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