Subjects Discussed With My Lifelong Friend Dick Ayre (in 3 hours) Riding Around Aroostock County in Northern Maine

1. fiddleheads (flowers that look like

Fiddleheads - Mainers from Presque Isle to Freeport collect them in marshy areas in April and cook them up

fiddles that people pick and eat in the spring)
2. the decline of the Maine paper industry and the dangers of working in the forests with the new technologies that now exist (monster mechanized chain saws)
3. the roads in Aroostock County that are built on near permafrost and how they are paved on 8 feet of gravel
4. the geographic distribution and political implications of moose warning signs and how many people have died in N. Maine from running into moose in their cars and on motorcycles

Dick Ayre in Houlton Maine

5. speculation on the evolution of the moose (how it is that animals as stupid as moose has survived for 30 million years and why deer, a related species, is so much more intelligent)
6. Dick’s near misses of running into moose on his motor cycle
7. the beauty of the Alagosh Wilderness (northern Maine) and whether large swatches of N. Maine might be made into a national park
8. the youth identity crisis

9. the history of cold weather in Aroostock County in the last ten years (year by year, season by season) including the history of blizzards during that period and the different kinds of snow that fell in each
10. Cathie Pelletier, author of Funeral Matters
11. research libraries (the library of Congess, University of California system)
public schools and charter schools…why charter schools have proven – over the long run – to be no better and

Lumber yard, Aroostock County

sometimes worse that public schools
12. immigration patterns and urban crime – immigrant communities are generally safer than non-immigrant neighborhoods
13. heart attacks, pulmonary fibrosis, acid reflux disease, diabetes and how they are all related
14. the right of a student to tell a public school teacher to `go fuck himself’ versus the right of a prisoner to tell a guard the same thing
15. the relationship between lack of control in the workplace and mental illness
16. why there is no canadian studies department at the university of maine presque isle (where dick taught) which is ten miles from the Canadian border
17. doubts about the continuing validity of Marx’s theory of history
18. Volume 1 of Marx’s Capital and its relationship to Harry Braverman’s writings
19. how contemporary China resembles Italian fascism under Mussolini
20. the best breakfast places in Mars Hill Maine where the gossip about affairs is really juicy
21. how to make good hummus and what kind of

Maine Moose - heard enough about them - never saw one

garbonzo beans make the best hummus
22. idiot college administrators we have known
23. history of the University of Miami football team and its close relationship with Miami’s Black Community

among other things…