...
Right around this time of year, 38 years ago, I met Old Uncle Dave at Rancho Nicasio in Marin. There was a rock band playing and we were at the same table because he was there with Ray Munday, with whom I'd spent about an hour in my old boyfriend's big brother's kitchen a few doors down from where Philip K. Dick was holed up, laughing helplessly, stoned out of our gourds, trying to stuff ice cubes in his Mickey Big Mouth that had gone warm on him. So any friend of Ray's was alright by me.
Dave was helping keep me in line for taking one of Ray's cat's kittens while Ray was off trying to pick up a woman or see a man about a horse, who knows? And we were lost in conversation, oblivious to the band for I don't know how long, one of the only places you can have a private conversation at a dead yell, and we were young enough to sustain it back then.
I know he was not hitting on me because he's only hot for tiny women, waifs, Audrey Hepburn being the most curvaceous babe he has ever loved, and I've had to endure a couple of his girlfriends over these years, both far less sumptuous and far more bumptious than Audrey. One of them was Australian. She was very nice, but I couldn't bear being around her for very long because, well, because, she never shut up... and... well... Australians who never shut up are nerve-wracking. They give me headaches, cut through my cosmos like flocks of space kingfishers.
[Turn this up all the way or it doesn't sound like the real bird.]
Still, once she was back in Australia, she set to work on a project that set out to improve the terrifyingly narrowing cheetah gene pool, did a study showing how the genes of the losers, the beta cats, would actually strengthen the overall gentetic heritage of cheetahs, that alphas crossed with betas often produced, not duds, but super alphas. In other words, she showed that our big ideas about "gene therapy" and eugenics are total crap, and contributed to the human ability to meddle with near extinctions when all else fails.
Not that I'm paying that much attention, but I haven't seen anything about research that sensible in forever.
always and any time....
