From my senior year journal:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
5-25-82<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Hackey\nsack is the range among the jocks and intellectuals lately. I find\nthe game stimulating. I am not skilled at it but it is a learning\nexperience. What the hell am I talking about?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Hackey sack, the Patron Sport of\nStoners, was invented in Oregon City in the early 1970s. I was there\nto witness its genesis, and later, its unlikely dissemination across\nthe world. There we were in Gardiner Junior High, 1976, 1977 or 1978,\nin PE, sitting in rows on the hardwood floor of the gym, tube socks\nto the knees, in our dank PE uniforms with reversible colors, when\nour teacher introduced two men, both bearded and wearing shorts if I\nrecall correctly, and one of them produced a little,\ntightly-stitched, brown leather bag, \u201cfootbag,\u201d I think he called\nit, and the two men faced off about five feet apart, and then the man\nholding the footbag gave it a little upward toss to other man, who\ndid not catch it as Americans are prone to do, because we are a\ncatching people, but, rather, he raised his right leg perpendicular\nto his left leg, and kicked the footbag up into the air with his\nright ankle and then raised his left leg in a similar motion and\nkicked the footbag into the air and then he used his left ankle to\npass the footbag to his partner and then they kept the footbag in\nflight between them with a series of of acrobatic kicks that often\nresembled slow-motion karate moves. They never once touched the\nfootbag with their hands or arms, which was against the rules as we\nlater discovered. The chest, however, was okay. We sat their utterly\ndumbstruck, watching these two men twirl and kick and smile and\nchant, and then they asked for a couple of volunteers for some quick\nbasic instruction and I volunteered, of course, and after that, the\nmen broke out a dozen footbags and it was on, around the gym, around\nOregon City, around Oregon, around the Pacific Northwest, around the\ncountry, and, approximately 15 years later, I stood near the Great\nPyramids of Egypt and watched two Egyptian youth playing hackey sack\nand I joined right in. They weren’t even stoned. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n I recall one game of hackey sack in\nparticular. There was about five or six of us, with a couple of girls\nin the circle. It took place during my senior year in the the court\nyard of the high school, the concrete space between the old and new\ncampuses. In the courtyard was a memorial plaque of the Oregon City\ngrads killed in Vietnam. We played a few feet away from the plaque\nand debated the Falklands War. In all my high school social studies\nclasses, I never had a teacher present a lesson about the Vietnam\nWar. There were no offhand discussions about it. All American\nhistory instruction stopped at the end of WW II, or if we were lucky,\na movie about the Cuban Missile Crisis. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n The names of the\nwar dead were etched in bronze only paces from the classrooms, yet we\nnever paid a visit. Interestingly enough, I wrote my senior term\npaper for College Prep English on the subject of Vietnam veterans and\ntheir PTSD, homelessness and addiction issues that were just then\ncoming to light. I still have it somewhere. \n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From my senior year journal: 5-25-82 Hackey sack is the range among the jocks and intellectuals lately. I find the game stimulating. I am not skilled at it but it is a learning experience. What the hell am I talking about? Hackey sack, the Patron Sport of Stoners, was invented in Oregon City in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5849,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,942],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-meditations","category-oregon-city","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5858"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5858\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5860,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5858\/revisions\/5860"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}