76\u00a0 bar falls 29.70\u00a0 0mph SSE dew-point 67\u00a0 sunrise 5:55 sunset 8:44\u00a0 Summer<\/p>\n
Waning Crescent of the Thunder Moon<\/p>\n
Echoes from the past.\u00a0 Over time certain folks reconnect out of the blue.\u00a0 Jerry Stearns is one.\u00a0 We were part of the movement at Ball State.\u00a0 Hard to believe, but we had a radical wing at this conservative midwestern teacher’s university.\u00a0 We did some drugs, raised some hell.\u00a0 He’s kept the faith working with Central American guerillas and medical groups like medicine sin fronteras.\u00a0 He’s still at it doing hospice work now and using the money to help develop clinics with the Zapatistas and sub-commandante Marcos.\u00a0 He brings word of folks I’d forgotten about long ago.<\/p>\n
Those days.\u00a0 They were so different than now.\u00a0 So formative for a generation, at least a chunk of the generation.\u00a0 As I’ve written elsewhere, we engaged in struggle in our own lives, with our friends and lovers, in our own communities.\u00a0 The personal was political and the political personal.\u00a0 It was, really, politics drugs sex and rock and roll.\u00a0 We went on road trips, driving through Indiana small towns flashing the peace sign and shaking our long hair. (Yes, I realize how ridiculous this sounds now.) We smoked dope, dropped acid and listened to acid rock.\u00a0 We demonstrated, wrote, loved and then disbursed.\u00a0 Jerry stayed in touch with more folks as near as I can tell, but I never looked back.\u00a0 After Dad and I split, I left home for Wisconsin, then Minnesota.<\/p>\n
Intense. Those days dripped intensity.\u00a0 Everything, every tiny thing mattered.\u00a0 It was, for this cowboy, too much.\u00a0 The more intense it got, the more I drank.\u00a0 I gave up acid and marijuana early on, but I hung on to beer and whisky.\u00a0 The sexual revolution kept going and going and going up until my second marriage, then it stopped until my divorce.\u00a0 At which point it picked up again.\u00a0 Then stopped again when I married Kate.\u00a0 And happily so.<\/p>\n
Back then I was an introvert trying to function as an extrovert.\u00a0 It took a lot of chemicals and a rich dose of denial to stay at it.\u00a0 When I finally woke up, I was on my second marriage, working for the Prebyterian church and wondering just what the hell I had done with my life.\u00a0 Treatment brought me into contact with a new reality, my true self.\u00a0 It was, though, as it often is, ten years before my maturation caught up with me after I stopped drinking.\u00a0 18 off and on years of Jungian analysis.<\/p>\n
All the drugs and sex, the politics of rage, make the true effects of those years difficult to sort out.\u00a0 They were painful in so many ways, yet pain and growth are old partners.\u00a0 The overall affective tone of those years has a negative valence emotionally, but a positive one in terms of commitment, struggle, victories.\u00a0 So much of it vanished in smoke and the slosh of beer. I mean my memories are unreliable, in some cases extinguished, or at least very hidden.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
76\u00a0 bar falls 29.70\u00a0 0mph SSE dew-point 67\u00a0 sunrise 5:55 sunset 8:44\u00a0 Summer Waning Crescent of the Thunder Moon Echoes from the past.\u00a0 Over time certain folks reconnect out of the blue.\u00a0 Jerry Stearns is one.\u00a0 We were part of the movement at Ball State.\u00a0 Hard to believe, but we had a radical wing at … Continue reading Vanished in the Smoke<\/span>