Clifford Pickover

I really like the science/science fiction writer Clifford Pickover. I bought his book "Sex, Drugs, Einstein and Elves" several months ago because it simply jumped out at me from the bookshelf and the table of contents were enticing.

What I like about him is that he is a contented, middle-aged, middle-class, Jewish-American science writer who seems to really appreciate his home, life, wife and pretty little town in Westchester. This is, ideally, the kind of life I would like to have. I want to be an "armchair psychonaut", a man who explores the paranormal and unknown from the cozy corner of a cozy library. A life full of love. And, of course, I can find ways to throw danger into the mix occasionally. People like me are dangerous anyway (we're bad) and we attract enough trouble and danger to not have to go out of our way to look for it.

Clifford Pickover devotes a good part of this book to psychedelic drugs. Clifford, like me, admits to never having done psychedelic drugs. I've smoked marijuana too many times to count (of course) and I've snorted cocaine and had a few other recreational experiences with drugs and I was a very heavy drinker for a long time, but I have never done psychedelics.

I don't know how I feel about this. I very badly want to visit other dimensions of existence, but I am afraid to do it chemically. Can't I just take the long way (meditation, herbs, exercise, visualizations, etc...) at least until I feel sane and healthy enough to begin to work my way through certain drugs?

Conformists and belongers (who can't even spell) take Clifford to task for lauding the very drugs he is too afraid to take. What's wrong with innocence? I, essentially, am a total INNOCENT. I am INNOCENT. I write INNOCENT in caps because I am so profoundly INNOCENT.

I was never out at clubs, raves (whatever the hell a rave is), parties and other social events where all sorts of drugs were passed out like candy.

No, I was at home becoming an artist.

So, here is a nice man who enjoys a happy life and illiterate conformists blast him for not doing drugs. What did drugs ever do for you? Acid, shrooms and Special K did not teach you how to spell, did it? It didn't make you extraordinary did it? No, you're still a mediocrity - even after blasting off into foreign spheres!

Thank goodness I am nice and innocent like Cliff. Thank goodness I am a sheltered little bourgeois. Thank goodness that in my house there was always disdain for weirdos and the drug culture and much of the post-60s social decay (hippie parents raising punk rock kids, etc...)

How glad I am that I will always be more innocent than Chloe Sevigny!

Now that's not a defense of suburban conformity! HECK NO! It's simply an answer to another kind of conformity!