Memoirs of a Flower Child - George S Geisinger (the best books to read txt) 📗

visit; while visiting is nearly a lost art, by this late date. It's something lost or stolen or destroyed, like a death which the TV is guilty of perpetrating. Television is the cold blooded murderer of the art of the visit between people, of the art of the conversation, a polite way of spending comfortable hours with another person. One can delight in another person by simply keeping them company. It's like reading, except fewer people than ever before can recall how to do it now. It's become almost impossible to find a person to engage in pleasant conversation, even in the retirement home where they find themselves, two younger old people. Even their elders seem to have forgotten how to visit, or have lost their hearing – or have even lost their minds to forgetfulness altogether.
But there they sit, out of doors so she can smoke, like the trendy law demands. She smokes, and he remembers how he used to, from his life-long habit, finally given up for fear of his mortality. His druthers would be different if he were 40, but at 60 he's just as delighted to sit there and talk, without cigarette or coffee, conversing about what they mutually agree to call “world peace,” with a mutual air of amusement at the futility of the expression. It's a pleasant afternoon, as she has a smoke now and then, and he babbles on about his inexhaustible ideas on everything and nothing, like this absurd writing.
It takes a reader to be a writer, and it takes both, now and then, to make up an artist, a conversationalist, a visitor.
If these two younger old people can remember how to visit while she smokes and he fills the air with thoughts, maybe the rains will hold off long enough for them to enjoy themselves over something ever so polite and decent as just being people together.
A man and a woman have found something to enjoy about each other, all the same from the beginning of time.

Flower Child
Chapter 15

In the fall of 1969 I went 500 miles south to a university, two states of the union away from home, help or security, to study music education, and by the next fall, a year later, I totally bought into the idea that I would grow my hair, smoke pot, and drop acid, because Richard Nixon was crazy, and the Vietnam War was way too horribly graphic on the evening news every evening, and because the United States of America is not a free country, it's a capitalist country, selling a lot of fairy tales about liberty and justice for all, while killing coeds on our own college campuses, who didn't like the war in Southeast Asia, from sea to shining sea.
Though I never read anything by Timothy Leary, did not go to Haight-Asbury, Woodstock or Vietnam, I was a product of all of those things in the midst of that day and time. I tuned in, turned on, and dropped out. I cast my fate to the wind, and starved on the streets of anyplace I happened to be for an entire decade, by the time my family gave up on me, over my drug addiction, long after my education had become an impossibility, and I wasted the entire decade of my 20's, of the very flower of my own youth itself, for the sake of being a Child of the Flowers, whatever that is.
I have read Richard Alpert, or Ram Das, or whatever he calls himself now, and I read Carlos Castaneda, too. Be Here Now didn't make too much sense to me at all, but I read a lot of the Carlos Castaneda collection in the 70's, and it helped me understand my tripping quite a bit better while I was still doing it. I did see some strange creature on the mountainside when I was tripping the first time, and I guess it was the peyote god, Mescalito, but I don't know how useful that knowledge or experience was, or is in the long run. I enjoyed the Castaneda books when I read them, and wish I still had them to read again, if I ever wanted to. I don't think they're any great literature or anything, but they were amusing books, like Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, was amusing, too. Douglas Adams was another wild and crazy guy, like those other two, but I'm not certain I can adopt any of those guys' techniques in writing anything I've got to say. They wrote their way, I write mine.

Though I can remember countless, wonderful, lovely young ladies I might have continued relationships with over the course of my lifetime, I have lived to the ripe old age of officially a Senior Citizen all alone and totally without a lifetime companion, not even so much as a dog or cat of my own, and can refer to no one to share my personal life and times with, whomsoever that I know I can count on when the lights go out and I get into bed. I get into bed alone, and that's all there is to it. It's OK, too.
The price I've paid in anguish and loneliness, frequently out of my mind with psychosis, mania or depression, locked away to shelter myself from destruction for so much of my lifetime, while I was successful at doing just that very thing in so many multiples of different ways, effecting my ability to think, act, and reason so desperately, I wonder at the idea that I am alive at all by this time, much less living in the lap of luxury in such a nice place, in my advancing years.
I cannot figure how God ever decided to perpetuate my existence, while I've worked so hard at doing away with it, in cooperation with so many awfully hateful, sinister, manipulative people over my entire lifetime.
I think of the many, wonderful people I've known, too, and wonder why they have mostly gone their own way, although I figure they probably just gave up on the fellow who just never quite figured out how to take care of himself. Maybe they just got tired of waiting for me to grow up.
Making a living, continuing a relationship, building a life for myself, and the like, were never things I was good at. I've had people hang up the phone on me in mid-sentence, or block my number from calling them altogether, just because they couldn't bear to listen to the intensity of all the confusion I was muddling through, like a lost soul, and refused to tolerate my calls another minute.
But I'm alive and kicking, surviving all of everything, whether I have anyone to interact with or not. The devil may care who will choose to approach me, but I will continue until God decides that I won't. I've grown weary of making threats and attempts at destroying myself. I'll go on just to spite all the impossible situations that come up in my life, and the devil can care whether I give him the satisfaction of ever loosing hope again. I don't want to die and lose my relationship with God.
This is the beauty of having a word processing machine like the one I'm using to notate all this nonsense. Writing these things this way is as much comfort to me as saying them to someone, even if no one ever has the patience to read this. Frequently, no one has the time or the patience to hear me out anyway, and I'd just as soon do the writing as do the talking.
“I almost cut my hair. It happened just the other day... It kind of increases my paranoia, like looking in my mirror and seeing a Police car.”
Long hair got tiresome to keep up after a while, but even though I keep my hair short now, I absolutely refuse to shave. It's not that my beard is particularly nice looking or anything like that. It's that once you start such a thing as shaving, there's no end to it.
I'm not so afraid of the Police most of the time anymore, because I'm basically a law abiding citizen. I no longer use drugs or alcohol.
Oh, I used to tie the stems of daisy’s together for a necklace or head dress, dandelions, too. I used to sit around with my guitar on my lap, playing the most wonderful music, whether anyone was close enough to hear it or not. I used to tell one girl or another that I'd never forget her, but if my memory did not serve me up her name quite so quickly later, after not seeing her a long time, well, she could just go ahead and be insulted. I'm not going to try to stop anybody as silly as that from hurting her own feelings all by herself over the likes of me. I've been rejected and alone too long to fall for that crap by any woman. Who do they think they're fooling, anyway?
I live for God and for myself, and that's that. He's the one that pull my life out of the fire anyway you want to look at it. I didn't do it myself. It was God's gift.
One time I called Caron on the phone, because she was so young and beautiful when I was so young and crazy. I just wanted to make a little noise in her ear, prattling about anything at all over the phone, simply to know that I'd be on the phone with a pretty girl, and she told me to get off the phone, and to talk to myself, if I needed someone to talk to so badly, but leave her alone to get her beauty rest. She had exams to take the next morning and it was late, at only 11PM when we were all of about 21 years young, and she was on her way to bed, to get her rest, so she'd do as well as possible on her exams. She didn't have time for the likes of me.
I didn't care about such foolishness as an education when there were girls in the world, at that time of my youth, hanging out on the same college campus I was. I was full of that idea.
I think it was Charley, the pusher who got me involved in all those drugs I could not assimilate into my lifestyle without serious health repercussions, who was Caron's drug connection, and he was possibly working under Caron's personal request, trying to overthrow my sanity, which actually did happen, or overthrow my success in life, which also did actually happen, but Caron, Charley and the whole host of other people, who also probably tried to kill me did not succeed can just forget their big plans for my untimely demise. I'm still alive.

I've known no pretty biddy nor shitty kiddy to take up space and pollute my home with noise and trouble in my adulthood. Oh, I've had plenty of dark skin guys and gals walking around noisy day rooms with me, when I had no way of getting out to get any privacy, but now I have a nice, quiet apartment to myself, and people wonder why I don't seek out more company, when I see more company, as more of an annoyance, unless I'd like to be around someone for a brief period of time,