Goofin’ with the Cosmic freaks

Posted on by Opher

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This is a novel that is a road adventure for the sixties, full of the characters that inhabited that world, its craziness and ideals. It bounces with fun and madness.

Here’s the preface:

Preface

This is the ultimate sixties book – an ‘On the Road’ for the British Underground with all its sex, drugs, dreams and music; those times of crazy people high on life and mad for experience – when anything was possible.

It captures that idealistic naïve impossibility permeated with vitality and careering love and dreams, the wild rush for adventure without a thought for the future because it was going to last forever.

– Seemingly forever changes!

It spans continents as it trips its way through time, space and mind in a mad rush to discover life and experience or die trying.

Now was all there was and it had to burn, burn, burn or it was dead.

In the days of dope and poetry, where the world was ripe for changing, there was a mystical buzz of unity. In the shadow of an establishment that stood for war, prejudice, work, isolation and the rat-race with all it’s status seeking power games, racism and slow death signified by getting the lines straight on your lawn, Jack’s cackling laughter and bright eyes, death-defying madness and care-free attitude showed there was an alternative.

Maybe dope was never enough and when we grow up it is time to put aside childish things where they are confined to our dreams and memories. But somewhere out there Jack still lives where it is real.

We did change the world!

 

Opher 16.8.2014

Beat Poetry and me – An awakening!

Posted on by Opher

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Beat Poetry and Beatnik’s

I grew up in the sixties. I was too young to be a Beatnik of the fifties but their energy and vitality, their perspective, their anti-establishment fervour, their craziness and sheer exuberance suffused my spirit. I may have been a child of the wild sixties but my roots were firmly in Beat.

I was repulsed by the grey pointlessness of suburban life. It seemed devoid of colour, excitement or purpose. The whole boring spectre of work, TV, mowing the grass and washing the car seeming so dull and directionless was an anathema to me. When I hit my teens I wanted something more.

I had this overwhelming urge to break out of that pattern. I did not want to wear the same clothes, do the same things or have my mind fixed into some standard way of thinking.

I craved wildness, excitement and craziness. I had to think, to fly and to experience. I had a life and I did not want it filled with money, possessions or safety; I wanted it full of laughter, friendship, love, wonder and adventure. Memories were my wealth.

I gravitated towards the crazy people. I liked the weirder things.

At seventeen I was enthralled by my Rural Science teacher who spoke wistfully of his years living in a hut on Box Hill, getting up with the sun, doing a paper round to earn a living, growing his own vegetables, living frugally and having the day to do his thing. He was building a boat and taking a navigation course to head off round the world. I came out wide-eyed. My friends thought his was a loony.

I wanted to be a loony.

I knew which life I would have preferred. I’d prefer to be in a boat heading off into danger, adventure and uncertainty than working in an office and cleaning my nice car.

Then I read Kerouac and Ginsberg and discovered there were others out there who were outsiders, who saw society as a scourge, consumerism as an evil and wanted to pierce the fabric of life with their tongues, words, poems and lust. They saw life as a mad journey, a monster to be wrestled with, a vessel to be drained, experience   to be savoured and gleefully seized. Life was monstrously brilliant. You had to live in the moment and grab the ecstasy, sample the extent, let it explode and gush it back out in unleashed words.

These were no carefully crafted poems so much as splurges of words splattering like machine gun bullets into the grey matter to explode in ecstasies of enlightening understanding. They were ripping the fabric aside and revealing the naked truth underneath.

Life was to be lived. It wasn’t supposed to be comfortable, safe and boring. It was the ecstasy of being alive in the moment, in the midst of the crescendo of the raw universe. It was a wild, drunken, sex-filled, journey into the unknown and it sang…. It sang… it filled the blood with fire….. it sent electricity through the brain…. It opened the eyes, ears and senses. Life had to be tasted, felt, smelt, seen, heard and thought and the revealed clarity had to be expounded in symbols and those words had to express the wonder.

That was the meaning the Beats gave to me. They took away my existence and gave me life in full colour.

My novel  ‘Goofin’ With The Cosmic Freaks’ is a  story of adventure, craziness and journeys. I saw it as ‘On The Road’ for the Sixties. If you like fifties Beat or Sixties Underground, Kerouac or Harper, you will love this.

 

Opher 2.9.2015