The Four-Two-Oh!

 As I mentioned yesterday, it was “four-twenty.”

Many theories have circulated about how that combination of numbers, and yesterday’s date, came to be associated with marijuana.  One is that “four-two-oh” is the police code for it.* Another is that the date is Bob Marley’s birthday.  Neither explanation is true.

Still another  explanation is that it’s a reference to Bob Dylan’s song “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35”:  Multiply those two numbers and you get 420.  While this is somewhat more plausible than the other two stories I mentioned —and the 2016 Nobel Laureate for Literature did, after all, introduce the Beatles to weed— I still doubt it.

The most credible explanation seems to be that a group of California teenagers met at 4:2O in the afternoon to partake of it and other pleasures prohibited by their school—and the law. Supposedly, that group met during the 1970s and one of its members, Dave Reddix, later became a Grateful Dead roadie. (What else can a teenage pothead from California become?) In late 1990, he distributed a flyer (Remember, there was no social media!) inviting Oakland “Deadheads” to smoke with him at 4:20 pm on 4/20 in 1991. That flyer landed in the hands of a “High Times” magazine editor, who printed it in his publication.

So..the folks at Trek could be forgiven for naming one of their models the 420.  After all, it was 1981 and they probably didn’t know about Reddix and his troupe of truculent teenagers in Tiburon.  Or did they?

*—Cops always say numbers digit-by-digit.  So, for example, the 114th Precinct in my old (It still hurts to say that) Astoria neighborhood is “the one-one-four.”

The Trip And The Day After

Yesterday was a holiday most people don’t know about—unless, of course, they read this blog.😏

It’s interesting, and perhaps unique, in that it doesn’t commemorate the thing for which it’s named.

Believe it or not, yesterday was Bicycle Day.  I’m sure that some club or another had a ride marking the day.  And I’m sure at least one of the riders has dressed or made themself up to look like the man who, however unwittingly, made yesterday Bicycle Day.

On 19 April 1943, Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann rode his bike home after taking a mild dose (or so he thought) drug he synthesized several years earlier. “I was taken to another place, another time,” he recalled. “My body seemed to be without sensation. Lifeless. Strange.”

One thing we don’t know about his ride was its pace.  He may have been pedaling vigorously but I somehow doubt that he was riding like a Tour de France or Olympic racer in training.  So whatever he was experiencing—which, he said, lasted until the following day—probably wasn’t the result of endorphins. Thus, he can be said to have been on the world’s first LSD trip, literally and figuratively.

Ironically, the day after—today—would, decades later, become another “holiday” having to do with chemically-altered states of mind:  420 is a code name for marijuana and, at least in the US—where we write our dates in the exact opposite way from the rest of the world—the 20th of April is known as “Four-Twenty.”

The doctor at 87.  See what cycling can do?

By the way, Dr. Hofmann died fifteen years ago—at 102 years old. What was the key to his longevity? It must have been the cycling.