It's eight-thirty, and I'm lying here, trying to decide if I can choke down another package of ramen, or if I should just skip dinner tonight. So far, skipping dinner is winning.

Not that it's a big hardship... I have enough flab to see me through a week without any food at all. Rice and ramen are... um... yeah.

Anyway, I'm lying here, watching Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman on the Hallmark Channel. One of the things that irritates me about this particular episode is the way the indians (Cheyenne, Ute, Arapaho, and Pawnee) are portrayed.

Now, I'm of two minds about the whole thing. On the one hand, one of my great-greats was a Cherokee. Of course, every white boy in America can probably make that claim, so I never treat it as worth more than it is... an indication of my Heintz-57 Americanism.

Indeed, I think the fact that I lived on the Navajo reservation at the age of nine through twelve does more to establish my opinion of Native Americans than my drop or two of Cherokee blood does.

The thing is... these days... indians are always portrayed as the Noble Savage; they're always shown as wise and basically harmless.

That ticks me off, because it's as much a caricature, as much a lie, as portraying them as Red-Handed Killers.

The truth is that there is no such thing as "Native American Culture," unless you count the crap that new-agers crank out without any knowledge of what real Indians are like.

The truth is, in the days before Columbus, there were half a thousand seperate tribes, seperate nations, on the North American continent. A member of the Iraquois league would have had no more luck talking to an Ute of his time than you or I would.

The truth is, some pre-Columbian American nations were pretty nasty folks. You wouldn't want them for your neighbors. They practiced torture as an art form, had slaves, raided their neighbors for wives, and other unsavory things.

During the early nineteenth century, the United States engaged in a war of conquest in the American West. You read, these days, about all sorts of atrocities the US Army was responsible for... the masacre at Wounded Knee springs right to mind...but you don't read much about the other side... about the civilians masacred by Geronimo, for instance, in Arizona.

Some sensitive, new-agey types might point out that the settlers couldn't have been masacred if they hadn't moved into the Apache's territory, and I would agree... but that doesn't mean no one would have gotten masacred. It would simply have been Tohono O'odam, or Navajo, or Hopi, instead of Europeans.

The upshot of it is, today, in the early days of the twenty-first century, no one gets masacred. Not Apache, not Navajo, not Europeans, nobody.

When I was a teenager, I spent a year in Germany. When people found out I was from Arizona, if they even knew where it was, they'd say, "Oh, the Wild West! Aren't you afraid of Indians?"

I couldn't tell them that some of my best friends, as a child, had been Indians. I couldn't tell them that Indians were just as much US Citizens, just as much Americans, as I was. All that would have taken too much time.

Instead, I would laugh. "Aww, shucks, no," I'd say, in a hick accent, "Mah paw, he jus' wears his six-shooter t' church on Sunday, these days. We ain't haid no Injun troubles in, oh, neigh on a hunret years, now!"

They'd laugh with me, and we'd go on to other topics.

No, I'm not proud of everything the US Army did in pacifying the west. No, I'm not proud of everything Europeans did in the Nineteenth century.

But I would like to think that I would have made the same choices as my ancestor, Bill Cowboy, who became an officer of the Union Calvary during the civil war, and came home to be a Deputy US Marshall in southern Arizona.

"He was a quiet man," the Historical Society records, "More apt to try and talk through trouble than to shoot it out."

Thanks to Ol' Bill, and others like him, today, I don't wear a six-shooter. I don't fear attack by my neighbors. I don't read about masacres in the news.

No, I'm not proud of everything they did, those men... but I am pleased with the result.

I have just awakened, and dreams still cling to my hair. I do not often write about dreams, for I feel that they are sort of a mental cesspool, your brain doing filemaintenance, and getting rid of garbage.

But...

I dreamed I had travelled back to Göttingen, Germany. I got off the train, and paused for a moment in the downtown bus stop where we used to wait together after our D&D games.

I had awkward things in my hands which I needed to redistribute into my bags, into my pockets. As I did, I kept looking around for familiar faces, telling myself how silly I was being.

It's been sixteen years. Where'd they go?

I had friends in those days. Thomas, Dietmar, Uwe... good friends. I miss them.