He writes of his father not being a father at all, and of the time he went to Tangiers when he was 14 and was sexually propositioned by several of the male lovers his father had at the house, and also of nearly continual drug use the whole time he was there. His father did absolutely nothing to protect him. He hardly talked to him. He spent all his time getting high and writing.
Where does such a child turn? Where is the sanity? Where the love?
To live, he would have had to turn his back on all this, to reject the value of literature concocted from such a place, from such degraded souls. He would have needed to find Jesus, or a Buddhist Temple, or a faithful yoga practice, or something along those lines, far from the fuckups, and far from the rationalizations for the fuckups.
As I have said before, the hippies were not the burgeoning of love, but a more or less generalized cry FOR it, which they could no longer find in a world without drugs. They were a weak counter-shadow to the Machine, but completely unable to counter it in any meaningful way. A large number of them BECAME the Machine in Silicon Valley. Steve Jobs certainly did. There is nothing magical or mystical about digital technology. And they know this. The same people created Burning Man, not as an alternative, but as a break.
Talk with any Deadhead. They will have positive memories from when they were stoned with their friends. They will also tell you all the times they got dicked over by de facto amoral psychopaths and thieves who are very thick in that population.