You Can't Pick Your Era

The eighties was a bad time to be a hippy. Fifteen years after it was hip and fifteen years before it was retro. If you were living outside of time and space and God said "Go pick an era to go to earth and go braless!" you wouldn't pick the eighties. The era of the material girl, neon fabrics, Reaganomics, and designer jeans. If you were to pick an era to canvas for Greenpeace, to artificially heighten your senses to reveal the essence of all things, to worship nature, to wash little and always with a philosophical soap, to work little and travel much, to scour songs and publications for indications of enlightenment, to do a feminist reading of everything, to drop acid in Disneyland, and to wonder who among us would grow up to sell out, it wouldn't have been the eighties. But we were born to swim upstream, and like Salmon we returned to our place of origin and we, some of us, spawned. And we somehow lived to tell the tale. It's one of life's great rip-offs: You can't pick your era.