The Price of Paranoia

Ah - now for something refreshingly different. My friend Gilbert, still a friend - I even know where he is - sends me a "memo" from someplace in one of the Carolina's, I think, where he is at a summer philosophy seminar - whether teaching or attending, I do not remember. 30 July 1984. He took his motorcycle out there, and complains, "Bar time here is 2:00 am, and the police are worse than flies on hamburger ... Put you through a routine (recite alphabet standing/hopping on one foot touching your nose alternately with different fingers) worthy of Monty Python - if you giggle they bust you."

This may be the same place where he rented a small one-room cottage that he could drive his bike into (much too paranoid to just park it outside, Gilbert's bike lived with him), and coming home drunk one night, he got caught in the doorway just long enough for the bike to lean against one of his calves on the muffler side inflicting horrible (don't know what degree) burns, a memory I'm glad I don't have, sharing his memory of that event hurts just thinking about it. Doesn't seem as if it has happened as of this memo.

I guess I had written him and chided him about not sending a card. He ends with, "Well, even if you never got a post card, at least you got a memo."