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going crazy part 2
I really became obsessed with the idea of vibes when I was working for High Times. They are the sponsors of the Cannabis Cup and on my first shift working “security” I was instructed to clear all the vendors out so we could close up the hall. I was told to go up to the top floor and clear everyone out without being pushy but to just “vibe them out”. That is apparently the hip New York stoner way of doing things and so I walked up to the top and kind of just started looking at people like they should leave. I don’t think I had any badge of authority and was just in my typical jeans and t-shirt but it worked people would just start to leave when I would look at them and wish they would.
I think I more or less held it together for a week or 10 days but looking back I could see where I was becoming a little unhinged before that. There was definitely a precipitous break with reality but I’m still trying to lay down the background of what was leading up to that and of course I haven’t even mentioned the paranoid conspiracy novel.
I have always been a big reader and when younger had hoped to be a writer some day. In high school I thought there might be two ways to become a great writer. Become a master of the craft, a real wordsmith and just pump out the great literature seemed one way but I wasn’t sure I had the skills and natural aptitude to do so. I thought an alternative route may be to have truly astounding and interesting experiences and learn to write competently enough to convey them. After attempting to travel a ways down the latter path I realized that rather than writing a novel it might just be better to live a novel. Why drudge away at a keyboard when you can be a protagonist in your own story, out living those life changing events rather than just imagining them and writing them down. I began to think I would just live those experiences and maybe write about them when I was old and couldn’t really do them anymore. And then I discovered the paranoid conspiracy novel.
Probably the definitive paranoid conspiracy novel is the Illuminatus Trilogy, by Wilson and Sheah (sp), which though dated is still highly readable. In this genre the protagonist is faced with increasing evidence that a mysterious and all powerful conspiracy is fucking with his life for some barely understood purpose. I loved it when I discovered it and went on to read all of Robert Anton Wilson’s fiction stuff and some of his non-fiction where he sort of alleges some of this stuff is true. Probably the best paranoid conspiracy novel is Umberto Eco’s Foucalt’s Pendulum about a coterie of conspiracy book publishers who make up a conspiracy and then start getting killed off by it. The one that bears most on this narrative is the Pulitzer Prize winning Gravity’s Rainbow by Pynchon.
I had never read Pynchon before I started working for the pot group. Debbie and I used to talk conspiracy lit. a little and she would share some of her own insider information on real conspiracies of the sort like the CIA farmed out exotic hallucinogens to the Yippies for informal focus group testing. I took all this conspiracy talk as just that talk. People also talk about ghosts, UFOs and Big Foot. She did loan me Gravity’s Rainbow sometime before the trip and I ended up drawing on elements of it as fuel for my own delusions. Or there was a huge international conspiracy of unknown motivation organized to blow my mind, frankly I’ve never been sure. The most telling elements of the story was the plot line about “Rocketman” stumbling into becoming an international smuggler of hashish and the idea of questions answered, answers questioned. The latter I thought was my own invention thinking that someday I would travel the world setting up a table (like the tables we sat up with CAN selling hemp products and cannabis propaganda) with a banner reading questions answered answers questioned. It was only upon re-reading GR that I realized I had lifted that from Pynchon as well as the paranoia.
going crazy part 1
I have not blogged in a while and I think even more than being busy is that I am apprehensive about telling the story I am going to try and tell. A couple of weeks ago I went to pick up my friend Terry from KCI. On the drive back he asked how I was and I told him that work had me feeling crazy. He asked me what that was like knowing I wasn’t just making a figure of speech. I told him since we had a drive ahead of us I would tell him about when everything went insane. The first thing you have to realize about being crazy is that you don’t just go crazy. The world goes crazy and you are just able to realize it. But first some background people always want to know how these things happen and I am in the somewhat unique state of kind of being able to answer that.
Leading up to the Fall of ’96 there was a lot of wild stuff going on in my life. I was into my 3rd year as a full time radical grassroots activist in a wildly intense experiment in identity politics and voluntary poverty. I had stumbled into a job with the Cannabis Action Network working for room & board and free drugs working on coordinating the grassroots campaign for medical marijuana. It was high stress often busting it from the time I got up till the time I went to bed, of course smoking huge quantities of cannabis and cannabis bi-products. On top of that I had taken to doing ecstasy on the weekends and continued to do some bad LSD from time to time and occasionally some mushrooms. I also worked weekends at an adolescent psychiatric unit for the culture shock and pocket money. I was also experimenting with sleep deprivation. After work on a Sunday morning I would often go the neighborhood bar for a couple of beers. I would smoke a few hits of something premium and then lay in bed. I would do progressive relaxation until my conscious mind turned off and I would fall into the most intense hallucinations I had ever experienced even more than when on mega doses of hallucinogens.
All of that was well and good as far as I knew, looking back that lifestyle didn’t leave a lot of time for self reflection as I was also an active reader and there are only 24 hours in a day no matter how intense your life, until we went to Amsterdam. We went to celebrate our victory in the polls, we had changed the world. We went to get away from the grind of politics. We went to work security at the Cannabis Cup, the international pot growing championships of the world. We went early to pre-party and stayed late. What happened there is of course fragmented and poorly understood but aspects of my subjective experiences still shine out of my memory like no other time in my life. I will do my best to convey my experiences but in the end they are my experiences and I make no guarantees to their external veracity.
We stayed at a mind spa for the 3 weeks we were apparently there. It was pretty cool. There was a sensory deprivation tank and syncopation machines by synchrotech. Syncopation flashes lights and plays rhythems in particular beats to generate certain consciousness states. Sensory deprivation was very big in the 70s and involves floating in salt water in a soundproofed chamber in total darkness. There was also television but no channels came in and there were only Terrance McKenna videos to watch and there was a well-stocked library of esoterica and mind expansion literature whose titles I do not recall. I do remember I read 5 or so books including Gurdijeff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson.
The mind spa was not open for business and made an excellent crash pad and we got to sample the wares. The syncopation didn’t do much for me I remember seeing some red and some green. My compatriots reported vivid hallucinations with narrative but didn’t really have the ring of truth to them when they told their tales. The sensory deprivation tank is difficult to judge because I was far gone into madness before I ever tried it. I remember floating in the salt water and being able to hear and feel my heart beating and feeling my pulse pulsing from my finger tips into the water making ripples. It dawned on me that that was what “vibes” were picking up on people’s emotional state through feeling waves from their blood pressure. I remember feeling utterly alone, like being in the womb without a mother’s heartbeat. It seemed cruel, an infernal device and I fled from its confines, but as I said by then I was quite mad.
I remember being pretty sane when we arrived. We all ate pot cookies to make the long flight endurable. We hit the first coffee house after leaving the train station from Shipbol and were smoking massive quantities of cannabis. Aaron would roll up these huge cone joints and we were on a constant quest to see how many different varieties we could smoke at once. I believe the record was 14 kinds of cannabis and 6 kinds of hash. We had been smoking a lot of pot just living and had definitely taken it up a notch. We didn’t do much touristy stuff besides hit the coffeehouses. We had also just one a big legal victory for pot and carried ourselves like gangsters.
Debbie had a gig selling poetry books and CDs for Fishbone as her man was a guitar tech and roadie for them and they always played Amsterdam during the Cup. I went to the Van Gogh museum with one of their roadies, as we were the only 2 in the scene into doing anything besides smoking pot. The museum was set up chronologically and Van Gogh’s early stuff was very Dutch Master’s stuff, all browns and blacks and heavy on the shadows. The most emblematic was a basket of potatoes. And then boom, his pallete exploded and their was the Van Gogh we all know in his one-eared mad-eyed glory. I pondered what in the hell happened to him that he could suddenly see full spectrum and at some level even then I knew it was coming to me.
To be continued. I promise not to make you wait 2 weeks for the next entry. I still despise George Lucas for ending Empire Strikes Back to be continued and then waiting 5 years to make Return of the Jedi. More by weeks end I promise.
poems and commentary
I have had a fairly grueling day at work and can’t talk about it because of confidentiality. I do have one piece of advice in that you should never say you want to kill people in front of a psychiatrist. They react strongly to that. So instead for your reading pleasure a work in progress.
I believe I am a pattern, a pattern of information
Built of millions and millions of simplicities
Organized through Emergence, I arise up from the bottom
I am many, but still I am me!
And I believe I am a pattern, a consciousness construction
Will, sense, imagination, memory
And though I surely rise up from my body, I am much more a story
Told in the hearts of everyone who knows me.
What I want to communicate next in that ditty is Plato’s idea that behind everything that is there is an idea of that thing. Take a knife for example. Everyone has an idea in their head of what a knife is. Something thin and sharp that fits in your hand that you use to cut with. They may differ but largely all six billion of us humans think of roughly the same when we think of knife or whatever it is called in other languages. Did the idea of knife get created out of what, smaller pieces of information, individually six billion times, over and over throughout history. Or is there just one idea of knife that we all get to use. Occams razor says I am right that there is only one idea of knife. What if everything is like that. That everything that we think of as real is a reflection of the idea of those things and exists in this information universe outside of time and space.
I write a lot about consciousness. It intrigues me to no end “who I am” and the mystery of learning the intricacies of unadulterated identity, the root core. Once you realize you’re not your body, and not your thoughts or your feelings, or even your will although of all those it is the truest of that one where do you go? Of course to I am a story. Narrative therapy I have heard it called when you think of your life as a story and you seek to learn how to manipulate your character by the character at the end of the book that you want to be than from all that you have learned from the book you have already read. When I heard about this intervention it really resonated with ideas I had had a long time about choosing to live a novel instead of trying to write one.
Let me end with another poem about consciousness.
Magical Mystical Thing
My mind is a magical mystical thing
Gives me thoughts to think and words to sing
Gives me sights to see and sounds to hear
The feel of grass the taste of beer
My mind is a magical mystical thing
Hard to believe the feelings it brings
Like languorous and hot hot passion
A lust for truth a disdain for fashion
My mind is a magical mystical thing
A holy kingdom where wisdom is king
My pattern of the patterns of those I’ve loved the most
My motherfatherteacherfriends the Holy Ghost
My mind is a magical mystical thing
An integral part of the whole damn thing
My flowery signature in the Big Book of Life
My graffiti cave carvings with Plato’s knife
My mind is a magical mystical thing
It’s the horse I ride to the King of Kings
Thanks for reading this far.
Michael Trapp
July 31, 2007 9:31 pm
truck loading redux
Yesterday I helped my friends Terry and Kirsten move. They had a household’s worth of stuff to put in a 32’ rental so Terry could drive their stuff from the garage of their old house in Columbia Missouri to their new home of Corvalis Oregon. I always think of Corvalis as the last bastion of civilization because of David Brin’s The Postman. They kept the lights on when no one else did. Good science fiction serves as a thought experiment; a way to illuminate “what if”. Brin convinced me that when the shit hits the fan communities survive, not individuals, no matter how strong the redoubt or how advanced the warning.
I’d told Terry after he asked for help that I would be happy too, as loading trucks was something of a specialty of mine. My dad drives truck, when I was a youngster he used to haul furniture. When I was three years old he gave up his career as a meat manager at Foodtown to drive truck for Beacon Van Lines, after my little brother drowned in our swimming pool. It was a way to runaway without really running away. He took one trip on his own, discovered he was powerful lonely, and grabbed me up for the next one, and all the ones after that till the accursed state decided I should be in school “learning something”. By kindergarten I’d been to 43 states but my moving days getting limited to Summer it took me till I was 12 to get the 48 continental states, and I’m still waiting on Alaska and Hawaii.
My main job was keeping Dad awake on the long night drives. I used to sit “Indian style” on the doghouse, the plastic console covering the engine raised up between the seats in the old cabovers he drove back then. He would confide in me and share his plans and dreams, hopes and regrets and tell me about the world we were driving past and what excitements lay ahead. I would share questions, jokes and stories and my thoughts on all we’d seen and what lay ahead.
Driving truck is brutal. Getting paid by the mile, it’s the last piecework. There is heavy pressure, Darwinian survival pressure even, to drive fast and even more so to drive long. There was no getting off work, only getting laid over when there was no work. Furniture haulers have it the worst. Hump heavy shit all day into a metal oven whose ambient temperature is running 20 degrees higher than outside than drive all night so you can hump it back out the next day. I was not only told the value of hard work but also, observed it first hand, and was soon enough actively participating in it. Carrying lampshades and the like and learning quickly the art of staying out of the way led to ever increasing workloads. By eight I could handle an end of a dresser and we didn’t always hire an extra guy anymore. I felt pride and a sense of accomplishment. I realized quickly how lucky I was to see the world and all the different ways that people could live, later how rare to have my father’s undivided attention for hours and hours day after day as we drove across this grand land of ours.
I also learned a thing or two about the loading of trucks. Just as my dad would survey the assembled objects that were to be carefully arranged for the long haul, I surveyed their things and sketched a plan in my mind. “I want the washer and dryer and we’re going to have to unbury the deep freeze for the first layer”. I tried to explain the process so I wouldn’t sound imperious as I pretty much stayed in the truck building the first layers and calling out for what I needed next. Between layers we started roping box springs and mattresses as they became increasingly less elegant as the game of Tetris was played with increasingly bizarre shaped pieces.
Terry and Kirsten’s 4-½ year old son Kai started carrying up some of the lighter items. I called him sir and thanked him and marveled at the size of his carries as I remembered the many workmen doing over me when I was his age. I praised him and his parents in front of him for staying out from underfoot and following directions. Even Ben at 2 ½ waddled up an item or two, his pudgy toddler legs pumping up the sandpaper ramp like mine must have in those early days.
It brought a smile to my face and the heady joy of some serious nostalgia even in the hard work in the heat and the humidity. My carriers faded in and out as more helpers arrived and other helpers got engrossed in conversation or childcare as the day progressed, but I didn’t relinquish the loading job till the very end. I’d paid my dues carrying and watching Dad build the layers, thousands and thousands of layers, trying to anticipate what he was going to need next. I’d earned my “Alright I want those three purple tubs and all the rest of the heavy boxes. Then I’ll take those long handled tools.”
The saddest part of the day was when the layer got seriously funky and I had to say; “Lets keep the kids out of the truck now, its no longer safe.” Saddened to see my remembrances cut short I was still glad to be done before the serious heat of the day. Hopefully Kai will have as sweet memories of driving truck as I do.
Michael Trapp
7/29/07 1:00 pm CST
Hello world!
How does a technologically unsophisticated basically shy person get a blog? About a week before the blog began i shared an anecdote and someone asked my why i didn’t have a blog. I said i was waiting for someone to come to my house and set it up for me. Then when i was helping Terry and Kristin move (see next post) i ran into Ben Jones who i hadn’t seen in 10 years. We got caught up swimming at the quarry and i invited him back to my house for coffee. He also asked me why i didn’t have a blog and offerred to set one up for me which he did from my back porch. When he was thinking about domain names he asked me what my philosophy was and i told him “i was multiconstruct”. I believe that every way of looking at the world is not really the way the world is but its an artificial construct built to make sense of the world, a construct. I also believe that every construct both illuminates some truth and shades other truths or renders them meaningless. The best way to understand this wonderful and infinite universe of ours is to draw the best most useful ideas from all of the constructs folks have made to understand. Robert Anton Wilson taught me that everything is true in some sense, false in some sense, and meaningless in some sense. Aleister Crowley shows in the introduction to The Book of Lies that all language falls short of actuality and there is no way to tell the complete truth with words. To make the most accurate picture of the world i draw from all systems of belief to paint as accurate picture of the Truth as i can. Instead of asking “is this true?” i ask “in what way is this true” “how is this false”. This allows me to defy contradiction and hold to science, religion, philosophy and draw what understanding i can.
Multiconstruct 
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