Quote of the Day (Shayla Love, on Elon Musk’s Ketamine Use)

“Ketamine is called a dissociative drug because during a high, which lasts about an hour, people might feel detached from their body, their emotions, or the passage of time. Frequent, heavy recreational use—say, several times a week—has been linked to cognitive effects that last beyond the high, including impaired memory, delusional thinking, superstitious beliefs, and a sense of specialness and importance. You can see why people might wonder about ketamine use from a man who is trying to usher in multi-planetary human life, who has barged into global politics and is attempting to reengineer the U.S. government. With [Elon] Musk’s new political power, his cognitive and psychological health is of concern not only to shareholders of his companies’ stocks but to all Americans. His late-night posts on X, mass emails to federal employees, and non sequiturs uttered on television have prompted even more questions about his drug use.”— Shayla Love, “What Ketamine Does to the Human Brain,” The Atlantic, Mar. 5, 2025

Okay, let’s see if Musk allows this post on X!

(The image accompanying this post, showing Elon Musk at the 2015 Tesla Motors Annual Meeting, was taken June 9, 2015 by Steve Jurvetson.)

Quote of the Day (Keith Richards, on Which Nobel Prize He Should Win)

Q.: “What do you think about Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize in Literature?”

Keith Richards: “Why not? About bloody time! It’ll be me next, I think.”

Q.: “You next?”

Richards: “Yeah. For Chemistry!” —Rolling Stones guitarist and songwriter Keith Richards quoted in Clark Collis, “The Rolling Stones, Recharged,” Entertainment Weekly, Nov. 16, 2016

Quote of the Day (Richard Rodriguez, on ‘The Paradox of the Border’ and Internal Despair)

“The paradox of the border right now is that you see young people coming to the American border for the opportunity of America, at exactly the time when Americans are importing drugs from Latin America because of the despair of our unhappiness. The paradox of that movement in both directions is so interesting to me and so little noted.” —Public intellectual Richard Rodriguez quoted in Kelsey Husnick, “Tippett, Rodriguez: ‘Brown is the New Color of American Identity,’” The Chautauquan Daily, August 8, 2014

Quote of the Day (Edward St. Aubyn, on Heroin As an End to ‘Unanswerable Questions’)

“No, he mustn't think about it, or indeed about anything, and especially not about heroin, because heroin was the one thing that really worked, the only thing that stopped him scampering around in a hamster's wheel of unanswerable questions. Heroin was the cavalry. Heroin was the missing chair leg, made with such precision that it matched every splinter of the break. Heroin landed purring at the base of his skull, and wrapped itself darkly around his nervous system, like a black cat curling up on its favourite cushion. It was as soft and rich as the throat of a wood pigeon, or the splash of sealing wax onto a page, or a handful of gems slipping from palm to palm.”— Edward St. Aubyn, Bad News (1992)

This weekend, Showtime kicks off its five-part Patrick Melrose. If the cable TV adaptation is anything like the quintet by English novelist Edward St. Aubyn, it should be spiked with all kinds of irony. Part of the challenge for its creative team will simply lie in providing a visual equivalent of the kind of virtuosic prose in the passage above.

Those sentences should, by all rights, fail. In the old days, when The New Yorker used to fill up spaces at the end of articles with picked-up filler, some wag might have put the sentences under its “Block That Metaphor!” department. They seemingly violate one of the cardinal rules repeatedly propounded to aspiring authors: Find one metaphor or symbol and stick to that rather than muck it up with multiple ones.

St. Aubyn will have none of that, comparing heroin to seven different concrete items. But it doesn’t feel like the kind of mistake that you and I might commit if we tried this at home. After all, the mind of a heroin addict is inherently unstable anyway; St. Aubyn only captures that reality.

Even from this isolated paragraph in the second novel of the Patrick Melrose sequence, we sense another difficulty in adapting this fiction to the small screen: the nature of self-medication.  Sexual abuse in childhood by Patrick’s aristocratic father leads his grown-up son to avoid the “unanswerable questions” posed by this horror. Heroin constitutes the phantom replacement for something “missing” in his life: robbed innocence.

Picking up the ashes of his now-deceased father in New York sends Patrick on a downward spiral of drug-induced self-loathing and misbehavior, as in this section: 

The four Valiums he had stolen from Kay had helped him face breakfast, but now he could feel the onset of withdrawal, like a litter of drowning kittens in the sack of his stomach.

For all its brilliance, the tone of this novel sequence (based, as St. Aubyn acknowledged in this interview with The Guardian 12 years ago, at least partly on his own cycle of abuse and recovery) is pitch-black—one reason why I stopped after the second in the series. But I hope to return to it at some point in the not-so-distant future, just as (since I do not get  Showtime) I want to see how Benedict Cumberbatch (shown in the image accompanying this post) takes on the author’s witty but self-destructive protagonist when the series makes it to DVD.

Quote of the Day (James Taylor, on How Addiction ‘Freezes You’)

“A big part of my story is recovery from addiction…One thing that addiction does is, it freezes you. You don’t develop, you don’t learn the skills by trial and error of having experiences and learning from them, and finding out what it is you want, and how to go about getting it, by relating with other people. You short-circuit all of that stuff and just go for the button that says this feels good over and over again. So you can wake up, as I did, at the age of 36, feeling like you’re still 17. One of the things you learn as you get older is that you’re just the same.”—Singer-songwriter James Taylor quoted in Paul Sexton, “James Taylor: ‘A Big Part of My Story is Recovery From Addiction',’” The Telegraph (U.K.), June 20, 2015

I have thought of Taylor’s quote a great deal in thinking of the current opiod crisis and its origins. The first indication of massive U.S. drug addiction came early in the late 19th and early 20^th century, when Civil War veterans turned to a variety of “medicines” for pain management. James Taylor’s form of “pain management,” however, was of a different sort: to ward off the depression that continually afflicted him in his youth (a trauma recorded in his harrowing "Fire and Rain").

The recent manifestation of the opiod crisis really came out of left field, as far as I am concerned, but I doubt if it would have surprised Taylor in the slightest. He has spoken for a whole generation in enduring and getting through all manner of pain. I hope that many others in the U.S. now find the kind of help he was eventually able to do.

Quote of the Day (Mikal Gilmore, on the Significance of the Beatles’ ‘Revolver’)

“Sgt. Pepper captured a moment, but Revolver created the context and motion that became that moment. Partly because it was swallowed by the events of the summer of 1966, and partly because of the shadow cast by Sgt. Pepper, it would take years – decades, even – before critics and fans would widely regard Revolver as the Beatles' finest album. But the form-stretching possibilities it had unleashed would change popular music by giving it new and more blatant thematic range, matched by innovative and outrageous sounds. It introduced different angles in chords and melodies and gave other bands the courage to look at the risky moment as both internal and social unrest. The Beatles sneaked all of this into their music with flair and confidence, with beauty and dissonance.”— Mikal Gilmore, “The Beatles' Acid Test: LSD Opened the Door to Their Masterpiece 'Revolver'—But Also Opened Wounds That Never Healed,” Rolling Stone, Issue 1269 (Sept. 8, 2016)

This August marks the 50^th anniversary of perhaps the most unsettling month in The Beatles’ history as a group—begun with John Lennon’s controversial remark that the band had become “more popular than Jesus now,” and ended, in exhaustion, with the Candlestick Park appearance that served as the final stop of their last tour. In between came their transitional LP, Revolver. I discussed this masterpiece in a prior post, but it's worth another look in light of what Gilmore brings to light on its history.

Rubber Soul, as I discussed in this prior post, remains (for me, anyway) the most consistently satisfying Beatles studio album. But in his essay in the most recent issue of Rolling Stone, Mikal Gilmore makes a credible case for Revolver as the group’s first to spring from a self-conscious search for personal meaning.

That search was spurred mainly by the LSD taken—first unwittingly, then more enthusiastically—by John Lennon and George Harrison. While Rubber Soul was what Paul McCartney later called the band’s “pot album,” Revolver originated with the more intense, dangerous LSD.  “Tomorrow Never Knows,” sometimes called the first example of  “acid rock,” derived from Lennon’s attempt to make sense of his LSD trip through reading Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience.

I wish I could have heard more from Gilmore about the evolution of the album’s other sterling songs (notably, "Eleanor Rigby," “Got To Get You Into My Life,” “I’m Only Sleeping,” and “And Your Bird Can Sing”). But in view of the group’s subsequent history, it’s understandable why he delves into the LSD angle.

The drug opened up the band to new thinking and new sounds—and irrevocably altered its internal dynamics. From then on, Lennon and Harrison shared a bond that would endure until Lennon’s murder in 1980. Simultaneously, they treated McCartney as someone apart from their philosophical and creative journey, a Johnny-come-lately to their altered state.

Gilmore does point out a cost of the hallucinogen to Lennon: it worsened his drug habit, even leading to a 1968 incident in which he summoned astonished Apple employees to issue a press release announcing that he was Jesus Christ returned to Earth.

Gilmore might also have discussed how Lennon’s increased absences from the studio within a few years led to more tensions with bandmates, as well as to Lennon’s push back when McCartney sought to fill the inevitable leadership void. But altogether, he shines a strong light on a key album in rock 'n' roll history--one whose significance may only now be properly appreciated.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Freaks and Geeks,’ on How to Figure Out Who Was Stoned in the ‘70s)

Millie Kentner (played by Sarah Hagan): “You're high!”

Lindsay Weir (played by Linda Cardellini): “How could you tell?”

Millie: “I know what high people look like. I went to a Seals and Crofts concert last summer.”— Freaks and Geeks, Season 1, Episode 13, “Chokin' and Tokin',” air date March 20, 2000, teleplay by Judd Apatow, directed by Miguel Arteta