Seek and ye shall spellbind.
A neo pagan gets turned on to cyberspace.
Hello you fanciful furies,
I got to chatting with some clients this week and found myself telling this ‘origin story’ … how I came to become a website developer instead of, say, a carnival barker or cutup poet (options which looked equally likely back when I was 22).
Thought it would be fun to share so… here goes.
My latest website project is for a counselor who offers psychedelic therapy.
It’s a strange and wonderful full circle, given that my introduction to the World Wide Web, back in 1994, came through one of the psychedelic counterculture’s founders.
I was a bohemian bouncing between the raw inspiration of Nelson, BC, and the hectic frenzy of Los Angeles, toting ‘zines and mixtapes I’d crafted in a ramshackle forest cabin to the dizzily lit streets of Hollywood.
I met some of the most genuine artists, mystics, and troubadours in California: lovely people working against a backdrop of sleaze and sin.
One night, a small group of friends and I went by an apartment to drop off a package. An elderly man answered the door: bright blue eyes dancing in his gaunt face, halo of shining white hair framing this delightful grin.
Timothy Leary?!?
He was pleased to see us, too, as we came bearing some of his favourite BC bud.
This was the guy who Allen Ginsberg called “a hero of American consciousness.” Once a Harvard researcher, his experiments with psychedelics in the early 1960’s got him kicked out of academia. He bounced straight to mass media, where he became an evangelist to the growing hippie movement, urging millions of followers at Woodstock to take acid and ‘tune in, turn on, and drop out’. His evangelizing for mind expansion prompted the CIA to call him “The most dangerous man in America”. Imprisoned for drug possession after an undercover cop planted two roaches on him, Leary escaped from jail 2 years later when the Weathermen smuggled him out of jail and sent him to live with the Black Panthers in Algeria.
Leary was caught again when he tried to return to the States. Uncle Sam was not amused: he was sentenced to 20 years and was put in a prison cell next to Charles Manson. In exchange for a reduced sentence, he quit his pro-drug proselytizing and joined the lecture circuit doing a tag-team ‘left politics, right politics” act with Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy. Regardless of whether you think he kickstarted the psychedelic revolution or set it back decades with his flamboyant attention-whoring, there is no denying that the man was ahead of his time.
I imagine Timothy Leary, peering from beyond the veil, looking at today’s ketamine clinics, ayahuasca jungle pilgrims, ibogaine addiction treatment, and myriad forms of psychedelic therapy … and feeling deliciously validated.
By the time I met him, he was a brazenly lively 75.
“Come in, come in!”
He bustled about making our little group comfortable in his colourful pad, then hastened to the microwave where he prepared his special ‘dish’. Forbidden to smoke by his doctors, his trick was to place a nugget of marijuana atop a cracker, add a piece of cheese on top, and microwave it until the cheese saturated the bud. Voila! A crispy THC edible.
I remember him darting about his place like a lit-up pixie: hyper, charming, excited to hear about projects each of us was working on… all the while smiling fondly towards my black-stockinged legs. When he heard I was into writing and publishing, he motioned me into his office where — beneath a Keith Haring drawing of a giant eye — glowed a blinking monitor.
“Check this out: it’s The World Wide Web!”
“Ummm… I’m not really into computers,” I said, being an anti-tech hippie.
“What?? You’ve got to try it. It’s nothing less than the physical manifestation of the collective unconscious!”
He clicked around and opened up a browser tab on a thing he called a ‘website’’. It was kindof like a zine, on steroids - with colour, animation, scrollable text, and — most importantly — a portal to a community of people flung all across the planet. His site had what was possibly the first ever ‘blog’, with daily updates on what drugs he was taking, surreal artworks he’d been given, and excerpts from the various books he was writing on cryogenics and space exploration.
That website was part of Tim’s vision of a ‘cyberdelic’ future in which human and machine intelligence would merge, to create a form of immortality and shamanic one-ness. Singularity, anyone? He kept posting for years from beyond the grave: a cosmic blue-eyed wink from the great beyond.
Meeting Tim was also my entry into a world of hacktivists, artists, and nerd techies whose ethos was grounded in an open-source, radical sharing culture where we exchanged tools and teaching across a network that meant I no longer had to hitchhike to California to sell my zines (or my weed). Maybe you get the Timothy Leary you deserve, but mine was a pervy raconteur with a glint in his eye who introduced me to the internet as a medium that was as playful as it was subversive. I think he would have enjoyed the fool circle that connected his pioneering work using LSD in psychotherapy, to me getting switched on to the ‘net in his Laurel Canyon flat, to how — in addition to building websites for folks who offer online psychedelic-assisted therapy — I’m using the web to help impact organizations, conscious businesses and social entrepreneurs to make the world a groovier place.
So…. that’s the story of how the father of American psychedelic movement invented edibles… and helped this technophobic bohemian to ‘turn on, boot up, and jack in.”
Some of those websites, plus ways folks are working with me now: andreapalframan.com
Keep up the seeking, you original grinners,
xxAndrea
Really enjoyed reading this! It’s interesting how the world we do finds us in the most unsuspecting places.