Sick of fear and loathing all around us

Hi Joe,

Reading your essay "Ghosts of Tim Leary and Hunter Thompson" and the associated issues of freedom vs. authority got me on my own stroll down the memory lane from "back in the day." It's cool that you got to spend time with them in person.

I was one of the many who was influenced by them from a distance. Reading your essay made me want to dig into some pot that I think is still stashed in the back of my freezer to smoke a bowl and ponder the old days -- lol -- I think I might have been that "forty foot vagina," figuratively speaking.

I remember hitchhiking from my backwater town of Muskegon, Michigan to Ann Arbor to see Hunter Thompson speak. Thompson talked like a man with a mouthful of mud, and I don't think he made eye contact at all with the audience, except to look totally appalled as the fans tossed joints on the stage and rolled a bottle of Wild Turkey his way across the floor. I remember there was a person dressed in a gorilla suit and Thompson looked as if he would bolt out of there any minute. But we loved him anyway, because of his insightful and outrageous political rants and his book, "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail," which to this day, is the best commentary on Nixon and the whole twisted times.

Hitchhiking was so fun then. I got to listen to Ram Dass and Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg taught us to chant "ohm niva Shiva" and played a little hand-held finger organ from India. Heady stuff for a girl from the midwest raised in the land of tulips and Dutch Reformed hypocrits.

We were of like mind in those days due to the ingestion of Orange Sunshine and Purple Haze and even liquid Sandoz acid that immobilized the mental lockdown that I guess is the brain's job so that we could perceive the wondrous truth behind the illusion of the "normal" world. I can still vividly recall watching music pour out of my record player in a rainbow of colors, the dance of the paisley prints on my comforter, the movement of the patterns of wood grain or linoleum tiles as everything melted and swirled into everything else. You could actually see the connection to everything, and you could sense the divinity, the connection, the intelligence and the beauty of it all. The pattern in an Oriental rug was like a roadmap to a mental place that actually existed. Like a Bible that had no need of words.

That seems to be what is missing in the frantic and futile efforts of today's Bible thumpers to experience God through the words of their concordias and scriptures. Sad, really. Spirit seems sort of like sex to me. You can read about an orgasm, but unless you have one, you just don't get it.

As for the New Agers, now that the dope is gone and the discipline of meditation is not emphasized, they are left with catalogues to leaf through, and commercials to watch to gain shallow materialist notions of wealth that don't even come close to what abundance of consciousness is about.

It's really a shame that we don't have rituals with the proper earth medicines to turn the young people on to their connection to spirit and to the earth and to the cosmos. I imagine that it's what was going on in those caves with the cave paintings. Once or twice would probably do it for a lifetime, if it was done right. I know it did it for me.

I am so sick of the fear and loathing all around us. Thompson had it right when he identified the "Generation of Swine." Let's hope they are on their way out. With any luck at all, this whole contrived mess will collapse, and we will again have the freedom of thought that will allow the wisdom of the universe to speak to us again.

Peace and Love to you, My Brother.

Freeacre