Hawkins:
I did not know that.
Guffey:
I always thought that was interesting because, apparently, Lee Harvey Oswald supposedly was given LSD when he was in the military. There's information about this in a series of articles by G.J. Krupey called "The High and the Mighty: JFK, MPM, LSD and the CIA."
Hawkins:
Sure, that's what Leary alleges in a book I read last year. Oswald was climbing the stairway to heaven during his Marine tour in Japan.
Guffey:
So perhaps Oswald and Huxley met on the astral plane. Getting away from Bela Lugosi for just a second. I do think I know where Hunter S. Thompson came up with the idea for adrenochrome being a recreational drug. Thompson did a lot of reading as a young man. At one point, in his collected letters, he mentions reading Brave New World, so I think it's not hard to imagine that he might have read Brave New World Revisited, Huxley's follow up collection of nonfiction essays, which he wrote in 1956. There's a chapter in which he talks about adrenochrome as a chemical that is manufactured in the human brain. I could see how a young Hunter S. Thompson might misinterpret what Huxley was saying and think that he's talking about a recreational drug that you could actually take and that it would alter your consciousness. I think that sparked the idea, and that's how it ends up in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Hawkins:
Mmm. Robert, you are a freemason. The only other one I know to have been a Freemason was Mozart. How does it figure into your thinking as you probe the underbelly of the fish in the barrel, as it were?
Guffey:
Freemasonry helped me hone my control over the language of symbolism. And Ray Bradbury said that if you know what the central metaphor is of a story, that's half the battle. If you don't know what the metaphor is, you don't have a story. So for me, Freemasonry is all about metaphors. It's a system of philosophical thought that's entirely about metaphors. And so for me, it's actually helped my writing.
Hawkins:
This year we commemorate the 20th anniversary of the towers coming down in Manhattan and the Surveillance State going up. As we move closer to 9/11, do you foresee any ramping up of QAnon activity and conspiracy theory mindsets?
Guffey:
Well, you know, it's interesting. I have a friend who says, 'I'm just tired of hearing about QAnon.' And, you know, I'm tired of it, too. But the problem is that it keeps growing. And I think people were underestimating it before January 6. And I think that they're underestimating it again. I think it's really going to grow into a kind of weird secular religion, like a branch of Christianity. I mean, there's this thing called the Omega Kingdom Ministries, an actual church where they interpret QAnon posts through the Bible.
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