|
|
|
Back To Blog Entries
| I Give Up-Title?
by yougotgame at 3/31/2008 11:07:38 PM
A "Child ot the Sixties," but not a "hippy;" didn't know any either, until I spent some time in Berkeley, CA (same time Charlie Manson was workin; it)' Kids that lined the streets were mostly "wanna bes," but they wore "flowers in their hair,” used words like "groovy, fab, gear." Head Shops selling bongs, monstrous hookahs., papers, incense, lava lamps, black lights, posters, all the hippy paraphernalia that we have come to imitate so poorly today. Smell of dope was everywhere, people nodding out here and there, people selling; tooled leather belts, vests, tie-died clothing, all that hippie paraphernalia that is now part of main stream America. One dude, dressed like a “spaceman” mostly tin foil),” stopped me and asked if I would “like to purchase some real estate on the moon.” He had maps, official looking certificates and contracts, and such. I waved him off (that’s what you do in the city, you learn to “wave people off like they are impediments impeding your progress to none where). Never like the city, don’t care for them now, and I surely will never live in one. Must be a Sixties thing.
Lot of skinheads (H. Krishna’s, mostly in airports, selling plastic poppies for a buck, dressed in saffron robes, dancin and flitin about. Stopped one of them once and asked him, " How old are you, man?" (Used "man" a lot back in the day, Real Sixties people still often do). Dude was sixteen. "Man, you don't know a Muslim from a Hindu from a Jew from Agnostic, from Christian, from a ….." He looked at me like I was a lost soul who just didn't "get it" and flitted away in his see-through saffron.
Hitched hiked, with brother Dougie, nearly three thousand miles through New England, Nova Scotia, and other parts of Canada before I joined the Submarine Service with brother Dougie. Wore embroidered Levis (Black volcanoes with colors shooting into the air. I did the needlework, also made sandals, belts and leather backpacks); suede boots that traveled half way up my calf and were fringed on the top. Wore the requisite bandana, had very long, curly, sun-baked hair that nearly reached the top of the vest I wore. Dougie was in the same “uniform of the day,” but his deep brown, wavy hair traveled down over his shoulders and down his back a bit.
My father, a Submariner and Commander, swore both of us into the Navy. Brother Dougie and I were dressed in the same clothing.
After the first day at Camp Barry (boot camp in Chicago), Doug suddenly started laughing and then calmly announced from the bunk above me that he was leaving. An so he was until I convinced him it would ruin his life. He stayed, for six more years, spending most of his time underwater. I stayed five more years a left as a conscientious objector in the last year of my enlistment. Wasn’t easy. Another story for another time.
I was a at major in high school and a football “star.” That’s all I did, just barely made it out. Blew the graduation Ceremony practices and headed for Cape Cod, the Dunes, and P-town. What a time it was, a time of ….
|
|
|
|
|
 |