The voices in my head

The notion of thought as a precursor to action is embedded in our language: "Don't you even think about it!" But the opposite seems to be the case: If we really thought about it, we probably wouldn't do it. My generation was, of course, the generation that preached we must throw open the doors of perception and charge down the road of excess to the palace of wisdom. Central to the madness of the '60s was the belief in the holiness of willful stupidity. The courage to act without thinking, to leap without looking, was an affirmation of a faith in something larger than us.

In the '60s, our fathers' overarching faith in reason and force and their unwillingness to just go with the flow seemed to have driven them to a dry, barren place of slide rules in the Nevada desert that called up mushroom clouds of oblivion. Their logocentric arrogance seemed to threaten the world with destruction. We did not understand how their warlike spines had been molded in the furnace of war and then quenched to brittle hardness in the chill of the suburbs. We did not understand how their caution had been learned in a treacherous world; what we saw was a generation of overly serious men; we thought a little craziness would lead to knowledge of a higher order that included the irrational. Perhaps it did. But by overlooking the powerful and enduring values of our fathers, we also created a culture of insipid shallowness and paralyzing uncertainty. I don't think my period of debauchery and drunkenness was unrelated to the failure of my generation to adopt some of our fathers' hard-won lessons.

For four years now I have ridden the streetcar every day to and from work in downtown San Francisco. Women enter and leave the streetcar. They stand and sit and giggle and talk and bend over and adjust their skirts and pluck at their bra straps and put on lipstick and root in their bags and brush their hair and rest their weight first on one hip and then the other. They pull at their panties and adjust their dresses; they chew gum and pop candies into their mouths. They tie their shoes.

A yellow taxi roars by in the rain and I glimpse a brunet putting on red lipstick in the back seat with a compact mirror and I imagine a Nob Hill hotel room, the lights of Sausalito, a black garter and high heels, the smell of a certain jelly that comes in a tube, a bubbly drink ... I meet someone, shake her hand and imagine her on her back with her legs in the air and my mouth on her. There she is on all fours, her back arched, her head high, her eyes shining as she looks back at me. There she is hanging laundry in a backyard where the train tracks run. She's wearing a housedress, translucent in the low morning sun, and when she finishes we are going to go inside and she is going to get down on her knees ...

I get on the elevator and share it with a tall, round, balding man who's sipping coffee and headed for the fifth floor. As he leaves the elevator I give him a walloping kick in the butt and send him sprawling on the floor, his coffee splattered across the carpet, on his face a sputtering, wounded perplexity: What was that all about? It's just my imagination, running away with me.

There's something wild and magical going on. The ancient animal within us is dreaming while we pretend to be awake.

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