As for LSD, I highly recommend it. We had a fine, wild weekend and no trouble at all. The feeling it produces is hard to describe. 'Intensity' is a fair word for it. Try half a cube at first, just sit in the living room and turn on the music - after the kids have gone to bed. But never take it in uncomfortable or socially tense situations. And don't have anybody around whom you don't like.

The dawn is killing me off, the fog is on the windows, the [ra]coons have robbed the cans, and down in Rio its 8 a.m. and the whores who missed last night are already out on the beach in their fine little bikinis and if I could get my hands on just one of them I would be God's happiest man. But that's not likely tonight, so I'll get some sleep and wake up tomorrow with a fix on the Hell's Angels.

- to Angus Cameron in a letter dated 06/28/1965

Coming of age in a fascist police state will not be a barrel of fun for anybody, much less for people like me, who are not inclined to suffer Nazis gladly and feel only contempt for the cowardly flag-suckers who would gladly give up their outdated freedom to live for the mess of pottage they have been conned into believing will be freedom from fear.

Graffiti is beautiful; like a brick in the face of a cop.

The brutal reality of politics would be probably intolerable without drugs.

One of the worst incidents of that era caused no complaints at all: this was a sort of good-natured firepower demonstration, which occured one Sunday morning about three-thirty. For reasons that were never made clear, I blew out my back windows with five blasts of a 12 gauge shotgun, followed moments later by six rounds from a .44 Magnum. It was a prolonged outburst of heavy firing, drunken laughter, and crashing glass. Yet the neighbors reacted with total silence. For a while I assumed that some freakish wind pocket had absorbed all the noise and carried it out to sea, but after my eviction I learned otherwise. Every one of the shots had been duly recorded on the gossip log. Another tenant in the building told me the landlord was convinced, by all the tales he'd heard, that the interior of my apartment was reduced to rubble by orgies, brawls, fires, and wanton shooting. He had even heard stories about motorcycles being driven in and out the front door.