// Kesey’s place… La Honda, 1965//

I’d-a given anything to have been at Kesey’s place in La Honda back then. To slide in and out of the movies of Mountain Girl, Intrepid Traveler, Zelot, Hassler, Speed Limit, Mary Microgram, Mal Function, Gretchin Fetchin and the lot.

Ah, but I WAS there, except the geography was different, and the names were… Ryan (“Walls, man, I need walls”), The Steckian, Tebh, O’Doyle, 2Pat, Stabone, Anaconda, Low-bee, Niki the Joker, Trippin’ Balls McFalls, and the long black hair gang… and I was Stenographer Steve, wild-eyed, scribbling bottled lighting in a mangled spiral notepad. 

Who knew there were UFOs on Folly Beach? That the vines on the wallpaper could grow so furiously? That we were all but vertices on the giant spiderweb of humanity? That each of Beethoven’s piano sonatas were actually thousands of sonatas, universes of sound layered upon one another, each one microscopically faster or slower than the others, making them each completely unique and of different color and mood? Who knew we could see the golfball as infinite - its entire Tralfamadorian path laid out in front of our eyes across the ever-expanding universe?

And, who… who knew that the Center of the Universe was in a basement in Duluth?