From the daily archives:

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Entheogens… steal your face

by Frank Paynter on May 15, 2007

I’m freshly inspired tonight. I’ve found some more of my people.

It’s not always easy living day-by-day the abstinent way, but sad to say back in the day I had more than my fair share. Now I have to pay attention to my health. So I miss some of the best parties. Still, it’s not all about the parties. Mark Morford recently wrote about the sixties counter-culture (via Annie):

Of course, true hippie values mean you’re not really supposed to care about or attach to any of this, you don’t give a damn for the hollow ego stroke of being right all along, for slapping the culture upside the head and saying, See? Do you see? It was never about the long hair and the folk music and Woodstock and taking so much acid you see Jesus and Shiva and Buddha tongue kissing in a hammock on the Dog Star, nimrods.

It was, always and forever, about connectedness. It was about how we are all in this together. It was about resisting the status quo and fighting tyrannical corporate/political power and it was about opening your consciousness and seeing new possibilities of how we can all live with something resembling actual respect for the planet, for alternative cultures, for each other. You know, all that typical hippie crap no one believes in anymore. Right?

On the other hand Paul Krassner once said, “If you can remember the sixties, you weren’t there.” Or maybe that was some other guy….

And there was Bruce at the River invoking the Europe ‘72 Grateful Dead album, and Annie with a clip of “He’s Gone” from Copenhagen, and there’s Pig Pen on stage, and I understand one of my favorite writers will be in Copenhagen soon, talking perhaps on “mortality and a sense of humor,” and of course Henry died this week.

Henry was no hippie. Henry was a classical scholar and a fine bureaucrat. But I’m sure he would have appreciated the synchronicity I’m experiencing this evening, and my sense that changes are afoot and there are better times ahead.

Meantime, why not click on the picture of God’s Rottweiler over there in the sidebar and see how he stepped on his own dick this week trying to justify five hundred years of genocidal oppression of indigenous peoples in the western hemisphere. Henry, that link’s for you.

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Mothers

by Frank Paynter on May 15, 2007

Mine died seven years ago.   She suffered a bout of leukemia, went through a debilitating round of chemotherapy, found a year or so of remission, and then was hospitalized for a few weeks before she passed away.  She wasn’t going to go through the chemotherapy twice.  She was , I think, ready to go.  She mostly had been able to care for herself until that final hospitalization, and my dad was strong and held things together around the house for the two of them.

This mothers day I thought of Cyndy and Elaine.  Their moms are alive but they present a terrible burden.   I don’t know what to say about that.  I hope when I go that I don’t linger.

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Silly little story

May 15, 2007

I have a tale of youthful indiscretion posted today at Ronni Bennett’s Elder Storytelling Place.  It’s called “The Cover-Up.”
                 

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