Read Online The Indifference League by Richard Scarsbrook - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Richard Scarsbrook
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she doesnât want to listen to digitized music or blather endlessly on the phone, she just wants to look at the trees and listen to the wind (or look at the buildings and listen to the traffic, if thatâs what happens to be around). She rarely ever checks her email or uses the Internet on her third-hand home computer, so why would she ever need a portable one? And television? When is there anything worthwhile on television?
Her lifestyle choices are not a matter of philosophy; they are merely preferences. Therefore, Hippie Avenger is not a true Hippie. She knows this all too well.
Her parents were genuine tie-dyed, pot-smoking, vegetable-eating, anti-war, anti-establishment, free-lovinâ, free-wheelinâ Hippies. They both turned twenty in 1968, and were already Old Hippies when they finally brought their first and only Love Child into the world ten years later. Now pushing seventy, they are one of the few ragged old couples who still cling to the whole Peace, Love, and Joy thing, and they will still expound at length about the dream of Woodstock, and how it died for most hippies at Altamont, but not for them.
Unlike most other members of their generation, who talk as if they had been there when they really just watched the movies, Hippie Avengerâs parents had in fact journeyed to both Woodstock and Altamont, using the money they were supposed to spend on college tuition. They also went to Monterey, and they followed the Grateful Dead for an entire year, all in the same VW Microbus that their Love Child now uses for her weekly trip to the mini-mall to buy the commercial-industrial products that her parents so despise.
Yes, Hippie Avenger sometimes buys manufactured goods from corporate-owned stores. She eats factory-
packaged cookies made with unwholesome white flour and sugar refined from cane grown on non-unionized Third-World plantations. She knows that this is philosophically the wrong thing to do, but itâs just so much easier than making them from scratch, and they taste uniformly, predictably, okay. She also uses toothpaste manufactured by the same company that made one of the ingredients for Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, because brushing with baking soda like her parents do makes her breath smell like a yeast infection. She even uses disposable razors and commercially produced scented foam to shave her armpits.
Does she feel guilty about doing any of these things? Of course she does. Her parents would be horrified. Her socio-political guilt wages war with her preference for minty freshness every time she brushes her teeth. Whenever she exfoliates under her arms or around her pubic patch, she hears her mother scolding her for âcaving in to corporate commercial social norms.â If her father knew about his daughterâs flagrant use of underarm deodorant, he would launch into a tirade about how âthe minions of commercialism have spent millions of advertising dollars to make us fear the scent of our own humanity.â
And yet, still she eats Chips Ahoy! cookies, brushes with Crest, exfoliates with Gillette, and masks the scent of her humanity with Lady Speed Stick. She knows that she really isnât a hippie at all. She only sort of looks like one. So her nickname, Hippie Avenger, is not quite right. But so far nobody has come up with anything better.
She sighs as she heaves a burlap bag into the back of the Microbus, which contains a couple changes of clothes, her toothbrush, hairbrush, razor, and the only portable, battery-powered technology she owns: a purple, plastic-and-rubber, quasi-penis-shaped vibrator. Of course she would rather feel a real, organic penis moving inside her, and of course she would prefer the tongue of a real man flicking at her sensitive clitoris, but in the meantime sheâs grown quite fond of her Purple Pal. Certainly it brings her more pleasure than a TV, a cellphone or a laptop computer ever could.
The Orgasm is one of the few
Her lifestyle choices are not a matter of philosophy; they are merely preferences. Therefore, Hippie Avenger is not a true Hippie. She knows this all too well.
Her parents were genuine tie-dyed, pot-smoking, vegetable-eating, anti-war, anti-establishment, free-lovinâ, free-wheelinâ Hippies. They both turned twenty in 1968, and were already Old Hippies when they finally brought their first and only Love Child into the world ten years later. Now pushing seventy, they are one of the few ragged old couples who still cling to the whole Peace, Love, and Joy thing, and they will still expound at length about the dream of Woodstock, and how it died for most hippies at Altamont, but not for them.
Unlike most other members of their generation, who talk as if they had been there when they really just watched the movies, Hippie Avengerâs parents had in fact journeyed to both Woodstock and Altamont, using the money they were supposed to spend on college tuition. They also went to Monterey, and they followed the Grateful Dead for an entire year, all in the same VW Microbus that their Love Child now uses for her weekly trip to the mini-mall to buy the commercial-industrial products that her parents so despise.
Yes, Hippie Avenger sometimes buys manufactured goods from corporate-owned stores. She eats factory-
packaged cookies made with unwholesome white flour and sugar refined from cane grown on non-unionized Third-World plantations. She knows that this is philosophically the wrong thing to do, but itâs just so much easier than making them from scratch, and they taste uniformly, predictably, okay. She also uses toothpaste manufactured by the same company that made one of the ingredients for Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, because brushing with baking soda like her parents do makes her breath smell like a yeast infection. She even uses disposable razors and commercially produced scented foam to shave her armpits.
Does she feel guilty about doing any of these things? Of course she does. Her parents would be horrified. Her socio-political guilt wages war with her preference for minty freshness every time she brushes her teeth. Whenever she exfoliates under her arms or around her pubic patch, she hears her mother scolding her for âcaving in to corporate commercial social norms.â If her father knew about his daughterâs flagrant use of underarm deodorant, he would launch into a tirade about how âthe minions of commercialism have spent millions of advertising dollars to make us fear the scent of our own humanity.â
And yet, still she eats Chips Ahoy! cookies, brushes with Crest, exfoliates with Gillette, and masks the scent of her humanity with Lady Speed Stick. She knows that she really isnât a hippie at all. She only sort of looks like one. So her nickname, Hippie Avenger, is not quite right. But so far nobody has come up with anything better.
She sighs as she heaves a burlap bag into the back of the Microbus, which contains a couple changes of clothes, her toothbrush, hairbrush, razor, and the only portable, battery-powered technology she owns: a purple, plastic-and-rubber, quasi-penis-shaped vibrator. Of course she would rather feel a real, organic penis moving inside her, and of course she would prefer the tongue of a real man flicking at her sensitive clitoris, but in the meantime sheâs grown quite fond of her Purple Pal. Certainly it brings her more pleasure than a TV, a cellphone or a laptop computer ever could.
The Orgasm is one of the few
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