Tangled up in Blues, Installment II

Previously posted (4/5/07) at Age of Reason

Apologies for ripping off Dylan's idea here.

For those poor sods who slogged through Installment I, the events in this installment occurred roughly midway through those in that installment.

I only knew her for a few days and possibly there was really not much special about her. I cannot even recall her name -- although if I close my eyes, I can easily picture her.

I had been working as a logger on the Oregon coast, and had decided to head to Vancouver to find Margaret (from Installment I). Just outside of Tillamook, I came across her and a friend hitchhiking. They squeezed into my VW Karmann Ghia, along with my guitar, sleeping bag and a few clothes (if you are familiar with Karmann Ghias, you can appreciate how crowded that was) and I took them to Portland, where they were part of a commune that shared an old house.

To backtrack a bit here -- at this time, I had essentially traded the strict fundamentalist morality of my childhood for a similarly strict and grim political morality. So, while in principle, I favored sex, drugs and rock n roll, that was not actually part of my reality -- everything was focused on "the cause." While I had spent some time in Haight-Asbury in the Summer of '67, that time was spent recruiting hippies to show up at anti-war rallies and that sort of thing -- I really was not a part of that life.

So this was a revelation to me. She was sympathetic to my political views, but made it clear that that was not her thing. Her "thing" was centered around art, music, hashish, macrobiotic food and Hindu/Buddhist thought. She made it very clear that we were not in a romance and certainly not exclusive. I had never before been sexually involved with someone with whom I did not at least pretend to to be in love.

I remained with her for only a few days, before departing for Vancouver. A few months later, I once again passed through Portland and tried to find her, but she had moved on and nobody seemed to know where she had gone and I never saw her again.

I never did completely rid myself of those old hangups, but this experience certainly was a good start.