Hippie Hell Week
Welcoming the Great White Buffalo has been an American tradition since 1972.
I lose my ladylove to a mescaline-laced cake, but am kept calm by Orthodox Jews who serve me vegan pizza.
Masturbating in front of little kids is uncool.
As I do most mornings, I awoke to the sight of a girthy, well-proportioned member. But on this particular morning, July 3rd, 2026, it wasn’t mine. The appendage in question belonged to a long-haired, bald-crowned hippie in his thirties named David, who was squatting a few feet from my tent with a diabolical grin, entirely nude. He’d evidently been holding that position for a while, waiting for me to unzip my tent fly.
“Heard you stirring in there.” David said. “Mind doing a tick check?”
Considering the circumstances, a tick check wasn’t unreasonable. Last night, David, another hippie woman named Krystyna, and I had hauled our suitcases, tents, sleeping bags, and other camping gear through several miles of Pennsylvania’s tick-ridden swamps and thickets in total darkness. Eventually David and I, abandoning all hope of finding our destination, set down our bags in some horrid bog and declared …
Engineer of Safe Havens
On her first day at the Harris School, seven-year-old Alice Elinor Hays told her seatmate Sadie at recess that she might as well begin by stating her situation, then explained where she lived, offered her parents’ and housekeeper’s names, and said she intended to be class Monitor. After Sadie failed to respond, Alice conceded this had been probably enough information for the time being, and that if Sadie or the boy who was eavesdropping beside her wanted more, they would each have to do without.
Eight years later when she was fifteen, she told Sadie she had long cherished their time together for how it had helped her sift out her own insights from the general way of thinking and discover what there was of the real Alice. She added she had by that point accepted that she was different physically and socially, unusually tall and sharp-featured, and perhaps too intense and judgmental for …
John Fahey’s Blues Rally
He discovered ‘Blind Joe Death’ after the Sligo River flood of 1927 and picked on a guitar made from a baby’s coffin. Or so the legend goes.
White boy music answers to the pathos of the suburbs and the weird monomania of record collectors.
Still, his myth lives on, as does his unique feel for the guitar.
John Fahey’s best-known composition is a deceptively simple one. It’s in standard tuning, modulating between C, F, and G, the first chords someone learns when playing guitar. “Sligo River Blues” starts at a slow clip, no faster than a train rolling out of the station. Fahey probes at the fretboard relentlessly, alternating his thumb between the upper strings to provide a sense of propulsion, while the melody unfolds underneath.
“It’s the most basic chords,” fingerstyle guitar torchbearer Hayden Pedigo tells me, “but he’s able to make the most basic chords sound brand new.” With a droning syncopation, the song captures an intense form of suburban melancholy. His compositions, a style he coined “American primitive,” are shrouded in otherworldliness. There’s no other player that sounds like Fahey, though many have tried.
“It appears a lot easier than it is,” collaborator Glenn Jones says …
