sorry in advance y’all
this post is a lazy post and pretty much stream of consciousness stuff so I kinda like these posts. therefore, I don’t do a bunch of edits to these types of posts so it bees what it bees and with that we will proceed:
PREAMBLE
so it is 3:00 AM and the writing hours begin again after a night of sleep where I could only manage my sleeping to about four to five hours a night., typically. Sleeping, night after night, for only four or five hours is a phenomenon I have noticed since I retired and has persisted since then (2015). It should be noted here that I worked for approx. six years before retirement on the Night Shift, building two new nuke plants from the ground up, here in Georgia.
Now if we are On The Road in the motorhome driving, sightseeing, hiking and walking every day then I seem to manage damn near eight hours per night. So it is all about set and setting as they used to say, in the amount of sleep I do get on a nightly basis. So for the longest time, I would get up at these crazy hours (much to the chagrin of my wonderful partner) and end up on a website that I discovered while I was still working for a living in 2013. This initially turned into an outlet for my writing. This was a magical place filled with people from “my long lost tribe.” And as such, I would go there and get inspiration from a comment made there by someone which would then spark a long story from my perspective about a specific instance mentioned by somebody and I was off the races. For instance somebody on that forum might mention Altamont (December,, 1969) and I would go off on a long story about my experiences since I was there on that day in December, 1969. Now, after ten years on that forum, I now know how brash I must have appeared to these people that in some cases, had been on that forum since it was founded in 1985. This brashness by me was only due to me not knowing about how things work on that forum. But the people there were very kind and patient with me as I worked my way towards understanding the operating conditions of that forum and bless them for it.
anywhoo, getting the thread back, I have used these crazy hours to write and apparently, now I am using them to write here, as opposed to there, on that forum. So be it. I still to this day, after having been on that forum for ten years, go there every day since it is the home of my lost but now found tribe and I like it there.
Started this post as a very rough draft and it is now still a very rough draft today but now I have preamble to this post which I just did above.
INTRODUCTION
Sons: This memory story is about a gift my parents gave me that has lasted a lifetime. It is about adapting and adaptability. I learned from Mom and Dad to accept change as a constant in the Universe and it is the only thing the Universe does is change so you better get used to it which I learned at a very young age due my parents moving every several years, to wit:
Born in Clinton, Iowa 1950, then a succession of moves that included Salt Lake City, Seattle, (Mercer Island, 1950s) , Lake Oswego, Oregon (two moves, same town), Manhattan, NYC, Bronxville, NY, and then finally a move to St. Louis where I graduated from high school in 1969, starting my own chapter by moving out to the Bay Area, California to attend my first year of college.
so inadvertently my parents taught me that change was inevitable and inescapable so, each time I adapted and came to embrace the change in these experiences. That is one of the lessons This Bus Trip reinforced in me and for me. CHANGE IS ONLY CONSTANT IN THE UNIVERSE.
so there you have it in a nutshell and a life operating condition or way of being in the Universe. So I did just that and began my life, at a very early age, to see the world with those lenses and have developed some odd (to others) coping mechanisms reflecting those realities of how the world worked. Or as I have heard it said, in military speak, “ADAPT AND OVERCOME.” which pretty much sums up my life, to this day..
THE BUS TRIP:
KEN KESEY AND THE MERRY PRANKSTERS
AND MINE 1964
it is 3:30 in the morning here on December 8, 2023, I never did make the connection between our two bus trips until now.
I went East to West and Kesey went West to East until just this moment.
SYNCHRONICITIES ABOUND
summers I used to take the train to Iowa and work Mom and dad’s relatives farms but not this year
never realized my affinity for all things Kesey/Merry Pranksters/ LSD until this morning when I realized and made the connection between our two simultaneous but separate bus trips in 1964
the bus came by and I got on
that’s when it all began
with cowboy Neal at the wheel
on the bus to never ever land
Worlds Fair, Queens, NYC 1964 opening April thru October
Kesey’s bus trip 1964 to the worlds fair in nyc
mom and dad took us to the worlds fair in queens most likely in 1964 soon after it opened in April
Back in 1964, when I was 14 YO, my parents asked me if I wanted to take a bus trip around the country that summer by myself. I said sure. Being big for my age, I could pass for much older and apparently, was mature enuff not to screw it up. So that is what we did. Mom and Dad made arrangements with family, business friends of Dad and family friends across America. I left Manhattan, NYC, travelled by a pre-paid Greyhound bus ticket with stopovers in Louisville, KY with family friends, two stops in Iowa with my grandparents, a stopover in Salt Lake City with business friends of Dad, a stopover in Seattle with family friends, a stopover in Portland with family friends, Los Angeles with family friends, Phoenix with family friends, Dallas with business friends and finally Jackson Mississippi, where I finally met my Uncle Edwin and Velma. Then back to NYC at the end of the summer to get ready for school. We thought it was normal back then but in retrospect, people have said that it was quite extraordinary for a kid my age to do that. We did not think twice about it. We just did it.