This is not strictly true.
None of this is strictly true.
It's pretty close to true, tho--I have amazingly little imagination.
…
Reading this story, or whatever it has turned into: Some say a story must have a beginning, a middle, & and end. Fine. Then this is something other than a story. Or else it is not so that a story must have a beginning, a middle, & and end. Not very important, is it?
I realize that it will not have been easy for you to follow, in one reading, without concentrating your attention with unusual force, what I have said [sic]. I have gone back & forth in time--I have put in all sorts of details (& left out still more--of which, more another time). Even my sentences are unusual & frequently difficult.
I made it as simple as I could. I am attempting to be of service to you. What I hope to achieve by communicating what I am here communicating with you, if it can be achieved, will not be achieved in an instant.
In spite of which cryptic presentation and heavy message, People I Met Hitchhiking on USA Highways proves to be a surprisingly light and easy read, a short book, leaving a thirst for more of Chaet's work. It is full of interesting, thought-provoking lives, not least of all Chaet's - all half told, with hidden relationships only hinted at.
They are stories of hardship, the working class struggle, complicity in a system that drives a deeper and deeper wedge between us, between people, between people and their planet, between one another, between those who have, and those who don't, between those who play ball and those who don't.
Chaet doesn't play ball. A university educated man, with a thirst for knowledge, a craving for wisdom (that eludes him as it does the rest of us) he winds up loading trucks to keep the grim reaper from his doorstep, while his profession flounders because of an imprudent tongue … he calls his story The Coup. "Sure! I'm scared of hitchhiking! And I'm scared of staying in one place, scared!" is he.
But he has the power to raise questions. He has the power to ask. He has the power to ask you to raise questions … implicitly by being who he is, doing what he does. "Our children will in time mature and stop asking such annoying questions" writes Jan Lif in his introduction, all the same, while overlooking the questions Chaet does in fact ask of us.
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