Chilling

I’m chilling at Books-A-Million with a cold coffee drink and the first Grateful Dead album playing on my iPod.

Their self-titled first release came out on March 17, 1967 and I had my copy a few weeks later.

The Summer of Love was a looming and I had a choice: Two college friends – Steve Power and Michael White – were preparing to head for San Francisco and the Haight and invited me to come along on the great adventure. But I was engaged to be married on June 24 and my fiancé was pregnant with our first son. And I was a few months into a newspaper career.

That was a supremely exciting time to be 21. The hippies were inventing a new way of living based on love and drugs. The music scene was exploding with creativity. The pull to be part of it, to go to the epicenter of that renaissance and experience it all firsthand was stronger than I can describe.

What to do? What to do?

Call it cowardice, call it a sense of honor and duty, call it good judgment – whatever you call it, I chose to stay in Indianapolis, make money at a job that felt more like fun than work, get married and start a family.

When I see the bitter fruit the hippie revolution bore, I’m supremely grateful that I didn’t go west. The illusions and fantasies of the hippie culture are still with us today, except they’ve mutated into the utopian absurdities being perpetrated by the Obama administration.

The last I heard, Steve was living on disability as a consequence of a near fatal motorcycle head injury. Whitey was homeless and living on a Florida beach.

They were victims of naiveté, building their lives on simplistic romantic notions and trying to create a world that can never be. Most of us ‘60s idealists outgrew that childish world view. Now we’re doomed to struggle against those who still cling to it.

But I still enjoy the music.