from Feb ’94 High Times pg. 30, 33 

Well, since the editors of HT said ‘ I could have this page a few times a year. I guess I should give you a little to go on about where these opinions come from.

I guess most people don’t identify it with my hippie self, but I served with Able Company. First Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, in Korea in 1953 as a rifleman, a BAR man and a Fire-Team Leader, I drew combat pay and was fired on and returned fire- and carried dead and wounded friends back from no-man’s-land. I joined February 26, 1952 and was discharged on February 26, 1955.

1 went to junior college at San Bernadino Valley College and took several years getting an AA degree. But I realized I was wasting time and needed to finish school already. I went to San Francisco with new wife and baby and went to school full-time on the GI Bill, which was $135 a month with wife and kid. At that time 1 was already a latent beatnik, which only got more so during the years I went to SF State. I got my BA in 1962, and my MA in 1964. After I graduated, I taught there in creative writing and general semantics from 1964-1966,

I first began Monday Night Class in 1967 on the San Francisco State College Campus, where I had been S.I. Hayakawa’s teaching assistant. 1 happened to be the one who answered the phone when the Free Speech Movement called up from Berkeley thinking that a general semanticist would favor free speech. To my absolute astonishment. Hayakawa threw a fit  that foreshadowed the right-wing force he later became in California politics. I told the guy from Berkeley, “I’m sorry baby. He doesn’t like you.”

It wasn’t till much later that I fell in with the hippie movement myself. Some of my students came to me and all but said that they liked me and all but that I  didn’t  know what was going on. They said that they wouldn’t be able to take me more seriously until 1 did something for them, 1 wanted to be taken seriously so I asked what it was. “First,” they said, “we want you to go see A Hard Day’s Night by the Beatles.

” Well, just as they had planned, I fell in love with John Lennon, recognized the power of youth as represented by the hippies and began my path as a hippie. The times were outrageous. There were a couple of hundred thousand hippies on the streets in San Francisco. Tripping on LSD was pandemic. Sometimes it seemed as if the whole city smelled of reefer smoke. Grass was $75 a kilo, Acapulco Gold was $250 a kilo, acid was $2.50 a hit and so was rock’n’roll. Every circle of people on the street had a joint circulating around the inside.

Like many people, I got a little strange when 1 was tripping weekly. The wife of my creative writing teacher when she saw me in my first hippie garb, beads and long hair, said: “You have gone too far!”

It wasn’t that I got fired for being a hippie. It was that I got too weird to rehire at the same time my contract expired. After two years of teaching, I went across Mexico and the Yucatan peninsula to British Honduras ( now Belize) in a 1952 Volkswagen bus. The road across the Yucatan wasn’t even bulldozed, just chain-sawed and machete’d. When I returned to San Francisco, 1 got my last voluntary haircut and tried to get rehired at SF State. Something in me wasn’t serious, though, and I found myself in my job interview, spreading my coattails and curtsying as I said, “Am I square enough for you now?”

I was not rehired and I don’t blame them. It was obvious that my major interest was getting high.

When, in the normal course of getting stoned. I wanted to take counsel with fellow trippers. I went to lan Grand who headed the Experimental College. He gave me Monday night in the Gallery Lounge at San Francisco State- This was the founding of Monday Night Class in 1967. The idea was to compare notes with other trippers about tripping and the whole psychic world.  We began as 12 people, dropped to six and eventually grew into a huge meeting of as many as 1,000 or 1,500.  We left the Gallery Lounge and went to the Glide Church and then to The Straight Theater on Haight Street and then to Chet Helm’s Family Dog on the Great Highway.  We discussed love. sex, dope, God, god. war, peace, enlightenment, mind cop, free will, astrology. theology, diet, birth control and what have you all in a stoned, truthful, hippie atmosphere. We studied religion. psychology, fairy tales, legends, children’s stories, the I-Ching  and tripping.

It ‘was easy to tell  when we were onto something hot; I could see the expressions move across those thousand faces like the wind across a wheat field. It was like being inside a computer with a thousand parallel processors.

Now some people may think that I am not as religious as i used to be and it is true that on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays I might be an agnostic, and on Tuesday and Thursdays, a primitive animist, while partying down on Saturdays and sometimes sitting Zazen on Sundays, There is, however, something I have to say. At no time do I subscribe to any Brand Name religions.

I love the ethical teachings of most religions and I love the psychedelic testimony of their saints. I do not believe in any of their dogmas. I am a believer in free will. I am not a believer in predestination. I think a belief in prophecy robs us of 01 free will.

I think each one of us has a nonshirkable obligation to figure out the world on our own as best we can. The way we behave as result of that investigation is our real and practiced religion.

I consider myself to be an ethnic hippie. I know that the hippies were preceded by the beatniks, the bohemians, the nihilists, Rimbaud, Joyce, Voltaire and on back to Socrates, but the wave of the revolution that spoke to me was the hippies. Rock’n’roll lights my soul and gives beat to the Revolution.

I see by the watching machine that LSD is making a comeback. I find some hope in this and, I admit, some trepidation. I was called for an interview the other day and I found myself trying to explain the difference between how we felt about acid when we were the Revolution and it was fun to freak ’em out and how it felt when we were trying to hold our own civilization together here on the Farm. We didn’t take acid on the classic Farm from 1970 to 1983, and it is still not our policy on the new Farm.

I am quite concerned about the lack of good contemporary tripping instructions in this Acid Renaissance. The medical establishment is still likely to label teenagers with a temporary acid psychosis as “bipolar paranoid schizophrenics,” load the poor kids up on Haldol or Thorazine until they twitch and drool, and mark them for life with a label they will never live down. You would think that they would know by now that most LSD-stoned people dry out over a period of time and don’t need heroic measures as much as they need support and love while they re- enter ordinary life.