The summer is over and the shadow of winter casts a cold fog at my back door early this morning. I am prepared for a cold winter.

The summer of love ended in September 1967 and all those love children moved on.

Or did they?

Heart broke and the loss, and melancholia at the end of what seemed like a free lunch that would go on forever…

Marty Balin and that Jefferson Airplane crowd seeped away, like the others that lead the culture, clots from a dying dream and headed back to real town, USA.

Balin’s 81′ song “Hearts” hinted and reminisced about the loss back then of youth and the loss of impassioned love and that idealism that kept a generation clued to permanent romantic idea of what life should be, and would become.

That idealism that started the whole thing, stabbed at the heart of an establishment from that counterculture hinge point, but never realized till much, much later — and many are still stuck in that thought-form for good — that the whole arrangement had been realized by those same said people that they were protesting against.

The corporations. The establishment.

The anti-war and free love antics. The suspicion of government and rejection of the ‘material values’ that were, arresting at break neck speed all other values, and there’s a pun there, if you look for it. And I don’t mean the obvious one.

But then again it was really about ‘their’ values, and ‘their’ stuff. That faked rejection of consumerist values, was for the old world and quaint and what could withstand time. But for their new normal of hip and psychedelic and cool. The constantly changing flavour of reality. A consumerist impetus.

Opposition of the Vietnam war and the general clusterfuckery of 1967 America. Was a great marketing point for Art, fashion and song. And we know who runs that…The institutionalizing of the “On the Road” and “Naked Lunch” poetic propaganda about sexuality and the homosexual.

The skirts and flowers in the long blonde hair. The bell bottomed and blue jean angst. The making it common to take drugs and sleep in the park and be promiscuous. And never so much as with the LGBQ community, which was on the rise politically.

“THERE IS NO OTHER WAY OUT FOR THE HOLY MAN: HE MUST SWEAT FOR GOD.”

And we were full swing into a cold war that was making the world a dangerous place with it’s dreaded fear of possible annihilation by nuclear weapons. As the Cuban missile crisis of five years previous had made it into a known fact. It could all end in a bright light.

Haight-Ashbury was cool as all the other cloned scenes in cities across North America imitating the former; small towns and even villages had their versions of what was cited as a, major cultural event.

That so called eclectic group and the mamas and the papas — and mama swallowed a ham sandwich whole and choked. Are what is wrong with the world right now.

They institutionalized the whole fucking idea, and it was a bad idea…

Those same people became in the end professors at universities and civil servants, politicians and leaders of the present establishment. Corporate heads and marketing chiefs that have ravished the world with their leftist idealism. Their cancel culture politics and Malthusian actions against such things as free speech and population, climate and gender politics. They wish to turn the world into a psychedelic Metaverse, of inclusion and fucking equity.

And where is Haight-Ashbury today, that place of the ‘Summer of Love’; a hippie Mecca and fake colourful cliché; and a rather expensive version of what once was…all that panache and fluff and false precedent for the now burned out old hippie tourist that might make it in there as part of his bucket list. A going back to the touchstone for some more woo…

The average house price is in the millions now, and the homeless haunt the streets. Its a ghost town really. They, wandering in from other neighbourhoods like the “tenderloin”.

And across town, “the tenderloin” is a war zone of misery as the early morning cavalry hose down the feces and urine from sidewalks and walls of buildings, and vacuum up the needles and crackerjack boxes from the the night before.

Its a state of emergency, everyday. The tents and sleeping on the streets are shuffled off to other places, as the power-washing patrol and emergency management workers move in to scorch the side walk back to the cement grey.

Public escorts patrols tip toe past the wet with lines of children to ensure children arrive at school unharmed and the zombies, and the homeless, arrive later in the day to start the whole godam process all over again.

The tenderloin, once a place were the ‘Monk’ and Brubeck and chilly Miles blew out abstracted notes of dizzy jazz has always been a seedy place. Drugs and sexually augmented and terrible bent. But now its a constant state of emergency.

Five hundred miles south, the drugs and homeless pour over the border like water over a broken dam into a broke and broke-souled America.

The cancer is spreading as other cities in North America start to fall and imitate the city of the “Summer of Love”. Homelessness; open drug culture on city streets; homicide and street violence; human waste on city sidewalks and tents cities for tens of blocks of down towns.

Chicago over the weekend nine dead and 54 wounded; a three year girl child was a victim if you believe it. And the zombie apocalypse continues as they rise at sunset in every major city across the continent.

There is nothing that can be said that has not be repeated over and over ad nauseum. We are comfortable numb from it…really.

Insurance companies are holding a dark secret. One Indiana insurance company CEO states that claims are up as much 40% since pre-pandemic numbers.

“Death rates are up 40 percent over what they were pre-pandemic,” said Davison of OneAmerica’s group life policy holders.

To illustrate just how severe the current death rate is, Davison said a 1 in 200-year catastrophe would likely only cause a 10 percent increase over pre-pandemic deaths.

Notably, Davison said that even if COVID-19 is not listed on a person’s death certificate, that doesn’t mean the virus didn’t play a role. For example, Davison said a person can contract COVID-19 and recover, but the virus could have triggered a separate illness that eventually leads to death. – Shirin Ali

Or does he mean the vaccine?

So I’ll end with a Covid Joke. Yes there are Covid jokes, nobody tells them, its not politically correct. And my telling it could get me cancelled…

“I thought I had Covid 19 so I decided to give it a go and I injected myself with bleach…

Surprisingly I’m all white now.”

Okay, okay one more, but just one, this could result in a double cancellation for me sunshine!…

“What’s the difference between being vegan and having Covid 19?

With Covid the loss of taste is only temporary…”