Just got word that one of my favorite authors, Ken Kesey, passed away tonight..."One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" the most noted of his many works. I guess, now, he'll be partying in that Merry Pranksters bus in one of any number of the dimensions they were looking for. Funny how you can't really bid farewell to a character like this without a wink and a twinkle in your eye...how high is the sky? See ya, Ken...and thanks for the great words and characters. Randle Patrick McMurphy!...yeah!!

Ken Kesey's novel about horror in a mental hospital was plausible enough to make many a hospital admininstrator check to be sure such abuses were not occurring in his hospital.

As a ploy to entice comment, I will mention that for a few years, I gave all the EST at my hospital. But never punitively. And I never had a nurse that I would compare with Big Nurse.

Read today that Ken Kesey was transported to his final resting place tied to the back of his psyhedelic bus, Further. With Neal Cassady, hero of Jack Kerouac's beat generation classic, "On the Road," at the wheel and pitchers of LSD-laced Kool-Aid in the cooler, Kesey and a band of friends who called themselves The Merry Pranksters took a trip across America to the New York World's Fair ('64). The bus trip was immortalized in Tom Wolfe's 1968 account, "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid test." A fitting hearse for his final trip! The smile's cool. He'd want it to be there.

I met Kesey six or seven years ago at a writers' conference in Denver, and had the chance to sit down with him over coffee and chat about writing. It was interesting but I can't remember much of what he said because it just plain didn't make any sense. That guy was one very weird dude. He seemed to be permanently stoned.

Well, what was in the coffee, TEd? But, actually, Kesey was quoted as saying that once he embarked on his romance with LSD that the art of novel writing didn't seem as important anymore. Huh?
Usually artists have a pretty driven impulse to create, and use drugs, alcohol (or the problems and pain associated therewith) as a catalyst to their creativity. So he wrote "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's" nest when he was 23, followed that with "Sometimes A Great Notion" a couple of years later (his only critically acclaimed works), and then didn't publish another major novel until '92 which was mediocrely received. It seems that in this case the drugs really became the man, shall we say, and his writing life became an asterisk. Which means he probably had a few more great books in him that never came out...which is really a shame. But, on the other hand, his drug usage didn't seem to wreak havoc in his life (unless you want to equate the loss of a great artist's creatic impulse in that category), and he enjoyed himself, raised a loving family, and had a good life...so, who's to say?