The older you get, the faster time goes by – there’s clinical proof someplace. You remember a time when a week felt like a month and a month felt like a century. You remember New Year’s Eve 1969 and you remember exactly where you were when it hit midnight and it became 1970. You were there – it was North Beach and you were right in the middle of it; thousands of people and even the cops were celebrating. It was the best life was going to be – it was the best it was going to get.
The next thing you know, people are telling you it’ll be the 80s soon. Where did the 70s go? You were there – you were living and breathing and talking but somehow, ten years up and sprinted through your life and you missed it.
You do know for a fact that things got interesting in the 70s. You discovered Tequila and you discovered Jack Daniels but you weren’t smoking nearly as much dope as you used to. You learned how to make Martinis. You were snorting things – lines and rolled up dollar bills and speed-babbling to anyone who’d listen. Days got pretty zippy then – and you sweat a lot and you didn’t sleep much and you had places to go and things to do and people to be.
And your outlook on life changed. You used to meditate a lot. Now you can’t sit still for more than 30 seconds. And hours passed into days and days passed into months and you hardly noticed.
But lately, every time you turned on the radio and a song comes on from before it all got crazy, you stop – the whole world falls into slow motion – and you start hearing things like pigeons and cars and you smell things like someone frying bacon or walking down the street wearing too much Chanel.
And for those 3, 4 or 8 minutes you stand frozen, just taking it all in; staring into space, picking up the pieces. And then the song’s over and reality slaps in – it’s 1979 after all and soon it will be the 80s.
And you can’t, for the life of you, figure out how that one’s going to work.
Click on the link and dive into August 1979 with Cynthia Fox at KMET.
