Memoirs Of An Aging Hippie

Hi and welcome.

Here you’ll find my ramblings and writings on a variety of topics including orphans in Africa, bus drivers in Australia, some Japanese Haiku poetry and an occasional series on the “Memoirs Of An Aging Hippie”.

I was a part of the Hippie generation in the 1960′s & 70′s. The contraceptive pill had just become available and it was before the advent of AIDS. It was a generation of post war babies, who reacted to post second world war austerity by becoming loud and colourful, adopting the ideology of ‘make love not war’ and ‘sex, drugs and rock and roll’. Just think, if our politicians would make love and not war, the world would be a better place. However, I think most of the drugs turned out to be a disaster, even Timothy Leary eventually admitted that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea.

It was one of the most creative eras for music. You can still hear it in riffs, styles and chord structures in pop music today. From rock to hip hop, Beatles melodies and Led Zeppelin bleed through. Of course most of the kids producing contemporary music these days weren’t even born when the musical revolution of the sixties took place. In fact, some of their parents hadn’t even met!! I suppose they have childhood memories of being subjected to their parent’s vinyls.

I often wonder what nursing homes will be like when us aging hippies get there. Hopefully they will become communes with festival after festival, everyone will be in touch with their ‘inner Bonobo’ and we’ll all wear sarongs and live in teepees. I’m looking forward to it!

Now, an aging hippie I might be, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t embraced new technologies, (appropriate technology that is, see my articles on Luddites ), not at all. I’m a renaissance man. I’ve taught myself how to build websites like this one using WordPress. As a result I am now quite proficient at HTML, CSS and even PHP.

Here are some of my results:

For clients:

• Sydney Airport Limousine Transport
• Executive Search Research

My own website business site,of course, is a work in progress!!

And for my own amusement:

• Aromatherapy,
• Herbs and Herbal Medicine
• Alternative Medicine
• High Blood Pressure, it’s dangers and how to deal with it, including Zantac and High Blood Pressure.
• Christmas
• Candles
• Solar Power
• Lingerie
• Portable Power
• How to set up your Home Gym
• All you need to know about setting up a Home Theatre , Ok! Ok! Home Theater for you Americans!
• A special site on Attention Deficit Disorder.
• A site on Home Business and Affiliate Marketing
• Cycling shoes Sidi genius 5.5 pro carbon

Browse away. I hope to keep adding articles and poems to this site when the inspiration hits me, so come back and have a look every now and again to see where my ramblings go next.

Peace.

Written when my grandchildren went home after Christmas.

No mess, no laughter

A paper plane is flightless

Grandchildren went home

In the seventies the height of luxury was the spa attached to the swimming pool. I never had one. I wasn’t that rich. However whilst building a house in the rural fringe of Sydney, Australia I befriended a women and her sons.

Janet was a wonderful person probably ten years older than me. Her husband was a doctor and fairly wealthy but he had died a few years earlier in a drunken car crash. He was an alcoholic. Anyway with the wealth came a swimming pool and the spa.

The pool was a welcome respite from house building in the hot Australian summer. Stephen, her eldest would help me with building. Peter, her other son was a bit young at the time.

And the parties were great.

Much quaffing of wine, playing of guitars, singing of songs, soaking in the spa and cooling off in the pool .

Stephen had a girl friend who was like ‘the girl from Ipanema’, any true man could not help but sigh as she walked past in her bikini.

Now, me, I was a hippy. I didn’t see the point of clothes, so I’m sitting in the spa enjoying my nakedness. I suppose the alcohol and weed helped! Linda didn’t share my enthusiasm for nudity, more is the pity, but she could cope with mine.

A group of us had been enjoying the warm bubbling water and glasses of bubbly when it occurred to me that we had run out of drinks so I thought it incumbent on me to go to the kitchen for another bottle or two.

Now I must explain at this point that this was a Sunday afternoon party to which Janet had invited not only her hippy friends but also the straight neighbours. The straight neighbours, actually all housewives, were already on the edge of their comfort zones in this gathering of bohemians and had retired to lounge room to drink tea and orange juice away from the wanton exposé of raw life happening outside the sliding glass doors. See, Janet didn’t discriminate when it came to inviting party guests. She was a socialist. Or a hippy pathfinder.

I started to get out of the spa expressing my desire to return with more bubbly. Some members of the group, realising that the path to the kitchen was through the lounge of the uptight, suggested that this might not be the best idea I’ve ever had. Linda, however, with a malevolent gleam in her eye, said “If he wants to let him’.

So, with the imprimatur of the most beautiful creature in the vicinity, off I went resplendent in my water soaked nakedness on a knights quest to secure alcohol.

Now I have to say that apart from being aware of walking through a group of fully clothed mainly female people I didn’t give it a second thought. I returned to the warm and bubbly world of the spa, via the same route, with a fresh bottles of joyous elixer. It was only later that Janet gleefully told me of the consternation and squirming that had greeted my spartan journey.

She then told me of the comment that went into local urban mythology.
‘It was all pink and wrinkly’ one of the ladies offered.

About a week later Janet acquired two kittens.

She named them ‘Pink’ and ‘Wrinkly’.

My penis, in a somewhat imperfect manifestation, was now immortal. Well at least as long as the cats lived and they do have nine lives!