seanessay.com from Free Fall Friday
No, I’m not nostalgic for the sixties. OK, for some of the fashions, maybe, but mostly it was a big hoax. Someone came across a girl by some park bleachers, perfectly looking like a hippie in a buckskin jacket, headband and so forth, a girl with a clear complexion. Turned out she was waiting for a photographer, for a magazine shoot. Her outfit, then, was a carefully crafted hoax.
There was much uproar, and a “generation gap,” and the “older generation” would never understand. Well OK, despite television being expensive for every second, there was going to be a show allowing the counter culture to explain to America why things should change. This was when Harlan Ellison was doing his television review column. (Collected in The Glass Teat)Now, Ellison was a free thinker himself, and so he was very excited that now, in living rooms all across America, the middle class would be informed.
Not so. The show started with a girl in a miniskirt shouting something silly, then gleefully swinging a mallet at a gong. Then came glee, more glee, and no substance. Ellison was crushed.
Here in Calgary I remember a big newspaper story on the day the Occupy Wall Street movement at the city plaza ended. Microphones raised, pens poised on steno pads, the journalists waited to hear what the Occupation had been about. Nothing. Maybe glee. Apparently people of student age who could, in theory, have documented and footnoted, researched which company owned which and what practises lay at the end of the labyrinth… probably, in reality, couldn’t even define capitalism… I was not crushed, just disgusted. This when there was a huge public library just across the corner from the plaza.
Surprised? Not me, because I remembered when the protestors were here for the G-8 meeting in the Rockies. As I recall they could write letters on their bums, line up and moon people, but… not one could write an essay for the local newspaper to explain their opposition to the G-8. At the end of the conference, middle class Americans here in our city were no more informed about the G-8 than citizens in any other city.
It’s as if responsible adulthood doesn’t start until, say, the age of a graduate student. Such a pity.
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Footnote: I guess I.Q. standards were lowered in the 1960’s to help students stay in school to avoid conscription. I wish I could romanticize students as being smarter than us, and able to research how to work for a better world but—No. And certainly not student activists, who seem to be as unscholarly as the Doonesbury cartoon’s Megaphone Mark …. They say you have to hear something brand new six times before you “get it.” Here (link) is a liberal interviewer, speaking for 18 year olds, who doesn’t get to “six.” He keeps misunderstanding what a professor is trying to tell him. (The title is false clickbait)
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The above prompt was Flower Child. Below is after the prompt Take a Hike.
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Sometimes I think I could go for a hike, but then I never do. I have a reliable car but… part of my situation is guilt about things I could be doing right here in town, and part is that I truly like towns.
Watch me on a road trip, and do I pull off to hike a trail? No, I pull into a wee town to hike the boardwalk and look for the local bookstore, preferably a second hand store with cool treasures.
Watch me go the British Isles. Not the outer Hebrides. Not the fens and pastures green. Not the shrouded hills. No, you will find me under the neon lights. I am not going to spend my hard earned jet air fare to go look at a tree.
I will always go to Trafalgar Square. Not to hike the big square, although I do, but to hike through the National Gallery, and the Portrait Gallery. And the local cool shops. Not to buy kitch from China, but the second hand stuff. I now own a penny from when Orwell wrote 1984, and big Queen Victoria penny from when Wells wrote War of the Worlds, in 1898. OK, for that trip I hiked a little, simply because the narrator did. So I hiked along a canal no longer smothered in Red Weed, and I walked off the tourist map up to the highest point, where the hero could survey the gash in Saint Paul’s cathedral. Where he had looked at a motionless Martian fighting machine. I had promised myself as a boy that I would go to that hill in that park, and now I have. Far more satisfying than looking at some soil-bare highland meadow.
Oh, and I hiked all back and forth through the huge park and common where Wells lived. I was imagining Rupert Bear and his friends doing the playing in the common thing, flying their kites. Besides, I wanted to find the sandpit where the first Martian cylinder landed. And I did. In case you are wondering: Yes, on their crowded little island the English have big parks with big trees. And horse trails. And orange cinder trails for biking. Better than hiking, some cyclists say.
Did I exercise, you ask? Sure, being too cheap to use a taxi or bus—OK, I did one token double decker bus— but the rest of the time I walked. Between the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
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Sean Crawford
City of Camrose,
which in Britain means “valley of roses,”
October
2021
Blog Notes: “It’s a good idea,” says my creative nonfiction teacher, “to write about what ever is keeping you from writing.” As you can see, I have no fiction about Jung and Sue this week. What you can’t see is me going slowly mad, blocked from writing, because, with my book infested place, I have to declutter by tossing books, aka “killing my darlings.” I really must and I really can’t. … I did buy a second home to store my books, post my paintings… but then I rented it to a friend. Can’t win. I’m going mad, mad I say.
So I will do a declutter essay…
Update: The friend, a senior citizen my age, to whom I was renting at cost, moved out to be with a boyfriend; I raised the rent and rented to a colleague at work who had relatives in the building. So there’s still no room for my stuff. Stay tuned.
