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It was fun taking the mental trip back to the sixties with you all. You helped me remember a lot of things I'd forgotten and it was an educational and entertaining journey.
I was one of the early births of what is now known as Generation X, raised in a household that, while not specifically "hippie" in concept, certainly drew more than a little from their ideology. My dad and stepmom went "back to the land" to a great extent, buying and maintaining a small ranch with their own garden, canning, and keeping goats, chickens, pigs, and rabbits for food stock and milk. I'm one of the few people I know that had his own horse as a kid.
My dad was a war vet, and exhibited a lot of the signs of PTSD, though none of us really understood that at the time. All I knew was that he was rather volatile, and one NEVER woke him up while standing too close.
My memories of the hippies came from the very early seventies and the young people who hung around our houses in San Jose before my parents packed up and moved to Central Oregon in '73. A LOT of really memorable people--memorable enough that a young kid can still drift back to recall bits and pieces of a long-gone era, an era of idealism, alternate spirituality, music (every group had at least ONE guitar player in it, as I recall), and hope.
I, of course, came of age in the eighties. A totally different era, as everyone knows. While you had the Beatles, The Who, and the Stones, we had Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Metallica. This was, of course, before Metallica went commercial--"sold out," in popular parlance.
We had our own spirit of "Fuck the Man," though it was more militant in some respects, or at least, more savage in appearance. I lived for some years in a "low-income" housing development in a distant suburb of Seattle, on that was, in retrospect, startlingly white. But it was firmly working class, with a smattering of welfare folks, some of whom supplemented their incomes in unconventional ways.
We would party more or less openly, we teenagers, gathering in the woods around the clubhouse (the local community center with its grungy pool and battered old pool tables inside) as dusk fell. It was a BYO affair. If cops showed up, we'd all scattered, making great use of the surrounding woods, trails, and cul-de-sacs to evade them.
We had our criminal elements, of course. The thieves, car prowlers, the dealers in things other than pot or hashish, and general punks looking for a fight wherever they could find one. Being a guy meant having to prove oneself at least a time or two. We weren't peaceniks or pacifists by any measure. We couldn't afford to be.
The local high school had a smoking area, a square area about thirty feet to a side, fenced off with chain link like a dog run. Any time class wasn't in session, you could find people there, smoking cigs and other things. The teachers and administrators avoided it like the plague. What we did there was our own business.
We resisted pep rallys and all that nonsense, at least those of us who were "cool," those of those on the fringes of our little society. We openly mocked the school, flaunted its rules, wore tee-shirts advertising beer, cursed in public, and let our hair grow. We spat in the general directon of Reagan and Reaganomics, and said "Yes" when Nancy said "Just Say No." We distrusted the authorities--ANY authorities--and bent and broke rules with near impugnity.
But for all of that many of us tried to treat individual people with respect. We didn't spray paint the garages and houses of the residents, or make too much noise late at night down the residential streets. Unless we got too drunk. In that case, all bets were off as far as noise went. We didn't trash the cars and those of us who weren't thieves didn't stand by and let it happen if we were in the area. We looked out for the girls, even while trying to get into their pants. We didn't have "gangs," but we did have groups that hung out together.
Mine was even on the fringes of the fringes, since we were Role-Players and D&D heads who spent the daylight hours racing around the woods and staging mock (or not so mock) "training" exercises in martial arts and weapon-craft. We made or bought our own nunchaku and carried them nearly everywhere--though we'd never have used them in a fight. They were strictly for demonstration. We developed demo techniques that I've never seen anywhere else to this day.
We trained ourselves and each other in sense of balance, and the ability to move silently through the woods at night, and held private keggers by the Green River in the semi-wilds of Auburn, unmolested by the law because we were willing to carry the keg half a mile from the main road rather than taking the easy way out.
My friends and I would go to the mall and sit on the big wooden benches and use the benches to pound out the beat to Queen's "We Will Rock You" or suddenly start quoting whole passages of the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."
On my eighteenth birthday I was living in Sacramento, where my dad had moved for work. A week after my birthday I wandered into the midnight movies and discovered the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Quite a revelation for a semi-suburban white kid who'd never met anyone who was openly gay or sexually diverse.
Other than wandering around with my girlfriend at the time, who happened to play Frank at the Sunrise Mall, in full makeup on show nights, I had my own way of "freaking out the straights." I'd stand at the doors of the mall with my long hair, combat boots, black parachute pants, and camo jacket, and open the doors for people with a cheerful "have a nice day!" Looking so wild and being so nice was wonderfully shocking to people who'd grown to expect surly and obnoxious.
When I returned to Washington State, I started "blogging" before there WAS blogging, before the internet was really more than a gleam in a research scientist's eye. By 1986 I was using my friend's Commodore 64 to write long rants about the state of the political situation--how the Reagan administration's love affair with the Military/Industrial complex was betraying the ideology of those who'd fought to establish the EPA and those who opposed military and intelligence operations in support of dictators all across the world.
My friends and I would "accidentally" leave these rants in public places for people to find.
Even then I was starting to work on my own Role-Playing-Game, an obsession that lasted all the way into the late nineties. It was my game that formed the impetus and background for my novels. Since joining DU, I've found that I've more or less come full circle. My rants here recall my early days writing in opposition to the Reagan administration, and my novels reflect all the time spent designing and play-testing my game.
It's been a wild ride. As many people know, I ended up hitch-hiking the length of the west coast, from the Puget Sound to Sacramento or San Francisco, or even points further South--all between the ages of 16 and 20. I celebrated the 20th Anniversary of the Summer of Love in San Francisco and Golden Gate Park--though, I must admit, some of the residents then cynically proclaimed it to be "The Summer of the Panhandler."
We went there to try to recapture some of the magic we'd heard about, or, in some cases, the magic that some of the visitors remembered for themselves. It was gone, of course, but bits and pieces of it still flowed through the space like a stream dried to a mere trickle.
I've led an interesting life, I think. I celebrated my wildness in the strangest ways and worked in so many jobs over the years that I've lost count. All through it, my only rock was my writing. No matter what else I was doing, I wrote. Before my first computer, I filled notebook after notebook, all lost now.
With all the things I've done, and all the risks I've taken, it's sometimes a wonder I sit here today. But I leave with a warning to the youngsters. At 17, 18, or 19, it's easy to believe you're immortal, that the things you do will never come back to haunt you. But your body remembers. Though my bones are dense and strong and hard to break, the softer tissue surrounding them has proved to be far less resilient than I believed. Some of the high impact things I did when I was "immortal for a limited time" have come back with a vengeance to remind me of how damn silly I was.
Be well, DU, and, even more importantly, treat one another well. No matter what minor differences in opinion might try to divide you, remember that you (we) are all allies in a much larger conflict. Stand tall and stand strong. We need one another because WE, and those like us, are the hope of the world.
As my wife might say,
Blessed Be.
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