Note:  No dissertation, just politics as lived by one man, right now.

You'd know Frank in a minute from the moment you entered the barroom door.  People paid deference to him.  He wasn't threatening - but you knew he could do serious damage in a fight.  He wouldn't start a fight (well, when he was younger and got flipped over the wall in the jalopy races, sure), but he would sure as hell finish it.  

Having cheated death once again (embolism), I lay in Santa Monica UCLA Hospital.  Outside, several blocks away, a crowd had gathered to protest the impending doom of one Tookie Williams, co-founder of the notorious but oh so sexy killer Crips.  It was on TV.  Several rather old people, looking like long-time committed protesters, plus the usual earnest 20 and 30 somethings walking around with the usual signs: "Death penalty = barbarism" and the like. Fade out, and it's hours later, the last few minutes of Donny Deutsch.  A pro-death penalty spokesman, dark-haired, too intense, and talking too fast for the cool blue has taken the bait and is making the point that clear-eyed, calm and obviously wise Mike Farrell, the anti-death penalty spokesperson and TV's beloved surgeon and veterinarian, would not execute even Pol Pot, Hitler, and/or Genghis Khan.  Mike nods his beautiful hair and calmly says in mellow tones, "that's exactly right," timing the message to the second to close the segment.  Perfect.  That's a wrap, baby!

I want a fuckin JOB.  My last work day was July 1, 2002.  I was suckered out to LA (CA, not NO) to take the fall on a project a few months ago.  It worked; they fired me.  The plan was for me to get settled in the job, get an apt, then start looking for a house.  We've got equity, and downsizing - well, since the wife fell all the way down the stairs and we couldn't afford the ER, she's kinda down on stairs, so to speak.  I used to be pretty comfortable - my mortgage is less than a Bimmer payment here - good reserves in the bank, college no problem and somehow retirement would work out.  Besides, you don't really want to do nothing all day, do you?  Well, yes, motherfucker, I sure as hell do!  I wanta drink some coldies and shoot up some TVs like Elvis if I want to.

The "official" death toll in Iraq/Afghanistan lurches toward 2,000 now, and people in the know (such as nurses at Landstuhl) say that it's already much, much higher than that.  Estimates of civilian dead are all over the map, and indeed it's hard to figure out which leg goes with which torso, which arm, etc., after a shelling with a mortar, artillery, tank, or what have you.  As a B-2 bomber pilot remarked, and I'm paraphrasing here: "Shit, they didn't even know we were coming.  If you watch the tape, they're just shooting blindly up into the air.  They didn't know when we were coming, and they didn't know when we left."  Indeed.

But this isn't about Iraq, Afghanistan, or Iran.

Well, the PTSD meds aren't working, so it's been a sleepless night again in LA.  Like you, I grieve for every lost life in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Like some of you, I can easily visualize the IED nails and whatever other metal trash the enemy of the day are packing spinning wildly into the bodies of our men and women, opening large gashes, exposing organs, splitting entrails, shearing off limbs.  Like a few, I can actually feel this happening to my own body (like stigmata, I guess), 1860+ times now.  And, as with my brother, I am thousands of miles away, unable to help as they try to stuff their guts back inside, beg for water, or cry for their Mom one last time.  And it tears me up.

So I wrote this.

She was a cute little girl with snow blonde hair from her Icelandic mom, but she's been taken over to the Dark Side, and now sends me this:

The average age of the military man is 19 years.
He is a short haired, tight-muscled kid who, under normal circumstances is considered by society as half man, half boy. Not yet dry behind the ears, not old enough to buy a beer, but old enough to die for his country.

By 1971, the famous LeMans "standing start" was long gone.  Drivers no longer ran across the track to jump in their cars and start up; the cars were too quick off the line.  But the traditions still stood.  LeMans was and is the world's greatest race because of the length (Le 24 Heures) and the obstacles that need to be overcome: driver fatigue (a minimum of two drivers now, but in the old days, iron men wrestled huge wooden steering wheels for a full day and a full night); metal fatigue (the ultimate race car would last only one minute longer than it absolutely had to; engineering and materials are pushed to the outer limits in every racing car); and other traffic (LeMans is one of the few races to mix classes; a sports prototype can be 100 mph faster than a lesser car, but they both run the same track at the same time).