Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Day of the Fredericton Dead

After eating the bands, the tourists, the vendors and the members of the Harvest Jazz & Blues Festival staff, the Fredericton Dead gathered at Officers Square to eat the Beaver. Fortunately, the Lord, himself, was perched on a podium higher than the Dead could reach.

Later that night, the Dead began to evaporate except Bob, who wanted a bratwurst before returning to the Fredericton Deadzone.

A car ran over him and now he's part of King Street ... right beside a bratwurst stand.

Saturday, September 16, 2006

The Night of the Fredericton Dead, or How I Came to Leave My Cable and Embrace the Music

Fredericton is the City of the Dead. Just walk around the downtown core on just about any Friday or Saturday night and the absence of party with shock you. It’s because the population is dead. When you move to Fredericton welcoming committees come to your door, not with boxes of cool stuff, but with toe tags and coupons for cemetery plots. But it’s kind of nice. It makes for peace and quiet. Tranquil nights of motionless existence. You get used to it. Each day, the boredom with any thing relates to conscious living grows like a giant maggot in some deep cavern where we store our interest in life.

You become one of the Fredericton Dead. Happily buried in a chair in front of 99 station cable crunching chips and sucking beer. It’s a good way to express your non-beingness.

But then, for one week every September, the solitude is broken and the streets of Fredericton’s downtown core raise the Fredericton Dead with saxophones, guitars, pianos, mouth organs, trumpets, drums, spoons, electric keyboards, and voices in every shape of blues and jazz, and then some.

The music and the mystical presence of tents and stands draws the Fredericton Dead into the open and into the streets and into the sheer joy of music for the sake of music.

They call it the Harvest Jazz & Blues Festival. It’s been waking the Fredericton Dead for fifteen years now, and drawing jazz and blues fans from as far away as Asia.

It started with Elvis himself rising from the beyond and calling to the Fredericton Dead to gather and enjoy.

They wondered away from Elvis, roaming the streets, looking for music, amazed at existence beyond cable.

They wandered into tents churning out jazz and blues and crashed into stands selling sausages and fries.

Even the bands playing rock drew the Dead to their tent steps.

The Dead were awake and beginning to feel the jive and the jitter. The crowds of cable-soul-less gathered and stared. Did they want to eat the musicians? Taste them for high speed bandwidth and channel selection?

The crowds of the Dead grew and converged on the rock group. Perhaps they wanted sausage.

A Fire Dancer from the depths of blues called the Dead to her.

The Dead are drawn to light.

A strange man from a strange place set up a strange stage on the sidewalk right where the unsuspecting Dead were struggling with decisions like: Should I walk left? Should I walk right?

The Dead decided to stay … and worship the strange man from a strange place.

Lord Beaverbrook (left, just above the glare of light) looked on with approval and may even have shaken a foot to a lively guitar riff.

A giant can of beer tried to take over the city, but was hastily pierced and its contents consumed by the Thirsty Dead.

And then, of course, they set fire to the city and put lights in the trees.

Next: The Return of the Fredericton Dead

Friday, September 15, 2006

Music in the Streets ... and Everywhere

Every September, Fredericton wakes up and the downtown core of the city looks almost like a capital city with a population that didn't go into hibernation sometime in the 50s.

This week is that week.

It's the 15th Harvest Jazz & Blues Festival with a huge lineup that includes Jeff Healey, Oliver Jones and The Love Dogs.

Suzie Vinnick and Rick Fines played to a packed sidewalk in front of the King's Place mall earlier today.

And, yep, it was a free concert. They're all over the city.

Back tomorrow with some pics of the nighttime celebrations.

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Iverson

I first met Iverson at a flea market over a decade ago. My marriage had just broken up and I was on the move again … with over 30 boxes of books that I’d packed moved and unpacked every year or two for what seemed like most of my life. It was time to unload.

Besides, I needed the money.

So I set up a stand at the Fredericton Flea Market and started selling quality books at ridiculously low prices. Turns out, some may have been collector’s items. Oh well, sometimes life is poop smoke.

I had a couple of boxes of art books for sale and on the first day, in the first hour, a lean young man and his mother came to my stand and started rummaging through them. The mother mentioned that her son was an artist and his name was Iverson and, though I’d never heard of him before that day, from that day on, I started hearing a lot about him, especially doing neat things like creating a painting in public in the basement of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery. He even took time out to talk to the kids and answer their questions about art.

His paintings are expressionist, dark, and sometimes very very big. One of those very very big ones was in the stairwell (a very very wide stairwell) in the Incutech Building on the UNB Campus when I was working for a start-up IT company. It was on a landing at the top of the stairwell sitting on the floor leaning against the wall. Sometimes it was face to the wall, sometimes facing out, sometimes leaning against the other wall.

It was a dark painting, and many of the people who passed by it didn’t like it. And nobody seemed to know what to do with it. It was sort of like having art around, and sort of like having luggage around when you’re staying home. A couple of years later, the company I worked for moved to a new building. By then, the Iverson painting was in the stairwell on the second floor. I guess the good thing about that was that more people would see it.

Iverson died recently. He was in his early forties. He had brain cancer. At least a dozen people mentioned to me that he’d died. Considering that I’m not really a member of the local art scene, this would indicate that a lot of people were telling a lot of people about his death.

His passing was something important, a shift in people’s lives, a noticeable hole in the fabric of things. And rightly so, he was a nice guy.

Ingrid Mueller, The Princess of Art, herself, paid tribute to Iverson at her gallery Art + Concepts. She even invited his friends and family along to talk about him and what he meant to their lives. That was last Thursday. It was a packed gallery. More packed than I’ve ever seen any gallery. Here’s what it looked like …

And this …

The Princess of Art was there …

And Marie and a smiling friend were there …

And Sophie was there …

And Iverson’s paintings were there …

And I’m pretty damn sure Iverson dropped down for a visit at some point. Just to be with friends.

Confessions of an Early 1970s Hippie – Freak Outs and Something Magical

One night we ate these cute little button things from Mexico and, after puking our guts up, we turned into coyotes. We grabbed the remaining buttons and set off to spread coyote-ism around the world. This is where we ended up:

They have another name for it now, but back then we just called it The Women’s Residence. It was Halloween. And we were coyotes. The inside of the building was dressed in webs, streamers and cardboard cutouts of skeletons, ghosts and witches. We felt right at home. And there were women everywhere. At least, we hoped they were women. They were in costume. One of them was dressed as a belly dancer. She was definitely a woman. I think her name was Bob. I asked her if she would like to become a coyote. She said she’d been waiting all her life to be a coyote. I gave her a button and spent the next hour watching an Exit sign transform. I’m not sure how that happened.

BIFF’S WARNING TO ANYONE CONTEMPLATING THE DANGEROUS ACT OF EATING BUTTONS: Avoid exit signs.

This building was called the Drop In Center.

It had hippie-like signs and drawings all around it that were drawn by bona fide hippie artists (i.e., anyone with long hair and crayons who referred to everybody as “Man”). It was where you went when you were freaking out on acid that was either too strong or too fucked up. A friend of mine spent three days curled up behind a bush in a park downtown. We had to visit him each day to change his pants and clean him up. He never made it to the Drop In Center.

I spent an evening there once talking a young coyote down from a bum trip on Green Monster, a particularly powerful acid. I was doing it myself at the time. I distracted her from her fixation on death and dismemberment by writing a poem about the acid and reciting each letter to her as I wrote it … a difficult operation considering that the letters kept trying to drip off the paper as I was writing them. It took the better part of the night to write the poem. I can’t recall if it was published in the Bruns, but this is what Green Monster was like:

Green Monster

Paling minds
And sunshine
And lemon rinds
Are here

I touch my face
My foamy head
Is here
My body sinks
Into the slosh of the room
That cannot be

Did I mention that my poetry is why I write prose?

This is the elevator in Head Hall.

I lived off-campus, on York Street with three hippie business students, a flat full of transients, Free Wheelin’ Franklin the motorcycle thief, and Miska the witch. A one point, we had a skull in the basement overseeing our homemade wine. I never saw the skull, but I’m certain that none of our wine ever went missing.

We walked along the train tracks to get to the campus because back then Canada had trains in that time before Brian Mulroney set out to dismantle the only symbol of a united country that ever existed in Canada. When we reached the campus, we went into the doors at the bottom of Head Hall and took the elevator up. It was an old creaky metal box that shook disturbingly as it climbed floors. We were always in fear of it. We were certain that it was possessed and that it would one day take us to the top of the building and then plummet with satanic speed.

But that never happened. What did happen was … it stopped. One morning between floors, it just stopped. My roommate and I were still half in the bag from experiments in alternate realities the night before and this didn’t seem like an appropriate time to be trapped between two floors in a satanic metal box. But the neon light in the ceiling was interesting. It was very interesting. Light seemed to emanate from it like bright smoke. We followed the bright smoke to the walls and floors and the certificate of elevator wellness posted on one wall. We remarked on the vibrancy of the bright smoke and its remarkable ability to shed light.

About forty-five minutes passed and the elevator started up again for no apparent reason right when we realized that we were both still in our pajamas. We thought about this until the elevator reached our floor and decided to go to classes anyway and just keep our winter coats on.

I don’t think anybody in any of my classes realized that I was wearing pajamas. And I'm not sure if that's a comment about them, or about me.

And now for something completely magical. This is the hill in front of Mem Hall.

See the manhole cover jutting out from the hill about the center of the photo? In the early 70s that was a spring. The coldest, clearest, best-tasting water in the world bubbled up from it. We used to go there when the ground wasn’t covered in snow and drink the water. It was beautiful. It was magical. It came from the earth and it was free. It was just there for the taking by those who wanted it.

Drinking that water from the ground below Mem Hall was probably the best thing that happened to me in the early 70s. Sometimes I dream of cold water flowing all over my body while it regenerates my spirit and body and I know where that water is coming from.

Have a good year. Make lots of notes for no other reason than they are proof you were in class. And … you may run out of beer and need to sell them to someone who wasn’t in class. Life is balance.

Monday, September 11, 2006

Confessions of an Early 1970s Hippie – Places to Sleep at UNB

The 70s were a great time to change the world, seek alternate realities, question authority, protest the American War, indulge in free love, hitchhike to God-knows-where, and talk like Bill and Ted, “Hey, man, pass dat sucker over here, man.”

They were also a good time to sleep at UNB.

This is the Lord Beaverbrook Room in the Harriet Irving Library. The chairs are huge and leather and there’re tables in front of them at just the right height to make great footstools.

It was one of my favorite places in the world to sleep. The backs of those chairs were a safe little barrier between me and the outside world. The leather and the books muffled the occasional snore. It was a quiet place, more so than other rooms in the library. I think it had something to do with the big slab-like tables, the red leather and brass finishing, the tall dark bookshelves with books from another area.

I had a strange dream one day. In the dream, I was curled up in one of those tall chairs in a twilight world somewhere between here and there when I heard someone muttering quietly. I opened my eyes and saw a man bent over the table my feet were resting on looking at the bottom row of shelves. He seemed agitated. He looked around at me. It was the Beaver himself. He told me to get my feet off his table and to turn to page 80 in my Soc textbook and read about the hobo.

I woke up in a cold sweat. But I had this overwhelming sense of a benign presence chuckling in the ethereal distance behind the books and the passage of time.

Or maybe it was just Bob messing with my head.

This was another great place to sleep.

This is an art gallery in Memorial Hall. It was an art gallery back in the 70s as well, but back then it had big windows and lots of big easy chairs and coffee tables and soft classical music. The paintings were on the walls between the windows. It was a relaxing place. There was a piano. Nobody ever played it that I can remember, but it lent the place an extra dimension of culture. Sometimes, aspiring actors would perform impromptu plays just for the hell of it. One day a couple of guys – I think their names were Bob – dressed up like tramps and performed Waiting for Godot. They even brought along others to play the bit roles. There were no announcements, invitations, or warnings. They did it just for the hell of it and went about the rest of their lives when it was done.

There was a lot of that in the early 70s.

More recently, this was the scene of a haunting: It Was A Dark and Stormy Night in Mem Hall and In the Dread of the Night.

This is a study desk at the end of a line of shelves in the library.

These haven’t changed an atom since the 70s. Oh, maybe a few more dried boogers under the metal slab desktops, a few more lines of graffiti, a few more puzzled thoughts floating in the air. But I tried one of these the other day and it was just like 1971.

However, these were never my first choice for uninterrupted sleeping. There were always people looking for books, and maybe it had something to do with the closeness of the place, but they always seemed to breath loud enough to wake me up. Plus, my friends could find me easily here and talk me into straying away from a good sleep and into a trip to the SUB which always turned into a party.

But they said it was a great place to meet women. And sometimes, you could even get in a few z’s.

This was another good place to sleep.

This is the chapel in the Old Arts Building. I could stretch right out and get some great power sleeps here, and nobody ever disturbed me. I don’t think many people know about this place. The day before I graduated, I carved my name into the wood along with those before me. Unfortunately, in the thirty-two years since, I haven’t been able to figure out where I carved my name.

Years later, I was married in this chapel. It was at least a hundred degrees and everybody was sweating so hard that when I kissed my new wife, I sweated all over her face. On the video, it looks like she’s wiping my kiss off her mouth. It was much like the ensuing marriage. She left me for a man named Bob.

Next: Freak outs and something magical

Friday, September 08, 2006

Confessions of an Early 1970s Hippie – Poems, Love Unrequited, and Losing a Flat of Beer

I once had one of those eye contact moments with a woman in this hall.

She was on the other side of the door and I saw her through the door window. I wrote a poem about her and it was published in the Bruns under my poet name, thomas. It went something like this:

a second’s regret

I saw her through a window
just a fleeting glimpse
of something that might have been
had I paused a moment longer
at least as long as something
pulsing strong inside me
long enough to pause and glance
and see her face again

I never saw her again.

But that’s not why I don’t write poetry anymore.

This is the Document Delivery Room in the Harriet Irving Library.

In 1971 it was a study hall with tables and armchairs and an almost cosmopolitan view of the outside world through the windows at night. I have no idea what that means. Just a feeling I had then.

One night, I was studying (yes, I did find the occasional moment to study in 1971) when a beautiful woman in a blue sweater (I think her name was Bob) sat down across the room from me and I wrote this poem about her:

the girl in the blue sweater

the girl in the blue sweater
studying across from me
is beautiful

I think I’ll write a poem about her

….

a while ago I started to write
about the girl across from me

I stared and searched for details
and pulled them apart
like petals from a flower

leaving nothing to write about

if the Brunswickan should publish
this “almost” poem
and if the girl in the blue sweater
should read it, I hope
she reads just the first three lines

I never saw her again either.

And yes, the Bruns published the poem.

This is the door to the office of the Bruns.

They used to publish my poems. One of my roommates told me that getting my poems published in the Bruns meant nothing because they would publish anything, so we bet a flat of beer on whether or not they would publish the worst thing I’d ever written. That turned out to be a one-act play I’d written in high school. I submitted it knowing more than I knew the color of my eyes after a three-day excursion into Purple Microdot Land (Hint: red) that they wouldn’t publish it. There was no way they would publish it. Nobody would publish that piece of crap.

The Bruns did. It filled a whole page. It cost me a flat of beer. I stopped sending poems to the Bruns.

About twenty years later, I came across the play while I was doing some research. I should have submitted something else. The play wasn’t all that bad. But on the bright side, my roommate shared the beer with the rest of us, so it turned out OK in end.

Last year (or was it this year?) I put together a collection of the poems I wrote in the 70s and turned them into an ebook that you can download free by clicking here. You’ll get to see firsthand why I write prose.

I always thought I would write a poem about the daycare that used to be here:

It was in a long old shack left over from the flood of veteran students that poured in after WW 2. In the fall and spring, when the weather was mild and the windows were open in Tilley Hall, we could hear the sound of children laughing in the playground in front of the daycare building throughout our classes. It was almost like a reminder of why we were there. Too bad they tore it down.

Someday when I’m not concerned about lowering the world-Quality-Rating-Of-Books-And-Writing-And-Stuff, I just might write that poem about the daycare in the middle of the UNB campus. Maybe an orange penguin will stop by to inspire me.

Next: Places to sleep at UNB (coming Monday, September 11)

Thursday, September 07, 2006

Confessions of an Early 1970s Hippie – The Biggest Party Ever

This is McLeod House. In 1971 it was called the Singles’ Co-op.

It was also called Speed City and/or VD City. I called it Second Home ‘cause, though I lived on York Street with a guitar I didn’t know how to play and a basement full of homemade wine, the Co-op was the place to party on the weekends. The drunks, acid heads, hippies, draft dodgers, transients, dealers, bootleggers and radicals lived and crashed mostly the third and fifth floors. In 1971, they had the biggest party the campus had ever seen and likely ever would.

We got there about ten. That night, the elevator was run by two tall men wearing turbins. I think their names were Bob. They had dark serious eyes and when they found we were going to the third floor, they asked if we wanted some acid. We smiled widely and said we already had some. It was in us. They asked if we wanted more. “Sure,” we said. “Why not?”

Remember, it was around this time that the vice president of the Co-op was quoted in the Bruns saying “…we have no desire to ban the use of drugs but where there is use, there are sales …” and he asked for “more discreet usage.”

Try that today.

We de-boarded the elevator into air so thick with cigarette and pot smoke that we had to push hard to walk forward, tripping and stumbling over bodies sprawled on the hallway floor. It was Freak City. The Lair of the Long Hairs. In some groups, it was impossible to tell which head belonged to which arm or leg and I swear some people were talking to the backs of other people’s heads and the backs of their heads were listening!

Somehow we found Rob and Steve’s room. They were our friends and bootleggers. We bought a few quarts of beer and Rob showed us the new sound system he’d build from scratch. It pumped out a hundred watts (real watts, deafening watts, teeth-rattling-mind-numbing-bladder-slamming watts). He had speakers set up in his room and the next room pointed towards the door, in effect turning each room in to a speaker and then he cranked it up.

In the hall between the two rooms, Paul – one of the first hippies in Fredericton – shit his pants. He spent hours trying to explain this to the people around him. It was a tough concept. If you ever have cause to listen to a sound system that throws out a genuine 100 watts, ease into it. Or wear a diaper.

Somehow, I ended up with a couple of deserters from the American army who didn’t want to fight in the American War anymore. At this time, it was in Vietnam. I think their names were Bob. One of them kept saying something about shooting their lieutenant and the other one kept telling him to shut up and then spinning off all sorts of jungle wisdom.

One of those jungle tidbits has had an effect on the way I pee for over thirty years.

Bob told me that his sergeant told him to piss quietly in the night when they were on patrols. Bob thought this sounded nuts but somebody had told him to listen to his sergeant if he wanted to stay alive, so he made a point of aiming the stream on a slant down the trunks of trees so that it barely made a muffled trickling.

One night when he was practicing the art of Stealth Pissing, he noticed movement a few yards ahead of him. He froze, yellow falls and all, and picked out the silhouette of a Viet Cong soldier moving through the jungle.

He swore that if he’d been practicing his pre-war pissing style, he probably would have had his dick shot off. Ever since hearing Bob’s story, I pee with the aplomb of a firefly while Viet Cong storm troopers lurk just outside my bathroom window.

Sometime around the middle of the night, we walked, staggered, crawled, rolled, and stumbled into the elevator where the two Bobs in turbins were still operating the elevator and handing out acid and they read our minds: “Fifth floor?”

The fifth floor was just like the third floor … wall-to-wall freaks, smoke-filled air, and music exploding out of every room. We passed out some of the quarts of beer we’d bought downstairs and found ourselves holding other stimulants. Everyone was hugging and talking and some were even dancing with others or by themselves. One group was trying to build a human pyramid to the ceiling. I sat down beside a beautiful blonde lady named Bob. Unfortunately, Bob actually turned out to be Bob, and he started telling me stories about the early days of the Singles’ Co-op … like, the year before or something like that.

Seems a biker spent the entire winter building a chopper on the top floor. When spring arrived, he tried to take it downstairs to drive it, but it wouldn’t fit into the elevator. He had to tear it apart in the hall and put it back together again downstairs. He got on his chopper and drove off and was never seen again.

Another guy (probably Bob who was confused about what he did to his lieutenant in Vietnam) went over the top one day just before exams and piled everybody’s books onto the floor and shot them to death with a machine gun.

Toward morning – early morning, like, when the sun is just starting to come up – most people were asleep, wound around each other, some having virtually motionless sex and others whispering and giggling. Only a few stereos were still on, playing mostly folk music. My friends found me still listening to Bob, who was telling me about the guy on the third floor who shot a hole in the wall with a shotgun trying to kill a mandala poster that was attacking him.

As I lopped away, I noticed that he was still telling stories and didn’t seem to notice that everybody around him was either asleep or doing things of a sexual nature under the cover of coats and sleeping bags.

The elevator was empty and we were faced with the prospect of having to figure out which buttons to use to make it function … if only those damn buttons would stop floating all over all walls and floor and ceiling, and I think one of them tried to roost on my forehead. Somehow, we got the elevator working enough to get us to the bottom floor where we wandered out into a world where the sun was just beginning to peak over the horizon and we made our way to a wooded area behind the Co-op.

We sat in a circle in a small clearing in the woods and watched bugs flying around us and talked about life, the universe and everything in it. Eventually, the sun was fully up and somewhere right over our heads meaning that it was probably around noon. Somehow, we’d all kind of worked our way into bushes and the boles of trees and we blended right into the woods. As we stood to go home, shaking pine needles, leaves and other forest stuff from our clothing, we had this strange feeling of being born out of the woods.

Or maybe it was just the party.

Next: Poems, love unrequited, and losing a flat of beer.

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Confessions of an Early 1970s Hippie – Philosophy and Special Ed

This is where I had Philosophy 1000.

We had three or four profs for this course, each of them teaching a different part of Philosophy, you know, mind/body problem, religion, how to dig a square hole with a round shovel. The class was divided into serious students, losers who thought that Philosophy would somehow answer all those questions they started asking in high school, and the hippie element, who were speeding up the expansion of their awareness through a finely tuned mixture of pharmaceuticals and higher education.

I was in one of those groups. We sat to the right of the picture, about midway between the front of the class and the back. It was a morning class and we were generally feeling the effects of the previous night’s intellectual explorations.

One of the profs drove us nuts.

He looked like Vincent Price. He talked like Vincent Price. He acted like Vincent Price. Vincent Price as, of course, you already know, was a horror movie actor who played the diabolical doctor or the gentle-mannered fool who, through betrayal, rejection or chemical stimulants, became just plain Joe Diabolical. But even in his most horrifying film role, Vincent Price could not have been as insidiously diabolical as this particular Philosophy professor.

It was rumored that he delved in opium, seeking enlightenment and a form of free thought and erasing of the slate. It was just a rumor, of course, but it might have explained the extraordinary manner in which he conducted his lectures.

You see … we were allowed to smoke in class back then. And we did. Even the profs. And his one did. Or … at least … so he insinuated. He smoked cigarettes from a purplish pack, long cigarettes, long enough that you might use them to point out a truth hidden between molecules of air. At the beginning of his class, he took one out of the package, slowly, while he lectured about what is was to be human and how we came to know things. Then, he broke a match away from his matchbook and began to strike it with the cigarette hanging from his mouth. But then he would have a sudden flow of intellectual inspiration, pull the cigarette from his lips and wave his hands around while he expounded upon his point.

Then he’d put the cigarette back into his mouth and begin to strike the match. And have another thought. And again, his arms were waving and gesturing and poking at the air with an unlit cigarette.

All of us in my group stared at him, at the cigarette, at the match, at the matchbook, and wondered when the hell he was going to light that goddam cigarette as he made point after point every time the match came within a plausible argument of lighting. By the time the class was winding down, we were sweating with antici …. pation. And then, just before he finished the class and we started to gather our books and pens, he lit the match and put it to his cigarette and smoke curled into the air and we all thought as one: There is a God.

And talk about crazy people. The door at the end of this hall is the tunnel leading from the basement of the library to the Psych Building (a term of endearment we used for Keirstead Hall).

Now, first of all … we need to cover this bit of ground. We need to look at the basement of the library back then. At the time, benches lined this area instead of vending machines. There were a couple of machines, but we used to kick the shit out of them when we put money in and got nothing back. It was an out-of-the-way place to talk, veg out, and sleep. It was a mellow place.

This is where a few others and myself taught Rolling 1000. We considered this normal enough at the time that we called the advanced course Deviant Rolling 2000, which involved creative use of corn husks and even some cool things you could do with a straw and a corn cob.

But then, there was that damn tunnel leading into the Psych Building. We used to hear strange noises coming from it, demonic laughter, terrible grunts and roars, hideous moans and long drawn-out sounds that surely couldn’t have come from anything remotely human. Classes sometimes stopped in mid-roll, conversations paused in mid-sentence, snores silenced in mid-glottal, when the awful noises started. No one dared open the door. No one moved. Everyone stared at the door and waited for the sound to stop.

Sometimes the door opened and strange beings disguised as students, though with dark eyes and malevolent smiles, emerged from the tunnel and passed through our cozy little basement world. We tried not to stare at them. We didn’t dare utter a word for fear we’d come under their hellish scrutiny. When they’d passed through, things returned to normal. Conversation continued, rolling rolled on, and snores bellowed. But, I swear, when I took the picture of this tunnel door all these years later, a chill raced up my back and those small hairs at the nape of my neck that are so tuned into the other-worldly twitched at the level of cellular memory.

Just around the corner there was a study hall. Here’s what it looks like now:

It was much friendlier looking in the 70s. There was a place to check out archived documents and other stuff that certain evil profs assigned as reading material even though there was only one copy and maybe about fifty thousand students who needed to read it. Somehow, we managed. But that’s another world … the study hall on the other side of those doors just past the water fountain, was one of my favorite places. It was away from everything. The librarians only told us to keep the noise down twice that I remember, and I think both occasions had something to do with the fragrance that seeped under the doors and into the halls and down to where the librarians were passing out one copy of a document simultaneously to fifty thousand students.

Now we fast forward to a later year when I was an honors English student and still sneaking down from my top floor honors English carrel to study in surroundings that nurtured my expansion of thought in days gone by. In other words, it was years after the last time I’d fucked my mind up on acid.

But one night, I was sitting in one of the downstairs carrels getting ready for a seminar class I was giving on something really tedious when suddenly I wasn’t sitting in the carrel anymore. I was circling the carrel about twenty feet away from it, inscribing a circle around where I was sitting, and I was watching myself study as I circled around myself. I watched my eyes roam the pages of the book and noticed the way the muscles of my hand shook like tiny jelly sausages as I took notes. I watched individual hairs growing on my eyebrows.

This went on for nearly an hour before I decided it was time for a beer. This is what we used to fondly refer to as a flashback, a free trip stored somewhere in the neurons and axons and slimey stuff of the brain ready to break out into a full-fledged acid trip like an old girlfriend dropping by to tell your wife how well you used to fuck. It was the last time I ever had one of those.

On the other hand, the years and years and years I’ve worked in the IT industry may have all been a flashback. That would explain a lot of things.

Next: The Biggest Party Ever

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Confessions of an Early 1970s Hippie - Living in the SUB

I wasn’t always as normal as I am today. What I am today, I arrived at through a twisted series of paths in the Valley of Trial & Error, most of them Error. Through an alternate reality experiment in 1969, I erased most of what I recalled of The Journey So Far, and rendered what was left irrelevant, making 1970 effectively the year I stepped onto the first path.

It was an exciting time to be stepping onto paths. We were just emerging from the complacency and scholastic tyranny of the 50s and it was dawning on people, especially young people, that the world might become a better place if we all just loved each other a little more. There was even a feeling that if we all joined together we could create a collective voice that would change the world. We all wanted to be different, so we all dressed the same, spoke the same, and listened to the same music. But hell, it was different than what our parents expected of us and they hated it, so for us, it was different. And it really fucked up the rednecks.

The American War was farther away than it is today but people seemed to object to it on a grander scale, especially in America. There were a few objections in Canada, but the loudest were right here in Fredericton, right here on the campus of the University of New Brunswick. That made for some colorful times on the grounds of the old Red and Black, but that was just before 1970. I arrived when things were slightly calmer, when the noise and babble of the 60s were beginning to translate into a shift in perspective for everybody, around the time when drug dealers were less into turning on the world and more into making money and all the rock stars were dying from the times a changin’.

My student ID for the 1970-71 year was stolen by orange penguins one night, but I did manage to save my ID for the following year. Here’s what it looked like:

Yep, I was a pot smokin’ bead-wearin’ long-haired dirty hippie, but it was the 70s, I was young, and orange penguins were stealing my life.

It all started here, in the SUB. It was different then.

It was a great place to be cool in the evenings. The raised stage wasn’t there. What was there … was a completely separate fast food area. An entire kitchen right before the stage. In back of the restaurant was pretty much the same as today, big, impersonal.

But the fast food section was where it was all happening. It was small, compact, tight and personal. They played music … the Beatles, the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin … and most of these people were still alive then and still putting out albums (not as frequently as they are today, though, all these years after they went to Jesus).

In the evenings, most were tripping on acid. There was this sense, then, that acid was a fast path to expanded consciousness and a means to wipe the psychic slate clean and start all over again. And again. And again. Like …

Like, we were all doing California Sunshine one night and one of my roommates went into his room and we didn’t see him for nearly two hours, but we could hear him grunting and giggling and laughing and talking to himself and saying things like, “Yeah, that’s it! That’s it!” and a lot of other stuff we couldn’t understand. He finally came out, in this pajamas, all excited and almost jumping up and down and saying, “Come on and see it! Come on and see it!” and we went into his room and looked around and there was nothing to see. He pointed at the bed. There was nothing on it. He pulled down the blankets with this big smile that wound itself twice around his head and pointed right at the center of the bed and said, “I did that!”

Right in the center of the white sheets was a little brown ball of shit.

Some trips were less enlightening.

But nobody shit in the seats at the fast food section of the SUB. We just talked and stared and talked and stared and listened to the music. The ones who were mostly drunk played cards. The game of the day was Hearts. I think I saw somebody studying there one evening, but I can’t be sure. It might have been in the day. A lot of people read books there in the day. In the light.

In the daytime, the party was upstairs … in the SUB lobby.

There were chairs (in fact, the ones in this picture look exactly like those chairs, expect they were pastel green in 1970), but mostly we sat or lay on the floor, usually slumped in groups up against the walls smoking cigarettes. Sometimes the smell of pot mingled with the smell of patchouli.

The north entrance to the SUB was really fucked up with the protesters and the left wingers.

They could really get in your face and mess up your head for people who wanted to save the world and make it a better place. One of them – I think his name was Bob – stuck his face into mine one day and said that he wanted to kill Nixon and kill Nixon’s family and kill Nixon’s dog and kill Nixon’s friends and kill anybody who didn’t want to kill Nixon. I threw my binder and books in his face and ran upstairs to the sanity of the people bunched up in corners and smoking cigarettes and pot.

But the north entrance to the SUB was usually a cool place with serious looking people who were flunking all their courses because they spend all their time passing out FUCK THE ADMINISTRATION posters and yelling “STOP THE WAR!” People with guitars and beards sang folk and anti-war songs on the stairway.

When the weather was OK, people gathered in the green area below the SUB.

Lots of people did their first trips here. I know a few women who lost their virginity here (a couple in broad daylight), and anybody with a guitar, whether they knew how to play it or not, was out here strumming chords and just being cool. These were times when anybody could be cool if they wanted. Sometimes bands would play in this area. I don’t know where they got the electricity, but they drew some pretty big crowds.

This place was called the Drop In Center.

It was where you went when your acid trip was getting out of hand and you were thinking about walking off a roof or hiding under the bed because a thousand police were on the other side of your door and hiding under your bed and your desk and in the bottom of your coffee cup.

When things got that fucked up, you went to the Drop In Center and really cool people with long hair and beads and round eye glasses said cool things to you and made you feel like you were having a good time and that the world was a nice place to be in 1970.

The only time I really needed to go to the Drop In Center (though later I went there to help someone on a bum trip), it was too far away and it was too cold out and I was too out of it by the time I realized that things were just a tad out of hand. It was Christmas and all my roommates had left for the holidays and I was home alone. I found what looked like a hit of Clear Light acid in my desk. I figured probably not, but I swallowed it anyway. During the ensuring trip, I confirmed Heidegger’s theories, hand an interesting conversation with Christ, solved the mind-body problem, and decided that I didn’t want tot do acid anymore.

The next morning as I was drifting slowly back to earth, I wrote this poem (which was published a couple of times in the Bruns):

thoughts after

yeah, you did it again
took that stuff
so
a few hours of crazy patterns
time
slowed down so that you could almost
step outside yourself and watch yourself
then, speeded up so that everything seemed
rushing past you at crazy angles, people
talking in blurbs, your head
swimming in a whirlpool of sensory
fragments, spinning so fast that
you instinctively grip the arms of your chair, hoping
that after this rush you’ll feel that gentle leveling, that
relieving awareness of normality restoring itself

it levels
you can feel it, almost
like gliding slowly down into the world
back to familiar surroundings that were
there all the time, but different, somehow
you breathe easier now, talk a bit wearily, but
in longer more confident sentences
you know what you’re saying now, you’re
not sidetracked as easily
a flickering cigarette doesn’t distract you now
that same flick that, an hour earlier
would have been a somersaulting ball of flame
not now
you’re leveling
coming down

you can feel it in your gut
that pain is sure now (but hell nothing’s pure)
maybe it’s that pain that makes you think
nagging
your head is still a bit fuzzy, your bowels sore
your eyes ache from the light filtering
through the windows
they’re still a bit big
sensitive
your nerves jangle easily

and you think
what happened?
nothing really, but a couple of times
you nearly lost your mind, nearly
got sucked into that whirlpool
but you knew that before you took it
maybe that’s what you’re trying to think about now
and what you might think about next time
after

Next: Philosophy and Special Ed

Monday, September 04, 2006

Newsletters and Hippies and Books

Just a quick couple of notes today. Author Marilyn Peake's newsletter for this month has an article by some crackpot named Biff about the Maritime Writer's Workshop and Literary Festival. Check it out here.

And tune back here tomorrow and for the rest of the week for Confessions of an Early 1970s Hippie at UNB.

And one last note ... autographed copies of The War Bug are now available at the UNB Bookstore.