It’s fair to say that my interest in what constitutes normalcy owes alot to when I was born. Last month, I turned 50, which means I was born in 1958, towards the tail end of the Baby Boom. I attended high school in the mid-1970’s, in the shadow of Woodstock. At age 13 I read The Greening of America by Charles Reich, sitting in the back seat of my parent’s car on our way down to the Jersey shore. This book had an enormous effect on me, at that impressionable age. It’s a very naive book, written by an academic, and attempts to explain, in dry sociologial language, the so-called counter-culture movement of the late Sixties. To me, it was a guide book, initiating me into the mysteries of the party I had just missed by a few years. I can’t say it changed my life, but at the time it was earth-shattering.
Suddenly, my middle-class family, squashed into the Plymouth Valiant crawling down the Parkway towards the beach, seemed very different from me. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, I felt very different from them. This marked the beginning of my journey away from Normal. By age 14 I was smoking pot for the first time, and by 15 I was smoking it every day, cutting classes with my comrades. The fact that I maintained my place on the Honor Roll merely added to a growing sense of alienation. I could fit in, do the expected things, while teachers and parents had no idea that I saw through it all. They didn’t know how things “really” were. Only we did: the cool ones. The ones who got high, and knew what was really going on. Straight people didn’t have a clue.
Professor Reich was wrong, though. The Revolution never came. The hippies got bored, bought SUVs and got jobs as stock brokers (there’s a great song by the Bobs about that) in three-piece suits, snorting coke instead of smoking hash. They sold out, as we used to say. No one questions authority anymore. No one normal, that is.
