Holiday Hippies
Sunday, November 28, 2004

"Holiday Hippies"
Santa Fe, NM. November 26th, 2004
Caleb John Clark

A huge coffee table book titled "Hippies" greeted me upon my arrival home to Santa Fe for Thanksgiving. It was from the library, an institution my 64-year old hippie mother believes militantly in supporting, along with several others like public schools, children's rights, worker's rights, peace activists, etc.

As I was reading it later that day, she stopped in front of me and said, "I don't like the book."

"Why?" I said.

"I'm not sure. It just doesn't capture what it was like."

"What is it missing?" I asked as I flipped though the book looking at the iconic photos of nubile braless women dancing with Adonis men, famous poets, rock stars, communes, concerts, psychedelic posters, protests, riots, earth mothers nursing love children, and the great unwashed masses of humanity in between.

Thus began a very interesting discussion on our hippie daze. I was three years old when my mother and father separated in the Bay Area and she dropped out of society like a runaway bride sprinting out of a church.

It was 1969 and she was a nice-Jewish-girl from New York, your typical first generation college over-achiever who had her Bachelors and Masters from Smith and Columbia Colleges by 22 in teaching (her current profession) and was proceeding along a path laid out before her designed to take full advantage of America's bounties, bounties made all the more valuable by her Russian Jewish immigrant grand parents who felt lucky to have made it out of Poland alive in 1905, and her parents who worked hard for her future and never got to go to college.

"So what is not in the book?" I prodded.

"Well pictures of our families, of where we came from for instance. For me it was a reaction to being an achiever," she said as I looked at a full-page shot of hippies lounging around a famous San Francisco house smoking, "I grew up during a heavy time. Parent's burdens effected you you know, what they want for you. But I thought there must be a better way to live then to just to work all the time."

"So you dropped out?"

"I'd always felt different, like a black sheep, so when I found people I felt comfortable with, we supported each other. Everybody I ended up knowing was a black sheep, or became a black sheep."

"Wasn't it an important revolution?" I asked, taking notes and hoping to keep her going as she doesn't like to be interviewed.

"It wasn't a real revolution at first. There was no intellectual base, no manifesto," she said firmly.

"But it effected society to this day," I said, "I mean there's hippie costumes in drug stores for Halloween, tofu in supermarkets, recycling, medical marijuana, and kids today still try and be hippies!"

"In the beginning we didn't label ourselves, we were just living and I didn't know we were doing something special. But later I wrote to my grandfather that this was 'my revolution.' But hardly comparable to his. He almost died for the socialist Zionists trying to over through the czar in Russia. Quite a different scale. His life was on the line, that's why he had to leave the country. I wasn't going to be sent to Siberia if I was arrested like my grandmother was."

"What else was it like," I said.

"Well it was the most fun of my whole life. I think a lot of us hadn't had a lot of fun in our lives because we were expected to achieve being the first generation to go to college. But as hippies we got to play! I'm sure that's why I'm still in schools, because I get to play. The other reason is that I like to learn. I had been taught to compete not cooperate. I'd never had a garden or animals, bartered, lived without electricity or running water, or lived under a tree. I never had felt part of something larger then myself and I had a lot to learn coming from the city and suburbia. But I loved it and I learned it well."

"What about all the protesting and changes in American society hippies are part of?"

"It was selfish. It was not a big thing. We were myopic and didn't know what was going on. But I was old for a hippie, being in my early thirties, so maybe I'm not typical," she said pausing and thinking.

"But I do remember that I didn't read a book for whole year. That was huge for me!"

"What did your parents think?" I said.

"My poor parents. They must have been so disappointed. I didn't talk to them much. They were appalled. All that they'd sacrificed for their children, and look what they did. They threw it all away, went to live in the woods, dress in home made clothes, and not work."

"Then we dropped out of the hippie thing in the early 1970s?"

"No we didn't. I just burned out on California and the whole thing and went home (New England) to have a more stable life and raise you. But it was still with those values and in a place I could walk lightly on the planet and not take more then my share. Fortunately I had my teaching credential, and could go back to work. You've had a harder time adjusting to the realities of capitalist, corporate America."

My mother went back to cooking thanksgiving dinner with my stepfather who she'd met on Height Street in hippie days, but they were both with other people. Jack dropped earlier and was first generation immigrants.

"Hey Jack," I yelled to the kitchen where he was cooking, "what did you think of being a hippie?"

"I was never a hippie," he yelled back, "I was a freak!"

I guess that's another story.

THE END
---------------------posted by Caleb John Clark on 11/28/2004 01:58:22 PM


Death of my Titanium G4 Laptop
Friday, November 19, 2004

My laptop died today, but I'm back up with a new one. Here's the skinny.

Summary
Long Live the Titanium 15” G4! OS X’s built in migration wizard is great, but Final Cut Pro won’t boot after without some system ID it needs. The rest of my apps like Office, Filemaker, Eudora, Dreamweaver, booted up fine and all my files were OK.

Report:
My 667mhz Titanium G4 Mac laptop finally died after 3 years of daily beatings and travel as my only computer. It was scared, dented, scratched and worn. It preformed beyond my expectations, even on its deathbed. For the last few months it would occasionally go to sleep if it was not on a flat surface, or if I put too much pressure on the left side - but it would wake up. It was gently hinting at retirement. If I had the money, I’d have retired it while it was working and left it as a music player or browser, but I had to finish a contract to get some cash, so it soldiered on fearlessly for me to its death.

Yesterday the screen suddenly turned to blurry lines and strange evolving energy flows, but it recovered. I was backed up, and had vital docs in progress on the Web, so I kept working. Today the screen just became blurry stripes that flowed into different colors. Obviously this was it. The drive was good though, so I could migrate.

I made an appointment at the genius bar at the downtown San Francisco Apple store. My genius said she’d done some Juvenile time on a diary farm in Maine. She was clearly rehabilitated now in her 40s, but had a worn look and glinting eyes from her adventures. She was good and agreed to Shepard my migration and gave me a fire wire cable to use. I got the cheapest 15” PowerBook G4 model with an education discount due to contracting with a university recently and proving this by showing her I could log into their servers. Total cost $1952.90. I probably could have gotten it cheaper, but I was computer-less and needed to be up and running that day.

My Titanium’s screen suddenly came to life at the bar, as if taking one last gasp, but then failed. My genius reseated the video cable, but no go. I could boot my old friend though, just by listening to the hard drive and hitting familiar keystrokes.

The migration of 20 gigs took about an hour and is easy with a wizard that automatically asks you when you boot up a new Mac if you want to transfer files. It just uses the Command "T" trick on boot up of your old Mac, which makes it into an external FireWire drive. During the transfer, it's last mission critical task, the Titanium heated up as usual during hard tasks, spun all its fans, but didn’t die. I toured the shop and played while it worked. The massive monitors are worth a look, truly TV size and feel, and the iMacs are very simple and slick. The place was jammed at 2pm on Thursday.

A couple hours after the death of my old friend, I was up and running with all my files and most of my software. I'm still working on the Final Cut Pro issue, asking the Titanium for a few more tasks before it officially slips into the big sleep.
---------------------posted by Caleb John Clark on 11/19/2004 08:13:26 AM


Election Poem
Friday, November 05, 2004

I'm fairly satisfied that the people have spoken
That the system is not totally broken
It is plain that I disagree, just barely, with the majority of voters this season
Be it brainwashing, different ideas, or for some other reason
I do believe they love this country as much as anyone
But have a different way they think things should be done
My anger is more at my folks
Who seem to whine about the reality of political daggers and cloaks
While the demean the opposition
As if they are people from a higher position
We just lost the race
And now we've got to buck up and keep face
And not lose our head
Or run around spewing vitriolic dread
And if we are so smart
Then today is the day we will start

Because this time we lost by a few million ballots
So I will not complain of lawyers, spies or other maggots
And although we can not fathom, we can not also ignore
That the public was not more against Bush then they were with Gore!
Think about that if you will. That after the war, the botched world affairs
And even if you give them a couple million votes manufactured from thin air
They still had more support then we did out there
It's easy to quote
They got out the vote
Proving that those evangelicals sure can fight
And that the youth factor was more bark then bite

So they get 4 more years to wield their big gun
But when the 8 years are up, they'll have nowhere to run
Perhaps since they're elected more surely
They'll fail much less demurely
But I hope another thought
That Bush sees the history books on his shelf
And does not want to be history's evil narrow-eyed elf
So despite long term damage to the courts
And being thought of worldwide as dorks
The country doesn't crumble
And the stock market doesn't tumble

That leaves us 4 years
To find a person who can lead us through our fears
Bind our faiths
And attract southern dates
With straight talk for those at the bar
And gray discourse for those listening to NPR
A singer and a cowboy?
A swordsman and plowboy?
Or will a cowgirl?
Unfirl?

So for now we need to keep our resistance strong
To what we think is wrong
But compromise as politics demands
Picking carefully where to make a stand
So that we live to fight another day
And have good grist for the media mill when we jump into the fray

---------------------posted by Caleb John Clark on 11/05/2004 02:09:05 PM