"Why, I wondered to myself, couldn't everybody just count to three and get better? From my present, chemically aided vantage point, it seemed to me that all these recriminations, resentments, and assorted unhappinesses were nothing that the right combination of drugs wouldn't put right. No doubt I was not the Messiah-like prodigy my parents had taken me for when I came along, but at least I had the right idea about what to do with this miserable mass of familial failure, disappointment, and dysfunction: Get out--out of all of it, in whatever manner and with whatever tools were at hand."
--ptolemy tompkins, paradise fever
I remember this feeling, the sensation of staring down at whatever little and petty problems people were having from the perch of whatever I was high on--alcohol, weed, acid, enlightenment, a relationship, honesty, good sex--and muse how it only was natural that if one wanted to one could get really right with everything and everyone, simply by deciding that was what one was doing. this is one of the aftereffects of the hangover of growing up in the 60s and 70s when it seemed like almost everything was possible if we just determined we wanted something enough--after all, we got anything physical or mercantile we wanted, didn't we? any amount of drugs and sex and strip malls offering anything we dreamed up was all there for the having--why not simply want justice and equality and right relationship enough? as greg brown sings, "I watched my country turn into a coast-to-coast strip mall; if we can do all that in 30 years, why does good change take so long?"
And wouldn't you think that the same wonderful folks who convinced American men that their car's accelerator was connected directly to their gonads could change the culture in other, more enlightened and positive ways. . .
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