Nesmith - Infinite Tuesday: an autobiographical riff

I was having lunch with Timothy Leary in the late 1980s at a little sidewalk caf near Sunset and Gower in Hollywood, California. Tim was famous for, among other things, encouraging everyone to take LSD and drop out of school in the 1960s. From there he took it on the lam from Harvard, where he had been a professor, and spent the next couple of decades running, in and out of prison, writing a bookThe Politics of Ecstasy, published in 1968lecturing, leading, explaining while waving his arms and balancing on the point of a spear. Maybe it was a spear he was wielding; maybe it was at his back. In any case he was always one step ahead.

I very much liked him, and we had become a bit more than acquaintances. He was mature by then, trim and fit, with a big smile, and still handsome enough to turn the head of every third woman who passed by. He had an intellect like a switchblade, and he was ruthlessly direct, so I was always very careful around him: careful to be precise and clear, careful to think through my answers to his questions, and careful to listen. He once publicly chided me for using a clich. The clich was apt for the situation, but it was a clich, and he was right to take me down for it.

During this lunch, we were talking about priorities and motivation. I asked how old hed been when he started thinking about the order of importance of lifes big questions.

Early high school, he said.

Next question: What was the hierarchy? What was your quest, the most important thing to you, then?

The same thing that is most important to everyone in their teens, he said. What do other people think of me? That was at the top of his list. Number two was similar: How do I look?

Given that Leary had rearranged the priorities and aims of a generation, these were startling answers. I was delighted by them. Those had been exactly my priorities as a kid. Vanity, thy name is teenager. I laughed hard, and he did too, when he told me how worry defined interest and how widespread and idiotic was the dynamic that set so many of lifes agendas.

Such a notion took a lot of courage to confessthe same kind of courage it took to tell everyone to take LSD and drop out. Courage is maybe not the exact word, but it is as close as I can get to describing the kind of propellant that guys like Leary burned.

Douglas Adams, the author of many radio and television shows, movies, and books, most notably The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, was another friend I paid careful attention to. We were close, and I dearly loved the man. He careened around ideas with a kind of flat-out open speed that made him take the corners off things. He was very funny as a writer and even more hilarious in person, especially when describing an object right after having knocked the corner off it, like when he explained how hard it is to move a sofa up an apartment stair if it gets stuck between two dimensions.