So here it is at 2 a.m. on a Friday morning and I have insomnia from a massive overdose of diet cola and I'm channel surfing. I come across VH-1 Classic and it is showing Woodstock. Great! A trip down memory lane.
So I'm 'feeling groovy' watching the pinnacle of my wasted youth as a wannabe hippie and remembering the music and the friends and lovers I associate with the time. And I start realizing how pathetic the people I am watching are. I'm not looking at a massive gathering of peace, love and music. I'm looking at the largest crowd of lonely people ever gathered in one place. I listen to the quotes and realize just how needy these people are. They are not in the majority, and certainly aren't role models. They are looking to find acceptance and be "free" while in reality they are prisoners to their own devices.
I think about how much my own pathos and emerging adulthood resembles these people. At the time, I was in my early 20s and searching for my own set of truths. I hated the war in Vietnam, but that was because my best friend was killed there and I sure as hell didn't want to wind up in the same situation. I never did drugs, which in looking back made little difference in my life since I had so many manic highs I frequently acted just as stupid anyway. Drugs, especially LSD, terrified me. I knew someone who had a "bad" trip and later committed suicide by throwing himself in front of a commuter train. Ironically, his dad was a magician and he dabbled in being an escape artist. He certainly did the ultimate escape act.
So my watching transformed from looking for an escape to an escapade in regretting the past and finally a reflection on the present. So much of who I am and what I believed in were formed in those days. Do I regret the decisions I made? Yes. But I also accept them.
At the same time, there is something sinister seeping into me. And I just can't figure out what it is. Then it hits me. The main sponsor of the movie is Wal-Mart, the epitome of big business! Whatever happened to the upagainstthewallmuthafucka attitude? And then my answer came. Other sponsors were for all kinds of medications. The Woodstock Generation, the epitome of youth, are now a bunch of geezers! We used to say "never trust anyone over 30" and now we've gone from being children of the '60s to being in our sixties! It sucks.
