Old Hippies Don't Die, They Just--Wait A Sec...What Do They Do?
Here's the tame beginning of something that just started to get carried away and out-of-hand:
There's something about aged hippies that makes me a little queasy.
When I talk about aged hippies, I'm not talking about my parents or my friends' parents or my parents’ friends. My parents and their ilk are the hippies who "did their thing" back in The Day, and then decided that they actually wanted to get on and earn a living or contribute to society in one form or another. They used to look like Janis Joplin or Eric Clapton (back in his Cream days) but now they're lawyers or teachers or nurses or social workers. They're over 30 now, into their fifties, and they've long since found that people over 30 are just about the only people they can trust these days.
They are the hippies of yore who will smile and nod their heads and say "yeah, I remember seeing The Doors at Winterland." Unconsciously, they’ll continue, “yeah…man, I remember it….” They’ll start to tell you about the show, but then they'll pause for a second. You can tell that they don't mean to pause, but they do. That one second pause lingers, turning into a five second pause, while they're transported back 37 years. When you watch them, you can almost see the memories of marijuana and protest and psychedelic music orbiting their heads like stars orbiting the heads of cartoon characters who've had an Acme anvil dropped on them. The hippy parents are in the Fifth Dimension; they’re Eight Miles High, flashing back to paisly and fringed leather jackets, and headbands and sillyserious talk of The Revoloution.
These are the hippie parents who tried to raise their kids on whole grains and banana chips and raisins, but eventually just gave up because, let's face it, when the kids vote, they vote the Oreo Cookie ticket, across the board. These are the good aged hippies, the ones who survived and stowed the goodness and idealism of their generation in their hearts and carried it with them into the present.
There's something about aged hippies that makes me a little queasy.
When I talk about aged hippies, I'm not talking about my parents or my friends' parents or my parents’ friends. My parents and their ilk are the hippies who "did their thing" back in The Day, and then decided that they actually wanted to get on and earn a living or contribute to society in one form or another. They used to look like Janis Joplin or Eric Clapton (back in his Cream days) but now they're lawyers or teachers or nurses or social workers. They're over 30 now, into their fifties, and they've long since found that people over 30 are just about the only people they can trust these days.
They are the hippies of yore who will smile and nod their heads and say "yeah, I remember seeing The Doors at Winterland." Unconsciously, they’ll continue, “yeah…man, I remember it….” They’ll start to tell you about the show, but then they'll pause for a second. You can tell that they don't mean to pause, but they do. That one second pause lingers, turning into a five second pause, while they're transported back 37 years. When you watch them, you can almost see the memories of marijuana and protest and psychedelic music orbiting their heads like stars orbiting the heads of cartoon characters who've had an Acme anvil dropped on them. The hippy parents are in the Fifth Dimension; they’re Eight Miles High, flashing back to paisly and fringed leather jackets, and headbands and sillyserious talk of The Revoloution.
These are the hippie parents who tried to raise their kids on whole grains and banana chips and raisins, but eventually just gave up because, let's face it, when the kids vote, they vote the Oreo Cookie ticket, across the board. These are the good aged hippies, the ones who survived and stowed the goodness and idealism of their generation in their hearts and carried it with them into the present.
3 Comments:
I like when you write all free and loose, my friend.
Thanks, Scott.
Actually, the "free and loose" part of your comment made me think of this flax cereal that I've been eating lately, and some gross-out response I could've made, but instead I thought about what I've been calling a Boston accent these days: Irritable Vowel Syndrome.
IVS is best illustrated by that phrase that people use to parody the Boston accent: "Park the car in Harvard Yard." I'm not going to try to give it a phonetic spelling, because anything you could write to try and emphasize the pronunciation of this saying wouldn't do the actual spoken version any justice.
Suffice it to say that Click and Clack, the Car Talk brothers have raging cases of IVS.
And if you like free and lose, I'll try to post a poem I'm working on--"An Open Letter to Lawrence Ferlinghetti," which, I promise, will be very free and loose!
Oh, and one more thing. I once posted, long ago, that I was working on a poem, a parody of "Howl" called "Spiel," written from the perspective of a used car salesman. Some witty soul said that they considered every song by the Minutemen to be sort of a bad parody of Ginsberg (who could actually be a bad parody of himself). Was that you? Anyhow, I thought of that today, and it gave me a chuckle.
Old hippies do one of the following:
1. Open used guitar stores and try to remember how cool they used to look playing Jimmy Hendrix. This would be before they had shoulder length hair punctuated by the centred bald spot.
2. Get picked on in conversation by people like my father, who at 73, STILL hates hippies.
3. Get over the whole hippie thing. This is never more apparant as when their grandchildren come to visit, as they always take the opportunity to tell their adult child that they are not strict enough on the kids. My ex-hippie in-laws are always trying to pass along the "family razor strap" for when the kids do things outragous, like chew their food les then 23 times per bite.
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