"It is better to travel hopefully than arrive"

The Eden Express, writte by Mark, son of Kurt, Vonnegut makes me think that I too am starting to lose my mind. The book is Mark's memoir, a hippie who graduated from college in 1969 (the same year Slaughterhouse Five was published), and then fled from his suburban life and famous father on the East Coast to middle of nowhere British Columbia to start a small farm/commune with a pile of his hippie friends and his dog, Zeke. And, the story of his schizophrenic breakdown. Likely due in part to his hippie thinkings, he tended to blame most of his early symptoms on the breakdown of civilization... "A sane response to an insane society."
At the start of the book, Mark is easy to relate to (especially for me right now, because I'm so tired of the city and the traffic and the people and the traffic and a farm sounds like total heaven). The first half of the book is about him finding people and land to establish the farm. After doing much more wandering than I would probably have the nerve to do, they find 80 acres only accessible by boat and move in.
Thanks in no small part to the influence of plenty of drugs, Mark starts to lose grip on reality.... He believes that he was responsible for an earthquake in California, and his father's suicide (which he imagined... Kurt is still alive and kicking), and, at some points, that his own suicide will resolve these problems. But I think that the oddest thing about the whole tale is that, Mark believes that the reason he is hearing the voices in his head is that he is finally able to tune in to them, and that this is a good thing. The voices are the result of ESP or mysticism or some other unknown realm, and his hallucinations are visions rather than biochemical reactions. And, in context, these seem like completely rational thoughts... That's what's scary about it.
The descriptions of his breakdowns seem so lucid that its easy to forget that he was losing his mind. But he seems to accurately describe the torture of the whole episode... losing 40 pounds, not sleeping for weeks at a time, convulsing... As he says "If there is such a thing as hell, and its anything like some of the things I went through when I was nuts, and you can acoid it by doing things as pretty as not coveting your neighbor's ass, by all means, DO NOT COVET YOUR NEIGHBOR'S ASS."
I'm totally into books right now that provide perspectives on things... walking a mile in a schizo hippie's shoes definitely provides new perspective. And as much as I enjoy when it when my brain is going 1000 miles a minute, the book makes me appreciate the quiet moments a little more.
Maybe book #5 will be a little lighter?