Acid for the Children: A Memoir

by Flea

the elderly women looked on with bemused countenances.

Tears are not a sad or happy thing, they mean you care. I’m a wimp who cries too, so be it.

the same thing looks different to everyone from their angle.

The greatest fault of humankind belongs to those who think their view of what’s real is the only truth.

I’m awkward with other people, sometimes even my closest friends.

We kind of look alike but she is smarter and prettier.

I always feel an umbilical connection to my birthland.

“That man is richest whose pleasures are the cheapest,” said Thoreau, and my father taught me early on to realize this most important truth.

Turn and face the strange. —David Bowie

His black-lake eyeballs were wells of emotion.

I equated creativity with insanity.

I enjoyed being a little rascal and hustler; I took a pride in the struggle.

That we’ve got to love with all we are, not for some reward down the line, but purely for the sake of being a loving person, and that creativity was the highest part of ourselves to engage.

I could tell he was a misfit like me. The universe gives us the ones we need. And the ones we deserve.

the transcendent sensation of floating, sliding, and recklessly speeding amongst our mountain’s majesties

a true friend is a beautiful thing and part of an extended family.

the burning desire to make something happen.

When his words met my grooves they flowed together unconsciously, like they’d always been together, like baby wolf twins bursting out of the dark den of their infancy, joyfully embracing the infinite light of the outside world for the first time.

We were closest when we had nothing.

“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Nothing special about me, we’ve all got our own sacred place, but to access it, your mission must be pure and your aim true. Just a little thought of trying to use it for a power tool, a career move, and the process becomes corrupted. You gotta go for the joy, the pain, the adventure, the search, the journey to love. I learned that from Kurt Vonnegut. You have to be willing to dedicate your life to that journey, not as a means to an end, but just as an opportunity to trip the fuck out. Ya gotta suspend all self-judgment, and embrace all. The reward is the journey itself.

Just exploring for a sense of purpose.

The crowd of Hollywood high- and lowlifes ate the pills and puked and pooped for days afterward.

I was living in a fantasy world because I couldn’t deal with the real one.

slapstick buffoonery.

One of his legs was amputated just below the knee, and he wore a prosthesis. He’d occasionally take it off and throw it at someone if provoked.

an epic forever,

When the stars threw down their spears And watered heaven with their tears —William Blake

Bob Marley said that it didn’t matter what kind of music one played, or even the quality of it. All that mattered was complete commitment in the creative process of channeling it.

My life was constant stimulus. I’d never learned what it was to have quiet time, or to nurture myself. I ran at full speed day in, day out. My body decided for me, go to sleep.

We get older, work hard to make money, families happen, and like the protagonist in Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree (which I can never read to a child without feeling the moistness of a teardrop), we separate.

that three a.m. stealth swim in someone else’s pool? A romantic memory.

I wanted to make music that sounded like his paintings.

the painfully unpredictable chaos of my life shape and pressure me into who I am today.