Today is Bicycle Day. Tomorrow is Weed Day.
About the latter, there are many stories about its origin--why, specifically, the 20th of April is associated with marijuana. The most plausible-sounding one involves a group of teenagers in Marin County, California (the birthplace of mountain biking) who met at 4:20 in the afternoon to partake. They chose that time, according to lore, because their schools' extracurricular activities ended by that time and as Dave Reddix, one of the group, recalled, "We got tired of the Friday night football scene with all of the jocks." Because they met at that time, "420" became their code for weed. Later, Reddix worked as a Grateful Dead roadie and the term went viral, so to speak.
On the other hand, the story of how today became Bicycle Day is more closely documented. On this date in 1943, Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann ingested a small amount of a compound derived from ergot fungus. Feeling disoriented, he rode his bicycle home. Along the way, he experienced the beautiful and terrible effects of that compound, lysergic acid diethymalide. So,. in more ways than one, Dr. Hoffmann took the world's first acid trip.
So, in honor of Dr. Hofmann on Bicycle Day, I am posting a video of the song that, in its own way, is "a real trip":
Hofmann lived another 65 years after his "trip," to the age of 102. It must have been the bicycling!
(Tell me what a latter-day hippie living in California had in mind when he called his book about bicycle touring "Bike Tripping.")
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