I remember.

I used to get to the beach, just south of the Santa Monica Pier, back in the mid-to-late 60's, early enough that the crowds hadn't arrived, and clean up the beach, walking around picking up trash. I joined a religious cult on that beach in early 1970, and never returned, sadly.

A great failing of mine was getting sucked into a religious way of life. God, in His grace, is gradually bringing me back to a gentler, less critical humanity as a goal.

A child's purer appreciation for the natural world ought not be trampled by attention to premature thoughts of religious duty. However, without having passed through the way of the religious cult, I never could have known the same to be as potentially devastating to the soul.

Of course, it helps to have been high when writing this.

 

the universe is still a magical place. unlike earth, it has yet to be infested by humans.

 

I remember putting the little bag full of WHAT? carbon chips? something? that was supposed to keep the potato chips "fresh" on the floor...and saying whatever magical words I could come up with...walking around it in a circle and pointing at it (I think) and wanting it to do magic. It was just so good to have that possibility, ya know? I remember Mama "catching" me and telling me that was stupid and crazy, I believe she probably put it. Still, what she said didn't matter to me...I simply thought she didn't want me "letting the genie loose", so to say. Hey, I was hard-headed, in my own way....even though I didn't have the vocabulary then, I do now...I was dang determined that there Would Be and Was Magic. lol Life and personal experience, not Mama, determined what I thought then and now. But then, I've always been a little different perhaps.

I remember not understanding math and getting out of it in school because my piano teacher would come and get me and I'd get out of ,math at least once or twice a week. lol I remember learning it/math eventually from my mother, who realized I didn't understand...and she taught me like that...quick, snap snap

I remember being idealistic, and being damned determined to "make a difference".

Lord how things change, and then...

I'm glad my son was taught to remember the happiness of possible magic...even if he loves computers and science now.

I'm thinking he will remember all kinds of things, the older he gets...just as I do. good, possible things

 

anhydrus silica gell. little packets of it still come in bags of dried seaweed.
always idealistic. never ideological.
i neither loved nor hated math, but seriously prefurred tit to the lies they passed off as history.
hated p.e. too. i don't think anyone else in my little four year high school flunked it all for years in a row.
and no i didn't hate it because i flunked it, i flunked it because of the period it robbed my of otherwise being able to take a class in something useful.
drafting, shop and music were my good classes. only really good grades i ever got were in band.
i loved art but never could finish the crap projects in school they insisted on.
reading was ok. i learned how to do that before i started kindergarten. don't think i ever would have learned the way they were teaching it in school though.
as long as i didn't actually have to write anything.

well the military draft rescued me from my parents. they'd started bitching about supporting me, the way most parents eventually do, but never gave me a chance to really figgure out how to support myself. can't say as i ever did get real good at it. i've always been ashaimed of every war in my life time. but i have to give them credit for that. and for the income i'm living off of now.

i remember old people always saying everything was better when the were young. of course we all knew that was rose colored hind sight and mostly still is. things are always getting better, and worse, at the same time. so we change everything without making the average of everything better or worse. when i was little we had mccarthyism and every kind of prejudice, but you could get away with ignoring building codes if people didn't see what you were building and cars didn't have seat belts either. and most places you could ride a train or a bus, even little wide spot in the road kind of places, instead of having to have a car at all. but we didn't have computers or the net yet. so you couldn't share your dreams with someone halfway around the planet.

no cell phones, but there were phone booths everywhere. most of which actually had doors you could close for some measure of privacy.
of course phones could still be tapped and were. but there weren't computers sorting through and storing everything anyone said.

i'm just old enough there's no end to what i can go on about remembering. i guess we're getting to be a bunch of other old farts on here too.
anybody old enough to remember what hippie was REALLY all about is. and it WASN'T drugs. whatever historians, corporate media, or anyone else tries to say about it.

 

I remember seeing the Beatles 1st show on the Ed Sullivan show. I was really a youngster, but I still remember that. How Ed introduced them and then that marvelous music and wonderful harmony that didn't sound "country" (which I was often surrounded by but really couldn't stand, I knew that )...

It was a damn moment to remember...somehow I even realized it back then.

Odd the things one remembers.

 

my mom always watched ed sullivan. "here is the beatles" or something like that. (he always had "a really big shoe tonight. i remember that) i don't remember his exact words, but i remember it being almost a year after they landed before you could actually hear what THEY were singing, instead of all the girls and half the guys screaming every time they opened their mouths to sing.

i remember i was in high school and i'm not sure now, looking back, if that was the year after or the year before or the same year as, when kennidy was shot.
i do remember before them, my favorite songs were the one eyed one horned flying purple people eater, and i think the flip side of the same 45 was the yellow purple polka dot bakini.

i liked the kingston trio and the smother's brothers. the beatles got better when they got rid of the bowl cuts that inspired the name and started letting their hair grow out.
i too couldn't stand so called country, which was more about belligerent urban alcoholics, pretending to be farmers, then anything rural anyway.
when 'country' first emerged from folk, it wasn't like that at all. but by the early fifties it had adopted that phoney twang bull shit.

well my own life was never about the music, even though the only grade i ever got in school better then a c+ was for playing my french horn in band. my own interest was in emerging technologies. so the pilot for star trek was the bigger deal for me, then the beatles. we didn't have personal computers yet, but we still had trains and cheap land.