The United States is like the guy at the party who gives cocaine to everybody
and still nobody likes him.
-- Jim Samuels --
--------------------------------------------------------
Well, I finished the King book. Pretty good, actually. In a postscript at the end, he says he changed some things to make them more convenient to his story. I wish he had said that in the beginning, because I did notice some discrepancies, and they bothered me.
The Cuban Missile Crisis happened early in my first year of college. King has people freaking out, committing suicide, the whole bit. I don't remember it that way. In fact, the way I remember it, there WERE NO missiles, just half-assed plans, and some empty concrete launch pads. The US government blew it all out of proportion just to make a point. Sabre rattling. Somebody wanted to look big and tough, and redeem themselves after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Whether that's what the reality was or not, I'm talking about how the people around me reacted. My point is that nobody that I knew of was freaked out, and I knew a lot of military people.
The Kennedy assassination happened in my second year of college. At first I didn't remember it at all. Shows how out of it I was at the time. After thinking about it for a while, I remember walking into the Husky Lounge, where resided the only television on campus, and the lounge was packed with students all focused on the TV, most crying and wailing. I'd asked what happened, and when someone told me, I shrugged and thought "Big deal. People get shot all the time. It's not the end of the world." I thought people were overreacting, that the whole thing was silly.
The context:
That was the semester when my parents were living temporarily about 15 miles from the college, and my father decided I should live "at home" that semester, and get a ride every day with the piece of scum guy who had molested me when I was in elementary school. I'd get home from classes every day before my father got home from work, and I'd rush to wash and go to the bathroom, and then lock myself in my bedroom until after he'd left for work the next morning. I'd sit up there shaking and listening to the shouting and swearing and hitting and crying downstairs. On the weekends I didn't leave the room until I was sure he was out of the house. Talk about bladder control. And hunger.
So, somebody I didn't know got killed? Hey, he knew that was a danger when he took the job. Just a few days before, my 4-year-old brother had been thrown across the kitchen, striking his head, and he had a huge swelling on his left temple, and I'd had to beg my mother to take him to the hospital. All you folks crying in the Husky Lounge over some guy you didn't know? Why don't you cry for my mother and my brothers and sisters.
So, yeah. I didn't have any emotion to spare for famous rich people.
-------------------------------
I hadn't noticed that my last post was Tuesday. I'm slowing down. Part of it is that I have been reading a lot of political stuff, and it makes me so angry I don't want to make it worse by commenting on it. I am having great difficulty this very minute resisting ... don't get me started.
-------------------------------
There are some people out there who have been checking this blog daily for a few years. That was ok back when I was posting daily for years. But now, checking here three, four, five times a day is, frankly, a waste of your time, especially if this is not the only place you check several times a day.
I strongly suggest that if you are not already getting the feeds, you start. One way is www.google.com/reader. It will tell you when there's a new post to any of the sites you follow that put out feeds. There are other feed aggregaters (-ors?). Seriously, they save time.
I might go to a blog, forum, or news site multiple times to see if anything interesting happened in the comments on posts I might be interested in. (I don't subscribe to comments because the alerts come in email, and I don't like my email cluttered with every update.) But if there's no comments I'm following, and no new posts, I don't have to go there again until Google Reader tells me there's a new post.
Over and out.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment