At first glance the area of Calgary that I grew up in would not seem like the kind of place that encourages a life in art.  Surrounded by car- lots and graveyards it is a working class and drinking class neighborhood perhaps a little more likely to produce truck drivers than poets but the first glance does not tell the whole story.  Along with the used-cars and graves there were huge areas, some which still exist, of undeveloped bush country right in the middle of the city; the kind that a kid could go and get lost in away from the eyes and schedules of an adult world. There were plenty of places to go and be by yourself and smoke Chesterfield cigarette butts that my mother left around or maybe get a little girl down there or whatever.  There was never any attempt to get me to join clubs or to organize my free time in any way; I was on poet's time long before I knew what a poet was.  A few blocks from my house the Beresko boys lived who were these tough Polish immigrants, four boys my age named Walter, Lothar, Victor and Neptune, who was named for the boat they came over on, nobody told us when to be in and the other kids were scared of us but they had great imaginations and never laughed if your gun was a stick.  We would roll tires onto Mission Road and peek in the windows at Pomer Wicks house to watch them in bed or try to talk girls into playing doctor and sometimes they would.

 

 

    In fact it could have been a typical small prairie-city childhood with illustrations by Norman Rockwell except for the anomaly of the air-raid siren at the end of the park and the evacuation drills and studying what to do in the event of a nuclear strike.  It forced some kind of international awareness, the world just sort of crept in.  We got a television so that popular and in a small way even underground culture became available if you had a tendency that way and learned to read between the lines.  I watched the Beatles on Ed Sullivan the next day, went to school with my hair combed forward and have identified with hipsters ever since which was fortunate because the alienated are traditionally the source of new ideas and most creative acts, it was a head start on realizing that every culture produces some kind of underground and thats always been where the fun is, especially if you grew up alongside the Beresko boys and my ten brothers and sisters who were all a little crazy too.

 

    We eventually moved to a small farm at the edge of the city and kept cows and chickens but I went to suburb schools and hung out with suburb kids and the brother of a big dealer sat behind me in French and we were smoking reefer before I was even aware that it was illegal and I didn't think it was strange to be a reefer smoking junior high school president in 1967 but in retrospect I guess it was, they kicked me out later but only for smoking cigarettes at the dance.

 

     I became more tuned in to pop-culture hanging out in restaurants with the juke-box blaring or going down to the Java Shop and scoring a nickle bag and the whole thing:  the reefer and the music and the political scene added up to an attitude very different than the one the straight culture would have liked me to have and by the time I first went hitch-hiking in 1969 it was already ingrained and I met hundreds of other kids who understood and if you were around then you remember how exciting it was.

 

    The thing of pop-culture is very important because even though the Woodstock Nation in itself was a big flop it at least lent a legitimacy to pursuing something other than money and it only failed because it was bought off; straight culture blocked the lines of communication by selling official tie-dye tee-shirts at the Bay and they did it again to the punks.  Though of course the joke of it is that they can't keep buying those movements off forever and some time and probably soon an idea will come along with enough momentum that no amount of marketing can corrupt and we'll leave them sitting scratching their heads on Madison Avenue saying what went wrong, this revolution had such promise.

 

    But along with the sociological consequences of my process is also the ordinary personal one and like any teenager I feel in love and like all teenage affairs it fucked up which brings us (me) up to about 1970 and the sum total at that point was a kid who identified with hipsters and rock music and blasting reefer and hitch-hiking and hanging-out who had just quit school and had his teeth kicked in by his lover and figured all he could do was to learn to write it down.