Pink Houses

This is my all-time favorite picture of me.
If you couldn't tell, I'm the baby being held by my dad in the middle of the swimming hole at Odie's (the man in the foreground). Clearly, everyone is having the best time.

This picture captures an affect of my childhood that I am intensely nostalgic for. The desire is not for a sense of youth or specific memory but for a moment and the zietgiest of an era I can barely recall. The mid-to-late 1980's in Indiana were a magic time. There was this great excitement and sense of place in Bloomington at the time -basketball championships, FARMAID, and desire to consider the local and the home-grown that I can only see as a counter to the slick, impersonal aura of Reganomics. My dad was part of a group of people who referred to themselves as "hillbilly hippies." It was a rowdy mix of bikers, farmers, library science students, and nudists who drove beat up old trucks, did coke to grateful dead bootlegs and gave a shit. It is a mutant counterculture that I find myself obsessing over. It was a lifestyle that seems so obviously appealing - the centrality of friendship, drinking late and building fires, an awareness and constant mention of 'freedom,' wingnuts with knowhow and toolboxes in their truck, dogs never on the leash, the fucking wilderness, appreciating your youth and feeling great, psychedelics, open roads to hot springs.
Shit, throw in a black flag tape and that's probably my dream summer.

TAKE ME BACK. I'M TRYING TO TAKE IT THERE.