Journal #23

I was panicking, but now I am not so sure that it was even warranted. A quote that has unironically saved my life is "Don't trust your thoughts past 9 P.M." because the great deal of melancholy that washes over me ought to be studied. I'm not even sure for what. Maybe a study on defective brains or lovesickness or something. 

I'm currently reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Trip which, to summarize it poorly, is a story about LSD hopped hippies that go around in a big ol' multicolor school bus and trip together. Out of everyone, my favorite character has got to be Sandy. He's paranoid all the time, cusses out Kesey, and it's made all the worse after he trips on some shit (I forgot the name of the substance lol) at this great big mansion owned by snobby spiritual people. Sandy's come to believe his friends are all plotting something massive against him. He takes LSD without permission and just has the absolutely worse trip but no one hates him for it. No one hates him for being paranoid or having insomnia so bad he gets up and walks away. No one hates him for his way of being. He comes out with it just randomly one day in the middle of a game everyone's playing, just all his fears, this massive conspiracy he thinks they're plotting, the whole of it. And no one hates him. They applaud him for being so out with it. So they decide to give him more attention, make things about him for a while to relax him, but he just can't seem to let himself be loved. What really tore me up was how he left. One night, everyone gets together, calls him outside "'San-dy'" they repeat. He comes out and receives a candle. Following them to the shore, his relief is so short lived. He comes to remember the conspiracy and darts up the hill like he's on fire. He rushes through Monterey and starts banging on some door, hollering. He gets the cops called on him. His brother and Kesey meet up at the jailhouse to bail him out and Kesey wants him back on the bus, but his brother takes him anyway, sticks him in an institution. 

It broke my heart. 

I know I just spoiled a great deal of the damn thing, but I highly recommend the book. I'll admit, I probably mostly like it because I befriended some hippies a couple years back. Not the LSD doing kind, but the kind that'd bum on beaches with friends high off of illegal weed down south. There's something beautiful in that, I think. A beautiful freedom. 

Don't do drugs though, maybe.