May 31st, fifth song off Calendar
Artwork by Eli Wengrin
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I’ve been super lucky to work each July at a summer camp in Hong Kong. The camp pays for my airfare, and the leniency of their flight policy has let me to go to Italy each August. Without this job, Baseball Gregg would not exist as it does today.


Perhaps the most fascinating part of Hong Kong is the dichotomy between the densely populated urban areas and the undeveloped nature reserves that make up 75% of the island. My friends and I go hiking a lot, and a few years ago, my friend offered me some LSD as we set out on a hike. I had never done any psychedelics before, but I impulsively decided that I would take a quarter tab.


The experience was not what I had expected based on any cultural idea that I had of acid; I felt like I had drank a bunch of caffeine. I quickly made my way up the mountain into a cloud that was covering the peak. Once inside the cloud, it felt similar to a foggy day, except that outside the edge of the fog it was sunny. You could see the reflection of the sun off the water and the big city outlined in a golden haze.


After hiking, we went dancing until 5 in the morning. In the morning we ate dim sum with the train workers just getting up to go to work. The small dosage of acid had given me a sustained rush of energy, which made for a wonderful day, but was not what I had expected from the experience.

I told Luca about the day, and he wrote this song. It is interesting that Luca wrote a song in which he tells the story of my acid trip, even though it is not part of his personal experience.


It’s silly to limit the music to the expression of one’s personal reality. I had a lot of fun doing acid, and I will probably do it again, but it would be uninteresting to hear yet another psychedelic song inspired by an acid trip.


Rather than talking about his lived experience, Luca is expressing my experience as he imagined it, and I find this distortion of an empathetic imagination to be much more human than the distortion of LSD. Each day we hear details from the lives of people around us, and it is this same exercise in empathetic imagination that humanizes others and helps us feel less alone.