h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

hello kifperran

my curiosity drove me here and to my astonishment i read that you are now 70+. the postings i have read from your hands certainly do not give that age away! (and that, by the way, was meant as a compliment).

also i read this in one of the other threads on your page: "I am wondering if this site is really just for young people, I don't want to be pushing in where I am not really welcome!"

let me assure you that you *are* welcome. more than welcome. and i am sure that i speak for quite a few other researchers. and not only those who, like yours truely, are considerably older than the uni-students Exis mentioned in his welcome



PS: Congratulations on your 70th by the way

Hello P the P
thanks for the message. It did not take me long to realise that I was having so much fun here that age doesn't matter. Some of the more way out threads are a bit too far for me to enjoy but I love the word games. If you have read my journal you will probably have realised 'The Boss' is my wife of some 48 years. She thinks I am about thirteen in my head so perhaps that is why my true age doesn't come across in the conversations!!

Kif

my youngest sister (who has the tender age of only 45) e-mailed me a new motto this morning: "It is never too late to get a happy childhood"

Seems to me i have lived by that forever

you are too right about some of the threads, by the way. too far to enjoy. but i am sure that has *nothing* to do with my - or should i say our - age. no way. none whatsoever. i just leave them be and ignore them

give my regards to the The Boss and tell her i admire her for living 48 years with a 13 year old

Hi
your sister is a smart cookie, I have a 39 year old son who is 'older' than I am I keep telling him to lighten up and be a bit more childlike, unfortunately, much as I love him sometimes he is just 'childish' and that ain't good.
The Boss says thanks for your kind remarks and she would send you a hug, but I won't put it in and she doesn't know how to
take care
Kif

well, okay, give her this then

what does kifperran mean - and how did you come up with a strange nick like that?

Hello
there is a long and involved story to my 'nick. two clues, 'kif' was a Cornish slang word for something I use to smoke in the 60s(not tobacco!) and Perran was a they both use to follow me about
<cheers.
Kif

aha, i had the right idea about 'kif'

used it myself for many a year. these days i only enjoy it approx. once a year, though

i have *almost* stopped drinking alcohol too

and i have completely stopped smoking tobacco



ps: of course i had no clue whatsoever about 'perran'. and if i said i did you wouldn't have believed me anyway, now would you?

The thing was an eccentricity I had in the early 60's. As a drunken kif head I had a wife no children and a I spent more time with the cat and the kif than I did with my long suffering wife. After an ultimatum, settled down to a proper job. Stopped carting the cat around everywhere with me.( Sometimes he went with me on a lead to the pub!)
I found that real life with job, wife and eventually children much more fun than being an aging hippie with S..t for brains. Since then I have been (more or less) normal (ish)
The nic stuck with The Boss who uses it when she wants to pull me back from some of my wilder ideas. It didn't work with the trampoline thing 'tho

I forgot to say Perran was s name

what good are regrets if we can't change our pasts anyway?

let's seize the day instead and look forward

and besides, some of the things i might regret have turned out to be very educational and useful. for instance i got some very bad acid on august 4th 1972 (a date i will *never* forget, trust me!) and went stark raving lunatic for many hours. and even after that wore off i had mental problems for years.

however this proved useful to me when my wife went psychotic in 1989. i knew and understood her problems from the inside, so to speak, and was in certain ways able to help her much better than her psychiatrists.

another ting: one day i suddenly realized that i was still okay and could even wear a smile on my face in spite of the fact that i had been mad myself, my wife had turned mad (she is much better now, though) and two of my three kids had survived diseases that could very well have been lethal.

so you see, in the end something good came out of it after all

i still don't recommend neither acid nor any other drugs, alcohol included, though...

How I agree with you about carpe diem, I try to get the best out of each day. my wife was seriously ill last year and we know how important it is to live as best we can. I have no regrets, what is done is done and I do not forget the past nor remember it with guilt I just try to be as careful as I can be not to hurt others.
I never dropped acid but I was tempted to try it by a book I read by Tim O'leary way back. However booze was my drug of choice and I never did get into other drugs than a puff of kif.
Are you a child of the 60's ? It was on the surface great fun, but really it was all pretty desperate in retrospect.
Kif

due to certain circumstances i was very often in the company of older guys, so even if i was a teenager until 1973 it is not wrong to say i was a child of the 60's. i usually did what the older guys did, which can be no surprise to you, i guess.

we were warned about the dangers of drugs, but in a stupid way: the told us it was all equally harmful, but with our own eyes we could see that people who used kif were able to go to school and work like the rest of us. at least it seemed that way to us...

so once we had tried kif the next step was obviously to try other stuff. i never injected anything though. i met people who did and they were clearly messed up.

i studied timothy leary's book thoroughly and read other books as well so was well prepared and everything was hunky dory for the first 20 odd times before i got the aforementioned bad acid

none of the 20 first times were worth the 21st - not even if you put them all together

but hey, no regrets. i'm fine today

i only wish i could pass my knowledge and experience on to everybody else, but alas. that is not an easy task. many have tried and - as you can see in the streets and media every day - many have failed...

you probably know what they say about the 60's? if you can remember them you weren't really there.

it was pretty desperate, yes. a lot of it. but it was a great time too. it was after the pill had been invented - and before they invented aids. 'nuff said?

Hi
I think we had the best of times in the 60s and 70s the 50s were pretty good for me also. I think the youngsters of today have too much 'angst' and that is why so many of them get boozed and use drugs to excess.
I do none of that stuff at all. As a stress therapist I have dealt with too many peole who's lives have been totally screwed up by such stuff.
I feel so fortunate to be where I am today it's safe harbour after a good few storms, mostly of my own making!
Take care Kif

thanks kif

i will

i always do




well, these days, anyway