It was a cold morning in hell and the

lynch mob opened the door wide and shoved me in. Why thank you very much, you mother fuckers.

Draft Morning was today. Thirty nine years ago and I still don't forget it. I would have been awake to leave in about four more hours or so, if I had slept at all. Although some years this day slides on by for a few days before it dawns on me, these days. Maybe in the recesses of my mind I don't want to forget it. Same shit happens with birthdays anymore, so what the hell. I don't know and why really care?

All of my worldly possessions, that mattered to me, had been given away to people that were special to me. Not many of them, people or possessions. Record collection, favorite hash pipe, special item or this or that, etc. You see I was sure, no I was really really sure, I was never coming back. I was going to die in Vietnam. I never did come back, at least not like I expected it to turn out. There have been times since the body bag might have been preferred by me. But in many ways, it's always like that when you go on a trip or career change or some such fucking thing. This trip was a little different though and I knew it and I had known it.

It is a very strange sort of day to go through. A relief and a god damn it, here it comes, the big one. I mean you had already lived a big number of your young days thinking about this day already. In my case some four, or a bit more, years on the serious level and the last two on a high degree of what the fuck am I going to do about this fucking world personal abortion. Those last two years it felt like your whole life was revolving around some form of this impending day or the outcome from some action for another solution to it. Crazy days and lucky, I see now, to have lived through those. Many didn't.

In some kind of hind sight it's like worrying about hitting 40 years old or some such made up fucking magic point in your life. You put so much of your effort into the before part, this number 39, the actual doing that day is like, what the fuck, it's just another god damned day. I'm just doing something different and you do that everyday. Sometimes you just think it's the same, but they never are. No, they never are. That's one of the outcomes, eventually, from that beginning day. I'm alive and it is, now.

You see there was a strange thing that also happened on this morning, besides the strangeness of the day, and I never knew it till some many many months later. I received a letter post marked May 18th and from this little town from a guy that I had been sharing an apartment with (and Patty) some months back. Greg Smith sent it, Vietnam Vet, Tet of 68, probably Special Forces. I never asked and he never said, it wasn't needed to be. Brilliant mind and one of the fearless 5 on our Woodstock 69 trip. (A someday post or 6.) I didn't see him this morning in the ago, but he was here and watching and mailed the letter. I suspect he was curious if I was going to go at all, he knew my feet were cold and my conscious was in an uproar, and if not, I suspect he would have made himself known. Some things you have to to decide on your own and I had made mine. Get it over, get it done, end it. End it, and I only mean that one way.

The letter itself I still have and I was going to reread it and maybe put it up. As I recall, when I finally did get it via my Mother who held it back to begin with, the bitch, it made me laugh and smile. The letter is now Missing In Action. I know what damn box it's in and where I last put it, but, as always, people move shit on me that they don't know has any real meaning to me. It's just a little cardboard box with some writing stationary label and looks like nothing that should be important. It is. Maybe not, now. Maybe not, anymore.

Somethings are better left dead and this morning is one of them and yet it still haunts me. I said yes, when I should have said no. Shame on me. Perhaps someday I will learn to forgive myself.

But, it is also a day I remember Greg and the gang and that's a good thing. The letter was all about a day on a river bank. He even drew a crude picture of where a mosquito had drawn blood from on his scrotum. You know a dot to mark the spot. Hey!!, none of us were too big on clothing if we didn't need to be in it and that is important information. Hell yes it is. I mean the guy must have suffered for days. What a horrid place to get sucked. Well that sorta depends I suppose, but the mosquito didn't suffer long. As I remember he was kind of digging the fact the little blood sucker had chosen that spot. I don't know what the blood sucker felt other then most likely high from the blood. I can guarantee you on that, the little fucker probably over dosed. Well maybe an opium mellow. But now that I think on it, there was a blood stain he put on the letter with the little buggers blood or his, well ok, both. Opium? Yeah he put a drop or small squirt of that on the letter too. It was a very graphically done letter, I have received few like them and damned impossible to do on the emails with such accuracy.

That picture, letter, has nothing to do with anything but a scratch that needed an itch and a setting. They were the last words I ever got from him alive. A small moment in his picture of that now.

My now. The Tao, he knew what he was writing. He was the first one to paint the picture for me, what it looked like to him. A fine picture of words he drew. They hold up well for me to this day. Life, death, friendships, and partings. The cosmic weave.

Ok, so much for all the wonderment wondrous bull shit. Now we were in an equal opportunity employer. Stay fucking alive, fool, by whatever means. They are mapping your career for you. Setting my life into a amplified acid trip like I never ever seen. Next time around I'd like to skip this part, thankyouverymuch. I'd rather come back as a blood sucker and not their kind.

Well anyway, the bus got to the place of repose for this mornings evening. I think someone had smuggled some beer on the bus and there was more smuggled in at the holding station, at all times. Strange smell in the air too. I mean we were really primed and ready to do well on the battery of tests they gave us over the next few days. Yup, I did well on them too. I don't know how and if they thought that was good, they should have gotten me sober first. Did I mention I was detoxing from a meth habit too? Maybe draft morning saved my life or maybe it set it up to start with, or none of the above. I'll never know. Everybody laughed their asses off when they buzzed of my long hair, I did too. That has grown back. Sparser, but I like it. Fuck fashion, this is freedom.

Fort Dix, New Jersey, boot camp in that summer was a, hot, humid, mind wrecking, hell on fucking earth and it didn't feel too god damned cosmic to me, at all. Clang went the prison door and they made damned sure we heard it loud and clear. I did learn to love some little things. Some of them I had never had. Some I didn't like before and some I had taken for granted. Pie crust, pistachio nuts, green olives and a soda pop when ever I damn well want one. Such little things to most.