An Ending
I've got some sort of infection or something in my right eye. If I try to focus too long on the bright white computer screen, it gets quite irritated and I want to cry like a two year old red headed step child. That being the case I found myself unable to spend much time reading or writing yesterday or today (or playing video games waaaargh) so I went up to my box of guilt beside my bed and pulled out the book that I had read the vast majority of. It ended up being Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
I stopped short of finishing this book a few months back for a number of reasons. First if you have ever spent much time around junkies and drunks or crazies who self medicate with whatever they can get their hands on, you know that it can be very hard to read about people doing the same things and making the same mistakes. I want to stop the ride and get the people off but they are locked in for the thing in it's entirety. Secondly, I know it ends with Neal Cassidy dead on the tracks in Mexico. It was hard enough knowing that that the entire Merry Prankster part of his life was a downward spiral in and of itself but to know that one of the great under ground figures of the past century is going to end up ignobaly dead makes it hard to read.
So when I picked up the book and plowed through the end I was pleasantly surprised to find that I rather enjoyed the telling of the Acid Test Graduation. Ken Kesey didn't find god like so many addicts need to in order to leave the life. He just thought that he and his people had tried something and learned from it and that they needed to move beyond it if they were ever to make any sort of progress. Progress towards what? He had no clue. He just knew that they couldn't stay mired in the paranoia of the Acid Culture for ever. It didn't lead anywhere. I also like that he mocked all the people who stayed with acid but tried to turn it into some zen eastern thing. These people tried to equate their drug trips with the sort of things they had read about eastern philosophy without ever understanding that if you need to take a drug, to take a shortcut, then you are denying the disciple and self knowledge absolutely essential to true enlightenment. Am I enlightened? Heck no. I'm a fan of some eastern philosophy but I haven't exactly made a study of or worked to discipline my thoughts and body.
So for fun interesting read that gives you a pretty good idea of the Acid Generation (the post beatnik era) The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is a good starting place. You might then want to look at a Jan Kerouac's autobiographical Baby Driver for a female perspective of the sixties and seventies. Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels was also in the time frame of the Merry Pranksters and talks about some of the same incidents.
I'm off to read.
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I stopped short of finishing this book a few months back for a number of reasons. First if you have ever spent much time around junkies and drunks or crazies who self medicate with whatever they can get their hands on, you know that it can be very hard to read about people doing the same things and making the same mistakes. I want to stop the ride and get the people off but they are locked in for the thing in it's entirety. Secondly, I know it ends with Neal Cassidy dead on the tracks in Mexico. It was hard enough knowing that that the entire Merry Prankster part of his life was a downward spiral in and of itself but to know that one of the great under ground figures of the past century is going to end up ignobaly dead makes it hard to read.
So when I picked up the book and plowed through the end I was pleasantly surprised to find that I rather enjoyed the telling of the Acid Test Graduation. Ken Kesey didn't find god like so many addicts need to in order to leave the life. He just thought that he and his people had tried something and learned from it and that they needed to move beyond it if they were ever to make any sort of progress. Progress towards what? He had no clue. He just knew that they couldn't stay mired in the paranoia of the Acid Culture for ever. It didn't lead anywhere. I also like that he mocked all the people who stayed with acid but tried to turn it into some zen eastern thing. These people tried to equate their drug trips with the sort of things they had read about eastern philosophy without ever understanding that if you need to take a drug, to take a shortcut, then you are denying the disciple and self knowledge absolutely essential to true enlightenment. Am I enlightened? Heck no. I'm a fan of some eastern philosophy but I haven't exactly made a study of or worked to discipline my thoughts and body.
So for fun interesting read that gives you a pretty good idea of the Acid Generation (the post beatnik era) The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is a good starting place. You might then want to look at a Jan Kerouac's autobiographical Baby Driver for a female perspective of the sixties and seventies. Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels was also in the time frame of the Merry Pranksters and talks about some of the same incidents.
I'm off to read.
More Laters
posted by Rich Rosenthal II at 3:11 PM
2 Comments:
That's a book that has been on my (amazingly long) list of books to read. Your description of it has bumped it up a few notches on that list now. Thank you! Oh, and "Hell's Angels" is a wonderful read. I don't know whether or not to admire Thompson for living that life. Pure insanity if you ask me!
The thing about Thompson is that he would never have lived to see 50 much less the age he is if he didn't exagerate and play to the idea of the completely excessive wild lifestyle. Also while he is an entertaining writer he has always seen it as work, something to be avoided. I identify with him because of that.
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