Peace & Love

As a young man, I sought out the excitement of taking a Trailways bus out of the white-bread suburb where we lived and cruising into New York City. Back then it was in the midst of its most extreme highs and lows. The Port Authority Bus Station was ground zero, filled with acrid diesel fumes and too many bodies, packed tight and rushing all over. On my first visit, a man approached me and asked if I would like to see his horn skills…. on a skin flute.

 Mine.

My friends and I went to Washington Square to score cheap Mexican pot in balsa matchboxes at $5/pop. It was so dry, almost dust really, that a mummified fly went unquestioned. We were happy to get it.

I thought that pot was God’s key to the next step. We had developed the technology to wipe our planet clean of all larger lifeforms, but what of us, I wondered. Have we evolved socially in any semblance of a parallel line?  Back then, I thought weed was the answer.

In what can only be described as a personal crusade I became something of a Johnny Appleseed for spreading the word. Passing joints out the window of my VW Bus on a highway doing 60 with another car of young people pulled too close. I turned on countless “first timers” with a pride equal to that of any Seahorse Mama when it releases a thousand spawn. “I’ve given you life! Go fly, I thought.

Now, as senility grabs an ankle and starts to climb a leg, states fall like dominoes to legal recreational, and I foolishly dare to hope that to some small degree it could help, even if I was only off by about 50 years.