Ill Spent Youth

I endeavor to avoid the pitfalls of nostalgia. Despite that caveat, I do look fondly back on my youth.
They were halcyon days when viewed through the silky cocoon spun by the white, middle class culture of 1950's America.

While I grew up in pleasant surroundings the world was in turmoil. Here's a brief list of events that occurred while I aged from 5 to 10:

1959 – Revolution in Cuba led by Fidel Castro

1960 – U2 pilot Gary Powers shot down over Russia  - war possible

1961 – Berlin wall erected – war possible

1962 – Cuban Missile Crisis – war imminent

1963 – President John F. Kennedy assassinated

1964 – Troops, not just advisors, sent to Vietnam beginning a police action - semantically a new term, but war nonetheless

 

1964 was a bellweather year. The Beatles on Ed Sullivan, Rolling Stones first album, the Civil Rights Act passed, to paraphase a song from that year, "The times they were a'changin.'" One mostly unnoticed thing that happened in 1964 was a garishly painted bus left La Honda, CA filled with a Merry Band of Pranksters searching for a kool place.  

https://vimeo.com/24145054 

Little did I know how much this bus trip, and the tidal wave that followed it, would affect me. 

Over the next eight years, I emerged from my protective pupa. This metamorphosis transformed a quixotic idealist into a thrill-seeking vagabond. The works of Kerouac and Burroughs led me to the underbelly of society. Dive bars, dealers, con men, junkies, hoodlums filled me with a strange exhilarating fear. The antics of Ken Kesey and Hunter Thompson led me into the alchemical search for enlightenment and bull-goose looney craziness.

Did I achieve aforementioned enlightenment? Not really, kind of, maybe...I'm not sure. My chemical experiments certainly manifested a different perspective on viewing this world. But I did learn that seeking answers in a substance is like looking for music in an instrument. They are tools nothing more. Understanding hides among weird scenes inside the gold mines of our own experiences. That vein of wisdom lays dormant until we are in the correct state of mind to make use of it. Whatever the hell that means. Don't ask me, I just write this stuff.

As for the craziness part, ahem, well, I ah...let's just say that part has been redacted from the official records. Maybe some day there will be a Freedom of Misadventures Act, but names will have to be changed to protect the guilty. 

I'm still waiting on some of those psychedelic promises to be fulfilled. Take LSD. We were told that the major problem would be the flashbacks that could occur at any time. So I figured it was a special promotional offer. Buy one, get one free! I'm still waiting on that free trip. All these years and nothing, no flash of colors, no life-changing insight, not that feeling of a oneness with the universe that an acid trip could produce. Thinking back, it was like a metaphysical time-share without the set of free golf clubs. And I don't even play golf. As ever BB

"And I said look here brother-who you Jiving with that cosmik debris?  Now is that a real poncho or is that a sears poncho" - Frank Zappa, Cosmik Debris