Funny how it seems
the more that we evolve
The more the basic problems of
our lives get solved
The more we yearn for harder,
simpler times back when
We envy them, the simple men
                       --Momus, "The Simple Men."

I USED TO love the 1960s.  I used to idolize them, back in The Day.  "The Day" was, of course, a long time ago.  Back when I was in Grades 7, 8 and 9, and maybe even 10 and a bit of 11.  And maybe even a teensy bit of 12.  Back when I was idealistic.  And yes, there was a time when I was idealistic.  (I think I've said this before.)  I was maybe cynical and bitter, but still idealistic.  Maybe even cynical and bitter because I was idealistic.  That's usually the way that works.
        In Grades 7-9 I thought the 1960s were awesome.  A great time had by all, filled with cool music, a driving sense of purpose and focus, history in the making.  I envied anyone and everyone who said they had some sort of claim to the '60s, everyone who said they were, in some way, no matter how small, connected to the spirit of the '60s.  I had a pal named Mike.  He worked at a bookstore I went to almost every day.  Mike was much older than I was, and he made it through the '60s.  He was there on the ground floor.  And Mike used to tell me stories about the parties they had, the time they gave hashish to all the cows on some guy's farm and then for hours after that all the cows did was stare, cock their heads, and give low, mellow, "mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmoo" sounds.  He also told me about the time they gave LSD to all the chickens.  The chickens really didn't behave any differently.  I guess the lesson you can take from that is that chickens are always already sort of on acid.  Mike also told me about the UFO guys who wanted to levitate a table and go to Venus.  They believed they were aliens.  Mike also told me about the time he got pinned in an alleyway by a guy with a knife.  And then the guy with the knife stared reading religious texts to him.
        Mike told me about protests, run-ins with the police.  The time they swapped a gay roomie's KY jelly with VapoRub.  Mike told me about all the crazy sex, the drugs, the partying, the protests.
        It sounded so cool.
        Eventually, however, Mike's stories darkened.  He kept telling the same stories, and they were still the about the same things.  The cows, the chickens, the UFO people, the protests.  But, the atmosphere began changing.  A type of desperation crept in.  They gave drugs to the farm animals because they were all too fucked up to know any better.  And, besides, they had no transportation, or food, and they'd been sitting around in the farm for days, and they were bored.
        The UFO guys got scary sometimes.  Loud, angry, threatening.  Demanding people believe them.  They weren't just harmlessly levitating a table, any more.  They were damaged.
        And the guy with the knife and the religious texts almost stuck it into Mike's shoulder.
        And the police were brutal.  And the protests were riots.
        And everyone had diseases.  And everyone smelled because they never bathed.
        And close friends OD'd in pools of their own puke and shit.
        And the cops caved in young boys' skulls.
        And girls ended up raped, and killed themselves.  Or just plain vanished forever.
        And cults swooped in and consumed the naive.
        And everyone was cold, and hungry, and scared.  All the time.
        And good things came out of the 1960s, to be sure.  There's more equality between the races and the sexes-- and that's a plus.  Don't get me wrong.  But the time of the events was still a waking nightmare filled with desperation and fear.  Or at least that's what I've heard.
        People tend to forget this.

"THEY WERE SINGING 'Keep On Rocking In The Free World.'"
        "God, that's so lame.  That's so old, such a cliché.  Couldn't they sing something new, from now.  Or maybe play some music on a big sound system.  Maybe some Trance.  Or, it doesn't even have to be Trance just, just something from today.  Not 'Keep On Rocking In The Free World.'  Or okay, they obviously like Neil Young so even if they like Neil Young, couldn't they sing a new Neil Young song?  Not 'Keep on Rocking In The Free World?'  Give me a break.  That's embarrassing.  And I mean it's the music now, more than anything that transmits the culture."
        "Yeah," I say.
        We're walking through a food court, looking for something to eat.
        "So what they're doing is promoting old culture," Adrian says.  "And you can't protest things that're happening today using old culture, using yesterday's ideas.  You need to employ the culture of now.  It's all a matter of bricolage.  You take what's around you and use that to effect change, you don't import old culture, you don't transmit your message using old culture.  That's why nobody takes these people seriously.  Now, if they looked cutting-edge and cool, if they looked like they belonged in the year 2001 and not in the '60s or early '70s or-- at the very most recent-- at the outset of what's recent-- the early and mid 1990s-- if they didn't look like a bunch of burned out Grunge kids and hippies and-- and if they weren't singing an old Neil Young song maybe people would look at them and go:
        "'What is that?  I've never seen that before.  This is new and I'm going to check it out.'
        "Instead of just dismissing them all out of hand as a bunch of losers and freaks-- which is what they're behaving like.
        "And, I mean, calling themselves the G6B?  That's just so lame.  No effort went into that name at all.  It doesn't resonate, there's no imagination.  It doesn't seem like a movement.  It doesn't seem important.  It just seems like a bunch of bored children looking for something to do between dope runs."

ANYWAY, THERE WAS a time, way back when.  Way, way, way back.  Back when I was in love with the 1960s....
        No.  I didn't love the '60s at all.
        I loved Doonesbury and Zonker Harris.  I loved the Freak Brothers and Cheech and Chong.  I loved Hunter S. Thompson.  I loved to pretend to be a Head, even though there was no way, no way in hell at all I'd ever do drugs.  Drugs scared me.  But pretending, that was cool.
        There was the time, way back in Grade 7, when my friend J., his brother G., and I were going to rip off all the pot-smoking highschool students who hung around one of the bigger arcades on the edge of (what was then) a fairly skid-infested side of town-- it has since become more of an artistic, bohemian zone.
        Anyway, J., G. and I had this plan, and it involved getting together a whole bunch of oregano, and making a bunch of little joints, and the going to this arcade, and then selling the fake joints to all the highschool teens hanging out there.  Pretty straightforward.
        It was my idea.  I got it from some book.  And, of course, it was a book about the 60s, and it told me that pot and oregano both smelled the same when they burned.
        When I read it I thought, "Hey, this'll be a cool caper-- just like something the Freak Brothers would do.  Very '60s."
        But then we got cold feet.
        And we stared to think:
        "What if they know the joints are oregano?"
        "What if they think they are pot, but just don't want to pay for them?  And so they just beat the crap out of us and take the joints?  And then, what if they light them up and then find out they're fake?"
        "What if the cops bust us?  How and what would we tell our parents?"
        So, we didn't go.  Scam canceled.
        But, we'd all booked the day off.  It was all planned out:
        Go and make the joints, and then go and sell the joints.  Get in and get out.  A quick burn job.
        But, now, the whole thing had been called off.
        So what to do?
        After all, it was after school and our parents knew we were going to be out.  So we had all this time to ourselves.  And we'd also bought all this oregano.  And we had to get rid of all this oregano....
        Someone, I don't remember who, but it was probably all of us all simultaneously-- we were kind of like a big hive-mind in those days-- decided:
        "Hey, let's smoke it!"
        But we had to get rid of all of it.  So we couldn't just roll tiny little joints and puff away on them daintily like kind old ladies sipping tea.  We had to get rid of it all and quick.
        (Why did we have to do this quickly?  I'm still not too clear on that.  And why we had to smoke it instead of simply dumping it in the trash is also kind of vague.  The years tend to blur things.)
        And, also, one of us discovered he had some old McDonald's napkins in his jacket pocket.
        (I guess it just seemed like a good idea at the time.)
        So we ended up rolling these two huge oregano doobies-- and we're talking huge-- we're talking blunts the size of small clubs.  Each joint was made of several napkins and was held together with little bits of scotch tape, and spit.
        I can't remember who lit the first one, but it stank.  And J. puffed on the doobie to get it going.  Soon, he started hacking and gasping.
        Tears, running down his cheeks, J. passed it to me.
        I sucked on it.  Took a huge drag.  And oregano smoke filled my lungs.
        I exhaled.  J. was still wheezing.  I probably made a sound that sounded something like:
        "GUUUUUUAAAGKKKUHHHHH."
        And I think I may have cursed a little bit, too.
        Because oregano smoke burns.  Really burns.  And also sorta tastes like Chef Boy-Ar-Dee ravioli.
        I caught my bearings, and sucked in another lungful.
        This time, the fire caught some of the scotch tape and seared it.  And the reek of melting plastic filled my lungs.  And, of course the smell of burning ravioli.
        "Don't hog it!" J.'s brother G. said.
        "Ih," I said.  And handed him the doobie.  And then I sat on the grass because my head was spinning and I thought I was going to die.
        And G. took one experimental little toke, grimaced, and said,
        "This is gross.  Fuck this."
        "Yuh," I said.  My lungs felt like they were be pummeled by a jackhammer, and everything smelled like burned cellophane.  "Fuck... this...."  Smoke still coming out my nose and mouth.  And I started to cough.
        Meanwhile, J. was gagging in the bushes.
        "I'll just throw them out," G. said.
        "Uh... huh..." I said.
        "Gllaaaaaaaaaaaaaa," J. said.
        I closed my eyes, but that just made my sinuses hurt more.  So I opened them.  That just made my sinuses hurt even more.  My sinuses were going to hurt for a long, long time.
        G. went and tossed the oregano doobies in someone's garbage can.  J. tossed his cookies.  I just held my head and tried to make the pain go away.
        Oddly enough, this little adventure didn't deter J. and G. from-- later in the year-- smoking pencil shavings, baking cloves, banana peels, and lawn clippings.
        I, for my part, and to my credit, declined....

NAVIGATING CROWDS, LOOKING for someplace good to eat.  Eventually, we begin to recognize protesters, people who've broken away from the festivities and who've come inside to cool off and get a quick, refreshing snack.
        "Y'know," Adrian says.  "I don't know if it's ironic or just pathetic seeing groups of anti-corporate, anti-capitalistic protesters coming into a mall and eating at a food court."

ANYWAY, I LOVED Zonker Harris, Hunter S. Thompson, and underground comics.
        But you get a pretty skewed perspective when these three things are what you base your knowledge of the 1960s on.
        Doonesbury is cool, but Garry Trudeau downplays the ugliness of the time.
        Hunter S. Thompson is pessimistic, to be sure, but when you're a teenager you don't see that.  All you see is some wild journalist running around Las Vegas, gobbling more drugs than humanly possible, and having insane hallucinatory adventures.  The politics of Thompson escapes people when they're young.
        And as far as underground comics are concerned-- for the most part all undergrounds are badly-drawn and badly-written collections of lame poop, boobs, and drug humour.  And what significant politics there are in the undergrounds of the '60s and '70s has for the most part been lost to time.  They violated taboos, sure.  But once they violated those taboos they really didn't offer much else.  For the most part.
        Oh yeah, and I thought Abbie Hoffman was cool, too.  I even had a copy of Steal This Book.
        Ditto Timothy Leary-- a guy any sane individual ought to dismiss as a dangerous lunatic.  And I had some of his books.
        And also there was the "classic" pot book A Child's Garden Of Grass.
        I had anything and everything that seemed, to me, to be "dangerous," or "radical," or "cool."
        So my nostalgia for the '60s was based, for the most part on light satire and drug humour, poorly thought out politics and offensive doggerel-- and the occasional bit of brilliantly scathing writing I was too young to recognize for what it really was (ie. Hunter S. Thompson).
        And I really wanted to go back there.  I really wanted to live in the '60s.  That would've been soooooo cool, I thought.  All that great music and all those cool books and all the fun drugs....
        Never mind that at that time I didn't listen to very much music-- and when I heard music from the '60s most of it just pretty much sounded like plain old rock to me, nothing really all that special.  And of course I wouldn't've done drugs even if they'd been free.  Which they weren't.  And most of the books I loved would have been hard as hell to get in the '60s because a lot of them were either banned then or perpetually on the verge of being banned.
        And, really, I was far too lazy to actually subscribe to any sort of definite politics.  It took more than enough time and energy to pay lip service to ideas from a distance.
        And so, I was like a lot of people.  I was in love with the carefully selected pop culture of a time I'd never experienced firsthand.  And, through this carefully selected pop culture I recreated that time.  And because the carefully selected pop culture was carefully selected because it seemed so snazzy and cool, I just naturally assumed the decade itself was snazzy and cool.
        I was kind of like Don Quixote.  I'd built up a world view based on crap.

"WHAT I DON'T get," I say, "is why hasn't it crossed anyone's minds that in the 30 years since the end of the 1960s maybe all the governments of the free world have figured out a way of humouring protesters.  I mean, they're not stupid, and they've had lots of time.  So maybe they've figured out a way of allowing people to protest without effect, and therefore making the people think they have a say, when it fact the governments will just go ahead and do what they want to do, anyway-- and no amount of protesting will change that fact because the governments can cloud whatever they want to do in the guise of caring, listening to the people, and wanting to make a difference."
        "So the protesters think they're making a difference when in fact they're not?  And meanwhile the masses of people have had their attention diverted away from real issues.  Smoke screens have been created, and buzzes are generated to direct protests away from the real issues, into trivial vague matters."
        "And even if their attention is turned towards real issues, whatever they do to protest these issues can still be defused by the government, somehow.  I mean, they have had 30 years to figure out a way to make protesters think they're making a difference."
        "So the governments are just saying, 'You can say your piece.  You have the floor.  We've listened to you, and now we're gonna go do what we were doing all along anyway, and just make it seem like we're capitulating to your demands.'"
        "Basically, yeah.  But, in general, career protesters believe they're far too intelligent to fall for a smokescreen.  They believe nothing gets past them because they've told themselves they're plugged into the Truth."
        "And so their own egos trap them, let them walk blindly in.  They don't think they can be tricked, so they won't be able to see it when they've been tricked.  If they're even being tricked.  If they're not just being ignored."
        "They may be nostalgic and paranoid, but maybe they're not nostalgic and paranoid enough."
        "Screw this crap," Adrian says.
        And so we go and check out used bookstores.

Next:  Feh....
 

Epilogue 27p.
Epilogue 27n.
INDEX.
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