(Screen) shot through the heart…
… a tumblr cataloguing online messages that evoke feelings of despair (and, often and unintentionally joy!). It may also be a poetry of the New Aesthetic.
More stupefying screen shots at Screen Shots of Despair.
***
As we reach for the Zoloft, we might pause to recall that it was on this date in 1964 that Ken Kesey and 13 friends (AKA, “the Merry Pranksters”) left Kesey’s ranch in La Honda, CA, headed east to celebrate the publication of Sometimes a Great Notion and to visit the World’s Fair in New York City. The troupe was aboard a 1939 International Harvester school bus, “Further,” purchased by Kesey earlier that year for $1,500. (The bus was named by artist Roy Sebern, who painted the word “Further” on the destination placard as a kind of one-word poem… and as inspiration to keep going whenever the bus broke down.)
The initial “pilot” was Jack Kerouac’s buddy, Neal Cassady– who was, novelist Robert Stone (who met the bus in New York) observed, “the world’s greatest driver, who could roll a joint while backing a 1937 Packard onto the lip of the Grand Canyon.”
Further made several trips over the years; it gave up the ghost after a run to Woodstock, and was replace by “Further II.” Pranksters, who came and went over the years, included Cassady, Kesey’s best friend Ken Babbs, Stewart Brand, Del Close, Paul Foster, Carolyn Garcia (AKA “Mountain Girl”), the Grateful Dead, Wavy Gravy, and Paul Krassner; “fellow travelers” included Stone and Kesey’s buddy Larry McMurtry; and “chroniclers,” Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test), Hunter S. Thompson (Hell’s Angels), Allen Ginsberg, and of course Kesey himself (Demon Box).
You are either on the bus or you’re not on the bus.- Ken Kesey
