REUTERS: MAY 3: OIL PASSES $75 AS IRAN NUCLEAR CRISIS HEATS UP
I'm not quite ripping up the lawn so that I won't have to buy gas for the riding mower. (Can you cook fescue?) I'm not yet sticking the garden hose in my 3/4 ton work hog's gas tank to see how much I can cut the three-buck Cheney juice. But man, am I close!
Inner rant: <iThese threats from Iran. Costing me serious dough. Bugger. Fucking towel heads/i>
Stop! I scream at myself. Maybe I'm just using this as an excuse to ignore the rest of my life.
Or Is This It?
Help me sort it out. With poll.
It all began for me when the USS Norris, in 1965, I think it was, ditched the CIA boys with the huge cameras who'd rode with us down the Suez to film some Egyptian MIG bases, and turned left. We picked up the Am-bad-ass-ador to Iran at a friendly A-rab tea party at Aqaba, Jordan, where sodomy did not occur (all I would have had to do was smile), and slipped him into a town on the Iranian coast to make nice with the Shah.
The Shah, you may recall, was the puppet of the West who followed the ousting of a democratically elected president facilitated by mates of the aforementioned camera boys.
There, Bandar Abbas, you and I, or your parents and I, you sort it out, gave his Shah-ness two minesweepers so that in case the Rooskie's clients decided to start something by mining the Staits of Hormuz-- the big bottleneck of the Persian Exxon, I mean Gulf-- Shah-na-na could dip them up with some pretty cool black-gold fish nets.
That was the year I began to realize that I lived in a World. See, I had been the kind of kid who threw his beer cans out the car window and emptied his cigarette butts in a Shoney's parking stall at 2AM of a summer debauch. The planet was some dim extension of moi.
But that year, first with the Culebra Incident off Puerto Rico, where I had witnessed a lone man protesting the armed might of the US Navy to defend his island from being a cannon target, and now this, I started getting interested in more than tits (although, they're still right up there).
I wasn't able to attend the ceremony. I had the watch duty, or I was still deathly ill from a pita sandwich I'd eaten off the street in Aqaba, I don't remember. It was possibly both: I have a memory trace that registers as "can't go ashore" and "don't want to anyway."
But the upshot was, "Hey, I'm part of history." This came home to me three years later when I was working in the El Tovar Hotel gift shop on the south rim of the Grand Canyon, when the Shah and his retinue walked right past me. Scary. I can only conclude that Iran is part of me, and wants me to know that if I could not come to her, she came to me, if only by sending her misguided courtesan past my door. I love her.
Does she want to hurt me? In the night I whisper, no. Send your sloe-eyed face to my cheek, kiss me under the Hormuz moon, make me forget that humiliating moment at the EM club up in Bahrain on that same cruise when some limey boys tried to throw me in the pool, Shore Patrol armband, nightstick and all.
She has made me a man.
I will never lift a hand
against Iran.