The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

It's late to be reading it. I could have been more inspired reading it back when I was 18 and reading Kerouac as well and trying a lot of that shit for the first time. But still. Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. What it makes me think about now isn't so much 'Man, how do I open those doors for myself and prop them open for a while?' but more just about sub-culture. The newest thing on the edge. How did the Beats turn into the Heads, and what was before the Beats? Who is on the edge of the edge right now, and pushing further? Even at the turn of the century, there must have been that group of people taking it where it hadn't been yet, doing something different. But if the current sub-culture is technology-based, if it's about metal implants and genetic modification, I'm not so interested. Maybe that makes me the same in a 2007-type way as the suburban work-a-daddies horrified by the Day-Glo bus driving through their neighbourhood. I don't know. The kind of edge I want to push towards involves free living, directed by intuition. Going where it goes. Where is the most current sub-culture on the literary and intellectual edge, and going further? That's what I'd like to know. Maybe if I take off somewhere warm for a while, with my backpack and sketchpad and a novel-in-progress, find a good surf beach to kick back on and throw around a lot of ideas with whoever's there, maybe that's my Day-Glo bus. I'm hoping. Discipline leads to prolificacy. Prolificacy leads to innovation, and that, ultimately, is what I'm going for. Innovative expression of the things everyone already knows but hasn't put into words or pictures yet.