Jimi Hendrix

I got out of bed really late and decided to just go along with the day.

Just as the day was deciding what to do, the phone rang. It was C.

"Hey man, what's happening?", he said.

"Nothing", I said. We talked for over an hour about nothing--Leonardo da Vinci, Tesla, the far-right wing in the USA, golf, French philosophers of the 17th century, the Italian Renanissance.

I told C. that if I was really a progressive I'd become right of the far-right wing and see where that would take me. When he asked me to explain what I meant, I said I couldn't exactly explain it but that it felt right to me, that pushing a misconception beyond its breaking point is often a good way of exposing its flaws.

"Besides I'm tired of being a liberal," I said.

Being a liberal has gotten me nowhere. It's true that being a liberal has kept me out of war, but good luck had as much to do with that as being a liberal.

I always say that I would have gone to Canada in 1969 if I'd been drafted.

Instead I got a really high lottery number, 313 out of 365, and was exempt.

C. got the number 13 and would have been drafted into the Army almost immediately. Instead of being drafted he enlisted in the Navy in 1972 and was sent out to patrol the Pacific Ocean on the aircraft carrier USS ORISKANY, that's since been mothballed.

In the Navy, C. listened to Jimi Hendrix and learned how to smoke pot. He hung out with the brothers and was surprised they liked The Ohio Players and Motown much better than they liked Hendrix. The brothers "didn't like Hendrix at all," C. says, sounding mystified to this day.

Maybe, I thought after hanging up the phone and pouring some Trader Joe's Maple Pecan granola into a bowl, the brothers C. had talked about thought Jimi Hendrix was too white, a hippie playing psychedelic music they just couldn't get into. It was the time after all when whites were becoming blacks and blacks were choosing to stay black, for the most part.

The USS Oriskany was decomissioned in 1976 and sunk for use as an artificial reef off the coast of Florida in 2004, the "largest vessel ever sunk to make a reef," acc. Wikipedia.