The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Read Online Free Page A

mysto, as the general mysto steam began rising in my head. This steam, I can actually hear it inside my head, a great ssssssssss, like what you hear if you take too much quinine. I don't know if this happens to anybody else or not. But if there is something startling enough, fearful, awesome, strange, or just weird enough, something I sense I can't cope with, it is as if I go on Red Alert and the fogging steam starts . . .
    "—when Cassady misses, it's never an accident. He's saying something. There's something going on in the room, something's getting up tight, there's bad vibrations and he wants to break it up.
    They mean it. Everything in everybody's life is... significant. And everybody is alert, watching for the meanings. And the vibrations. There is no end of vibrations.
    Sometime after that I was up in Haight-Ashbury with some kid, not a Prankster, a kid from another communal group, and the kid was trying to open an old secrétaire, the kind that opens out into a desktop you can write on, and he pinches his finger in a hinge. Only instead of saying Aw shit or whatever, the whole thing becomes a parable of life, and he says:
    "That's typical. You see that? Even the poor cat who designed this thing was playing the game they wanted him to play. You see how this thing is designed, to open out? It's always out, into, it's got to be out, into your life, the old bullshit thrust —you know?—they don't even think about it—you know?—this is just the way they design things and you're here and they're there and they're going to keep coming at you. You see that kitchen table?" There is an old enamel-top kitchen table you can see through a doorway in there. "Now that's actually better design, it actually is, than all this ornate shit, I mean, I truly dig that kitchen table, because the whole thing is right there —you know?—it's there to receive, that's what it's all about, it's passive, I mean what the hell is a table anyway? Freud said a table is a symbol of a woman, with her shanks open, balling it, in dreams—you know?—and what is this a symbol of? "
    He points to the secrétaire. "It's a symbol of fuck-you, Fuck you, right?" And so on, until I want to put my hand on his shoulder and say why don't you just kick it in the kneecaps and let it go at that.
    But anyway this talk just flows. Everyone is picking up on the most minute incidents as if they are metaphors for life itself. Everybody's life becomes more fabulous, every minute, than the most fabulous book. It's phony, goddamn it. .. but mysto ... and after a while it starts to infect you, like an itch, the roseola.
    There is also a lot about games. The straight world outside, it seems, is made up of millions of people involved, trapped, in games they aren't even aware of. A guy they call Hassler comes in out of the sunlight screen on Harriet Street and, zoom, he doesn't even wait for the metaphors. I never got into an abstract discussion with a total stranger so fast in my life. We began talking right away about the games. Hassler is a young guy, good-looking with a wide face and long hair with bangs just exactly like Prince Valiant in the comic strip and a turtleneck jersey on with metal stars on it, of the sort generals wear on their shoulders, and he says, "Games so permeate our culture that..." rumble rumble ego games judge everything screwed up brainwashing tell ourselves "... keep on oppositioning"—here Hassler stiffens his hands and brings his fingertips together like a karate collision—
    But my mind is wandering. I am having a hard time listening because I am fascinated by a little plastic case with a toothbrush and toothpaste in it that Hassler has tucked under one thumb. It is shuddering around in front of my eyes as Hassler's hands opposition ... What a curious bunch of bohos. This guy with the generals' stars on his jersey is giving a kind of vesper service lecture on the sins of man and—a toothbrush!—but of course!—he brushes after every