Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

the first time I dropped LSD
was on thanksgiving day
on the night, I went over to my musician
high school friend's house, it was just him and me
that night,we took a green capsule and
put a record on the turntable
and waited for the drug to come on
we were listening to Leonard Cohen
"Suzanne takes you down to a place by the river""
and then the walls began breathing and moving
colors moving on the walls and patterns
we began laughing , then we listened to some
Donovan, "season of the witch, beatniks out
to make it rich", then my friend decided we
should go for a ride in his older brother's
little MG sports car who happened to have
let to my friend that night, so we got in the little car
and drove into the night on the freeway
the LSD was good but it was not a large dose
but we laughed a lot as we drove deep
into the crazy star night in the eternal summer of love
not knowing where we were going just feeling the trip
we were seventeen and the acid was purple and green
and nothing bothered us because it was 1967
and the night was full of possibility and the now called



that was my first LSD experience, as I recall the sense
of timelessness I felt on that night, because there is
nothing like the first time, in the novel I wrote many years
later I describe a series of trips and each one is more intense
in its own way,I use surrealism to explore the psychedelic
we don't really think about the other reality of those times
what it was like for a lot of young people experimenting
with psychedelics, because now we are being taken over with
virtual reality,it's like the late sixties was a thousand years ago
hippies with flowers in their hair going to San Francisco
how did this happen, literally over night, one minute
you are just a teenager listening to surf music, the next
you are catapulted into the psychedelic wave and walking
down Haight street and every girl is smiling and dressed
in gypsy flowing colors, and you walk down the street
and enter golden gate park, and find a place in the grass
on hippie hill, and the music is coming from everywhere
a moment in eternity, magic on the air, everybody dancing

Can totally relate....remembering the first time.....and beyond ....I saw Hot Tuna in that park for free....camping around the US in the early to mid 70's...the Doors of Perception opened....Oddly ( or perhaps not ) science and medicine are giving LSD a second look for treating a number of things, just as marijuana is gaining in popularity in many states both medicinally and for recreation......Powers that be often prohibit what may be useful and promote what does grave harm ( like soul-draining Mc Jobs)

Yes, but who actually writes about their psychedelic experiences in those early psychedelic days, when it suddenly came on the scene, and shifted the whole mental landscape,this being all years before personal computers, and virtual reality. LSD was the biggest thing to come down the pike, it allowed people to experience something unforgettable, something that allowed them to explore their own minds, and have deep spiritual insights, or maybe they just were another cheap thrill. But they were making great strides until LSD was made illegal. At this point the story diverges, Tim Leary was called te most dangerous man alive, Nixon started his drug war, the Vietnam war escalated so they could bring more heroin back in body bags, and LSD flooded the scene, and a lot of young people were caught up in the psychedelic wave. The main intensity which was the late sixties years. But for some reason nobody really knows what happened, yes a lot of people grew their hair out and beatniks morphed into hippies, I mean you don't really hear about beatniks after the hippies came along. But for a few short years 67' 68' 69' a lot of teenagers took a lot of LSD, and what were some of their experiences, not just the ones we know about in the few Hollywood movies that were willing to show the use of LSD, which there really were only a few. The main one being The Trip that came out in 67' which did an ok job considering the limited special effects. The point I'm making is that those years 67' 68' it is like they have been almost erased from history. Almost like they never happened except Hollywood stereotypes of hippies . You never see a movie that tells a real story about teenagers experimenting with LSD but it was the biggest thing happening there in those years, besides other teenagers going off to Vietnam. So i wrote a novel based on my own experiences, to try to reclaim the meaning of those few years, to try to show what it was like to be a seventeen year old teenager when that magic drug suddenly came on the scene,and I no longer thought about hot rods, and the non-education I was getting in high school and now I had this drug that could teach me things by just popping a cap, I could go deep into the hallucination we are given by the powers that be, and truly see beyond the facade of normality, yes it is truly a mind bending experience, and for some all they ever saw was the colors, but for me it was a journey, I was willing to take, because in my young life there was nothing else going. And what is going now, technology that they want to control us with. A lot of young people don't even know where Vietnam is on a map, but they know how to play pokemon.