The good old days

They seem to be on a ska kick at Chapters today, or is it reggae. I don't know the difference, I only know I've hated that stupid rhythm from the first time I heard it. That would have been the mid-seventies when I was staying at Lynda's place in the West End. Haven't seen her since she ran off to Newfoundland with a coke dealer. I always liked Lynda and kind of miss her, even if we never were more than friends- but came pretty close to it a few times. I had met her in the U of Alberta Blue Room a few years before. She wasn't a student, she was a fifteen year old who thought she was too cool to waste her time with kids of her own age. She made the acquaintance of University students by offering to give back rubs and by sharing her hash pipe. I got my back rub and I shared a few of her hash pipes. By the mid seventies she had a nice hippie apartment in the West End (I think it was on the corner of Nelson and Barclay) she shared with her husband and a few others, and I stayed there for a little while. I liked her little place, especially the kitchen table by the window where I could watch all the office girls walk by on their way to work. Since the apartment was in the basement of the building my eyes were just about at their knee level which provided a pleasant viewing angle. But she didn't give back rubs any more. That was more than thirty years ago. Damn.
Alas, she used to play reggae a lot in that hippie pad. What does that idiotic beat remind me of? A sort of dance of the dead? A Samuel Beckett character trying to do the mambo? It could be an accompaniment for a crack or meth head gyrating jerkily down the street. The drug culture began innocently enough in the sixties and we laughed at warnings from our elders that it would lead to far worse things. They were right. The drug scene very quickly morphed into a death cult. The last hippie house I lived in turned out to be full of junkies. I watched as their eyes went blank after shooting up. I heard them puking in the bathroom. I watched them spend hours afterward just sitting gazing at nothing. Most of those guys are probably dead by now. Too bad. They were good guys, but the haunted look in their eyes is something I'll never forget.
In Edmonton I used to be friends with a girl whose dad promoted most of the shows that came into town. Ice shows, circuses, rock concerts, lots of stuff. Her family was pretty cool, I thought. Her mother liked to come to our parties and flirt with the young guys. You could sit around in their kitchen and smoke pot, they didn't mind. The kids pretty much did what they wanted without any interference. And then a few years later when I was living on Vancouver Island they were in the news. The mother had come home and found her youngest son and some of his friends dead of an overdose. I never found out of what, I never asked. Sex, drugs and rock and roll was the mantra in those days, but it was really about death.
I wonder how Lynda is. Of course she will be old now, just like me, but I'm sure she'll be a scrawny old bird and still full of ginger if she's still alive. But I still hate reggae.
Today is welfare day in BC, the last Wednesday of the month. It's popularly called mardi gras, even though it's mercredi. It's the whores' day off because they will be able to get drugs on the taxpayers' dime. I have often wondered how much of the province's welfare expenditure goes directly into the pockets of the drug dealers.