You know, I can’t remember the name of this gal. It was Marcy or something like that. Ah, later, it was Darcy. We had a few wild months. She never admitted it, but she was totally hung up on some fisherman that had been taking advantage of her for years. This doomed us as a couple. He’d use her while in port and then off to the next port. She lived in the hope that one day he’d come to his senses and marry her. When we met, she was already thirty-something.
She hadn’t seen him for six months when we met. Myself, I thought it was neat how she had a china cabinet with fancy glasses for everything you could possibly want to drink. Yes that is the hand-made Mexican blanket I still have today. When I say hand-made, I mean I watched it being woven, in Acapulco.6:30 a.m., Miami. I arbitrarily canceled everything today (and y’day as well) to relax and read. Something motivated me to stop—the book I’ve been at a while about (Soviet) Russia. [Sorry, details lost.] It was written after the collapse so contains input from sources not available before. Gee, now Russian history can be boring, “so and so was secretary of the something-buro until executed as a British spy”.
[Author’s note: such books were still rare even ten years ago. The following is an interesting take on what will be happening in America within a few years, but of course, here it will done by coercion, not by force. Coercion is force, but it is applied very slowly, like sun tan lotion.]
What got me was the feelings of people who lived under the regime and [who] did not like it. To a one, they appear to be a group superior by whatever sets them apart from the masses—artists, poets, scientists, doctors, generals. I can identify with that.
What hit me was the themes of their discontent. Lack of privacy. Constant tests to prove they were right-thinking, no right to private property, no freedom of choice, and above all the constant surveillance by others [who are] unqualified to understand any motives except their own. I can really identify with that.
These people were not revolutionaries. Mainly, they were asking that the regime obey its own stated rules. The theme was quote, “fight with ideas, not with prison and execution”.
It is not good to allow someone to strive without guarantees that what they accomplish cannot be confiscated. Or [to punish by taking away] the right to stop striving. Or that striving will not disqualify them from prior benefits (however scanty). Indeed, it seems that I used to have a lot in common with these themes.
Even when this (Soviet) madhouse imploded, they found themselves . . . in a vacuum. The struggle for the right to improve themselves was so intense that it cost them the years of experience (of having been improved and carrying on from there) which would otherwise have been theirs. It is not proper for a person to be compelled to spend half their lives fighting for what was legally their own to begin with. Fighting to gain a tool is not the same as having the experience to use it. As complicated as that sounds, I speak with complete authority on the subject.
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