Year In the Same

Gong became very important to me during the spring of my Junior year in High School.  Pot was involved, certainly.  The on-ramps to Gong appreciation were all lubricated with bong hits.  A hardcore punk, I wanted nothing to do with seventies trip-tunes.  But hanging out there in the dorm room of an earnest friend who, not for the first time, was playing the elfin duet of Bloomdido Badigrass on flute, and Steve Hillage rubbing rosewood, playing “Flute Salad” there, just before “Oily Way” and it struck me than this somehow sounded . . . beautiful. 

 

Streits makes a box of kosher potato pancake, latkes.  Apparently, this is the new formula and there are no sulfites.  It’s Passover.  I know from my weekly call with Israel, but I’m not Jewish and I don’t keep kosher.  I just want to make the kids something they wouldn’t normally have.  Something delicious.  My nephew slept over.  He, my daughter and I are going to reconvene our Dungeons and Dragons game today.  I loved D&D when I was in high school.  Oddly, my daughter is a Junior this year in the same high school I once attended. 

 

And though I hadn’t deliberately put all that together when I thumbed through Spotify, and saw the “Angels Egg” album rise up and almost pass by, I let myself consider my own evolution and the evolving experience of my daughter, as Daevid Allen suggested I consider the “ceaseless tides of self, ever passing away before our eyes.”  Immediately I thought of all my pals from that time and began drafting them an email in my mind.  One is in Italy, one is in Oakland, one is in Beijing.

Later in the day, my dad and my stepmom swing by and we head up to the Trapps with my nephew.  En route we’re all concerned.  It’s lovely out.  We may not find a parking place.  Should we consider something less popular?  We persevere and as it so happens someone is leaving just as we’re arriving and soon, we’re up on the shelf of the cliffs, trying to squint to find our home, off to the right of the tower at the Suny New Paltz campus, that doesn’t look so tall from up here.  So many climbers.  Next weekend is when my daughters have a lesson which I’d got for them, to climb these cliffs with an instructor.  A forest canopy’s complexity of ethnicity that practice a few feet above fat mattresses, and hundreds of feet up the cliff face are people making their way to the top.  My nephew walks alone ahead of us all, pondering perhaps what it might mean to actually do such a thing. 

Saturday, 04/03/21