No one would believe my story. And yet it would bore
pretty much anyone to tears. My story, it ain’t no good.
A story can come in many sizes and a good one will work on
multiple levels, they say. The same could be said of the icons of
today's blockbuster cinema: Superman, Spiderman, Naruto, Wolverine,
Magneto, the Avatar, Captain Underpants (he IS a cinematic superhero,
right? I just ran into a 5 year old sporting an under-sized t-shirt with this
unlucky official moniker), Jack Black, Captain Jack Sparrow, Cap’n Crunch,
Peter Pan, etc. “I was born in the Summer of Love,” I say, just to throw
people off. I mean, look at me, do I look like the son of hippies (I certainly am
not)?? And then I wear a grimace for the rest of the day. What happened to
all of the love, I mumble intermittently from, I dunno, 4:00 to 11:00 pm
(the latter couple of hours I mumble somewhat drowsily until later:
“I wasburn in a Smermer of Loovthe!” I shout somewhere on Haight
Street, knowing that most people confuse this summer (not my mumbles,
necessarily) with 1969, the summer the twins were born (my little brothers),
and the summer those men landed on the moon (or else the year that Stanley
Kubrick was an unusually prolific, not to mention quite stealthy director).
Reality? Most people don’t get 1969 confused with 1967. On any level. Um.
Perhaps on some level, almost everyone (of a certain age) gets 1969 confused
with 1967. But what of 1968, 1971, 1975, or even 1979....1973? Presently,
I’m either depressingly or at least toyingly toodling with the distance between
the present and that grand demarcation: the Summer of Love. Now let’s all
poke some fun at glaring half-centuries which ogle back at me like oversized
bobble-heads (aren't they all?). And above those blurred bobs – in a precisely
delineated neon yellow – flashes the appropriate word, one we’d take on
decades later: “D’uh.” So did folks living in the Summer of Love realize that
they were participants in the Summer of Love? Or did that realization arrive
years later as a posthumous (so-to-speak) appellative? And how subsequent,
if so? This I am pretty certain is a fact that I should know, but, my memory.
And, on a related note, as luck would have it, I’ve already lost all interest.
Except in how it might pertain to me, as usual. You know, that
particularly easy-going plump babe was born the second Thursday
of June; during what (in towns, such as the one in which I was
born), lovingly (or laughingly) is called the morning rush hour (actually
two fantastical l-words of my own bias, because most citizens hereof had
never even been anywhere else in the world (another fantasy/bias, if you’ll
allow), when it comes to the rush of an hour, to even realize there can be
a difference. I was such an easy birth, too, just ask my mother, (who
definitely knows from worse). That’d be me, born as I was in none other
than THE summer of love, a summer which will never again be half a
century in distance from anywhere else in the world (be that anywhere:
Vesta, Arkansas; Kyoto, Japan; Skopje, Macedonia; or either of the multi-
tudinous but each unique canals of Venice, Amsterdam or St. Petersburg).
