Bankrate: Your work is typically associated with the hippie movement of the late '60s and '70s, yet you were closer in age to the Beats, and were in fact on the road about the same time Kerouac, Cassady and Ginsberg were. Were you aware of being on the cutting edge, surfing the zeitgeist, in the 1950s? Were those enjoyable years or frustrating ones for you?

Robbins: Some people do persist in associating me with the hippie '60s, a misjudgment that both annoys and astonishes me. True, I did participate enthusiastically in the psychedelic revolution, and yes, I did write "Another Roadside Attraction," which Rolling Stone deemed "the quintessential '60s novel," but that was nine books and nearly 40 years ago. The protagonists of my subsequent novels have included CIA agents, stockbrokers, MIAs and Japanese folk deities, characters who, though flamboyant and unconventional in their own right, obviously have nothing whatsoever to do with those love-fest summers of yore. My pigeonholers either haven't read my work or have pigeons roosting in their cerebral cavities.

Throughout most of the 1950s, my home base was Richmond, Va., and while Richmond entertained a large and active bohemian quarter -- the fabled and much beloved by me Fan District -- it was well off any major beatnik path. Even when I was on the road, I never had an opportunity to interact with the iconic Beats, not getting to know Allen Ginsberg until the winter of 1964 to 1965. I sensed in the 1950s that America's square egg was starting to crack, but I don't believe it ever occurred to me that I might be somehow assisting in the cracking. It was a dichotomous decade, as auspicious as it was stifling. I found it both enjoyable and frustrating.

Bankrate: You're our first meteorologist. Where were you stationed, how did you adapt to Air Force life, and what effect, if any, did that three-year military stint ultimately have on you?

Robbins: I've always had a difficult time with authority, so you might guess that I was not well-suited to military discipline. However, I became quite skillful at the practice of passive resistance, managing to avoid serious trouble while having a pretty good time. I got to track hurricanes in Florida, teach weather observation to the South Korean air force -- my students and I operated a black-market ring on the side -- and plot top-secret weather maps in a war room right out of "Dr. Strangelove," three stories underground at SAC headquarters in Nebraska. I liked the camaraderie, and it is thanks to the U.S. Air Force that I was introduced to Japanese culture, in which I still have an interest that extends far beyond sushi.

Bankrate: You encountered LSD in the summer of 1963. What was your first trip like? How did it change the course of your life and work?

Robbins: Frankly, the day I ingested 300 micrograms of pure Sandoz LSD was the most rewarding day of my life, the one day that I would not trade for any other. To try to explain why it was so transformative, so profound, it would take pages -- and even then would likely strike the uninitiated as flapdoodle. I'll just say this: On that fateful day, I experienced in a direct, first-hand, concrete and thoroughly rational way that 1) time really is relative, 2) every daisy in the field has an identity just as strong as my own and 3) what we smugly mistake for solid form in our "realistic" world is actually some strange fluid dance of molecular wonder. How could knowledge like that, lucidly demonstrated, fail to alter a person's life?