i think my friends at the beach this morning scoff at my radical core. they brought up handguns and the notion that kids kill because their brains aren't fully formed until they reach twenty-five and i brought up the war culture and asked why they fuck we expect kids to act any different than we do, and said their brains are formed by an ultra-violent society even if they have good nutrition and education and economic opportunity. later, on the way back i told them how i stopped saying the pledge of allegiance in 3rd grade because it felt false and coercive, and in short it was bullshit. how did i know this? i think the instinct for truth and the instinct for lies is maybe inborn, and maybe my bullshit detector was calibrated by my father too, his nixon youth masquerade, his wanton womanizing and his capricious patriarchal rule. his utter absence of integrity. his american entitlement and violent impunity.
my friend said well we won't go there but as far as i was concerned we are already there. kids, handguns, economics and war, are on one stretching continuum from here to the vanishing point. and my third grade radical core says so. 
oh i write hastily and not well i could never make a book but i gotta keep a record dang me. i been upset all day about this morning when i said the pledge of allegiance is bullshit and i knew it in third grade and my friend wrote to say they were both shocked and granted i was crude but underlying that was just an anger at america and a radical nature that was spawned before i reached third grade, and at our labor day party my sister said she had stopped reciting the pledge too when she was in 3rd grade! 
so i'm upset, and shocked too, but what shocks me is how unquestioning, how uncritically, how thoughtlessly, how obediantly patriotic americans are. but i'm getting used to it, it's manageable, because i love america, dang me.

i said it's ok if yer friend is shocked out of liking me. i prefer dislike to being liked for only a select, palatable, un-shocking part of me. and i'm sad that critical thought about the regime is so shocking, even if it is crude and simplistic. it's crude because i know it's unwelcome. i was a crude kid too. and as a kid i realized my refuge would be books and movies, as i sadly admit is still true at 56, i have to go to cinema and literature for sustenance and home for my radical spirit. 
i said to my friend if i am a friend i am a radical spirit in a conventional war-making society, that is even more important and essential to me than swimming with dogs, and that means the world. 

without realizing it we set a precedent.