It's heading towards 11pm, and I have gone back to Blogstream in the way I used to...staying up late, writing whatever comes into my mind and listening to radio from far away.
Tonight it's Oscar Brand's Folk Song Festival on WNYC in New York. The guy's been doing a weekly program of folk music since 1945. He must be in his 80's, but his mind is still sharp, even if he talks a little slower than he used to.
When it comes to writing, I Usually have an idea synapsing around for a day or so, and I finally sit down and type it out when it has begun to gel.
Not so this time.
I hadn't offered a post since May, so I figured part of getting back in touch with my fellow Blogstreamers would be to see what they've been doing for the past two months.
Sadly, many on my favorites list have been away longer than I have. One has even been (ominously) "deactivated"!
So I began to expand my circle of friends, letting one person's favorites list lead me to another's, who would lead me to someone else. I haven't commented on any, but I have noticed one interesting thing.
A lot of people are putting their secrets on their blogs.
There are secret relationships, secret desires, secret problems and secret triumphs that no one but the Blogstream reader knows about.
The exceptions, of course, are the love affairs. Yet, even here, I get the impression that the reader may know more than the lover. They are fascinating to read, because the feelings expressed are so staggeringly genuine.
They may not be polished, but they are very real.
Personally, I don't reveal too much about myself.
When I first got involved with Blogstream, my ego got in the way, and I was quick to tell friends and family what I was doing and where I could be found.
Yet, tonight, I noticed a small notation at the bottom of the "My Account" page.
It said, simply, "Add A Blog To Your Account."
Hmm...a whole new blog...that nobody knows about...with a whole new name.
Should I?
After all...we've all got our secrets.

I couldn't let the day go by without aknowledging a certain historic event that took place on this date, and to use that 300 year old event to show how history has changed in my lifetime.
Since the early 18th Century, the 12th of July has been celebrated by Ulster Protestants in Northern Ireland as their greatest victory! This, despite the fact that they are commemorating a battle that took place in the Republic of Ireland's County Meath on July 1st, at which few Ulstermen were actually present.
At The Battle of the Boyne, 35,000 well equipped troops under English King William III, who was actually Dutch and Protestant, met the 25,000 strong force under English King James II, who was actually English but Catholic. William was aided by German, Dutch and French Huguenot regiments, while James had English regiments who had remained loyal to him, along with some French soldiers, sent by Louis IV, and a few Irish cavalrymen.
Horse racing has been called the "Sport of Kings", but in 1690 the sport of kings was war.
The details vary, depending on who's telling the tale, but both sides agree that the Protestant force defeated the Catholic force, keeping William on the thrown (he and his Queen Mary got a college in Virginia named after them)and sending James into exile and oblivion.
In the next 316 years of blood drenched Irish history, there have been battles, rebellions and famines galore. Yet, the Ulster Protestant community has chosen this particular incident, the victory of William of Orange, as the touchstone of their very existance.
In my lifetime, the Lambeg drum would sound and the Orangemen would march, usually through predominately Catholic areas of Belfast or Derry, and riots would ensue. People would throw stones or petrol (gasoline) bombs, and British soldiers would fire back with rubber bullets or tear gas.
Sometimes they used live ammunition.
So, today I checked the news on the Irish radio and television service, RTE to see what sort of atrocities had been perpetrated again this year.

Nothing!

Fearing a Republican bias in reporting, I also checked the BBC.
You can see for yourself, both news outlets report that about 100 members of the Orange Order marched through the predominately Catholic Ardoyne district without incident. For the first time since the early 70's, British troops didn't have to back up the local police. Not a single rock was thrown, or a single explosion went off.

So what has changed in Northern Ireland?

Just as a single post like this can only give the briefest outline of the Battle of the Boyne, I can only offer the most shallow of opinions as to what seems to be changing in the six counties of a partitioned island.
I believe it may have to do with a combination of recent laws prohibiting religious discrimination in educational opportunities, and an increase in international investment in Ulster. This creates a uniformly skilled workforce, and employers who consider a worker's religion irrelevent when they're trying to fill a position.
I would also imagine a new generation of potential bombers and gunmen can't be running the dark streets of Belfast and Derry at all hours, if they have to be at work or school first thing in the morning.
As for the 100 or so marching Orangemen, perhaps they are the last of a dying breed, and the first of a new breed of Irish re-enactors. Just like the Americans who like to dress up in Civil War uniforms or costumes from other bygone eras, the men and women of the Orange Order will continue to do their best to preserve their history when "The Troubles" have long faded from living memory.
Perhaps I am overly optimistic, but I believe the Orange Order parades held every July 12th will become no more controversial than the Green Irish parades held every March 17th.
Unless, of course, some Gay Orangemen want to march too.

I always use the same excuse... Summer in Metro Orlando is just too damn hot to do anything that takes any kind of thought, so that leaves the stuff that just has to be done. Naturally, if I mow the lawn, I end up drenched in sweat. I wear long pants and work boots to avoid the creatures of the high grass. ("Eat Leather, snake!", I mumble to myself.) My sleeveless T-shirt looks like something found at a Fort Lauderdale bar during Spring Break, and My F.U. hat (for Fordham University...what did you think it meant?) becomes a make shift sweat band. The back yard has never actually been mowed, creating an effect I like to call "free-style gardening". When I make it back inside, and get around to balancing my checkbook, the sweat pours off my forehead and into my eyes with a stinging saltiness. Despite the AC going full blast, large droplets roll off my nose and onto the checkbook, smudging my classic signature. Part of the sweatiness is because I don't wear the F.U. hat indoors, and part of it is a direct result of my salary.
So what, you may ask, brought me back to Blogstream as we approach mid July?
I was shamed into it, I suppose.
It was 49 years ago this past week, that Jack Kerouac wrote the classic American Novel "The Dharma Bums" in 11 days on one continuous roll of teletype paper. He wrote the whole thing about two or three miles from where I now sit...in the Summer...in Orlando.


It was 1957, and Jack had bought a $30 bus ticket in New York heading south to meet up with his mother in a section of pre-Disney Orlando called College Park, although there isn't really a college there but it does have streets named Yale and Vasser and Harvard with Smith street going one way to the East and Princeton a one way street heading west. He ended up at 1418 Clouser Avenue, with neither of us ever knowing who Clouser was or if it was a college or a founding father or a misprint in some early city map that they just decided to leave rather than spend the time and money to correct it to whatever it was meant to be. If you're heading south on Edgewater, you make a right at the 7-eleven on the corner of Shadey Lane Drive and your very first left is Clouser and the Kerouac house is on a double lot on the Southwest corner, looking for all the world like what it is, a single story shotgun shack, so called because it was said you could fire a shot gun in the front door and it would go clear out the back door with the buckshot being impeaded by nothing but each door, with wooden floors and what is probably now vinyl siding. Central air conditioning was unheard of in Orlando in 1957, so I suspect the 35 year old Jack worked at night when the temperature would drop into the low 70's, and the only sounds were the soft whirl of the celing fans moving humid air and disapating cigarette smoke, the rapid click clack of his typwriter, with the occassional "ding" when he came to the end of a line and the occassional truck passing by over on Edgewater Drive likely hauling the last of the Citrus down to the Bluebird Juice factory on the South Orange Blossom Trail. Here was where his use of Spontaneous Prose reached full development after being hinted at in "On the Road" and he called himself Ray Smith and gave thin aliases to poets and musicians and thinkers and drinkers and people he met in San Francisco while never mentioning Orlando or Florida or a place called College Park as he sweat in the night hunched over a manual typewriter loaded with a continuous roll of cheap paper cranking out a good seller, if not a best seller, that would influence a generation of writers who, no matter how much they copied his style, ended up cranking out not works of jazz-like art but meanderings of rap-like disposability regardless of how many sentences they managed to run together.

I started off early a couple of a Saturdays ago, around 7 or 7:30 in the morning, before it got too hot and went to see the house myself for the first time. I stopped off in the 7-eleven for a cup of coffee and decided to walk the half mile or so. As I stepped onto Shadey Lane, a man came up to me. We usually call them transients, but the people of Kerouac's generation would be correct (if not politically) in calling them bums.
There didn't seem to be anything Zen like about this man, but I thought I'd make sure.
"What has the Buddah shown you?", I asked pleasantly.
He started his usual spiel about getting some spare change, then stopped abruptly, his eyes narrowing.
"What do you like to read?", I asked.
"Uh, the Bible?", he asked, in question format as well.
"Ever read Jack Kerouac?"
"No, Man...I don't do crack!"
I handed him a dollar, saying "now you go make someone else happy."
He took the dollar from my hand in a surprisingly gentle way, and began to back away. He had turned and broken into a ragged trot by the time I got one quick Kerouac quote out.
"None of us want to think that the universe is a blank dream, you know!"
He didn't look back.


(By the way, the house is now owned by The Kerouac Project of Orlando and is assessed to have a market value of $291,830. Believe me, the price has more to do with its place in College Park than its place in history.)

It's been a while since I finished the McGreevy saga.

I cannot begin to thank all the people who encouraged me with their comments, both public and private, but I will try to respond very soon.
One friend, while encouraging the fiction, said she was sorry I couldn't find the time to continue the political or observational commentary.
She's absolutely right, and I agreed to try to do both as the weeks wear on. There is another story in the gestation stage, but it will have to wait while I transport my mind from a totally invented world to the one you and I inhabit.
I was transitioning nicely, going from a Fascist America, to the "Good Ol' USA", when I came across this little article in an English Newspaper.
The World Cup Soccer Tournament is being held in Germany this year. Apparently German officials insisted that busses carrying the US team not have the Stars and Stripes painted on them. The 31 other countries participating will have their flags splashed across their team busses, but the US squad will not.
Officials are insisting the US keep a "low profile", fearing a bus with an American flag on it will provoke an attack... in Germany.
Mid way through 2006, it appears the flag of the United States of America has become such a hated symbol to some, that it's very presence is enough to trigger an attack.
On Friday, Bush said in an interview on CNBC, that the doomed passengers on Flight 93 conducted "the first counter-attack to World War III".
So it's World War Three now.
If so, it may not be unreasonable to think that displaying the flag of an agressor nation in a world war might rub some people the wrong way. Is it any wonder the Germans would be sensitive to an issue like this?
Coincidently, it was exactly 69 years ago yesterday the German airship Hindenburg exploded in Lakehurst New Jersey. The Nazi flags on the tail section were the first to go up in the hydrogen fueled flames.

       As the green light faded, McGreevy found himself in what appeared to be a version of Von Ruger's office. He saw the same floor to ceiling windows, with the same view, only this time he was looking from the World Alliance Tower to a second World Alliance Tower!                         

      As he stared dumbfounded at the sight of a duplicate of the world's tallest building, an even more amazing sight appeared in the office.  

      "Who the hell are you?!" said a voice behind him. McGreevy spun around, and was astounded to see a man, a BLACK man, in a business suite and tie asking "what do you think you're doing here?". He had only seen Negroes in New York acting as busboys or janitors, otherwise rarely seen and never heard. This man was obviously accustomed to being in a position of authority.   

       "Now you just stay where you are...don't move", he said calmly, as he reached for the phone on the desk, picked up the receiver and pushed a single button.

      "Jamie? Get me security...we have an unauthorized individual who is....Holy Shit!"     

      McGreevy followed the man's gaze out the window, just in time to see a passenger jet crash into the other tower at just about eye level.     

     While the other man walked slowly to the window transfixed, McGreevy slipped past him and slipped out the office door. He walked into the hallway and through a door marked "stairs".     

      He wasn't sure how long it took; steps, turn, steps, turn, but he eventually found himself on the street.     

     His EuroRail station was gone.       

     He didn't see one Reich uniform...not even an armband. What he did see were well dressed people in various stages of panic, some were even holding the sides of their heads with one hand while waving the other and shouting. Eventually, he noticed these were people with tiny wireless telephones.     

     This was something new.     

     The air was warm, so he took off his leather coat and carried it over his shoulder, hooking the collar with his index finger. As he did so, he managed to look back to where he had come from. He saw two towers, one of which was in flames and, as he watched, a second passenger jet slammed into the undamaged tower.     

      "This is one strange world you've landed in, old son", he said to himself.       

      McGreey fell in with thousands of others who were walking towards the water. Like the people around him, he had no idea why airplanes were flying into tall buildings. In his world, the pilots of Lindberg Air or Luftansa would never make such a mistake on such a clear day, but he again reminded himself that he wasn't in his world anymore.     

      Apparently, things had changed.     

      He wondered if planes flying into tall buildings was a common occurrance in this New, New York...of if, indeed, it would become so. He wondered if he would be able to contact Von Ruger, or make it to his emergency "safe house" in Weehawken, New Jersey...or if there still was a Weehawken, New Jersey.     

     Above all, he wondered if he was possibly the creator of his own dystopia.     

     Could his world have mutated so drasticly, simply because he arrived too late to shoot one obscure Englishman?     

      Despite himself, McGreevy shook his head with a smile.     

     "You've really made a 'hames' of it this time, Michael", he said to no one in particular, and kept walking

. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~  

 Historical Note;

Winston Churchill was hit by a taxi cab on December 13. 1931 while crossing Fifth Avenue in New York City.  He was taken to Lennox Hill Hospital, where he would eventually recover from his injuries, spending the rest of December recuperating at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel.  He and his wife Clementine sailed for England at the beginning of 1932.  In the next decade, he would become British Prime Minister, ultimate leading his Nation to victory over Nazi Germany in 1945.