Born to do Math 23 – LSD & SAT
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/03/30
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: [Laughing] You were taking the SAT while on it (LSD), the old harder SAT.
Rick Rosner: That was just a joke. I was 20. I read a book called Texas Celebrity Turkey Trot, which was one of the first books ever about the coming celebrity culture. It is about a semi-successful—well, it is about a professional football player who is injured in a game and has to spend the year recovering and doing like things that a minor celebrity does, like going on radio shows and making public appearances.
This thing was in ’78 or ’79. Celebrity culture was just coming online. The message that I took away from it—the message that you’re not supposed to take away from it is that everyone is horrible. The message that I got away from it was that the people who are most horrible got most of what they wanted. People who had moral qualms did worse than people that blatantly did anything that they wanted. The message that I took away was that I need to be more of an asshole.
I need to be unafraid to go out into the world and just behave like a schmuck and do stupid things for the sake of doing stupid things. Next semester, in college, I had to take the mandatory expository writing course that every freshman has to take. I was in my third semester as a freshman. We had to do spontaneous writing things in class. One thing that came to me was to write stream of consciousness of a dumb kid who finds himself on a Saturday morning trying to take the SAT while he is still tripping from acid that he took from the night before.
It was a fun writing exercise. But I thought, “Alright, I’m doing new stuff.”
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
In-Sight Publishing 