<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body dir="auto"><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; ">While browsing the internet for poetry from the 60s I came across a virtual treasure trove of everything related to growing up in the 1960s courtesy of the University of Virginia. Among these items are poetry, documents, personal narratives, etc. etc.</div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><br></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; ">Although the poetry strongly appealed to me, I found the personal narratives to be awesome beyond words.</div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><br></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; ">One particular narrative that I read, re-read, and re-re-read is posted below.</div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><br></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; ">To fellow hippies and flower children I encourage you to read . . . and enjoy.</div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "> </div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; ">Courtesy of the University of Virginia's Sixties Project at:</div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><br></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 19px; white-space: nowrap; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.296875); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469); -webkit-text-size-adjust: none; "><a href="http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Stories/Narratives/014story.html">http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Stories/Narratives/014story.html</a></span></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><br></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; ">-------------------------------------------</div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><br></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; ">A Personal Narrative (Brent Green, b. 1949)</div><div><p style="text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">I wandered through a torrid dream before my awakening. I saw a tapestry of images woven with mop-top hair, stringy recording tape and tattered denim. I tasted sloppy cheeseburgers, sipped old black coffee, smoked filterless cigarettes, and slammed down shots of Madeira wine. Fragrances -- burned car oil, wispy female breaths, sandlewood, cherry vodka -- wandered through my nostrils. The songs I nodded to were of silence, wind and JFK.</span></p><p style="text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">I thought about differences and similarities, but mostly differences. I challenged anyone over thirty. I believed fervently in nothing but hopefully in everything. I followed well because I listened passionately to protest songs and shrouded myself in bell-bottom garb just like every other iconoclast.</span></p><p style="text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">I awakened to shadows of doubt. My eyes squinted open full of fuzzy sand, watering with unrest ... darting with distrust.</span></p><p style="text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Demands placed upon me for decisions were hopelessly complex, yet so simple. At once I wanted to fit nicely, to become a fundamental spoke in the great machine of society, to enlist in the American Gleam Team. But I detested sameness. My gut ached to be like the starving artists because I needed to carve a feast of spontaneous combustion.</span></p><p style="text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">My footsteps away from childhood into looming obligations were screaming yawns. I trembled at one horrible nightmare: my teeth tangled with jungle vines; my tongue blackened from innocent death; anger spilling over my lips as drops of blood mixed with sputum; and righteous indignation dripping down my chin onto an empty heart.</span></p><p style="text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Many times I attempted somnambulistic love, a narcotic. It was on the sandbars surrounding slowly passing time that I saw starlight reflect in laggard muddy waters. I flowed down a forever river, absorbed in concerns about connectivity. I drank too much warm beer, lay on my back in sunburned sand and watched the Big Dipper swirl with hot loneliness. Brilliant ripples of ardor radiated around me in those moments when I raced in circles with sexual feelings. So I took captives and kissed parts of young women to learn about the ephemeral addiction of touch. Instead, I discovered the power of eroticism. And in the twilight of my morning mind, among the wet dreams, I lived a hundred lives filled with romance and shuddered many times with anguish at love lost, even when I did not find it.</span></p><p style="text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Trust fell from grace and slapped my face with Rule Number One: There are no safe mating harbors.</span></p><p style="text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Songs wandered from an eight-track stereo across blowing winds of uncertainty to fill me with doubt, exhilaration, bombast, and gall. Guitars were twangy and sweet and swift. Drums punctuated my youthful, lofty ideals. The beat beat me, beat me, beat me.</span></p><p style="text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Shrill harmonies carried me to audiences who loved me, screamed for me. Concert halls full of rapacious fans adored my honesty, my humanity, my brief, clear vision of life. (Good rock n' roll songs always delivered the happy dream: What poignant fantasy to have been one of the melodic messengers of my youth, to have sung the words that were the mood of my generation. So I listened to every song, born from either crystal or needle, and heard with some level of rapture.)</span></p><p style="text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">And little by little, I cleared my callow eyes to understand Rule Number Two: You can survive either in a reality or a dream; it is always your choice.</span></p><p style="text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Friends I found along the way were much needed. They awakened with me. Boys became men as we reached into the wellspring to find visions of a time, together. We sat in stuffy coffee houses, ate peanuts in the shell and laughed about puberty. We burrowed deep into musty bars reeking with stale beer and stole private moments between gregarious chugs. We smoked too much, drank too much, held on too hard. Drunk or not, we drove fast in unimpressive cars; ashtrays were always full of fading fairy tales.</span></p><p style="text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Arguments often lasted late into night when we talked about life differently. Nobody was ever completely right, but neither was anyone completely wrong. We warmed each other to the struggle of growing up. It was enough to make the journey plausible.</span></p><p style="text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Then Rule Number Three tiptoed into consciousness as my groggy head cleared: Nothing is real outside your mind, unless it hurts you or kills you.</span></p><p style="text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">My awakening took me somewhere beyond the senses. I woke to a raging beast and also met a timid wanderer. At first I boasted little knowledge of which was which. The horrific duty animal slithered into my mind and bit me where it hurt. But the poet also bloomed during soft moments of appreciation. In one sense, I lost everything: All the old codes were meaningless; mangy, arcane philosophies grew tiresome. In another thought, I gained primordial wisdom that would nurture me through banal years of rigorous maturity.</span></p><p style="text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">My eyes blinked alert; I stretched wistfully, stood carefully; and I unfolded my mind to a new era, squinting over my shoulder at that bright, spiritual, paisley, unsettling, psychedelic black light of the Nineteen-Sixties.</span></p></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; ">-------------------------------------------<br><br><div>Seeya at the Wingding, Moscow, because . . .</div><div><br></div><div>"Moscow Cares" (the most fun you can have with your pants on)</div><div><a href="http://www.MoscowCares.com">http://www.MoscowCares.com</a></div><div> </div><div><div>Tom Hansen</div><div>Moscow, Idaho</div><div><br></div><div>"<span style="font-size: medium; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469); ">There's room at the top they are telling you still</span><span style="font-size: medium; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469); "> </span></div><span style="font-size: medium; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.296875); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469); ">But first you must learn how to smile as you kill </span><br style="font-size: medium; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.296875); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469); "><span style="font-size: medium; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.296875); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469); ">If you want to be like the folks on the hill."</span></div><div><font size="3"><span style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469);"><br></span></font></div><div><font size="3"><span style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469);">- John Lennon<br></span></font><div> </div></div><div><br></div></div></body></html>