"A New Age Diary: Personal Glimpses Of Life In Post-Modern America"

"If you remember the Sixties," the old saw goes, "you weren't there." But Chicoan Carl Ochsner was there, and he remembers. 

As a kid, he and his family move from a little Wisconsin town to Southern California. In 1969, now twenty-one, Ochsner attends "Altamont," the Woodstock wannabe east of San Francisco. The headline band is the Rolling Stones, and a lot of people at Altamont get stoned. Disorder prevails. Psychedelics flow. Fights break out. Four die.

Ochsner recalls those times in "A New Age Diary: Personal Glimpses Of Life In Post-Modern America" (paperback, self-published; available from the author at ochsnercr@att.net for $17 including postage). ABC Books in Chico, open limited hours, also has copies.

No stranger to the L.A. County Jail (where he spent a couple of weeks at age 19), no stranger to booze and reefers and garage bands ("The Rolling Diablos," anyone?) and "beach culture" ("cut-off jeans, bare feet at all times, deep tan, unkempt hair"), the author in his mid-twenties begins to feel that "something here was not quite right."

"I bring forth these drug-infused reveries not to glorify my past (well, maybe just a little bit) but to help provide a realistic, thorough and nuanced view of the challenges we face today." He'd like to see pot pushed back "to the margins."

In 1969 he wanted to stick it to the Establishment, with its law-and-order crushing freedom-and-creativity; by 1990, he writes, "I fully understood that Law, Order, Peace, Freedom, and Creativity all sat together at one end of the spectrum, while Anarchy, Injustice, and Violence sat at the other."

A letter he sends to a secular humanist group whose meeting he attends in Wisconsin makes it clear that while Ochsner considers himself to be among the "free thinkers," the "new age" philosophy which sought to overturn fusty old Victorianism is fraught indeed. 

While no friend of the socio-political right, he worries that "in the process of moving fearlessly into the new age, we have shoved aside some worthwhile concepts (such as shared morality and self-restraint, for example) that are indispensable to a civilized society."

Ochsner lived through the Sixties. And he remembers.