Status Updates From The Butterfly Kid (Greenwic...

Andrew Blake had conjured up what could pass for the ghost of Henry James — barring unsuspected gaps in Andy’s memory — and was trying to get it to teach him how to write dirty books in pure 1890’s florid high style; but the ghost of maybe Henry James, concerned more with the subject than the style, insisted on asking blunt, unflorid questions that made Andy blush from beard to brow...

The Tripsmobile had a sun deck on the roof, planted with grass and dandelions. We’d intended to put a few lawn chairs up there, too, and a table with a parasol, but we never got around to it.

HAVE YOU ever tried to talk a bunch of hippies into helping you save the world? Forget it. Next time I save the world, by Starky, I’m gonna do it solo. Easier that way, less work.

Racists suddenly become omnipotent. The persecuted manufacturing impossible revenge. Cops really stamping out crime. Kids getting even with grown-ups. Mental patients striking back at the world. Sadists getting infinite kicks. The weak grown powerful beyond endurance. Lovers crushing all things under love…

Human beings are just naturally violent animals, even the nonviolent ones. Hell, even the limp protesters who lie down in front of ammunition trucks and have to be hauled off the street like sacks of flour, all they’re doing is imposing their will on others, compelling other people to behave contrary to their own desires, which is the crystalline essence of violence.

“Nyah! Nyah! Nyah!” he chanted, war-dancing around me in clumsy circles. “Now you’re gonna Get It, an’ I’m Glad! Nyah!”
“Cool it,” I said.
“Nyah!”

Honestly. It offended my sense of propriety something fierce, this hackneyed invasion-from-outer-space routine, but the lobster sounded quite sincere, and who was I to doubt the word of a six-foot-tall blue lobster?

The walls were whitewashed, mostly, and decorated with Laszloish slogans in gaudy colors, like: Art is Fredom; The Cretor is The Onley True God; The Futur Belongs too the Poet — the rest being unprintable, just as poorly spelled, and pretty dull.

“Right. Whatever this plot is, we’ve got to thwart it.”
“We do?”
“It’s our duty, baby. They’re trying to overthrow society, Chet. And where would we be without society?”

“Nobody.” This was Mike’s field of special competence. “There’s just no way to keep that kind of secret. Not even in China. No.”
We stared at each other with matched expressions of unbridled surmise, and then, in chorus, said, “The Pill from Outer Space!”

"Anyhow, this L-and-Z person called his little goodies Reality Pills. Wasn’t that sweet?"

A famous proto-hipster once said, “It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.”

“Would you believe,” I invited, “that the term teenybopper was invented sometime prior to 1962 by Lee Lamb?”