In an exception that might prove the rule I want to test, I did contend in a talk at a pre-pandemic conference on the psychotropic imaginary that the work of Kelley and his fellow pop-culture-contrarian, Jim Shaw, emerged through the haze of pessimisms, social interrogation, and utopian entropy associated in the US with the energy crisis of the early 1970s and Nixon- and later Reagan-era conservative retrenchments, emblematized by the prosecution and unremitting failure of the “War on Drugs.” Then came the realization that I haven’t done this kind of posing consistently, or at any rate trenchantly, in a good deal of my writing on Kelley—along with the sidecar question: how come?