Watch your speed

Whoa, I don’t know about you, but the Summer of Love certainly was no picnic for yours truly. The pigs. The bad acid. The hassles with my old lady. And by “old lady,” I mean “Mrs. Harmer,” my first-grade teacher, as I was all of six during the brutal ’67 summer. But the Summer of Love is a time many of us claim as our own, whether we were old enough to have lived through it so, um, comprehensively that we’ve forgotten it, or were born several years later and just love that fashion and Hendrix and cute peace symbol. (Then there’s the case of at least one SN&R staffer who was conceived that very summer. It’s a wonder her name isn’t Tree Bark or Indochina or Purple Microdot).

As far as I know, Sasha Abramsky was not conceived during the Summer of Love, but he was interested in what was going on around here enough to take us all back to that crazy time—crazy in the sense that kids actually thought they could change the world. Crazier still, they did change the world, only it was for the better (make love not war!) and worse (the Nixon presidency, barely functional burnouts still peeing on my stoop, interminable Dead jams).

Our big brothers and their holding companies set the Summer of Love agenda one-and-a-half hours away in Frisco, of course. Here in the Central Valley, we got the overflow, but much of it still flows today. In fact, we suspect there are many of you with your own Summer of Love stories, and we’d love for you to send them our way so we can post them on our Web site. Send them to my e-mail address above.

’Cause Sacramento is all about the sharing, except—as Sena Christian reports in News—when it comes to car sharing. To reduce traffic and make this world a better place, must we simply hop on a passing train, as David Puketza writes of doing in this week’s Essay? Don’t ask me: I’m driving that train, high on, er, lo mein. Next stop: 1967. All aboard!