THE ELECTRIC KOOL-AID ACID TEST

This book was written as a somewhat, chronicle of Ken Kesey’s* life and the adventures of The Merry Pranksters in 1964. In the words of Tom Wolfe, Kesey acted as a counter-cultural icon, who some consider, was a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s. He said, “I was too young to be a beatnik, and too old to be a hippie”… Often depicted as a very influential person and the unspoken leader of the Merry Pranksters, the book references popular figures and influences from the movement as Stewart Brand, Jack Kerouac, Mountain Girl, Jerry Garcia, Timothy Leary, Larry McMurtry, Fritz Perls, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, Hunter S. Thompson, Paul Krassner, Haight-Ashbury, LSD, Grass, The Grateful Dead, Hell’s Angels and even a bit of the Beatles… The book details various cosmic trips within their La Honda, California playground and actual mad trips (all over the U.S. and Mexico) on their bus, nicknamed - FURTHER**… Once is all it takes, and the experience will blow you away, you will no longer dream in black and white, and your thoughts will be covered in Day-Glo images…

The way he wrote the book made La Honda, California in 1964 seem other-worldly and made the characters seem invincible… The pranksters easily got themselves onto some impossible, foolishly wild and dangerous predicaments, but somehow always managed to always just skate around all of the holes in the ice, seemingly by magic, almost made you feel like the the story was fiction… The way Tom Wolfe described every detail was sheer poetry, and would’ve made an amazing graphic novel… You will never believe how someone in a dapper suit as Wolfe, can actually capture the existence and necessity of the beautiful people… The Book also made a lot of references to the way, The Unspoken Thing, keeps happening… When you experience something, unfamiliar and it literally blows you away… Much in the same manner that religion depicts an awakening of the soul… No words can describe it, but it is there… It also gives you an insight of how Ken Kesey developed the manuscripts for his book — One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest… One author i greatly respect, admire and miss… He is, i believe, in day-glo heaven…

* Ken Kesey (September 17, 1935 – November 10, 2001) was the author of One FlewOver The Cuckoo’s Nest, and he wrote the beginnings of the book while experimenting on psychoactive drugs ( LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, cocaine, and DMT ) as part of a study called Project MKULTRA at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital…

** FURTHER, was a 1939 International Harvester school bus. When Ken Kesey buys it for a trip to New York, for the publication of his novel Sometimes a Great Notion, he signs the contract “Intreprid Trips, Inc.” — http://www.univie.ac.at/Anglistik/easyrider/data/tom_wolfe.htm