Good evening, dear reader.  I’ve been in a not-great mood about generally everything for a week now, so I’ve been avoiding spending much time online, but I thought I’d take a break from the darkness for a bit and say hello.  Besides, today is a date of some not-inconsiderable import, a day of historical gravitas.  On this day, some 238 years prior to this present moment of typing, a clutch of bewigged and justifiably sweaty men in Philadelphia signed their names to a document of such audacious, world-reconfiguring ambition that it still causes spasms in the global body politic.  The United States Constitution.  It was a radical blueprint, a schematic for a republic scribbled down in the face of monarchical certainty, a glorious albeit flawed attempt to bottle lightning.

And yet.

On this same day, in 1935, another kind of American lightning was born out in La Junta, Colorado.  A different sort of founding father.  Ken Kesey.  The Chief.  The man who hotwired the novel and drove it straight into the psychedelic heart of the 20th century.  While those dudes in Philly were arguing about bicameral legislatures, Kesey was busy mapping the far-flung territories of the human mind, first with the cuckoo’s nest and then with the sprawling, rain-soaked, timber-striking saga of the Stamper clan.  He mainlined the American experience and spat it back out as high-voltage prose.

I had the profound and frankly reality-bending good fortune to see the man himself, live and in the flesh on a Friday the 13th in ’96, in San Francisco.  He was on stage with the Pranksters, or what was left of them.  They had a movie they had shot, and Kesey wanted to record crowd reactions…cheers, boos, the usual.  He was there with a Bay Area band called Jambay (if memory serves).  It was a chaotic explosion of light and noise and rambling, prophetic poetry.  Kesey, even then, was a titan.  He had this physical presence, a charisma that felt less like charm and more like electrical current.  Years later, not long before the final curtain fell for him, I managed a brief, halting email correspondence.  A note or three, a quick response.  At the time, for me, it was like getting a postcard from God, if God wore a funny hat and had a permanent twinkle in his eye that suggested he knew the punchline to the whole cosmic joke.

Which brings us, via a particularly noxious detour of logic, to the third and arguably most spiritually cleansing event of this day: the reported, blessed, and long-overdue demise of Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night shit show.  A true cause for national rejoicing.  Absolutely fuck Jimmy Kimmel.  I was supposed to be on his shitty show in 2005, but he cancelled.  I’m glad to have never been associated with that shitbag.  To witness the end of that suffocating pageant of obsequious celebrity interviews and steady, completely unfunny Trump Derangement Syndrome propaganda that felt more insulting than honest – it feels like a cultural fever is finally beginning to break.  Thank Christ.

So let’s raise a glass.  To the bewigged radicals in Philly who dared to dream up a nation.  To Ken Kesey, the wild-eyed Chief who showed us what it meant to be truly, anarchically free.  And to the sweet, sweet silence replacing one more smarmy, woke-infected voice in the night.  Happy Birthday, Ken.  The asylum is still running itself, but we’re still listening for your laugh in the static.

N.P.: “Electric Head, Pt 2 – Sexational After Dark Mix (Explicit)” – White Zombie