AUGUST 18, 1978 - JOURNAL ENTRY - EAST VILLAGE

Tomorrow my older brother is visiting New York to take a two-day legal deposition for his law firm. Frank called from his hotel and asked, "Can I take you to dinner?"

I had $5 in my pocket and over the last three weeks, Alice has been riding me, "Who paid for this?" or "Who paid for that?"

And she's right.

Of the two os us only Alice earns money from her waitress gig, but she pays for breakfast and brings home food from the yogurt shop. I'm getting to hate yogurt, but beggars can't be so picky. I take care of the action-packed evenings, because every place lets me drink for free and Alice too.

My brother didn't extend an invitation to Alice. She is a vegetarian. Frank and I will go to the Old Homestead on 14th Street and enjoy a bovine feast of steaks.

"I don't know how you can eat blood-dripping meat," Alice says before we go to bed. She sniffed my skin, We've moved the futon into the living room. The bedroom has no air.

"At least I'm not a cannibal." My mouth clamps on her calf. I bit higher. Not hard. Her skin is almost too soft. We make love like I am a mercenary. I can't cum and spend myself on her belly. She's not on any birth control.

We lay back and Alice says, "I love the way the city lights up the sky."

We admire the dead black night out the alley window. Not a star in sight. No constellations, No galaxies. Only the full moon above the alley. Man has ceased to reach for the stars. The cosmos has been obliterated by the city bright. We are earth-bound as always.

In the west deserts the night is alive with distant stars.

They are our destiny.

There is no God.

We are the levelers of cities like Hiroshima, Dresden, or Tulsa.

Our victims live as running shadows against concrete walls or charred flesh or almost unscathed.

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”. Robert Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad-Gita

NEXT YEAR ANDROMEDA

And Man thought themselves Gods
Divine beings destined for the stars
Traveling in Hydrogen-fission spacecraft
On a Holy mission
To spread the Word
To the Heathen Extra-Terrestrials
The first meeting happened long ago
Hunters greeting tri-podites
They taught us life
Now we ready for the Bible-jihad
We are Gods in our minds
More Shiva than Jesus
Lucky to have survived the last mass mutual extinction__

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Much more to come.

August 6, Plus 1

The survivors of the Hiroshima attack woke on August 7 to the horrific aftermath of an A-Bomb explosion. According the military records published by Wikipedia some 80,000 people or almost 30% of the population of Hiroshima at the time, were killed by the blast and resultant firestorm and another 70,000 were injured. U.S. surveys further estimated that 4.7 square miles of the city were destroyed with few standing buildings left in the impact zone.

Most of the dead were civilians, who had ignored the warning leaflets.

The USA has always claimed that the attack saved the lives of our troops, since the Imperial troops had been defending Okinawa and Iwo Jima with suicidal ferocity and the Empire still held onto vast territories throughout Asia.

Nothing had prepared the world for Hiroshima, but on August 7 Dr. Yoshio Nishina and other atomic physicists came to the conclusion that the USA had no more than two more bombs and that the Empire should sustain the losses and continue the war.

Two days later Nagasaki changed the mind of the Emperor and Hirohito announced the war was lost.

Forever, especially for the dead.

Hiroshima Plus One Month 1945

This rare photo of the Hiroshima mushroom cloud was taken on August 6, 1945. The Hiroshima bombing claimed approximately 120,000 lives and the subsequent leveling of Nagasaki annihilated 80,000. The US military strategists have long held that these two attacks saved over a million US troops by forcing the Japanese Empire to surrender to the Allies.

My uncle Russ had passd through Hiroshima on his way to a US Army assignment in Nagasaki.

"Everything was gone. There was nothing left. Sometimes you'd see someone wandering in the streets, but there was nothing there."

Everyone else had been turned into shadows.

Hiroshima August 6, 1945

"There was a very strong flash and a heat wave. The whole world turned into something orange. I felt like I was thrown into an oven for a moment."

This quote comes from a Hiroshima survivor.

Only a few of dead had anything to say and that was merely with shadows.

Mushrooms Clouds Teriyaki

1992 marked the last nuclear bomb test in the USA, although the nuclear club of the USSR, the USA, UK, France, India, Israel, and Pakistan have conducted nearly 2000 explosions since the first blast in Los Alamos, NM. Only two were on populated targets.

For years my Uncle Russ ha recounted at family gatherings to his nieces and nephews that he had been about to parachute into Japan, when a flash had appeared over a city. The airborne assault troops had watched the mushroom cloud consume Hiroshima and the pilot had returned to base saving my uncle from a suicidal attack on Imperial Japan.

We believed the story until years later my uncle admitted that his tale was a fabrication based on a real event.

"I was stationed to Nagasaki after the Armistice. One day a B-29 bomber caught fire in flight. Nine parachutes appeared in the sky. The bomber lost altitude and crashed into a nearby mountain. We searched for the four officers left on the plane. The aluminum fuselage had been melted by the fire. The only human remains we found was a half a skull. One of the sergeants said that the B-29 normally carried a crew of 11. Two more survivors should have floated to safety. No one ever heard any more of that story."

Uncle Russ went to Japan immediately after the Armistice. He said these words about his time in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

"Flat."

"No people."

"I was 19."

Uncle Russ never spoke more about those wasted cities.

People from wars rarely tell stories.

At least ones that are true.

Hiroshima 1945

The survivors of the Hiroshima attack woke on August 7 to the horrific aftermath of an A-Bomb explosion.' According the military records published by Wikipedia some 80,000 people or almost 30% of the population of Hiroshima were killed by the blast and ensuing firestorm. Another 70,000 civilians were gravely injured by Fat Boy. U.S. surveys further estimated that 4.7 square miles of the city had been incinerated by the blast with few standing buildings left in the impact zone.

Most of the dead had been civilians, who had ignored the warning leaflets.

The USA has always claimed that the attack saved the lives of our troops, since the Imperial troops had been defending Okinawa and Iwo Jima with suicidal ferocity and the Empire still controlled vast territories throughout Asia.

Nothing had prepared the world for Hiroshima, but on August 7 Dr. Yoshio Nishina and other atomic physicists came to the conclusion that the USA had no more than two more bombs and that the Empire should sustain the losses and continue the war.

Two days later Nagasaki changed the mind of the Emperor and Hirohito announced the war was lost.

Forever, especially for the dead.