It All Started When He Hit Me Back

I'm hearing on the radio today that there's a big sting operation in progress "all over Southern California". Under-age people are asking passersby to please buy them a beer. Then police jump out and bust them for it. Making drinking be a crime below a certain age and not allowing any sex training between different ages are both working so well, how about we use the same strategy with driving? Any driver training (or "education") to a juvenile by an adult before a given age is illegal. ("Contributing To The Delinquency of a Minor.") Then at that set age, at midnight, every person is given a drivers license and a car, and any time they mess up, we can come down on them hard.

The economy is big on the news. I remember Bernard Mickey Wrangle saying something like: "If they make it a thousand dollars to get into a movie, we'll figure out how to get the money. And if we can't, then we'll sneak in." Like it or not, there's not really much else we can do. Might as well make it have been the plan all along, our own idea. But I'm afraid the game is gonna change levels real soon. (" . . . and it's happening a lot faster than scientists had predicted . . . ") We all need some air and a place to stand, no matter what else.

It's now Sunday, and I've been hearing more about that hey-mister-can-ya-buy-a-beer-for-me sting operation yesterday. It was a four-county coordinated effort. I reckon with manual labor becoming scarce, hey, it's springtime, the local governments had to harvest some community-service sentences to get some work done. I'm sure none of those decoys ever had a beer from any other source before in their lives.

"The troubled pop star."

Two young gangsters, ages twelve and fourteen, walked up to the receptionist and said it's a robbery and that they had a gun. She was the receptionist at a police station. This was on the news this morning. Now I am looking forward to reading their book when it comes out. Like which one did the planning.

I was hitchhiking north and got a ride with an eclectic group of nine followers of Abbie Hoffman in various degrees of hats, boots, scarves, guitars, hair, leather, feathers, belt knives, shades, and reading material, (as was I), riding in a pretty new regular yellow school bus with a great sound system not being wasted by these guys. From scenic Highway 101 in Northern California, up Route 199 from Crescent City, California, to Grants Pass, Oregon, up through the redwoods along the twisting Smith River, the drive always enhanced by close calls on hairpin turns with log trucks, RVs, bicycles, cop Jeeps, and tourists stopped in unlikely places. Soon after passing the fruit inspection station for folks heading south, the state border, the road straightens and the first little town you'd hit back then was O'Brian, Oregon. After a stop for refreshments in O'Brian, we traveled on. Up to Grants Pass, then the 5-Freeway north. At a stop at an official Rest Area for the night, I took my sleeping bag to one of the picnic tables and unrolled it. In the morning after another hundred miles or so, the anarchists were going to pull into a picture-book western town and wait for more money to be wired to them from the owner of the bus back in New York City. I got off at the off-ramp as they left the freeway. (A few months later I ran into one of the guys from the bus in the park down in Santa Cruz. Yes, they'd gotten the bus all the way to Seattle as planned. And yes, as a matter of fact, they had spent the night in the jail in that town, I had been lucky to get off when I did.) Anyway, back in O'Brian, there wasn't really much of a town in those days. I haven't been through that way lately, and things have a way of changing. There had been a store with a covered wooden sidewalk across the front and an old post office inside. Across the hot dusty street, ol' 199, stood a small restaurant on the far side of a large unpaved parking lot, and two or three houses. A road cut off to the east, going the few miles to world famous Takilma. When a guy climbed back aboard, one of the others who'd seen him checking out the bulletin board on the outside wall of the store asked, "What's on the board?" "Oh, just like a tractor for sale, and somebody looking for firewood." "Wasn't there anti-anything?"

Tibet.

So now it's Monday. Groundhog Day. Not really, it just gets to feeling like it some mornings. But actually it's Saint Patrick's Day. I don't do holidays, but I am aware when they strike. I know virtually nothing of my heritage, so I don't feel a connection to any place like that, but like when the nurse in San Francisco asked my religious preference while filling out a pre-surgery form, I said, "All." She glanced up to get my meaning, then went on to the next question. On the old TV western show, Maverick, he came riding up to a saloon out in the middle of nowhere just as two guys were flinging a patron out the swinging doors and into the street. Maverick asked, "What'd he do?" One of the two bouncers turned back and answered, "Today's Saint Patrick's Day, and he ain't Irish." He gave Bret a sudden hard look. "And what be your name, stranger?" Big smile. "Hi. I'm Bret O'Maverick."