the alienated war baby report

I mostly grew up in a suburb -- the community of Lakewood Park. Or maybe it was Parkwood Lake, or Lakepark Wood; I don't remember all that clearly. What I do remember is that it wasn't a bad place to live if you owned your own car (I didn't) and could escape once in while.

When I was 19 and still living at home as a sophomore in college, we moved to another suburb, the fabled Marin County, reputed to be paradise on earth.

I left home and became a hippie in San Francisco, then a clerical worker working various low-level paper-pushing jobs, then a musician working in bars from San Fran on up to Anchortown. At 45 I decided I was old enough for a real job, and taught high school English in the Central Valley, CA the next 15 years. And now:

Sometimes I live in the country;
Sometimes I live in town,
And sometimes I take a great notion
To jump ahead into the river and drown.

Okay, that last part isn't true, but it's still a great song. Anyway, we don't have a river around here, just the creek, and it's too shallow to drown in. And if I jumped in I'd get really cold and probably ruin my shoes. Luckily, there's another song that describes things better:

You can't always get what you want,
But if you try sometimes, you just might find
You get what you need.