IT Chapter 2

Part Two:The search for It; The Adventure Begins.

Harmony and understanding

Sympathy and trust abounding

No more falsehoods or derisions

Golden living dreams of visions

Mystic crystal revelation

And the mind's true liberation

When the moon is in the Seventh House

And Jupiter aligns with Mars

Then peace will guide the planets

And love will steer the stars

This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

Okay, get this…not only is the moon supposed to be in the seventh house (whatever the hell that means)…but the Age of Aquarius is also supposed to be driven by the crossing of “the galactic equator” between the astrological signs of Taurus and Gemini where the sun is positioned at 90° 00’ 32” from the “Sagittarian center of the universe”. Never mind that the “modern” system of astrology is pretty much based on exiled medieval astronomer Claude Ptolemy’s earth-center-of-the-universe drawings of circles inside of circles; we are talking some heavy-duty jargon here! (By the way, this Ptolemy cat was not even related to the Egyptian kings of the same name; he just liked the handle and adopted it — a very new age thing to do for someone in 2 A.D.)

If you are of the school of thought that the flat earth is in fact the center of the universe and that modern physics is all nonsense because Aristotle was correct that a circle is “perfect” and a straight line is an “abomination” (and thus an arrow can only continue in a straight line if it is pushed by the element “wind”)…then what-the-hell, those silly pseudo-mathematical coordinates are about all you need to know about the Age of Aquarius.

And, if that is the case let us please totally overlook that the reality of day-to-day events of the famed 1960s’ Age of Aquarius’ harmony and understanding correlating with the 42,000-plus American Vietnam War deaths and un-totaled Vietnamese deaths; or the Sympathy and trust abounding correlating with the assignations of two Kennedy’s and Martin Luther King, and the ever-popular No more falsehoods or derisions with a Presidential-sanctioned burglary.

Likewise, if we are going to assign some mystic crystal revelation to every such Age of Aquarius in the Ptolemic system let’s also praise the 1990’s rise of Russian organized crime taking over that country and forcing millions to near-starvation poverty as the pinnacle of the 1997 harmony-alignment of the planets.

Oh yeah, am I ever-so-glad to be a child of the 60s! Though to be honest, I really DO believe that at the very last minute, when things look the worst and no escape is possible, that the cavalry will come charging over the hill.

But, you should understand from the very beginning that I am crazy. I don't mean in the pleasant sense of playful craziness...you know, the "I'll try anything once" silliness so often heard in the frustrated rantings of secretaries, file clerks and topless dancers. No, I mean that I am absolutely, stark raving mad...insane.

My brother, Ron—who we grew up calling "Ronny" until one day in college he announced he had changed his name—has this theory that modern capitalist society has made everyone crazy. In support of his thesis he presents some pretty bizarre examples, which he points to as the more "normal" of the craziness.

There is the 21-year-old Pizza Hut manager whose hair is an unbelievable shade of orange as a result of an attempt to dye it blonde from its apparently natural dark brown. To compensate for the color failure she has it teased into a modified "afro." Besides being 30 years outdated, she is white and lives in rural South Carolina…the state where the Confederate battle flag still flies proudly over the statehouse. On her day off from the Pizza Hut she found it necessary to come into the restaurant, her expanded hair smashed flat against her head, her clothes wrinkled like a never-finished spin cycle, and carrying a smell of yesterday's staleness. Entering the family eatery she proudly announced that she had not been home but had spent the night with "the boys in the band" and could "still taste them all."

Or, there is our 30‑year-old friend, Bob, who was enjoying the life of a "kept man" living with a 19-year-old stripper. After noticing a particularly pungent odor spewing from the young dancer for seven consecutive days, he politely suggested to her that he might have to stop administering cunnilingus if the smell didn't subside. Embarrassed, she admitted that she thought the odor was from the marijuana and beer mixture she ritually consumed for breakfast. Subsequent medical examination revealed a long-lost tampon rotting away inside her and breeding a bacterial kindergarten.

But even these Jon-Waters-movie-type sexual deviations aside, there is some pretty compelling evidence to support Ron's theory. It was not that long ago that a President of the United States got down on his knees with the Secretary of State to pray to a picture of Abe Lincoln that the revolution would not come; the funniest part of that is that I was part of that “revolution” and believe me, he had nothing to fear! Then there was the well-known business executive (and best-selling author) who admittedly bashes his skull against cinder-block walls to "stimulate thought" when he has a problem; no wonder his cars fell apart every three years.

And there is probably a legitimate question about the sanity in the day-to-day lives of millions of people who have adopted a life philosophy of wage labor's endless quest for an "end" that emptily never exists. In fact, that insanity always reminds me of the great Albert Einstein quote:

"Even when I was a fairly precocious young man, the nothingness of the hopes and stirrings which chases most men restlessly through life came to my consciousness with considerable vitality. Moreover I soon discovered the cruelty of that chase...by the mere existence of the stomach everyone was condemned to participate in that chase."

Even with Einstein in agreement, Ron's thesis is more directed at the fact that everyone...absolutely everyone...has some fantastic deviation in their life that really presses the bounds of "normal" ideals.

But, alas, that is not my insanity. I am just nuts. You've heard of "living on the edge?"

It is as if I am moving on a high-speed roller coaster, barely clinging to the edge as I spin near the speed of light. And just before the Doppler effect shoots red and purple toward me, I reach out and pull myself back from that edge long enough to lust for the ideas that keep the rest of you off of my edge.

I can't stay behind; I can't go backwards. If I slow for too long the death symptoms begin to haunt me. First anger. Then diarrhea. Then an acid restlessness to find a new mark and suck its lifeblood into my reflectionless vampire soul.

I must crash a heavy 9-pound sledgehammer hard against the plaster idols of society to learn which are hollow and empty and which have substance. I must test the bounds. I must light both ends of every candle and rejoice as the two blushing flames join for one huge glory blaze.

Write it off to my being raised on 1950s television westerns and their great moral passion plays of middle class white America, but I truly believe in the thundering hoof beats of a fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust and a hearty, "Hi-yo Silver."

I believe that when that helicopter falls over the edge of the building, Superman really will appear from nowhere and catch it and Lois in mid‑air. I cry every time I watch the videotape of that scene. Just as I believe that Oz is color to our black-and-white and Eisenstein's red flag will indeed appear over a black-and-white hill of depravation.

And, I believe that Jesse James and Billy The Kid faked their deaths and Elvis and Jim Morrison are still alive. And it is all for the adventure!

It is in that break-neck speed and rush for the adventure that I find "it." "IT" is what this is all about. "IT" is not a metaphysical or spiritual or Zen ideal; "IT" is the material, real "IT."

If Kerouac's passion was the beat and Kesey's quest was for the hip, then I am in love with "IT." And this is a chronicle of that love and a gazetteer of the journey toward it.

The children of the sixties? The real Age of Aquarius? The source of the whole “new age” movement of the last 30 years? IT.

Those who thought the swashbuckling romantic scoundrel, the debonair revolutionary, the too-daring adventurer was nothing more than fodder for the smooth-faced matinee idol and his stunt-doubles or are the legend-stories for the Guthrie-esque rambler, the custom-made cowboy suit and diamond stickpin gambler, and other exaggerated pieces of historical memorabilia; those who think that a seeming anachronism can live only in sad parody; those who scoff at men who live dreams...never new about "IT."

I was teaching a course called "Folk Music and the American Left" at the Free University in 1971 or 1972. After we spent two hours talking about Woody Guthrie, one young woman looked up at me in fascination but skeptical dismay and proclaimed "It would never work today. No one could ramble around the country writing and singing and organizing and living like that." It was actually more of a question than it was phrased; almost as if she wanted me to say, “Of course it works today, just look at…and then name some good 1960s role model.”

I didn't know what to say or do. She popped my bubble, blasted my ideal, attacked my dreams...all in that one sentence. If she was correct then my ideal was impossible. If she was right, then there was no “Summer of Love” and the “Age of Aquarius” was just as bleak and hollow as I made it sound in these opening passages. Ohmygod, if she was accurate, then I had been living a lie.

I could accept her proclamation and resolve that I had been living with come-clean-for-Gene daisies over my eyes, blinded by the four-way-barrel orange sunshine and deafened by Hendrix;

Or I could totally ignore her too-smug questioning wonderment and give her some sort of pejorative pat on the head for simply “not understanding”.

Ah, but there was a third, unexpected and uncalculated possible reaction that bubbled to my lips before I could control it. "Fuck you," I told her. That night I packed my guitar and left to pursue my continuing search for and affair with "IT."

Enter the flying chicken. Actually it neither flies nor is it a chicken. It's only a rubber chicken. That's right: a rubber chicken. You know, the kind that you would expect a really bad lounge-act comic-magician to pull out of his pants. A plucked chicken about 18 inches long and molded from yellow rubber, painted with black eyes, orange beak and long toes, and a red crown.

Somehow this de-feathered, rubber, bumpy-skinned chicken held all the symbolic recognition of American magnificence reflected back to my eyes from the toe of the sheeny-booted motorcycle cop, the starch-burned neck of the white-shirted dilettante, and the cremated reflecting cans in precious, splendid brains of three generations.

God bless the flying chicken, for it knows not who flyth it! Let it proudly wave with the other subliminal emblems of paradise found for this epoch's heirs with bell jars dangling over their heads and deathly homelessness accepted as freely as usury and disease.

Without allegiance, reverence, nor tribute, the naked and knobby flying chicken sparkles in the fireworks' exploding glitter with the deranged madness of the worn-green novus ordo seclorum. Bare and naked, it stands plucked to the world with more authenticity, truth, and validity than the hollow death monuments televised into the gulping, eagerly‑open whore-vulva geniuses of the empire.

The flying chicken bares all, challenging the tragic phlegm‑filled smegma-mucus charlatanizing as education, the pathetic beauty-pageant winner's "inside" secrets of false-prophet/true-profit religion, and the awfully sad empty-stomach relentless search for substance in the void. In a world where form is all and content is nothing, where heroes wear business suits, and where identity is determined by positioning, what can be more true and more real than the flying chicken?

So with fire in my eyes, amusement in my heart, and my mind soaring heaven, I prepared the ultimate road trip: Life in search of IT. I stretched the already-too-long legs of the flying chicken and firmly tied them in a square knot around the base of the rear-view mirror so that it's magnificent body would pendulum-dangle from the mirror like 1950s furry dice.

In brightest day or darkest night, in whatever vehicle I commandeer, let all those who sanctify the icons of emptiness gaze on the medusa-power of the flying chicken. And let those children of the road know its meaning as true as the silver bullet that followed the thundering hoof beat, a cloud of dust, and a hearty hi-yo Silver.