FREE JOHN SINCLAIR'S MIND!

After 21 days and nearly 6,000 miles on the road, I suffered tonight through the most painful two hours of my trip: a lecture by infamous, Sixties icon, John Sinclair, in East Lansing at Michigan State University.

Yesterday, while having tea at appropriately-named Strange Matter Coffee in Lansing, with an old girlfriend from that era, Diane asked me: "What happened to our generation?" She was referring to how we somehow ended up with that lunatic, Trump, but it's a good, broader question. Tonight, I found at least part of the answer, in the pathetic, ineffective, self-indulgent rantings of 76-year-old Sinclair.

If you've never heard of him, that's no surprise. I barely remembered him, and I was of his era. Sinclair was something of a counterculture hero of the day, a free-verse poet from Flint, manager of the rock band MC5, and most famous for getting sentenced in 1969 to ten years in jail for giving two joints to an undercover narcotics officer. "Free John Sinclair!" was a Michigan mantra. After John Lennon came riding to his defense, he got out of jail after 2½ years.

This is a guy with an amazing story to tell, with lessons relevant today. He was introduced tonight as a man who "pushed the front ranks of the hippy revolution."

Some revolution. Some revolutionary he is. Sinclair spent his "conversation" tonight slouched in a chair, reciting stale tales of past battles, telling lame cannabis jokes, and grumbling about today's lousy music like an old man on his porch cursing at the kids who threw a ball into his yard.

Accompanying Sinclair's torpor-inducing anecdotes was a slide show, projected on a screen behind him and another old guy, who was charged with directing their "conversation." I flashed back to the basement of my childhood, with my father stumbling through family slides on the Kodak carousel projector. Like then, I fought to keep my head upright and eyes open. A terrible sound system made their exchanges sometimes hard to follow, though I never felt I was missing out on any nuggets of wisdom.

Mind you, this amateurish, clumsy performance was sponsored by MSU's brand-new Broad Museum, a premier art edifice and program at a prestigious Big Ten university.

Not that it's relevant to the embarrassing caliber of the show, but I will admit to being distracted by unrelated emotions induced by the locale. Sinclair's show-and-tell took place in MSU's Erickson Hall Kiva, a small theater-in-the-round. Precisely fifty years ago tonight, I would have been running a vacuum and floor polisher in that exact place, since I worked in that very Kiva as a janitor, on the night shift.

Not surprisingly, that history brought weird memories flooding back -- like when I would sneak off in the middle of the night and climb into the Kiva's A/V cabinet to hide and sleep until my shift was over. All this went through my mind, while Sinclair droned on and on about the good old days of the Sixties when, as he put it, "people's minds were free." I think John Sinclair's own mind could use a little freeing. Plus, some multi-media training wouldn't hurt. And public speaking lessons.

* * *

These first two days back in Michigan have given me a case of sensory overload. I lived here for decades, during some of the most consequential years of my life. As a result, every spot I turn, every person I reconnect with, brings back memories of stories I'd forgotten. Tonight, for instance, Ben reminded me that he and I and Abbie Hoffman once watched an NFL football game together at Pasquali's Bar in Lansing after Abbie's lecture at MSU. I still can't remember that one.

What hasn't changed is the depressing place Michigan can be in March. It's cold and gray and spring is still a long way off. The roads are pocked with winter potholes, giving the state a tired, run-down feeling.

And then, there are the fat people. I spend a lot of time in Walmart at home in Oregon, and I thought we had fat people. There's no competition. Two days ago, I spent an hour in the local Honda dealer, waiting for an oil change, sitting in front of the waiting room's popcorn machine and coffee hutch, which offered free donut holes drenched in frosting. The people who could not resist the tasty treats looked like balloon characters you see on lawns, but which have been over-inflated so that their body segments droop over other body segments. Their rolls of blubber made normal walking impossible, so they shuffled, pigeon-toed, like geese that had been grossly over-fed to produce foie gras. Nevertheless, I learned that Michigan needs to try harder; it's still tenth from the top in the national obesity contest.

Despite everything, most Michiganians I've met during my visit seem optimistic. Diane, for example, now a grand dame of Michigan's dance scene, teaches a popular course at MSU, "Dance as Human Experience," and another for "Ageless Dancers." Somehow, she found a way to build here a life around her art. And change people's lives for the better.

Ben has his unique graphic design art on display in the heart of downtown Lansing's revitalized riverfront, property that was a wasteland of warehouses and decrepit industries that I still remember. Ben, too, found a way to live his passion. And bring beauty to people's lives.

My friend, Bill, now semi-retired from being advisor to the state's top political and business leaders for nearly half a century, insisted that I drive along the Detroit riverfront to see the remarkable changes, which he helped make happen -- new parks, walkways, housing, and restaurants. In his own way, Bill turned political progress into an art form -- the art of the possible. And in the process, saved natural areas all over the state, and restored other such places where they are needed most -- in the middle of urban Detroit.

Today, Ben and I spent the morning at Detroit's world-class art museum. A room of Impressionist paintings, familiar to me as long-ago friends, moved me to tears. I stared long at a small Van Gogh self-portrait, and remembered it had been fifty-five years ago when a high school friend had first dragged me to see this masterpiece, one of his favorite paintings. It was my introduction to a lifetime of loving art.

That first encounter could well have happened fifty-five years to this very day. The high school buddy who first showed me that Van Gogh was the same guy I'll be seeing, two days from now, for the first time since shortly after high school.

After gorging on as much culture as we could digest, including an especially long time marveling at the indescribable Diego Rivera murals that feature Detroit's early auto industry, we cruised down Woodward Avenue, and soon were caught in a sea of Red Wings fans flooding to the new hockey arena. Driving up Jefferson Avenue, we checked out Bill's pride-and-joy, the recently created William G. Milliken State Park, on the riverfront right in downtown Detroit. The area's transformation was as impressive as Bill described. His pride was well-placed.

Yet, this is still Detroit, and as Ben reminded me, "When they say Detroit's coming back, remember, ten blocks from here there are ghettos and slums that are so bad they've been abandoned. The magnitude of what has to happen, it's a mammoth job."

Last story: GOODBYE WARM