Dear Neil,
All the really great writers of the past hundred years or so were involved in a war of some sort. Maybe this is an unfair generalization, since two back-to-back World Wars tend to draw people in, but it seems true. The only time I've ever been shot at was in a video game. I guess kids today can't become men on the battlefield, so we have to become men in a Quake deathmatch. The trouble is, I'm not that good at video games. When I practice for a while I can get up to very decent. That's about it. I'm never an innovator discovering new tricks or a guru master besting all challengers. I beat people who are new to the game hands down, but give them a week and we're equally matched. Maybe you can understand where I'm coming from as the first civilian test pilot in the astronaut-training program. It seems like in a war everyone is let in on a big secret and no one else gets to hear about it. It is probably something mundane like, "We're all going to die someday…" But still, the whole idea of secrets puts me off. What exactly goes on inside of Mormon temples and who shot JFK? It seems like I, of all people, am entitled to know. There is my solipsistic culture showing through again. Me, Myself and Irene was entitled Irene y Yo in Mexico. I guess they don't have a similar expression there. One must wonder why? Perhaps they lack sufficiently varied pronoun forms. Perhaps the memory of revolutions past has kept their culture from growing stale.