Playing Pinochle with Pink Floyd

So we are playing pinochle, three-handed, me and Radarette and our friend Mark (the car collector, not the blogger) and listening to jams on our Bose stereo. We wind up breaking out the Pink Floyd and during the song "Echoes" the subject of LSD comes up. Now, since Radarette and I are both over 50 years old we grew up in the age of Flower Power and Psychedelic jams. In fact, all three of us are former acid-heads, or just "heads" in the common jargon of the sixties. I used to eat acid like candy and the Radarette and even Mark used to imbibe as well. But he is a bit younger and the stuff he got was more like speed, got him "hyped up" more than anything. Some speed acid tightened your neck, made you hyper and shaky much like speed would do.

The real stuff didn't really hype you up so much. It was like I explained to Mark. Speed acid was like taking a ball of silly putty and bouncing it off the wall. But take some silly putty and then push it down on a Sunday comic and the putty would wind up with the color picture impressed upon it. Stre-e-e-e-e-e-tch that picture out and sideways and now you are talking LSD. I would take acid and listen to something like Pink Floyd and I would go on trips above the ocean where fish would leap out of the sea wearing dresses and accompanied by dog musicians with trumpets for noses and parasols for tails. Or something like that, only stranger.

I won't ever take acid again. Once we were all druggies but all of us are conservative Christians now and don't even smoke cigarettes. Funny how life changes. Yet, when we play Pink Floyd late at night we all find ourselves transported by the music, we find ourselves remembering how to "trip" without the substances. Yes, I concluded, in a way we are all still "heads". I took something of the imagination, the daring, the fun away from those days and those parts were the good parts.

LSD has been credited with expanding the minds of geeks and scientists in ways to bring innovative improvements to society. Maybe so, me, I was inspired to write poetry rather than beginning to crank out quadratic equations when I was on LSD but more often I would rather get into music or maybe go check out people, maybe even drive around(!) while under the influence of LSD. I never got in a wreck but once I saw a fifty-foot elephant loom out at me over the road followed by a fifty-foot mouse and on that particular occasion I pulled over to the side of the road for awhile. Another time, while tripping but on mescaline rather than LSD, the other three people with me discovered that "God was in the bathroom mirror" and began falling over each other to be closest to "God". Usually, though, things were much weirder than that.

Anyway, when you see a fiftyish couple in the supermarket, maybe he is losing his hair and she is losing the battle of the wrinkle, keep in mind those two may have been groovy back in the day.