RHF wrote:
On Oct 6, 3:41 pm, dave wrote:
Bob Dobbs wrote:
Bill Baka wrote:
I wonder where that country went???
Still looking for it myself.
“ Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later?
Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak
that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very
special time and place to be a part of.

I was there after graduating in 1966 and wow, was it the happening place
or what? In 1969 I moved to L.A. and got a small apartment on Sunset
strip across from the Whiskey a go-go club. So many people on the
sidewalks that the street was full of people trying to get somewhere.
In the middle of that mass of people there was always somebody yelling
"drugs, I got Pot, LSD, and more.". It was a whacked out year.
O.T. but 1969 was a year to remember, even if all you remember was Neil
Armstrong's "One small step for man, one huge leap for mankind.".

Maybe it meant something. Maybe
not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music
or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and
alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bull****, but even
without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think
that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head
in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the
time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe
forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore
half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning
across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean
shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the
Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and
Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other
end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while
I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter
which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high
and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .

1969? You are 110% correct on that.

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay,
then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You
could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that
whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over
the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t
need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in
fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were
riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las
Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see
the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled
back."
-HST

[HST] Hunter S. Thompson -circa- 1972
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_an...g_in_Las_Vegas
.
What strikes me as a joke is that we went to the moon over 40 years ago
and now baby Bush dared to have a vision of landing a man on the moon by
2020. That was bad enough, and we now have a (N-word) president who
wants to cut NASA to the bone and cancel any ideas of another moon mission.
Too bad old man Bush didn't go down with his plane!

Bill Baka