The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

To me, nothing says Christmas better than trippy colors mixed with love, peace, and harmony.

Turn on the lights and turn yourself on, find the bus and/or Santa's sleigh, and it's truly the season to be jolly!

... and freak out the squares, man.

Break the mold in our lives, put on the day-glow, THINK DIFFERENTLY, and DEFY EVERYTHING! It's CHRISTMAS-ish. :) Let's check out those elvish helpers...

The Merry Pranksters!

Ken Kesey (un)led this band of social explorers took so many mind-altering trips that they spawned a whole movement in the mid-sixties... so much so that the whole thing became passe and overdone well before '69, and even burned out a number of mental cosmonauts before LSD became illegal a few years before.

This particular book is a Non-Fiction in the best tradition of great storytelling. Or is it the reverse?

Doesn't matter. It's all real. It happened. A Kerouac-Adventure diving deep in the psyche as well as busting social-norms, these Merry Pranksters hung out with Hell's Angels, disturbed a disturbed America, and gave access to unimaginable quantities of hallucinogenics to the world. The impact on music, fame, spirituality is undisputed. This was the total awakening of the imagination, for good or ill, that made people hope for a brighter future.

Hope and all these people working together to build something bigger than any of us IS the point. Never mind that it didn't quite turn out the way they hoped. The pendulum sure swang back HARD on them.

Even so, this history is pretty freaking amazing. All the good, the bad, the ignorance and the hope... it just smells like Christmas to me!

Merry Christmas! The bus is here!



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