I have not been blogging in French for one, simple dumb-ass reason: I can't operate the French diacritics on my keyboard. Truly, in the brave new world of post-technology technology, I am a babe in the woods. And before that, back in the day when there was technology, I was already a sylvan neonate. I never learned to drive a car, for example, though I grew up in the rural West. There are several reasons for this. In the first place, you might not think it to look at me, but I am a man of (perhaps neurotically rigid) principle, and a keeper of oaths that I make to myself. My first principle in this life is never to engage in any activity during the routine performance of which I might kill myself, or, worse, somebody else. There's more to it, of course, but to this general principle I have been faithful, and one can observe its operation throughout my life, even in matters that at first don't seem to have much to do with it, e.g., way back in the day, my defiance of the draft. Of course, in fact, it had a lot to do with it.

The notice from my draft board arrived on the 6th of June, 1964: "You are ordered to appear at 6:00 AM, on June 20th, 1964...." Fucking ordered. I spent the next two weeks partying high (marijuana and peyote were definitely part of my life by then), worrying, asking my friends what they had done, what they thought I should do about being fucking ordered to show up for induction. My grades were bad, or non-existent, and my student deferment had evaporated. The obscene beast had fucking ordered me to appear before it: How could I persuade it not to devour me? Did I even want to acknowledge its obscene summons?

In the end (two weeks was a long time in those days), I showed up--after a fashion. I woke up around 8:00, already a couple of hours past the time ordained, made a leisurely toilet, and caught the bus to Spokane, arriving around 10:00. Craig Young, a friend of mine and former roommate, happened to be in town, staying with his grandmother a few blocks from the induction center; so I stopped in on the way and had coffee and a funny, brave chat with him. It was 11:30 when I walked into the induction center. Immediately, a tall man in uniform with a crewcut and a clipboard barked at me, "Why couldn't you have been here at six ay-em like everybody else?!" To which I barked right back, "Because it would seriously have inconvenienced me!" And so it went; being among the very last of those run through that induction center on that day, I followed the lines on the floor in my underwear, going from probe to palp to pee station, and wherever I stopped, the cute young medic in charge of that particular part of my body would greet me with, "Ah yes, the inconvenienced Mr. Noziere!" Simply put, I failed every test that was given me that I could fail, i.e., the seeing, hearing, intelligence tests. Giving all the wrong answers was surprisingly difficult, but rather enjoyable, and it was fun to watch the expressions on the faces of the young soldiers as they read over my carefully written test papers. I was shown out with some marks of contempt. It took a couple of more weeks for my IV-F ("unfit for any sort of military service") classification to arrive in the mail, but somehow they flew.