Getting out at Harvard Station, she enters Harvard Square, and it’s as bad as she suspected it would be – fucking hippies are everywhere, the air smells like pot and B.O., every twenty feet or so someone’s playing guitar and crooning about either love, man, or Richard Nixon, man. Nixon helicoptered off the White House lawn, almost three weeks ago, but he’s still their bogeyman, those pampered, over educated, draft-dodging pussies. She loses count of how many of them are barefoot, tromping around dirty streets in their frayed bell bottoms and their multicolored shirts with their beads and long hair, the girls without bras and their ass cheeks spilling out of their cut-off shorts, filling the air with cigarette smoke and clove cinnamon smoke and pot smoke and everyone of them a fucking embarrassment to their parents who spent an ungodly amount of money to send them to the best school in the world – a school no poor person could get into, that’s for fucking certain – and they return the favor by walking around with dirty feet and singing shitty folk music about love, man, love.
Dennis Lehane, “Small Mercies”, 2023
A Bird's Eye View of Fashion, Food, Travel, Culture, Beverage and Curiosity 