Baggage…

I was one of those kids who should have snapped, gone “postal” and burned the school down, or carried a gun up into a clock tower. Growing up I was surrounded by “friends” with whom I had little in common and even less to agree upon, so there was always a conflict brewing and it was always me who was made to feel like the stupid one. I had a tendency to hang around in groups of three, which made the problem worse as the other two in the group invariably conspired against me at every opportunity.

As a result of these unfortunate arrangements, I often found myself trying to explain something or other to my friends, such as why I enjoyed a certain movie or book, or why hockey was stupid. They usually didn’t have the faintest idea what I was talking about and had fun collaborating on their denial that my idea or opinion meant anything, and therefore (went the logic) I was an idiot.

The only safe topics of conversation involved things in which I had no interest, like hockey or baseball, or television shows like “Starsky and Hutch” or “CHPs.” There was no point in trying to have a meaningful discussion about those topics, since anything beyond “did you see that” or “did you see this” would produce smirks, rolled-back eyes, and the standard two-against-one derision of whatever was going on inside my head. I learned this early, so I simply didn’t say anything when those topics were on the table.

I kept my sanity — barely — because one or two of these kids were capable of extending their thoughts a bit and not being total idiots when I was with them one-on-one. But as soon as a third kid joined in, everything went to Hell. This situation lasted throughout my teens. Fortunately I was able to find a girlfriend in high school, which — thankfully — cut into the time I spent with my friends.

Here’s one memory that stands out: I was about eighteen and I had developed a theory about an obscure children’s television show called Lidsville that I had seen a few times when I was 12 or 13. Lidsville aired for a couple of years in the early 1970s, its premise being that a kid had fallen into a magician’s hat and was now stranded in a land occupied by living hats. There were good hats and bad hats, and the whole thing was weird and surreal, and way trippier than Alice in Wonderland.

Lidsville came out at a time when there were a lot of trippy people around smoking and popping a lot of trippy substances. Pot and acid were both illicit and alluring (unlike today, when they’re mainstream and stupid). The psychedelic art and culture of the 1960s, while fading, were still quite present. Although I was never a druggie, I watched enough non-mainstream television and read enough trash to know a bit about drug culture. As such, I had this theory that Lidsville was some kind of metaphor for an acid trip — or had at least been inspired by an acid trip. This was bolstered by my knowledge that a “lid” — as well as being a slang word for a hat — was some kind of illicit drug term, although I wasn’t quite sure what it meant.

I brought the topic up that fateful night when I was eighteen. The progression of the conversation went along these lines: they had never heard of Lidsville, and thus denied that the show had ever existed; they had never heard of a “lid” in drug terminology, and thus denied that such a term existed; they denied that anything seemingly written for children could be inspired by drug tripping; they mocked and dismissed me for having such idiotic ideas; they said something about hockey.

Just another fun night out with my friends.

Cut ahead to 2003. In the years since that night I have never heard the term “lid” used in a druggie context, nor have I met anyone who remembered Lidsville. Then M and I were at Cinema du Parc the other night, taking in a screening of City of God. It’s a Brazilian film set in the slums of Rio de Janeiro during the sixties, seventies, and eighties. The setting is very violent and drug-riddled. During a scene set in the 1970s, a character describes, in Portuguese, how the local drug dealer packages dope. On screen, we see someone packing pot into rolls of paper and in big English subtitles we read “Pot is divided into lids“.

Hallelujah! According to this movie, a “lid” is a small measure of pot — enough for a handful of joints by the look of it (and not, as I had thought, something to do with acid). However, there it was — the word “lid” in 1970s drug culture-ese.

So this morning I Googled “Lidsville” and it returned more than 1500 hits, including this one and this one [do a browser search on “acid”]. Twenty five years after that conversation and I finally feel vindicated.