Flashback
Looking back, youth wasn’t wasted on us, since we survived it. Youth is meant to be used up, plundered, squandered, and blasted through. Glad for the juvenile delinquent junkie girl at school with glassy eyes and homemade tattoo, who pulled a knife on you. She got away with attempted neck slashing that never happened, only in her mind, and continued getting away with wearing a tight leopard print top without getting kicked out of class that day or any other. Tom throwing a party for no reason, just because. Being teenage kids in a big backroom with records playing as loud as could be, two 1970s-colored couches, and low lighting, learning how to French kiss. During a time when bell bottoms fit and rational thought didn’t. We knew the wisdom of The Monkees and snippets of Marshall McLuhan and Aldous Huxley. Were intimately involved with laughing until all together we fell on the Shag carpeted floor, out of breath. Dissolving into the technicolor world of TV Land, smoking pot for the first time in a garage with smuggled joints from an older sister. Her boyfriend had bushy sideburns. Always wore a worn jean jacket, spoke in a raspy whisper. Overwhelmingly, uncontestably, we knew we were there in a moment in time to make up for something terribly wrong in another corner of the universe. To be alive and mock the backwards-looking fun blockers, to be influenced by music and movies and art in such a way as to totally bend our minds, never to be unbent again.
Oh, what a time briefly and eloquently summed up here, Russell.
The superior first sentence sets the high bar for lyrical recall. The rest of the piece meets that excellent challenge.