I’m a hippie. I don’t think there’s anything more fun than growing my hair long, getting into a sky-blue Volkswagen Campervan with huge daisies painted on it, and driving across the country from coast to coast banging out ’60s tunes on a Spanish guitar. I drink wine from a carton, pee in park hedges, and have declared war on cologne. The only fragrance that satisfies me is the smell of freedom. I know that declaring wars isn’t too coherent with ’60s orthodoxy, but what can you do — one still has those reactionary twinges of youth.
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I have bought round sunglasses. I’ve thrown away all the bottles of expensive rum, except those from revolutionary countries, and I have a trunk full of liter bottles of beer. I wear the kind of torn and aged clothes that are worth a ton of money but give you a super-cool sloppy look. I listen to the Stones non-stop, which doesn’t have much to do with hippies, but I like it. And I’ve burned all the neat ’80s pop vinyls, the ones I used to put on during my morning shower, because they upset my fellow bobmarleys. There is no one more violent than a pacifist first thing in the morning before his first toke of marijuana. I smoke with a mouthpiece like Hunter S. Thompson because I aspire to be a hippie but an intellectual one, that is, instead of dying passed out in a wasteland, I will die with my head resting on a typewriter.
My love of freedom prevents me from wearing leggings. And that is something else I have to admit. The oppression that leggings produce in the differential fact that distinguishes the male hippie from the female hippie goes radically against my concept of free will. It’s an old debate I have with my fellow hippies, who don’t see how they are to fight the oppressive enemy when the oppressive enemy is in their testicles. I’m a baggy-legged, airy-shirted hippie. I abhor all that tightness that exposes capitalist fatiness, to put it eloquently.
I live in communion with nature, and my girlfriend is the ecosystem. That’s the sum of my thoughts on hygiene. When you believe sparrows are clean because they rub their wings in a puddle of mud every morning, and if you’re sure your kitty is neat because she scrubs her little paws with her tongue, then there’s really no need for a drugstore close to home. I don’t shower. I only bathe in the sea. Yes, every day. And then I take showers on the sly, of course. But don’t tell anyone, or my colleagues will force me to clean the trunk of the damn van.
I’m a practitioner of natural medicine (huge quantities of beer), I read the strangest books in French (and without knowing French, which is doubly meritorious), and I display a kind of expansive love that especially encompasses all those hippies in their 20s who buy frayed denim shorts and white shell necklaces in the luxury boutiques around New York. In other words, I’m a hippie, but I’m a posh hippie, which is the trendy thing to do. Kind of like being a progressive in the Republican Party. The norm.
I am, first and foremost, an intellectual. My lecture The Counterculture Speaks for Itself is receiving excellent reviews. The duration is two hours and the fee close to $5,000. It is a conceptual talk. During the two hours I just walk silently around the auditorium staring at each of the attendees. When the time is up, I leave. And the audience bursts into a resounding ovation. I have already been called from several countries to give this master class on counterculture. And in the summer I will go on tour. The truth is that it is quite easy to translate it into any language. And I’m sure that in Brussels I’ll find a lot of idiots willing to subsidize my tour with EU funds.
I think the whole universe is good. At least, the universe of my campervan. I’m not interested in politics, like Maduro. I watch parliament sessions as if they were silent movies. In an artistic sense, I travel from psychedelia to counter-power and anti-war protest. Maybe that’s why my hobby is to raid abandoned military facilities to celebrate raves with my hipster buddies, who are not hippies but only by two or three letters. After the sixth rum and coke, nobody notices the difference. Least of all the hippies, who are too busy dodging colorful elephants on the dance floor.
But I have a problem. I confess, with no shame, that I like the system. Yes, without the system I wouldn’t be able to spend my summers at hippie island resorts with my Silicon Valley buddies. And that’s just out of the question. I don’t intend to spend the whole year putting up with the stale aroma of that campervan to not be able to dance reggae with the hippie daughters of bankers and businessmen in summer. Bob Marley would understand perfectly. I have already said that I am a hippie, very hippie, a total hippie. But a classy hippie.
Translated by Joel Dalmau.
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