In a world that’s out of control, isn’t it nice to know that there are still some controlled substances? But geez, they’re so expensive and hard to get a hold of. However, every day that passes only serves to make me more aware of how much I need them and how invaluable they are regardless of the price.
What I want to know is what happened to all those happy-go-lucky-casual-friends of the Nam era? When your eccentricities were at least accepted with a “far-out-man”—if not reveled in like some new Mexican recipe. Then going to college meant something. At the very least, it meant that you weren’t into the war scene, but more than that, it meant you were searching for life. Students, teachers, whatever, smacking their intellects together, beating out a reason for existence., lighting up a little relaxation to calm those cosmic intellects just long enough to envision a harmonious earth. That was a college student!
And those intellects jived and grooved and had a beat a sound. They moved on English dudes that sang American and garage bands, and San Francisco music when it was played on twisted organs, folk guitars with harmonica thrown in, and electric strings with a sound that could pierce holes in your brain. It was a sound with a theme, and themes with a passion, even the worked-over love song was run through with an honest passion and rawness which shocked because it was true.
These weren’t just new brains out for a test drive with the radio turned up loud, joy-riding on the wave of a little dope. Rather these were minds sucking up knowledge and experience as fast as they could create it. They had something to do. They had a unified and self-proclaimed mission. In their laps was the knowledge of all that was wrong in the world, and a unified desire to change it.
But then some of their more prominent eccentrics got too near the edge and proved their own mortality. And I suppose this scared the rest, or they woke up one morning and saw that they were old. Whatever the case, little by little they all disappeared. The only thing it seems their gulping minds neglected to see was that age and mortality don’t matter. Instead of fading slowly away or renouncing themselves as foolhardy, the notion of their own mortality should’ve juiced them up to progress even faster, and to train the new generation to care about their world, and to seek and develop what they needed to change it. They could’ve done so much. They could’ve taught us how to heal ourselves, and thereby heal the world. But instead, they slithered into obscurity as if purging themselves for being too accepting of the eccentricities, and pushed us right back into our conservative corset.
So here I am stuck in 1986. Thrashing out in six different ways at once, trying to create anything that will make a difference. Trying to be at once accepting and as eccentric as possible, trying to spark something that now seems like a fairy-tale. I’m stuck in the 1986 world, where every college student is a fledgling capitalist, fed on synth-pop music written by a computer. A world where people look at my “Free South Africa” button and ask, “Why?”
I’m a poor artist stuck in a world out of control where thank God, (if there is one) there are still some controlled substances, but damn, they’re expensive and hard as hell to get a hold of.