Hippie Vignettes

[lapsedmodernist]

This is for tragicmulatta, from my college days.

On, I believe, North Professor street, once upon a time there was a house that was shared by hippies and goths. This counterintuitive combination spawned, at some point, an adoption of a wolf cub. The wolf lived in the house, terrorized the other, non-lupine pets, and was called "wolf" because the lupophilliac hippie believed that "you can't name animals, man." The year dragged on, the hippies smoked weed, the wolf grew , and eventually due to some *incidents* was deployed to the college arboritum "to be wild," which is why when you were walking home late at night in the winter, and you heard HOWLING, it wasn't the wind, and it wasn't your overactive imagination, either.

While the wolf was unique in its own right, at least in my four years at the small progressive college, every the hippie coop next to my freshman year dorm housed some hippie dumbass who would buy or adopt a snake. Every year the snake invariably escaped, and every year some patcholi-smelling freshman girl named Sara or Becky would find the snake (lethargic from all the second-hand weed) curled up in the shower, and there would be screaming and hysterics and recriminations and eventually history would repeat itself with the new crop of freshpersons.

The year before I started college, a rich hippie with a hyphenated name became a legend as one half of the "dead monkeys" duo. At our college we had "winter term," which was basically an excuse for people to come up with the most ridiculous projects and fuck around for a month. This duo declared their intentions of studying marmocet monkeys in Peru. Indeed, they returned from Peru with some hippie hemp bags and three marmocet monkeys that they bought at a market in Lima. How did they get them across the border? By doping them with valium, of course, and putting them in the shirt pocket. Unfortunately, they were delayed at the airport for almost 24 hours, in the course of which they kept feeding the monkeys valium. One of the monkeys died somewhere around the "Welcome to Cleveland" sign, the other monkey expired shortly after the return to the dorm. The monkeys were thrown out into the smoking lounge garbage can, where they were found by the janitor, who promptly called the CDC and the town was nearly quarantined, Outbreak style. The coda to this saga was straight out of Bret Easton Ellis, involving FBI warrants, the sale of $2000 of baking soda in lieu of Ecstasy, and a flight to Algir by perpetrator #1. The hyphenated hippie returned to the campus next year, with a taciturn, worldly air around him, which he used to seduce virginal propsective students.

There is no other group that provokes more intense and visceral schaudenfreude in me than the hippies. Which is why, when some hippies built a raft for the purpose of some stoned sailing in the aforementioned arboritum (Home of the Wolf!), which was emphatically counterindicated for swimming or sailing, I can't say that I was heartbroken when their raft, turned over and they all got weird skin rashes after a dip in the waters of the arboritum.

There is more, but you all are invited to share as well! We can all cheer up tragicmulatta with Hippie Tales.

Comments

[tragicmulatta.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the cheer! And you know, I think the college-aged hippies are my favorite hippie demographic of all because they're just so earnest. Stoned and irresponsible, too.

But a wolf?!

[mjmj.livejournal.com]

i, of course, do not have any tales to share, but this amused me and maybe it will you and tragicmulatta:

http://newyorker.com/shouts/content/

here's an excerpt:

'Resolution No. 1: I Will Quit Smoking On New Year's Day, I started using nicotine patches, nicotine gum, and nicotine lozenges but stopped when I began to hallucinate that I was a Lucky Strike. January 2nd brought a new, less arrogant resolution: “I will smoke only cigarettes I did not pay for.” Unfortunately, I hadn't anticipated how easy it would be to steal them at the 7-Eleven, especially when the girl behind the counter was on her cell phone trying to cast a vote for “American Idol.” Seven months later, I'm actually smoking slightly more than I did last year, but that may be because I'm more focused on trying to quit stealing.'

-mjm

[never-the-less.livejournal.com]

duuuuuuuuude, i love your hippie stories. stanford was so conservative that there was really only one subculture, centered around, you got it, co-ops filled with hippies (it was norhtern california after all). basically these were where you lived if you had no intention of becoming an iBanker, doctor, or getting rich from tkaing two CS classes and getting your friends together to form a start-up selling virtual peanut butter from which you were going to make a jillion dollars by the time you were 24. needless to say, i did my share of time in co-ops, and though i managed to insulatee myself to some degree with art/radio kids, hippies were totally unavoidable. i still will not touch tempeh to this day. i'm sure it's great, but not when it's uncooked and thrown in with whatever other ingredients were left in the kitchen that could be assembled into a meal for 60 people. even worse was my senior year when i lived off campus in a house owned by this guy (scroll down). he used to be THE dancing bear at grateful dead shows and my house was named shakedown street!!!!!! our porch was painted in blacklight paint. when we painted over it in normal paint he came back and insisted on blacklight.

anyway, this is all just to say, i feel your hippie pain.

[klingrap.livejournal.com]

No really, dude. You may or may not know this about me, but before I went to NYU I spent my freshman year of college doing a program called the Audubon Expedition Institute, which consisted of travelling around the country on a tricked-out school bus learning about environmental issues through "experiential education." Dude. We slept on the ground every night. We made communal meals for twenty people, every meal of the day, and each person had one tupperware container that they ate out of for the entire semester. We washed these containers in a series of three plastic basins: one filled with hot water and environmentally-sound bleach, one filled with hot water and environmentally-sound dish detergent, and one filled with cold water, straight-up. Some people chose not to wash their dishes in order to create an interesting macrobiotic environment to observe.

Another highlight of life "on the bus" was our decisions-by-consensus-only policy. This meant sitting in circles in Food Lion parking lots for up to two hours trying to make everyone agree on whether we should grocery shop and then make lunch, or make lunch and then grocery shop.

The crazy thing was, we were not allowed to smoke pot. Dear God. It would have helped.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

hahahahahahaha. was there at least a lot of fucking going on?

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

what the fuck IS tempeh? I've never been able to understand that.

your house was named Shakedown Street? Well, I guess my house was named Big Five, and the ontogenesis of the name alternately involved Canadian motel chains or fisting. And while a hippie-free zone, my house made it on the Jenny Jones show.

What are you doing Thursday after work?

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

hahaha, poor people with nicotine addictions. luckily for me, I can smoke or not smoke at will, which, I suppose, is like a superpower. That also means that I scoff at this type of humor, rather than identify with it. I know, sometimes I am obnoxious.

[never-the-less.livejournal.com]

tempeh is a fermented soybean product. blech.

yeah, i remember your jenny jones post. i don't think i could have dealt with the filth. shakedown street was actually also a hippie free zone, as it was only 8 of us (just our landlord was a hippie), and wasn't an official school owned co-op. the worst named school owned co-op was undoubtedly EBF, or, The Enchanted Broccoli Forrest, named after a cookbook. all of the halls were painted in different hippie themes (sgt. pepper's, deep space which was grateful dead related i believe, probably something related to pink floyd...). there was a lot of dmt use there and there were always acid and acid free libations (usually bottles od whiskey -- because tripping is not fun unless you're also drunk?) at there parties, sometimes not marked as to which was which.

unfortunately, i just made plans for thursday evening...next week? tuesday? arg.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

ew. whiskey and acid. I cannot imagine a worse combo, except, perhaps, for tequila and mushrooms.

yes, let's say Tuesday! I feel like if we don't actually make a plan in advance it will take us another three months.

[never-the-less.livejournal.com]

yes, that is how new york goes. i'm always like, let's be spontaneous, which turned into, uh, i can't do it next week, but how about the thursday after that at 7:50?

so good, next tuesday. did you see that there is a new bar on the way to greenpoint (n11th? and bedford)? maybe we can check it out. or just go to enids or the other place.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

ooh, what new bar?