The Watermark: A Nostalgic trip

I think everyone in my generation feels they missed out on the 60s - 'the summer of love' and all that that our parents lived through. In this piece I try and piece together my understanding of the 60s era from the accounts I have been told and read. This is really an on going project. I started this blog in San Fran in August 2006 and never finished it. So now I have [February 2009]. Read on if you are interested.
To me, that period was more than just the music [that just carried the mood]. It's like that guy on the bus in San Diego [with his magic mushroom feast] who put it as 'more than nifty'. I think my desire to retread these places expresses my nostalgic interest in reclaiming a piece of that history from the stories told. The title of this piece comes from 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' where Hunter S Thompson describes being able to see 'the watermark' left by the wave of feeling in the 60s above San Francisco, which carried the belief they could change the world, but instead it 'broke and rolled back'.
Hunter S Thompson said that in the 60s there was 'madness in every direction', and the epicentre was certainly here in San Fran here....next to Goldengate Park. Now a-days though, Haight-Ashbury wishes it was what Ocean Beach (San Diego) was. Visiting Haight-Ashbury today taught me that, even before the 60s were up, any original vapours of the era had burned out and dried up. The dregs were sold, rolled and burned shortly after.
All that remains now are a few burned out old hippies on guitars or drawing on pavements in chalk. The more savvy ones run shops selling guitars and chalk. The place did have character though. On one shut down shop someone had sprayed 'your shop sucked anywayz'. The area was a strange mix of old record and book shops, Hippy clothes and cash-in tag-on shops. In some ways the area was similar to parts of Amsterdam. Especially having strangers walk up to you and whisper strange drugs into you ear. The crowd going through the area were either shopping for the nik-naks and clothes or were the lost children of the flower generation, looking for a taste of “the love nectar”, which they know they'll never have.
Before I published this, I wanted to hear what Mike and Reba thought. Mike and Reba are the age group of my parents – they were at college during the late 60s and Reba actually lived on a hippie commune for a time.
Mike said that his generation had the one before it fearing them. For the first time they challenged everything that was power, and did it peacefully. On the cause of the failure of this movement, Mike Croft agrees with Hunter S Thompson. Mike claims that people became too self-indulgent with the drugs.. Instead of getting 'high', people wanted to just get stoned. As Southpark puts it ‘Godam hippies, they want to change the world but all they do is sit around and smoke pot’. Maybe Dylan has something to answer for here, but there is a big difference between the two.
With the widespread euphoria from LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs came a new awareness borne from meditation and borrowed badly from Eastern religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism. From this came a naivety. This was the first and most significant flaw which was the product of both a lack of foresight in the movement and a press involvement, which caused a widespread fashion of behaviour rather than a gradual crystallisation of thought spread from a concentrated, centralised and guided body of thinkers. The result was that these naive but well intentioned people fell onto the awaiting 'meat hooks of reality' (Hunter S Thompson). I think they failed not only because of a scattered philosophy, but also because they wanted too much. Perhaps they trusted too much into the human condition, or as Hunter S Thompson said.
"What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create ... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody — or at least some force — is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel."
But perhaps I’m the kind of sceptic that brought their system of thinking down. I’m not saying I’m an untrusting of innate human nature but a movement such as the Hippies is very much like the stock market; as soon as one group lose faith and stop buying into it, it’s is assumed they have a valid reason and have detected a flaw in the fabric of belief. This is all it takes and this is perhaps why it failed. The Neo-Conservatives were a group in America that ultimately, like the Catholic Church, believe man-kind cannot look after itself and needs controlling to keep it from trouble. I'm now off the point.
Right smack in the middle of Haight-Ashbury nowadays is a Ben and Jerry's. Fitting some may say. It was a company founded on good principles and free love (well, icecream) which sold out, thus replacing what it once stood for at the centre.
I think the thing I like most about Haight-Ashbury is the eccentrics. Maybe it’s because I’m British. I like it because, unlike most of America [excluding crack-addicts] eccentrics are not extra ordinary here. Singing opera out of your car window to a street full of baffled wanabess or dressing as a fairy (just because) fails utterly to stand out. Just generally being yourself is a lovely example of people enjoying their individual freedoms and right to happiness. And why not? Now where’s my fairy outfit…
So in some ways, the hippie culture has permeated. Me and Hannah have enjoyed two 'spare the air' days here, when ALL public transport is FREE! This is done in an effort to relieve car traffic and it includes all the cable cars and some ferries! So Hippie culture didn’t change the world overnight, or in a decade, but it’s been inherited and the ideas have perhaps echoed through our generation and beyond.