So I've been thinking about initiations lately: structured, unstructured, spontaneous, planned, ceremonial; some are into life, into an instinct (losing virginity, or the really big one, buying a house), into society or out of it, into a "spiritual" identity, or into a real moment of awareness... It seems once I start considering them all, like love, the word becomes meaningless in itself. So what does it mean to me? For now, initiation means a one-way transformation, a change that is as permanent as anything can be in life. Oddly enough, the real ones only reveal themselves over time; many times we believe we have changed, awakened, begun a new life/path, whatever, but only to find that once the sheen has worn off, we're still as we were, just with a different flavored wrapping. ... Also, I think that the most genuine initiations are so truly intimate that not only are we not inclined to talk about them, but in the end, we cannot. It is not something which carries universal, shareable meaning; it is one to a customer, innate and inextricable from our interior self.
So another remembering; hardly a novelty - a road trip, or rather a few of them sort of smooged together. Back in the day I had a VW Beetle painted all paisley in a sort of too stoned to pay close attention to detail way. I eventually repainted it - because, after the first engine burned out (thanks Dad for forgetting to put the oil cap on when you added more oil), I was stuck in the middle of Ohio with no cash and no motor. I ended up reading horoscopes at a father -son bowling chamionship for about three days and raised enough cash to buy this motor a guy in a garage was willing to install for me. It was expensive, but at the time seemed my only option.
It was the best purchase I ever made of that sort. It turned out that this motor wasn't a 4 cylinder VW lightweight at all, but a Porsche engine that had been rebuilt for racing. He changed the tranny too, so my little bug did 40 in first gear, and, while I never did know its top speed, I did get busted for going 120 in it (the cop let me off on my promise that I wait until the county line to start trying to smear my innards on the pavement). It was a fine thing cruise down the highway at 65 and get passed by a rich kids sports car, and then I'd slide up next to it, wait until the driver looked over, and let them hear me shift gears, and blow them off the road as I disappeared into the night. Preferring speed to style, I opted to let the car go back to its natural innocuous color scheme - turquoise, and let the engine do the talking.
So I took this VW and two friends on the great pilgrimage of our times - out to Haight Ashbury when it was still slightly authentic. It really wasn't by the time we got there, as the original crop of freaks had been replaced by media-made hippies, but the Filmore was in full swing as a truly wild and creative place. This was before lasers, or much besides colored lights for stage shows, and the Filmore was exploring light shows with patterns and old movies and various other entertainments for the psychedelic mind. Just being there was an initiation - a discovery that we weren't the only freaks in the world, and that, without trying to be anything at all other than being open to the strangeness of the world as it really is, we were not alone.
Boy was I wrong. We are alone. The three of us came out of that summer changed, but not for the better in every case. My trumpeter friend got himself killed by riding a motorcycle into a storm, my flutist friend got himself crazy by activating latent epilepsy when he got stoned (which we found out about on this trip - while we were also teaching him to drive!), and I came out of this still hungry, still looking for something that could support the creative, mad fire I felt - feel - within me. The freaks became a freakshow; everyone had to do the same drugs, have the same records, and all the rest of the drill. I kept moving, visiting folk all over the country, hearing bands, driving through the night, talking for days on end, and all that stuff.
Around this time the idea of communes was emerging, and I ended up building a yurt deep in the woods near one in this part of the country (upstate NY). That is a story for another day..
So another remembering; hardly a novelty - a road trip, or rather a few of them sort of smooged together. Back in the day I had a VW Beetle painted all paisley in a sort of too stoned to pay close attention to detail way. I eventually repainted it - because, after the first engine burned out (thanks Dad for forgetting to put the oil cap on when you added more oil), I was stuck in the middle of Ohio with no cash and no motor. I ended up reading horoscopes at a father -son bowling chamionship for about three days and raised enough cash to buy this motor a guy in a garage was willing to install for me. It was expensive, but at the time seemed my only option.
It was the best purchase I ever made of that sort. It turned out that this motor wasn't a 4 cylinder VW lightweight at all, but a Porsche engine that had been rebuilt for racing. He changed the tranny too, so my little bug did 40 in first gear, and, while I never did know its top speed, I did get busted for going 120 in it (the cop let me off on my promise that I wait until the county line to start trying to smear my innards on the pavement). It was a fine thing cruise down the highway at 65 and get passed by a rich kids sports car, and then I'd slide up next to it, wait until the driver looked over, and let them hear me shift gears, and blow them off the road as I disappeared into the night. Preferring speed to style, I opted to let the car go back to its natural innocuous color scheme - turquoise, and let the engine do the talking.
So I took this VW and two friends on the great pilgrimage of our times - out to Haight Ashbury when it was still slightly authentic. It really wasn't by the time we got there, as the original crop of freaks had been replaced by media-made hippies, but the Filmore was in full swing as a truly wild and creative place. This was before lasers, or much besides colored lights for stage shows, and the Filmore was exploring light shows with patterns and old movies and various other entertainments for the psychedelic mind. Just being there was an initiation - a discovery that we weren't the only freaks in the world, and that, without trying to be anything at all other than being open to the strangeness of the world as it really is, we were not alone.
Boy was I wrong. We are alone. The three of us came out of that summer changed, but not for the better in every case. My trumpeter friend got himself killed by riding a motorcycle into a storm, my flutist friend got himself crazy by activating latent epilepsy when he got stoned (which we found out about on this trip - while we were also teaching him to drive!), and I came out of this still hungry, still looking for something that could support the creative, mad fire I felt - feel - within me. The freaks became a freakshow; everyone had to do the same drugs, have the same records, and all the rest of the drill. I kept moving, visiting folk all over the country, hearing bands, driving through the night, talking for days on end, and all that stuff.
Around this time the idea of communes was emerging, and I ended up building a yurt deep in the woods near one in this part of the country (upstate NY). That is a story for another day..
VIEW 4 of 4 COMMENTS
s_eldorado:
That's a fantastic story. Well written - what a great life!
morgan:
I'd learn Parseltongue. Just so I could watch out for evil.