Cruel Harmonies: Acid = LSD and the Dovetail Joint, yeah.
This contains footnotes marked numerically and parenthetically, to be found at the bottom of the page.
The common perception of LSD was by far most damaged by the hippies of the 60s. Accurately introduced, the power of Lennon’s “wonderdrug” was immeasurable, but coming off of the emotional repressions of the previous three decades to two thousand years, respectively depending on whether one asks a sociologist or a philosopher, your average draft-dodging deadhead(1) just couldn’t help themselves, and so acid’s reputation was left to be decided by those happy to regurgitate sheaths of sheaves, eager to be rewarded with attention and influence(2), their role to fill the public’s mind with only the most melodramatic, overwhelming visions of LSD. No matter how we’d all have wished it(3), the American conservative did not sample LSD to make up their own minds, but simply funhouse-mirrored the claims made by the monolingual kumbaya-ers, turning stories of transcendentalism into tales of mental degeneration. Hand in hand, “Peace and Love” and “Just Say No” waltzed LSD into a prohibition which has lasted half a century.
With its subject redacted, a modern reading of the testimonies so frequently and famously given by the longhair camps would bring to mind not LSD but DMT, or possibly Ecstasy, two substances distinct from LSD which, respectively, inspire psychedelic visions and heighten emotionality beyond even acid’s “God-Dosages” of the 60s. To those who have long warmed themselves by the idealism of the flower children this can be a disappointing discovery, painfully humanizing in its reputational corruption. We’ve discovered the celebrity of LSD is like any other’s celebrity. In order to be worthy of the headline, an oversimplification and exaggeration of something or someone’s finer points must take place, and all the subject can hope for is an opportunity to attempt to reveal those subtler folds of their beauty, their humanity, petals only visible firsthand to those who already care to learn, so as to not exist in the minds of others as an archetype. A character.
1. No offense is meant, though some should be taken
2. Influence, noun: A word used by those who find the word “power” crass
3. Consider: Nancy Reagan, obscenely high, in Brooklyn, seeing a bodega cat and weeping at its beauty while offering it Swedish Fish from the floor