Psychedelia and Paste

Jesus, they're dying like flies. Now Paul Kantner is dead from a mediocre diagnosis as a heart attack. He didn't flame out ripped on DMT while racing his car over a cliff. No, he died of something any medical coder of ICD-9 regularly types in, Code 410.

I expect more to start being toe tagged soon due to commonplace causes.

I haven't played any of my Jefferson Airplane cd's in a while so I put a few on. As they played, I kept getting memories of cutting construction paper, gluing it and whatnot in Miss Eno's 4^th grade class. Why there? I had been reminded that she'd play her acid rock albums in class while we kids were busy eating paste and doing “artsy stuff.” It was nice time, being 9 years old and relaxed, hearing reverb guitars in the background, Grace Slick screaming away and making a collage of badly cut out animals.

I think hearing a song like “Triad” was completely lost on us kids then, what did we know of menage a trois? I'd hum along absentmindedly while John Ashburn, next to me, smeared paste on his all over his shirt. Meanwhile Slick was asking about the demand to choose amongst her two boyfriends, “”Why can't I have both of you?” I wonder where John is now? Great kid he was then.

This class was where we had our first “encounter group” though we didn't know it. Think of group therapy with a teacher guiding it. She was trying to deflate any long standing friction between various kids and cliques. I actually thought it fun because she assured us that “telling the truth” of what you're feeling was perfectly A-OK. The funny thing is that it actually worked, thought it needed booster shots every two weeks or so as newer issues would pop up between kids. Mostly the girls though, as they get their roots deep into each other and all hell breaks loose if someone's feeling are hurt. Even at 9, girls have doctorates in that. It wasn't for years until I learned in college that it was Fritz Perls, at Esalen, who popularized those groups. Shit. Miss Enos trying to reproduce her own little Esalen in Pawtucket. Ah, she didn't do too bad of a job copying Perls.

She moved onto one to one therapy one time. I went through a bastardized version of Transactional Analysis (another 70's pop psychological movement) with her. Put three chairs in front of you and each chair is either the “child, adult or parent.” You sit in each chair and from that perspective, you talk of an issue from that particular perspective. You have to jump from chair to chair, perspective to perspective quickly and lo and behold, you get all sorts of personal insights. That does happen but whether it really solves anything permanently is up to debate. I think it's been mostly discredited now. But in her class, we did it while it was thought to work.

I look back on all that and wonder why none of the parents stopped it or complained. Ahh...it wasn't so litigious back then either.

Miss Enos was thought of as a space truckin' loon by our principal, who was from an older school of thought. But what he probably didn't know or wish to accept, was that a good dose of counterculture was infiltrating his school quickly then. He lost complete control by 1975 and wisely tried not to prevent it.

Anyway, hearing the old Jefferson Airplane cd's again was cool...reminding me of the environment I grew up in back then. It's all memories now but what a hell of a time to be part of. You can't get away with this shit now in classroom, though at times I think it might do some good, at least in teaching kids self determination..and to think on their own vs. listening to some adult who was a loser at life anyway (and I met plenty of them as a kid).