It Wasn't All Roses......

Bumping this up for any more mixed memories ?

 

There are so many I hardly know where to start. OK, maryjane may wreck your short term memory but it doesn't appear to have degraded my long term recollections. One such that's always the first to come to mind is a 21st birthday picnic down by the ocean. We hired a moving van which crammed about 50.
No seat belts, no windows and illegal transport today. Half way to our surprise destination the munchies hit. We stopped at a small country cafe along the way ( we called em 'Milk Bars' in those days in Oz).The couple serving behind the counter are still probably wondering what happened as soon after entering we all got the stoned, paranoid giggles & fled without buying anything. Then back in the bus our birthday boy produced a stash of acid and things really started getting interesting. I can still see myself lying on the edge of a rock pool, bottle of French bubbly in hand staring at a crab investigating my toes, a gorgeous young bearded male pleasuring another region. Bliss !.
On the other side I have memories of vast police corruption and violence used as a form of political repression. We really did threaten societies stale values and some of us still do. From my perspective things started to go sour when dealers started to carry guns and sell heroin as well as smoke. Then came the forced move to indoor hydroponic maryjane cultivation and all the mutations and chemical manipulations that created a drug far removed in it's effects from what nature intended. That's another subject but anyone wanting to follow it up can google 'gibberellic acid' and 'tetrahydrocannabinolic acid isomers'.
As to drugs like LSD, these days they’re so putridly adulterated I wont go near them.

http://scholar.google.com.au/schola...a=X&ei=idhPUK_gB4ySiQfWx4D4Ag&ved=0CCEQgQMwAA

http://www.google.com.au/search?cli...pw.r_qf.&fp=20562ff9324f1139&biw=1530&bih=925

 

aw the old days sure miss them but I still have my hippy spirit

 

Glastonbury in the UK had a lot of no hippy signs back in the day, but we still found places to eat and drink and buy groceries (the Abbey Cafe was the town's version of the Unicorn Cafe). St Ives did as well I'm told. We were hassled and shouted at generally in the UK as well, but nothing like the abuse and violence that was going on in the USA as we saw on TV. And we didn't have a war going on and a draft. Here we were treated as a rather strange aberration for the most part - almost affectionately as 'bleeeding 'ippies' or just freaks. However, hassled on a daily basis - great days!

 

i don't really try to think about the bad but it was definitely there. i had plenty of experiences where i couldn't get service in a store or restaurant, had things thrown at me from passing cars, had strangers say shitty things to me on the street. we thought we were going to change the world with pharmaceuticals and it might have happened if lsd were given out like communion. as it was, i had too many friends who od'd, who wound up prostituting to pay for a habit or who just literally blew their mind. i'm still mourning janis joplin 43 years later...but, my god, while it was happening it was the best time of my life.

 

I can only imagine...
I'm glad you're here and stuck with your beliefs.

 

Living a hippie life is still life. You still have to function in civilization ... everything from feeding and clothing yourself to getting around, whether by public transportation or your own car, and a thousand other things.

I guess I was fortunate in that I realized that sooner than a lot of people I hung out with, and I left the hippie life for a time and got a "real" job. If there was a "not all roses" moment for me, that was it.

And now the irony is, in many ways I'm probably more radical now, in my 60's, as I was back then, in the 60's. It's different now, though. I have a broader perspective on things. I don't get as upset over small things. I've written about this elsewhere on this site, so no need to rehash it, really.

 

Same here Granny Longerhair, off to work I went. After I retired, I bought a farm, built a log cabin and now I can kick back, watch the world go round and enjoy the peace and quiet out here in the hills of WV... What a long strange trip it has been thus far tho....

 

Sounds wonderful

 

It is, it is. There are a lot of the early "back to the landers" still here in this area, and I am lucky they call me friend. We have get-togethers and pick and grin bluegrass and old tyme music. We help each other out on our farms and just have a good gentle vibe going. Its not perfect, but its our life! :sunny:

 

Cool that you all help each other out like that...

 

That's how it should be

You have your life, they have theirs, but you take care of each other. Sort of a little tribal thing, it sounds like.

 

Tysonswood, yea, we are all getting older so we have too. Most of us never had any children, so we're on our own.
Granny longerhair, pretty much like a disconnected commune of sorts, we call it " The Neighborhood" There are trails and back roads and ridges you can actually walk to most of the farms. Others are via the blacktop only and a bit further. I can walk a mile further up this WV holler and get to a friend who lives alone and his hand built log cabin. He is totally off grid and quite happy about it still. And he is one fine banjer picker....;-)

 

You're giving me ideas, farmout .. wanna sell a corner of your property to an old lady? lol

I live in my little bungalow near a major state university and I love it, but the fact is it's in the middle of a large city and it takes an effort not to let it drive you crazy sometimes.

 

Farmout, you're life sounds good.. many of us had to fit into the mainstream to raise our children, but the inner hippy never disappeared.. my views are way more liberal than my children, but my youngest son (soon to be 32) is definitely made in our mould..

 

I was lucky in that I had a piecework job and neither hair, nor clothing or anything else mattered if I got the jobs done. Therefore , I could make a few grand and quit for months, go sailing or traveling, but go right back to work whenever I wanted. Gave me freedom and bucks too. That was a very good situation in the 60s--70s. memories?? Deserves a book. Mostly roses for me.