We are stardust, we are golden

Archive: Listening

Song and celebration from my youth. This entry is a failure I think but I never throw anything away.

With dream comfort memory to spare,
and in my mind I still need a place to go,
All my changes were there

Gordon kindly cut me a copy of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's Déjà Vu

The album is pleasing vocal harmony from 1970, so it is imbued with the sentiments of the 60s (a state of mind that didn't start with the 60s and lived on faintly in the 70s). I remember listening to it repeatedly many, many years ago when I was visiting Victor.

I feel like letting my freak flag fly

Almost Cut My Hair always caught my attention. Looking back I can't say why. When a fussy old lady complained to the Holiday Inn management I did cut my hair (and got fired anyway). How fond of that long, curly mess that caused Gordon to call me a broccoli head?

Not sure how much I let it grow back out again. Eventually I settle for a length that pretty young men seemed to like best. What an early or mid 70s movie with a guy wearing medium length dishwater blond hair, a moustache, jeans, looking a bit scruffy and you have something akin to Richard at twenty.

As must seem almost wearingly clear to folks who've been reading this recently Victor and John Belue's arrival in Savannah liberated my poor young self. In a flash my self-imprisoned self flashed free and joined the zeitgeist.

Thinking back to the pink, flowery "hippie" shirt I bought with fancy cuffs and wood buttons I sometimes wonder how much I became a part of my (or the just passed) generation.

Someone once cruelly said to me (after they'd watched The Day the Earth Stood Still* with me) cynics are always idealists. Cruel because I did not enjoy hearing it but I couldn't necessarily say that it wasn't true of me.

My image of myself is free 'politics' to use a damnable word. The self I remember used to hope for a nuclear war so he could watch a worthless race perish. But the worth of mankind couldn't have been judged without a standard, an ideal condition it should strive towards.

Really there was a soft-spoken boy who was invariably polite. I remember pissing off Victor when I said to a mall clerk "Pardon me, miss, do you have the time?" Victor thought it prissy or pompous. Seemed normal to me maybe it was my Savannah upbrining.

When I left home it was awhile before I could not five winos money.

I remember breaking into tears at another's inability to control their behavior; having to say go away because there was no helping them.

But I wander into sentimentality. Listening to Four Dead In Ohio I'd thrill to:

Soldiers are cutting us down. Should have been done long ago.

That was when National Guardsmen killed four protesting students at Kent State. (Do you really think you have it that hard with Bush II?) Without the slightest hope that humankind would ever improve itself my spine tingled to hear:

We can change the world, rearrange the world.

Not that I didn't know it was sheerest buncombe.

And how could I not assent to the sanity of:

Rules and regulations who needs them?
Throw them out the door

I'm over thirty now and want all sorts of pests boxed up by whatever rules and regulations will keep them from bothering me.

Maybe I was just sucked into the spirit of the age. Or I was just a young sap. Famously the generation that followed mine (the last of the boomers to use journalist's cant) was hungrier for money and shiny success.

Ah well, we are just billion year carbon and as near as I can tell we're still caught in the Devil's bargain.

*My favorite movie.