The scare quotes suggest that the NYT was onto to the fakery but...
Permission to publish the diary, with names, dates and places changed for protection, was given by the parents after their daughter was found dead of a drug overdose....
... I guess not!
The title is, of course, taken from the drug culture anthem composed by Grace Slick and successfully recorded by the Jefferson Airplane. The song had Alice in Drugland popping pills to encounter her rabbits 10 feet tail....
What drug is the editor on? Quite aside from the need for an apostrophe in "rabbits," there's nothing in the Jefferson Airplane song about a rabbit's tail and the only thing that's 10 feet tall is Alice herself.
The total effect of the film is as unusual as its structure. Several crucial and disturbing points are conveyed about the youthful drug culture, and perhaps they are all the more disturbing in the slick context of the film's treatment....
Slick! Don't use "slick" as an adjective right after you've been talking about Grace Slick.
The book's blunt street language was rigorously deleted and, except for a couple of vague and indirect allusions, references to various forms of sexual promiscuity were cut....
"Various forms"... I know from the NY Post: "'Another day, another blow job,' reads one entry." Ha ha ha. Straight from the mouth of "a suburban housewife." Makes perfect sense.
[T]he film is considerably less complex than the book. The author of the book careens wildly from one enthusiasm to another. The period away from home is a confusing swirl of contradictions, barely touched in the film....
Apparently, you can write a chaotic mess of a book and get credit for complexity when the point of comparison is a cheesy TV movie.
The parents are reduced to convenient soap‐opera cues. And a couple of the others provide “star turns.” Andy Griffith is on hand briefly as the sensitive‐tough priest....
A star turn by Andy Griffith as a priest?! Now, it sounds as trippy as men on a chessboard getting up and telling you where to go and the White Knight talking backwards.
So let's read this 2021 article in The Guardian, "Grace Slick and Jack Casady of Jefferson Airplane: how we made White Rabbit." Grace Slick addresses the decades-old question whether this was supposed to be a pro-drug (as the NYT assumed) or an anti-drug song. She says:
All fairytales that are read to little girls feature a Prince Charming who comes and saves them. But Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland did not. Alice was on her own, and she was in a very strange place, but she kept on going and she followed her curiosity – that’s the White Rabbit.
A lot of women could have taken a message from that story about how you can push your own agenda. The 1960s resembled Wonderland for me. Like Alice, I met all kinds of strange characters, but I was comfortable with it....
In the 60s, the drugs were not ones like heroin and alcohol that you take to blot out a terrible life, but psychedelics: marijuana, LSD and shroomies. Psychedelic drugs showed you that there are alternative realities. You open up to things that are unusual and different, and, in realising that there are alternative ways of looking at things, you become more accepting of things around you.
The line in the song “feed your head” is both about reading and psychedelics. I was talking about feeding your head by paying attention: read some books, pay attention....
Jack Casady — the bass guitarist — said:
It’s difficult to explain how innocent the beginning of discovering drugs was before people got so dependent on them, or their life changed, or they made really poor life decisions. The song explores the simplest form: the idea of taking psychedelic drugs to open you up and make you more receptive.
Everybody took some psychedelics but we rarely played on them, not like the Grateful Dead guys did. When I did it got a little too weird for me – my bass would turn into a tree log and grow vines and I’d say, “I gotta move on here.”...
Posts
81 comments:
Drugs have never harmed anyone. Ever.
And if they have it was only a few unimportant people.
So of course let's mock anti-drug efforts.
That's what this post implies.
So much damage the boomer left has inflicted on the world.
Honestly, I did not know until now that Art Linkletter's daughter had a clean toxicology report. I first heard about her jumping while on LSD when I was in college. I never heard it refuted. It's amazing that such an obvious distortion of the facts can live on so long.
I have to ask, have journalists ever been trustworthy? Has any newspaper gotten anything right? Why am I still so naive, that a story like this surprises me?
I did some psychedelics in college. For me, while they appeared enlightening, they also were an escape from realty. I stopped when I realized I couldn't control what I experienced, and yet was becoming dependant on them. The "trippy" stuff started breaking into my regular world, and that scared me. I knew two friends who used them regularly, and went off the deep end. One stayed in college, but his behavior became very bizarre. He was no longer connected to reality. The other dropped out, and I don't know what became of him.
1st of all..
If you took 250 micrograms of LSD about 8 hours before you died...
What toxicology report made in the 1960's would have been able to detect remaining LSD?
When gilbar was taking LSD in the '80's, one of the things that he liked about it; was The was NO WAY on EARTH for the authorities to prove you were on ANYTHING.
2nd. *IF* the fine print on Alice, said.. Inspired by True Events.. Would you let it go?
What if they admitted that Alice was "composite girl"??
Compared to modern "journalism", you're complaining about ALICE?
NEXT THING YOU KNOW, you'll be saying that SE Hinton's characters weren't "real" people
Psychedelic drugs DO NOT show an alternative reality. They show a fantasy land in your own mind. It is in no way reality, and should not be confused with reality. Otherwise, reality is likely to smack you right in the face.
A lot of women could have taken a message from that story about how you can push your own agenda.
Yes, everything is "empowering" now, even when it really isn't.
I remember "Go ask Alice". I was also a big fan of Jefferson Airplane. It was such a weird time then. As Jack Casady states, it was a time of trying new things, many trying drugs, and psychedelics in particular. This was decades after "Reefer Madness", but there were so many idiotic portrayals of acid trips, it was almost like "Reefer Madness, Part Deux: The Next Level".
As anyone would be, Art Linkletter was broken by his daughter's death. The President and the press both took that on and made hay with it. My takeaway is that the media was not much different in checking their sources and confirming the truth before running with it. Today it's more embarrassing because there are so many more sources one can check and there are so many angles to get information. One only has to give an effort.
What would be really interesting is to read the contents of the Biden daughter diary. The FBI seemed pretty intent on keeping its content secret. Especially the showers with dear ol' dad.
Yesterday 4chan claims the cracked the code on Hunters cell phone. It's probably better than the laptop.
Yes people will believe what they want to believe. Lies have been told and published throughout history. But today in this new totalitarian American digital era, they are pushed with power and veracity.
Conservatives believe lies too. Like Iraq had WMDs. That's why we all abandon the GOP establishment and see Liz Cheney as just some hack trying to protect her Dad's legacy. Who knows? Maybe she showered with him too.
But in the last two years the lies that liberals have pushed, and are readily accepted by their followers is brining our Constitutional Republic to and end. They are destroying Generation Z, and today's young children. Too many examples to write. We all know what they are. What liberals called "debunked conspiracy theories" only one or two years ago, and now today's "what does it matter anyway". And that comes from you average college campus Phd.
Right now all of America could use a good hit of Acid.
embellished
That's the word y'all are looking for!
The next question was obvious: .. did she do the same with “Alice”?
Emerson looked into “Go Ask Alice’s” origins and found that Sparks did meet a troubled young woman in 1970, whom he calls “Brenda” to protect her privacy.
“My sense is that it was a patchwork,” Emerson tells The Post. Some of “Go Ask Alice” came from direct talks with Brenda, some from letters Brenda wrote to a friend (who supplied these letters to Emerson), and the rest from news stories and Sparks’ own imagination. “It’s indisputable that large sections of ‘Go Ask Alice’ are just embellished and/or false.”
SO, According to the NY POST.. There WAS a Girl.. She DID that stuff.. She DID write it down
Then, the author "embellished" it
Welcome to the world
Very interesting post in light of the Washington Post reporting today that the "10-year old rape victim refused abortion" - touted by President Joe Biden - is Fake News.
Everything old is new again.
The War On Drugs. Another failed attempt by Government to legislate morality. Shades of sumptuary laws; Agustus and Julia Caesaris filia. Did not work then, does not work now.
Government should be of the People; not vice-versa.
I learned everything I know about the '60s drug culture from Sgt. Joe Friday on Dragnet.
I remember the story of Art Linkletter's daughter; I, too, never kneew it was debunked until today.
When I was a child, I very much liked his show "Art Linkletter's House Party", but I always sensed something about him that he wasn't his real self on the show. I guess the fact that he played a character of his own creation was and is common, but as a child I rarely got that sense from TV hosts.
An enterprising housewife was smart enough to exploit the American public’s fear and paranoia of the drug culture and make a profit. An interesting parallel would be the recent “real-life” account of a 10-year old Ohio girl seeking an abortion that has been making the rounds. Although the only profit to be had that I can see in that case is Twitter likes.
"Avon Books published the paperback and two years later, in 1973, ABC aired a TV adaptation of the book. That, too, was a supersonic hit, with nearly a third of all US households viewing it...."
A blog post doing a retrospective of that week's TV says: "Not a single movie night was in the Top Ten; The ABC Wednesday Movie (Go Ask Alice) was the top-rated movie night for the week, ranking 15th."
Adam-12 ranked 9th.
http://www.tvobscurities.com/2010/05/nielsen-top-ten-january-22nd-january-28th-1973/
I read Go Ask Alice when I was in high school. It just made me want to do all the drugs. (I didn't. Not all of them, anyway. It was obvious that real drugs were not as fun or exciting as fictional drugs.)
There is still no verified “leaping to their death” tale about LSD yet the myth is so persistent.
It's almost like the story of a 10-year-old rape victim who had to travel out of state to get an abortion. Repeated enough that it becomes "fact" - according to the Washington Post.
Just like the raped ten-year-old who had to go to a different state to get an abortion. There was a demand for the story so somebody supplied, even though the story was a lie.
"Psychedelic drugs DO NOT show an alternative reality. They show a fantasy land in your own mind. It is in no way reality, and should not be confused with reality. Otherwise, reality is likely to smack you right in the face."
Where is this real reality other than in each person's head? You are *expressing* a fantasy! Please take LSD and think about this or just think about it more deeply. There's a shitload of philosophy books on the subject, so take Slick's advice seriously and feed your head.
"... so take Slick's advice seriously and feed your head."
That is, as she said: read.
If you read a philosophy book, are you in reality, or is it "a fantasy land [of the writer's] mind"?
I took one of Jack's bass workshops at Jorma's Fur Peace Ranch (which is nominally alcohol and drug free). Good teacher in his cranky old man way. Thoughtful, good observer, heath nut.
Is White Rabbit the most "iconic" LSD song? (I think this is one of the few places where "iconic" is the right word.) I think so. Tomorrow Never Knows, Eight Miles High, 5D - White Rabbit has them beat. Maybe it's just a better song. Lewis Carroll is a better source for the lyrics. The song owes a lot to Jack's bass line. You don't need the lyrics (as much as I like them) to evoke the mood of the song. You can do a lot with root - five - octave.
There's a rich tradition of "made up" books in the New York City area. Must come from being in close proximity to New York Times reporters. They do that sort of thing as they write.
I don't know about "Go Ask Alice". But I do remember reading--with some amusement--"Naked Came The Stranger". It was published sometime in the 1970s(?). The reporters on staff at Newsday--the Long Island newspaper--decided to write a pornographic novel. Each writer wrote one chapter. Remarkably the story hung together despite its very mixed parentage.
"When I was a child, I very much liked his show "Art Linkletter's House Party", but I always sensed something about him that he wasn't his real self on the show. I guess the fact that he played a character of his own creation was and is common, but as a child I rarely got that sense from TV hosts."
If I remember correctly, that show bothered me. I'm thinking of the "Kids Say the Darndest Things" segment. To me as a child, other children weren't cute and their misunderstandings of things didn't amuse me but made me feel sorry for the kids and worry that I'd get things wrong and be laughed at. The kids were lined up and sequentially interviewed by Linkletter with the whole idea being that they'd say something in a way that no adult would.
There's exactly one thing I remember hearing that a kid said and that I have remembered all these years. The kid said his mother had a nightgown with a face on it with eyes that rolled around. That is, he was talking about a negligee that wasn't fully opaque and he had seen her breasts and nipples moving underneath!
Art Linkletter did have a show called "People are Phony."
Daffy Duck was a guest on it once.
How many psychologists/psychiatrists have pulled this kind of stunt? This instance, Sybill. I guess this was a popular book, so not subject to peer review. From what I've read, though, even scholarly papers in this field are not as carefully vetted as they should be.
I doubt any 1969 analytical chemistry device could have detected the residual LSD or it's metabolites from what would have been a standard dose measured in micrograms.
That bus I stepped out in front of had better not be real!
I had the same reaction to "Kids Say the Darndest Things." Candid Camera and Borat are even worse, but I am really put off by all of them.
What if they admitted that Alice was "composite girl"??
Then she could have been Obama's girlfriend.
Not like I would know, but my guess is that Grace's "feed you head means read" is a post hoc justification. I don't think the original intention of "feed your head" was a simplistic "take LSD," but rather a cheer for the whole hippie experience: yes, literature, but poetry, dancing, drugs, music, sex, etc.
Interesting how the reality/fantasy discussion fits with the physics/math discussion a few posts ago. Was that intentional? I've stayed out because I think it would take me days to say something that was both interesting and short.
Tim said...
Psychedelic drugs DO NOT show an alternative reality. They show a fantasy land in your own mind. It is in no way reality, and should not be confused with reality. Otherwise, reality is likely to smack you right in the face.
Agreement with Althouse's reply at 9:51 ... "Where is this real reality other than in each person's head? You are *expressing* a fantasy!"
Reality is different than our meager perceptions of it, sober or influenced.
" shroomies" - The word itself gives a big smile.
Gusty Winds said...
'Right now all of America could use a good hit of Acid'
Right now all of America could use a micro-dose of psilocybin.
Some of you people don't realize that we don't see reality. We imagine a highly simplified model of reality in our minds. It's true psychodellics can be dangerous when taken by weak minded Cucks. My mind is so strong, I never once had a hallucination whilst under the influence of LSD or shrooms. It made me very relaxed and focused on whatever fun activities we were doing at the time. It was always a joyful experience for me.
My Vietnam helicopter pilot PTSD brother has been doing occasional peyote microdosing trips for the last several months. He reports that it has made his nature hikes more enjoyable and he has since started dating for the first time since his divorce. He still is overly vigilant but is more aware of the positive aspects of that mindset and he reports being less anxious.
I remember watching 'GAA' in school...the time frame fits...
I don't consider Grace Slick to be a great singer, but she knocks that one out of the park...
Abbie Hoffman was the preeminent publicist for LSD. True, he later went on to commit suicide, but who's to say that he would not have committed suicide earlier were it not for the healing properties of LSD. (s/)...When young, I did some drugs and alcohol. A healthy youth can write and cash huge checks against the body's credit balance. I guess I didn't suffer any permanent damage, but young people with incipient schizophrenia or bipolar disorders don't have such a huge credit balance to draw upon and would be well advised not to dabble with drugs.....At the age of thirty I discovered jogging and long distance running. If you run five miles, you feel pleasantly tired and at peace with the world after the run. Works nearly every time. Beyond that, there's the sure and certain knowledge that you have the means to banish the blues and to do so in a way that makes you healthier. That was a great comfort.
'Right now all of America could use a good hit of Acid.'
Or an enema...
I got a lot of anti-drug lectures in the navy 1967 on.
Two things stick in my mind
1-the story about an elephant dying after being injected with lsd.
2-the hippie who went blind staring into the sun.
Was either true? I recall being somewhat incredulous at the time. Still am.
I avoided psychedelics, though many of my set didn't. What people described to me of their experiences didn't sound that attractive, and beer and pot (sometimes hash) got me where I wanted to be just fine.
Along with the books and music, and the humanities classes, and travel available to American Boomers--the smorgasbord of the last few thousand years to study.
The Humanities--deep, delightful, delicious.
"... so take Slick's advice seriously and feed your head."
That is, as she said: read.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Did Gracie say that before or after she locked herself in the bathroom with the cocaine?
Wasn't Alice's dad played by Shatner?
I first smoked pot in the 12th grade (1971) in the HVAC attic above the backstage at Overton High School. A friend's older brother and his girlfriend came by and we toked. I don't recall the rest of the day, but must have done OK. Of course, we were hardly the first or worst when it came to drug use there among the Rebels.
I recall my widowed mother wanting me and my younger brothers to read the Alice book. Poor deluded woman. I didn't know at the time, but when I was taking my first toke they were already gobbling pills by the handful. Of course I wasn't about to read her stupid book, but I did admonish my brothers that both booze and pot could destroy brain cells and that one should exercise caution and moderation.
She suspected she was being mocked, of course.
Since Joe Rogan dumped Trump, the stoned ape theory has fallen out of flavor with the MAGA faithful.
Whenever someone addresses an audience as "you people" I quit reading and move on.
A... another handmade tail (sic) brayed for effect, leverage, and profit.
For all the pot and other delights available to me and my friends in the 70s, we mostly drank. We were pretty smashed at the obligatory baccalauar-whatzis; I don't recall the graduation itself but must have been smashed.
The week after graduation, three friends and I loaded up the trunk with booze (I was a mature looking young man--the result of a lot of responsibility at an early age--and could often get stuff from liquor stores without getting carded) and headed for the Gulf, where we got smashed every night while hoping to score some pussy and weed. Had more success with the weed, to be frank.
My older brother by this time had been out of the Army for a while and was ripping off the VA bigtime by pretending to be a college student. He and two lowlife friends from before rented a little house in Marshall County just southeast of here and started growing pot. They got busted, of course, and what happened after opened my eyes to a lot of things.
The cops uprooted their crop nd weighed the whole plants rootball and all--and then claimed that they had kept that much pot, with a value they pulled out of their asses, off the street. The jail where they were kept awaiting trial was a hole, but they could bribe the trustee--a B/black man who had murdered his wife--to get them smokes and other things.
It took a while, but my uncle Jimmy (ma's only brother) was eventually able to grease the necessary palms and I think they ended up with a fine and time served.
I learned later that Jimmy did so much for my brother--to no thanks, I should add--because he had had his own struggles with alcohol and thought there was hope.
Thank God we no longer engage in these crazy anti-drug campaigns. Except for demon tobbaco. Its ok to smoke, but it'd better be MJ. That's harmless.
Every broad-based push by the establishment to change people's behavior includes fakery and propaganda. People have asserted that ann Frank' diary includes fake entries. My mother had a popular 60s book called "Black like Me" in her library about a white man who disguised himself as a black in the early 60s in the segrgated south. It helped Civil Rights, but it was a total fake.
Next to Muir Woods in Marin County, hidden away, there's an old, very cool and dilapidated '50s enclave called Druid Heights. It's private land but hikeable. Was home to some early acid experimentin' and other activities that influenced the '60s counterculture. The architecture of the buildings: bizarre and wonderful.
The matter of LSD flashbacks was real. In 1965, we had a serious problem in the medical school. Half the second year class was using LSD and apparently the dorm was wild at night. The Dean called me in to talk about it. He said he talked to one of the students who told him that he went to the beach at night and the waves talked to him. The Dean said,"Those illusions can be powerful." The student said, "No they were really talking to me." This was at a time when he had not used LSD in a week.
Some of those students never finished med school.
ABC After School Specials were a source of incredibly soppy, often incorrect, life lessons starting in the 1970s. Drug abuse was just one source of prurient interest ABC milked for us naive kids back then. Finally we got novels like Fear of Flying by Jong and Wifey by Blume, where suburban sexual hedonism was celebrated rather than explored as problematical. And then the 80's hit and coke wasn't just a soft drink. In the 1990s I got to experience the crack epidemic up close in Baltimore, as the drug gangs exceeded a murder per day trying to evict competitive entrepreneurs from street corners, and babies arrived in the pediatric ER already addicted.
My college roomie did LSD a few times, in a relatively safe environment, as well as a wide variety of other intoxicants and hallucinogens, yet ended up a stock broker of some success. Other kids I knew who did drugs ended up suddenly dead. Most results fall between those two extremes.
“I first smoked pot in the 12th grade (1971) in the HVAC attic above the backstage at Overton High School.”
Good Lord… you were lucky they had no window for you to jump out of!
I was in the 10th grade (1968) when a classmate thought I needed to loosen my tight ass up. Imagine my surprise when I walked up to my school locker one morning and found what appeared to be a fat joint stuffed through the padlock hole.
Imagine the look on Vice-Principal Eberhardt’s face when I angrily marched into his office, fattie in hand, and told him of the low-lifes that insulted and embarrassed me with this “gift”.
This incident won me several stay out of jail cards when VP Eberhardt would catch my friend Mike and me ditching 2nd or 3rd period and hightailing it for the hole in the chain link fence on the far side of the athletic field… the path that led to the TasteeFreeze two blocks away.
We had a Smoking Tree at OHS--those of us with a nicotine jones could indulge out there.
On the MSU campus in the early 70s, pot-smoking was ubiquitous outside of classes--with one exception that I know of. The male students had a two-semester AFROTC obligation. By'71 we didn't have to dress out or drill, but sometimes they took us to the old admin bldg auditorium for agitprop sessions.
Imagine if you can, some hundreds of long-haired young men, often hungover, being herded into the long rows of seats, sixty or more across with no middle aisle, lighting up joints to be passed up and down completely out of the reach of the instructors--not that they cared much and were usually on their last posts anyway.
Not everyone partook, but everyone understood.
I went to some classes stoned, with varying results. I had to sneak out of a physics class on my hand and knees once when a quiz was popped.
"Abbie Hoffman was the preeminent publicist for LSD."
I think you're confusing Abbie Hoffman with Timothy Leary.
“I first smoked pot in the 12th grade (1971) in the HVAC attic above the backstage at Overton High School.”
Yeah, the burnouts in junior high in Ann Arbor (7-9 grade) were really cool.
And so important research into psychotropics was suspended for fifty years. It is now slowly gaining legitimacy
Something similar happening right now possibly with the alleged 10 year old pregnant rape victim.
All the same sort of signs of it being potentially fictional but you aren't supposed to call any of that out in case it might be true.
Megan Fox covers some but far from all of what makes it very 'sus' here The story about a 10 yr old pregnant girl who had to go from Ohio to IN for an abortion gives me serious pause for a number of reasons. There are many red flags. I'm going to detail them here.
The law referenced does not exist as stated and there is as yet no evidence in Ohio an abortion under these circumstances is not explicitly protected by the fetal heartbeat (not 6 week) law being misrepresented. cf. ORC 2919.193(B),2919.16(F) & (K) A viral story sourced to an Indiana pro-choice activist references a law that does not exist.
Grudgingly WaPo's damage control, Glenn Kessler hops on to fact check, plagiarizes Megan's work without attribution, then surmises there not being any it "had acquired a "status of a 'fact' no matter its provenance" (the new Fake but Accurate it seems!) New #FactChecker: A one-source story about a 10-year-old and an abortion goes viral
Ann says: “Where is this real reality other than in each person's head?”
The real reality it out there and we grasp it with our mind the best we can.
Chill, Mark at 359. Am I supposed to apologize or what?
I've never been fond of the 60s and their malign impact on the decades following, and so no one will be surprised to read that I simply don't understand you all who seem so fondly to remember your adolescent drug use etc etc.
But I do see a connection between Glenn Kessler's 'it a fact although it will become more of a fact' if there's ever any corroboration of it factuality and Althouse's 'you can't say what reality is! there's books about this, by philosophers even'. Perhaps that connection's only reality is in my head. Paul Mac links to the Kessler admission at 4:23 pm. I couldn't get to it via Tor or any of my usual methods so I broke down and bought WaPo (I hope just for a month) to read it.
With news reports around the globe and now a presidential imprimatur, however, the story has acquired the status of a “fact” no matter its provenance. If a rapist is ever charged, the fact finally would have more solid grounding.
Mr Biden's imprimatur, pft.
Don’t confuse Albert Hofmann with Abbie Hoffman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Hofmann
“ The real reality it out there and we grasp it with our mind the best we can. ”
Thanks for the directions.
Out there.
Noted.
Far out.
“I first smoked pot in the 12th grade (1971) in the HVAC attic above the backstage at Overton High School.”
"Good Lord… you were lucky they had no window for you to jump out of!"
An Overton window?
I keep forgetting--Airplane were a fucking awful band.
Having lost a son to an alcohol-related accident 10 years ago, and in the aftermath meeting many parents who lost sons to drug overdoses, not a fan of glorifying drug use. A plague on our society, and the mainstreaming from elements of pop culture like “Go Ask Alice,” a song I actually do really like, is a major cause of it.
gilbar,
NEXT THING YOU KNOW, you'll be saying that SE Hinton's characters weren't "real" people
Absolutely true story: A teacher in my HS recounted teaching one of SE Hinton's YA novels (Rumble Fish?), and a kid asking him at one point where exactly was "Coast City" (the place where the action in the book took place). He explained to the class that Coast City wasn't a real place. The students were horrified. Not real? He tried to explain that it was a fictional place, a stand-in for many actual cities on the (presumably CA) coast. Gradually, it dawned on him that these kids had no idea of "fiction" at all; everything they encountered, in print or video, much have actually happened. Unsure how to proceed, he asked them whether they had ever read or seen anything that they thought wasn't actually true.
Long pause. Then one kid stuck up her hand and suggested meekly that maybe humans and dinosaurs didn't actually live at the same time, as they did on "The Flintstones."
Ye Gods.
I don't know about this being the "most iconic" LSD song. What's happened to "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"? Or is that "alternative" theory that "LSD" was actually just "pounds, shillings, pence" actually correct?
The news from Britain reminded me of the teen pregnancy/marriage novel of the same era, Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones. It was intended to be a serious adult work, but it sold better as a Young Adult book. You could get it from the Scholastic Book Club run by Weekly Reader. Later, it became a TV movie starring Desi Arnaz Jr and Christopher Norris, who was actually a woman (or so we thought back then).
Overton window . . . Gah, how did I miss it? Misspent yoot, I suppose.
Marc comments on not understanding our fond memories of adolescent drug abuse. I'm betting that he didn't experience it, and therefore CAN'T understand it--per recent discussions.
(The quasi-binge drinking we did from about 15 to 30 [in my case] was enough to last a lifetime, but I don't mind a cannabis high at all, at all.)
The human urge to alter everyday consciousness is almost universal across time and place. My own theory is that the human brain, as the most complex part of the universe, must be full of potential states to be unlocked by the adventurous. I stay close to shore myself, but don't discourage the bolder spirits.
MDT's anecdote at 621 warps around nicely on the truthiness theme: William C. Davis, one of the senior ACWABAWS historians around, noted recently that when he was starting his writing career around the time of the Centennial, it was accepted by almost everyone that if a story or tale was recounted in a -published work- it was fair fodder for the historians, and he didn't exempt himself for a certain lack of due diligence.
Sorry, Roger Sweeney… it was, admittedly, a cheap laugh.
San Francisco and other cities eliminated war on drugs.
SF way nicer than it used to be.
SHOCKING VIDEO: San Francisco Children Get Off Bus in Open Air Drug Market Filled With Homeless Addicts to Get Home From School
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/07/shocking-video-san-francisco-children-get-off-bus-open-air-drug-market-filled-homeless-addicts-get-home-school/
Hugh- so sad. I’m w/you.
Right now our area is swimming in fentanyl. Many ODs and luckily(depending on how you view it) NARCAN revivals. I guess it’s in everything. The next step is to give special kits out to users to test their drugs of choice for anything laced in it.
It’s a jungle out there.
I wouldn’t do drugs. I’ve seen the damage done. I value my faculties too much. As such they are…
Didn't Goethe's Young Werther inspire a bunch of suicides of young German men? Even feeding your head by reading has its hazards.
I'm betting that he didn't experience it, and therefore CAN'T understand it--per recent discussions.
You are certainly right about this. Did a hit of acid once when I was 30ish and in my teens and later on smoked weed probably a total of a dozen times, so perhaps it's true I cannot understand the fascination, at least when one factors out the relationships of friendship, camaraderie, love, whatever, that presumably attended-- most of the time such things happen in company? maybe not; maybe this is more true so far as beer and wine and alcohol go than 'drugs'? I don't know.
Thanks farmgirl. You reminded of another song from that era—“The Needle and the Damage Done.” A little part of it in everyone, but every junkie’s like a setting son. Mixed feelings about Neil Young, but when he was on he was really good. Just talking with a co-worker/close friend. Our relationship exists because her brother OD’d.
And now listening to a great song—“There She Goes” by the LAs. Sounds like a straightforward love song, but I’m told it’s actually a double-entendre about Heroine use, and the words do fit
Marc in Eugene--bingo! My experiences with cannabis have almost entirely been in good company, listening to music and conversing. We drank a lot too back in the day, and I found that I have some mean drunk genes from my mother's line, so I am near tee-total now.
So yes, set and setting and personal chemistry and history have a lot to do with ones attitude toward drugs.
I don't bother telling people to use or not use this or that. They won't listen anyway, so I just speak my truth ;-)
I found that I have some mean drunk genes from my mother's line, so I am near tee-total now.
I have to stay away from alcohol, too. Unfortunately.
I don't go out to the corner on Saturday mornings and preach abstinence from drugs and alcohol but, that said, I do think the expression 'the law is a teacher' has its place in these matters-- one that ought to be subordinate to children's upbringing... but we all know that so much of family life is screwed up these days. SMH.
Post a Comment