Missin’ This?

All Rights Reserved © 2022 Thomas W. Day

 “You think I’ll miss all this?” He pointed out the window of his Fitzsimons General Hospital room. It wasn’t much of a window, but it wasn’t much of a room, either: white tiled, white ceiling tiles, even a white metal door and just enough space for his hospital bed, some medical equipment and two friends to sit in folding chairs near the bed. His window looked over a parking lot across miles of Denver rooftops to the west, but most days the view of the mountains was right there, filling the window through the Denver haze. We were, all three of us, young and from western Kansas and the mountains were a rare sight. Any kind of variation in the earth’s topology was rare, for us. I wasn’t sure the mountains were what he meant, though. For the purposes of this story our hospitalized friend’s name will be “David,” for several reasons.

It had been a rare spontaneous trip across the Kansas desert into the Colorado foothills and a blizzard just a few miles outside of Denver for Don and I. We had been in a band together, but the Vietnam War was winding that down for us. Don, the band’s drummer, and Ed, our lead singer, guitarist, and my songwriting conspirator were both going into the Army in a few months. I’d flunked the Navy physical exam, due to asthma, early that spring. So, I was “free” from military service, but that meant I had to grow up on my own without any of the social guardrails some of my friends would meet in the Army. There were a few gigs booked, but not for me, it would turn out. I was registered to start classes at a fly-by-night computer school in Texas in a few months.

The reason Don and I were in Denver was Don had heard that a kid who had been a neighbor of mine a few years earlier and who was a Catholic school classmate and friend of Don’s was back from Vietnam, struck in a hospital room in Denver, but who would soon be released from both the hospital and the Army with full disability veteran’s benefits. Neither Don or I understood the implications of the full disability designation, but we knew it must be something serious.

My memory of the seriousness of our friend’s illness is sketchy, more than 50 years later. Other than being extremely thin and pale, he looked pretty much as I remembered him. For a more perceptive kid, that should have been an obvious clue since I hadn’t seen him since we were both 13 years old. He was upbeat, smiled a lot, was anxious to “get back home,” and seemed glad to see us. We thought he had it made, a few months in the Army, a trip overseas, a plane ride back to Denver, and he was financially set for life. That’s what we, especially me, thought.

A few years later, Don and I would be in a band again. Me back from a hippy urban-survivalist adventure in Dallas and him back from a tour of Vietnam, a mental breakdown, and a general discharge from the Army for not being able to hold up his end of terrorizing a third world country as an in-country sniper and, later, a CID spy in Germany. Don would definitely not have it made with his general discharge. In getting reacquainted after three years of mutual absence from our “home” town, Don was back in school, in a community college electronics technician program and trying to be a good citizen. The stigma of his general discharge would follow him for the rest of his short life. While I occasionally took some heat as a “draft dodger,” that slowly went into the background as the nation quietly tried to forget about Vietnam and our unimpressive showing as “the most powerful nation in the world.” But Don’s general discharge stuck to him until he died. In one more act of kindness, Don convinced me to join him in the electronics program which kickstarted the rest of my life.

Back in ‘67, the three-hundred-and-fifty mile drive from Dodge to Denver and the hospital had been an adventure. Just barely after we made it to I70 a few miles outside of Aurora, Don’s ‘57 Chevy died on the side of the freeway in a white sheet of a late spring blizzard. It wasn’t the first time this had happened to him, so he knew what to look for first; the fuel pump. We’d left Dodge on a seventy-degree early summer day, dressed accordingly for poor kids in 1966, and landed in the plains of Colorado, freezing temperatures, snow falling practically in clumps, traffic blasting by us while we soaked ourselves taking turns trying to get the fuel pump off of that godawful car. There was a filling station, still open, about a half mile back east of where our transportation had become a mediocre shelter from the storm and we hiked back for a telephone and heat. The station was going to close for the night at 11PM, but the guy running the place let us pile a bunch of pallets and other flammables at the end of the driveway, near a fifty-five gallon steel barrel, and Don called a relative in Denver for help. We were almost penniless, so it wasn’t like the station attendant was refusing us service, we couldn’t afford anything he could offer. We set the trashcan on fire both for warmth and as a signal fire for Don’s rescue vehicle. For what seems like several hours today, we took turns warming up and stoking the fire and hiking back to the car to keep at the fuel pump service.

I don’t remember how the vehicle rescue happened. From that flaming trash barrel to a night on a couch to sitting in that hospital room envying David’s financial situation, it’s all a blink and a blur. We made the fuel pump repair, in a warm dry garage, drove to the hospital, and negotiated the usual hospital maze in a series of flashback photos in my memory. But, now, I am back in that room, admiring the view, wondering about my future, David’s medical situation, and thinking about the drive back home and the odds of ending up frozen to death in another blizzard. And I said, “Miss what?”

David grinned at me, “All of this. Us, the hospital, the mountains, the blue sky, this crap in my body the docs say they can’t figure out and can’t kill, being alive. Do you think I’ll miss it?”

My mother died when I was nine-years-old. The next couple of years of having bullshit like “God works in mysterious ways” and “everything happens for a reason” securely pounded the atheist nail into my personality. 

Don was a lapsed Catholic, partially because when playing basketball for a Catholic college he injured his knee and the college voided his scholarship and booted him out, not because he was a poor student but because they recruited him to play basketball and he couldn’t. Later, after returning from Vietnam one of Don’s career phases was as an evangelical “minister” in a small Kansas town. Between being an evangelical minister and an Army sniper, Don had been a carpenter, a cabinet maker, and a drug dealer who spent some time in prison. At one time, he answered his phone with "Praise the Lord this is . . . " I don't know what Don believed, but I think he desperately wanted to imagine there was some kind of point to his journey.

Don’s response to David's question was, “Anytime you want you can relive any part of your life.” I think he was serious, too.

I tried to skate the question, but several times David asked, “What about you?” Meaning me.

“Nope. You won’t miss it or anything else. None of us will”

About six months later, David died at home from some kind of untreatable bacterial or chemical infestation he’d received in Vietnam. “Set for life” took on a new meaning for me. Ten years later, Don died of a drug overdose, alone in a shabby rental unit in a small central Kansas ghost town.

All Rights Reserved © 2022 Thomas W. Day

Rigged Against Them?

I watched a little of Dave Chappelle’s SNL opening last night (Yeah, I know it’s “Saturday Night Live,” not “Sunday Streaming.”) and his remarks about his poor (not really), dumb (really), Republican-voting, Trump-loving Ohio rube neighbors struck me as totally clueless. I’ve been hearing whining rural and urban underachievers bitch about the “system” that is “rigged against me” since I was a kid 70 years ago. Out of every group of this pitiful group of losers will come several people who pull themselves up by their bootstraps and have a whine-free life, blowing the hell out of the “rigged against them” argument.

Genetics are what are rigged against them. Like Larry McMurtry said

“He’s [Trump] is very loved. The reason he’s loved is because people in Ohio have never seen somebody like him. He’s what I call an ‘honest liar’. . . That first debate, I’d never seen anything like it. I’d never seen a white male billionaire screaming at the top of his lungs, ‘This whole system is rigged,’ he said. And across the stage was a white woman, Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama saying ‘No, it’s not.’” Of course, that is a fairly perverted observation of what happened in that debate and the resulting national argument about electing a con artist and known mobster to national office. “Another con artist,” would be more accurate, since the whole Republican establishment has gone over to the darkest of the dark side.

Chappelle’s political and social analysis is, of course, as goofy as most of Dave’s career of funny over-simplifications. Those “poor white people” in Ohio have seen hundreds of Trump-like “honest liars,” Trump was not only not the first but not even the 1,001^st. They see and hear them every Sunday in their fundamentalist churches and on television where they pour money into the pockets of televangelists in the equally insane and gullible hope that if they can’t make it in this world they’ll make it in the next by following their pennies and dollar bills into heaven. And, of course, Trump was lying (as always) about being a billionaire, but there has never been a shortage of bullshit artist millionaires and Ohio has more than a few of those characters.

But low brows like Chappelle’s neighbors (who “love” him because of his money and tolerate his color) and Dave himself conveniently neglect to mention the reason Republicans hate Hillary Clinton with a passion. She tried and failed (thanks to the people she was trying to help) to start a first step at a national health care system in 1993. She tried to start unravelling the worst part of our rigged system, 60% of US personal bankruptcies are due to medical expenses and a fairly conservative estimate means at least 650,000 medical bankruptcies occur every year which would mean about 18,000,000 personal bankruptcies are due to the Republican effort to squash national healthcare. Currently about 1 out of 6 Americans are carrying significant medical debt.

And they voted for that fucked-up system, repeatedly. You don’t get to bitch about a rigged system when you keep voting for the riggers. Worse, your whining rings false when you fall in love with a con artist who has failed at every business he’s started, even with an $800B head-start in life, left a long trail of ripped off customers, vendors, and business partners (including almost every major bank in the western world), and had an obvious conflict of interest with his Russian “business partners’ and the job of US President. That’s who you think is “telling the truth?”

The problem with Trump’s whining lovers isn’t that the system is rigged against them. The problem is that they are too dumb to know what “rigged” means. Start with this definition from Webster’s, “manipulated or controlled by deceptive or dishonest means." Trump’s fans manipulate themselves and purposely choose the people who obviously lie to them without restraint. When you are in the driver’s seat and you choose to drive off of a cliff, you are not being manipulated or controlled by anything but your own foolishness.

Cults Here, Cults There, Cults Everywhere

Humans are a herd animal. You can’t avoid the evidence, it’s everywhere. Even out on the open highway, in a remote area with nothing but wide open spaces all around you (like 99% of every where west of the Mississippi), humans crowd into herd. I’ll be cruising along, alone, and in the review mirror I’ll see a crowd of vehicles, all practically bumper-to-bumper, approaching at some speed well over the limit, huddling together as if being in a pack of vehicles is protection from wolves or marauders. That wave of vehicles will pass and I’ll get a few moments of peace and sanity before the next wave of idiots arrives. I used to wonder what that was about, but no more.

Today, there are cults for everything from the clothes or shoes we wear to the religion or politics to which we ascribe. The wingnuts all herd together, listen to the same 2 “news sources,” wear their self-identifying MAGA hat uniforms, and call everyone else “sheeple.” Like the crazy right, the crazy left only accepts “news” from the proper incredible academic sources, which can only be verified by other equally cynical academics, none of whom have ever held a position of responsibility or accountability in their lives. Both sides hate “the mainstream media” as if only the nuttiest commentators are worth listening to. There are vintage car and motorcycle and, probably, golf cart cults. There are guitar, golf club (and golf club memberships), football and basketball and soccer team, and racial cults. Tesla owners desperately cling to the delusion that making Musk “the richest man in the world” has made the planet a better place, while glibly signing off on an NDA to get routine maintenance performed on their homicidal and unnecessarily complicated and expensive vehicle. And religion, of course, is the ultimate cult. The United States and the rest of the Third World is overwhelmingly religious (71% in the US, at the last count) and the easiest path to becoming wildly rich with no verifiable skills or originality is to be a nutjob cable television “Christian minister.”

Cults are the ultimate herd statement. Nothing says “I can’t think for myself” like a cult membership. Cults need “leaders” and followers and “others”; the enemy, the rest of the world that the cult has bonded together from whom to defend itself. Inclusiveness is the furthest thing from the point of a cult. If you don’t have a larger group of people to feel superior to, the whole point of a cult vanishes in a “puff of logic.”

There are all kinds of resources explaining why so many humans desperately need cults, from "10 Psychological Reasons Why People Join Cults" to "Why Do So Many Adults Join Cults?" (a loose definition of "adults," in my opinion) to my favorite “Why People Fall for Cults – the Church of God International.” In that last one, the author states “some people fall in with a cult due to their intelligence or lack thereof. Some people are too young to know better or not very experienced with life. On the other hand, intelligent people who fall in with a cult may be too smart for their own good. The more intelligent cult followers think they are smarter than the average person and privy to special knowledge than the average person.” Being “too smart for [your] own good” has been a prime reason that the ruling cult of the moment has burned at the stake, disemboweled, banished, and drawn-and-quartered cult doubters since humans started “banging the rocks together.” The one thing that article probably got right was this, “everyone is programmed to be part of something larger than themselves." By “larger,” we usually mean a like-minded community of people, probably led by someone with an agenda that is probably destructive to the group but beneficial to that leader.

Being in the minority is not a requirement for cultism, but it helps. More eyes, more opinions, and more voices is usually the way a cult collapses. As of 2014, 70.6% of US citizens professed to be “Christian,” with evangelical protestants being the larger of that group at 25.4%. Of course, that evangelical protestant category contains a ton of very independent cultish groups, most of which are led by someone raking in the money in barrels full. Even Catholics, the next largest group at 20.8% are widely segmented from traditional members to activist groups like Pax Christi. Then there are the 5.9% of non-Christian faith cults and, finally, the 22.8% “unaffiliated” “nones” who include atheists, agnostics, and the majority “nothing in particular” folks who have better things to do than worry about magic and bullshit. If the slowly growing group of “nones” give you some hope for human intelligence, it’s worth commenting that 80+% of US citizens are absolutely certain to fairly certain believe in the Christian God. The Christian cult is almost as strong as ever in this declining empire. Religion and superstition has always been the path empires take on their way to oblivion.

“Where Did They All Go?”

In a discussion that turned weirdly (hysterically similar to the stuff that used to go on in my parents’ home whenever they suffered any kind of cognitive dissonance sneaking inside their very conservative western Kansas news-blinders) an acquaintance shrieked “Where did they all go, then?” and “nobody wants to work anymore.” This was at the end of an interminable last-of-its-kind (I hope) dinner where pretty much everything finally went off of the rails with little hope of reconciliation. That had been a long time coming, but when it arrived it was a little startling. Still, the conversation (screaming match?) inspired some investigation into a topic I’ve wondered about.

A lot of “where did they all go” question is old news for me. Friends working in a dozen different industries have kept me sort-of-in-touch with manufacturing tech, and support work after I retired in 2013. All of them, by the way, are making more money in today’s dollar than I ever did at my peak income. Pandemic and supply lines stuff aside, people with skills are in huge demand and everyone else can, at least, find a job if they want one.

Tech and other sorts of parts in the supply lines were coming unglued in lots of manufacturing in early 2018 as Trump’s “trade” fuckups scared some of our economic partners, like Canada’s forestry production, into finding more predictable/rational trade partners. At least one guitar manufacturer in California started using “urban forestry” to supplement their diminishing access to “tone woods” like red and yellow Canadian cedar. Lots of the raw materials we used to get from South America is now going, first, to China, Japan, and the EU. Those infamous ”chip shortages” that suddenly appeared in the media as “lost in the supply chain” during 2020 and 2021, were actually vanishing about mid-2019, again thanks to Trump’s trade off-again/on-again weirdness with China, Taiwan, and India where almost all of that stuff has been made since Reagan purged the US of manufacturing investment in the 80s with his bizarre and foolish Dribble-Down Voodoo Economics. If we didn’t want it, lots of other buyers did. Now, we’re nobody’s preferred customer. When you’re building (or working in) a service economy, many of these problems appear insignificant. In manufacturing and engineering, they are show-stoppers.

As far back as mid-2018 a friend who was working for a company that supplied most of the automotive industry with design and production of high-tech headlights complained about the fact that Chinese suppliers no longer felt obligated to stick to their price quotes for manufactured parts for which they knew the US (and EU) could no longer provide alternatives. Not long after that, the company began shutting down the parts of their production that relied on semiconductor manufacturing and my friend was prewarned that he’d need to get out while the getting was good. It took him less than a week to find a better paying job in medical tech and he left Detroit in early-2019 for Minneapolis.

As for “nobody wants to work,” justifying that claim with our current 3.1% unemployment takes some hard work or simple denial. Our acquaintance chose denial, which made for an entertaining song-and-dance and an amazing display of ignorance when it comes to how employment works. It helped that neither of these folks were ever skilled labor (Unless you call being a junior college adjunct anthro “skilled?”) and neither have any sort of employment record worth talking about. If you haven’t been involved in chasing this country’s economy from one area crash to the next during the past 50 years, it’s hard to explain job hunting. I, on the other hand, have never experienced the kind of job opportunities available to today’s employment-age workers. I’m getting hit up at least a dozen times a month, through my LinkedIn page, for jobs I’m qualified for and some that aren’t even in the vicinity of my experiences.

Oddly, this Chamber of Commerce article, ”Understanding America’s Labor Shortage,” is surprisingly informative (for a group sadly known for its corporate propaganda output and disconnect from much of reality). Thanks to a variety of issues—from early retirements to Covid deaths and long-term Covid effects, to the long-standing child care problems—“in 2021, employers ended up adding an unprecedented 3.8 million jobs. But at the same time, millions of Americans have left the labor force since before the pandemic. In fact, we have more than three million fewer Americans participating in the labor force today compared to February of 2020.” That isn’t including what anyone who has followed numbers in national disasters knows will be a much larger than the reported 1,2M US citizens dead from Covid.

Speaking of killing us with Covid, thanks to the MAGAt nitwits and their “fearless leader,” almost 20% of the US healthcare workforce quit during the pandemic and another 12% were laid off, about 1.7 million professionals gone from hospitals and clinics, The people left in that overstressed, underpaid industry are considering quitting, too: 31% of them, in fact. They are not having any problems finding alternative work, either.

The Chamber’s survey found that of the many people who have yet to return to the workforce, “Twenty-seven percent indicated that the need to be home and care for children or other family members has made the return to work difficult or impossible. More than a quarter (28%) indicated that they have been ill and their health has taken priority over looking for work.” That survey found that many of those folks are not returning to the workforce because they are “concerned about COVID-19 at work, indicate that pay is too low, or are more focused on acquiring new skills and education before re-entering the job market." Some of that last group are taking advantage of the fact that many skilled labor unions are providing free and paid education for highly paid skilled in-demand jobs such as electrician and plumbers.

Retirements are kicking the workforce’s ass, too. That same article stated, “As of October 2021, the pandemic drove more than 3 million adults into early retirement.” At the other end of “ where they went,”Over the last two years, nearly 10 million new business applications were filed and in 2020 alone more than 4 million new business were started.“ This is exactly the kind of economy, except for the booming job market, where I started my Wirebender Audio Systems business after a layoff in 1980 and various good and bad times kept that going until a few months before I retired. So, good for them.

And that is where they all went. Any questions?

Where They Are the Same

Do you know where you can’t tell the far left from the far right, other than the level of crazy? They are both humorless. Before you put both feet in your mouth and spout out your asshole, look at the left wingnuts' comments on Jimmy Fallon, Jon Stewart, Seth Meyers, Bill Maher, Stephen Cobert, and even George Carlin (who pissed off everyone).

You can also make a case for both groups lacking introspection (and the associated humility that comes with self-examination). The furthest lefty I know, so left he calls himself an “anarchist” which is also how Libertarians often self-identify, calls himself “a really smart guy” so often I wonder if he isn’t pretending to be Donny Maralardo. I know a few really smart people and I have yet to hear one call himself that in public. At those far polarities, both groups often seem to lack empathy, also. But the absolute lack of humor is astounding and practically a carbon-copy of each end of the political and social spectrum.

Being the fool I am, I drug Mrs. Day into an evening with a couple we have known since we moved to Red Wing. He is a retired adjunct community college social anthropology instructor and she is an artist and a gardener. They have lived on a small hobby farm in Wisconsin since the 70s and have had an interesting relationship with their mostly-cultish Trump Republican neighbors. Covid hasn’t nurtured or matured those relationships. We often have heated discussions because he’s convinced I’m a malleable kid who just hasn’t been jabbered at long enough to be indoctrinated. For years, Mrs. Day and I thought his wife was the family adult, but last night was worse than a Day family reunion.

Every time I tried to inject a bit of humor and to slow down the pace of attacks and non-stop lecturing, I got bit. It took me until this morning to recover enough from that awful evening to realize that while they often sneer, I can’t remember either of them ever laughing or even smiling in an open, friendly manner.It probably happened at some time, but it was so long ago I don't remember it.

For at least 50 years, after my brief experience with the Texas SDS and anti-Vietnam movement of the 60s, I have said, “The best we’re ever going to get in a political leader is someone who both the right and left hate.” Presidents Ford, Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Biden qualify by the measure. The rest have been train wrecks. I can't think of a single instance of a radical left political leader making it beyond even local U.S. politics, so we don't have any examples of that to compare. What the crazy right calls "socialists" any reasonable person would call "moderately liberal." Of course, fascists have thought liberals are the Devil's Spawn since the first bully got yelled at for beating up the first nerd. 

The differences between the far right and the far left are still pretty substantial. Wingnuts will quickly point to the momentary spots in U.S. history when anarchists, radical left rich kids, and minorities have spun out-of-control and taken to violence not so much to imagine they might affect change as to expel frustration at a mindless system that revels in waging expensive, high-tech war on Third World countries or hires high school bullies and racist goons to provide "police protection" to keep brown people from thinking they also have rights. As we've seen in the past 250 years or more of North American history, conservatives are quick to grab a gun (or a hammer) and attack anyone who challenges their preconceived notions of reality. And conservatives will always vastly out-number radicals and, even, moderate liberals. Comparing race riots and the moments of Weathermen radical student violence to the past 250 years of racist violence across the nation, north-to-south and east-to-west, is insane and mathematically inept.

Natural distribution defines how both our national intelligence and our political proclivities will lie (literally). Half of every population will be of below-average-intelligence and that is not a hard bar to beat. We're just not a particularly bright animal, on average. However, that curve does not accurately define the conservative-progressive split because the overwhelming majority of any animal will be afraid of change (the primary definition of "conservative"). So, combine a half-stupid population with a nine-tenths (being optimistic) conservative population and you have what has kept humans from becoming "the rational animal" for as long as we've been on this Earth. One of my favorite science fiction writers from the 50s and 60s, Theodore Sturgeon, said "90% of everything is crap" and I've always thought he was a starry-eyed optimist. In the curve above, at best, the population from 115 and up are who have been dragging the rest of this trainload of deadbeats toward a better world while the other 90% are either non-destructive but not particularly helpful or outright wrecking balls of mindless human flesh and meat. 

So, radicalization does seems to either take or create a particularly humorless sort of personality. In the United States, our history demonstrates that Marx might have been on to something when he claimed that a society has to pass through all phases of the idiocy of capitalism before it is adult enough to head toward socialism. Although some of the European nations made that passage a lot faster and more efficiently than we've managed. There is no "good people on both sides" stuff here. There are no good fascists. None.

"Somebody shoot me while I’m happy!"

Kurt Vonnegut's 1997 book, Timequake, used a quote that Vonnegut credits to jazz pianist Fats Waller, “Somebody shoot me while I’m happy.” That thought hit home hard with me.

Earlier this year, I wrote a piece marveling at my recently deceased friend’s attitude toward preserving his life as long as possible, “I want to see what happens next.” I did, and still do, love that attitude, but I don’t share it. I suspect Keith had some kind of unfounded (in my opinion) faith that everything will somehow miraculously “work out for the best.” I love that attitude in anyone, but I suspect it is not much less insane than the intense desire for chaos that plagues much of the world, especially the so-called “conservative” populations all across this planet. My friend believed that human beings, under the right kinds of incentives (impending extinction, for example), could and would band together to stave off the death of the species; largely because he had a complex and convoluted intense love for nature and our planet, which included the species most likely to destroy it all in a fit of ego, arrogance, and stupidity. I am totally with him on the first part. I wholeheartedly love the planet we call “Earth” and everything living on it, except humans. And I am totally baffled by the logic or rationale that led to his faith in our species. I’m not saying it’s wrong, I’m saying I don’t understand or share that faith in humans. From my observation deck, it looks like more than enough humans worship chaos and imagine that, if you toss the world into instability, all the quarters will flip in their favor and they’ll end up rich and powerful. That experiment has been run repeatedly throughout history and it always produces the same sad outcome.

Vonnegut's Timequake also included a made-up biblical bit that should have been included in at least one of the 2,000 versions of the so-called "Christian Bible." Adam and Eve informed God, "that they like life all right, but that they would like it even better if they could know that it was going to end sometime." Even better, would be knowing when. Everlasting life might be ok if it were just going to be Adam and Eve and the flora and fauna of the planet. But once those 930-year-old progenitors started puking out their 9 to 1,000 or so offspring, they had to become hoping for an end to the chaos and foolishness. Like me, I suspect those imaginary founding humans probably just hoped that they were having fun when the balloon popped. Suffering for what either is or feels like an extended period before dying sounds, to me, like the worst possible way to go. Those rich guys who are found dead with a half-suffocated prostitute pinned under the lard asses probably went out as happy as they ever were. How is that not ideal?

In Timequake, Kurt also wrote a succinct analysis of evolution, human beings, and the kind of crazy crap that random selection has produced on this planet, "I have to say that the giraffe and the rhinoceros are ridiculous. And so is the human brain, capable, in cahoots with the more sensitive parts of the body, such as the ding-dong, of hating life while pretending to love it, and behaving accordingly." Kurt desperately tried to generate a personal philosophy of optimism, but he was a realist and reality kept dragging his hopeful-self back to the dirt. When Kurt was well into old age (at 83), he told Rolling Stone Magazine he wanted to sue the Brown and Williamson tobacco company, “And do you know why? Because I'm 83 years old. The lying bastards! On the package Brown & Williamson promised to kill me." A few years earlier he told a Progressive Magazine interviewer the reason he chain-smoked Pall Malls was “I’m trying to die, but it’s not working.” He was clearly hoping someone would kill him while he was feeling good. It didn’t happen, though. Kurt died at 84 as a result of brain injuries from a fall at his home, and it took a few weeks for that injury to do him in. I would bet he wasn’t happy when he died.

Optimistic people baffle me. Mrs. Day keeps telling people she is having so much fun at this point in her life she wants it to go on like this forever. It won’t, of course. Our declining empire will continue to crumble, the crazed wingnuts will do everything they can to blow up anything that resembles decency and civilization, the media and the lucky quarter-flipper billionaires will finance it all hoping to get even further on top, and it will all continue to swirl around the toilet bowl of disaster and extinction. But for right now, this short unsustainable moment, For my money, this is as good a time as any for "somebody shoot me while I’m happy!" Actually, almost anytime between 2001-05 would have been perfect. 2008 was the last gasp of the old Musictech College as an educational facility and the beginning of the Age of McNally Smith College of Making Doug, Jack, and Harry rich. Before that downer moment, the school was a hotbed of creativity, academic direction, and cooperation. The downward slide to the school’s eventual despicable demise was rapid and predictable and no fun to be around. I retired in 2013, but the lights had long gone out of the building before then. During the summers, I was wallowing in the luxury of the brief moment when the Motorcycle Safety Center’s training philosophy was “adult learner centered” and offered a lot of room for creativity and individual instructor personality. But, if I had a moment to reflect and react, if a school shooter had appeared at any time during that amazing period of my life I’d have gladly stepped between everyone else in the Musictech building (except Jack or Doug) or any of my motorcycle students and taken one for the team. I would have absolutely died happy, assuming it was a quick death. Any other kind voids the inspiration for this saying.