Dropping out in earnest

From Stage 4. Late Adolescence – The Wanderer in the Cocoon,  Stanford Overview, and Stanford quarters

Spring Quarter 1965, in which I tried to enlist in the U.S. Army as the Vietnam War was ramping up, took LSD at Esalen, became the drummer in a rock band, got an Incomplete in Chinese Philosophy, failed Shakespeare, and got a B in Sociological Foundations of Political Theory. The day after the quarter ended I hitchiked to New York with no money or possessions, and returned to my parents house with a friend who initiated and supervised LSD sessions for two of my parents neighborhood friends.

I don’t think I had a place to live this quarter. I think as the quarter began I was sleeping on John Dufford’s couch in his cottage on Homer Lane. After a while he found a new place for me, with a family he somehow knew, a middle aged single mother and her young daughter. He drove me to their house in a lower middle class neighborhood pretty far from campus. I was living there when I went to the Oakland Induction Center to enlist in the Army.

Q6 Spring 1964-65, Apr-Jun 1965
POLS 153 Polit Soc Thry, 5, B
ENGL 25 Shakespeare, 4, F
PHIL 194 Probs Chinese, 4, I  (GPA 1.1)

Oakland Induction Center

John Ketchum’s philosophy house

LSD at Esalen

Auditioning to be the drummer

Summer Break – Hitch to New York

Bringing it home to the suburbs

Working toward a shared planetary consciousness that heals the Earth