86 And Counting---Chapter II, Austin Reverie

 

No one will ever convince me that Austin, Texas was not the best place in the world in 1962.  The city's natural charms were abundant---large verdant parks, a smattering of hills, the beautiful University of Texas campus with its Spanish Mediterranean and Spanish Renaissance architecture styles, quaint Mexican restaurants with better food than those in Acapulco, and the other Colorado river running right through the middle of it all.  And that's without mentioning the best comedy club in the world, the Texas State Senate and House of Representatives.

This was a time when the last vestiges of the beatnik era had faded and before the core ideas of the beats had morphed into the larger counterculture phenomenon of the hippies.  It was before marijuana became widely available and LSD was barely heard of.  Searchers for Truth and Meaning were relegated to the harsh test of peyote and its stomach-churning charms.  Austin was filled with brilliant explorers in these days, young people who had fled the intellectual backwaters of a stifling, conservative state to look for allies, brothers-in-unacceptable behavior, rag-tag soldiers to fight back-to-back within their own liberal Alamo.  Such people often congregate around maverick student publications and eschew the stodgy dorm life for the rustic pleasures of insect-ridden antique houses, flophouse apartments or to-be condemned barracks like Austin's infamous Ghetto.  These were my best friends in the Summer of 1962.

The Early Days; Wine & Warfare

I bounced down the dirt alley to Gilbert Shelton's ramshackle apartment, arriving in a cloud of smoke as my radiator finally gave way after 388 miles of huffing and puffing.  The new editor of the Texas Ranger humor magazine came out to greet me.  "You sure know how to make an entrance, Killeen!" he commented above the noise.  "Let your car settle down a while.  Come on in and have a beer."  I walked into a large room, its walls painted with all manner of cartoonery by the celebrants of a painting party held there the previous night.  A familiar friend, Wonder Wart Hog looked down at me from above, a fine rendering proffered by Ranger Art Director Tony Bell.  On the stereo, the Greenbriar Boys were singing "We Need a Whole Lot More of Jesus and a Lot Less Rock and Roll."  The apartment consisted of the main room, a small kitchen, a bathroom and Shelton's bedroom.  It would be razed in two months to make way for a new post office, alleviating any need for a security deposit.  I would eventually become the last person to live there, fleeing only when the giant wrecking ball came smashing through the wall.  Janis Joplin, visiting at the time, looked up from the rubble at the surprised offenders.  "RUDE!" she admonished.  "Very, very rude!"

The concluding days of summer before the apartment fell were full of wine and roses.  Almost immediately after my arrival, we came home one day to find a note tacked to the front door.  It was a challenge to a massive water-balloon fight two nights hence from the West Side Boys, a nefarious band of trolls headed by Rangeroo Joe E. Brown.  We went out and bought up all the balloons we could find and stashed them in an abandoned upstairs apartment to be guarded by antihero Lieuen Adkins, amiable writer/poet/punster on the magazine staff.  Lieuen was a very straight looking guy with glasses and a permanent grin, who still lived with his parents and had an eleven o'clock curfew.  If the terms "nerd" and "geek" had been invented at the time, Adkins would have qualified.  Lieuen constantly earned Shelton's enmity by screwing up whatever task he was given, so this time he was posted  upstairs and out of the way as balloon monitor to prevent him from innocently abetting the enemy.

Precisely at 9 pm, a giant flare flew skyward from the surly encampment of the West Side Boys, and the battle was on.  Ensconced behind sturdy walls of stone, we waited...me, Shelton, brother Steve, Ranger staffers Tony Bell, Hugh Lowe and a loose assemblage of hangers-on, quivering with anticipation.  All was still, the lingering light from the flare beginning to fade.  Steve, moving stealthily from one hiding spot to another, was the first casualty.

SPLOOSH! goes the waterballoon.  "AAIIEEE!!!" goes Steve, stricken in the chest with a massive shot.  "Where the hell did that come from?"  I looked over in Steve's direction, saw nothing and foolishly decided to advance.  SPLOOSH! again.  "YOWEE, THAT SUCKER'S COLD!"  

Gilbert's angry voice knifed through the smoky night air: "LIEUEN, YOU IDIOT, THAT'S OUR GUYS YOU'RE HITTING!"  Then, "ADKINS HAS TURNED ON US, MEN, I'M GOING AFTER HIM!"

Some of the enemy troops were advancing now.  The light had dimmed considerably, but I saw someone behind me and ducked into a doorway recess.  Two West Side Boys slithered past and turned the corner of the building.  I advanced warily and peered around the corner just as a nearby door closed and ally Hugh Lowe arrived from the other direction.  HAW HAW! thought we...two enemies trapped inside with no weapons.  This would be a massacre of mighty proportions!  I knocked on the door, expecting nothing and amazed when it slowly opened.  "EAT PIE, PIG!" screamed Lowe, unleashing his heaviest weapon.  Then we both stood in silent horror as the nice half-drowned Japanese man who still lived in the condemned apartment gasped and stumbled around, dazed by the strength of the blow.  "WHAT THE HELL GOING ON HERE YOU CRAZY BASTARDS...?"

We decided discretion was indeed the better part of valor and fled before the Samurai Warriors showed up.  The action around us was incredible, soaked soldiers dashing hither and yon firing weapons, then retreating to reload.  Balloon bombs arced through the sky raining terror on those below.  Shelton, meanwhile, had reached the ammunition dump to discover Lieuen Adkins bound and gagged, with all the ammo stolen or skwushed.  The brilliant General Brown had anticipated Shelton's tactics, sneaked up from behind and surprised the hapless Adkins.  With defensive weapons running low in the fortress of the East Side Boys, the invaders were soon inside the walls where fearsome hand-to-hand combat ensued.  Eventually, Brown's raiders crashed through our southern resistance forces and captured the flag, as well as Gilbert's hand-drawn sign bearing our tireless battle cry, "A Mighty Fortress Is Our Pod!"  The damp Fat Lady had sung.  One war was over but a greater one had only begun.

Zilker Park, home of the Great Waterballoon War

Oh, The Humanity!

Word of the Great Waterballoon War echoed throughout Austin.  Lieuen had performed another boner for the ages and the story grew in the retelling.  Soon, small groups of balloon bearers were sloshing it out all over town and waterballoonery became the order of the day.  Austin merchants began stocking all manner and make of ammunition and tales of legendary confrontations proliferated.  All of this would culminate in the epic Battle of Zilker Park, where the East and West Side Boys would fight as one, challenged by a consortium of pagan armies.  Outnumbered by at least five to one, Gilbert and Joe plotted guerilla tactics to win the day.  The mighty hearse was reactivated to serve as the ultimate indestructible, uncapturable mobile ammunition dump for the ages.  We rolled into battle with sneers on our faces and towels in our belts.

It was a bright and peaceful Saturday in lovely Zilker Park.  Young mothers pushed baby carriages down verdant paths, picnickers spread towels on the lawn, little children played, urban gentlefolk walked their dogs, all oblivious to the bubbling menace all 'round them.  Then out of nowhere, our guerilla band attacked an unprepared enemy column blithely wending its way through the Zilker playground, drowning several poor rookies before melting back into the woods.  The counterattack was not long in coming as vast numbers of armed insurgents hustled in rage to the scene of the atrocities.  The enemy legions, prodigious in number, had need for thousands of balloons and a method to transport them, thus had constructed a gigantic crate with two long poles lashed to the sides, which four mighty men could shoulder and carry along.  

General Shelton, however, had cleverly implanted a half-dozen imitation girly-girls in the enemy ranks and they would soon expose the ammunition carriers' route through the park.  No one who was there will soon forget what happened next.  The redoubtable leader of the E/W Forces leaped from the bushes clad only in white cotton underwear with a scarlet bandana around his forehead, charged the ammunition crate, and with a mighty cry of "BOOGIEWAHH!" jumped into the vulnerable box of balloons and stomped them to jelly.  The horrorstruck weapons handlers were immobilized by shock and awe.  As they screamed and flailed about, the agile editor dismounted the sopping container and ran for the hearse, a bloodthirsty band of enraged lunatics in hot pursuit.

What stated out as a Chamber of Commerce Saturday in the park turned stormy as angry troops galloped through the picnic grounds, displacing Aunt Fanny's chicken brisket and Mom's razzleberry pie.  Terrorized gentlefolk fled in all directions to their automobiles, grannies wailed in distress and tiny tots stood agape, pointing.  Soon enough, Zilker Park was alive with the sounds of sirens as Austin's finest arrived in extravagant numbers trying to figure out who to arrest.  By this time, of course, most of Our Gang was back in the hearse, capacity two-dozen in a pinch, and rolling toward Gloryland.  Gilbert Shelton, of course, was never captured but Wanted posters persist in Austin post offices to this day.  Alas and alack, balloons were temporarily removed from retailers' inventories at the request of law enforcement and the Great Waterballoon Wars of 1962 sadly abated.

What kind of a day was it?  A day like all days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our times.  And you were there.

Scrabble me up an urban eden better than Austin 1962.  I'm waiting. 

 

Gilbert Shelton, Bill & Jimmy Olson after the Incomparable Ranger Bike Race of 1962

That's all, folks....

bill.killeen094@gmail.com

There will be subsequent Austin chapters on November 19 and December 3.

     

       

86 And Counting--Chapter I, College Days

 

"You know you're old when the candles cost more than the cake."---Bob Hope

 "I'm at an age where my back goes out more than I do."---Phyllis Diller

When I was a little kid growing up in Lawrence, Massachusetts, nobody was 86 years old.  Monsignor Daly, head leprechaun of our St. Patrick's Parish, was the most ancient soul we knew, and he was a mere 65.  Babe Ruth seemed very old when he retired at 40 and FDR was a relic when he perished at 63.  The average age of death in the U.S. was 65 in 1945, so our town of scrabbling immigrant millworkers must have been below average.  My maternal grandfather, Bill Gosselin, a smoker and a bar-owner gave way in his fifties and my father Tom went down at 63.  In 1945, only 6% of men lived to age 86, although 11% of those feisty women made it.  We didn't know any of them.

I had plenty of chances to cash it in early.  As a pre-teen kid, I fell into the Shawsheen River, slid off a two-story house roof and most spectacularly of all, fell out of the top of the tallest tree in town onto a handy telephone post.  One of my friends was sure that God saved me but my best pal Jackie Fournier thought I might secretly be an alien invulnerable to death until my mission had been performed.  I lean to Jack's way of thinking and I'm still waiting for my final orders.  By the way, I outlived that giant tree.

Once, while pitching, I was hit by a batted baseball right between the eyes; another time a line drive smacked me right in the middle of my chest, leading to my future career as a first baseman.  On the way home from movies, a couple of us typically tightroped on narrow girders emanating from a railroad bridge over the Merrimack River far below.  The closest to death I came, however, was in tackling a locomotive named Paul (Pinky) Higgins on a kickoff return.  Pinky went flying and got right up; I managed to crawl off the field unassisted but very offended.

Over the years, I have survived two marriages, prostate cancer, a heart attack, a rollover in my t-top Toronado and a head-on crash at 50 mph, not to mention a couple of very dangerous girlfriends.  I drove automobiles while tripping, but usually very slowly.  I got in a fight with a 6-4, 250-pound guy in Walmart, which ended in a draw.  I rode at colossal speeds in Michael O'Hara Garcia's Silver Phaeton automobile, battled professional shoplifters in the Subterranean Circus and spent five weeks living with Janis Joplin.  Miraculously, I have made it through the gauntlet prepared for me by the Cosmic Arranger, a being with a deeply perverted sense of humor.  I can hardly wait to see what 86 has in store.

In any case, bring it on.  I've got a battery of agile doctors, regenerative protein shakes, an exercise dog and a crafty wife who won't let me leave.  I'm ready for whatever y'got.

Number of buffalos in Stillwater--0.  Number of oil wells--still 0.

Independence Day

Upon graduation from high school at age 17, I applied to a dozen universities scattered around the country and was accepted by all, although a courteous dean at South Dakota sent me a hand-written letter telling me I didn't really want to go there (he was right).  I might be the only person you will ever know who got accepted by Harvard but went to Oklahoma State instead,.  The decision looks worse when I tell you my father's life insurance policy and commuting to school from home would get me through four years in nearby Cambridge whereas the jaunt to OSU would be unfunded after eighteen months.  You always pay a steep price for independence, however, and that was high on my list of reasons for leaving.  And didn't that clever Horace Greeley advise us to "Go West, young man!"

In 1958, 80% of the American population had never been on an airplane.  Air travel was incredibly expensive, very noisy and the slow propeller planes flew at lower altitudes, often encountering bad weather and turbulence.  Ergo, I'd be taking the train to a place called Ponca City, then a bus to Stillwater, home of Oklahoma State.  The journey would be more tolerable because my high-school friend Tommy Rys was coming with me.  Until he wasn't.  Tommy never showed up at the train station, a victim of premature homesickness.  Some people just can't break the cord.  Last I heard, he'd stayed in Lawrence all his life, so Tommy probably knows a lot of Puerto Rican songs by now.

My voyage was very slow and, alas, there were no teenage girls on the train for entertainment.  When I finally got to Union Station in Chicago to change trains, I had ample time to see a Cubs game so I stashed my heavy suitcases in a locker and took the El to Wrigley Field, where the cellar-dwelling locals were playing Stan Musial's St. Louis Cardinals.  Like Tommy, Stan didn't show up that day either but the price of admission got me a seat anywhere I chose except the boxes, a privilege you would never receive at crowded Fenway.  Leaving, I alertly took the wrong little El car to Union Station and missed my train.  It was a very lo-o-ong wait for the next one.

OSU Rodeo Club wranglers.  Bet your college doesn't have any.

A Horse In Every Garage

One of my reasons for choosing the Sooner state was to experience a different culture.  I got that in spades.  Everybody owned at least one horse, a confederate flag and an enmity for Northerners.  When I asked my Biological Sciences lab partner Betty Jane Kendrick out on a date she said, "But Bill---you're a Yankee!"  I told her, no, I was a Red Sox, but that didn't seem to help.

On of my dormmates was a dumb, lanky kid from Sherman, Texas, whose wardrobe consisted exclusively of rodeo gear and Stetson hats.  Said his name was "Tex."  Called me "Boston."  Didn't know much about The Hub, but knew he didn't like it or me, either.  One day in my dorm room, he took a swing at me, missed and slipped to the floor.  He got up fast and smashed his head into a medicine cabinet and started bleeding like a stuck pig.  We patched him up and gave him a beer and he started laughing like hell.  He considered himself my good pal after that.

In those days, when you went to a land-grant college like OSU, you were automatically in ROTC.  If you were smart, you got yourself enrolled in Air Force Rotcie so you wouldn't have to carry around a heavy M1 rifle while you were drilling.  Who knew?  I wound up in Army ROTC with Sergeant Schulz.  On my first day of receiving my silly uniform, I was walking to my dorm when a primly uniformed fellow marched up to me and told me to put on my hat.  I thought the hats looked dumb so I told him to get lost.  He advised me that he was a cadet commander and I had to dress properly and do what I was told.  I blew him off, so he reported me to Sergeant Schulz, who fortunately was from Fall River, Mass.  He took me aside and explained the facts of army life to me.  I wore the hat after that but I didn't like it.

About those M1 rifles.  Aside from being heavy, they were very complicated.  Every time I took mine apart and put it back together, I had parts left over.  Also, I was obligated to learn to shoot the thing.  What do people from eastern Massachusetts know about guns?  My first shot at the rifle range hit the pin holding the target.  I figured I'd better go down there and put it back up before somebody noticed, oblivious to the bullets flying all around me.  Sergeant Schulz screamed bloody murder and told me to come back before I got killed, which I hadn't been aware was a distinct possibility.  I thought those Oklahoma kids knew what they were doing.

Dawn Of The Charlatan

I worked at the OSU student newspaper, the silly-named O'Collegian much of my first year.  During my stay, I noticed some old copies of the Aggievator humor magazine the school used to publish a couple of years previous.  "Erased by bad behavior," said one of my O'Collegian cohorts.  "The alumni hated it---very irreverent, lewd jokes, made fun of the university."

Sounded like my cup of tea.  I applied for reinstatement of the Aggievator, promising to be a good boy, but the deans were onto me.  No sale.  I decided to do it myself, maybe make a little change to keep me in school longer.  "What do you know about publishing magazines," asked my sensible friend Joe Alexander.  "Not much," I admitted, "but I'll figure it out.  Remember your first day in typing clas?.  Who thought we'd ever get through that mess?"

The first thing any aspiring magazine publisher needs is someone who will print the magazine at an affordable price and explain what you needed to provide him with.  I knew a little bit about that from working on newspapers.  Then you need some advertising money to pay the printer.  I found a local kid who knew the town to sell me some ads.  Everything else I did myself, including the lousy artwork.  The U. wouldn't give me a permit to sell on campus so I got together a gang of allies and went through the dorms at night selling the State Charlatan for 35 cents a copy.  Since this was obviously an illicit enterprise, everybody bought one.  We sold hundreds and I made $200 over costs.  Happy days are here again.

Next issue, we printed 2000 copies, double the first batch.  My old pals at the Aggievator, pleased that one of their cohorts was making trouble, wrote a front page article about us for the paper.  Some of the RAs were waiting for us in the dorms, so we agreed to leave but came back hours later at 11 p.m. and easily sold out again.  The OSU administration decided to co-opt me by offering to let us sell the next edition in the Student Union in hopes we'd stop picking on them.  Alas, that happened to be our legendary University Is Going To Hell issue, with big red flames licking the cover.  Two days later, I received a hand-delivered letter in one of my classes telling me that one more like that would get me expelled.  I published a farewell Charlatan and headed out for sunnier climes, eliminating any need to kick me out.  I went back to Lawrence and published a hometown edition of the magazine, eventually meeting a fellow named Jacques Guerin in the process.  Jacques joined up and we enjoyed several memorable adventures together, the most famous being the night we loaded up a dozen Tufts girls in my famous Cadillac hearse and carried them home from a party in time to beat Tufts' snarky curfew.  A stringer for the Boston Record-American took a photo, and next day the scurrilous Hearst newspaper screamed Tufts Coeds Depart Hearse Party After Sordid Goings-on!"

Guerin's dad happened to be the Ambassador to Trinidad and Tobago, and he was putting Jacques up in royal digs at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque in the Fall, so I promised to drive cross-country to join him there in the summer of 1962, continuing the Charlatan escapades.  I made it all the way to Oklahoma City before my radiator exploded.  A couple of local geniuses put it back together cheap but gave me the bad news: "It's 600 miles to Albuquerque---you'll never make it." 

Hmmn.  I remembered that Gilbert Shelton needed some help putting out the Ranger magazine at the University of Texas in his coming term as editor and had invited me to live in his unadorned apartment "and sleep on my famous hair couch."  Could I make it the 388 miles to Austin?  "Maybe," said Marvin the mechanic.  "But not a mile further.  You'll have to fill up that radiator every fifty miles and pray." 

I puttered south at modest speeds, stopping in Waco to spend the night.  Now as you might suspect, a hearse has numerous advantages to the traveling man without the funds to stay in your finer motels.  I pulled up behind a closed family fruit stand and caught a few hours of sleep before the final surge to the Texas state capital.  When I woke up in the morning, I rolled down a window to get out, the back door being unopenable from inside.  Descending the vehicle, I was almost encircled by a half-dozen terrified Mexican fruit peddlers there to perform their daily duties.  The didn't say a word, just backed up and stood aside.  I grabbed an orange juice and left the money on the counter since no one was interested in dealing with the hombre who lived in the death car.  A couple of them slowly blessed themselves as I tootled away.

Off to Albuquerque!  Better make it Austin.  Fate is fickle.

That's all, folks....

bill.killeen094@gmail.com

Tune in next week for Chapter II of Bill's Big Adventure.  Some call it "Life."  

 

 

 

   

The Batsignal Beckons

 

If you're ever feeling old and in the way, tossed aside and forgotten by contemporary society, hang on for a little while longer.  Pretty soon, they'll need you.  Most people don't know this but there is a tome in the University of Florida Library titled "Really Old Guys Who Might Know Stuff."  I know this because the other day Miss Emma of the UF History Department got hold of me and asked if I would come over to Keene-Flint Hall and participate in an oral history study about what it was like to have a business in Gainesville in the very old days when people lived in caves and ate dirt. 

There must be some mistake, I told her.  What she needed was a really old person like Methuselah or George Swinford.  "You're the oldest business owner we could find," she said.  "Everybody else is dead or lives in Idaho."  I sussed out that I wasn't being called upon to deliver any pearls of wisdom or canny social commentary on the swingin' sixties---they just wanted me because I was there.  I asked Emma if she was sending me a UF parking pass since I was such an antique.  She said no but she'd be holding a $2 parking space for me in back of the WAWA.  I told her I'd be the guy in the green Duesenberg wearing the "Muskie For President" shirt.

I showed up on time and there was Miss Emma, smiling and waving her arms like an airport marshaller guiding his plane to the gate.  We went across the street to a small Gothic-style brick building at the north end of Newell Drive that was built in 1910 and looked like it.  Inside, there was a large room with a table, chairs and a camera.  Emma tried to make me comfortable, but I told her I was an old hand at these interviews and had once been on Larry King's old radio show.  I don't think she knew who Larry King was.

Richard Allen, Bill Killeen and Harvey Budd at the Circus

Where Did You come From, Cotton-Eye Joe?

Miss Emma wanted to know how and why I came to Gainesville and how I chose the location for the store.  The Circus was located at 10 SW 7th Street, just off University Avenue, right next door to Buchholz Junior High and across from where Steve Solomon would set up shop with Leonardo's 706 several years later.  The previous tenant was Standard Fertilizer Company, which still owned the building.  Right next door at 8 SW Seventh was Cecil Shannon's auto salvage palace with automobile engines in various stages of disarray spilling out the door.

Emma: "Why did you choose that location?

Bill: "It was $75 a month, close to the university and had six parking spaces in front.  How do you beat that?  It was such a good deal I was terrified the little old lady who owned the place would discover what we were doing in there and throw us out.  As soon as I had enough money to buy the place, I got everybody's favorite realtor, Louis Bliziotes, to make the deal.  I didn't want her to even see us.  The building was huge, about 30x80 feet, plenty of room for what we needed." 

The building was also a mess, just an empty shell raised a few feet above the ground.  There was an enormous cooling fan in the rear.  The first and last time we turned it on, it sucked all the posters off the wall.  There was nothing inside except a tiny, dingy bathroom with a toilet and a sink.  A fat man wouldn't have been able to use the toilet.  The wiring in the place was an arsonist's delight with a big wad of skrunched together wiring at the fusebox.  Before we got it fixed, we turned the power off at night so the whole mess didn't burn down.

Emma: "What did you sell?

Bill: "At first, pretty much just the posters, blacklights and color wheels to accentuate the day-glo colors on the posters.  You couldn't call up the HippieMart and order inventory, there were no wholesalers.  My housemate Dick North began making pot pipes with lamp parts and plumbing screens and a couple of local guys made bongs.  You could get limited kinds of incense from Indian wholesalers.  Before long, the underground comics appeared, also a number of counterculture newspapers like the 'L.A. Free Press' and the 'East Village Other.'  We also found books on growing marijuana, identifying psilocybin mushrooms, etc.  The first day we were open we made $27, the second we doubled it.  The third day, the Gainesville Sun put a picture of Pamme Brewer on the front page with a rose in her teeth.  We never made less than $100 any day after that.  Within six months, wholesalers were manufacturing all manner and make of paraphernalia and we were grossing $1000 a day.  My lawyer said I was a genius.  I told him no, I was just in the right place at the right time." 

Our Town

Emma wanted to know what the town was like in the sixties and seventies, what businesses there were.  The population of Gainesville was about 85,000 in 1967, but it was a very quiet eighty-five thousand.  There was no Oaks Mall, not even a Gainesville Mall, which opened three years later on NW Thirteenth Street.  The current Butler Plaza extravaganza was a rinky-dink airport.  I know this is a troubling shock, but there was not one single pizza place in town.  The only food delivery operation was Alan's Cubana, a clambox-sized building perched right next to Gainesville's lonely skyscraper, the Seagle Building.  Silverman's  department store was the kingfish downtown and The Primrose Inn, which opened in 1924, was the place to dine.  If you dropped in around noontime, they were feeding the juries from the nearby Alachua County Courthouse.  Donigan's was the go-to haberdasher, especially for frat boys who required Sego shirts, preferably striped.

Emma: "What effect did the opening of the Subterranean Circus have on other businesses?"

Bill: "Not much at first.  Who's going to worry about a hippie place that sells mostly posters?  When we started selling clothes, however, people noticed.  In the space of five years, "straight" clothes took a dive.  Everybody wanted bellbottoms or some other jean style and the boys, who previously had few choices in clothing, bought Cossack and Nehru shirts.  The Circus was the only place which sold this stuff, and we could get it far more quickly than potential competitors.  Eventually, our clothing business got so big it outgrew the Circus.  We had to buy Cecil Shannon's space next door to open Silver City in 1970."

Emma: "How did the success of the Subterranean Circus affect Gainesville business in general?"

Bill: "It changed the whole business dynamic.  In those days, all the businesses were run by older people.  Clothes and several other things were bought by retailers on credit from the manufacturers via Factors, who had to approve their credit.  If you were young and unestablished, credit could be a problem.  The manufacturers wouldn't take cash.  But the new hippie wholesalers would.  And when a 27-year-old guy with no business background opened a store that promptly thrived, other young people jumped in.  Doug Bonebrake opened a health food store called Mother Earth, Ira Vernon and Steve Tannen opened a jean shop named Tuesday Morning.  Before long, the Morning Glory Juice Bar opened up, then Snuffy's burger joint, all of these on University Avenue between the Circus and campus.  Across town, George Swinford opened a bar called Lillian's, which survives today under different ownership.  There were numerous other businesses opened by kids.  Sandal shops...record stores...you name it.  Jeff Meldon and Jim Forsman bought the old Florida Theater and started bringing big-time musical acts to town.  Finally, the inmates--us--were running the asylum, and we ran it for a long, long time." 

Patty Wheeler, Danny Whiddon, Guy Thibaut and Debby Adelman afront the store

"And The Folks You Meet Ain't Always Kind...."

Emma: "When you opened a counterculture shop like the Subterranean Circus in a southern town like Gainesville, was there any opposition from the general public?"

Bill: "Oh yes, indeedy.  The fourth day we were open, I got to work to find a large concrete block thrown through the window.  We remade our facade, eliminating all but a small space for plexiglass windows.  Gene Whitworth, the State's attorney, busted us a couple of times, once for selling classic Kama Sutra artwork, another for "pornographic" underground comics.  He lost in court both times.  There were narcs in and out all the time; one of them was Wayland Clifton, the future Gainesville Police Chief.  There was never a more obvious covert agent than Wayland.  The City Commission, led by a clown named Gary Junior, made a huge effort to pass laws that would close us down.  We printed up t-shirts which read JUNIOR SCUM and gave them away.  People were wearing them all over town.  Forty years later at the Last Tango we got a Subterranean Circus Day proclamation from the Gainesville City Commission.  C'est la vie."

Emma: "As time passed, how did the attitude of the local population change?"

Bill: "Even rednecks want to be cool.  As time went by and the Vietnam war went from "necessary" to "troubling" to "outrageous"...as the new music and art and fashion generally took hold...as young kids fell in love with the new wave and demanded a lessening of the reins...hippie stuff became a symbol of the revolution.  Even if you weren't a hippie you could hang out on the fringes and flash the colors.  Psychedelic stuff became cool.  If you ranted against it, you looked like a Neanderthal." 

Gainesville Swings Like A Pendulum Do

Emma: "You must have had a lot of satisfaction...rags to riches and all that."

Bill: "We did, but we were naive.  We thought everything would keep getting better.  The Liberals were in charge of the government, pot was becoming generally accepted, mere users weren't getting busted much anymore, your parents were asking for advice on what waterbeds to buy, the paraphernalia industry was booming.  But nothing lasts forever.  Chinks in the armor appeared.  Communes, once thought the ultimate edenic lifestyle, began fraying.  Free love was great until it was your girlfriend who spent a weekend with Ishmael, the sandalmaker.  Hard drugs began knocking off a few of your friends.  You discovered it was impossible to read 'Gravity's Rainbow' if you were stoned.  Nobody can live in a crashpad forever.  We learned the pendulum always swings back...and sometimes it swings back hard.  The Subterranean Circus was a moment in time, a glorious moment for most of us.  We were in our adolescence or just past it, at the peak of our powers, blessed with strength and beauty, and life was an open road.  Almost noone who had the experience ever regretted it, there will never be anything like that era again.  We feel sorry for everyone who never got to drink the wine and smell the patchouli."

Emma: "Thank you, Bill."

Bill: "Thank YOU, Emma!"

That's all, folks...

bill.killeen094@gmail.com

  

 

         

   

Saving The World

Those of us who attended Catholic schools first heard the subject broached in seventh or eighth grade and later in high school.  “Some of you will have a calling we call a vocation,” revealed sister Louise Clara.  “Something deep inside you that draws you to consider the priesthood as your course in life.  There is nothing more pleasing to God than one of his flock going out into the world to save souls and bring them back to Him.  Literally, a religious career is helping to save the world.”

‘Holy shit!’ I thought.  'I’m glad that’s not happening to me.’  I slowly eyed the room, looking for victims of this calling, even finding a few likelies such as the Blanchette twins whose mother volunteered them and herself for numerous sucker jobs at the convent.  I felt better than ever that my long-planned baseball career had caused me to refrain from joining the choir boys, who later inevitably became altar boys, a sure early trap leading to one of those “vocations.”  Saving the world seemed like an enormous bother and there were no guarantees you’d even make a dent what with all those Protestants, Jews and Hindus out there.

Throughout my early life, it seemed someone was always saving the world, but it never seemed to stay saved.  Early on, the Americans saved the world from Hitler, then Jonas Salk saved the world from Polio, and after that Luke Skywalker saved the world in Star Wars.  Even bacteria once saved the world, for crying out loud (See: War of the Worlds).  Later, young Greta Thunberg, an avid climate advocate, took her swings at the plate to mixed reviews. This business of saving the world never seems to end.  The latest candidate taking the plunge is perhaps the least likely of all and we don’t like his chances.  Or hers, either.

Ziz LaSota To The Rescue

"Oh dear, what can the matter be?  Johnny's so wrong at the fair!"

Once upon a time in the cold expanse of Alaska, a homeschooled child stared out at the aurora borealis and wondered if the world was real.  Years later, that same child---taller than most men, cloaked in black, calling itself Ziz---would terrify Silicon Valley’s Rationalists, faking death, wielding a sumurai sword and leaving six bodies in its wake.  Such is the tale of Ziz LaSota, the transgender AI doomsday cultist who believed humanity would perish under artificial intelligence…unless Ziz saved it first.  We all have our doubts about the intentions of AI but LaSota wasn't taking any chances.

LaSota’s early life as a boy was unremarkable: eldest of three, his father a university instructor, homeschooled through lonely Alaskan winters.  But teenage depression twisted his mind inward.  Puberty felt like death.  Ziz wrote of being “horrified at being overwritten by a new self.”  Horrified or not, LaSota soon identified as a trans woman with a revised agenda.

Logic became the new religion.  LessWrong and the Rationalist forums were the new sacred texts.  Ziz  decided AI was the harbinger of humanity’s doom and dropped out of the University of Alaska graduate school in 2016, arriving in California’s Bay Area ready to “save the world.”  Alas, Silicon Valley is a cruel temple for prophets.  Ziz was just another zealot in a city full of them.  LaSota declared faith in the Sith, the dark side order in Star Wars.  You gotta start somewhere, right?

Ziz called Rationalists “master Jedi.” The community tolerated the eccentricities since they, too, believed AI could destroy us all.  Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried all had passed through the Rationalist forge.  But Ziz took it further with a blog listing categories of people to be “airlocked.”  Oh-oh.  LaSota advocated radical veganism, sleep deprivation rituals and violent moral tests, recruiting a cadre of mostly transgender and nonbinary tech aspirants from Google, Oracle and NASA.  They called themselves the Zizians.  To them, Ziz was the messiah the anti-artificial intelligence universe had been waiting for.  So here’s the payoff:

2019—Zizians don Guy Fawkes masks and robes to disrupt a Rationalist event in California.  No guns were found, but SWAT stormed the venue.  Arrests followed.  The Zizians chanting was described by police as “speaking in tongues.”

2020---In Vallejo California, landlord Curtis Lind was stabbed with knives and a samurai sword after demanding unpaid rent.  He shot two Zizians in self-defense, one died.  Ziz faked death by falling off a boat, the obituary running in Alaskan newspapers.  (Y'gotta give the gal 'A' for effort.)

2023---The parents of Zizian Michelle Zajko were found dead in Pennsylvania.  Bullets matched Zajko’s gun, but evidence fell short.  Ziz was arrested with Michelle in a hotel but bailed out and quickly disappeared.

2025---Lind was stabbed to death before he could testify against the group.  Days later in Vermont, two Zizians fired at Border Patrol agents.  One agent and one Zizian were killed in the shootout.

Rationalism has always prided itself on logic untainted by emotion, but Ziz turned logic into madness.  Rolo’s Basilisk, the infamous AI thought experiment predicting torture for those who don’t create AI, haunted LaSota, who believed that any attempt to stop AI would condemn her to eternal torture by future malevolent superintelligences.  The solution: don’t back down, escalate and airlock the doubters.  Eliezer Yudkowsky, the Rationalist guru who warned Ziz of AI extinction, called LaSota’s descent “sad,” writing that one’s weirdness attracted even weirder people, some of whom turn out to be “genuinely crazy in a contagious way among the susceptible.”  No shit.

Today, Ziz LaSota is no longer saving the world, but instead sits in a Maryland jail undergoing a court-ordered mental competency evaluation.  She faced federal charges for possession of firearms and ammunition as a fugitive from justice and both state and federal charges tied to homicides across multiple states.  Ziz is not accused of wielding the murder weapons, but prosecutors say LaSota orchestrated the violence.  The Rationalist community is left with a bitter aftertaste.  Was Ziz simply an unwell person who found justification for her madness in an AI apocalypse theory or did Rationalism’s own doomsday fetish birth a new Ziz?  The Rationalist blogger Zvi Mowshowitz wondered if LaSota would have simply created another cult if AI philosophy hadn’t ensnared her.  “I give it a 55% chance,” he guessed.

But who knows?  And who cares?  For Ziz LaSota and others of a similar bent---sometimes you just gotta Save The World.

Operation Cat Drop

In the late 1950s, a large area around Sarawak, Borneo was sprayed with DDT to control malaria.  The DDT killed wasps that had previously left caterpillars in check, which led to an alarming caterpillar boom that quickly damaged homes throughout the area.  The DDT also poisoned insects that the local cats ate, leading to the death of virtually all cats in the area.  Without the cats to serve as traffic cops, the rodent population exploded.

This was obviously another job for England’s elite Royal Air Force, which had already saved the world---or at least London---from the German Luftwaffe in World War II.  On March 17, 1960, if was raining cats, if not dogs, on Bario in the Kelabit Highlands of Sarawak.  From a height of 400 feet, the RAF parachuted twenty-three felines into town.  The cats were packed expertly into wicker baskets and all of them survived the flight, which landed smack in the middle of the war zone.  Subsequent to the operation, Mr. John Seal, chief operations officer of the Sarawak Civil Aviation Department sent a congratulatory telegram to the RAF.  “We are delighted with your magnificent job on the delivery,” it stated.  “This army of cats from heaven has quickly put an end to the problem and saved our little world.”

The London Times suggested a new motto for the Royal Air Force; “Saving the World, One Cat at a Time.”  After brief consideration, the advisory was wadded tightly and heaved.

The Real Heroes

Has anyone actually saved the world?  Edward Jenner has a claim to it with his pioneering work on vaccination against smallpox in the late eighteenth century.  The vax led to the eventual eradication of the disease, saving millions of lives.  Norman Borlaug, an agricultural scientist, undoubtedly saved at least a billion people from starvation via his work in developing high-yielding, disease-resistant crops.  Carl Bosch and Fritz Haber, developed the Haber-Bosch Process, which allows for the mass production of ammonia in fertilizer.  ScienceHeroes.com says the process allowed production of enough food to save billions of people.  Plaudits to all of them, but save the world?  Probably not.

The closest people to planet savers are likely two Russians.  In 1983, Stanislav Petrov, a lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Defence Forces, was on duty when a Soviet early-warning system indicated an American missile attack.  Instead of following protocol and launching a retaliatory strike, he delayed any action, correctly suspecting a false alarm.  Petrov’s good sense potentially averted a nuclear war.  Then, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vasili Arkhipov, a Soviet submarine officer second in command, prevented the launch of a nuclear torpedo during a tense standoff with the U.S. Navy.  The captain of the sub and the third senior officer wanted to launch but the order required authorization from all three and Vasili refused.

You know that Doomsday Clock, the brainchild of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists…the one that CNN is always telling us is rushing headlong toward midnight?  Right now it’s 85 seconds to midnight, almost the closest it’s ever been to catastrophe-time.  Back in the days of Stanislav and Vasili, it was one second to extinction.  Let’s give those Russian boys a hand…and maybe a dacha on the Kamchatka Peninsula.

That’s all, folks….

bill.killeen094@gmail.com     

Alice In Wonderland

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of a bad Patriots season can stay the Fearless, Fighting Killeens from the eventual completion of their appointed rounds.  Resilience, good genes and a spot of luck have carried Bill (85), Alice (83) and Kathy (75) through all kinds of weather without breaking stride...until now.  Recently, we got word that Alice (the Republican) had a mass on her brain and would soon be on that midnight train to Georgia, or wherever the Cosmic Arranger sends lapsed Catholics who obeyed the rules and stayed out of jail.  Alice was not too worried about this because she seldom fretted about much of anything and this new annoyance was a just another bump in the road.

As kids, Alice and I were stuck with one another, like it or not, on snow days, vacations, trips to Salisbury Beach or to see relatives.  Alice loved the beach, thought one day she might be one of those California Girls, and she eventually was.  At Salisbury, she inevitably headed straight for the roller coaster, went further out in the ocean than she was allowed and wrote a book on how to annoy one's brother.  In grade school, she was a good student and brought home a plethora of As, but at Lawrence High School she discovered boys and was occasionally found smoking with bad girls behind dumpsters.  She went to the prom with Sonny, a bright and cheerful fellow, but wound up with Bob, who none of us knew from Adam.  Before we knew it, Alice was married and lived in California.  Except for vacations, she never left, winding up in a very nice condo in Camarillo, "where the weather is always perfect."  She had kids and they had kids and they had kids and the green grass grew all around, all around, the green grass grew all around.

I Saw Alice Kissing Santa Claus

When we were kids, the hullabaloo surrounding Christmas extended from at least a week before the big event until well after New Year's Day.  Our friendly house was constantly full of rotating guests, hearty drinkers all, moved by the spirit of the season, carousing late into the night by the light of the brilliant tree and the candlelit windows.  On Christmas Eve, my sister and I were sent upstairs to my Grandmother's half of the house to avoid the tipsy conversation and the raucous clatter, but also not to be caught off guard by the sudden appearance of Santa Claus, who famously grows apoplectic when children are not nestled all snug in their beds prior to his arrival.  Alice was a big fan of Santa.  As far as she was concerned, anything extraordinary that happened between mid-November and the end of January was due to the influence of the Jolly Old Elf.  Snow on Christmas Eve?  Santa, of course.  Our Dad gets Christmas Day off from work unexpectedly?  Santa again.  Alice gets a better doll than Celia Hart, across the street?  "Well, Santa knows she was bad and I was good!"

By the time I was five, I was pretty sure Santa Claus was a parental fabrication, the logistics of the situation being what they were.  All those countries.  All those kids.  How could Santa possibly do it, even with the capable assistance of all the elves in Europe?  I kept quiet until a year later, not wanting to shatter my sister's illusions.  When she was four, however, I tried to explain the science of it all to Alice...the incredible numbers involved, the troubles with possible headwinds, the petty jealousies which sometimes occur in the best of reindeer families.  She was having none of it, and she had her unimpeachable answer.  "Magic," she said.  Santa Clause is magic.  So how is a six-year-old boy supposed to argue with that?

A few minutes after our discussion had run its course, there was an unexplainable noise on the roof above us.  Alice dived for the covers and advised me to get in bed quick, which I did.  I mean, no matter what you think you know, there's no sense in taking chances, right?  And who the hell else could be on the roof?  The next morning, Alice and I crept downstairs to get a look at the vast panorama that Santa (or someone) had wrought.  My heart caught in my throat when I spied a large, shiny lump of anthracite at the top of my stocking.  My sister was giving me the stinkeye.  "He knows what you were thinking, Billy, and that's your warning" she said in her best scoldy voice.  Let me tell you, there's nobody as smug as a four-year-old girl who's been proved right by the likes of Santa Claus.

The Achilles Heel

One of the great joys of Alice's and my early years was the occasional summer weekend automobile excursion to fun-filled Salisbury Beach.  The whole family traveled on narrow, winding country roads past colorful little farm produce stands, cluttered antiqueries with fascinating junk piled to the sky, past fried clam shacks and miniature golf palaces full of dinosaurs and windmills, over the meadows and through the woods all the way to the sea.  The first hint of Salisbury Beach was its iconic rollercoaster jutting out into the coastal skies, available for viewing miles from the beach itself.  It always brought out the same reaction from my crusty grandmother: "That damn thing is dangerous.  Too rickety, hasn't been fixed in years.  Some day one of those cars is going to fall right down into the street."  To which Alice would always whisper, "But not when I'M on it." 

The first thing anyone heard after dismounting their cars in those days was the siren song of Salisbury's famous carousel, our obligatory first stop.  No matter how many times we went to the beach, my Mother always took pictures of her kids on their favorite horses.  It was a ritual not to be questioned without getting a rare frown from Marie.  You didn't want that frown because when it arrived Tom Killeen was on his way to the rescue.  After the merry-go-round, it was off to the ride of your choice.  With Alice, it was always the rollercoaster.  It was an addiction.  She would have ridden it all day if funds allowed, careening left and right, screaming bloody murder.  When she was about ten, she told me "If I had all the time in the world I would find a place full of rollercoasters and move in next door.  It would be like Heaven."  Later in life we would find out such desires are called wretched excess.  

While Alice was soaring through the sky, the rest of us went over to the Ferris wheel.  My Mother loved it so I always went with her while my Father read the sports pages of the Boston Post.  We didn't wait for Alice because the innocent, serene Ferris wheel was anathema to her.  "I know if I get on it will stop at the top and I'll be stuck there and never get down," she said.  No amount of reasoning would change her mind.  She was aware that the wheel behaved admirably every time my Mother and I rode, but that was no consolation.  Alice had read once of a faraway Ferris wheel that faltered and left its riders stranded for the better part of a day, and she wasn't taking any chances.  "She'll get over it," promised Tom Killeen.  But she never did.

When we got older, I approached Alice every now and then about going up on one wheel or another.  "Nope," she'd say.  "It's just waiting for me to give in.  It knows I'm onto its tricks.  The Ferris wheel is the work of the Devil."  She carried her grudge into adulthood and beyond.  Her husband just smiled.  Her kids begged her to go.  Her friends heaped ridicule on her fears.  Nothing could dent her resolve.  Then one day, visiting New England with her small grandchildren, the lot of us went to Canobie Lake amusement park in New Hampshire, an old favorite haunt from childhood.  Walking by the Ferris wheel, the grandkids pleaded to take a ride.  Alice was reluctant to let them go up alone, but she had spent the better part of her life avoiding her nemesis.  "Come on, Alice," I prodded.  "The kids want to go and this isn't your 1950 Ferris wheel.  It'll be fine.  What are the odds?

Reluctantly, she caved.  We all strapped in, the music played and the Canobie Lake Ferris wheel took our bucket up into the sky.  Until it didn't.  After two or three revolutions, it stopped--right at the top--finally capturing its long-awaited prisoner.  Alice glared at me with anger and disgust that I could play a part in her ride to perdition.  What could I say--first, Santa Claus and now this?  It took about half an hour to get us down and half a year for Alice to stop grumping about it.  Two years later, an unknowing friend on the West Coast grabbed her enthusiastically and said, "Hey, let's you and me go on that Ferris wheel!"  Poor thing.  Alice chased her off the end of the pier.  

Next Of Kin To The Wayward Wind

"In a lonely shack by a railroad track, she spent her younger days.  And I guess the sound of the outward bound made her a slave to her wanderin' ways."---Gogie Grant

Alice always liked to travel, and emigrating to California was just a start.  Despite being a woman of modest means, she was determined to get out of the house as often as possible and any mode of inexpensive transport would do.  Alice became a master of the Cheap Trip, investigating all manner and make of bargain flights and dubious hostelries.  She would pore over mountains of literature to discover optimal travel times, absurdly cheap fares and rickety carriers.  She was not above riding steerage class on a Sumatran garbage scow if it got her where she wanted to go.  The redeye to Borneo?  "Where do I sign up?"  Alice was willing to ride in swine delivery vehicles, strap herself to the wing of a rusty airliner if the price was right and the authorities looked the other way.  She maintained it was safe to go anywhere if you wore a flak jacket, carried a two-shot derringer and a bottle of Lysol.

Alice traveled across Europe, but loved Ireland the best.  The natives are warm to all visitors but treat Killeens like long-lost family and fear no excess in behavior.  Alice was such an  enthusiast for the auld sod she once turned herself upside-down to kiss the Blarney Stone, and they still tell sordid tales of her activities in the raucous pubs of Tipperary. 

Perhaps her second-favorite destination was nearby Mexico, which she visited often with her California amigos.  On one unfortunate occasion, she was deep in a surly canyon when she broke an ankle. Now, you can see the accompanying photos of Alice, so it's obvious she was no fashion model; there would be no hoisting her over two shoulders and carrying her out.  Rescuers had to resort to a dolly, strap her in and drag her uphill.  After that her pals hauled her around town on a hotel luggage rack.  Not a fan of the Mexican Kwik-Fix, Alice wouldn't hear of south-of-the-border repair.  When she finally got back to California the doctors had to put her back together with bolts and screws. 

A few minor inconveniences, including her advancing age, never deterred Alice.  To celebrate her 69th birthday, she and Kathy took a Gulf of Mexico cruise which included a stop in Belize.  She told her sister that everybody celebrated their 69th birthday by riding the portside zip-line, also known as a flying fox, aerial runway, death slide or Tyrolean crossing.  The zip-line, as we now know, is designed to enable a user propelled by gravity to travel from the top to the bottom of an inclined cable, usually made of stainless steel, by holding on or attaching to a freely moving pulley.  They may be short and low, intended for child's play, or long and high, sometimes used as a means of accessing remote areas, such as a rainforest canopy.  Or they could be used for entertainment, like scaring yourself to death on your 69th birthday.

Kathy, after much fretting ("Hey, it's not MY 69th birthday!") finally agreed to the zip-line experience.  Alice went first, thoroughly versed in the importance of the zip-line braking procedures.  If you brake too soon, she was told, you have to pull yourself in, hand over hand.  If you brake too late you will have slowed down enough for the Belizean "catchers" to haul you in.  We should point out here that the men of Belize are a smallish lot, not to be mistaken for burly Samoans.  When Alice came blasting in without even slowing down, she carried her tiny Belizean grabber several yards down the landing field before stopping.  "All in a days work," he assured his apologetic passenger while limping off to the medical tent.  "How much is a good tip?" Alice asked Kathy.  "You don't have enough," she replied.

Farewell, Adelita!

Siobhan and I visited Alice in California several times, the last in 2021 when we were to meet her for dinner near Santa Monica's famous pier.  She fell in the parking lot on the beach, bloodied up her head and arm and gained the attention of EMTs from the local fire department, all of whom looked like actors from Baywatch.  After receiving more than enough attention, she was asked which hospital she preferred to be taken to.  "Oh, none," she said.  "Can you just take me to the restaurant up at street level?"  They did, and we all had a splendid dinner, Alice bleeding through the bandages a bit to the anxiety of the waitresses.

In 2025, Kathy and Alice visited their brother Bill in Florida, spending a few nights in our little guest house and cavorting around St. Augustine, Silver Springs, the World Equestrian Center in Ocala and the Hippodrome in Gainesville.  A great time was had by all.  At our frightful ages we were grateful for another opportunity to celebrate our good fortune and tell sordid and hilarious tales of the old days on the not-so-mean streets of South Lawrence.  

When Alice learned Siobhan and I were going to Paris this year she called to tell me she'd lost her tiny Eiffel Tower statue bought years before on her own visit with Kathy, and asked if I would find a replacement.  It was one of the first things I did when I got there.  She called in late July, thrilled to have her new trinket.  It was the last time I spoke to her.  Alice died Tuesday morning at 1 a.m. with her granddaughter Kelsey at her bedside.  Kathy, Siobhan and I were scheduled to leave for California a couple of days later, thinking we had plenty of time.  The best laid plans of mice and men....

Practicing and even lapsed Catholics think differently of death than some others.  If they've observed protocol, they might wind up in that great amusement park in the sky.  If not, well...

If my calculations are correct, Alice is a bit east of Newburyport, Massachusetts right now, headed toward the sea.  In about five minutes, she should get her first tiny view of the salty skyline of Salisbury Beach.  And what shall this California Girl, this adventurer, this daughter of Santa Claus see reaching up to the sky in the distance?  Will it be the heavenly glow of the rollercoaster or the snarling lip of that ever-lusting Ferris wheel?

There are no answers, only mysteries.

That's all, folks....

bill.killeen094@gmail.com  

      

  

Jousting With The Reaper

 

One good thing about riding the Octogenarian Express is that the passengers no longer have time for procrastination.  Do It Now! becomes the inevitable motto, which is likely why Bill Killeen finally made it to Paris after lollygagging for sixty years.  A little travel, of course, always makes one want more, but ancient bodies snort and grumble and start looking for their easy chairs.  When we finally have the means and the enlightenment to do brilliant things, our backs go out, our sciatica acts up, our lungs cry for help, and on that murky horizon we can make out the figure of the Grim Reaper, rearing up on his steed.  We know if he can nail Dolly he can run down anybody.

There are two alternatives: we can submit meekly because we don't believe in magic, or we can join the hunt for the Holy Grail, the legendary wonder which can suspend time, maybe even turn it back.  Poppycock, you say, and with good reason.  In all the history of mankind, no one has unearthed the secret, even Dick Clark.  Whatever we do, our cells continue to age until they become defective.  As time passes, normal metabolic stress, environmental factors and internal wear and tear cause progressive harm to our cells while the body's natural repair and cleanup systems grow less efficient.  Eventually, the Reaper rides in, executes his Mandible Claw Hold and we're finished.

But what if our cells ceased to age?  What if they could be reprogrammed by resetting the chemical marks on DNA and making cells young again?  As we sit here today snuggling our coffee and watching Good Morning America, there are superheroes like David Sinclair hard at work trying to do just that.  The science is called cellular epigenetic reprogramming, and the studies on its progress are encouraging.

David Sinclair, The Man With The Plan

The first thing scoffers should know about David Sinclair is that Harvard University, that bastion of no-nonsense, hired him.  Harvard is not in the business of fooling around.  Sinclair's early discoveries in genetics and molecular biology laid a foundation for subsequent work on sirtuins, epigenetics, NADs and the biology of aging.  His 2023 study in Cell demonstrated that partial cellular reprogramming using modified Yamanaka factors can reset youthful gene expression and reverse aging in mice.  Yamanaka factors are a group of four specific protein transcription factors that can reset a mature, specialized adult cell into an immature, versatile stem cell.  Animal experiments successfully restored vision in old mice with glaucoma by rejuvenating damaged retina nerve cells.  Good job, but mice are not humans, except for Mickey.

Currently, Life Biosciences, a company Sinclair co-founded, is running the first human trials as we write.  Why use the eye?  Because it's easily accessible so that therapies can be delivered locally and vision can be measured precisely.  The first patient was dosed in June for open-angle glaucoma and sudden optic nerve stroke (NAION).  Results are expected soon.  Sinclair is also pushing a pill version---chemical programming to "epigenetically restore the animal and eventually the person."  It would travel through the bloodstream.  Some scientists are worried because the chemicals used are in very high concentrations.  Then again, Sinclair IS tinkering with defeating Death so you can't just take an aspirin.

Should we be encouraged?  Sure!  This is the most serious attempt ever to reverse age-related loss of function and much more realistic than Serge Voronoff's grafting of sliced baboon testicles onto elderly men.  If it works, it's enormous, so we're rooting from the cheap seats.  Maybe we'll get to visit Northumberland after all.

Six Things You Don't Know About Longevity

1. Food plus exercise actually moves the clock consistently.  A Yale review of 51 human studies found Mediterranean, low-carb or low-fat eating patterns and regular exercise consistently decreased epigenetic age across 16 different clocks.  You thought so, but there was no proof.  Now, reams of pooled evidence attest to the fact.

2. The greatest progress in longevity comes from existing drugs, not supplements.  Metformin, semaglutide (Wegovy/Ozempic) and anti-TNF anti-inflammatory drugs each significantly decreased measured age across all 16 epigenetic clocks.  Researchers acknowledge it may be because they fix underlying metabolic diseases, but it shows age markers are modifiable.

3. The APOE2 longevity gene works by fixing DNA.  We knew APOE2 people live longer and avoid Alzheimer's, but new Buck Institute work shows how: APOE2 neurons strongly upregulate DNA repair pathways and carry significantly less DNA damage, and they resist becoming senescent after stress. Even adding APOE2 protein to APOE4 cells reduced damage, hinting at a future drug, not just genetics.

4. Aging flips your genes from long to short---and it's reversible.  Your long genes (brain function, regulation) get quiet with age; short genes (inflammation, telomere stress) get loud.  Seven interventions including rapamycin and resveratrol led to a relative increase in long gene transcripts.     

5. It's not just your age, it's your speed.  And now we can measure it.  A 2026 Nature Ageing study tracked people over years; those whose epigenetic clocks speed up faster had significantly higher mortality.  That means a simple blood test over time could tell if your diet and exercise changes are actually working months before you feel the results.

6. Better predictors than Horvath clocks now exist for function.  New transcriptomic aging scores (TAGS) outperformed epigenetic clocks in predicting frailty, walking speed, cardiovascular disease and mortality.  That's huge for you---it links molecular age directly to staying functioning, not just years.

Good News!

An AI drug candidate called Rentosertib which was originally developed by Insilico Medicine to target idiopathic pulmonary thrombosis reduced biological age by three or four years in a small clinical study.  It is recognized as the world's first drug candidate where both the biological target and the molecular structure were discovered and designed entirely using generative AI.  Rentosertib has advanced to Phase III clinical trials following positive Phase II results.

Rapamycin currently remains the single most reliable lifespan extender across sexes.  Rapamycin extends lifespan by blocking a master growth switch called mTOR, which forces cells to shift from growth mode into a cleanup and repair state.  When mTOR is active, cells grow and divide.  When rapamycin blocks mTOR, cells start Autophagy, breaking down damaged proteins and recycling old parts.  This internal housekeeping mimics known lifespan-extending benefits of caloric restriction without requiring you to eat less food.  Slowing down constant cellular growth helps reduce the chronic low-grade inflammation that drives many age-related diseases.  

The ABCs Of Dodging The Reaper

The Grim Reaper is like any other predator.  He goes after the low-hanging fruit first, so climb further up that tree.  Here in plain English is the Simple Plan for longevity:

Move a little, often.  Walk 20-30 minutes in the morning before it gets hot.  Twice a week, stand up and sit down from a chair 10 times.  Leg strength is what keeps you out of a nursing home.  Eat like those old Mediterranean guys.  Not necessarily a specific diet but more olive oil, beans, fish, nuts, veggies.  Eliminate or greatly reduce soda, white bread and processed meat.  This practice is one of the few things that actually made people's aging clocks go backward.

Keep weight and blood sugar steady.  The drug semaglutide made clocks younger because it fixes blood sugar and inflammation.  You can get much of that effect without a drug by eschewing sugary drinks, eating smaller portions at dinner and walking after you eat.

Sleep at the same time every night, hopefully 7-8 hours.  We know it's not easy for everyone.  Keep the room dark, no TV.  Melatonin is a safe supplement for most.  Poor sleep ages you faster than almost anything.

Get out and meet people.  Call a friend, go to a coffee shop or bookstore, see a Gator game, drop in at Heartwood or One Love Cafe or follow Vicki Bordeaux around.  Statistics show that loneliness ages a person as much as smoking, which is scary.  Talking to people is literally longevity medicine.  We're trying to set up a lifeline where you can call Gina Hawkins directly, but she's not sold yet.

If you can't hear well, your brain works harder and shrinks.  So what if you have to wear hearing aids, nobody cares.  Keep your glasses updated.  If you can't see, you fall.  Forget the exotic supplements, they're expensive and they don't deliver as much as they promise.  Centrum Silver is a good multivitamin, maybe throw in some extra Vitamin D.  The big review of 51 studies found most anti-aging products did not lower aging clocks.  Food, movement and sleep did.

Remember, you can now measure if what you're doing is working...there are blood tests which show your aging speed.  If you're no longer working, think of putting the above recommendations to work as your new job.  Good luck.  Good Lord willin' and the creek don't rise, we'll see you soon in the sunny hills of Octogenaria-by-the-sea.

That's all folks....

bill.killeen094@gmail.com