For Erik Davis, it was the summer of 1985, when he took a total-immersion course in Robert Anton Wilson.
It didn’t help that I spent the summer reading Aleister Crowley, Phil Dick, the Principia Discordia, and Robert Anton Wilson, especially the Illuminatus! Trilogy, Prometheus Rising, and Cosmic Trigger. Or maybe this was the only stuff that actually did help — and especially RAW, who taught me, as he taught so many others, to nimbly dodge the gravity wells that threaten to suck us down the various informational reality tunnels that make a Swiss cheese of our consensus trance. A year ago I traded a bunch of books to a Russian teenager who sent me a couple of samizdat copies of my book Techgnosis, translated into Russian. He liked Terence McKenna and wanted me to send him more books that would tug the silly putty of his world with humor and verve. He was about the same age I was when I had my Weirdest Summer Ever. And so RAW — and especially the two indispensable nonfiction books listed above — topped the list. He appreciated them.
For me, it was an earlier summer that I will always remember as my “total immersion course in occult hysteria.” Alas, there are not always hyperlinks to the past.
Sometimes it’s a good thing there are no hyperlinks to the past. I remember my discovery of RAW–read the Illumintus! trilogy in a very short period of time. The world hasn’t looked the same since.
Had one of those “total immersion course in occult studies” in 1984 where I hung out with a lot of the local pagans and spent free time reading through all the Crowley material in a friend’s library. Good times.
I gotta say that my summer of most peculiar coincidence (I did not and do not think that it was “weird,” but it did carry a lot of overtones of patterns of strangeness and how they work themselves out in life) was the one when I (incidentally a nerdy young science fiction fan blooming with the beginner’s enthusiasm for the heady delights of fandom) watched, sitting in his Bonny Doon house in the company of many of his cats, the first moon landing on Robert Heinlein’s TV, Heinlein being away to provide TV commenting on that moon landing.
I had made no effort whatsoever to do so, yet there I was. Blessed by how the Golden Apple of Eris rolls.