They were somewhere into their sixth viewing of the movie this column gets its title from when they stopped the media player. “Hold on man,” I heard someone say. “I’m hungry.” This summer, I took some classes at an unspecified American college. Often, I would walk in on my roommates getting high. Getting high with people they bought weed from, with people who lived on the other side of campus, with people who lived on the other side of town, with foreign students, with townies. Lots of people. This marijuana thing is apparently pretty popular in college. Usually they were taking the beatnik’s journey across the universe using the “apartment car” (the visualizer on the computer hooked up to the TV). I walked in on 10 people spread across the couch and the floor, watching the visualizer in the dark. Two hours later, they were still there. Some might have passed out, although it’s pretty hard to tell. I changed the channel and they watched white noise for another hour. It was the best song ever.

These people didn’t just have the marijuana. They were the whole package. Marijuana and 60s music. Jimbo Morrison shirts. Those sandals that hippies wore to keep mud out of their feet at numerous music festivals. I swear to God, one day there was a dude with dreadlocks. It’s like they all wanted to go back to a happier time, about 40 years ago, when women and blacks didn’t have rights. But man, was free speech legal. And by “free speech” I mean acid. It took me a while to realize, although my thought processes were probably clouded by the toxic marijuana fumes coming from down the hall, that these people were hippies. They weren’t regular potheads. No way, man. These guys had vibes.

To me, a modern day hippy is about the equivalent of someone who goes to renaissance fairs dressed as a knight. They are trying to reenact stereotyped parts of history that have long since passed us by. I have heard from a renaissance knight that he believes he was a real knight in a previous life. I assume hippies are especially prone to believe stuff like this, what with all their karma.

And do you have any idea how much of that karma is released when you smoke a cannabis leaf? Cannabis is a gateway drug. It leads to things like veganism, abstract art, abstract poetry, regular poetry, environmentalism. These real world issues prevent people from thinking about real real world issues. Maybe I just don’t understand it. I mean, that is what they tell me. They’re passing joints around a circle while I’m busy being a square. My lack of vibes, however, was made up for by my ability to operate the microwave at times of need.

All in all, I’d say it was pretty much the equivalent of being back in the summer of love. That is, if the summer of love consisted of listening to a bunch of zonked dudes play guitar hero every night while I tried to sleep. Pretty much what the original was, except with better guitars and what I’m told is more “kush” weed.

Now, I’m back in Ithaca. Ithaca is — if you either:

A: Believe the “stereotype”

B: Have ever been to the Commons

— full of hippies. Add to that two colleges, one of which is a liberal arts school, and Ithaca is pretty much the greenest city in America. The other school, by the way, is one of the most well endowed schools in the world. Is there some hypocrisy in pretending to live a bohemian lifestyle full of free-association when your family is wealthy? Yes, I think there is. And although I haven’t taken any surveys, I’d wager my financial aid on the fact that college hippies are more often wealthy than not. And when the weather warms back up to a point where they won’t freeze in their Birkenstocks, they’ll be out on Ho “Woodstock” plaza, protesting things. Protesting about same things, incidentally, their parents cared about 40 years ago: the war and women’s rights. 40 years and the same things are still pissing you off? Now that’s progress. Even my columns bitch about something new every two weeks.

Neo-hippies are, and they’ll love me for saying this, the lost generation. These hippies desperately want something to revolt against, but there’s nothing out there. Years of protest and we still can’t use BRBs to get guests into dining halls. And you want to do something about world hunger? Look at the reaction to The Cornell Review article that’s been getting so much heat. Look at the video clips from ClubFest on The Sun’s website. Do these protesters know that nobody actually reads The Cornell Review? Their headlines have always been offensive to those who don’t first find them to be a joke. If they weren’t offensive, they’d get even fewer readers than they do now.

Having pissed off both the left and the right, I think I can now say that Karma has been equally distributed. Right on.

Yevgeniy is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be reached at yfeldman@cornellsun.com. That Really Grinds My Gears appears alternate Mondays.