The hills of Arcata reminded me of San Francisco only it was an endless, rolling suburb. They took us to the UC Humboldt campus and showed us the woods behind it, a clearing designated just for smokers. The night before crossing into Oregon we stayed with a friend of K’s in Arcata, CA. We stopped to wrap ourselves around the redwoods and marveled at just how close we could inch toward the guardrail. Accepted during the same timetable, we put our names on the same form requesting to be roommates.Īlong with a third friend, M, we decided to spend spring break driving the west coast, hugging the Pacific Coast Highway for as long as we could. When the time finally came for a semester in Los Angeles - all the communications students were doing it - it led us across the country. Our friendship led us across campus together, always inseparable. My sheltered, South Jersey upbringing might as well have been a string of pearls around my neck. I’d listen to K’s stories of tripping on acid in high school, running through backyards and dipping into neighbors’ pools with friends in the middle of the night, an alternate Cheever reality.
The dazed sun, its drooping eyes, sleepy stare, and skeleton dozing as the nose. I’d stare into the Sublime poster on her wall. “What’s your younger sister doing with the word ‘psychedelic’? How does she know what that means?”
When I saw the art her younger sister made and tacked to her wall with the words “she was a psychedelic mess” on it, I was scandalized. A minute into our conversation we discovered we lived in the same dorm and walked home together. I would come to know and sometimes accidentally fall into her infectious laugh - a deep sputtering chuckle. She wore a flowing skirt down to her ankles, a peasant blouse, and hemp necklace with a big, glass blue bead at its center. She looked like the kind of hippie I always thought existed but never saw. As soon as I saw her across the room at Radio Rush Night I instantly wanted to be her friend. The brief encounter I had with the band in high school doesn’t count: I was only chatting through an open window as the truck idled when “Caress Me Down” pumped slowly into my mind.
We were all white in a very white county at a very white private liberal arts college in a very white hippie town.
SUBLIME APRIL 29 1992 HOW TO
These are the friends who would, over the next few years, classically train me in all the disciplines of how to smoke weed - how to pack a bowl in a moving car, how to light my own hit, use a drug rug, how to smoke a bong, and how to build one. It came when I went to college and met a bunch of stoners. Los Angeles on a more musical, political, and historical level.
SUBLIME APRIL 29 1992 CRACK
Years later I would watch newsreel footage of tanks rolling into peoples’ homes in ‘Planet Rock: The Story Of Hip Hop and The Crack Generation’ on VH1 as I came to understand The Police vs. My first interaction with the concept of police brutality, as a cis white woman, came from the most expected of places: Sublime. It’s bout this fucked up situation and these fucked up police But if you look at the streets It wasn’t about Rodney King
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