Decades ago, I shared a love of light as one part of a gypsy commune. Carrying a vision of self from self to self into society, we followed the vision of the Most Holy Moly Mostly Unlikely, until he got lost in his name.
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A balanced person is true to his or her nature. A guru persuades the vulnerable to be what’s good for him. The living discard their possessions and ambitions, while spirits in the Dead await results.
Not me, in part because I’d nothing to lose. I’d endured power trips in martial arts. We trained as warriors, but were disciplined like soldiers. My antipathy to authority wasn’t news. Cults are Religions. Words are interchangeable. Talk is cheap. So why are the overly holy so well paid!
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We crisscrossed the continent along power grid lines. Guided by a corner ripped off a mystery map, we sought the true pattern that numerically ascertained an uncertain grail. In a perpetual a&a fog, with high beams alight, we’d peer through driving rain at obscure street signs. And on bright days we’d stare into oily rainbows floating on sun-drenched parking lot scum.
We travelled in convoys in cranky, oft ticketed graffiti adorned vans with shocking auto osteoporosis. With gardens on roofs concealing the buds, and carrot patches on trailers, we made our way from nowhere to nowhere in an era when gas was affordable.
Into our public persona, we appeared as green elves, phosphorescent gnomes, or long hair bag beings sporting ponytails and buns. Children of our age in a circus age, we acted out a creative anachronism as anarchists on an anti-Establishment express.
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(Chain toking grass junkies sit in a circle, sharing a purpose to oblivion.)
The past shadows the present, then not. Has anything change? Systems still create crimes to profit from crime. Laws are designed with bribery in mind. Traffic cops are slot machines on a quota. Lingering malingering archetypes die without friends.
Vice is rife when punishment is directed at souls who play. Where freedom is a commitment to uncorrupted truths. And jails are for free spirits who are right with their souls.
Being insightfully stoned wasn’t deadly, as it is now. We’d act out as anyone else as we explored the edges of death. I’d find answers beyond the obvious from my spirit teachers in the Dead. Years later, the monk felt something similar, as an indistinct identity in a monastery.
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Anecdotal old wives’ tales had rehabilitated into New Age superstitions cloaked in quantum nonsense. Pastoral mindsets about the climate continued to mix and mash with contemporary communalism. The line dividing the meta and physical was as always thin.
Differences of opinion were based on personal biases, not stereotyped prejudices. Ignorance was seen as willful, or a result of stoned stupidity.
Either way, we held biases to be honest, as opposed to correct. Typecast by real world experiences, a person was left feeling safe or betrayed. But feelings, not results, were germane.
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Like the radical progressive evangelicals of today, life was a presence, and the astral a current that was shocking to established mores. Free love was a replication of the cross pollination found throughout Nature. Inevitably, every adult was a child’s nurturing parent. When they grew out of their clothes, we exchanged the kids.
When life is tedious, folks have them. It’s a pleasant surprise to discover the excitement they provide.
Imagine the social effects if they aren’t taught to be terrified of altered states that are happy states. And don’t overdose on drugs they learned nothing about, because addictions arise from needs denied.
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With change comes growth in maturity. All got to experienced the intense physical wear of parenthood. And the soft, subtle sweetness of laughter and giggles. That happens all the time when free time goes on all the time. Where life isn’t micro-managed by economists skilled in ivory tower arts of bullshit, charts, and communication resolutions.
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With the buffoon, The Incredible Bladder, prodding DogSlobberDodger with a liberated tank of pressurized air, (farting like some kind of bagpipe), we organized paraplegic hootenannies, guillotine balloon block parties, fume Fun Festivals, and scandalous birthday party food fights. At halloween, Buddhists dressed like Dracula. Zombies dolled up as corpses of the prior body, visiting at the reincarnation christening.
Incorrigible to an extreme, invented music, oft obscene and insulting, meant a third of an impressed guest audience split by the first set. But those who stayed had a pretty good time. And were rewarded with farce.
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At one most Politically Correct Olympia we competed to put the healthiest booty in the kids’ Halloween bags. Walnuts, dates, figs, and dried bananas; all organic, as a matter of course. At the pagan solstice feast, on the whistle many hands ripped apart a turkey or two, finger spooned the stuffing, sucked cranberries up through straws, padded Brussels sprouts, ping-pong style, with greasy palms.
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There’s no need for punctuality when altered states are normal states. Hallucinating our way around on roadworthy rural roads was a sign of how punctual we weren’t.
We lived today copiously, as if tomorrow we’d die. And tomorrow as if happy to have survived yesterday intact. <Assumes you didn’t party through the night, and sleep away the day.> Um. Then it was our dreams we lived in and out of while the rest of the world worked.
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Without sponsors, an enterprising grubbie sold tickets to his annual bath and the washing of his clothes. With him in them. Charged a double bill for the double bill. (Bladder!)
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Personal development isn’t possible when mediocrity is elevated to adoration of a person with a larger than life charismatic talent. Not that most didn’t enter the New Age in a big way. Undersized under-appreciated pseudo-religious typecast cults thrive with a rare inflow of bright individuals who see the errors in conventional Religions.
They compensated for the outflows of those born into those Cults, who with a compelling need to cop easier ways, re-join established Religious sects that attest to their superiority through quantity, not quality. And guarantee their preeminence by cowing or annihilating the rare meat who won’t be owned!
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It ended when we met leering bigots, and bigotry, head on. I spent the morning with a gang of shopping mall grannies having the time of what remained of their lives, racing souped-up motorized walkers. The more daring darlings coasted behind on rollerblades strapped to leg braces. The crippled veterans cheered them on as they rolled walnuts around in their boots to massage their feet.
They christened their club: “Delirium!”
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The hat dropped during a wild debate outside the Bawdy Body Shoppe with an inbred family of ex-con cowboys hanging out around the local video store, viewing the new pornographic releases.
The pool hall manager was running a shampoo carpet cleaner over the tables. We agreed to meet at Rest Area, at the edge of town. More beer reappeared like a stale premonition. Shit happened with the appearance of the wrath of the prostitute, who went from serial sexual exhibitionism and giggles to a viral scorn of a life of umpteen times with an identical script. Which was much like the farting around lives of those angry inbred Republican voting turds exhausting their systems.
The mother of all trucker bikers out of Hog Wash said he ate hippies for lunch. I said I was an asshole. He said he ate assholes for lunch. Tongues sucked into the back of faces. Time off became time out as he wiped out.
Can a spirit be diseased by the form’s hate? The more violent bigots probably died of their bile, and came back as glowworms, nine/eleven, on parallel vertical airport runways in Manhattan. The rest carried on to smashed glass and nail-stomping parties.
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What did it take for a person to join a commune like ours? One guy’s brother was a Peace Corp volunteer who tried to introduce American pot pie to a cannibal tribe. He mistook cannibal for cannabis. They mistook American for pie.
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Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; the glue holding us together evaporated. The gravity of magnetism released us from our auras.
Onefork Shy and Nothanks Tuyu, she five foot nothing and he six feet much, opened a school to teach uptight folks how to be stoned.
No Chit, the repetitive journalist, commercially astute, pasted commentary on poles and placards, called himself a walled street journal, sat with his hat on his lap.
No Name rented himself out as a dial a hippy. Never paid rent. Circulated between houses, clearing refrigerators of leftovers.
Seshe Wasn’tme, and her adopted sister Yeshe Khan, insecure progeny of a Tibetan-Mongol mixed up marriage, drove a van for a security company. They never left the cab.
Half Black Jaw changed his sex. Rented himself out as a stud. Didn’t do the research.
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Letting go in my indelicate way, with the last gasp of my gas guzzler I drove the wreck into the white trash dumpster. Recycled trash in back was bagged in black. Launched that into the metal recycling bin. Then, as now, now and then ego makes a statement on how to create a diversion as a distraction, and safely split from a hostile town.
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With an open blister on my foot from the vehicular escapade, and me on crutches, the rest who were left signed my arms. Boxing Day, I opened a used toy box store beside the unlicensed “Som Gon Bad” migratory food booth. Harvested an inventory from recycling bins that lasted months. Got a lot done, compared to nothing. Did a few gigs playing body padding and a metronome with “The Undertones.” A band that didn’t leave a mark.
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The rest of the restless moved on to fight the good fight. The hard core paranoiacs wandered lost in their personal Gobi’s. I ran into Not ThoseSocks in another chapter in time. He had lost his mind in a laundromat. Became a blue collar ambulance driver for working class stiffs. Buries the fat ones at the mortuary in wine or beer barrel caskets. Or rotgut, on demand.
