Great Falls Virginia Winter 1979
It is another gray morning.
From time to time, the wind charges up from the river, sending shivers through this house and turning the driveway into a mad ballet of tiny tornadoes of dancing dry leaves.
The household sign rests outside on the cold ground, ripped from its anchoring by a recent vandalic gust.
The sign reads: Waystead.
It is the name I created for this house, a Strunkian phrase which proclaims the dreams and despairs of my generation: we were the flower children, borne out of the rich, guzzling epidemic of consumption and gratification which broke out after World War Two.
Coddled from birth, shielded through adolescence by loving parents, bathed in the numbing bathos of television, soothed by high fidelity music, we were ready to step into our old man’s shoes, a smooth transition into the second generation of the nuclear family.
But life is at variance with the principles of logic. And the nature of Man is unpredictable. Thus it was, as Dickens wrote, the best and the worst of times. For there must be painful compensation paid to survive, and usually it is the children who are called upon to make the sacrifice.
Our severe test was Viet Nam, a singular act of violence which, unfortunately, lacked the convincing ‘bite’ that characterized your Depression and your War.
But with the proper amount of governmental warmongering and lackluster policy-making, there was created a critical need for American boys to shed their blood on the other side of the Earth.
It was through Viet Nam that we learned the meaning of your Truth. It was in Viet Nam we learned the flowers die. Only the cactus and the spiny plants and bushes endure.
The only verdant smiles here, warming the dull winter woods, are the Virginia laurel bushes, ever-green, yet on the verge of extinction, clinging to precious life in the acid soil of their natural habitat.
Like a bankrupt, lumbering bureaucracy, Springtime is too busy laundering its debts to service the essential needs of its people.
The sun has yet to shine.
Lenin penned, “Treaties are like roses and beautiful women: they last while they last.”
His tenet offers up a cynical, selfish Truth and Attitude which is the watchword of life today: any means justify the end. In 80s America, commercialism is the sugar and lofty idealism and practical restraint are the sour wines.
We were the flower children. But the soil has been abused and overworked. The flowers are dying. The earth is sharp and rough. We need shoes we didn’t need before.
We live on sugar now.
We are the Sugar Babies.
We’ve stepped into our old man’s shoes, into his Truth and his Attitudes. Soon the shoes will wear thin and we will replace them, but his Truth and his Attitudes will be our Truth and our Attitudes. . . Until the next generation.
Let them all die of their sweet overdose. I’ll take the bitter grape. I am, after all, a modern wino: harmless, alone and unshod, waiting for the sun, undernourished from lack of elemental human feeling and saturated with poly-ultra-video-induced negative feedback.
In a nation of 220 millions, where does a derelict like me fit? In a world where Truth is an illusion, where will the flowers bloom? And how will a man like me survive until they do?
WAYSTEAD
The noun: a comfortable dwelling occupied by person(s) whose principle concern is to ensure that all who enter their abode be well fed and bedded and entertained during their stay.
The adjective: Dissolute.
