In the movie Even Cowgirls Get The Blues

Uma Thurman had super-sized thumbs.

[video:https://youtu.be/imbA6Nkb8e8]

Wicked cold up here. Thanks for posting!
or as orbufucan (sp?) would say: two thumbs up

of a hypothesis (or conjecture) I once had to the effect that one acquires the taste for or habit of hitching a ride either at a young age or through dire necessity. As a corollary I suspect that it relates to cowrie. Being young and desirous of adventure,a type of acculturation found on the road,seeing sights and wonders and other things AND devoid of cowrie, the thumb is the obvious recourse. Also too, there is the propensity for activities and endeavors which can generate cowrie to be somewhat removed from one's usual hangout(s) and since it would be silly to waste one's precious, because minuscule, stash of cowrie in order to obtain mas cowrie, the thumb is again called into service. The intersection of these and similar mental and environmental pressures is somewhat more likely to arise early on as opposed to to very much later, because one won't make it to very much later without indulging in such behaviors while youngish. This is quasi empirical, but my sample size is embarrasingly small. Nonetheless:

be well and have a good one

edit, fixed of through ... to OR through ...
second edit - fixed empirical

were unique.

Adventure took on a new meaning as the baby boomers got old enough to do weird things like hitch hike.

I was in the middle of it, born in 1953, but was too uptight to join in the reckless abandon. I was very late to even appreciate marijuana as my best friend from the seventh grade on became a dealer of pot, psychedelics, and eventually, cocaine. He and his girlfriend and virtually all my buddies ragged on me relentlessly from our senior year in high school through college. I did give in and took my turn on the doobie passing around in the summer after graduation, but it was a big nothing for me for the first several dozen times. I was an enthusiastic boozer instead.

In hindsight, it is clear that alcohol was far worse for me in every way than cannabis. But my head was stuck in an already passe image of cool -- the James Bond, Rat Pack, Ladies' Man.

One reason for my disjunction from the counterculture of music festivals, camping out and hitch hiking was my family background. My father and grandfather were union representatives and from my toddler days until now, I have been in opposition to the main stream, especially as it existed in Texas where I grew up. I saw the hippie revolution as a lame version of resistance to the oppressive structure of capitalism.

This naive arrogance eventually yielded at least to marijuana one night in 1973, at my apartment in Austin that I lived in while a student at the University of Texas. I became the impromptu host of a gathering of my dealer buddy and his soon to be wife and a bunch of her girlfriends. Over a couple of hours of music and chit-chat, a dozen or so doobies passed around the room. After they all split, there was a pile of roaches in the ash tray. I used a pair of pliers as a roach clip and burned through the lot of them. I finally got off and became a regular toker for the next five decades. Before edible boogie became available in the last decade or so, I would occasionally make pot tea out of about a half lid and get really off.

Another adventure from them days that I was too uptight even to consider, was the sudden road trip. Another of my friends somehow came to own a VW hippie van during the summer after his graduation in 1969. Along with another long-time buddy of his that I barely knew, he took off from Dallas to San Francisco. The surprise for him came when they got to The City, when his traveling partner came out of the closet and got a job dancing in the chorus line of a drag show. By today's standards, my friend's reaction was very homophobic, but relative to the mores of Texas fifty years ago, he was pretty damned respectful. He parted company on pleasant terms and drove the hippie van back to Dallas.

Them days when anything was possible. Thanks for evoking the memories

he had this cool Sony reel-to-reel, which we would play with, making absurd jokes,
fooling around with sound-on-sound and reverb stuff. Listening to the Beatles,
doing commercials and whatever recordings our expanding minds could produce.

Didn't do much to prepare me for these futuristic realities, but it was fun at the time.

[video:https://youtu.be/Rt75y38J00s]

the smoker you drink, the player you get!

While in Africa we decided to try our hand at “catching a hike”/hitch-hiking in Namibia. So up to the main road to catch a hike. It was also a check point and the guards got into helping us. So our first leg was in an 18-wheeler hauling frozen fish to the Congo. Got us to Botswana…first country border crossing. Now to onward passage because were heading eventually to South Africa. A man with a boat he was hauling to Lake Malawi gave us a ride to another town in Botswana where we caught the local border bus to South Africa. Were dropped in Pretoria, South Africa with no rand but with help of bus/combie guard got on bus heading to Kempton Park, Johannesburg. The driver dropped all of the local workers off and then drove us to the hostel where we were staying. Had to money so Divine Order went inside and got the owner’s wife to come help us. She was black African and she explained to the driver in their common language that we were “crazy’” and paid him and then shook her head at us. But it was a memorable experience!

Incredible great stuff JtC. Too cool man. Those festivals were awesome, socal had some. Music was big, as in, THE thing, for lots of us. And oh those crazy thumbin' days...

PeeWee's Big Adventure - 1 min. hitch hike scene... funny

I once got a job maybe at 18 as a construction site labor grunt, and the last question was 'how are you going to get here?' My reply was 'thumb'. I didn't think anything of it and apparently that was an acceptable mode of transp. PCH, the Pacific Coast Highway in socal was rich thumbin' in the day. As one that got around like that at first PC, pre-car, I picked people up all the time once I got wheels. Until it started getting sketchy and dicey out there maybe late 70's.

My wife and her girlfriend as 15 year-olds, early 70's, would thumb a few miles to the mall, pier (Redondo) or beach. That was in Torrance. I was in Huntington then, and lots of girls did it there too. Everyone always picked them up, and there were no incidents. It was very normalized along the coast of Cal methinks. Later, I had one of those VW Hippie vans, Microbus they were called, mine a '64, 6-volt, in the late 70's.

Also normalized was recreational experimental chemistry for mind, body, and spirit. Not to brag, but which I graduated from with flying colors at the top of my class. At one time was the guy that color-coded the cubes, or grew the mush. It was another life, but it was a great one.

The big festival that I went to was April 6 1974, California Jam. At Ontario Motor Speedway. ELP, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, the Eagles, Seals & Crofts, Earth, Wind & Fire, Rare Earth, Black Oak Arkansas, wasn't $15. Lots of Cal Jam vids of it all on youtube, Keith's flying piano gag was impressive! There is a Cal Jam club it was so big! It was huge in socal. I heard the re-make attempted 4 years later was bush league. Cal Jam was 300,000 and no arrests. Pure music and camaraderie.

Became significant personally as this was probably the last big gathering of 'the gang', since high school, where we were all together, all twenty of us. The splintering began shortly after. It was a big event for us. I get emails every April 6 from one of them, too many are gone. Lysergic was the best thing for max recall on concerts. IF you were totally bonkers about the band's playing musically, instead of looking to sail away. Alcohol, barbs, pcp people (mint leaves there then), no recall.

Sweet Hitchhiker

Hitch Hike

Great memories, thanks JtC!

be well all!