"Turn on, tune in, drop out"
- Timothy Leary, 1966
I suppose it was inevitable that sex, drugs, the sixties drug culture and drug music had to be mentioned somewhere in this process. Given a person with my dispositions and confessed background they seem almost mandatory.
My experience with any of those things other than the music was limited at most. Let's just say that the statute of limitations ran decades ago on any crimes of indulgence I might have committed and that I have tried to make personal amends to any individuals whose trust or personalities I might have violated. Up to the point that finally I partook of those forbidden fruits, however, their allure was ever present.
How could any young person not find appealing the suggestion that enlightenment and understanding could be obtained at the mere cost of a pill or a puff of smoke? Where could the harm be found in the comfort and fulfillment granted by the passionate embrace of another person who deems you a worthy candidate of her affections? Maybe that Bible they told me about in Sunday School banned adultery, but I wasn't married. If a person kept his consumption of mood and conscious altering substances under control, where did the Bible condemn those things?
Still I had some nagging sense that both were somehow wrong. Worse than that, I dreaded the disappointment my father would suffer when I eventually got caught. (I always got caught. I did not know then how fortunate I was to get caught. I just always did.)
While the youth of America frolicked all the way from The Summer of Love to the gruesome murder at Altamont, I suffered in a hippie hell of my own creation. Because I kept listening to the music and watching the movies and reading the books, I wanted to participate in all the indulgences those genres romanticized and glorified. At the same time something inside me held me back. I would like to think my reluctance was due to some virtue, but the real restraining power was nothing less than fear. Fear that I'd get caught. Fear that my father would be disgraced or humiliated. Fear that I'd go to hell. Fear of whatever other unknowns were out there. I was paralyzed by fear. Stuck in limbo wanting to tune into whatever felt good, doing it, and dropping out of the guilt associated with all those feelings.
It was at this point in my life that the vague, powerless message I heard at my church became almost less than useless to me. By this time my family had moved to a different congregation; one that at least had the good sense to teach that there were consequences to one's actions. If they ever explained how to deal with the guilty feelings associated with my past actions or how to get help avoiding the same mistakes again in the future, I never heard it. All I heard was "Guilty!"
In an environment like that I suppose it was inevitable that I eventually would give in to my baser desires. Absence might make the heart grow fonder, but abstinence only made me want all the more the things I could not have that others were enjoying.
My stint of unbridled self-indulgence was longer than it was deep, but it evntually was as thorough as I was able to make it. After a few years I thought I understood Solomon's words, "all is vanity." Unfortunately my dilemma was magnified. At that point I suffered the vanity and frustration of the emptiness my egocentricity necessarily generated but I also had accumulated a number of unhealthy habits along the way.
Keith Moon, who likely was the greatest drummer of the rock 'n roll era, already had gotten Peter Townshend's wish: "I hope I die before I grow old." Keith's body aged well beyond his years because he never found a way off of that same roller coaster. I was looking for a soft spot of ground where I might land relatively unharmed but I still could not muster the guts to jump out of the car.
Vanity, vanity. All is vanity. There is nothing new under the sun.
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