So Anyways, In My Early Ohio State Days

So anyways, in my early Ohio State days, circa 1971-74, thanks to Al Sciarappa, Kim Green, Johnny Kochmit, and also Don Doty (then in Bowling Green, Ohio), we were reading the Bhagavad Gita, Siddhartha/Hesse, the Upanishads, Alan Watts, the Beats, Lao-Tzu, Taoist literature, and going to the Hare Krishna Temple occasionally for good-natured debate with the Krishnas and free vegetarian dinners. It should be noted that this was all new stuff for me, fresh from a neophobic Cleveland that would never have suffered such departures from the post-war dogma and social construction.

Creating a real internal philosophical tension in our West Norwich Avenue non-sectarian ashram (Columbus, Ohio), we were also reading Abbie Hoffman, Eldridge Cleaver, WEB DuBois, Malcolm X, Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, H. Rap Brown, and Maoist literature. The Gita shared shelf space with Pedagogy of the Oppressed, On the Road, Slaughterhouse Five, Gary Snyder’s Cold Mountain Poems, Seize the Time, and Malcolm’s autobio.

Finally, there was the explosion of European existential literature—Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, and Nausea, Albert Camus’ Stranger and The Plague, Kafka’s Trial, Ulysses, Samuel Becket, the Absurdist theatre, the Transcendentalists, the Dadas, Rimbaud and the Surrealists.

We were deeply immersed in this stuff.

Only a handful of months removed from the truck docks of Cleveland, this stuff was intoxicating

Talk About Thirteen Ways of Looking At A Blackbird

Talk about thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird. At 17, all these directions of exploration were both liberating as hell and daunting AF. I had not heretofore spent much time in deep thought territory, and now the utter endless meaning of existence musings, and the nature of the deepest historical social justice issues were right there on West Norwich Avenue.

The psycho-philosophical cats were out of the fuckin’ bag, man, there was no collecting them back again. I distinctly remember one night, following a particularly depthful convo with the household, sharing with Johnny Kochmit what felt like one of the biggest light bulb epiphanies of my young life: “You know, once you know this stuff, you can’t un-know it.”

We had climbed to a certain depth of consciousness, and damn, there it was, bigger’n hell, and there we were, scaring ourselves with our own open-ness to the universe, and that selfie would live on in infamy, though we could not have known that then…Fifty years later, I am talking about it here, now…

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