excerpt "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" by Tom Wolfe
"Sometimes he would go to work high on acid. He could see into their faces. Sometimes, he wrote, and sometimes he drew pictures of the patients, and as the lines of the ball-point greasy creased into the paper the lines of their faces, he could - the interiors of these men came into lines, the ball-point crevasses, it was the most incredible feeling, the anguish and the pain came right out front and flowed in the crevasses in their faces, and in the ball-point crevasses, the same - one! - crevasses now, black starling nostrils, black starling eyes, blind black starling geek cry on every face: 'Me! Me! Me! Me! I am - Me!' - he could see clear into them. And - how could you tell anybody about this? they'll say you're a nut yourself - but afterwards, not high on anything, he could still see into people."
M i k e !
You give me one better name than "mom" for what she is and I'll punch you right in the mouth. Feeling rascaly tonight. They were all poking fun at my sweatshirt at dinner, the one Matt found. I love this sweatshirt so I was like, gimme a break, guys! But you know how Mike is, well maybe you don't. A heckler. Obviously the bold colors and stripes confused him and mom jumped on the bandwagon. When I first stepped out of the bedroom it was all oohs and aahs and I was thinking how surprised I was that Mike and especially mom liked my outfit so much. But pretty quick it turned into, "So, really, what's with the sweatshirt?" and questions like that coming from Mike. The point of the joke so far as I could make out was that I wasn't about to make any boys fall in love with me in a shirt like that, and mom seemed to agree and her expression whenever she looked at me was of dismay. So all through dinner I was just chuckling, I was! Because it was clear as day to me that I looked amazing! And there were so many other things. For example, Mike asked if I would trim his eyebrows at some point during his visit. So I said to him "are you serious?" And he pulled a tiny pair of scissors out of his pocket and said, "I can't see my eyebrows without my glasses and I can't get to my eyebrows with my glasses on." And he brought the tiny scissors up to his glasses to act out the problem.
It's just so much of the time I have the feeling that we're gesturing at each other from across a river and the echos and the pantomime-- it all becomes a goofy dance. So there I am laughing as we sit around the table, mom to my left and Mike to my right and Proud across from me. And each time I look around Mike is laughing and mom is laughing and Proud is too and I realize we're all laughing for different or somewhat different reasons. But, hey! It's a moment. And I love these people! And it makes me think of the word "ahhole" and how me and Josh both had a different joke about it but for a long time we cracked each other up by saying it and we just assumed we were laughing at the same thing which, as it turned out, we were and we weren't. Then one day something made me reminisce to him in further detail about the scene in Children Of A Lesser God where the deaf guy on the basketball court goes "AHHOLE!" and Josh was like, "what are you talking about?" And I was like, "you idiot, that's where ahhole comes from." And he said, "No it's not!" and told me his version (which, unfortunately, is a private story and cannot be shared). So, of course, we laughed harder than ever then.
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