Long Hair, Goats, and Grain Belt Beer

I was sitting in the big fluffy white recliner yesterday, and I started to add up how much it was costing me to entertain myself. Eighty five dollars a month for satellite television, plus an extra fifty during football season. Then there's the price of the gigantic flat screen, high def television that we have, and the electricity to run it. It made my butt clench just thinking about it. Used to be that all I had was a black and white television with rabbit ears. That was very low tech, but at least I could go to bed at night without fretting about how the hell I was going to pay for it.

It made me think back forty years, to when I was living on a hippie commune out in Iowa. We didn't have any television, nor even a radio. What we did have was long hair, goats, and an ability to entertain ourselves in strange ways that often involved chemical or herbal enhancement. One of our favorite venues of entertainment was the unused feed silo out in back of the big old farmhouse. Many an evening you would find a bunch of us sitting in the bottom of that thing with guitars, drums, tambourines, and a couple of six-packs of Grain Belt Beer. That big round silo reverberated as if you were actually inside the guitars, or drums.

There is no doubt we had a good time back then, but I don't think I would want to depend on that to entertain me now. For one thing I don't have a twenty year old body anymore, and the idea of sitting cross legged in a pile of old hay, filled with chiggers, and ticks just makes me itch thinking about it. Besides, it didn't smell all that nice, and the silo had no air-conditioning. No, I'll just sit back here in 'Big Fluffy', my recliner, and control the world with my collection of remotes at my side.