When I was 17, we had righteous midnight movies. About 900 kids would pile into the theatre to watch “Woodstock” or “Quadrophenia” or “Gimme Shelter,” although the movie was a secondary detail. The party was the primary draw. In 1982, you could load up your macramé mega-purse with contraband and walk right into the theater. No one cared. The movie people basically sold out the show, shut the doors and looked the other way.

Everyone drank: flasks of blackberry brandy and Southern Comfort, quarts of Bud. The smoke was eye-watering. Three-foot tall bong? No problem.

“Hey, man, you want to do one of these?” said He as he held up a shiny candy-like capsule in front of Her.

“Sure, man,” answered She, an array of feathered roach-clips dangling from Her bandana headband.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is not an exaggeration!

The light from the projection booth shone eerily through the haze of pot and cigarette smoke, but Roger Daltry’s image always survived, ten feet tall and bellowing. We won’t get fooled again and with a little help from my friends and just another brick in the wall.

“Cool, man.”

Occasionally, a horror-fest usurped Mick Jagger and co., which brings me to “The Wizard of Gore.” Filmed in 1968 by gore-fest master Herschell Gordon Lewis and released in 1970, it is one of the campiest cult films of all time.

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I grew up in New York City, where the cost of real estate works against big supermarkets–the footprint of your suburban Stop and Shop or Safeway is unthinkable in New York. And when my family moved to rural Massachusetts the local markets were small, local things. When big chain supermarkets started to spring up, they were, to me, exotic (although in the late 60s and early 70s the range of produce available was limited–but it was less of a foodie world then generally, wasn’t it?). I could wander the aisles looking at products I’d only heard of on TV, dazzled by the sheer, astonishing range and quantity of stuff. Now, of course, I live in California, where there are routinely six kinds of mushrooms, five kinds of hot peppers, and fruits the names of which I cannot spell. Aisles and aisles of stuff. It’s wonderful, but sometimes it’s a little oppressive.

Look at the thousands of products in a supermarket. What’s the turnover? How many of those mushrooms and peppers and cherimoyas and ugli fruits are going to be thrown out? I know there are food banks that will take the over-expiration Cap’n Crunch and Tater Tots, but when you consider that all that plenty in one market is replicated, give or take, at thousands of markets all over the country and the world–well, sometimes I find it overwhelming. So much Stuff.

I’ve been dealing with Stuff a lot in the last week. I wasn’t here to do my last-week’s entry because I was in Sheffield, Massachusetts, cleaning out my father’s house. Now, when I say that I was brought up in a barn, I say sooth. Steve and Laura have seen it and can testify. My parents bought a working farm in the early 50s, because my father had always wanted to convert a barn. The fact that this barn came with 180 acres of pasture and mountain land, several outbuildings, and an ugly but sturdy farmhouse, was immaterial. Dad wanted the structure to play with. My childhood was spent working on and inside of the world’s biggest family hobby. I will spare you, in this writing, the anecdotes that come with it, but there are many. What I’m here to talk about today is Stuff.

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