Tag Archives: hippie

Dapper

Dapper: (adj) neat, trim and smart

There’s a huge difference between dressing up a banana and a grapefruit.

Take a moment and think about it.

A banana has lean, straight lines and almost anything you put on it looks rather dapper.

A grapefruit, on the other hand, is round—sporting a circumference—which makes almost anything you place upon it appear to be an overlay.

This was my situation growing up—wanting to be a musical artist and stage personality but having the body type of a beachball.

I wanted to be dapper.

What was that definition, again? “Neat, trim and smart.”

So I immediately eliminated “trim.”

“Neat” only required that everything be well-pressed and fitting.

“Smart” normally is considered to be an intelligence issue, but we’re all mature enough to know that “dressing for success” is not just a slogan.

When I was nineteen years old, traveling around and appearing in coffee houses, I wanted something distinguished to wear. At the time we were emerging from the hippie era, so I yearned to pursue that look and apparel.

May I explain to you, however, that if you want to dress hippie, you can’t be.

Hippy, that is.

There were no clothes my size at all. I tried.

I literally began to hate Ashbury.

So I convinced my young wife—who had never sewn before in her life—to draw up a pattern for pants that I could wear onstage, which had a button-up fly and bell-bottoms.

I can still remember the horror on her face when I finished my request. I tried to make it sound adventuresome and assured her that whatever she came up with would be perfect.

I was wrong.

I don’t know how she came up with the design for the pants—but the waist was too big, the legs too small, and the buttonholes, tiny.

So when I pulled the pants up, the leg holes barely let my feet pass through, the waist hung down as if severely depressed and it took me fifteen minutes to get the buttons to go through the holes.

After I was done, I looked in the full-length mirror.

I resembled a sausage in the midst of being cased.

I still loved them. I decided to wear them to the next coffeehouse.

I managed to get them off and get them back on performance night. But when I walked over to sit down at the piano, my chubby thighs burst the seams of the legs, as I sat there in front of an audience with my white skin protruding through every seam.

I will never forget that I had to wear those pants the rest of the night, covering up my protruding fat thighs with my hands, which is almost impossible to do while still playing the piano.

Due to a shirt that was more or less a huge poncho, I succeeded in coming as close as I possibly could to dapper—mainly because God was merciful.

And the coffeehouse room was dimly lit.

Busy

j-r-practix-with-border-2

Busy: (adj) having a great deal to do.

“Busy as a bee.”

Are bees really busy? We attribute this to them because they fly, buzz and appear to be accomplished.

But if you think about the normal day of a bee, it’s more the life of a hippie at a commune.

They fly off, check out the flowers, and while there, they pick up some nectar–and then they fly back to their hive, buzzing and maybe taking the long way home.

They contribute their nectar to the general well-being–the ongoing project, the commune’s goal. They spend a little while enjoying their time with the other drones, dreaming of a day when they might have their moment with the queen.

And then they’re off again, at a respectable, but not break-neck pace, to enjoy more flowers, bring back more nectar and come into the hive with that age-old joke that most bees hate: what’s the buzz?

After this procedure is repeated a number of times at an enjoyable clip, the bee can proudly step back and say, “I made honey. I made the world a sweeter place. I have taken something that was in the flowers and created a substance that transfers that glorious juice into the tastebuds of human beings.”

Most of the people I see who say they’re busy are just frantic.

They don’t visit the flowers.

They don’t take the long way home.

And they sure as hell don’t make honey.

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Antemortem

dictionary with letter A

Antemortem: (adj & adv) before death

Sometimes words can be head-scratchers.

Isn’t antemortem just another way of saying “life?”

In other words, if we’re talking about everything before death, doesn’t that just refer to today’s activities and our ongoing existence?

But after I get done scratching my head, freeing up a few dandruff flakes, I discover a much deeper concept. (Not so deep that it makes one drown, but perhaps deep enough that it promotes moving forward swimmingly.)

For I will tell you right now, almost every facet of our society has us thinking just as much about our death as it does our life.

I was trying to remember the last movie I went to that didn’t have at least one, if not many, people killed. I guess the message is, we’re all mortal, so eat, drink and be merry.

Politics focuses on retirement, social security and often even flagrantly discusses death benefits.

You add in the medical field, constantly reminding us of all the things that can terminate our journey, and religion telling us we need to get ready for heaven, and it certainly seems that we spend an incredible amount of time wasting our present life force in preparation for our inevitable death.

Since we are granted less than a century of breathing, to study too much of the past or fear too much of the future seems a bit ridiculous and obsessive.

Yet if you have a “live for today” philosophy, people shake their heads in disapproval and mouth words like “irresponsible, hippie, Bohemian and gypsy.”

What is the balance?

I don’t know.

But I do know this–I’m not going to spend the majority of my life, while I’m still young, vibrant, mentally active, socially aware and sexually viable, laying up treasure for a time when I’m not.

I am sure, at any juncture in my life span, no matter how old I may become, I will not be thrilled to leave.

So with that in mind, I find it much more intuitive to pursue the activities of this day with jubilance and a bit of “devil-may-care,” so as to guarantee that when the post-mortem arrives … that my antemortem has sufficiently kicked ass.

 

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Aerie

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter A

Aerie: (n) the nest  of a bird of prey, esp. an eagle, typically built high in a tree or on a cliff.

Am I being too needy when I say that I take great comfort in the fact that an eagle is considered to be a rather regal creature, even though it is bald like me? (Of course, lacking feathers, an attractive beak, and not to mention, the ability to fly–at that point all similarities seem to cease.)

But there is something wonderfully intriguing and even mysterious about the eagle, soaring high into the mountain, nestling itself into a home far from the jungle and the maddening crowd.

There is something here to learn: I need an aerie–not to remove myself permanently from humanity as a grumbling objection to the insanity being proffered, but rather, a place where I can escape at times and get a little higher so I can see a little clearer and gain some perspective, instead of touting how wise I am, with the evidence of how cynical I’ve become.

  • What passes for philosophy nowadays are actually jaded observations from those who have embraced sarcasm and abandoned solution.
  • What is pushed forward as government is an exclusive club of politicians, who get together to advertise favored causes, which most importantly, contradict the views of their opponents.
  • And what is passed on as communion of spirituality is either a narrow-minded God who’s pissed off with mankind or some benevolent hippie juiced up on weed, who loves everybody, no matter how miserable they are.

Fly a little higher.

Find a place of seclusion every once in a while, where you can clear your head.

In so doing, you might be surprised, like the eagle, at how God will give you new ideas … and expand your bird brain.

ACLU

by J. R. Practix

dictionary with letter A

ACLU: (abbr.) American Civil Liberties Union

I’ve got it figured out. (Well, I probably don’t, but I thought I would begin this article without using the passive voice.)

EVERYONE is conservative.

That’s right. Everyone is trying to conserve something. And everybody who disagrees with what the other guy is trying to conserve believes that the other party is either a hick, an ignoramus, a pseudo-intellectual or a hippie.

All you have to do is mention the American Civil Liberties Union in a positive light, and you are already labeled a liberal. There is no such thing as a Republican who is an advocate of this organization. But if you read their charter, all the ACLU wants to conserve is the liberty and individual rights of every American citizen, with an emphasis toward honoring the sanctity of the freedom of minorities.

THEY want to conserve liberty.

Now, you find some organization down the road called the Family Research Center, or something of that ilk, and they are just as deeply convinced that they are divinely ordained to conserve morality. Now, the ACLU may not be nearly as concerned about morality as they are liberty, but quite honestly, the Family Research people are not nearly as concerned about liberty as they are morality.

You can see the problem. They’re all conservative, without realizing that they need each other. That’s right:

  • Liberty without morality is a train wreck right outside your front door.
  • Morality without liberty is a decision to build a dungeon in your basement for all the people you have decided are evil.

If we could learn to respect one another and listen to each other’s core belief, we might be able to meld into a strong unit for justice.

But it’s much easier to throw rocks across the fence–because you have the great joy of tossing them without ever knowing who they hit on the other side.

I would not want to live in a country that does not have the American Civil Liberties Union. They remind me of people I might forget about–if it weren’t for their presence.

I also would not want to live in a country that does not have the Family Research Center, which informs us when we begin to take good health for granted–be it emotional, spiritual, mental or physical.

Since we’re all conservatives in our own way, we might want to conserve our energy by not fighting–and expend some of it in an attempt to become reasonable.

But since that won’t happen, the ACLU should probably not do a lot of traveling south of Louisville, Kentucky.

And the Family Research Center people might want to avoid taking the big tour of Hollywood.