Scenes

A wall on Worthington Street in Springfield.



A stretch of sidewalk on Worthington.



Springfield Technical Community College.



Politicos in Agawam this weekend - State Senate candidate Tom McCarthy, Congressional candidate Jay Fleitman and State Treasurer candidate Karyn Polito.



My late father's car being overrun by weeds in Belchertown.



The public beach in Wales at sunset.



Outside a Wales biker bar.



No burnouts.



There was fine music to accompany the fine dining at the Amherst Survival Center today as the Buckley Ensemble from Amherst College performed the work of Mozart and Brahms, despite the cramped quarters that forced them to play in the hallway!



Along the wall of the Haymarket Cafe in Northampton.



Benchsitters outside the Haymarket.



Guitar and drums.



Horn man.



Luke.



A flower in the window.



Candid scenes such as this from the UMass dorms may not be exactly what the UMass promotional department might produce, but they may still bring in a lot of new applicants!


To see all the pics click here

Some recent Electric Hot Tuna.

Shocking Video

What Really Went Down at the Feder Fiasco.



Yesterday I bemoaned the fact that I had no good video of last night's attempted speech by consultant and former Boston Herald writer Don Feder. It is one thing to read a written account of what happened (a more detailed written account than mine appears in today's UMass Collegian) but it is quite another to see and hear what happened for yourself.

Well, ask and you shall receive. Today a somewhat mysterious entity calling itself The Pioneer Truth Project has put the entire incident on YouTube, broken up into convenient snippets of various lengths. Here are what I think are the most compelling of the videos, with my own commentary on the action preceeding each video.

Video Number Two

This video shows the just introduced Feder walking to the forum to a chorus of boos. Only one minute and ten seconds into his speech, students stand up and turn their chairs around, sitting back down with their backs to Feder. This is generally considered the worst symbolic insult a public speaker can receive. What exactly he said in a minute and ten seconds to warrant such an insult is not clear.

In a pleading tone, Feder asks for permission to speak but the taunts continue. Now angry, Feder slams the podium and calls what is happening "fascistic!" The audience responds with ridiculing laughter. The video ends with Feder making yet another attempt to begin his speech.



Video Number Four

By the time this next excerpt begins things have deteriorated badly. Taunts from the audience, including personal ones concerning Feder's daughter, have caused him to fly into a rage. He throws down the microphone after shouting, "You've won! Hurray fo you, you goddamn Nazis!"

As you will see, the protesters cheer loudly as Feder attempts to leave the stage, but then is restrained by Republican Club members who beg him to reconsider. Returning to the podium Feder is still mad, saying he feels like he is at Boston University in 1969, which the audience takes as a complement. When Feder attempts to exit a second time, an older man in the audience begs Feder to return, and angrily denounces the police for "not doing your bloody job!" This seems to please Feder, who returns to the podium to make a third attempt to speak.



Video Number Five

Video Five begins by showing an exasperated Feder futilely trying to use logic to convince the protesters to back off and let him talk. When that too is greeted with taunts and catcalls, Feder exits the podium once again, while campus Republicans again attempt to get Feder to reconsider cancelling his speech.

While the audience waits to see if Feder will return, debates break out between those who approve and disapprove of what is happening. One such debate erupts right near the cameraman and provides fascinating insight into the mentality of both camps.



Video Number Seven

Finally Feder, making his fourth attempt, was allowed to speak for three minutes and forty-five seconds. That proved to be the longest amount of time he was ever allowed to speak. What's interesting from this brief glimpse of the speech he came hoping to give is how academic and statistics-filled Feder's talk was. He hardly appears the bombastic hate spewer his critics were accusing him of being. In fact, the speech is actually a little dull. But after speaking for less than four minutes, an audience member begins screaming at Feder something about "fag is not only a word" and is subsequently ejected by the police even as he hurls insults at Feder all the way out the door.

This outburst is the last straw for Feder, who leaves the podium for the fourth and final time, despite a final plea shouted from the audience that Feder not submit to "a heckler's veto."



You can see all of the Feder Fiasco tapes by clicking here. Beyond that I don't know what to say. The tapes speak for themselves, and they don't tell a happy story about the future of the First Amendment. Here's a scary final thought.

The people in these videos are tomorrow's leaders.

Art for Art's Sake

This picture I stumbled upon online has no other significance than that I like it.



My Life and Times

Wow, yesterday I got this notification that the recording of my life story by National Public Radio's StoryCorps has been placed in the permanent collection of the Library of Congress. If you're ever in Washington D.C and want to listen to it just give the librarian the numbers on the right. (click to enlarge)



Gee, that's so weird that people a hundred or two hundred years from now will be able to listen to me (and Amherst's Hwei-Ling Greeney) tell our life's story. I guess that means I'm immortal, for whatever that's worth. Hey Library of Congress, the immortality is nice, but can't it come with a little money?

Bad Beer

Today walking along the woodland way downtown I stumbled upon this empty can of Golden Anniversary Beer, to my knowledge the most vile tasting form of alcohol ever made.



I think alcohol does so much more harm than good that I would not oppose a movement (which is coming sooner than you think) to make it illegal. On the other hand, the libertarian in me might win and I'll end up tolerating alcohol's legality, but not if Golden Anniversary still exists. My experience with it was similar to this testimonial on a beer website:

Many moons ago when I was a freshman in college one of the local frat houses that I frequented ran out of money at the end of the semester. So they were unable to afford the pallets of beast and natty ice that they usually consumed. Now since having no beer was inconceivable they were forced to pick an even cheaper brand. The cheapest they could find at the local distributor was Golden Anniversary Ice. So they bought several pallets of it.

Now since we were freshman and weren't paying for the beer they were giving us we pretty much had to take what we could get. So we were among the first to have to make the switch from Natty Ice to Golden Anniversary. At this point I truly believed that Natty Ice was the best beer ever I loved the taste. But Golden Anniversary was just too much for me. I had to just grit my teeth and take it while I was drinking the first few cans. The taste was absolutely horrid. It was like they had a basin under the floor grate in the Natty Ice plant and collected all the beer that fell through and canned it.

I can't acurately recall the exact taste except to say it was horrid. If you ever have a chance to try a can I advise you pass, unless you're curious about what a truly shitty beer tastes like.

Very true! And what the hell is it a "golden anniversary" of anyway? Auschwitz? The rise of Stalin? The invention of telemarketing? I never knew, but assumed it must be something awful. Now thanks to the Wikipedia, I have at last discovered that it honors the golden anniversary of the John Koch Brewery that makes it.



During prohibition the brewery continued operation by producing "near-beer" under the Kobru label, along with various flavors of soda, and seltzer water. The brewery also bottled Orange Crush soda during this period.

In 1933, following the repeal of prohibition, the Fred Koch Brewery began to again produce beer and ale. Brands introduced after prohibition included Pale Lager Beer, Deer Run Ale, Koch's Holiday Beer, and Koch's Bock Beer. In 1938, Koch's Golden Anniversary Beer was introduced commemorating the 50th anniversary of the brewery.

I like Orange Crush, but not enough to forgive Koch for inventing the worst of all beers. It does have one use to me however, whenever I'm tempted to drink beer, I need only remember the taste of Golden Anniversary to kill the urge at once.

Spring Break

Today I was at the Black Sheep Deli in downtown Amherst.



I saw these young women with psychedelic hair, and asked them what was with the wigs.



They told me they were dressing up weird to celebrate the arrival of Spring Break, which is next week. We regular residents of the upper Valley will also enjoy a brief break from the students before they return and the academic year moves toward its always roaring finale.

Color Coded

Northampton is the only town in our Valley where you see lavender houses.



Today's Video

This song recommended to me by Tim is by a beloved Valley band and has references in it to Northampton such as the old Baystate Hotel on Strong Avenue.

The New Eroticism

What happened to the New Homosexuality?



Recently I came upon this book THE NEW EROTICISM: THEORIES, VOGUES AND CANONS
New York, Random House 1970 at a church book sale. It intrigued me because of it's age, there's been a lot of new chapters in the sexual revolution since 1970. The book is a collection of essays by prominent radical thinkers of the time such as Herbert Marcuse, and a lot psychiatrists who base their theories to an embarrassing degree on the now largely discredited theories of Sigmund Freud.

To me the most interesting chapter was by someone called Tom Burke, who originally wrote the piece for Esquire in 1969. It's called The New Homosexuality and it begins:

Pity: just when Middle America finally discovered the homosexual, he died. Countless stolid burghers, reconciled to the idea of such opulent phenomenon as acid rock and the male pill, are finally prepared to empathized with (if not quite approve of) this thirty-fivish semi-neuter whom they imagine to be the prototypical modern deviate: a curio shop proprietor with an uncertain mouth, wet basset eyes, a Coppertone tan and a miniature Yorkshire, who lives in a white and silver Jean Harlow apartment, drinks pink gin, cooks boeuf Bourguignon, mourns Judy, makes timid liaisons on 42nd Street, get mugged by midnight cowboys, and masturbates while watching televised swimming meets.

The public is now prepared to have a gingerly if patronizing romance with him, and, alas, the attachment is necrophilic: he has expired, with a whimper, to make way for the new homosexual of the seventies, an unfettered, guiltless male child of the new morality in a Zapata moustache and an outlaw hat, who couldn't care less for Establishment approval, would as soon sleep with boys as girls, and thinks that "Over the Rainbow" is a place to fly on 200 micrograms of lysergic acid diethylamide."

Hey cool, but how come I don't see much of this "New Homosexual" thirty-nine years later? Something happened to cause that old, stale image of gay guys as a sort of male version of a dumb 50's housewife to reassert itself. Part of the blame is no doubt the entertainment industry, which thought it was helping to expand the acceptance of homosexuality by making it cute and funny.

As I've said before - I'm queer but I'm not a fag. I refuse to be stereotyped into having certain opinions, attributes and abilities just because I'm gay. Being homosexual does not make me good at interior decorating, or at fashion or any of the other bullshit things I'm supposed to be and do because Hollywood and the TV industry told you that is who I am. I'm gay but I can do what I want, be any way I want and if anyone wants to tell me what gays are supposed to be like based on some straight person's ignorant stereotype of what a gay person is supposed to be, my reply to them is FUCK YOU I DO WHAT I WANT!



The many talents of former Northampton wonderboy Paolo Mastrangelo (above) have been exploding all over New York City since he moved there last summer. He's currently a contributor to one of New York's hottest blogs, and has even got New Yorkers talking about Northampton's proposed panhandling ordinance. To check out Paolo's latest adventures click here.

A sea of snow conceals the esplanade outside the campus hotel at UMass.



The snow we can stand, at least with a little self-encouragement.



But the arctic temperatures with a cruel wind is too much!

The Naked Valley

How much is too much?



In 2006 the town of Brattleboro, Vermont attracted national attention for its high tolerance of public nudity. As reported at the time in the Boston Globe:

"Here on the banks of the Connecticut River, in the busiest parking area of a downtown peppered with bookstores and coffee shops, more is meeting the eye than some people want.

A politely rebellious collection of teenagers passing time in the Harmony Parking Lot this summer has taken to disrobing. Seemingly on a whim, they shed clothes and soak up the sun, nude.

What began as a lark or an ode to youthful exuberance has now turned into a municipal quandary, because public nudity is permissible in Brattleboro.

In the words of Town Manager Jerry Remillard, if you're naked in public, and you're minding your business, you're legal."

But that didn't last. The following summer town officials voted 3-2 to pass an ordinance banning nudity in the downtown area and near schools. The reason for the change of heart was that all the publicity had turned Brattleboro into a nudist tourist destination, with all kinds of folks showing up nude from out of town. Some of them were acting pretty lewd.

Brattleboro's experiment in public nudity raises an interesting question - why exactly is being nude in public against the law? In Massachusetts such a ban is perhaps less surprising, just look at the attire of the Samuel Chapin statue next to the Quadrangle in Springfield. Buckled and buttoned from head to toe and wrapped in a flowing cape, the Bay State's puritian heritage is perfectly represented in the Chapin statue's far from revealing clothing. The women of his time wouldn't have shown a bare ankle, let alone a bare breast.



Although standards of modesty have relaxed considerably since the 1600's, complete nudity in public is still far from legal in Massachusetts. In fact "public indecency," which is the charge usually brought against those who are too undressed in public, can be a serious black mark on your record. Employers who see such a charge are not as likely to think you were a hippie at Woodstock as they are to think you were caught in a schoolyard dressed in nothing but a raincoat. It can be a hard conviction to explain away, even though the circumstances may have been quite innocent.

For example, you might have been arrested for streaking. That was the big fad of the college campuses of the late 1970's where students, sometimes alone but usually in groups, would strip off their clothes and go running around campus in the nude. I was a student at UMass during the streaking craze. While plenty of my classmates participated, I can't recall that I ever did. However that might be because I was part of a gay scene in the Southwest dorms where paryting naked was common. In fact next to what me and my queer friends were doing, the straight kids with their innocently nude running seemed almost quaint. Frankly, the pre-AIDS gay scene was awfully loose.

At first the campus police would chase streakers and arrest them if they were caught. Then the cops learned that chasing the kids only encouraged the streakers, and that ignoring their behavior tended to take the fun out of it. So the fad faded once the novelty wore off, but the prevalence of nudity on campus continued to increase in other ways. For example casual nudity in the dorms became more common.

In the 1990's UMass decided to crack down on the level of nudity in the dorms, resulting in student protests. WNNZ Radio personality (and Valley Advocate writer) Al Giordano expressed his solidarity with the protestors by doing his radio show in the nude. Of course it's hard to tell what someone is wearing or not wearing on the radio, but no one who knew Al, a disciple of 60's radical Abbie Hoffman, doubted in the least that he was starkers in the studio.

Without anyone really taking note of it, today's college students have adopted an almost European indifference to nudity. I lived in Amherst until recently and occasionally got invited to student parties. I'm surprised by how common it is after midnight for people to wind up nude, guys mostly but some women as well.



There seems to be a double standard for the sexes in regards to nudity at parties, which perhaps reflects the double standard in society at large. For example men can go naked from the waist up almost anywhere anytime, but women can still be charged with indecency for doing the same. In fact, it has only been in recent years that exceptions were allowed for breastfeeding. Are guys running around bareass just boys being boys, while girls doing the same thing are acting slutty?

A female UMass student I know told me about an experience she had last semester at a "Socks on Cocks" party. This is a gathering where the guys party nude except for socks that cover their genitals, a fashion inspired in part by the popular rock band Red Hot Chili Peppers who in their early years used to perform live so attired.

My friend said that at first there were several women at the party, all of whom were fully dressed. However as the night got late one of the women ran around the room pulling off the socks and throwing them out the window. This caused most of the women to leave, but my friend and one other woman remained. She said the guys started urging them to get nude as well, or at least remove their tops. Although the other girl did bare her breasts my friend kept refusing until she finally felt compelled to leave. She told me that the next day all her friends told her she had done the right thing, and that she would have degraded herself to strip.



My friend's experience showed there is still a sense that you shouldn't just get naked under all circumstances, especially if you are female. Yet at the other extreme is our insistance on nude celebrities. Today it is a mark of success, a sign that you have finally arrived, if you have paparazzi stalking you in hopes of catching you with your pants down. For those who have truly achieved stardom, to be nude before the public has become almost a job requirement, for male stars as well as female.

For some, their objection to nudity is aesthetic - they fear that if nudity becomes legal all the wrong people will get naked. They point to the lessons learned by the arrival of the bikini in the 1950's. At the time it was heralded as a great new fashion destined to reveal the best attributes of the nation's youth. Instead, it sometimes seemed as if the truly beautiful people remained modest, while every overweight middle-aged slob on the beach wore the tiniest of swimwear.

So what is this brave new world of nekkidness? Should people be arrested, even stigmatized, simply for appearing in public in the nude? It is one thing to advocate for the right to be casually nude on a hot summer day, but what about the dude that wants to strut down Main Street naked with his hard-on bobbing up and down? What about nudity around children?



Clearly there needs to be some relaxation of the public nudity ordinances to reflect changing societal norms. Obviously the standards have changed, with nudity being much more common in television, movies and especially advertising than was the case just ten years ago. It also would be a good thing if we finally shed the unhealthy vestiges of our Puritan heritage and learned to celebrate our bodies rather than be ashamed of them. But how much public nudity should be allowed and in what context? As Brattleboro learned the hard way, it is not as simple as just allowing people to get undressed, because exactly what the difference is between innocent nudity and tasteless lewdness is not quite as transparent.

In the UMass Campus Center today Students For Life had a table set up. They have been very active this semester.



Outside, there were free classes in pumpkin carving. While the instructions were free, the pumpkins cost five bucks each.



Nearby were trash bags meant to symbolize the bodybags of victims of the genocide in Darfur.



Am I a bad person because I can't make myself care about Darfur?

I'm saddened to hear that longtime Grateful Dead "family" member Merle Saunders has died. From the obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle:



SAN FRANCISCO -- Keyboardist Merl Saunders, the gentle lion of the San Francisco music scene best known as co-captain of guitarist Jerry Garcia's solo excursions outside the Grateful Dead, died Friday at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center after fighting infections.

The 74-year-old musician suffered a debilitating stroke 6 1/2 years ago and, although he lost the ability to speak, he made numerous sentimental guest appearances at shows over those years playing with one hand.

"I never met anybody so happy who had a stroke," said Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart. "In the end, the only thing that lit him up was the music. Sometimes he'd cry, but I've never seen anybody so happy in the realm of music."

"Merl was an ensemble guy, a groupist," said Hart, who played with Mr. Saunders in his early '80s solo group, High Noon. "He brought those sensibilities to the Garcia band. He let Jerry have his flights of fancy."

After Garcia fell into a diabetic coma in 1986 and lost some of his basic motor skills, Mr. Saunders spent hours daily with the stricken guitarist running scales, working him out on jazz standards such as "My Funny Valentine."

Here's Merle performing in 1998:

Lover #3

Third in the trilogy.

This is the last in a series of three essays I've released at random about the three times I had full heterosexual intercourse.



The first time my friend Mike Stedman played the Grateful Dead for me I didn't like them. I was a rock n'roll kid with a preference for heavy metal, and the record Mike played for me was Workingman's Dead.



I was not impressed. I told Mike that The Grateful Dead were too mellow, and worse some of the songs had a country feel to them. It was unlike any country music I'd ever heard, but it reminded me of country and I hated anything connected with country music.

So, like a lot of people I acquired a taste for the Grateful Dead only gradually. When I heard the live Dead stuff, in particular Europe '72, I started to appreciate the fact that the Dead had a very wide musical range and the members of the band were first rate musicians. But my attitude was still sorta so what? Certainly there didn't seem to be anything to justify the nearly fanatical devotion that some people seemed to have for their music.

Then I tried LSD. One day Mike and I went to a free concert in Forest Park in Springfield on Hippie Hill, which was located near the water gardens by the back gate. The city put the concerts on, with bands like Fat and Clean Living and the whole hill was covered with people partying. This was the first time I saw parents getting their children high by blowing marijuana smoke in their faces. I was shocked, but the kids seemed to love it. They couldn't stop laughing.

At one point this girl came running towards us shouting and laughing and waving her hands which had a long strip of paper in one of them. She was ripping off bits of the paper and stuffing them in people's hands. What was odd was that she was running in the direction away from the concert. She gave some of her strip to Mike and me, and we saw that they were divided into little squares. There were pictures on each square of the R.Crumb character Mr. Natural.



Mike knew exactly what it was - acid! Apparently the girl had come to sell it to the crowd, but seemed to have gotten too high on her product and felt it necessary to flee the concert while giving away what she had once meant to sell. We each took one of the Mr. Natural squares. When after a half hour nothing seemed to be happening, we took two more apiece. Then it kicked in. REALLY kicked in.

At some point that afternoon, while I was sitting in cosmic contemplation of the concert, receiving my doctorate education in the subjectivity of reality, one of the bands covered a Grateful Dead song from Workingman's Dead called "Uncle John's Band." Suddenly I went:

"Oh. Now I get it!"

In the coming years I would go see the Grateful Dead in concert about thirty times. That is not very much by Deadhead standards, it was not unheard of for someone to see thirty shows in a single year. Those people used to follow the tours, while I always waited for the Dead to come reasonably near-by. Sometimes they came to my hometown of Springfield. Often they came to Hartford or Boston. The furthest I ever went to see them was Highgate, Vermont in 1995 on their last tour.

We usually went to see the Dead as a group. A whole bunch of us from Pine Point would all get tickets and take over a few rows of the scene for us Pointers to party and whatever. The people who went used to vary from show to show. One time part of our group that was going to a concert in Hartford was this girl from the Pine Point Cafe who was named Crystal. She had never been to a Grateful Dead show before but had heard about them and wanted to join us. She was pretty and funny and we were glad to have her along.

On our way down to Hartford Crystal ended up in the same van as me, which was being driven by Fuji Cardinal. She asked me how she could get the most out of what she was about to see. I told her my experience, that I had never really grasped the Grateful Dead until I had heard them on acid. By that time I had pretty much given up on LSD as a mind expanding drug, although I occasionally used it for sex. The thing about psychedelics is that while the first few times you take them they are profoundly powerful to the point of life-transforming, that effect fades with continued use. It's as if you pretty much get all you can get out of them in just a few trips, then afterwards you're just going over and over the same psychic terrain without experiencing anything new. It's best to stop taking them when you reach that point, those who don't tend to get a little strange.

So I had no intention of taking acid at the Hartford show. Frankly, at that phase of my life Budweiser and marijuana were my drugs of choice. However Crystal was totally determined to take acid, and begged me to find some for her. At first I said no, but when we arrived in Hartford several beers and several joints later, my mind was more open to the possibility.

The fates dictated it. En route to the Hartford Civic Center someone came up from behind and stood too close to me. He whispered something under his breath that I couldn't make out. Crystal however heard him more clearly. "Yes!" she cried. "We'll take two!" Then I realized that the stranger was an acid dealer. "None for me!" I said, but Crystal pleaded, "I can't do it for the first time by myself!" Before I knew what was happening she had popped it in my mouth and I swallowed it. I saw her do the same with what appeared to be a little piece of clear plastic.

"Dammit Crystal, what did that guy sell you?"

"I don't know," she said, "something about windowpane, four-way."

Windowpane was an unusually pure and powerful form of LSD that was made by suspending the drug in a clear gelatin which then hardened and was cut into squares. The term "four-way" meant that one quarter of each square represented one dose, so you got four doses per square. In other words, due to Crystal's ignorance we had taken the equivalent of four doses of LSD apiece!

The details of the rest of the evening are a little vague. The drug came on like a fog at first, gently and soothingly I found myself in a place of perfect peace. All I wanted to do was to sit and grok with amazement at everything I saw and everything I heard and everything I thought. Somehow my friends got us to the concert and into our seats. I remember thinking that God was love, and God was in everything, especially Jerry Garcia.

At some point the concert ended. I looked around, and no one was sitting near us. It was just Crystal and I. Everyone else had left. Janitors were cleaning up. Where had everyone gone? Crystal started to panic - how could we find our friends? We had no way to get home without them. We went outside and roamed up and down the street trying to spot someone we had come to the show with. We couldn't see, or couldn't focus well enough to see, anyone we knew. We were stranded in Hartford.

Somehow we had the presence of mind to add up our money, and realized that we had enough for bus tickets back to Springfield, so we headed in what we thought was the direction of the Hartford bus station. By some miracle we arrived. One of us was coherent enough to buy tickets. We went to the waiting area and sat in a trance waiting for it to be time to board the bus to Springfield. That was okay.

God was in the bus station too.

The next thing I realized we were being pushed out the door by a security guard. Wait, we need to catch the bus to Springfield! The last one left an hour ago? Oh no, how did we miss it? Apparently we had sat grokking beneath the neon lights of the terminal while our bus to Springfield came and went. Now the bus station was closing for the night and we were being put on the street!

Oh God, what a disaster this was turning out to be, or so I would have thought if I was clear headed enough to properly appraise the situation. Thankfully Crystal, even being the novice tripper that she was, concluded that we had to get a room for the night. There was a flophouse hotel near the station and we walked over to it and spent the last of our money on a single room with a double bed.

And the LSD, which had not yet even peaked, worked its magical mischief on us all night long. We talked, I don't know about what, but I recall that we were both crying at one point. Eventually we were both nude. We explored each other's bodies like they were marvels of beauty and miracles of creation. In other words, we saw one another as we really were. The fact that I was queer had become meaningless. We were two humans exploding with sensuality. I remember at one point I was licking between her legs, the first and last time I had ever done that to a woman. She licked me all over. I fucked her freely and she wept with joy. Eventually the drug began to wear off. The sun was coming up and shining like shimmering shafts of gold through the window. We got dressed and walked back to the bus station in the dawn's early light. The station had reopened and we got some coffee and caught the first bus back to Springfield.

That was in 1986 and that was the last time I had full sexual intercourse with a woman. I never again took such a large dose of psychedelics. Soon after our adventure Crystal moved to Boston with a boyfriend she met at the Ranch House Bar and Grill on Boston Road. I never saw her again or heard what became of her.

I hope she's okay wherever she is.

To read #1 of the trilogy click here.
To read #2 of the trilogy click here.

Here's a bumper sticker you don't see everyday in downtown Amherst.



A campus police car was parked outside a bar near the University of Massachusetts around Last Call. The officer noticed a young man leaving the bar so apparently intoxicated that he could barely walk.

The man stumbled around the parking lot for a few minutes, with the officer quietly observing. After what seemed an eternity in which he tried his keys on five different vehicles, the man managed to find his car and fall into it.

He sat there for a few minutes as a number of other patrons left the bar and drove off.

Finally he started the car, switched the wipers on and off - it was a fine, dry summer night - flicked the blinkers on and off a couple of times, honked the horn and then switched on the lights.

He moved the vehicle forward a few inches, reversed a little and then remained still for a few more minutes as some more of the other patrons' vehicles left.

At last, when his was the only car left in the parking lot, he pulled out and drove slowly down the road.

The police officer, having waited patiently all this time, now started up his patrol car, put on the flashing lights, promptly pulled the man over and administered a breathalyzer test.

To his amazement, the breathalyzer indicated that the man had consumed NO alcohol at all!

Dumbfounded, the officer said, "I'll have to ask you to accompany me to the campus police station. This breathalyzer equipment must be broken."

"I doubt it," said the student with a smile, "Tonight I'm the designated decoy."