ticket and he let me pass. then i screwed up (the bus driver was black, and their were 2 sisters in their 40s sitting in the seats behind the bus driver).

i said under my breath, it was barely audible, "the bus driver is an asshole." before i knew it, the sisters were both saying very loudly, "he just called the bus driver an asshole." i went back to my seat on the bus. the next thing i knew, the bus driver sticks his head through the open bus door and says - "you, off my bus !" i said, "what, i have a ticket, i've been on your bus for 6 hours." he said, "off the bus." the next thing i knew, there was an omaha cop sticking his head in through the open bus door, "the bus driver wants you off his bus." i used the same retort, the cop said off the bus, and so it goes.

so i got off the bus w/ my bags, including my duffle bag filled w/ books. i went to the ticket booth at the station and was told i'd have to wait for 6 hours for the next bus. meanwhile a snowstorm that had been following me from wyoming was turning into a bad thunderstorm system and all buses going west to denver were being canceled, one by one. i was stuck in a crowded bus station.

it was at this point that i scanned the room with my eyes and found one soul. i walked up to him and said, "hey would you like a tab of LSD?" he said sure. we walked outside the bus terminal in omaha and each ate a tab. the local disappeared in about a 1/2 hour and i was by myself staring up at the buildings and the impending storm that was bearing down on omaha. 6 hours later, still tripping, i got on a greyhound bus completely packed w/ travellers, albeit w/ a more pleasant, non-combative driver. the bus ride was a 350 mile trip across the state of iowa at night during a relatively severe thunderstorm. it was a little claustrophobic, but the light show outside the bus, coupled w/ the music on the walkman made it a little easier, anyway a true story.

9 months later i joined ringling brothers and barnum and bailey circus as a laborer through a connection i had from my previous time living in chicago. my friend was a former circus worker and an herb dealer, and he hooked up the circus train w/ herb in chicago. he also helped me get a job at RB&B as he saw me languishing in chicago, and personally knew the general manager of the circus.

i joined RB&B circus at the age of 25 on thanksgiving day, on the floor of the united center, literally working as the ringcurb person for ring three of a three ring circus on the floor in exactly the same physical place where michael jordan worked - that was the last year the michael jordan won the national championship in basketball w/ the bulls.

my job responsibility was to create the ring (ring 3), help w/ the curtain (i.e. open the curtain as all the clowns, showgirls, performers, and animals were lined up for the opening act) and pick up animal shit during the acts. i was the guy w/ the shovel picking up elephant shit, horse shit, tiger shit, llama shit, and the guy running around the elephants in front of 10,000 people. i also rearranged the magic ring making different configurations to allow the performers to enter and exit the ring (1/2 circle, 1/4 circle, completed 40 foot circle).

the ringcurb position is one of the oldest jobs at the circus. one of my additional responsibilities was to loosen/tighten all of the tie downs (chains) on the flat cars where the circus wagons were secured during the train runs. i would do this during setups and after teardowns with my fellow ringcurb co-workers, gary and steve, and my boss greg, a short stocky man who resembled a crab. steve, an african-american from north carolina, became my best friend at the circus. (the ringcurb crew for the blue unit - there were 2 circuses that travelled by train across america simultaneously). the ringcurb crew were the first laborers to touch the train when it arrived, and the last to touch the train before it departed (of course the circus also had its own train crew).

i got the job as a ring curb worker as a quirk because the person who had held it for 20 years - herzog, a polish man from chicago - had retired. he got off the train in chicago which was the last stop of the season. many on the train believed i was just joining the circus for the 3 day train ride to winter quarters in orlando, to escape the cold weather. the old timers placed side-bets on all new workers joining the circus, wagering on how long they would last before they quit. wagers were made on me as well.

at the time i joined the circus, i was living in an abandoned loft on maxwell street. maxwell strreet is in jewtown, which is what chicagoians called maxwell street. jewtown was just south of the eisenhower expressway on south halsted, just south of greektown, just south of chicago's little italy. chinatown was south of jewtown headed in the other direction towards the southside (notice the order of things in chicago, in ways america's most segregated city).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell_Street

i was living at a place called maxworks on maxwell street which was a green anarchist collective occupied by squatters for 8 years before i briefly resided there. the collective consisted of 2 small storefronts on one side of the street, and a storefront across the street.

it's a place that no longer exists. here's a photo of the building i was living in before it was demolished.

https://maxwellstreetfoundation.org/sightssounds/716-w-maxwell/

there were 4 or 5 permanent occupants living at the collective. they were all misanthropes of sorts - skeptics, but hey they were kind people. tyner was my favorite person there, wiry hair, dirty clothes, fast speech. he didn't wear shoes. he was a word freak and probably had a master's degree in linguistics. the maxworks crew would go to abandoned buildings in the city and salvage old pieces of wood (oak/maple/walnut) out of the buildings before it was fashionable, then they would meticulously restack the lumber back at the squat (there was a lot of moving objects around from one place to another at maxworks). i remember exploring more than a few abandoned buildings in the city during my stay at maxworks.

they also would visit the uppity natural health food stores on the gold coast where they dumpster dived gourmet cheeses and fresh produce. the fridge would be filled with slices of the best pizza in chicago - giordanos and ginos east pizza - that would occasionally be salvaged from dumpsters, from the restaurants at the end of the night. the food was excellent, mostly vegetarian, but you had to use your nose before you consumed any of it (always a good rule of thumb, by the way).

the collective had a human waste composting system. 5 gallon buckets of waste were collected then spread out in a very organized manner on pallets in an adjacent empty lot. the waste was layered with straw on top of stacked 4 foot square pallets which in ways was my first practical introduction to deep ecology.

every imaginable piece of junk, piece of discarded functional junk: tools, furniture, clothing, that they could find and collect from a city of 3 million people was gathered and stored for a future purpose in one of those three buildings (let not good things go to waste, right ?).

it always was an insane experience at maxworks. i learned how to play the game go at maxworks that fall. i also met a few political activist videographers who took me along with them on their journeys, including trips videotaping bo gritz (independent running for president in 92), and another trip documenting a legalization of cannabis rally in madison wisconsin in 1992 (10-15 people were arrested in front of the state house. cops on horses running down non-violent demonstrators, the usual).

all in all, it was a useful organizing space, a successful squat until the university literally destroyed the entire history of jewtown, the market, everything. it just disappeared and was replaced by nice, neat dormitories for middle class kids at the university of illinois chicago. it all happened in one fell swoop while i was working at the circus between 1992-1994.

there is a famous scene in the film 'the blues brothers' that was shot one block away from maxworks, on maxwell street and south halsted, where the scene with aretha franklin singing 'think' was shot.

it was the gritty cafe/soul food restaurant where chicago cops would gather on sunday morning before the maxwell street market opened. there the cops would determine who would receive bribes from vendors, and where the bribes would be distributed.

here's the clip of the scene shot in the nate's deli from the film 'the blues brothers' in 1980.

The Blues Brothers | Aretha Franklin Sings "Think" in 4K HDR

maxwell street was the largest open air market in the united states until it was destroyed and purchased by the university of illinois and turned into housing for college students.

when i lived there, it looked like germany after ww2. empty blocks of destroyed buildings, many just piles of rubble, surrounded by folks hawking blues tapes, prostitutes offering their services, folks hawking porn videos and heroin. there was a famous polish hot dog stand "joe's hotdogs" (mustard and sauerkraut - as i was a vegetarian it was french fries, sauerkraut and mustard for me, but it was so delicious). i loved the aesthetic. i can't express how much i loved that place

Maxwell Street Blues, Ode To A Dead Community 

https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/dca/supp_info/maxwellstreetmarket0.html

i had visited maxwell street/jewtown many times during my first residence in the city, and i lived there for about 2 months before i joined the circus; it was my last official address in chicago.

it also was a perfect bookend. maxwell street juxtaposed with the smart, upper-middle class kids from the north shore whom i had debated against when i was a teenager/young adult. their grandparents had originally lived in jewtown. they sold their lots and/or rented them out to the african-american community before they moved on to greener pastures in the north suburbs.

this topic is a contentious subject, for some claim no one else would deal with the blacks, and that the jews were the only ones who would help them during the great black migration north. others point out that jewish landlords took advantage of blacks, offering them deeds, withdrawing offers, and charging exorbitant rents - there are 2 sides to the story.

The Ghetto, Public Policy, and the Jewish Exception

By Ta-Nehisi Coates Feb 28 2013,

https://web.archive.org/web/20130302072937/https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/02/the-ghetto-public-policy-and-the-jewish-exception/273592/

Satter's book is a mix of memoir and history chronicling the fleecing of Chicago's black community by the city's mortgage industry and her father's complicated efforts to fight that fleecing. Beryl Satter's father, Mark Satter, was Jewish. In his story and the stories of his neighbors in the Jewish enclave of Lawndale, we see two impulses born of oppression. 

The first is genuinely sympathetic. Many of the Jews in Lawndale held fresh memories of their own discrimination, and could not fathom doing to blacks precisely what had been (and to some extent still was being) done to them:

Several of Lawndale's first black families were encouraged to seek housing there by Jewish friends. If viewed without prejudice, they had the makings of ideal neighbors. Most were Chicago-born middle-class men and women who purchased their buildings with substantial down payments. They managed to get modest mortgages to finance their purchases, and several paid off their mortgages early. The new black residents of Lawndale not only maintained their buildings but upgraded them.

The second impulse was darker:

...If many of Lawndale's residents were unsettled by the new arrivals from Mississippi, a small group of men saw something else in the faces of the hardworking new people now streaming into the area. They saw an opportunity.

Lawndale's operators, its schemers and hustlers, had much in common with the area's idealists. Like my father, several of them were first-or second-generation immigrant Jews. Their early years, like those of my father, were marked by anti-Semitism and poverty. But while my father's childhood disability and exposure to his father Isaac's social idealism inspired in him a profound empathy for the oppressed, these men drew very different conclusions from the harsh realities they had witnessed during the Depression. They had observed a world of victims and of victimizers, of those who "worked the system" and those who were destroyed by it. And they knew which side of that divide they wanted to be on.

In finding their way onto the proper side of the divide, Satter's operators hit upon the contract scheme: A speculator would purchase a Cicero--at times numbering some 4,000--represented a communal will. You can't really draw the same conclusion from the Jewish speculators. It's much easier to argue for "bad apples" in those cases. 

And to argue for the great harm that the concept of whiteness has done to this country, because what you do find among the Jewish contractors is the same racism that you would see in Cicero. Satter reports one contractor asking a question of black people, that any bigot of Mississippi would have posed at the time, "How are young going to educate dumb animals?"

A speculator would purchase a home at a low price, and then offer it to a black family at a much steeper price. Except no deed would be transferred. The new black "buyer" would be responsible for monthly payments with high interest attached. Moreover, they would be responsible for any repairs and for all code violations. If one payment was missed the contractor would immediately move to evict, and the black "buyer" would forfeit not just their down-payment, but every payment they'd made since, and any money they'd put into upkeep. The speculator would then wash and repeat.

The scheme was dirty all the way through. Often the speculator would present himself to the family as a "broker" seeking the best deal on their behalf, concealing the fact that he was also the owner. He might steer the family to a lawyer who was in on the scheme, or a construction crew also in on the take.

side note -

in addition to the market, maxwell street also was where jane adams first established hull house in 1889. it also was destroyed when the university of illinois expanded in 1994 (along with all of jewtown).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hull_House

Hull House was a settlement house in Chicago, Illinois, that was co-founded in 1889 by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr. Located on the Near West Side of Chicago, Hull House, named after the original house's first owner Charles Jerald Hull, opened to serve recently arrived European immigrants. By 1911, Hull House had expanded to 13 buildings. In 1912, the Hull House complex was completed with the addition of a summer camp, the Bowen Country Club.^[2][3][4] With its innovative social, educational, and artistic programs, Hull House became the standard bearer for the movement; by 1920, it grew to approximately 500 settlement houses nationally.^[5] 

back to the circus...

i wore several hats while i worked for ringling brothers and barnum and bailey's circus. i was the ringcurb guy. i was an english tutor for a man from kazakhstan who had the most profitable contract with the circus (a horse act); his first language was kazakh, but he mostly spoke russian (there were multiple languages spoken at the circus including mongolian, kazakh, polish, russian, spanish, french, mandarian chinese). remember, this was in 1992 immediately after the dissolution of the USSR, so there were quite a few acts from the former USSR in the circus that year.

i was the union representative for the workers - the shop steward for the teamsters, a largely symbolic role. the circus required its workers belong to the union so the circus could have access to arenas (like madison square garden, the united center, and the summit, etc.) without having to rely on local unions, as the rigging and set up for the circus was extraordinarily unique, unique to each of the arenas as well. the circus had worked the arenas around USA since the late 60s after irving feld bought the circus in the mid 1960's. irving feld, kenneth feld's father, had sponsored rock concerts before the family purchased the circus and moved it into indoor arenas in 1967/68.

the teamsters local based in st louis didn't really do much to protect the circus workers, despite my phone calls. for example, the circus owned the train and the workers.

one example of what i experienced as the shop steward occurred when i discovered that the train conductor and his train crew would search workers' coach rooms for contraband while the workers were working at the arenas. this infuriated quite a few people, and i brought the complaint up to the local, who arrived at circusville (RB&B circus had its own zip code) for a different reason a month later. they threw a little rhetoric at the circus manager and then left town without addressing the grievances.

a reminder, all of these experiences occurred before the internet, and before the ubiquitous cell phones. i communicated with my family twice a month by payphone using a calling card.

the train was on train tracks, and was parked in train yards, which were exclusively under federal jurisdiction, meaning local authorities were never called for simple misdemeanors (like fights).

another anachronistic trait of the circus was providing new hires with company script called 'dukie dollars' that could be used at the pie car, the name of the quick grill wagon at the arenas (lunch/breakfast) and the small diner on the 88 car on the train. the pie car had 24 hour service on train runs. here the workers would play gin rummy and eat greasy food on the runs between towns.

i also had a special perk as the shop steward. i sold beer on the train runs. translation: this meant before the train left town, i had to get a cab or a ride to a supermarket where i would by 20 cases of beer (usually budweiser, but i tried to be creative pending on where we were), and a few cartons of cigarettes. beers were a dollar a piece, cigarettes were 5 dollars a pack, and also were sold at the set ups (set ups took 4- 6 hours, tear downs took 3-4 hours).

side note - ringling brothers and barnum bailey circus was so efficient at moving material that they were hired by the kaiser's army before ww1 to demonstrate how material could be efficiently moved by rail.

i went to 2 funerals while i was with the circus. the first was in ashville, north,carolina after the head elephant trainer, overseeing 22 indian elephants for 25 years, was crushed by an elephant at winter quarters. he had been flown away from the show to deal w/ the elephant, and there are suspicious elements to his death which i won't go into detail about.

his name was axel gautier, and as i noted above i knew his kids, having been introduced to one of them in chicago before i joined the circus. i stood in line at his funeral (again the ringcurb position was one of the oldest, if not the oldest position in the circus - although it was the lowest rung in ways, the floor, the ring) with the rest of the circus crew to pay my respects.

i was standing next to bob the clown, a close friend of mine during my time at the circus, whose grandparents emigrated to new jersey before the holocaust. by chance, or i don't know why, but when i turned around, kenneth feld and his wife were directly behind us in the line, and signed the guestbook for axel's funeral immediately after bob and i had signed.

https://www.nytimes.com/1993/05/07/obituaries/axel-gautier-51-elephant-trainer-with-circus-dies.html

here's the program of the second year i worked at the circus - link below.

Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey / 124th Edition Video Program (1994)

asheville north carolina was the birthplace of novelist thomas wolfe, it also is where i acquired my compact edition of the oxford english dictionary (read w/ a magnifying glass that accompanies the 2 volume set) at a used bookstore in asheville. the dictionary still sits on my small bookshelf today.

i started journaling when i first moved to olympia in 1990, and i managed to complete 2 journals while i worked at the circus. i saw 75 american cities in 18 months. there are too many stories to share about the circus. however, one of the most memorable stories concerned the circus train derailment in lakeland florida (i was on the train) between st petersberg and orlando. a wheel fell off the train and 2 people were instantly crushed to death, including a 28 year old clown, cecley conkling, who was in the clown car and noticed that the wheel had come off the train. she was killed in a vestibule between cars as she attempted to walk back through the train to alert the trainmaster in his car at the back of the train

also, oddly enough, the new elephant trainer, ted severtsky, age 39, who was replacing the 25 year elephant trainer axel gautier who had died at the elephant sanctuary in ocala, florida the year earlier (whose funeral i attended in asheville) was smashed to death by a train car flying into his living room, in his train car, as he was watching TV.

it's important to realize that the train was about a mile long (1.6 kilometers, 60 train cars). the train cars were arranged in different configurations pending on the set up. during the train trip from st pete to orlando the animal cars - wagons filled w/ tigers, camels, horses and elephants - were directly behind the 2 diesel engines, followed by the passenger cars. the workers 75 car to 87 car were filled w/ laborers and concessions workers, then the pie car, then the showgirls, clowns and entertainers (in order of their significance), followed by the most prominent acts and the circus administrators, and then the equipment on flat cars.

the train derailment occurred at the closest point to the old winter quarters in winterhaven, FL, where the elephants had been kept for the longest period time - the elephants are psychic. the newspapers provided a succinct overview of what transpired. it was straight out of the 1952 cecil b demille movie, 'the greatest show on earth' in every way.

https://www.tampabay.com/news/humaninterest/from-the-archives-a-look-back-at-the-florida-circus-train-crash-of-1994/2207191/

It was a jumbled up mess," he said. "People were screaming. All the doors were locked. Everybody was terrified. We pulled out one man pinned between a car and a Frigidaire." Most circus workers spent the night at hotels in the Orlando area.

Before Thursday, the safety record for Ringling Brothers' two privately owned 53-car circus trains was unblemished, Federal Railroad administration officials said. They said the circus train was required to have an inspection certifying it met all federal safety standards before the train was originally coupled together.

Four Amtrak passenger trains experienced slight delays and reroutings Thursday as a result of the derailment. Spokesman Steven Taubenkibel said Amtrak used buses to get some passengers around the accident site; delays were kept to less than an hour.

If the 16 derailed cars are not cleared and the railway is not repaired by today , Amtrak officials are planning more rerouting. Passengers of train No. 88, scheduled to leave Tampa today and travel through Lakeland, instead will be bused to Lakeland to board another Amtrak train and continue to their ultimate destinations, Taubenkibel said.

The undamaged front of the train carrying horses and elephants, including the yearling elephants Romeo and Juliette, continued to Orlando Thursday night.

- side note a news helicopter crashed the same day while the covering the train derailment, i was on the train watching CNN in my car when the helicopter crashed

- second side note, i’ve randomly been interviewed/filmed on local news as a person three times in my life, in three different cities, for three different reasons. the second time that happened was a week before the train accident in lakeland, when i was videotaped by a TV crew randomly while i was donating blood at a local blood center (something i used to regularly do) in saint petersberg. i was laying on the reclined chairs, w/ a tube in my arm, when the TV cameras came in the room, my mates at the circus noted that they had seen it on the local news.

the opening night in orlando after the train derailment was extremely emotional. again it's difficult to describe the atmosphere. there were entire rings blacked out during a the first performance in orlando.

there were clowns on the front track wearing braces and arm slings. the former elephant trainer's children, including a person i had spent thanksgiving dinner w/ a year earlier, the night before i joined the circus, had to take over the main elephant act on the fly (his father had been the elephant trainer for 25 years). it was a mess, but it was the greatest show on earth, and people from all of over the world had sent best wishes. the arena was packed, the show went on.

of course there also was a circus funeral in orlando for cecley and ted.

side notes - cool train story. the memory of going through grand central station in the morning on the train, before the rush, opening my window at ground level and seeing the commuters with their briefcases in hand, as i smoked a joint, drank a cup of coffee, and watched it all roll by.

another cool train image. watching the georgia country side outside of macon roll by, sitting on a bail of hay in the elephant's car with the door open. to get to the bails of hay in the elephant car, you had to squeeze past the elephants who are tightly packed 2 a piece in the narrow stock car. so you had to kind of squeeze yourself between the wall and the elephant. at any moment, she just had too lean to the left and you would be squished.

i was never afraid of the elephants. i always trusted them. in fact when i had an argument w/ a roommate once in indianapolis, i went to the arena and slept on a bail of hay next to the elephants (i was the only vegetarian on the circus, out of 200 people - the elephants as vegetarians instinctively knew that, we got along just fine).

i had a chance to ride one of the elephants for several miles as part of the circus parade to the arena in charleston, south caroloina, 7 miles from the train to the arena.

one day in raleigh, in front of 10,000 people, my boss was screaming at me to clean up the elephant shit during the show. i was in a rush, and my boss was shouting so i acted quickly without forethought. in the middle of the act, while the elephant was standing on a stool in the middle of the ring, i ran beneath her to the other side of the ring to quickly do my job. the elephant trainer looked at me with a puzzled expression on his face, but it wasn't a mean glare. the elephant didn't move. i think she smiled a bit, but the show director - the man who wore a tuxudo and directed the show - on the other hand was livid, and within minutes, he also was screaming at me from outside of ring 3 (there's a rule at the circus, the working man must always remain as invisible as possible).

we were in NYC for 6 weeks at madison square gardens. a few memories i recall from that venue. first, playing frisbee w/ my friend on the thick cardboard that sets over the ice where the NY rangers played. both the rangers and the knicks made the playoffs that year, so the circus played second fiddle to the rightful owners of the building, the sports franchises.

because the rangers and knicks made the playoffs in 1994, we had to set up and tear down the circus (props, rigging and all) and store everything backstage, like over 20 times during our 6 week stay at madison square gardens. but playing frisbee on the floor of NYC's living room was fun.

also celebrities, like sting, did visit the circus. they would go back stage to visit the performers and to be photographed with the elephants.

finally, i was in madison square garden in april 1994 when kurt cobain killed himself in seattle. i watched it on a TV backstage where the animals and performers worked and practiced - there was always an acrobat, or a clown practicing acts backstage.

nirvana's acoustic sets were performed at sony studios in NY 6 months earlier and were released posthumously later in 1994 - november 1994, including this track, a david bowie cover song - one of my favorites.

Nirvana - The Man Who Sold The World (MTV Unplugged)

i became bored (strange i know) and i left the circus after the shows in philadelphia in june of 1994, about a week before my birthday. donald trump and i share the same birthday. it's called the day of gutsy confrontation in the birthday book.

i recall the last words the circus manager (who hated the union, and always teased me about me about my weltanschauung) shared with me as i had finished tying down the circus wagons on the flatcars for the last time as the train started rolling out of the the philly trainyard, he shouted from the vestibule on the last car, "who is john galt?"

i loaded my possessions into a friend's RV that was headed towards chicago. my friends were driving overland to texas for the next show. it was a big train jump between philadelphia and texas. people with cars at the circus drove their vehicles overland. people w/ bicycles paid a small fee (5$) to have their bikes hauled in a trailer/truck combo to the next destination.

when i arrived in the city, i stayed with friends for a few days then went to my parent's house in the small town on the prairie, a town of 900 people. i had saved $2000 at the circus and had planned on traveling to the czech republic.

but a strange thing happened. a day after my birthday, a woman called me.

in fact she was the only person i had gone on a date w/ in my entire tenure at the circus (we saw pink floyd on a down day 3 weeks earlier at the spectrum). at the time she called, she was in san antonio texas, and said she had left the circus. she could either catch a bus to california where her family was, or she could catch a bus to chicago. it was posed as a question. i said yes, take the bus to chicago. i picked her up 2 days later, and drove her to my parents. i had bought a 1974 yellow ford elite limited for $400 the day before i picked her up at the bus station.

we spent the next 2 1/2 years together, starting w/ a 1.5 month car journey with a 15 year old cat named muffin that my parents were going to euthanize. the striped yellow cat was my sister's cat from her childhood. my friend refused to let the cat be put down and demanded we take the cat with us on our journey. we traveled along the northern tier of USA on US highways, intentionally avoiding freeways - minimal freeway travel - in the vein of the memoir 'blue highways' by william heat moon.

our route was as follows:

wisconsin/minnesota/north dakota/montana/idaho/eastern washington and then 3 weeks on the olympic peninsula, before returning to olympia (full circle) around labor day.

"without the errors, wrong turns and blind alleys, without the doubling back and misdirection and fumbling and chance discoveries, there was not one bit of joy in walking the labyrinth." - William Least Heat-Moon

after a few months of staying w/ friends in olympia, we found safe haven on a 55 acre farm w/ two other couples caring for an elderly woman who had lived on the same farm outside olympia since the 1920s.

we cared for her goats and chickens, maintained the hayfield and the 35 acre woodlot of second growth cedar and douglas fir. the farm was on henderson inlet, on puget sound. harmony's father and mother were both originally teachers from idaho in the 1920s when they opted to leave the magic valley and move to greener pastures, to live on puget sound in western washington.

her father also was a bitter recluse (i only heard stories) and a communist. there were old copies of the daily worker from the 40s stored in the barn near the old farmhouse, and harmony delivered the newspaper in the mid-1990s to evergreen's labor center and a few retirement centers around thurston county.

she was spunky but always drove 10 miles below the speed limit. harmony was in her 80s at the time we lived with her. she was an active demonstrator against the vietnam war, and her family was one of the families in the region that petitioned the governor to place the new college (the college would become the evergreen state college) in the area so that out of work timber workers would have educational opportunities.

harmony and her cohorts petitioned the governor, and they won. the college was set up in the mid 1960s on a thousand acres of forested land on the sound (were it sits today). the first classes were convened in 1967. the first graduates completed their degrees in 1971.

after harmony's father died, and after one of her two children died (he was crushed while working on an old car near the milk house), and after her second son drifted away to central california, harmony allowed evergreen students the opportunity to live on the property to help her with her chores and maintain the land. farmhands helped harmony from 1976 until the day she died in 2002.

my partner and i, and 2 other couples, paid $25 dollars a month each for rent. we milked the goats twice a week (in the morning as the sun rose, and at night when the sun set) and gathered eggs. we made sure the chickens were in the henhouse, made certain the milk house was clean, and that the trails through the woods were accessible. we also made sure harmony had enough chopped firewood stacked near her wood stove.

because harmony had grown up during the depression, she had a serious clutter problem (like the folks at the maworks coop on maxwell street), which required constant attention so she wouldn't accidently burn down her trailer, or poison herself w/ expired food she had collected from the community center in yelm while on her milk route. she would make a 50 mile circle around the farm, visiting friends in small towns around thurston county, and at the college, where she would sell her eggs and milk.

her milk runs did generate a small amount of money, but the route was mostly to stay in touch with her friends, and it made her feel useful. like KD, she drove an ancient car, a suburu station wagon from the early 70s that also had to be regularly maintained.

the farm hands had monthly meetings w/ harmony, where all 7 of us would discuss the goings on about the farm, and assign/designate special seasonal chores, like cutting the hayfield w/ a borrowed tractor, gathering apples in summer, pressing apples with the cider press to make cider in the fall, tool maintenance and any other concerns that harmony had.

before she died she donated the land (to her son in california’s dismay) with the help of a lawyer (a former farm hand) to a nature conservancy. all 55 acres on the sound (which is easily worth 10-15 million dollars today) was donated to the capital land trust. she did it because she didn't want to see the cedar and douglas fir trees cut down. it's all still there 21 years later, the 35 acres of second growth, the hayfield, the farmhouse from the 20s on the clam mitten (ancient native american clam mitten). today the girl scouts use the property in the summer. absent the scouting activity, the land sits undeveloped. harmony's granddaughter - about my age - ensures that there are no shenanigans with the trust. there were a few famous guests who stayed at the farm over harmony's reign, including the peace pilgrim. have you ever heard of the peace pilgrim ?

https://www.peacepilgrim.org/

all and all, i absorbed many lessons at harmony's farm, and i was exposed to unconventional ideas that i hadn't previously explored. many of these ideas are laid out in the book 'living the good life' by helen and scott nearing, which i read and consulted while i stayed at the farm.

scott nearing was a professor of economics at the wharton school of economics who dropped out in the 1920s. with his wife helen, scott wrote the bible for the back to the land movements that followed. all of them, but especially the back to the land movement in the 1970s.

There are several ways to perform almost any act - an efficient, workable, artistic way and a careless, indifferent, sloppy way. Care and artistry are worth the trouble. They can be a satisfaction to the practitioner and a joy to all beholders. - helen nearing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_the_Good_Life

like the cooperative on maxwell street, we used composting toilets (55 gallon drums w/ toilet seats). it took two people about a year to fill up a 55 gallon drum (poop only. no pee, plus ashes, and detritus - leaves). remember, a person creates about a pound of poop per day. after the drum was filled, it was capped with a lid and moved to another location on the farm, where the cap was left ajar exposing the material to air, where it dried out and decomposed. then after a year, it could be spread beneath the dozen or so apple trees in the hayfield. repeat ad infinitum until the human animal dies.

in addition to composting toilets, and gravity fed fresh water, our cabin had no electricity. we used oil lamps to read. the cabin we lived in was practically built between 2 huge cedar trees, and we'd listen to them sway as we drifted to sleep at night. we were living without electricity in this cabin when ted kozinski published his unabomber manifesto and was arrested in his cabin in montana. i remember reading a copy of the manifesto while i lived at the farm. it was the first book that i had read off printed paper, from the printer at the public library, gleaned off of the internet (there wasn't internet access on the train).

all's well that ends well, and for some reason my partner and i couldn’t keep our relationship together, even living in an ideal situation.

side note - for the record, muffin the cat (harmony called him mr muffin) lived for 2 more years, he died in the wintertime at the age of 17 on the farm where he spent his last years around chickens and goats in the barnyard. my partner and i buried him on a small hill near our cabin. he managed to extend his life, through happenstance, two extra years past his planned expiration date. when we buried him, we put a newpaper comic strip of one of the last comic strips produced by calvin and hobbes (harmony also collected newsprint). we cried.

here's a picture of the land where mr muffin is buried.

https://capitollandtrust.org/conserved-lands/conservation-areas/budd-henderson-inlets/harmony-farm-conservation-easement/

Calvin and Hobbes is a daily American comic strip created by cartoonist Bill Watterson that was syndicated from November 18, 1985, to December 31, 1995. Commonly cited as "the last great newspaper comic", Calvin and Hobbes has enjoyed broad and enduring popularity, influence, and academic and philosophical interest. Wikipedia

End date: December 31, 1995

after the relationship collapsed in 1996/97, i had to leave the farm. it was then that i remembered the initial dream from 1990, the dream to acquire my education at the famous liberal arts school in olympia, which was the reason i had initially moved to olympia in, so i went back to school.

the decision to go to evergreen required going into debt, and the risk associated with that choice (many americans face the same dilemma today). sadly, i have only made more money than the base poverty level twice in the past 22 years, and often my income is a fraction of the poverty line. i made less than 7,000 this year (2023). this past year most of my income was derived from being a landscaper/gardener. so i have never been able to make my deal work, the deal with the banks and with uncle sam.

a few notes about evergreen.

https://keepingscore.blogs.time.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2009/01/top10_mascots_geoducks.jpg

the evergreen state college is a public liberal arts college that does not have grades. students at TESC are evaluated by written evaluations, by both the professor and the student. the evaluations (self evaluation, student's evaluation of the program, and the professor’s evaluation - 3 documents) are collected, and kept at the college. cumulatively these documents reflect the work of the student.

even today in 2023, after the woke phenomena that has infiltrated and disrupted campuses across USAinc., students are not assigned 5 point grades. the college does have a super-duper secret formula/format that it uses to transcribe written evaluations for students who go on to graduate school.

TESC offers intensive coursework, offered as programs. so a student can study one topic for either a semester (32 credit program), or for a quarter (16 credit program). this inter-disciplinarian approach enables people to focus on their subject of choice without distractions. all coursework is integrated. a student will be assigned credit in science, math, english, history or what naught, but all study is inter-coordinated so that the knowledge is gleaned and integrated into a single focus.

for example, i took a 32 credit program called ‘history of american economy’ where macro-economics, history, literature and statistics were integrated into a single curriculum taught simultaneously by two professors - dr lassen and dr bowerman. in addition to the famous economics text by paul a samuelson called 'economics', we also read the novel 'the octopus' by frank norris, which provided a fictional explanation of the rapacious railroad barrons of the late 19th century.

“Believe this, young man," exclaimed Shelgrim, laying a thick powerful forefinger on the table to emphasize his words, "try to believe this - to begin with - that railroads build themselves. Where there is a demand sooner or later there will be a supply. Mr. Derrick, does he grow his wheat? The Wheat grows itself. What does he count for? Does he supply the force? What do I count for? Do I build the Railroad? You are dealing with forces, young man, when you speak of Wheat and the Railroads, not with men. There is the Wheat, the supply. It must be carried to feed the People. There is the demand. The Wheat is one force, the Railroad, another, and there is the law that governs them - supply and demand. Men have only little to do in the whole business. Complications may arise, conditions that bear hard on the individual - crush him maybe - but the Wheat will be carried to feed the people as inevitably as it will grow. If you want to fasten the blame of the affair at Los Muertos on any one person, you will make a mistake. Blame conditions, not men.” -
frank norris, The Octopus: A Story of California

yet not every student takes advantages of the opportunities provided by the college.

for example, even though parts of the WTO demonstration in seattle (1999) were organized at evergreen (there were info sessions at the college) before the demo, only one person (me, myself and i) out of 50 students in my class “history of american economy” attended the demonstration on the day of the famous interaction with the police, teusday november 30, 1999.

https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/DdC5AyFCATNhAboZaU7WMIm4rbsccTFVwpdmlxMitgw/w:900/h:642/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTIuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pdHQtaW1hZ2VzL0dldHR5SW1hZ2VzLTUxNTM0MzMyLmpwZw.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/63/WTO_protests_in_Seattle_November_30_1999.jpg/300px-WTO_protests_in_Seattle_November_30_1999.jpg

by the way, i thought that was odd and ironic at the time - the fact none of my classmates attended the demo. i gave a presentation to the class after the demonstration. i was 32 years old at the time. many students at the college attend TESC because they do not want to study, or learn, much like the students at the traditional college i attended 10 years earlier. often their parents encourage them to attend evergreen so they can finish college and get a job. therefore among the local washingtonians in thurston county, the college kids are often derided as spoiled rich kids just biding their time (and there is some truth to that).

the ratio of professors to students at TESC was intentionally kept to between 20-30 students per accredited professor. so the marxist theory class i took (16 credits) had one professor (there were 15-20 people in the class).

course work relied on primary sources. so instead of receiving one textbook, students (at least in the humanities) typically had to acquire 10-15 books (primary sources - including fiction and non fiction) per quarter.

all of my classes had mandatory seminar twice a week. this meant that for 2 hours - on tuesday and thursday afternoons - undergraduates had to sit in a room w/ 15 other students and their professor and discuss and interpret the primary texts we'd been assigned. the students also had to provide brief written summaries of what they read in seminar.

it was obvious who didn't read the texts - usually 100-150 pages a seminar - as those were the few who remained silent. the seminars in larger classes were usually one class divided into 2. occasionally the 2nd seminar was overseen by a TA, but that was rare.

the college provided the opportunity for independent study, which allowed students to spend a semester focusing on a topic of study of their choice. the independent study is overseen by an accredited professor - in my case dr mosqueada - who had to sign off on the proposition put forward by the student in writing.

my choice for independent study: indigenous resistance to authoritarianism in guatemala during the dirty wars in latin america. my self-created independent study included 4 months of travel by myself in guatemala (i travelled to guatemala and returned home by bus), reading 15 books and numerous articles/essays about the topic with book reports for each, a journal of my travels, a 35 page paper for credit, and documentation of studying spanish in quetzaltenango, guaetamala.

the college was founded in the year of my birth, and was one of a handful of colleges (all private schools) in the US (hampshire college in amherst is another) that adopted the educational ideals/reforms that were popular in the 1960s - integrated coursework, self-evaluation, inclusion of seminar (influenced by folks humanist educators like a.s. neil, author of 'summerhill', plus other intellectuals who underrstood that personal development wasn’t exclusively an intellectual endeavor).

“Summerhill children are allowed to go through their gangster period, and consequentially more furniture is destroyed.” - A.S. Neill, Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing 

what has unfolded at evergreen since 2017 is a travesty. the pedagogy practiced at the college is sound. what happened is that the political liberals (not in the classical sense of the word) felt compelled - consciously/subconsciously - to destroy an institution that offered students a solid public (i.e. affordable) liberal arts education. the professors and administrators do not see it this way, and i understand that, yet that's exactly what they did. they confused humanism with sectarianism and fucked it up (as reflected by decreasing enrollment numbers at the college since 2017).

allowing a real humanist education is dangerous in an authoritarian society (creating free thinkers), and they destroyed the college’s reputation through shenanigans (yes brett weinstein was involved in this treachery as well - every action has a reaction).

here are the two side of the argument - first brett's side of the story.

Campus Argument Goes Viral As Evergreen State Is Caught In Racial Turmoil (HBO)

and here's professor zoltan grossman's take (not a professor of mine, but my x partner and i were his gardeners/landscapers for a few years. i mowed his lawn)

Another Side Of The Evergreen State College Story

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/evergreen-state-college-another-side_b_598cd293e4b090964295e8fc

i did participate in the infamous 'day of absence' with dr mosqueada in the spring of 2001 when i was studying marxist theory.

it wasn't that big of a deal to me, at least i thought larry handled it well. we sat on the grass outside of our seminar building, and each person in the class of 15 maybe 18 people went around in a circle and described their experiences interacting with people of color. i picked one example - i don't even recall which one now, but for the most part i listened to the others, as that was the point of the exercise. what i gleaned was this, younger people (i.e. people who are 20 years old, who have lived in suburban middle class environments) typically don't have a lot of experiences with poor people (black/brown/white) regardless of their ethnicity.

they may overemphasize the racial aspect of a person's identity while ignoring their relationship to class. i wasn't offended by the exercise - the day of absence, nor was i surprised by the exaggerated responses to the day of absence on evergreen's campus. of course, weinstein's experience, and the protesters he encountered, occurred 16 years later in 2017, after obama, after trump, after america had gone crazy.

the opportunity to honestly pursue truth (exemplified by former graduates like paul stamets, john bellemy foster) was smeared by the entire affair.

this wasn’t an accident. by emphasizing differences (especially along racial/gender/sexual orientation lines) the administrators and many of the professors (many of whom were timid and easily manipulated by the activists) intentionally destroyed the humanist ethic that the founders of the college had created and fostered.

many of these founders of the college obviously died/retired by the mid 1990s. i was fortunate that i had 2 of these professors who had been at evergreen since its founding before they retired or died (jerry lassen RIP, and pris bowerman). these professors from the colleges founding were different. they realized what the founding of the college was intended to achieve, and after living in this community for 27 of the past 33 years, i believe they would have been upset with how both sides reacted to the protests surrounding the day of absence.

jerry and priss were not the 2 professors i mentioned in the earlier comment a few days ago; the comment that motivated me to respond to the question implied in his comment, that i was a peer of dr peter bohmer.

thank you who d who for the inspiration, i never would have taken the time to write this response answering the questions.

"are you a professor ?" and "what am i grateful for this thanksgiving ?"

my grandmother died during the first week of september 2001. i returned to the place of my birth and attended her funeral. i returned home on an american airlines flight with a swiss army knife in my pocket, a week before sept 11th 2001. that was the last time that would ever happen in my lifetime (pocket knife in pocket on an airplane). it also closed a chapter in my life, as i officially received my diploma from TESC that month as well (september 2001).

the people of olympia gathered in sylvester park on september12, 2001. sylvester park is a park in front of the old state house (the most beautiful building in town, besides the old olympia brewery building, in my humble opinion). there's a statue of john rogers, a populist legislator (not a D or R), who helped pass the barefoot schoolboy act in washington state in 1895, ensuring that every washingtonian, regardless of their wealth, would have the opportunity to receive an education. (link below, plus photo of the old capital building and the statue).

https://www.hmdb.org/Photos3/309/Photo309354.jpg?5252015121700PM

The Barefoot Schoolboy Act:

Various solutions were proffered, but the first major shift in responsibility from local sources to state resources was undertaken by the Populist Representative John Rogers from Puyallup. “Rogers was a strong, well-liked Governor whose administration increased the strength of Populist principles here. In 1895 as a member of the State House of Representatives, he had sponsored the Barefoot Schoolboy Law, as it came to be called, which provided that a certain minimum allowance for the education of each child in the state should be made available by the Legislature. In effect, this was the beginning of the principle of equalization in education between counties, the procedure by which wealthier counties contribute more to state educational funds than poorer counties, the difference being used to increase the amount available in the latter. This concept is accepted now in many areas of government, but at that time it was startling to many people because up until then a county that could afford money for schools and most other services provided them; a county that could not afford them did without.” (Avery, p. 201)

The measure provided six dollars for every child counted in the census, “whether or not they attended school. As the number of students who actually enrolled in school increased, the plan became less adequate. This led to several amendments to the original proposal. In 1899, the figure was increased to eight dollars per census child and in 1901 it was increased to ten dollars.” (Hawkins, p56) Even though not the last word on school funding, the Act introduced the concept of an expanded responsibility for the state to provide educational funding. This trend continued through the following decades and increased the need for state revenues, having an impact on discussions regarding the state tax structure. The need to support schools and the growing acceptance of the role of the state became intrinsically connected to the question of taxes.

However, districts still relied heavily on local property taxes for the bulk of school monies and the inequalities between rich and poor districts persisted which needed to be addressed in the coming years.

the people in olympia who wanted peace in the world gathered in a giant square facing each other, silent, holding hands, and praying. olympia has always reminded me of the town whoville from the children's story 'how the grinch stole christmas'. it's a resilient place filled with many optimists and a few pessimists.

the choice to re-attend college (not on scholarship, as i had previously attended college in illinois) was the nail in my coffin (student loans), in a sense this choice guaranteed that my subconscious desire to live a voluntary life in poverty would be fulfilled.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostolic_poverty

the story becomes complicated from this point on and would entail revealing details about people that i don't want to reveal too many details about for the moment (as i've tried to not describe too many details about lovers, and friends, and family who are alive).

so i'll rap it up with a couple of short vignettes.

after evergreen, i worked as social worker with the developmentally disabled - a job that rachel corrie also worked in olympia - for 2 agencies and a family. i lost one of the jobs for refusing to take a drug test. i appealed the decision and ended up having a long conversation with an unemployment adjudicator (in this case a real judge). i explained to him that what i did on my own time, perhaps smoke cannabis, had no reflection on my ability to help people as an aide. he agreed with me, but pointed out that those were the rules as he denied my unemployment claim in 2003.

washington was one of the first 2 states to legalize cannabis in 2016. as of january 2024, washington employers, along w/ the state of california which passed similar legislation last year, will not be able to punitively use drug testing against cannabis consumers (except for certain industries, always exceptions), as it will be treated the same as alcohol i.e. what you do at home is your business and doesn't affect your employment, as drinking a glass of wine with dinner also doesn't impair your ability to work.

after i lost the first job as a social worker, health care aid, i lost a second job working in the same trade, working as a caregiver for the developmentally disabled. the job was lost after i was caught dumpster diving with a client who was crazy, but who had no belongings because of his disability and limited income.

the client, who was 50, and i decided to on a field trip to the forest at the college. the two of us walked the trails down to the beach, then wove our way back up to the parking lots. it was mid-june, the day after classes ended. as we passed the dumpsters, the client noticed the discarded piles of dishes, clothes, electronics, and furniture that the students had abandoned near the dumpsters before they headed home after break. the client immediately, intuitively, was drawn to the dumpsters as we were walking to the car (a 1971 orange superbeetle). i didn't see any problem with examining the contents of the dumpster whatsoever, in fact i saw dumpster diving as a positive activity. so we went through the dumpsters looking for treasure, and my friend, the client, filled up a big box with miscellaneous stuff, with anything he wanted. the client had the biggest smile on his face as we took the possessions back to his group home. upon arrival at the house, big frowns. the manager of the house without haste informed the agency of my treacherous act potentially teaching the client survival skills he could use if he were to escape the group house.

i had committed a grave transgression when i allowed a person who is an impoverished ward of the state access to a few meager possessions discarded by college students.

objects that he couldn’t afford to purchase himself. these were not dangerous objects mind you, just objects that the agency were denying him (dishes/clothing/art). the manager of the agency promptly fired me for encouraging anti-social behavior. as he fired me, he accused me of believing that i was "better" than everyone else. that was his dig, that was his rationalization for his fear of dumpster diving (ichy, ichy ichy - danger will robinson, danger will robinson).

finally last olympia note, in 2003, there was the tragedy of rachel corrie being crushed to death by a weaponized bulldozer in rafah, gaza. crushed by a machine made by the caterpillar tractor company - a company that employed both sides of my family in illinois, both of my grandparents during ww2, and employed my uncles up to the present day (currently retired).

for the record, i wasn't friends w/ rachel. she was a person in my small activist community that i inevitably crossed paths with on several occasions, but i respected her and her and her peers involved with the internatonal solidarity movement.

i have about 1/2 dozen memories of her at demonstrations, memories of her asking questions of ralph nader after a speech he gave at the college, of rachel speaking to a small circle of about 20 people at percival landing, including a few of my professors from the college. the small demonstration at percival landing (the southern most point of puget sound) occurred immediately after the united states started bombing afghanastan in 2001. the following link is an image of mural in olympia showing solidarity with the people of rafah, gaza. it's on a wall, in a parking lot, a stones throw a way from percival landing.

https://olympiarafahmural.org/explore-the-mural/

i also remember rachel marching with a group of activists to our congressperson's office in the buildup to the iraq war, before the war actually happened, and...

and one rainy day, i remember holding the door for rachel corrie briefly, as we both crowded into our local coffee shop at the time (batdorf and bronson - before they moved across capital ave a few years later to their bigger more spacious, vacuous yuppified space). it was a busy morning, and it was raining. the coffee shop was packed. the windows were filled with steam, as people lined up for their morning caffeine. there were only 4 small tables in the joint, and 30 people crammed in the tight quarters, 5-10 people at the coffee bar, anther 5-10 people at tables, and 5-10 people in line. she didn't make eye contact as i held the door open, but she was shy. we all felt welcome in that coffee shop, getting out of the rain for a few minutes before our days started outside in the real world.

i’ve lived in olympia most of my adult life (and olympia and evergreen are inseparable in my mind). i’ve spent that time working as a manual laborer, and reading, pursuing the truth as i have come to understand it (dear NSA minder, please take note here). by living in olympia, (minus a 4 year odyssey to deal with my family/friends in the midwest during/after my mother's death in 2005), i’ve managed to interact with many intellectuals who’ve wandered through the town. olympia is now an oasis for yuppies from all over the US (16th 'best' city to live in and so on). as the college changed, as the state grew in population, so did the essential character of olympia change. the character of other counter-culture refuges in the PNW also changed. bellingham washington, eugene oregon and arcata california also have been irreparably altered in the past 20 years.

i’ve learned to love and appreciate the people who were raised in washington state (their quirks); and in many ways i am now one of them, as opposed to the ideologues who now dominate the college and the people who have massive amounts of disposable income who are flocking here to buy their piece of paradise, as they destroy paradise cutting down one tree after the next to construct new housing developments. there are now discussion in washington state to place a second international airport (between sea-tac and portland) in a forested strip of land about 10 miles south of town.

for the record, my favorite time on earth was spent hiking by myself alone for days in the mountains - long trips into the cascades of more than a week, solo hiking trips on the pacific crest trail. i've made 3 such journeys in the past 10 years.

my most memorable experiences i've spent with other people were hitchhiking trips by myself (7000 miles, three 2000 mile trips b/w WA state and illinois, one 1,500 mile trip between illinois and arizona - most of it b/w 1999-2001), standing by the freeway waiting for a ride, and then engaging in random conversations with ordinary people in the sanctuary of their cars and trucks where they freely spoke their minds and shared their thoughts without reservations. 

bob dylan - Desolation Row (Official Audio) 

“Remember that the best and greatest among mankind are those who do themselves no worldly good. Every successful man is more or less a selfish man. The devoted fail...” ― Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

happy holidays. i hope anyone who reads this collection of vignettes will find something that they are grateful for, some person, some time, some achievement, some memory that they cherish in their own lives.

...peace...