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Today's Featured Biography
Greg Lent
is this too weird as a profile? i am out of touch with the zeitgeist !! don't want to embarrass myself !
high school graduation, a friday? ...three days later i was gone from bremerton .. the centrifugal force of all that insane walking the halls released the moment the walls dropped, and we all went arcing off into the future. for me, a greyhound bus from downtown on washington street, to sun valley, get a job so i could afford the university of washington. i had a crush on nikki anderson, and she was going there. .. stayed the night in an $8 hotel in portland, but somehow, something we cannot name had shifted ..
next morning i walked out onto a main road and for the first time in my life stuck up my thumb, a hitchhiker. .. destination san francisco. i had no freaking idea what i was doing.
neither did america, social change just under the surface in 1964. i was still unconscious about civil rights, war, alternative lifestyles, social repressions… someone killed jfk, we all heard it on the loudspeakers in that cement bunker high school called west bremerton, but little did we know what was coming up.
me, five months later, syracuse, new york, college blown off for the sake of the open road. i had not read kerouac, but he was in my bones. american boy.
yet, in the first of numerous attempts to go straight, all misguided, i caught a greyhound back to bremerton. 72 hours. i thought i should go to college. the choice in that moment? olympic community college, sort of high school 2.0, but who knew what else to do? not me.
slogging around in the grimness of 1965 bremerton, i think i worked in the shipyard, went to school, still no clue about anything, not girls, not life, not money, politics, power, art, literature, the world, nothing! grim. young bremerton boy.
one day on a whim i walked into the army recruiter on that same washington street, joined the army, and was again gone out of town. first airplane ride, seattle to fort ord. later, my first foreign country, thanks to the army. what a revelation!
i left the army in okinawa, hitchhiked through asia, around australia, back to asia, went to vietnam as a tourist to visit bruce matlock, on to india and west to the middle east, thumb in the air, the courage of youth. it took three years.
the highlight, and the end, was arriving in munich, finding a letter from mom, brother gordon was in mallorca, and i hitched to barcelona in 40 hours, caught a boat, hitched to his address, and there was maharishi mahesh yogi, teaching transcendental meditation. eric hoffman was there, he initiated me, the opening of the mystic inner door.
and americans! and natural food and hippies and the entire counter culture, having burst open while i was riding on the tops of trains in india, or wherever. 1500 people, learning how to teach meditation ..
and then, the desire to go straight looms up, again, and back to bremerton, first time in years. college, finally. didn't finish. marriage, finally, didn't finish. years of wandering in the american wilderness, hi, lonnie folger, and seattle, the scene of the dance. years go by.
i become an artist. a girl friend leaves me. depressed, i start meditation again. a light goes on, kundalini opens up, in a magical way i meet a woman guru from india and suddenly i am in an ashram in india, and i'm still in india two decades later. not in the ashram, but around them. and shanghai when i can, because it is also a magic place for me, like all the asian cities, in a direction opposite from india.
so, bremerton? it's still there! and a reunion! 50 years! or a few days, hard to know which, time is so plastic and non-linear… used to caddy at kitsap golf and country club, bruce matlock turned me on to that, great friend then, last i knew of bruce, looking at his name on a door on broadway, nyc … rang the bell, a woman's voice, "not here".
and me, probably, at the reunion, "not here" … unless that big mother cat in the sky just picks me up by the back of the neck and parks me back in bremerton .. trying to go straight one more time :-) … and i still have no freaking idea what i am doing!
enjoy!
@gregorylent
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