Two things that make me happy about this blog: It puts a lot of people and images and music I loved as a kid in one place, and it gives me a second chance to understand what I witnessed the first time around.
Sharing an adult perspective on the passions of our youth is a very cool thing to me. Even with those tools, though, I sometimes find it hard to explain to people who know me now what excited me then.
Hence today’s conversation-starter: Is there anyone you wish you could take back in time for a one-day tour of your wasted youth in San Diego? If so, who would it be? What would you like to show them?
More topics:
- Ye olde body mods (Where’d you get your ink?)
- Weird SD (Odd corners of San Diego)
- Hyphenates (How did you define yourself and those around you?)
- Career opportunities (What do you do nowadays to pay the bills? And what did you learn then that helps you now?)
- She gets confused … Flying over the dateline (Why’d you end up where you are?)
- Under the ‘hood (Your corner of San Diego and how it shaped you)
- Who’s the OLD dude? (What would your current self tell your young self?)
My husband. Who never saw anything like 1970s Southern California high schools. He was a nice Korean boy, then a Southern gentleman. I’d take him to stoned lunch on the football field, garage band practice, Fairmont Hall, movies at the Ken, and gay Denny’s. With breaks for oxygen and debriefing.
I think my older daughter would currently find it extremely instructive to observe my friends in action at roughly her age. I would steer her away from some of the murkier corners, but I think she’d get a kick out of watching a gig … And she’d LOVE Jerry!
I would not expose the younger kid to this field trip just yet (although she is already the age that Little Sergio was when he was playing bass with Hair Theatre)!
I would also take my daughter as long as I could pick and chose what she remembers and when.
I can hear it now……….But daddy, I saw you and your freinds……..
Don’t think I would take the wife………….
I would love to take a few neighbors and people I have met in the older years. They never could understand the little I have ever talked about. You really had to be there or take a time- machine sidecar
>>I would love to take a few neighbors and people I have met in the older years. They never could understand the little I have ever talked about.
Mark: It is funny … I’ve had the same disconnect telling tales to peers who grew up other places.
Was our adolescence more intense than others’, or have a lot of us done a better job of remembering that intensity? Maybe a little of both.
I’d like to believe it WAS a special experience…unique. Many people through the years have said, “You were in a punk band”??, in disbelief, (and in some ignorance of what this actually meant)
I would like to bring brothers, sisters, kids, professors, employers, priests,….all back to SD 1978.
Some of us had the “real-time” disconnect of being in the service during this whole period of time. Surreal…with instant feedback from a more pedestrian perspective. Nothing like inviting a bunch of brothers from the deep south or some real midwestern farm boys to a punk show.
Needless to say, they looked at us quite differently back at the squadron the next day!! I guess Terry, Lou, Cliff, Joanne, would concur….
Pedestrian is a poor word choice…can’t think of the right word?
It is odd
And I’ve traveled all over the country for quite a long time now. SD was ever so special in all sorts of good and bad ways…HA
Only if you knew about it and embraced it. I bet there are 100,000 other people that grew up at the same time we did in the same area that would think we are nuts with these stories.
I know 2 of my 3 kids if sent back in time and was in the right place at the right time would of been completly one of us. With that said…… Just about all of their freinds I have ever met would probably not. What does that mean? I have passed on the coolness or stupidness.
Matt, I do not think many have experienced that kind of intensity. Shit I was going to the Lions club and walking home at night at 2 am at 13 years old. Not normal then and certainly not now.
the whole music dept @ UCSD should
fieldtrip back to that scene
I just keep trying to forget
when trying to explain our lives back then to anyone i know now i simply preface it with, “you had to be there.”
i would take henry, and do what matthew talked about. keep him from seeing some of the murkier part…
me and someone else have an inside joke about Hot Tub Time Machine.
but seriously…I’d take all my younger “besties” who weren’t born until the 80’s -- they worship that time period! I’d like to show them what it was really like and that if you wore a Depeche Mode shirt with a Black Flag button you may have gotten your face rearranged.
Black FAag
~BLACK FLAG KILLS ANTS ON CONTACT~
“if you wore a Depeche Mode shirt with a Black Flag button you may have gotten your face rearranged.”
That is funny….also, if you walked around North Park with blue hair: automatic jail time. If you walked around OB in any punk attire: automatic ass-kicking.
If you walked around Hollywood in the late 70’s Black Flag was spraypainted everywhere, someone was going around turning the L into an A, hence Black FAag
> “you had to be there.”
Everywhere I go I keep meeting people who seem to have been there. But their “there” was located in San Antonio or Philadelphia or New York.
True.Our time was special,very much so,and in a way that has deeply affected most of us and affected us for the better I feel. The main reason I think that it was/is special was because it was special to us,it was our scene,and that makes all the difference,as I’m sure it does to people from any one of a number of scenes that were taking place concurrently to ours.Because of our involvement within it and with eachother it is as if we grew up in a village where everyone knows one another rather than the larger context of the city that we actually lived in at the time.
I was the village idiot
we were a village of idiots!
“It Takes a Village of Idiots to Hold Us Back”
I stayed awake for 12 years one summer….
take a trip back?…no thanks
the future looks good to me
>>take a trip back?…no thanks
the future looks good to me
MadMike: An excellent attitude!
Personally, I’d have fun on a day trip, especially with people who became important to me after that time* … But no way would I want to be that guy again! 🙂
*Alternative scenario: I can just imagine the laughs Paul Kaufman and I could get out of a quick visit back to the Headquarters parking lot! We’re still joking about material we collected 27 years ago!
on further thinking..I guess there might be a few times and things I’d like to re-visit
but honestly..very little good could come from that
I cant wait for tomorrow
I’d take my wife. It’s been impossible to explain in words the magic of seeing the Answers at Headquarters, loading up on Thick ‘n’ Creamies at Sheldon’s, and then going to hang out at Pat’s house. And yes, I’m sure there are many great conversations we’ve forgotten over the years- a gold mine to rediscover.
i havent peeked at the blog in a very long time. apon this visit i cant help but opt in.
i can not speak for anyone elses experience in my sorted past. i can share the reverberations i have experienced.
when i visited chris mathes a few days ago, after hanging out at his house for a few short moments he took me aside, not knowing any thing about my life over the last 20 some years, he grasp my forarm looked me in the eye and told me i was family, that if i needed a place to stay, ever. i was welcome to come live with him.
joe hughes noticed something screwy on a facebook post of mine, next day i woke to a voice mail from him saying that he would drive south for 15 hours to grab my shit and that i could live with him as long as i needed to to get my life back together. when i called him back to let him know all was well, he said oh good, can you pick something up for me i just bought on e bay, i did. i’ve spent time in a dear brothers moms back yard reciently, talking about stuff that would make regular people commit suicide to be away from a world where things like that happen. we cried and laughed and told the kids to stop throwing stuff over grandmas fence, and we held on to each other for dear life. just like we did when we were 15. my old buddies that have stopped by to visit have -- givin my mother their phone number and offerd that anything she needs, to just call. anything, truck, construction, noisy nabors ? they have shown endless patience and compassion to my autistic son, talking about vw maintanance and repair. to see kristen tobiason and my boy max geek out with photo shop and thrill at the sight of pee wees big adventure, is enough to make one believe that our species might be worth saving. my older kids -- clio and jessy want louis damien to start a church -- all my family has been affected by being around the che underground folks. the jurys not clear on what happend then, but is greatful for the fallout. my daughter tattoos herself and feels going to, what her generation thinks is a punk rock show is -- life itself. my son likens kristen to morgan lefay, told me louis and his charming wife are fricken kool! and to see him on his own, hug chris, my son walks around in his double breased sport coat and cowboy hat, feeling that if the bow tie aggitates people -- all the better. i have a buddy in my life, 24 years old, brilliant and a little self destructive. kelcey had just gotten back from hiking out of chiapas mexico through peru. he is the only person i think i have met who i could trust might get our time and place. from my experience, what ever that was. i cant find anyone who wasent there who has had a similar experience. “we” talk and it’s automatic. thats kool. i just dont talk about the che, except to the che. life is big and alots happend since then that i really love. and if my former life with you guys informes my every step to some degree, though the world i live in wont understand who or why to thank, they still get the benifit of all the stuff you put in my head.
Cricket makes this blog a better place — thanks for visiting us! (Wish I were in SD for your visit.)
Back to the Future, 25 years later
“Great Scott!
“When Doc Brown was showing Marty McFly his converted DeLorean, he set the time machine 25 years in the future. That’s today.
“That’s heavy, as Marty might say.
“(Hat tip to many in the Twitterverse, including Steve Buttry and Mathew Ingram.)
“Update: There’s some debate about the date.”
Thanks, Cricket.
I needed that this morning more than you could possibly imagine.
cricket/ish, man, yesterday, today, and far into the future. love you like a brother. xo
It’s hard to look back. I’m not sure if it’s because I was having so much more fun then than now, or because I have to remember the bad with the good. I’ve often thought that I experienced more in that brief time than at any time later. I’m happy to be reacquainted and reconnected with you all. I hope to see many of you in S.D. next week.