The Diary of a Man Downunder I

In the last two years of School I moved into the back garage at our place, which was good because it was stand alone and had rear street access, which meant friends from school could drop in mostly undetected and then we could smoke weed and listen to Pink Floyd.

It could be that smoking weed and listening to Pink Floyd first opened me up to the inner life(although, I am not completely sure about that, and it could have been Hermann Hesse’s Siddartha). Anyway, my memory is shot, but when I first heard the bells in ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ it sounded like something archaic from a far distant past, that was trying to remind me of something. It felt like some kind of a ‘wake up’' call to me. And like an old epoch was ending and there was a new epoch that was beginning.

That is the thing about weed, you start thinking about time differently(and things like ‘epochs’). And this could be an excursion but these days I could see smoking weed through Gestalt therapy, maybe - where there is a background and a foreground, and when you get ‘stoned’ it is like the foreground of your so=called ‘normal’ everyday consciously directed life and some of its more practical concerns and concrete particulars, seems to recede, and then you become more open to the background of a more unofficial unconscious life, and then you start getting excited about some insights you seem to be having, or the associations you are getting, or the patterns you seem to be seeing.

Anyway, that is just a theory, but we weren’t thinking about Gestalt therapy at the time. And were probably more drawn together, by the fact we didn’t trust anyone over 28, and also because we shared a rebellious streak. Anyway, I had decorated that garage myself, and the first thing I did was set up a sound system and then moved in two messed up looking battered massive matt black speakers which had woofers and sub woofers and things like that, and which looked like they had fallen off the back of Pink Floyd’s tour bus.

The I set up a small counter-cultural library with everything by George Orwell and Aldous Huxley and ‘To Have or to Be’ by Erich Fromm. Then there were bean bags strewn around the place. And a single Modigliani print to feign some refinement. And many different friends dropped in and out of those ‘Garage Sessions’ as they later became known. ‘H’ was a Sixties music aficionado and could tell you every Sixties album that had ever been made(and you have to remember this was before Google, and I loved how his mind worked). Kim wanted to be a writer, and he had even read French authors, like Camus, which I found impressive. Francine and Arianne were French(come to think of it they didn’t come from our school, but no-one was really arguing about that).

What we were mostly doing in those Garage Sessions was holding long and meandering conversations about Sixties Philosophy. We were trying to get to the bottom of it, which was taking way longer than expected. And we held conversations about the main Sixties albums and the main artists, And Crosby Stills Nash and sounded like the Sixties. And Bob Dylan was a genius(who somehow held the secret to Sixties philosophy). But it was harder to know about The Beatles who had to be geniuses, probably, but even parents seemed to like Paul McCartney, which wasn’t really a good sign.

We couldn’t understand the 1950’s. My mind is a little hazy about all of this, but I am trying to give you the essence of it. Many things were intuitive and hard to express. And we couldn’t understand why Straight people did some of the things they did? We wondered what did they do all day prior to the Jimi Hendrix Experience? They were probably just putting up parking lots all day, if you listened to Joni Mitchell. And one of the main things about the 1950’s, that always had to be kept in mind, was that never before had so many ‘Straight’ people ever been gathered together, in the same place, at the same time.

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One day in one of our Garage Sessions we decided to roll one of the world’s biggest ‘numbers’. And just as I was about to light up, whem my mother walked in. And she took one look at me and then at everyone else and then said that she would like to see me upstairs. Which didn’t sound good, but I went upstairs, and then she said ' John, You were smoking marijuana down there, weren't you?' And I thought of denying it, but eventually said 'Umm, well…yes’(probably after about half an hour). And then she said ‘I would like to try some'.

And I don’t know why but that freaked me out, and I had the thought that maybe, she was having an existential crisis or going off the rails. And then i thought it is time for me to give up weed because someone has to be responsible around here. And then I was quietly disgusted, because what kind of Rebellion was it when your mother wants to join in(and not too mention how it could ruin my street credibility). And dont get me wrong my Mother was a beautiful person, but up to that point in time, she had never even smoked a cigarette.

Anyway, I was stalling for time, and so I said I would have to go and talk to my friends about it. And then I went back downstairs and said that my mother wanted to join the Revolution. Anyway, we talked about it for some time(and probably for about half an hour). And I put forward a theory that I thought she she was already naturally producing THC in her brain(because she laughed and hugged people randomly and things like that).

And I didn’t think we should give her any weed, under any circumstances, mainly because she saw the world like a Fellini movie, full of acrobats and circus clowns and lion tamers, and other weird shit like that. And you just never really knew what could happen if you got your parents stoned, and we couldn’t guarantee everyone’s safety, so we decided not to give her any, and maybe is he started listening to Pink Floyd first, we could take it from there.

Maybe, in retrospect, we should have let my mother her join our revolutionary cell, she was only pretending to be mainstream sometimes. But at the time it felt like we were striking out on our own, and the revolution wasn’t a family event. And I hadn’t fully forgiven her for always kissing me in public and saying ‘Í will always be her lovely boy’'(and I couldn’t even begin to imagine the damage she had done to my reputation on the street). Anyway, I was making a display out of my independence at the time, and I was also scared that she had a plan to keep me at home until I was fifty, or maybe Sixty.

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The biggest thing we did in our Garage Sessions was go back into Sixties music. ‘There is Something in the Air’ said Thunderclap Newman. ‘Something Happening around Here’ said Buffalo Springfield. There was something ‘Blowin in the Wind’ Bob Dylan said. ‘The Times they are a Changin’ he said.

I didn’t always understand Bob Dylan, because he sometimes spoke in strange and mercurial tongue’s(and fast and flashing poetic images). It was like he was speaking another language. But he did seem like a prophetic voice, or a mercurial messenger, And he had probably said, everyone ‘must get stoned’, so that they could understand his lyrics

The old road is agin’ he said. It wasn’t old people, as such, but the old way of seeing the world. There might be some people that like the old order best, but whatever was true in the 1950’s was no longer true in The Sixties.

‘Come senators, congressmen’, he said ‘please heed the call, don’t stand in the hallway, don’t block up the door’. That was directed towards whoever was standing in the old institutional hallways of power. The senators and congressmen and any other old men. And whoever was in charge of the grubby and corrupt world. And all he was saying was please don’t stand in the hallways, or block up the doors, and stand in the way of the new spirit of the times.

Then in ‘The Chimes of Freedom’, the sky was like ‘a wild Cathedral’ he said. There was a ‘thunder and lightning’ striking like a primitive force. It was shattering the old reality. It was radically altering the universe. It was changing the cosmological situation(and it wasn’t The Sixties youth that started the Sixties Revolution, but the thunder and lightning). And also he said that ‘The sky was cracking its poems in naked wonder’.

And sometimes I sat in naked wonder listening to Bob Dylan’s lyrics(and could feel the thunder and lightning striking like a primitive force) and how the sky was cracking its poems and they were falling down to earth and into Sixties musicians and artists and poets and into their songs and their lyrics, which was the Sixties version of the Revelations.

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