On The Road In The 1970's: Part 8

Back in Los Angeles in the late afternoon, after returning from Disneyland in Anaheim, I was ready to go on the road again. So, with less than $20 in my pocket, I began hitching back from the West Coast to the East Coast.

Strangely, I felt I was absolutely free on a certain level, having no job, no place inside where I was sure I would be able to sleep that night, practically no money left, and no one in the whole world whom I felt both loved the person I had become in the 1970's or cared whether I lived or died; and I, myself, on a certain level no longer cared whether I lived or died, given my conclusion, at this time, that for working-class people in the USA, in the 1970's, life after leaving college was a meaningless one of spiritual, intellectual, emotional, philosophical, political, moral, artistic and sexual death and economic enslavement, within a morally degenerate, imperialist economic system of corporate totalitarianism. I felt that I had made the good fight in the 1960's and early 1970's. But given how bleak the future looked for me personally, even if I didn't make it back East, I then felt I had already experienced the best of what life in the USA would ever offer a working-class person in the way of relative personal freedom, during my years as a college undergraduate; and I then felt post-college/post-campus life in "real world" would continue to be a downhill, deadening experience compared to what life had been like when in college, until the day I died.

But despite these kind of thoughts, I had never been much of a suicidal person, no matter how miserable I felt my personal economic life situation might be or how personally unloved or lonely I felt. Maybe because I had always been blessed and lucky in my personal physical health situation no matter how impoverished I had become in the 1970's. Or maybe because I had always been able to channel any of my personal blues feelings, that might have pushed me into a suicidal mindset, into a source of artistic inspiration for the folk song lyrics, poems, plays, stories and folk song tunes that I had always found it easy to write, since my teenage years in high school.