our 82nd weekly open mike
Let’s see what happens when your host (me) has nothing to say. Step right up, speak your mind, tell a story, sing a song, whatever.
5/30/2026
Anything goes: 5/30/2026
19 responses to “Anything goes: 5/30/2026”
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It’s odd the things that can make an impression upon us. Odd? Maybe surprising. Things we wouldn’t expect to make an impression that do end up making an impression.
15, 20 years ago when my youngest son was still in middle school, he had a homework assignment. He had to watch a World War II documentary, and then write a 300 word essay about what he had learned.
Bro, you know how many fucking World War II documentaries there are on Amazon Prime? Is there a more overworked subject in the field of history than World War II? We know everything about anybody who even so much as ripped an audible fart from 1939-1945.
Which fucking documentary was my son gonna pick? Scrolling through all these titles, it was probably the same shit, anyways, so I suggested to him he just pick the first one that was less than an hour long. Why ruin the whole evening? So that’s how he picked *The Battle of Aachen.*
I couldn’t give a shit about the Battle of Aachen. A bunch of people killed each other. Like that hasn’t happened before or since. The documentary was one-sided. It was basically just a series of interviews with old American GIs. Skinny geezers in their faded uniforms reciting the same cliches about freedom, camaraderie, sacrifice, honor, country, like they were reading from the same American state historian’s script, or they’d all watched the same *Greatest Generation* documentary before they filmed their own documentary. They were all pretty satisfied with themselves.
With one exception.
Gerard Crabb.
I’ll never forget the name. His brief interview, no more than 7 or 8 minutes, not even an interview, really, the documentarian just asked him what he remembered most from Aachen, and that was it, at least for the finished film.
His answer made a lasting impression. Unforgettable. Toward the end of this paint-by-numbers World War II documentary came this astounding kernel of human experience. Buried under mountains of WWII drivel, the treasure of the human soul.
I’ll summarize as best as I recollect. The brief quotations are, I believe, remembered word for word:
As the Battle of Aachen was winding down, Gerard Crabb’s unit or battalion or whatever was going door to door looking for Nazi stragglers. They had just cleared a rooming house, and their sergeant had told him they could take a break before moving on. Crabb told the sergeant he was going back into the rooming house to look for some souvenirs to loot. When he opened the door to a second floor room he was startled to see a German soldier, a Nazi, in reality just a kid. Crabb at this time was 20 years old, and he believed the Nazi was even younger than himself. 18, maybe even only 17 years old. The boy was in the process of stuffing his Nazi uniform under a mattress. The only clothing he wore was a pair of dirty underpants.
Crabb and the Nazi boy stared at each other. Crabb knew he had a Nazi that he had to take into custody to be transported with the other detainees to a prisoner of war camp. ‘Put your uniform back on, you’re coming with me,’ he said in English.
It was obvious the Nazi boy didn’t understand. As he thought about what he should do next, he continued looking at the Nazi youth in his dirty underpants. He was hungry-looking skinny, blonde hair, blue eyes. Crabb said he thought he was three or four inches taller than the Nazi boy. He said he’d never felt so strong in his life as he did when he stood there looking at the boy. This occurred in a matter of seconds, Crabb said. And in even less time than those mere seconds, and less than the couple of seconds it took for the Nazi boy to take off his dirty underpants and stand naked before him, Crabb, for the first time, understood he was a living being in an impossible to comprehend state of existence. Crabb had, he believed, killed Nazis from a distance. And he had seen some of his own fellow GIs die. But it wasn’t until he was undressing himself in front of the Nazi boy that Crabb understood the awful wonder of life.
After Crabb undressed, the Nazi boy haltingly moved closer, then wrapped his arms around Crabb and rested his head against Crabb’s chest. They moved to the bed. They kissed and groped each other in, in Crabb’s words, ‘the fashion a normal boy and girl would.’ And then he said they ‘made love.’
Crabb said that in less than a half an hour he was dressed and back with his fellow American soldiers. Given the era and circumstances he found himself in, he felt he had no other choice than to return to his army. He did not turn the Nazi boy in.
Crabb said he has never thought of himself as ‘queer,’ that later in life he was married twice and he had three children. He also had a ‘few one night stands with women.’ But he said though he had many moments of great personal joy, every day was a sad day after the day that he left the Nazi boy in a rooming house in Aachen. ‘Of course, I have wondered and wondered about him. Life is tears, I would wipe all his away, if I could.’
Crabb said he understood how and why his fellow soldiers felt they had won something, and how they were able to participate in the national pride of War victory, but he personally never felt like he had won anything. At the most basic level of human existence, Crabb felt he and his Nazi boy had both been victims of the war and he often wondered how much human beauty had been choked out by mankind’s collective struggles.
As soon as Crabb’s segment of the documentary ended, I said to my son:
“Damn! I did not see that coming!“
“Right?” he said.
In my son’s essay, he wrote that he learned that in historical events too much emphasis is placed on national and political outcomes, and whether they were positive or beneficial, and not enough to the literally millions of individual lives that were impacted, and that it would be impossible to accurately assess the good and the bad outcomes to the point one could say any historical event was truly positive or negative. Only God could know such a thing. He got a B+.
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jesus, best anything i’ve read in weeks.
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I agree with Jonah.
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Now I’m horny as Fassbinder after snort of 1970’s Bolivian coke
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I think the evidence has produced to me that I’m a high masking autism person. I really don’t know how to digest this. In one way a ton of earlier decisions make sense. In others I have a big resistanence to be sorted by others.
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Near as I can estimate or almost understand, autism is difficulty or inability to socialize, which is certainly me. Difference being that I understand the basic concept and goal of social interaction, even as it’s awful to me and I suck at it, while autistic folks don’t grok even the point or purpose.
And beyond the social scale, there’s also the autistic preference for order and repetition in things, which again is certainly me, but I imagine it’s much moreso for autistic folks.
Autism, I guess, is me but much moreso, to the point where it becomes a disability. Does that sound like you? Or is my very limited understanding of autism all wrong?
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I think we’re in agreement on the basics. I’m seeing it more on being a type of massive introversion. Most times I can socialize just fine, I’ve learned different techniques and humour is a great bridge. Socialization does take a lot of out me because it is an effort, a learned practice. Afterwards alone time is a great recharge.
Looking at my life through this lense, thing have started to fall into place. Obvious events really, such as being pulled out of class in grade school in order to practice eye contact.
This is a new thing for me, and I’m going to get evalauted to see if it has any legs. I’m going to stop short of officially getting tested or going through insurance as the scuttlebut is that RFK may have some plans for the neural divergent folks.-
> … being pulled out of class in grade school in order to practice eye contact.
God, that feels creepy. A lot of what teachers do, especially in the early grades, seems less about teaching and more about knocking anything out-of-the-ordinary out of the kids. Maybe the motive wasn’t cruelty, but if you’re remembering it that way, all these years later, it *was* cruelty.
RFK Jr has a near-visible hard-on whenever he mentions autism, and it’s not a desire to *help* autistic people. He would, I think, like it if there was a camp where autistic folks could be concentrated, so yeah, stopping short of making the diagnosis official is a wise choice.
Plz lemme know if the questions asked lead you to learn something interesting about autism and/or yourself.
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I don’t remember it as creepy, more as a way to get out of a class I was bored in. In retrospect I believe they had good intentions. This was back in the 70’s. They also pulled me and a couple others out to work on speech. I had a lisp and a classmate had trouble with R’s. I’m pretty ignorent on how the schools today work, but I doubt they currently have the recources to help kids fit in, at least on the surface level. This following is pretty similar to the way I think about it.
https://i.redd.it/dnjdgldgz3ug1.jpeg
Anyway. Thanks Doug, I do appreciate it.
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That comic is gloriously bleak and oblique.
The tinyest things from kidhood can and do reverberate, usually in warped ways not intended by the people who done what they done. I have half a dozen memories akin to your eye contact practice, and yup, most of them I can see that something worthwhile was intended, but it didn’t work out that way for me.
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I was going to put a link here in the next anything goes, but hey why not get a jump on things. Let’s change it up with James McMurty, son of Larry McMurtry of Lonesome Dove. I’ve loved his songs for years and would like to share a couple that I love. (you may already be aware of his song “We can’t make it here anymore”
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Hey, cool — nobody’s much talked about music here since John the Basket stopped hanging ’round.
I almost never listen to country music, because most of it seems aimed at redneck Republican retropeople, which ain’t me. That’s maybe why I hadn’t known James M was the spawn of Larry M.
“Angeline” is poetry, “Copper Canteen” is a fine short story, and “We Can’t Make It Here” is rock’n’roll — my highest compliment for music & lyrics.
Clicked around for some background on the guy, and hell, even Forbes likes him, and so do I, thanks.
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Ok If you haven’t hear it
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You know, I’d be interested in which music reaches you. It’d be a fun post to read and to listen to.
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Generally, music doesn’t reach me. I like old-style rock’n’roll from the ’60s, and used to play it on a constant loop, but only for listening at work. At home and in real life, my brain buzzes a lot and I generally prefer no musical score. I’ve only attended a handful of concerts, never knowingly heard Taylor Swift, and I still don’t think anyone’s topped Crosby, Stills, & Nash except maybe Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young.
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Wooden Ships on the water…
I get that. In my youth I was super into music. I was one of those kids who would go to the record store after school and talk with the owner about this band and that. I did like some new wave stuff, still do. My core though was Jethro Tull. I think I really connected with the precision masquareding as chaos in their music. Classical blending with rock with jazz with lryics that really were meaningful the Ian and only Ian.
As I aged music became much less important because it became much more predictable, even with the stuff I loved. If I put an album on, it would play in my head before going through the stereo and unfortunately become boring. This was especially noticable on simple hit songs. I still like the occaisonal listen to Thick as a Brick because that is a true brain tickler but mostly I prefer the quiet.
Btw where I live now, outside Astoria, has some of the best silence I’ve ever experienced and I love it. I’ve a new neighbor that prefers to turn things up to 11, but it’s not that bad or that often, We get along and I hope he’ll eventually see the quiet.
Anyway to get back on track. I posted McMurtry as he’s broken through my current ambivilance regarding music. Other than him, I’m not a country person. The combination of lyrics and musical talent reach me and I was wondering if you have similar artists that break through to you.
Thanks for letting me ramble
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I like it when you ramble.
Definitely remember enjoying Jethro Tull, and I agree with (what I think) you’re saying — it sounded like “loud music” enough that my old man hated it, but there was always something else going on.
Not sure I’ve ever heard Thick as a Brick. Thought it was just a cliché, didn’t know it was a band.
Some people are music aficionados. John the Basket sure was, and so’s my stoner nephew George. They’re always happy to talk about music, and know their way around the sounds. Me, I appreciate good music, sincerely and very much, but I rarely listen to music by choice, and I love the silence.
Other than the background music when watching a movie, I’ll often go weeks without listening to music.
Listening to Jethro Tull now, though, and damn they’re good.
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A music critic whose name escaped me once said that by his 30s he had figured out that popular music was running on a loop, like a simulation, with new musicians like actors characters filling pre-determined roles that have always been there. There was a Debbie Harry, there was always a Debbie Harry, there will be a new Debbie Harry born today. Each character really lives through it, like they’re doing it for the first time, and their fans feel that way too.
But the music industry doesn’t care that he figured it out, because by the time you’re over 30 you’re outside of the coveted 18-25 demographic and nobody with money cares what you think anyway.
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Surfing the internet, I’ve probably never gone two days without stumbling across pictures of Debbie Harry. And I don’t go looking for ’em, the pix are everywhere. Pretty blonde chick. I like her sound, and hell, maybe I’d like Taylor Swift’s sound if I ever listened, but they are playing the same role.
> But the music industry doesn’t care that he figured it out, because by the time you’re over 30 you’re outside of the coveted 18-25 demographic and nobody with money cares what you think anyway.
Same with the movie business. There seem to be about two original flicks made each year, the rest are all reruns.
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