Counter Culture

It's been a strange couple of days as seen from the 14th floor. I came home on Tuesday night at about 10:10 PM and looked out to view the lake and the wind was high, producing some serious waves that were crashing over the running and biking path. It froze pretty quick and was making mounds of ice along the concrete shoreline across the street. The next morning when I got up there were icy stalagmites along the edge of the concrete shoreline. It was bright and sunny here on the Streeterville side of the lake, but to the east I could see ominous dark clouds that told me that Michigan was getting socked seriously with lake effect snow.

That morning and the next, it was 9 degrees at the lakefront and 6 degrees at the outpost in Back of the Yards. Yesterday morning when I looked out at the lake the water within the barrier was frozen and solid. The water beyond the barrier was totally open water. This morning the water within the barrier was totally liquid and the deep water beyond was frozen over solid. Go figure. Some ice. Some water. Don't think I'll be swimming in any of it anytime soon.

This morning I hopped into the Mini and headed out for the outpost and, voila, it was 14 degrees. I thought to myself, "Self, it's probably going to be 25 by afternoon. Woo hoo! Here comes that big warmup we've heard so much about. Get out the shorts and t-shirts! Give me that SP-64 sunblock! Oh yeah!" Got home this afternoon and it was 28 degrees at the Mini. Still not a word on the wind chill factor.

I've been accused of having an odd sense of humor, of being incredibly cynical, of coming from somewhere in left field a lot in life. Sometimes I have great intervals between these accusations and I tend to forget for a while that I'm not really what Middle America thinks of as normal. Then the realization that I must have been dreaming smacks me squarely up the side of the head. Thank God! Frankly, normal people don't spend all the hours I do spilling my guts to the world on a blog and getting 5 people a day to actually read it. Normal people don't spend endless hours holding conversations on Facebook with a cupcake. Let's hear it for abnormal.

As David Byrne once said, "How did I get here? Letting the days go by...." Well frankly, I have views and a sense of humor formed, and heavily influenced, from a lifetime of functioning on the fringes of society in an area known as the counterculture. Sometimes in a large city it is possible to begin believing that you are normal, because large numbers of other outsiders surround you. Inevitably, though, you are slapped down, either figuratively or literally, and you are reminded once again, "Nope, not normal. Not even close."

So what does it mean to be a member of the counterculture? When I was younger, it was easy to spot. You wore your hair a certain way. You dressed a certain way. You had a certain coded language that you all used. You espoused a leftist viewpoint. You were an artist of some sort (in the larger sense, visual, musical, written, performing...) and most of your friends were also some sort of artist. You disdained the middle class, the rich, the stupid, the average, the ..... You disdained a lot. You listened to music that no one else did. Did I tell you the story about going to the Rainbow Bar and finding out that I had to pay a cover charge to see,...get this..., an all bass band. Truly transcendent. Managed to stay for one set and look at the art on the walls that a friend created and was trying to sell.

As a grownup, though, what does it mean to be a member of the counterculture? I still have those leftist views (Voted for Barack you know.), but I don't belong to the Democratic Socialists of America anymore. Grew out of that one just as surely as I grew out of my marijuana usage. As regards that, I woke up one day and looked in the bottom of my underwear drawer and realized that I'd had an ounce of marijuana in there for a year and hadn't even come close to finishing it. That was over 20 years ago now. Still have, at least the pretense of art. I have this blog. I write songs. I sing. I play guitar, albeit badly. I write poetry now and again. I've been married for 22 years to the same woman with no kids and we've traveled around the world. Babs is writing a book. Deadline in a little over a month. We still have oddball artsy friends. We know a lot of gay people and African Americans and people of all sorts of backgrounds from every place on the planet. Exchange emails and Facebook comments with a former exchange student/child for a year in Belgium. Interact with all of them openly. Explain that to your fundamentalist Southern family, or even middle of the road Midwestern family, for that matter. Just not normal.

It gets hard to distinguish the counterculture, though, just by looking at us as we get older. I pay my bills by teaching for the Chicago Public Schools. I own a suit and tie and even wear it on occasion. I've learned to like red wine better than beer. I've developed an affinity for South Beach instead of hiking and canoeing down the river. Don't smoke anything anymore, not reefer, not Marlboros. Have a condo on the 14th floor, overlooking Lake Michigan. Got a 37 inch flat screen Sharp Aquos TV. Got a steam shower and a Jacuzzi. I like running 10 mile races on Sunday mornings, meaning I don't hang out until 4 AM on Saturdays very often. Own a $1000 bicycle. Drive a Mini Cooper (Made by BMW). Oh and a guilty pleasure of mine that I didn't mention in a previous blog devoted to that topic, I like Italian clothes and Italian shoes. Can't really afford Italian cars, at least the ones I'm drawn to. Back in the day, when I had hair on the top of my head instead of coming out of my ears, I might have thought of someone like myself as a sellout. Not so. There's nothing wrong with being comfortable. There is something wrong with being a greedy asshole.

People age and they mellow. I had a lot of mellowing to do. After mellowing there is still a lot of edge to my views on life. I hold down a job and I am accepted within certain realms, but as mentioned before, when I try to overstep my boundaries, I get slapped down every time. "What do you think you're doing here?" A colleague at work once told me, "I heard that they hired this new history teacher, and I thought so what? The first time I saw you walking down the hall I thought, 'That guy does not look like a history teacher. He looks like he belongs blowing a saxophone in a smoky bar somewhere.'" I live part of my life in normalcy, but the real me still sticks out, not like a sore thumb, but like a proud flag, announcing who I am, who I really am, and it is not part of the normal American middle ground. It's from the fringes, and I'm damned proud of it and I'm damned proud of the rest of us who exist there.