Life On a Lake 

Dedicated to the Joys of Waterside Living

301

My heart aches, and I am filled with shame as a former US soldier. And yet I am not surprised. Without a draft, our military ranks are filled with the dregs of society--young men and women who are proven misfits and mental cretins who can find useful employment no where else. Nobody wants them. Often it is a choice between the military and jail. And like Appalachian trailer trash, Pfc Lynndie England, pictured above, they find inspiration and superiority in degrading and demeaning a person of a different faith and color than themselves. A foreigner whose country they illegally occupy. They are the worst of the worst. (And Lynndie is reportedly four-months pregnant by another MP on duty at the prison;; let's see: that dates conception to about the time of the atrocities. One can picture them as the culmination of the torture orgy.)

A draft is unpopular, yet it is one way of getting superior grade warriors, if we need them, and we seem to do so, badly. Urging Republican Congressional leaders to write legislation for a draft would greatly lessen George Bush's chances of reelection, and that is foremost in our President's mind. It is even more important to him that truly ending the war and bringing home the troops. The civil war and carnage that might follow could hardly be worse than from this non-war that is presently taking place.

And the men fighting each other to establish a government in Iraq would not be ours. They would be fighting as they must to establish democracy, or some Mid-Eastern version of it highly unlike our own. The rule of the emerging stronger Muslim faction, probably the Sunnis.

Remember, our own brand of democracy emerged from just such a war. Ours was with the British occupation of America.

Pfc. Lynndie England. Let's bring her home in a body bag. Then we can honor her properly. (See below.)

300

Male blackbird in a field of cattails

The old brown cattails have been replaced by fresh green shoots, and the blackbirds have been nested among them for, oh, a couple of months now. The females are brown and mottled; the males, however, are jet black, with brilliant red and yellow bands on each shoulder, which produce an orange glow in flight that seems fluorescent, it is so bright.

The baby birds are fledglings. Since their parents have been feeding at our feeders, in it only natural that the parents bring the babies to the feeder. Already, though, they are able to find it all by themselves, thank your.

The babies all have female coloration; this is true of most species. So male and female juveniles look alike and are growing fast. They are smaller, thinner, than their adult maternal counterparts, however. And they have peculiar, youngish characteristics, such as not knowing what to do with their feathers, and are often found fluffing them up and laying them back down again. And they tend to contest each other at the feeders. The adults don't seem to do this and feed separately and selectively.

The adults are still protecting the nest and the young. Usually it is the male that does the guard duty, and I remember just a short time ago, when the females were on the nest, and the males would chase away all intruders, even the crows (especially the crows) that were about four times the size of the fierce blackbird.

I'm in love with the tattooed lady.

299

I found this, or rather her, somewhere while surfing around on the Web. Not quite a porn site. Imagine having this done to yourself. OK, I'm old, and can't imagine it. But it is happened everywhere in the world today, and we'd better get used to it.

Of course she is quite young and lovely. And look how complex and gothic the tattoo is. I should imagine she picked the picture out of a book and the tattoo artist . . . executed the picture, the design.

I am trying (unsuccessfully, I must add) to imagine her mindset when she set about getting the tattoo, which occupies an entire upper arm, shoulder to elbow bend, and pre-visualizing what it would look like, and what her friends would think and say. And her boy friend. Would it turn him on or off? Like a faucet? Or would he know ahead of time? Or would she even bother to consult him

Boy friends come and go. (No pun intended.) But a tattoo--it remains with you, long after the pain has faded.

A tattoo is eternal. Someday this young woman will be old. Will she have the tattoo still, or will she have had it surgically removed when the novelty has passed, or when gothic is out of style? Or when a boy friend or husband strenuously objects? And then there will be pain again.

Maybe pain is what it is all about.

Robert Arnold, Editor
rcarnold@direcway.com