high powered mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird
to live, and too rare to die.
years
later? Six? Itseems 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. 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.
There he goes. One of God's own
prototypes. Some kind of
high powered mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird
to live, and too rare to die.
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---the place where the wave
finally broke and rolled back.
History is hard to know, because
of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history" it
seems entirely 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.