I hate doing this. I mean, I really hate it. I’ve put it off for weeks. Everyone is begging for your money. Especially on this side of the street. If you’re a Trucker Carlson, you just snap your fingers and the money falls like rain. Trucker got $2 million dollars from his “friends” with assurances there was more if he needed it. There’s always plenty of money defending the bureaucracy and speaking for the status quo.
You don’t just start doing this strange activity for fun. It’s a compulsion and an obsession. It wakes with me early in the morning and sleeps with me at night. Sometimes, I write in my sleep and the product is fully formed, only needing polishing in print. You have to have a motivation beyond a casual interest and a weird story to tell.
I was in Dallas on November 22, 1963. I was in Montgomery, AL in 1965 for freedom summer and the march from Selma to Montgomery. I was in Chicago in 1968 for the Democratic national convention. Or I should say my father was in town during these events. Strange? After the Kennedy Assassination, guess where we vacationed? New Orleans, of course. It was a business/family vacation. Strange? In 1967, my parents travelled to Europe and made a stop in East Berlin. During the cold war Berlin was where east met west. It wasn’t a tourist destination. It was where spies were exchanged, and spies plied their trade.
This is my childhood. The day they murdered President Kennedy, as soon as they announced the roads in Dealey Plaza were open. My father put us in the Chrysler, and we were there. As we approached the school book depository on Houston street. I saw two silver/gray marks on the pavement. They were marked off with small lighted police barriers. Being a kid, I asked. “Daddy, what are those?” Bullet marks, my WW2 military veteran father assured me.
Take a ruler and a map of Dealey Plaza. We all know about where the shooting occurred. Now, imagine they missed from the grassy knoll, and the bullets struck Houston street near Main street. History says, no such thing ever occurred, but I saw it with my own eyes. Somehow, even though we’d lived in Dallas less than a year, my father seemed to know all about Jack Ruby. That he was a pimp and mob affiliated.
During the war, (WW2) my father had been a flight engineer on a blimp. Blimps were used because they could hover with a radar set over the Gulf of Mexico. My father’s job was repair and maintenance of the radar set. For a job like that, he needed a top-secret clearance. He was also in the “secret squadron.” They went on intelligence missions and just listened and watched at night. If you know where the U-boats are, you can reroute the convoy away from them. If you bomb the U-boat, they will just send another.
In Montgomery, I got to see Jim Crow dying. The old Dairy Queen’s used to have two serving windows. Do you know why? It wasn’t for faster service. I went to a Saturday movie matinee once in one of those cavernous old downtown theaters. Being a kid, once I saw a balcony, I wanted up there. I looked all around but couldn’t find the stairs. Finally, I asked at the concession stand how to reach the balcony. I was told in no uncertain terms the balcony was “Closed!” There were no stairs on the inside. There was a rickety fire escape type of stairs on the outside which led to the balcony. That was the “colored entrance.”
I remember bloody Sunday and when we went down Highway 80 and saw MLK and the marchers. My father took us to see where Viola Leutso was murdered. Dad always seemed to know about things like that. This is my childhood. All sorts of odd coincidences. I learned with certainty the government lies to us at age eight.
Funny story, when we first arrived in Montgomery for about the first month or six weeks. We stayed in a Trailer Park by the front gate of Maxwell Air Force Base. Growing up poor, my father was very particular about his lodgings. This wasn’t a new doublewide this was an old 1960s airstream trailer. And the funny part is, I didn’t learn until years later. Maxwell Air Force Base was a major CIA base handling Latin America and the Caribbean. And the trailer was located miles away from where my father was supposed to be working.
That’s my childhood. Nothing is as it seems. It was like sitting in the front car of a roller coaster. You’ll love this. Out of the blue one day, my dad asked my 18-year-old sister, if she would like to be a page at the Democratic National convention downtown. He picks up the phone and Shazam, she’s in. But that’s nothing really, in 1960, my other sister had really loved JFK. My father picked up the phone and got them front row seats less than six feet from JFK.
Is there any reason I wouldn’t end up warped by that childhood?
Because of that childhood, I’ve always loved history. In 2008, I got a history lesson of my own. Like millions of you, I got fucked. I lost everything, including a wife. I was outraged and bitter. Somehow, four years of homelessness brought it all together for me. At first, I was outraged for me! How could they do this to me? Me! But after a couple of years, I had my polish knocked off. I was reborn. How could do this to all of us!
I saw the world with new eyes. I saw mothers telling kids to put the cereal back and get the cheap shit. I saw a woman forty cents short of a Happy Meal for a child. Anyone in that line would have gladly paid the difference for her, but she was shamed and publicly humiliated. She couldn’t feed her child. It hurt me to watch that. I can only imagine what it must have felt like to live it.
Too many coincidences not to be a custom-made education made for something.
It’s like Woody says;“I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard travelling. I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you. I could hire out to the other side, the big money side, and get several dollars every week just to quit singing my own kind of songs and to sing the kind that knock you down still farther and the ones that poke fun at you even more and the ones that make you think that you’ve not got any sense at all. But I decided a long time ago that I’d starve to death before I’d sing any such songs as that. The radio waves and your movies and your jukeboxes and your songbooks are already loaded down and running over with such no good songs as that anyhow.” ― Woody Guthrie
There are no paywalls here. No subscription levels. All are welcome. No discounts for prompt payment and no merchandise! And there never will be! I don’t do this to make money. And if I didn’t need money, I wouldn’t ask. But I ask. I ask humbly and I don’t play games with you or run gimmicks or come ons. No free Jell-O mold in the shape of Colorado with your paid three-year subscription! I’m not looking to get rich; I just need to pay some bills and feed Ms. Grumbles, the world’s noisiest house cat. I ask humbly in world filled with better causes. No tricks or gimmicks or games, this isn’t a scam, it’s a personal and professional obsession. Like a guard dog watching. Someone who is unbought, and on your side, in a world of the purchased.
Ms. Grumbles – Offical house cat of the 2026 revolution!
This Carbon Based Life 
Leave a comment