Create Your Own Roadshow Dept. - Terence McKenna

Here's Big Mac posing with a bunch of crap, basically. Credit: ©High Times

 “Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet.”

Terence McKenna died at the turn of the century, as the fingers were tightening on the trigger. At least he didn't have to be embarrassed by the failure of his prediction that 2012 would see a global evolution of human consciousness. It's always a mistake to hold the calendar - any calendar, no matter how deeply etched in stone - to ransom in this way, because it has no meaning or application outside its own artificial parameters. Zappa told part of the curly tale in Greggary Peccary, and it's a disappointment that McKenna, who believed in the redemptive and transformational power of chaos, should also believe in such a weaponised piece of bureaucratic control magic as the calendar. But don't follow leaders, as the best of our leaders say. 

Literate/articulate proponents of the psychedelic are pretty rare. Timothy Leary with his blarney-stoned gift of the gab, Richard Alpert with his academic helix twist, Ralph Metzner (the Quiet One) and Curiosity McKenna were in the Thinking White Guy tradition (nothing inherently wrong with that) of Aldous Huxley in trying to attractively package the experience in language. Where the whole deal comes apart is, of course, we have to eat. For a lot of people, this means buying food. Which means having money. Which may involve working for it. And floating with the Eternals above Nazca isn't an attractive skill-set on your resumé. Embracing chaos isn't compatible with punching the clock except in the sense of shattering time, and your employer isn't likely to accept experiencing the ineffable void as an excuse for not turning up at the sausage factory. Caveat emptor - any celebrity telling you to drop out is either making money in some way from that message, so he can eat, or living off his parents.

Which is not to say - heavens to Betsy! - that the psychedelic experience is to be avoided, or is invalid or irrelevant. It's necessary, dammit. Here's Terry again, on the glitterball, behind the eight ball, having a ball:

“Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.”

A convenient approach to the man and his life, should you be desirous of making it, is in today's loaddown, detailed in the comments. Thinking about the psychedelic is the next best thing to being it, and in some ways more useful. Let's eat!