Opened in 1967, I discovered it in 1969I decided to Google an image of my teen age head shop this morning, just for a trip down memory lane--only to learn the place closed a few years back, after 37 years of service to the stoner community. Well, well. Synthetic Trips was where I went to buy my rolling papers and Rolling Stone magazine, which was state of the art hippie literature with left wing politics thrown in, back in those days.
What can I say, I was smitten with the place from the very beginning. At 13 I was reading Aldous Huxley's
The Doors of Perception and Timothy Leary's
The Politics Of Ecstasy, and just aching to get my hands on any substance that would alter my consciousness.
Eventually I got my "sacramental" drugs--I stayed away from speed, opiates, anything derived from the coca plant, and for the most part, caffeine. I flirted with alcohol but have never given myself to it. It wasn't cool, it still isn't. I was a card carrying member of the Psychedelic Church of East San Diego.
Making the pilgrimage to Synthetic Trips was a pleasant rite of passage that also included incense and staring at the black light images of nude women. It seems the counterculture gave mere lip service to woman's liberation. Ultimately it was women who did for women, with only a tangential relationship to the ethos and mythos of the patrons of Synthetic Trips.
Like all phenomena, Synthetic Trips ran its course and is now rotting into society's soil only to be reincarnated into something else that will question the status quo. This questioning must be partly sincere and insightful, partly foolhardy and a load of hype. That's the way of most social innovation, is it not? Meanwhile, you can now get what you couldn't get in 1969 at any convenience store--ten kinds of rolling papers. And Rolling Stone sold out to Capitalist Records a long time ago.
So I'm bidding goodbye to the era of Synthetic Trips, which helped to bring me this far. I won't go looking for another one because I'm now more afraid of death than afraid of not understanding the meaning of death, and consequently, I do not find wisdom in any sort of trip that is not natural. Or as Merle Haggard sang, we don't take our trips on LSD.
But there is one song that seems most fitting for the requiem of Synthetic Trips, and here it is.