Opaque Membrane of My Mind

The Damage is Done

Imagine 

They're connected. A hole in the wall and a crushed wall; the beginning and the end. One doesn't happen without the other.

April fools day is tomorrow. Tupac is alive. Spring is here. Every memory from then sits behind an opaque membrane my mind created to keep me safe and the contents secure. The courage to open a door escapes me. I know what's in there; I want to stay away, and I know I won't. Maybe I have to go inside to see it's all still there. As if it would ever leave. Idle and content were the contents and in the spring they stir.

The hole was patched and painted over, and it's still there.  The wall is too late gone, but it's still there.  It will always be there where it should have never been. As time goes by, there will never be an end.

Here we go again and I can't imagine.

One, two, three, what are we fightin' for?

Country Joe McDonald at Woodstock 1969

What are we fighting for? We've been here before and we so soon forget. In 1961 a rich kid president with no son to sacrifice blustered this country to the brink of nuclear war and settled for opening the gates to Vietnam hell. Of course the next two Commanders In Chief had no sons to sacrifice so they served up more war for your sons and daughters. We learned what we needed to know by 1975 and by 1983 we were blustered back to nuclear brinkmanship aboard the SS Bed Time For Bonzo.
But there was no were to war to so we waited.

The wait ended when George W. Bush was safe and sound from military duty and his daddy sent your kids to the middle east to flex US muscle.  By 2003 Vietnam was history and the lessons were forgot. Iraq, Bush The Younger, tool to President Cheney, said is not another Vietnam. We disagreed. He was right. Iraq is different. It's a worse nightmare.

 The horror will not end. And here we are, right back to where we've always been. The next generation of sabre rattlers is ready to send the next generation of American's somewhere, anywhere, to die to prove once again, we never ever learn, and we never ever have a president who has sons or daughters in harms way.

Feeling a Word

Packers. The word looks green and gold, black and white; it feels young and old. Packers sounds like an AM Radio station in a 1960's brown Chevrolet. I hear the flick of a Zippo lighter, a fooopff of the flame and clink of the silver steel lid, and then the aroma of a freshly lit Winston followed by the first twinges of car sickness.

Packers. Mud, rain, snow. Sunny warm Sundays. The boys. There are those old feelings of my youth where the Packers are black and white on television and the middle years where they're brilliant green and gold and the fun would never end.

I like the word, Packers. All by itself this word, Packers, takes me places.