Riding and Writing the Toad

Well, I’m taking the liberty to twist the title of Michael Pollan’s December 30 essay in the NY Times Book Review called “Smoking the Toad,” about the challenge of putting a drug trip into words. His latest book Changing Your Mind ranked as one of the top nonfiction books in 2018, and I’m glad to be what might be call a distant literary relative because of my own 2015 title, Aldous Huxley’s Hands, on a similar topic. Bravo, Michael, and I hope you stay in the limelight because some of your reflected glory spills over onto me. It also got me thinking about my own early attempts to write down impressions when under the influence of LSD in 1965, and turns out I still have those sheets of nearly illegible scrawl. Not bad curlicues, though. Maybe I’ll post the artifact someday, though at the risk of publicly looking as foolish as Pollan admits privately happened to him.