MANY YEARS AGO, IN A faraway kingdom called The Sixties, when doctors drove Buicks and ecstasy couldn't be bought, there lived a young man named Wes.

Little did I realize in 1966, as I drank coffee at the Double Dip Drive Inn restaurant on the Drag in Amarillo, and contemplated the ranks of the College educated, that I would soon be eating mud in the jungles of Viet Nam. At the time, I was a student at West Texas State University (now WTAMU). The plan was a major in playing spades in the Student Union Building distinguished by the fact that every student had some form of facial tic. There was nothing practical about graduating with a degree in Spades, only a desire to not get drafted. About all you could do with it was leave town with the carnival or run off to Canada. After much soul-searching, I opted for the one that would look best on my resume.

I desired to travel about the country like a rambling hunchback, hitchhiking from place to place, singing Bob Dylan songs at truck stops. I knew the truckers would not be pleased. Yet I had abandoned my dream, and eventually I landed at the wedding altar in 1973. Perhaps I should have joined that lady over in Africa studying monkeys. As the only thing I learned over the next 12 years, was the only time I reflected character was also the only time I walked on my knuckles.
By the time Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated, I'd gone quite outcast. I'd taken to spending a lot of time at a semi bohemian coffee shop a friend of mine and I created across the street from the Campus at WTU. The collection of people who hung out there were a spiritual people, but they were also rather serious party animals. They had a traditional combo that might have even been stronger than a John Belushi cocktail. It called for chewing betel nut until your lips turned blood red, smoking an unidentifiable herbal product in a jungle cigar, and then drinking a highly potent homemade wine that would have made George Jones jealous. To belong, we would push this combination on every guest, and it was considered extremely bad form to turn down this offering. Accepting this libation, however, would invariably lead to projectile vomiting.

As a US Soldier, in Viet Nam, my mission was to preserve the culture as much as possible while attempting to distribute seeds downriver. In 14 months of duty there the US Government failed to send me any seeds, so I was eventually reduced to distributing my own seed downriver, which led to some rather unpleasant reverberations. To save this indigenous culture, the protectors against Communism were constantly at work to destroy it. As with the attempts with the American Native Indian, they told the native Viet Namese to cut off their hair, throw away their heritage, and dance around the fire singing "Oh! Susanna." I've got nothing against "Oh! Susanna"—only against the people who told the natives to bow their heads and pray long enough so that when they looked up, their traditions were gone.

In 14 months, I was gone too. And all that remains of me there or anywhere is a thought, in a little town in nowhere Texas, a little thought deep in the heart of two young girls my daughters, though they may have left it many years ago and many miles away.

I remember the coffee-colored river of my life. It seemed to flow out of a childhood storybook, peaceful and familiar, continued its sluggish way beneath the moon and the stars and the Texas sun, and then picked up force and become that opaque uncontrollable thing roaring in my ears, blinding my eyes, rushing relentlessly round the bends of understanding, beyond the banks of imagination.

she's got no place to fall

The game of life is like a series of one night stands, if you play long enough, sooner or later you will find that everywhere you go and everyone you meet has become a another station along the way. the view in your rear view mirror.  On the way where is, by this time, something you know even less about, than when the journey started. But you feel like you have to keep going even if it kills you and, of course in one way or the other, it always does.

I had pretty much become a case of wake me when we get where we are going, I'm still waiting for my soul to come back from the dry cleaners in the town I'd left behind.

For many years I traveled from town to town waiting for my next big hit. But it takes millions and millions of years to become the kind of star a lonely cricket can make a wish on. 

Maybe I've finally learned the wisdom of Bob Dylan's words.  "She never stumbles, She's got no place to fall.