“First things first, I always say,” said Fred, as he took the utensil firmly, but tenderly in hand. “I know I know what I’m doing. It’s just that I haven’t bothered to recently review my reasons for doing it.”

Nevertheless, he gave the fingerpick a flip and launched into a torpid rendition of Melancholy Baby. What color! What luminescent balls! The story of six thousand generations locked tightly in the circular tones of a fifth octave Sousa march! It like to knock your socks off.

These things; these things and more occurred to Fred, through the medium of Esmerelda as she shed her desires and unfolded on the floor by the blazing hearth. “What now should I make him do?” she asked herself. And this was a significant change indeed, for before, she had been making him do as she pleased. But now, she only thought to manipulate him as she ought.

It wasn’t long before the answer occurred to her. She would make him paint a picture. She would bring him structures. She would bring him a fine muslin and a crystal of blue glass. She would bring him yellow ochre and lime juice. He would paint. He would realize her finest idealism. He would grow in his own eyes and in the eyes of the public. He would get rich.

That was the plan. Then could come the small house in Montgomery County, the backwoods pavilion where she could hold her divine parties. Esmerelda and the Architects of the New Society would blossom into a true historical entity. But Fred. What of Fred? Poor, dear Fred: who only knew the driving passion and the utter loneliness of his worship. What comfort would there be for him? Esmerelda could not bother about that now. That would come with time. All the difficult answers would surely come with time. You know?

He sat there like a junkie, pulling slivers of wood from the picnic table with the teeth of his car keys. Every minute that ticked off some invisible clock seemed to him like another crack from the lion tamer’s whip. He rubbed his eyes and tried to block the calliope music from sending him off the deep end.

He tried to list the reasons why he hated her. How many promises had been broken? How many trusts stubbed like awkward toes? How many nights left cold and outside while she pandered to the crowds?

But who would ever understand him the way that she did? Who but the Bearded Lady could love the Stunted Pinhead?

So he sat there waiting for her to return. But would she?

– John Hooker

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.