by deadwhitemale » May 16th, 2009, 9:32 pm
In the early Seventies, when I was in my early to middle teens, when I was walking down the sidewalk or standing waiting to cross the street, no doubt with a glum expression or demeanor, it was a fairly frequent occurence for a pickup truck full of quite lovely "Jesus Freak" girls to pass by, with all the passengers shouting more-or-less in unison: "SMILE! JESUS LOVES YOU!" They'd drive on by, seemingly having a ball, leaving me alone with my gloomy reflections. They almost drove from the fold permanently.
I was very annoyed and put-off by this common practice, and, to tell the truth, if memory serves at all, this general kind of thing, and being exposed to various other manifestations of the so-called Jesus Movement, rather put me off Christianity altogether for a while. I stopped attending church regularly chiefly because I no longer wished to sing in the choir, which I had been pressured into. It did not occur to me I could still attend but not sing in the choir.
Even a bit later, when I generally wore my hair kind of long or long-ish, when I could get away with it, I was never a hippy --- though of course I was frequently mistaken for one by people who couldn't see or didn't look beyond the hair, and took not a few of the hippies' lumps for them.
Long hair alone doeth not a hippy make. (If you'll look at old portraits of, say, Oliver Cromwell (died, possibly of poison, circa 1659?), and Richard III (died in combat, 1485), you will see that they both wore their hair fairly long, and neither of them was any kind of hippy.
Music was and to a degree remains a special problem or sore spot for me. My father, born in 1920, was a State Trooper from c. 1950-'51 to late 1975. His father had been a country preacher in the Twenties and Thirties, when it was considered sinful to go to the movies. Dad never completely shook off an aversion to movies, even on television. He'd watch variety shows and game shows, and some situation comedies, and even some dramas (he was fond of Walker, Texas Ranger in the Eighties), but kind of shunned feature-length films. I never cared for Walker myself.
He was pretty socially conservative, but in more of a conformist way than I. He disliked (then) modern music very much, and somehow, over time, came to seem to blame me personally or hold me responsible for the music and other follies of the youth of the day, though I was hardly typical of my generation in any way. (I was probably the only kid on the block who never wanted to be a Beatle or Elvis or any kind of musician.)
Mom had had an unhappy childhood. She was religiously conservative, for the most part (allowing for some eccentric flirtations with things like astrology), and active in her church, serving for many years as a Sunday school teacher, and a popular one. She also disliked modern music, referring to much of it as "acid rock" in the early Seventies.
I was not very musical, either by upbringing or inclination. For instance, I owned few records, and never attended any rock concert in my teens or twenties, nor felt any special wish to. I just wasn't made that way.
However, I did experience a renewed interest in music in the middle 1980s, when I discovered the work of female British recording artist previously very little known in my part of the world. I bought several of her records. I remember feeling constrained to ask my mother's permission to buy the first one in the fall of 1985, when I was 28.
I was still living at home with my parents then, you see. One evening in about 1986 I was sitting listening to one of those records in the living room when my parents returned from what must have been Wednesday evening church services. Perhaps the topic of the sermon had been the evils of modern music. In any case, my mother could hear the music before even coming inside, and became incensed. She lumbered toward the record player bellowing "Turn that off! That's the DEVIL's music!" I think she would have broken my record, but for once I defied her and physically blocked her path, buying myself time to turn off the record player and put my record safely away.
Mom didn't like my books either. My tastes generally ran to fantasy and science fiction of a kind. At one point in perhaps 1988,when I was 31, a friend presented me with a picture book of photos of the aforementioned British recording artist, who at the time was a noted beauty. No, it was not at all pornographic, at least not to me. The day I brought it home Mom angrily snatched it away from me, crinkling its cover in doing so. About 20 or 21 years earlier she had confiscated my paperback copy of Ray Bradbury's Golden Apples of the Sun and thrown it away, because she'd discovered some relatively mild profanity in it. I salvaged it from the trash and still have it.
Convinced that I was "on drugs" -- when I was almost the only person I knew who was NOT -- she was always going through my stuff under the pretext of "cleaning" my room, often damaging something.
I moved out on my own in 1989, into the first of a series of rather substandard apartments. Of course I was not very free to play records there either, because of noise complaints from the neighbors on the other side of the paper-thin walls.
All this is just a round-about, rambling way of saying that in my youth I was generally not very interested in or enthusiastic about the things most of my contemporaries set great store by. I wasn't very interested in cars, for instance, and rather resented the way I was almost forced into driving -- into debt, and dependence upon an unreliable machine. To this day I find car ads on TV especially obnoxious and irritating.
I never, ever even tried marijuana. It was not even a temptation to me. It held no appeal or charm at all for me. On the contrary, I was repulsed by it and by all the trappings and ceremony and rigamarole surrounding it. Anyone sporting a cannabis leaf tattoo immediately forfeited my respect. "Sacred herb" -- bah! That'll be the day, when I worship a weed.
Of course, I have mellowed a good deal with age, and officially favor the legalization of pot, and just about all drugs, now. Not because I like them, or think they are good, or good for you, or are going to save the economy or the rain forest or anything, but just because I am generally a live-and-let-live, mind-my-own-business-type.
My "drugs" of choice were alcohol (chiefly beer), caffeine, and, circa early 1977 to mid-October of 1996, nicotine, in cigarettes. Why did I take up smoking cigarettes at age 20, but never pot? Good question. I would say it was mainly that pot and LSD and other hippy-type drugs were never presented to me in any appealing way. If anything, even when my hair was long, I was always sort of counter-counter-culture. Beer and cigarettes had little or no counter-culture cache to me (even though a kind of alcohol Prohibition still applied right around here, and many of the more zealous "Temperance" fanatics made little or no distinction between a can of beer and a syringe of heroin).
I wasn't especially clean-living, just kind of square, if you could see past the hair. I'm bald on top now, and finally cut the remaining fringe quite short, mainly to make it easier to wash when returning from my mother's death bed, and now from my father's.
It's interesting, though, how much I was offended by all that "Smile! Jesus loves you!" stuff back then. I felt that I was in a kind of ill-defined war, and that my side was losing, and that "darkness inescapable" was closing in, and there was not much to smile or dance and sing about.
DWM
"It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun." -- Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim(1899?)