Strange Days Indeed

I woke up early this morning and went out when the moon was still full in the constellation of Virgo and enjoyed the quiet of the city. Now the sun is rising as I sit down to write this with my coffee after breakfast. I have not written here this week so I thought I would take some time this morning to put down some words.

Inman Park Festival drinking, 2013. Photo by me, April 2013.

Later today I am headed to my favorite festival of the year in Atlanta and that is the Inman Park Festival. I used to do this festival with my former friend Rod, but he's moved to Arizona. We would spend the day at the festival people watching and enjoying the day with beers in our hands.

I dedicated six hours to watch that Netflix documentary, Wild Wild Country, that has been getting so much press lately. The film is about a cult that moved from India to a remote area of Oregon in the 1980s and built a commune. It is a wild story including attempted murders, poisoning an entire town, 90 Rolls Royces, greed, power and sex. However, it did not need to be six hours long and could have used a better framed editorial perspective instead of letting so many lies go unchallenged. It was not a very good documentary series. Of all the big stories of the 1980s I do not much remember this cult and their activities but then again this was in Oregon and no one paid much attention to Oregon then and that was a world away from where I grew up. I think people are acting as if this was a bigger story now and than it was at the time. It was probably a blip on the radar screen of new stories that would get buried in the last ten minutes of the national evening news.

The fashionable 80s cult in Oregon. Wild, Wild Country.

The part that I found most interesting were the clothes the cult members had to wear. If you were a member of this cult you had to wear the same color as everyone else. When it was India they all wore orange and when they came to the United States they changed colors to a more burgundy color. Their clothes were the coolest thing about this cult. They look so fashionable and stylish in their cult clothes and notice how skinny everyone was. The food we ate in the world was much more healthy back in those days. No one in my family was overweight and it was uncommon then to see overweight people, unfortunately diets and lifestyles have changed and now so many people are overweight. 

 
Here's one of my favorite of John Lennon songs, Nobody Told Me, from which I borrowed a lyric for the title of this post.



Strange days indeed...have a great weekend.