Different World

It's too late for me. Not like these young guys I see today. They just come right out with it. "I'm gay." Hell, they even call themselves queer. That was the worse thing they could call you, used to be, queer. Or faggot. They probably call themselves that too. I just called myself a bachelor. Lifelong bachelor.

Pisses me off, sometimes, they got it so easy. Makes me proud, too, though. Takes balls, call yourself queer. Call yourself queer, takes the sting out of it if somebody else call you that. I still can't do it, though. Couldn't call myself that.

They got parades now. Only parade I was ever in was after the war. World War Two. Had a little parade for veterans back home in Keokuk. I was in the Marines. First Marine Raider Battalion. Took a couple rounds...one in the hip, one in the thigh...on Tulagi, August, 1942. Little piece of shit island, Tulagi. Only a couple miles long, maybe seven or eight hundred yards wide. Don't know what the fuck we doing there. Except killing Japs.

We can't call 'em Japs no more. That's the world, now. We can say queer but we can't say Jap. It's better this way.

It'd be nice to be young again.

posted by greg @ 3:28 PM