14 June 2004: The Return of the Kenosha Kid

There is a chapter in Gravity's Rainbow which follows the train of thought of the protagonist, Tyrone Slothrop, under the influence of sodim amytal, a hallucinogenic "truth serum" of highly dubious reliability. At the beginning of the chapter, Slothrop's train of thought consists of a series of nonsensical jokes and dialogue fragments, each one of which ends with the punchline "You never did the Kenosha Kid," punctuated in various ways ("You never did the Kenosha, kid." "You? Never! Did the Kenosha Kid?")

I don't remember by what twists and turns of psychedelic semantics "doing the Kenosha Kid" became the standard slang term, among my circle of friends in the late 1980s, for ingesting entheogenic chemicals. Once we got that far, of course, it was a fairly obvious step to simplify it to "going to Kenosha," with Kenosha being the name of the vast realm that encompasses the infinitude of states of entheogenically-induced consciousness, and with the Kenosha Kid, by implication, being to Kenosha what Neil Gaiman's Sandman is to the realm of the Dreaming.

In the mundane world, by the way, Kenosha is the name of a medium-sized city in Wisconsin, on the shore of Lake Michigan.

Saturday morning I walked to the Y and did my usual Saturday morning yoga megadose - two back-to-back yoga classes, the first one starting at 10 a.m. and the second one ending at 1 p.m.

After the second class, I walked to a Thai restaurant in North Berkeley to have lunch with Argus and Bonkydog. It has been a very long time since that particular triad of Tabrizi has convened. Despite my living about ten blocks from Bonkydog, the two of us managed to go almost an entire year with no contact between us. We're like that. I finally reconnected with him about a month ago, when his delightful fianceé Fandango put together a charming little birthday gathering for him at Fellini (a relatively new local upscale pizza establishment that I highly recommend, run by a charming couple about my age who seem to attract employees of particular excellence).

In just under two weeks, Argus will be getting married, and about eight weeks after that, he and his wife will be moving to (ick!) Los Angeles, so it may be another long time before the next time that the Nicky/Argus/Bonky triad reconvenes.

After lunch, the three of us strolled around the UC Berkeley campus for a while, and eventually made our way to the roof of the Student Center, where we each swallowed four 5-milligram tablets of pharmaceutical-grade 2CB.

This was the first time I had ingested an entheogenic chemical since Burning Man 2000, almost four years ago (at Burning Man 2000, I did my favorite LSD trip to date, with Bonky, Cygnus, and Omega 7... then my fabulously enjoyable first-ever 2CB trip the very next evening, with Bonky... and then another LSD trip with Bonky for the Burn, two nights after that).

Bonky and Argus and I had a marvellous time romping around the UC Berkeley Campus, engaged in the fine art of Sacred Conversation. When we’d come down sufficiently to become hungry, we strolled through Downtown Berkeley and eventually down to Fellini, where Bonky treated me and Argus to a long and sumptous feast, accompanied by even more conversation (amazing how much good conversation I’ve had in my life in the past few weeks... including two of the best conversations of my life, both among triads of Tabrizi, exactly one week apart).

I’ve had many more intense visits to Kenosha (LSD tends to blow 2CB out of the water, intensity-wise), but this one was, hands down, the single most pleasant Kenosha trip of my life so far – one hundred percent enjoyable, from start to finish. My companions, too, had a splendid time.

It was good to be back.

And meanwhile, sometime Saturday night - probably during the hours that Bonky, Argus, and I were feasting at Fellini - my sister, many miles away in Nevada, gave birth to a daughter.

Grades for this previous semester are in. I got my A in Algebra, maintaining my 4.0 average.

The summer term starts at 9:00 tomorrow morning. I’m taking World Religions and Creative Writing (those are two separate classes). Cramming a semester’s worth of Creative Writing class into a six-week summer term means there won’t be many journal entries for the next six weeks. But maybe I’ll write a story I can post.

Overheard conversation fragment: happy-looking ancient married couple, tottering along arm-in-arm... as I pass, the woman is cheerfully saying to the man, “Of course, you can do most of those things after you’re dead...”