Waking from a dream I am hungry.  I crack open a can of soda water, sip, and lay back, remembering.  In the dream I am almost a different man, but with the same people, my father, in my life.  I have a young girl friend (of legal age), a student.  Am I a student also?  She likes me, which is novel to me.  When I return from a trip of a scientific professional artistic sort, involving underwater photography, optimal use of tight restaurant space, she has missed me.  It's all tentative, but seems to be working.  She is pretty, of a Lauren Bacall sort.  She likes me.

And I wake, and must get ready for work, and the hollow feeling comes back to me.  I must eat something, my stomach tells me.  Back to the sense of shame, of imprisonment.  The writing is the only thing to save me, to convince me I'm still following through with my values.  I suppose I avoid bitterness and something in the neighborhood of anger, inward or outward, fear, confusion, by having to work a hospitality job.  The body has to get up, feed itself, not counting on the staff meal, take medicinal herbs, shower, shave, get ready for work, and at work, no time to dwell on anything.

Where I went to school, the attitude was too WASP to care that much, to look out for a wayward intellectual.  Stiff upper lip.  If you can't keep up with us, darling...  There were teachers who cared, deeply, but not all of them.  To balance this out of really getting it, of really caring, they institute a shift toward ultra liberalism, another form of WASP fairness and the lack of personal treatment, of actually caring for another human being, another human soul in the process of trying to figure out life.

And so I said, to hell with them.

Shakespeare, I was about to say, would not have known WASPs, not their actual Twentieth Century embodiment, but that might not be all fair to say.  For, they say, he was one of the old faith, a Catholic, trying to get by, tenuously, in a dangerous spot, in a very dangerous atmosphere, of spies, and powers in the wrong court.  His Polonius is convincing, and perhaps Leartes, who ultimately kills Hamlet through trickery in their duel, represents WASP forms of "justice."  Yes, back then they didn't just ruin young people's lives through their callousness, they put people's heads on pikes.

And I had come from an Irish tradition, a Polish tradition, non-practicing Catholics, teachers who cared about their maturing charges, who would have reached out to a student going through a hard time.  I had come from a philosophy of the higher purposes of education, which went beyond the WASP bring out the battle fit, the preselected to salvation in a crowd of people.  A blind eye to a stoning, 'couldn't keep up.'

I presented a direct conflict to them, which was not exactly wise.  It cost me a lot of things, including that girl of dreams...  my own place in the sun of education.

And, I suppose, that's why became a writer, even without knowing how to do it, as the only way to save that which they would have thrown away.

The words there, of JFK, one of my sensibilities, held up for me.  And so did those of the at the time avant garde writers.  Hemingway.  They were my torches out of the whole mess, out of the creepy collusion.

Many years later, many scandals began to come out.  Entertainment, the news...