Wanting to be a Folksinger

Some time ago, I received a Joni Michell tape for a gift. As I played it, shades of my hippier days returned. Days when I thought listening to Bob Dylan was better than anything else life had to offer. Hearing Tom Rush, Phil Ochs, Buffy St. Marie and Joan Baez back then put notions in my head.

I wanted to be a folksinger. One who saw and knew the agony, anxiety and anguish of life and wrote meaningful little ditties about it.

So, I got a guitar (Sear's best). I got a strap. I got musically motivated. I got bleeding fingers (strings too far away from the neck). I started writing poetry ("Oh! to be a bird!")

Soon, I began hanging out in "earthy" places, singing odes to butterflies, ballads to grasshoppers and sonatas to groundhogs.
I bought clothes at boutiques and from mailorder companies, let my hair grow and threw away my fingernail polish (folksingers were natural folk).

The time period was influencing. I began saying, "Like man, you know" a lot. I saw life through a new perspective. Everything became important, heavy and deep. Everything became "Like wow!"

I looked for meanings within meanings. Someone would say, "Hi!" I would answer, "Why?" I meditated on the true meaning of happiness and heartache and hiccups. I twisted myself up like a pretzel in strange yoga positions trying to find the center of my inner being.

With renewed depth and interest, I became ultra-aware of my surroundings and began sounding as if I belonged to another era, another species or another planet, as I spouted out philosophical phantasms such as "Wow, man, like I sense the karma in this space is like heavy..real heavy..like maybe real, ya know!?" It scares me today that I actually knew what I meant.

Then, I wanted to complain, dissent and protest my heart out, singing about the despicable, depressing, devastatingly downcast lives we all led. I wasn't looking to be a "star" (folksingers don't become "stars," they take on causes and gather followings, and just are).
I got directions to Greenwich Village, and may have made it, had there not been one major obstacle in my way. I couldn't sing! Couldn't carry a tune if it was strapped across my back and superglued. I'd sing in the shower and the water would stop. I'd sing outside and cats and dogs would assist one another in getting away from the horrible sound (exaggerating there, but not much). Of course, it never dawned on me that my superhero, Dylan, couldn't carry a tune in a dump truck either. And then came Tiny Tim, who made Dylan sound like Pavarotti.

But my history knowledge increased slightly during that teen time interval. I fantasized that whenever there had been a "cause," I could have been the folksinger voicing my lungs out about it. Who knows, that Boston tea party may have been instigated by some idealist with a guitar, protesting in some colonial dive.

Looking back, I think perhaps I could have been a folksinger. I certainly had the ego for it, I've certainly used enough "I"s in this article. If only I had gotten loud and gathered up that following.