#Nuke them till they glow code

And on the walk around the outside I began to wonder. The fuck.? Who the hell locks a damn dorm door? Must be some sort of prank the north side door will be open.Д®xcept it wasn't. I recall yanking on the door handle in a sort of irritated disbelief.

#Nuke them till they glow code

Not only was it some sort of fire code rule there were always at least a handful of people who needed to go in and out. The exterior doors of dorms were never locked. What was surprising, however, was that the outside door of my dorm was locked. I won't pretend that my college, even in the coke-and-disco-fueled Seventies, was the sort of girls-gone-wild party school of college films so I wasn't really surprised that the campus was dark and quiet on an end-of-break Friday night. I had a couple of exams early in the next week, and my plan was to return to the dorm to get a weekend of studying in away from the fleshpots of Kennett Square, PA. Armored in that impervious ignorance I bagged up my clean laundry and shoved it in my father's secondhand Ford Pinto station wagon (all I could afford as college transportation and quite the babe-magnet it was, I tell you. I had no idea what the fresh hell was going on along the banks of the Susquehanna River. Literally I didn't turn on the news or bother to read the newspaper. Young Chief, being, as noted above, a clueless git, had no panic because he had no clue. The governor of Pennsylvania issued some sort of evacuation order which was widely ignored, and the public response was entirely determined by individual threshold levels of nuclear panic. The accident was more frightening than actually dangerous but it was frightening, and a fairly broad swath of central Pennsylvania (and, I think, even a bit of north-central Maryland) was warned that a deadly radioactive cloud might descend at any time in the manner of one of those Fifties mutant-monster films.

You can read the accounts of 'Three Mile Island' to get the history it's a bit beyond this post, which is just a personal momento nuki. Here's the sad, funny part of this story, though. It was four in the fucking morning who was getting up that early on a vacation weekday.? So I can't say it was surprising that I hadn't the slightest idea on this day 38 years ago that as I was lazing about sleeping in my old bedroom in my parent's house on a Spring Break vacation Wednesday that about sixty miles to the northwest, at the Three Mile Island power station, reactor TMI-2 was melting down.

A fairly socialized, relatively educated dope, but a dope nonetheless. I paid as little attention to the world's business as I had just half a dozen years earlier when I was approaching draft age and the war in Southeast Asia was winding down.which says something about how gormless I was, given that I had not the slightest assurance that my government might want me to go to proof-test the Domino Theory with my body when I came to legal adulthood. What I was not was particularly aware of my surroundings.