Sidetracked Charley

Life is very complex at this time. Winter is approaching. Decisions are hanging waiting on the result of actions taken this summer like seeds planted for a garden. These are the things I focus on when I attempt to divorce myself from those things over which I have no control. Things like the orange monster in the White Castle on the swamp. As elections ramp up I more and more feel I have no choice. Or certainly that my choice does not matter. We are no longer a representative republic. First there was 2000 and hanging chads and the Supreme Court doing what it constitutionally should not have done. It was a rip off and oddly I felt grateful we did not riot. But we should have rioted. We were cheated. Where would be now on climate change if Gore had been allowed to be president? At least the Democrats should have screamed but they didn't. The DNC didn't help with the Hillary debacle over Bernie. Another rip off. But by then we had been through 9/11 and the election of ...

The only reason I entered college was because I was suppose to. It is what my senior class did. Or at least my special class of the senior class: the college bound. I took the obligatory tests for college entry, received higher than adequate scores, even got a scholarship offer or two, but it was my mother who filled out my college application to the University of New Mexico, told me of my acceptance, and made sure I got up and out the door at the appropriate time to register. She did that, I now believe, because she knew how dangerously close I was to losing it. Losing me. Mother and I were not close. And maybe at that time when she pushed me out the door further apart than we had ever been. But she made the right decision for me. I had always been a bookworm, and college was full of books, and people who loved books, people who debated books and authors and meanings. And on November 22, 1963 I was going to the SUB, student union building, to meet some of those bookish friends...