Ithaca Sucks 60's PageLet's face it, fellow babyboomers. You're getting old! You're on 5 different medications, chugging down Centrum Silver, being harrassed with constant junk mail from AARP, retirementvillages.com, funeral homes; your My Pictures file is filled with baby pictures of the grandkids, your garage or attic is a vertitable archaeological dig,filled with ten layers of junk. You check your IRA accounts daily, asking yourself, will it be enough? A latte will cost $15 by the time you reach 75. You won't be able to visit your kids unless they live next door because of the friggin' cost of oil. You've lived through the Kennedy administration - Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II. Oh, Ez forgot Eisenhower, not that he matters. America, thanks to tv and the internet, is beyond the point where someone who looks like IKE could
ever get elected. We have become a youth-oriented society, if you hadn't noticed.
You reap what you sow, suckers!
What happens when people get old? They wax nostalgic. Oh, the good ole' days when I was dropping 15 tabs of acid a day, changing the world with my buddies and thousands of others who had bussed into town to rock the boat, flopping around the mud at Woodstock, all those other concert venues where they never had a decent shitter, getting laid regularly or consistently not getting laid, staying up all night on pills and cheap vin rouge, living in barely habitable apartments where the roaches were unionized, ridiculing the old, yeah, those old farts. Hell, I'm not going to live past 30. Surprise!
That's your brain at 60. Actually, it's the brain of someone who didn't do a fraction of the acid, mescaline, hashish etc that you did.
Your brain looks an avocado left in the trunk space of a Volkwagon bus for five years. See all the clouding that looks like a Gatorade spill? Well, dudes, that is the white matter of your brain turning to mush. Your synapses just aren't as perky as they used to be. They want to sip some warm milk and go to bed. They don't want to read Hegel and Schlegel. Learn Portuguese. Or,alternately, your neurons want to cuddle up and linger over those fuzzy images (while they last) of a golden era when revolution was in the air, the Beatles were constantly playing on the radio, when every surface was painted with glorious color and peace symbols, before the world wide web and pop up windows, when someone with as little talent as Britney Spears couldn't even a job as a backstage groupie at an orgy, when things were real!
Up at Cornell, people teach courses on the 60's. People have been writing books about the 60's since the 60's, trying to explain the 60's. As if the 60's needed any explanation. A few people even try to relive the 60's but they don't have much success. Except in Ithaca, New York. Ithaca has been described as a pleasant stop along a time warp. There's a little guy shooting around Ithaca in a motorized wheel chair, oxygen tank strapped to the carriage, who looks like the spitting image of Jerry Garcia, give or take a few pounds. Frizzed out hair, tie-dyed shirt, beads, porkpie hat. He calls himself Silent Thunder. Ithaca is like that, the 60's die hard. Guys still get away with calling themselves shit like that, Seven Song, Sparrow, (Ananda for chicks.) There are two head shops in Ithaca. There's a woman walking around who looks like she might be Jack Kerouac's widow. She has that distant look of someone who has been trapped in a fog bank for the last 40 years. Who knows, maybe she runs through Stewart Park late at night, calling, Jack, Jack, come back.
There are people in Ithaca who think John Lennon is still alive and shacked up with Yoko in the Dakota. They haven't picked up a newspaper in 40 years. Reading the Ithaca Journal or Ithaca Times doesn't technically qualify as reading a newspaper. At the dentist's office, they are more likely to pick up a copy of Popular Mechanics or Inside Sesame Street than Newsweek or Time. They don't know that the 60's are over. That the music died. They still believe in a guitar heaven. They float their dead guitars on rafts in Cayuga Lake in some ritualistic form of instrument sati. These are the kinds of people that sent their kids to school with Peter Paul and Mary lunchboxes. That sang Puff the Magic Dragon in the shower well into their 50's.This place is 60's hell. Dante didn't know, died too soon. Or, he would have added another circle.
Hey, need costumes and party supplies for your next 60's bash, check out this cool website: www.c-boom.com/ big0_party_60s.htm
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 6:57 AM
