MKULTRA

If you know me, even on a very basic level, you know my love of all things subversive. It's this strange, almost pathological obsession that compounds itself in these small ways in my life.

I'm fixated with Ken Kesey, yet my knowledge of him, apart from the basic, is limited. I know he wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and I know he used money from the sales and marketing of that book to fund his many adventures with the merry pranksters. I know he was an acid head and found himself associating with the likes of Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson and the Beat writers.

These things I know.

What I didn't know is how he came to write One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I had no idea his seemingly inside view of what life was like in a mental hospital in the late 1950s came from personal experience from working late nights as an orderly in one. I didn't know he had such a strong connection to the characters he wrote about. I should have known this - his view is so personal and honest. I didn't know he volunteered to be a part of a top secret CIA project called Project MKULTRA, where the effects of such drugs as LSD and Peyote were studied. MKULTRA's main goal was to see if you could create a 'Manchurian Candidate,' via drugs and mind control who would do exactly what you told them too. Scary shit.

I sometimes feel my heroes are perplexing. They are even to myself. Did Kesey have any idea the inherent dangers of Project MKULTRA when he signed up, or was he just interested in the opportunity to experiment with the drugs he later became synonymous with? It's hard to say where ones logic lies. History tells us that the CIA failed in MKULTRA, and no Manchurian Candidate was created. But I can't help but think what if?

What if Kesey, or anyone did become warped to the point where they lost themselves completely? Where would we be? No Merry Pranksters and no One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Fate is a very strange thing. Karma, maybe, is a better word for it. Things have to happen in a very specific way, at very specific times for a specific outcome to be produced. Take, for example, the conception of a child. Everything has to be so perfectly matched between man and women at that very specific moment for conception to take place. It's crazy how specific you have to be. It must be the same way with the way Kesey's life evolved. The CIA learned you couldn't control minds with drugs, but Kesey found some other uses and helped spread the word of LSD across America in the 1960s.

Fucked, no?

I'm probably thinking to hard about things. I can't get the circumstances out of my head. Being surrounded by mental patients, some being treated with electric shock therapy, others lobotomized and then subjecting yourself to a CIA experiment that goes right for your main control system, right for the brain. This crazy and fucked up combination gave us the glory of Kesey and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which if you haven't read, I recommend you do.

Where is my line of fate leading me? While I subject myself to more ironic situations, such as this? Probably. My life appears to be full of ironically juxtapose situations.

What's next?