Clearing House Season

I have the ‘Russians” tonight so I drove in today. When I drive into to work I am not as stressed getting out of the house as I am when I taking the train. I had some time to kill so as I was wondered round the house this morning I noticed an envelope laying office down on the table. My name was written on back with my address under my name. I flipped the envelope over and it was a Clearing House Sweepstakes envelope, filled out sealed and ready to go. The envelope just needed a stamp. Dianne had obviously filled out the envelope was going to send it in but had not a yet. I grabbed the document and slipped the envelope into my backpack so I can mail at the post office next to my office.

I gave up participating in the Clearing House Sweepstakes, it seems decades ago. It seemed that I would get an envelope every couple encouraging me to take part in the next level of the sweepstakes. It was like a FOX television series which never concludes. There was always another envelope waiting to be processed with the hopes of winning big. In the old days when stamps were five cents this was not such a big deal just a never ending frustration. I finally just stopped entering all together and throwing the CHS envelopes immediately out when the envelopes showed up in my mailbox.

Dianne often gets the mail now in the afternoon and she must have intercepted this piece of mail for me. Dianne is cute in that she is an optimist and really believes we could win this contest and that is great and so she will always respond to the Clearing House and I will be chagrined if she wins. But she won’t no budy ever wins. Do you know anyone, personally, who has won the clearing house? No of course not I firmly believe the Clearing House is a myth, one of the great American myths that the public loves to believe.

Curt Vonnegut died yesterday. Boy do I hate see these old guys leave. Curt Monson turned me on to Vonnegut in the early sixties: Cat’s Cradle. I liked the book immediately. This was also the time I came out of the “nerd closet”. I had always recognized I was different from the pack, possibly even strange. I don’t know what I recognized n Vonnegut’s work but it touched a chord and I felt I had some how come home. The time must have been 63-64 and I was in jr. high school. Curt was in the crowd I hug round with at lunch. We had taken over small room at bottom of the back stairs, which let to the boys locker room or to the cafeteria. There were five or six of us in this group and they had accepted me. The were all smarter the me with the exception of Mark Sterling—if I ever had learned to think this where I started. I hope Curt V has found his own ICE-9.