Lynn, Lynn, City of Goodness (a 30:30 report)

Dear Diary – I have lived in Lynn Massachusetts and I hope you have too, anyone seeing this, and if you have not lived in Lynn Massachusetts well boo hoo for you and pooh on you and even voodoo hexes upon you because there’s places all over and then there’s Lynn and boy do we have the good stuff, we’ve got hills and we have streets with trees and ponds with fish and the GE factory and cool tenement three-story-houses close together and of course big mansion-like things up on hills by coastal drives and of course, I just hinted, we have the ocean right there and we have this cool causeway which goes out to an island and all along the causeway when you drive it you can look and see all the tall buildings of Boston just over there in the distance, which this is an as the bird flies look and to drive it would take longer than flying because you would have to travel beyond Lynn Massachusetts and down through other towns where the roads get more crowded – which never happens here in Lynn – and you even have to pay a toll either in a tunnel under water or a bridge way above the water where a bad man jumped off one time after he tried to start a race war, no not Charlie Manson some other guy named Charles, and the point is they do have water in those places including Boston and a pretty cool river called the Charles (which is a name that keeps repeating in this entry and I may need a séance later to try for understandings of why),

But here in Lynn Massachusetts they used to have lots of house fires and people even said it was the people who owned the houses who were purposefully burning them down to collect insurance but then we got wicked smart cops and investigators who began getting down the nitty gritty and sending crooks and other selfish people to jail where they belonged and after a while Lynn got pretty cleaned up and there is a beautiful commons area just off of downtown and there are two high schools right on the commons and they are both named Lynn and one is Classical and one is English and when I got to Lynn high school was in my rearview but Classical and English have different school colors and probably Thanksgiving rivalries and I never heard about them not getting along because I’m pretty sure most people get along real good here in Lynn Massachusetts,

And I have lived here two different times and one time it was shacking up with a female boss of mine when I worked at a kids summer camp after I’d quit college for the sixth or seventh time and I was still heavy on the illegal drugs then and the bullish drinking of Ballantine Ales and sometimes Tango (and not knowing Tango is nearly as bad as not knowing Lynn and I feel wicked bad for you in either case) and this was in an apartment up the top of one of the way cool hills in Lynn from which you can see the tops of other apartments and streets and everything and that lasted a while until I fled out of that scene which got too serious and there and then began a life of crashing at other peoples’ places, which this then had me move nearly all the way up to the New Hampshire border and I got a job at a kid runaway house and people who worked there used to drive around and pick up kid hitchhikers and bring them back to the runaway house for hots and cots, which you couldn’t get away with that looseness these days when everyone has a HIPPA contract jammed up their asshole or for other similar reasons, if it’s okay to speak like that, but anyway the second time I lived in Lynn Massachusetts was many years later and I was now in my early thirties and in fact, amazingly and somewhat spookily, I had by that time given up all my favorite ales and alcohol concoctions and even smoking fatties all day long and was going to what I will sneakily call ‘meetings’ and I before that had to move all of a sudden when the landlord sold the house where I was living near Boston and because Lynn is great and cool and already was filled for me with great memories I moved back and this was into a brand newly refurbished building very close to the water which you could see from the street and it was a small two-room place,

And even though I was in Lynn and I was now a runner and getting to run on the tar path along that causeway (with smells of wild roses) I was telling you about so right next to the water and all along the water off toward a real wealthy town called Swampscott which is a weird name and for sure there were no swamps probably closer than 1400 miles away, but for some reason I spent a number of my days contemplating thoughts of self-destruction there and eventually had to move, which was pretty sad and I drove my truck down to Florida then and crashed with people from the meetings and I was repeating patterns in my life of leaving one place and begging for lodging and food when I got to another though I am happy and proud and nearly thrilled to tell you that there are lots of people who like doing that, putting up someone in need, and that’s been part of my story all along and this is exactly the kind of people who fill up the population in Lynn,

And I haven’t even told you yet about the food coop which begins when a bunch of us were hanging around the state school one town over and, I know for me and some of the others, not attending classes and mostly sneaking large inhales of grassy leafs and such and all of a sudden up from Boston come these three guys who are recruiters for radical student outfits, one outfit actually and it had the initials SDS which you may have heard of though if you haven’t heard of Lynn you probably are not cool enough to have heard of SDS and anyway these three guys and I do know their names but (diary) I’m going to leave them out since it’s possible the authorities will try to get my own life story book because they do that and trample rights and stuff and it’s getting worse and part of me wishes I was back in Lynn because I remember there were so many people there not willing to put up with the government bullshit, but anyway one of these three guys was all about community and serving the people and getting involved and being part of something special and so he found a place to rent in spare unused rooms in one of the churches in Lynn and I do not remember which one because all the bottles of Tango and ale and the bag after bag after bag after bag of reefer substance makes me forget stuff sometimes but he got these rooms and I remember they had windows and the sunshine would stream in which could have been one of the God’s way of saying thanks for taking care of each other, and some of us, we’d take turns and drive into downtown Boston either over that bridge or through that tunnel and do vegetable shopping at a place called Haymarket Square and bring all this stuff back to Lynn and we would separate vegetables and even meats and sometimes household goods into bags which people who had placed orders would come and get and it cost way less than Stop and Shop or A&P or any of them capitalist places because of the sharing and a bunch of people doing stuff together,

And we would volunteer instead of going to college classes and you tell me which was better and anyway the SDS guys were trying to save the planet and I believe nearly all the people in Lynn, both times I lived there, felt the same way, when you wake up in the morning you look around and say wow I’m here in Lynn again and I get another day to run or walk by the water or climb on these streets and their hills and walk by Classical and volunteer at the co-op and generally get on my knees anywhere around the city, which hardly ever has fires anymore, and say thanks a lot.