It's the 4oth anniversary of the summer of love, and there it is getting a lot of press here in San Francisco (most tragically, the fact that the only date they could get for a summer of love concert in Golden Gate Park is the same weekend as Burning Man. Bummer...). I wasn't around for the summer of love, and i'm pretty sure the whole thing would have annoyed the shit out of me, being that i'm not the biggest fan of hippies, hallucinogenics, or jam rock. It dawned on me the other day that my generations version of that era is probably the dot.com days here in SF. For those not blessed enough to be around, in the late 90s SF was full of young rich kids throwing expensive parties, doing expensive drugs, and basically running wild. Everyone was a dj, everyone was on e, and every weekend there was at least one or two massive parties to celebrate the IPO of a website that didn't actually have a business model or way of generating income. I'm pretty sure the whole excitement about the dotcoms was perpetuated by the fact that all the investors were on e and coke, making it really easy for them to get excited about anything.
My mom was in SF in the sixties, and played her own small part in those days. I don't feel especially blessed or proud that I was around for the dotcom days. Mostly i'm just glad that they are no more, and that i survived them without losing too many braincells, or becoming too pickled in bitterness. Just as the optimism of the sixties turned into the excess and nihilism of the seventies, the e-fueled good times of the late 90s were wiped out with the falling stock market and post 9/11 big brotherness.
God, now i've depressed myself.
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