Continuing my story of why I call this blog, “The Extreme Centrist.” When I last posted I had been talking about some of the things that happened to me in the late 60’s. When 1970 came around I noticed that there were many more people that joined the peace freak movement. Some of these same people were the ones that had been fighting us earlier. It was such a big difference than back in the late 60’s. There wasn’t as much hate that was directed towards us now, which was great. Of course this was Texas so there were still many that hated us only now there were more of us. There is safety in numbers which made things seem much better. It was a little bit of a shock at first. Now being a freak had become somewhat popular with many. I started going to Reagan High school at this time. I remember some friends and myself were walking to school for the first time when we were stopped by some red necks. They told us our hair was too long and that we would have a hard time with them. I don’t think they understood that having a hard time was normal to us. Things were pretty tame compared to junior high. The school still had a dress code so the dean of boys would call me in to measure my hair from time to time.. Growing up in this hostile environment had become the norm. To us it seemed like all the school and police wanted was to throw us in jail and throw away the key. We were big pot smokers and in Texas back then you could be put in jail for life for just a joint. This usually only happened to the Mexican Americans but not always. Walking around with pot in your pocket was taking a big risk. We always had a group that would sometimes go smoke during breaks. Usually we did it in a parked car or in the bushes. This continued all through high school. It seems funny now but even in the 60’s we were sure that pot would be legalized because it was so harmless. They would always say that they needed more time to study it before legalizing it. Some 38 years later and were still waiting. We just couldn’t understand how alcohol could be legal and not pot. Today the laws for alcohol have become tougher and the laws for pot looser. Back then drinking was seen as being good. I remember one time when my mom came into my room and while getting something out of my closet a bottle of vodka roll out onto the floor. I thought that I was in trouble but my mom was happy because it was alcohol and not some illegal drug. We could always buy alcohol with no problem. There were a few stores that would sell to me without asking my age even though you had to be 21 at the time. Later when I turned 18 it became legal for 18 year olds to buy it. People thought that if you could go to Viet Nam and die then you should be able to by alcohol. They changed it back to 21 after I turned 21 so again I was lucky to be my age. Also I had an older brother that would buy if for me. I remember one time when my older brother had a whole bag full of alcohol that he purchased for us when the police pulled us over. They took my brother in for some warrant they had on him and they let me take the bag full of alcohol. That’s how lax the law was back then when it came to alcohol. We had no problem drinking and driving back then. Not at all like today. We liked to go to the drive in movies and drink and have fun. That was never a problem even though we were so young. Today I won’t even have one drink and then drive because I am too worried about getting thrown into jail. Back then we also started doing harder drugs. The most popular was LSD because it was so cheap and would get you so high. I remember that I would save up some of my lunch money and would buy some for Friday night. It only cost about a dollar fifty or two dollars back then. I would do it on Friday because I couldn’t wait for Saturday and I needed to do it on a night when I could stay up late. The acid was so much stronger back then because it had a lot of strychnine in it. People would even jump from buildings to try and fly because it was so strong and not like it is today. I remember that after a trip we would always tell ourselves that we would never do it again but after a few days we were ready to go again. It seemed like a bad dream that we couldn’t escape and we couldn’t understand why we kept doing it. Of course this was just part of being a freak back then. We always would notice how a person would change after doing this drug. Like when the band the Who wrote there song, “The Acid Queen,” and talked about this. It was a strange thing that only we knew about. People would say that we were experimenting with drugs back then. This was very true because we didn’t know that some drugs were worst than others. After we smoked pot and saw that everything bad that they were saying about it was untrue, we couldn’t believe anything they told us. We had to find out the hard way. Some bands would try and warn the other kids by writing songs like, “Speed Kills,” by Canned Heat for instance. If we heard one of our guys say something bad about a drug then we could believe them. The only way we knew speed was bad was by doing it and dying. We were like experimental rats trying different drugs to find out what was good and what was bad. I remember that I was really sick of school and thought about dropping out. My parents let me go check out a school in the country for freaks called Greenbrier. They had it very easy there and would just hang out and go swimming and have fun. My parents told me that they wanted to move to my grandparents place near the lake outside of Austin. They said that fewer credits were needed there so I stayed in school. I was however pretty worried about going to a school with a bunch of red necks. I thought that I would have a harder time there but the people there were very nice. The red necks there were more like freaks than the red necks in Austin. These people were real cowboys and not like the fake cowboys in Austin. They liked to get high and have fun like we did. In the country that’s about all there is to do. The school however was always trying to bust us. They had people spying on us and could tell us where and when we had been smoking. One time after getting high at school the vice principal called me and another guy into his office. He told us to empty our pockets or he would have the police come in and empty them for us. I wasn’t holding but my friend was. I began to stall for time while my friend placed the pot into his sock. Then while I was talking and stalling for time my friend said go ahead and search us. They searched us but found nothing. Another time when I was driving home a DPS officer pulled me over. He had his gun out and pointed at me. He said he pulled me over for a missing tail light. By now the cops knew who I was and I’m sure that’s why I was pulled over and treated that way. They found a few joints and put me into jail with some crazy guy. His girlfriend had jumped out of the truck while it was moving. He kept yelling for a smoke ever hour, so I would get one too. This jail looked like it was around during the civil war days. They let me go the next day and later put me on probation for a year. I remember the lawyer that they gave me was some big red neck that also had a custom made club like the police in my previous posting. It had a bull’s eye on it and he said that it was for beating up hippies. The judge asked me if I like to smoke bananas which I thought was strange. He seemed to think it was funny but I didn’t. These people were very different than the Austin police and there laws were much tougher. Somehow I made through high school and moved back to town. I can remember well when the Ramones put out there first album back in 1976. My younger brother and my room mate sat me and my girlfriend down and asked us to listen to this album. They didn’t do anything to show weather they liked it or not. After hearing it I stated that I liked it because it was loud and getting back to basics. My girlfriend however didn’t like it. This was the beginning of the end for her and I. We would split up some five years later. I was really into punk and new wave but she could never get into it like me and this caused some problems. She would go to the punk club with me but she liked the older rock. Back then there were very few of us punk rockers so people would always tell us how much they hated punk. My younger brother and my room mate would copied the Ramones first album and would play it to people that had never heard punk. I remember well how they would look in shock after playing one of there songs. It was like they didn’t know what to think. They would just sit there with there mouths open. Soon after that I and my girlfriend moved to Houston because there were few jobs in Austin at that time. There was only one punk club in Houston at that time. It was called, “Rock Island.” We would usually just call it, “The Island.” We had a lot of good times there. At first there were some pucks that were to the right. They would sometimes wear Nazi symbols. There were also punks like I that though that Nazi stuff was uncool. There was a kind of war between us. There were bands like, “The Dead Kennedy’s, “that wrote songs like, “ Nazi Punks Fuck Off”, or Elvis Costello's " What's So Funny About Peace Love and Understanding",which shows how this little war played out. We were more to the left and more liberal than these boot boy, or skin head types. After some time most people sided with us. Some of the punks would say that they hated hippies but I was never like that. To me punks were hippies that moved on to the next thing. I remember that my older brother was angry with me for being punk because he would listen to these hippie hater types and think that I was like that. I think that people were just tired of the same old rock and needed something different. What I didn’t like was that the regular rock groups always had this very fancy equipment and tried to sound perfect. I remember that back then I would tell people that punk sounded better on a cheap stereo. I didn’t really believe this, I only said this to make a point about rock not being so fancy and to maybe piss off the punk haters. Sometimes I would come back to Austin to visit my friends and family. I remember one time when I saw the Dead Kennedy’s play at the Ritz in Austin. I was really high on acid and coke. I was usually in the front near the band when I watched a band play. At one point the lead singer Jello Biafra jump into the crowd near me. He went down to the floor when I jumped on top of him and yelled into his mike. After doing this I looked behind me and saw a wave of other people about to do the same. Not liking what I saw I knew that the only way I could stop from being buried was to get Jello back up on his feet. I grabbed him by his sweaty arm with my right hand and started hitting people with my left elbow until I could get him back up on the stage. That was really weird when you’re tripping. Back then I remember that I would slam dance so much that I would often start bleeding. At this same show when the first band the Dicks were playing I wrote my initial on the stage in my blood. I remember one of the band members looking at me with a strange look while I was doing this. When that show was over I was totally soaked from head to toe in my own sweat. I think that the punk club in Houston was maybe a little wilder because I would try and hit the guitar strings which they didn’t care for in Austin. I did that to another band in Austin called the Big Boys at a club call Liberty Lunch. The guitar player jumped off the stage and tried to kick my ass. I was also tripping at this show. I ducked and moved away before he could find me. Somehow I became attached to a vine that was growing on the wooden fence. Thinking that someone had tied me to the fence I pulled the vine until a large section of the fence fell down. The bouncers could tell that I was messed up so they let me go. I feel bad now that I was so wild and did something that the group didn’t like. I wish I could say that I’m sorry but I think that it’s better that I just say nothing. I sometime see the guy that tried to kick my ass and even have talked with him but I never bring this up. I wonder if he remembers me. I hope not but think he does. He works at U.T. like me. After that I stopped doing that. I saw the Big Boys play at a club called Raul’s which was one of the best shows I’ve seen. I was also tripping and with my girlfriend and her two sisters. This was a time when punk was new and I remember that people would pay to come in the club and then stare at the crowd and then leave. They wouldn’t even sit down. There was this endless line of people that keep coming in, then look then leave. I felt like someone in a freak show. I moved back to Austin in 1981. I lived with some friends in a large old house. One time we threw a party and the same thing happened there. There was this endless line of people that would come in, look around a little then move on. I remember myself and a few friends were sitting in my room wearing sun glasses at this party of ours. At one point the female lead singer of a band called D- Day asked us why we were all wearing sun glasses. I told her that we were all tripping and that we didn’t want to show our eyes. I think she then understood. At this time my younger brother, a friend and myself formed a band we called The Land Sharks. We were hardly a band though because our instruments were almost always in the pawn shop. We called the band that because we were always hungry and poor because we would spend all of our money on drugs. Later another band in Austin called themselves The Land Sharks too but we were the first. We had a motto also that when like this. Live to eat, eat to live. We were hardly a band because we would mostly just play the song Louie Louie because Iggy Pop told his audience that his band would only play Louie Louie if they didn’t stop throwing bottles at the band in one of there live albums. I think that album was called Raw Power. We thought that this was funny so we did it as a joke and also because we didn’t want to try too hard. I just wanted to talk about the hippie days and the punk days to make a point. When I was a hippie I was to the left but not like the pacifist types. I was more to the right of these people. When I was a punk I was not to the right like some were and some wanted the punk movement to be. I was more to the left and what the movement finally became. I am to the center but in an extreme way. And this is why I call this blog The Extreme Centrist. When I was watching something on TV the people made an interesting point that made sense to me. One of the people said that they believe that we are heading into a new dark age and that people should write down there story. They said that they thought that nobody would read what they wrote during this Dark Age but that in the future they may. I have this same belief only I think that we are heading into a DEVO period. Like the band DEVO that named there band after D- Evolution, or evolution in reverse. I look at all these young people now dressed like hippies and punks which is a little strange because we were at one time such a small group that was disliked so much. Another thing is that people like me grew up with the threat of the Russians attacking us as far back as I can remember. It was so wonderful seeing the Berlin wall come down at long last. I thought that now we have this threat almost gone that nothing can stand in our way in having peace at long long last. I thought that now the young peace freaks were grown and running things that things would finally get better. That is why I hate these Isloma Fascist so much. Just when things are about to be perfect, here come these fascist with there hateful senseless excuse for war. Doing unthinkable things to humans in the name of God. Even woman and children are not off limits to these perverts of religion. Now look at us, we try so hard to not kill woman and children while they try so hard to kill ours. Whatever we do is wrong and they always get a free pass. Can you even imagine how pissed off God must be. Like I stated before, I believe that God is far away and can’t help us or hurt us until we die. I can’t help but believe that God would want us to kill these perverts and send them to him as soon as possible. So I feel I must do what I’ve always done and speak up. Like always, people will think that I’m wrong but like always I will turn out to be right in the end. Like always people will come around to my way of thinking sooner or later no matter how much they fight me now. I guess in a way I feel it’s my duty to speak up again. Now I’m old and I can see that I may not be around much longer. My younger brother died a couple of years ago. My older brother is in a nursing home unable to walk. My health has been rapidly declining as I get older so I feel that I should speak up while I can. Today I don’t do all the drugs like I did in the past and live a very tame life with my wife. Doctors have told me that I suffer from depression so I take Prozac which has made my life better. I’ve never been like normal people. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to have a normal life. If there’s one thing I have learned is that it can always be much worst. I know that it’s important to be thankful for what I have because we are very lucky to live in this wonderful country that believes in freedom for all.