What I have to say about hippies

I don't really know much about hippies. I think I met a few once, in Mexico. When you go to exotic places, there are generally a lot of hippies. Except that in that context, they're usually Travelers with the capital T.

I consider myself something of a traveler, but not a hippie. I've seen a handful of continents and have had a handful of cockroaches scurry over me in the night. I've played guitar outside for strangers and showered infrequently. But the hippie Travelers have longer hair than I, and they do not shave. They are either way too tan, so that their faces turn all pruny, or way too pale. They smoke a whole bushel of pot and play in bongo circles on the beach. When Lonely Planet says that a town has "a lively traveler's scene," they are saying it is infested with hippies. I did eat fried grasshoppers once or twice, but I think that's more gross than hippie.

Female hippie Travelers are people you want to stay away from.

On the Zipolite, a famous occasionally nude beach in Mexico, I met this Traveler I knew was a hippie because he had long hair, didn't shave, and smoked a lot of pot. He also happened to be quadriplegic. He liked to romp in the serf with a buddy of his. His friend would stand him up on his stubs, and he would see how long he could weather the buffeting waves. You're not really supposed to swim at the Zipolite, because the rip tides are ferocious. The little limbless hippie was eventually knocked over, like a bowling pin. He would paddle with his nubs to try to keep his head above water, with about as much success as a bowling pin would have. Eventually a crashing wave would throw him, long-haired and short-limbed, onto the sand, where he would lie like a washed-up baby walrus. A hippie walrus.

Symposium #1 of a Several-Part Series: Hippies

I believe one can spell the word one of two ways, namely, “hippie” or “hippy,” though if you go with the latter you risk confusing it with the adjective used to describe someone with a round figure.

I have no personal recollection of the birth of the movement because at that time I was not even an idea. And I have no access through the stories of my parents, since during the 60s my father was a young man striving through school in New Delhi, and my mother was a Catholic school girl who opted for Diana Ross rather than Jefferson Airplane. She said she did a puff of marijuana once and then everything went fuzzy and she swore to never do it again. My father ate marijuana-laced papadam on a regular basis, but his eating was totally legal and never linked in any way to a communal ideology.

My knowledge of the era comes from books, TV, etc. The novelist Robert Stone thought it was a good shift from the “awful triumphalist 1950s, the American Catholic church.” He didn’t use the words “good shift,” but he seemed to mean something like it, that although the time wasn’t perfect, it at least loosened the collar of the country. Stone was my teacher and a merry prankster with Ken Kesey, although I would hesitate to call him my teacher, and would not hesitate to call him a bad teacher, a well-known writer who took the job at an Ivy League college because of the money and who really just wanted to write, not sit around with a bunch of young overachievers baring their souls for him. Looking back now I sort of don’t blame him, but his indifference still puzzles me, because although we might’ve been a little too eager, we still needed him as any student needs someone in his position.

Nonetheless he was a guy with a capacious mind and a gift for the word, and the closest I ever came to that time of itinerant living, smoking weed and taking acid and speed and any other chemical that had been vouched for by someone you knew or didn’t know, then going forth and experiencing your alternate reality perhaps by seeing Coltrane play at the Fillmore East. I think a lot of people lost their minds, and the ones that didn’t always knew that a different – possibly horrible, wonderful, disgusting, sweet – way of experiencing the world was just within their reach, that reality was essentially relative.

But the time was not just a lifestyle or aesthetic. I could probably talk about Hegel’s dialectic here, but I won’t and will just say that, from what I’ve heard and read, behind all of the strange behavior was something like a moral imperative that felt urgent and natural. The assassinations, the war, the racial struggles, the lunar landings, it was a time of condensed big events, and the closest we’ve come since in history in this country would be, well, maybe right now.

But we don’t have hippies today. People today that call themselves hippies are either old washed-up ex-hippies, or if they are young they are hippies gone limp, hippies inspired not by the injustice of their age but by the cool clothes and hairstyles of their forbears. I dated one very briefly once. She had dreadlocks and rarely showered or brushed her teeth. She was not really interested in anything other than getting high and sitting around, but she was good in bed.

Interestingly, the people in the world animated now by the same kinds of feelings of alienation, banded together by their antipathy towards the strong, are not part of this country at all, but rather are the terrorists, the insurgents of the Islamist variety, who are growing in number every day.

What I don’t understand is why there is not more of a countercultural movement in this country today, given the fact that we probably have in power one of the most militant and incompetent administrations ever. Why are we sitting back and relying on opinion polls to do the talking? Elections don’t happen often enough. Why isn’t everyone yelling on the street?

The best I can do to answer that is to quote the famous Yeats poem “The Second Coming”: The best lack all convictions, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity. It’s a generalization, but it is one that rings true, because it is based in the patterns of history, which say that every empire must eventually fall.

Can bees sting a person while he holds his breath?

Many people believe that bees, wasps and other stinging insects cannot sting a person while he holds his breath, clenches his fists tightly or grasps one wrist firmly with the opposite hand. According to the popular notion, the insect is physically unable to penetrate the human skin under such conditions, no matter how hard it may ply its stinger, because the pores are then closed. The United States Bureau of Entomology investigated this question and reported that the belief has no foundation in fact. The stinger of a bee does enter the skin through the pores, and these tiny openings may be slightly affected by breathing, but the difference is not sufficient to interfere with the operation of a bee's stinger. If bees do not sting a person while he holds his breath or clenches his fists it is not because they cannot sting under such conditions, but because the person is then likely to be more quiet. Bees seem to be able to detect the slightest sign of fear in a human being and are stimulated to sting by any quick, nervous movements. A person who remains quiet and who shows no fear is not in great danger of being stung. Bees, however, are repelled by certain body odors, and some persons do not excite and anger bees as others do. It is absurd to suppose that a person tampering with bees would be immune from their stings merely because he held his breath or clenched his fists. Some have tested the popular belief to their sorrow.

-George Stimpson, A Book About A Thousand Things

evolution

S' is proud to announce the launch of their new website, www.sapostrophe.com. It's currently a vacant lot of a webpage, but one with pretty wildflowers sprouting from the cracks in the concrete. Check it out, and drop us a line if you have any expertise in such matters.

We, you see, have little expertise. Yet to compete in the modern rock race one needs graphics, a visual hook, an entire aesthetic. Great songs are a bonus, but alone they can't make a band cool. That's why we have fancy pig logos. Nothing screams "indie!" like a gaping porker with your band name branded on the backside.

They Return to the Villa

MS and BP, after systematically painting the town various shades of red and mahogany, return to their extravagantly decorated living room. MS sits in his black, high-backed, leather, heavily-padded king chair, and BP grabs a stool and snorts a quick line. Meanwhile, MS kicks his feet up on his desk and says in a leisurely tone, "The world could be ours. The world could be ours."

The musicians then phone short, amply muscled sherpa BK, just back from another Everest expedition, and engage in a conference call during which they brainstorm ways to make money to pay for their fledgling album, which without any shadow of a doubt will be hailed as a paragon of artistic genius, a fierce singular statement squelched too long by The Man, being The White Man. Their ideas range from the gutter to the sublime. They are sticks twisting in the wind.

(1) Enroll in Pfizer's phase II pharmaceutical trials. (Pfizer's headquarters is located but a mile from MS and BP's palatial estate). The money could be big, but phase II means you are the first human beings to try a drug formerly tested in dogs. Moreover, likely they would collect urine for a toxological screen to ensure that participants are not junkies.

(2) Sell their goods. But BP, after a long snort that leaves the tip of his nose heavily powdered, remarks that this would mean that they can no longer do their own stuff.

(3) Rob houses.

(4) Rob jewelry stores.

(5) Beg their parents for money.

(6) Make money legitimately, perhaps by bartending or waiting tables or washing dishes in a filthy kitchen.

(7) Look for twenty dollar bills people may have dropped on the street.

After some time, they tire under the weight of their ideas, and decide to hope to run into street bills. (A stiff moral sense is their tragic flaw). BK leaves the country again for another expedition. BP collapses in a pile of crank. And MS bites his nails, and thinks, "Money --> Power --> Women? Or is it, Power --> Money --> Women? Or maybe, Women --> Power --> Money? No, definitely not the last one." He retreats to his bedroom, where he cracks a book. Before he turns out his nightlight, he resolves, ultimately, that that shit don't matter. Though easy to say alone in your room.

Asleep, he dreams of places wide and far.

McClintic Apologizes to Bonnie Cohen for Previous Blog

So sorry, Mrs Cohen. I really don't know what came over me. I'm watching football with this here son of yours and I seem to have consumed too much beer. But your son, that is, Benny Profane, is drinking water, pure natural spring water.

McClintic's Favorite Swear Phrase

Cocksucking Motherfucker

super superlatives

The Hammacher Schlemmer component of the SkyMall catalog contains an impressive quantity of items that out-perform all others in their class. I imagine the crack HS field team spent many days scouring the chaotic markets of Burma, wiping the dripping sweat from their brows and calling mission control on their satellite phones, before they fulfilled their quest to find and sell the best-ever electronic pants presser. How their eyes must have lit up at the sight of it when they finally found that device in some steamy back-alley. "It can be wall-mounted," they exclaimed, exhaustion forgotten. "By God! It includes a pants-stretching mechanism!"

On the other side of the globe, an HS executive and his wife on holiday in Quebec City take a wrong turn on their way back to the Sheraton. They're returning from a long, pleasant evening at a particularly well regarded and well secreted opium den hidden in the converted upper story of an old firehouse in the shadow of the old fort. Their minds fogged by poppies they turn right when they should have gone straight and enter through a low-brick archway into a small courtyard where once French fur traders would gather to drink rum and reminisce. Now it's empty, with a light snow covering the frozen ground, with the exception of a small fake tree. Catatonic as he is, the executive immediately sees that plastic shrub for what it is, and he cries out as he falls to his knees. "What the hell, Jasper," drools his wife, annoyed, but he doesn't look at her. He gazes adoringly at the thick flame and crush resistant branches, the PVC needles, and sighs, "The world's best pre-lit Christmas tree..." Then she sees it, and her annoyance melts into astonishment. "Oh!" she cries, "But it can't be!" "Yes," he says, quaveringly but resolutely. "It does have 135 percent more commercial-grade lights than ordinary trees."

These finds and others, brought back by weary, khaki-clad teams from around the world, slowly accumulate behind the cast-iron gates at the Hammacher Sclemmer ranch (or "The Bunker," as it's affectionately called). The world's largest inflatable play pen (220 square feet!) gathers dust next to the best space-saving TV wall mount and the first digital picture-taking spotting scope. A special vault that opens only when three different vice-presidents simultaneously insert small keys and twist (to the left) contains two special superlative gems, entrusted to the company by a top-secret subcommittee of the United Nations: planet Earth's largest crossword puzzle ever devised and the biggest write-on map mural of all time.

It must be a great honor to store these national treasures, but also a great burden. SkyMall, we salute you.