Thomas M. Powell:  

Life It was Grad Nite at Disneyland. Mame and I were high on purple double-dome, watching Goofy to make sure he didn't come anywhere near us. He scared us then, just as he did when we were tots. Way back then, it was the impersonal, rubbery, "non-human-ness" that scared us. Still, those same qualities were what frightened us, but under the influence of Owsley's mind-expander, everything was amplified a thousand-fold. It would take years and years after that to get over the thrill of getting high. I'd be supplying friends with the stuff for years, myself having a dose just about every day. I'm ashamed to say that while some of you were planning rich things to do with your lives, all I wanted was to play and laugh, and thumb my nose at the "suits". It wasn't the right thing to do. But it was what I did. I'm here today to say that yes, it did catch up with me. Survive? Yes. Keep most of my brain cells? Well... I had graduated with a small scholarship, enough to pay for Chaffey Community College, and I was going to major in Art, and minor in Languages. But I was gay and I knew it, and having been released from the constraints of the High School society that didn't understand it, I was free to pursue what gay people did back then, and that was PARTY. So party I did, until oh, I don't know... week-before-last? I never got a degree from Chaffey. Rather, I met a guy after my first year there, got busted for pot in Huntington Beach, and ran away to Oregon with him, where pot was the official state flower. The drug program we were mandated to attend was taught by a hippie who showed us how to pick 'shrooms out on Highway 126. We fell in with a gay, hippie coffeehouse collective in Eugene, and learned macrobiotic food preparation, folk songs, and T-shirt screenprinting. I designed the coffeehouse's menus and T-shirts, and their promos, and Mike printed T-shirts with me in a small apartment on Washington Street. That was in 1974. Portland was a grand town. We'd made t...Expand for more