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Please visit my website, www.watermelonslim.com, and especially you writers will be interested in checking out my blog, which I've been doing regularly for more than five years now. A lot of it is writing from the musical trail for my fans, but there's a whole bunch of other stuff, including a lot of politics, because I am that Watermelon Slim who played "Taps" at the December 16 action, in the blizzard, and at the recent civil disobedience. I was arrested at both. I've been in the fight against war, fascism, injustice and inhumanity for 40 years. I was at MayDay, and at the moratorium March the week before. I was one of the leaders of the Great New Jersey Turnpike Stall on my birthday, April 25, 1971. I bear the scar on my left shin from a neoNazi jackboot, when I was one of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War who bounced the NSWPP from Flamingo Park at the Republican National Convention of 1972. My father fought the Nazis in the North Atlantic and Anzio, and I met their spawn in Miami. My formal education has been first-rate. I wouldn't trade my degrees for Harvard ones. I was raised in the finest private Catholic and Episcopal high schools. Elementary School: Gibbons Hall, Asheville, North Carolina High Schools: Asheville Scholl for Boys, Asheville Country Dat, Lenox School for Boys. Graduated with honors 1968. College: Middlebury College, 1968-DNG; ended up in Vietnam by August of 1969 after failing, dropping out, enlisting in the Army and volunteering for Vietnam deployment. I came back to the USA in 1970, rank private E-2, with a general discharge under honorable conditions for having naively told my company CO that I had missed a formation because I'd been sleeping with a fellow GI (I am bisexual). I was just ashamed I missed the formation, and wanted the captain to know why. I was way, seriously naive. I appealed for my retention, but it was not to be. But I was already living way outside the box. I was incompletely trained by the Army. I was an experimenter, and I suppose LSD was among the greatest experiments. LOL. The combination of my exposures to LSD and to the writings of the English evolutionary existentialist philosopher and prolific author Colin Wilson, plus a lifelong interest in psychology, are among the bases of the phenomenology which I have practiced as a lifelong psychological discipline. In addition to being a phenomenologist, I would say Iwas undoubtedly what the author D. Edward Williams termed a "Dionysian." 1984-86: University of Oregon, B.A., Journalism and History, Departmental Honors in History, 1986. I CLEPed out of my entire freshman and sophomore years. I was a well-read revolutionary and outlaw who was creating his own educational curriculum in learning what he loves the most-- the English language, all styles of it. My mentors at U of O: Daniel Pope and W.Gordon Rockett, both Emeritus now. I was also captain of the U of O bowling team, 1984-1986. High game 299. 1997-2000: Oklahoma State University. M.A., History, 2000, plus the school-teaching curriculum. Mentor: Dr. Ronald Petrin. This was my second great self-reinvention attempt. In both, I got the degrees, but neither worked. After both, I went back to truckdriving and the blues. and now the latter makes my living. I just am not a button-down enough fellow ever to be a schoolteacher or general-purpose news reporter. However, as a man turning the corner of 50, I refined (I shall not say finished) the process of becoming (with no intent to boast) a master of the English language. I have visited Shakespeare's birthplace twice now. Just day before yesterday I visited Ernest Hemingway's house in Key West, and played the blues in the legendary Green Parrot where he hung out. I quoted "For Whom the Bell Tolls" from the stage. Afterwards, I went fishing off the Keys, beyond the color change. I know The Old Man was there, but we came home with nothing but snapper and grouper... OpEdNews Member for 47 week(s) and 0 day(s) 17 Articles, 0 Quick Links, 43 Comments, 0 Diaries, 0 Polls 17 Articles
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