“We are but a moment’s sunlight fading in the grass …” I was kneeling on the floor next to the big radio, weaving to the music. It was late afternoon. We had drunk perhaps foulest concoction ever, boiled dope tea, never to do so again. But the stoned-ness, ah, the stoned-ness. The extent to which one was stoned, the way in which one knew oneself to be utterly, thoroughly, completely stoned, washed over me in that special dope way, a feeling of both sinking and rising at the same time, much as a feather might float this way and that upon the air. The Youngbloods came to that line, and the words like a liquid, I swear, spread through the deepest recesses of my soul; their truth felt like this phrase must be from God. Ecstatic, that’s what I was, for there it was, The Key To Life. The essence, the distilled meaning—and oh, we were such Meaning junkies—and never satisfied til everyone in the room “got it” too. I recall, though, keeping this private (probably because I could neither stand nor speak) and the main thing to know is, this was pleasure.
This was pleasure to the nth degree. Pretty soon we all came down enough to get hungry and started cooking one of those fabulous spaghetti recipes that were manna, that were a second round of ecstasy in themselves. All the qualities of a good spaghetti sauce brought to a dope peak. If you had brownies for dessert, you had Nirvana in Berkeley. For a little while.
The phrase had no magic, of course, the next day. Life was like that. No problem. Smoke more dope. Nothing like this had ever happened before; we had no idea of how things were supposed to go, which shone a certain ontological blessing on us all.
Thanks, Zo, for helping us remember, we who were there! ;)
You can make the mountains ring or make the angels cry.
When I was stoned, which was as often as possible then, it was always “Ridgetop” I wanted to hear. “Between blue jays and hoot owls, I’ve got twenty-four hour singing sky.” I never wanted to come down from that ridgetop. I believed in it.