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"Coaching Our New Patriots" -
Randy Burns
July, 2002

If this takes any longer I'm moving to Florida. I hate Florida! Went to school there for a few years, I know what it's like. Florida sucks. I guess this is more of a threat than anything else, because I'm only pretending and it's fun to pretend. I do have a plan, and it's moving along nicely. So, threatening to do anything at this point in my life, would make little difference to far too many people. I'm pretending everything I write, somebody reads, thinks, and cares about. Someday, perhaps that will happen. I don't have a large reading audience, not yet. No one hangs on my words written. However, there are two important things I do have. One is a computer, and the other is time. I'm off on the new road, with old road ideals. I'm slightly offbeat, political, and an ancient radical primed and ready to mix it up again. If they're still breeding radicals in this new world, I'll volunteer to be a father figure. Kind of like the Big Brother program, except they'll already know the way I've been thinking.

What a gas, man. Coaching, rather than teaching!

I can be a "Big Father Figure," and a pioneer that falls asleep in a chair with his electric word-sender going. Right in the middle of the paved universe-void of wilderness and real mystery. Happenings don't happen, they're planned. Have to be, because that's the way the new world is. Maybe it won't be that way tomorrow, but that's the way it is today. I'm talking about this very moment on the new road, this moment only.

Now….what in the hell was I talking about? Guess I got lost in the moment.

Wait, wait, I remember. The "Big Father" thing. Okay, I'm back now.

So this radical kid, my prodigy, becomes a little more radical than me in my presence. I shoot a hard glance over to him while saying nothing, so the audience naturally returns to me. He's been quickly processing radical thoughts, but I'm a Goddamned Museum! My short glance said, "Respect your radical elders, you little shit!" It was good enough for me to learn it all that way, walking five miles in the snow-up to my waist, just to hear a few lines of alternative thought! We earned what we learned back in those days, and my "Adopted Son" will learn to respect the original seekers of radical thought.

We'll have grown close naturally, as our government continues to lie and perpetuate atrocities that always seem to follow the lies. We'll share the same vision and need for radical change.

Finally, as I knew it would, the big day arrives. It was bound to come, eventually. I'm sad, but proud as any real father could possibly be. Our cab pulls to the curb uptown.

"Well, good luck son." That was all I could say.

"Okay, but I won't be needing it," was his return. "Still, thanks for everything, man, really. I'll be all right. Don't worry about me."

With one strong handshake friends only know, he leaps out of the cab and joins the demonstration already in progress. Good old Columbia University!

"Where to sir?"

"What?"

"Where to now, sir?" the cabbie asked again.

Being given that moment to think, "Downtown, around Sheridan Square. Yes, drop me off at the White Horse Tavern."

"We're as good as there now, sir."

"Well, maybe we are," I replied. Really, maybe we can do it this time. ~

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