I don't have to make the climb

Got home yesterday night, switched on the tv looking for something subtitled to watch while brushing my teeth and saw this:



This is just a small excerpt from the awe-inspiring 1970 documentary Woodstock, and somehow stands in sharp contrast to the rest of the film in the sense that here we have a young couple not necessarily wanting to be part of the action, dissecting from a distance not only the festival but their own generation almost like philosophers watching over the masses. Theirs is a lost generation, as the young man puts it, imprisoned by the urge to be free. Rather than a genuine state of mind that can be attained as much by squatting alongside a country road as by switching the batteries of your camera in a skyscraper elevator, freedom had become a conceptual goal that could only be reached through the well-defined channels of drugs, music, Eastern spirituality, free love and what have you.

Woodstock wasn't the proclaimed gateway to nirvana. It ended in the mud and fatigue, with junk and debris of untraceable origins scattered all across the field. It looked like a battlefield swamped with indefinable ‘stuff’ and here and there a human body crawling without any apparent sense of direction. Yet another lost generation had reached its culmination, there on the muddy fields of Bethel, NY. The proverbial bang they went out with: the roaring howl of Jimi Hendrix’ guitar.

On the other hand, it sure looked like one hell of a party, and graced the world with imagery of which even Hollywood wouldn’t be capable of, and yes, perhaps in essence every generation is lost, anxiously looking for a common denominator that connects & bonds us all in the comforting warmth of borderless unity, a global herd, although probably in the end

(...) everybody's looking for some kind of answer, where there isn't one.

Heart-shaped

In my world, invisibly walled, she was wearing something red. I couldn't clearly point out what it was exactly, but it was something red. A classic heart-shaped earring maybe, with even maybe a matching heart-patterned dress. But no, that would be too much. Too fifties-diner-style, drinking a milkshake, no matter what kind, as long as it is pink, on the way to a drive-in cinema, where night fills lungs. I'm playing the air guitar to an old tune and I see the bar tender looking at me, thinking "he's got it", while an hour ago I was just plain sober and he was just plain bar tender. Now, however, we share a connection, one that can only last as long as I'm in the bar. Only difference is that he probably knew her for real.