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The Miracle Question
Yesterday I did an education group on solution focused therapy. I love the solution focus approach and have been an advocate for it in our agency and we have incorporated it into our treatment planning. Its based on the idea that when working with someone with problems you don’t really have to know the origins of those problems but you just have to identify where you would like your life to go and what are the steps you need to take now that will move you in that direction. Prior to a solution focused approach we took a problem solving approach which is not as motivating which is really the key factor in personal change. Its far more about motivation than it is about knowledge. You begin with “the miracle question”. “If you woke up tomorrow and your life was perfect how would you know it was different?” Its phrased in the form of a miracle because a lot of people mired in nonsense have lost any notion that their lives can be any different. It has to be a miracle for them to wrap their minds around the possibility of change. I also like it because it moves me out of the problem solving business and into the miracle business. Most people’s miracle is to have a safe home with their family with or without a relationship and with or without a dog. On rare occasions people have impossible miracles, bringing back dead relatives, winning the lottery, living in glass domes on mars and the like. The follow up question is “how would that make you feel?” There’s their real miracle. Its future focused rather than driven by hindsight and regret. I wove in some stuff from narrative therapy, looking at your life like a novel only instead of turning back to look for lessons you skip to the end. Ask the character who has it all figured out and is leading a happy life what did they do now that made that happen? It was well received and a really big group. Afterward I did the process group and it had hit home with folks. After dinner Dad and I watched The Time Traveler’s Wife (not to bad but no where near as good as the most excellent novel). It opens with a future version of the main character coming back to advise his younger self. Just beautiful.
sublime detroit part 2 –
Woke up Saturday morning at the Burns-Pavlik demesne specifically in the princess room. I had slept hard and needed it going on a few hours of light sleep the night before. The heavy curtains were nice as sleeping well into the morning was a nice change of pace. Trevor was out for a run so i curled up with Doris Lessings “The Golden Notebook” which is just a heavy and brilliant novel. Dense with meaning she has literary talent, a piercing political consciousness, and rare insight into the human condition. its sweet.
After Trevor returned I made coffee and had some of Jeff’s most excellent cinnamon roll I explored the backyard. I remembered what it was like when they first moved in, typical suburban fenced in grass box, the green rectangle endlessly repeated. Now there’s a nice patch of prairie wildflowers looking very Autumnal to my Missouri eyes, looking very sharp in its benign neglect. I was envious that i couldn’t let my plot be and have it still work.
It was a just beautiful morning and I was glad to have lingered. We drove back to Farmington and went to the farmer’s market. Very cool, very lively lots of great stuff. We got cucumbers and a couple of melons a cantaloupe and something similar and some apples. Besides stuff we could eat in detroit i also looked for stuff to take home. I was delighted to see some Michigan maple syrup and I excitedly picked up a big bottle then remembered that i only had a carry on bag to get home and there’s a 3 oz rule for michigan maple syrup (can’t get it at home). I put it down and said “i’m flying and i can’t take it back. the terrorists have won. i conceded, i admit defeat, please now can i fly with michigan maple syrup?”
so i bought nothing, my innocent glee in the beautiful day of seeing all these folks marketing tempered.
but only for a moment. then it was lunch with rosie, jeff was baking and becky was slinging bread but rosie was up for some chicken chili. tre’ and i had the reubens, good but the french dressing kind which i like a bit less, but really good. i can’t remember the name of the place but rosie thought highly of it.
after lunch we said goodbye to becky and rosie and after stopping to look at discount books and by a map we were off. we decided to drive up 8 mile to most appreciate the transition into the city. for some reason we took grand river instead, a cool street that runs across the state. i’d ridden my bike on probably the first 100 miles coming out of grand rapids getting in shape for my trip to Mexico.
This stretch got shoddier and vacant buildings started to increase until we were in full on city. we stopped at a ghetto mart and stocked up on food: bread, mega sized jar of peanut butter, chips, salsa, cheese, plastic ware, perhaps other things. We were in line behind an older african american guy buying a nice stock pot at $5.95 and a mess of greens. I commented quietly to trevor that that was a good buy on the pot and was pleased to see the guy straighten up. everybody likes to get a good deal.
Anathem
I would post a lot more about books but I also use visual bookshelf for book reviews so I don’t do that so much here. However, recently I re-read Neal Stephenson’s Anathem and wanted to say a few words. Its a really powerful and amazing book that I couldn’t recommend more. In it Stephenson posits a world with a much longer history. The people of math and science are kept in monastic seclusion to limit their impact on the world through advanced technology in the past praxic (industro-technological) ages. Its from a perspective of a young fraa (secular monk) in a decennial math (each group is secluded for a year, 10 years, 100 years, or a thousand years from the secular world so as not to contaminate each other). During Apert the 10 days of interaction with the secular world he is most struck by how distracted everyone is by their jeejahs (cell phones and hand held devices) and I have adopted that term as well. Jeejahs seem to be the plague of the modern age. Even otherwise intelligent and focused people can’t hardly do anything for 20 minutes without looking at their jeejahs and jeejah noise is ubiquitous. Having moved back to a land line I have really noticed a difference. I always found the ringing of the phone a distraction and kept it on vibrate. Even now coming up on a year of being cell phone free I still get ghost vibrations in my upper thigh and pat my pockets. Having near continuous access to the internet has its advantage, as does convenience, and emergencies and all that, but at what cost??
The other piece of the book deals with what he calls The Hylean Theoretical World. What I think he is talking about is Plato’s World of Pure Ideas, which if you are a regular reader of my blog you know has been a big part of my philosophy for a long time. Its where I think Heaven is and what the purest most true part of ourselves are made of. Where the rubber hits the road i think its the most real reality. If you don’t know what I’m talking about and you want to wrestle with a really fun fast moving adventure story about ideas than Anathem might be for you.
I might try re-reading Snowcrash next.
Books
I have been a big reader since my brother taught me to read peering over his shoulder of some classic DC comics. The first full on book I read was The Hobbit and after that I started to chew them up. Reading all the time, stashing books to read in class, on the bus, most of my free time. I read anything I could get my hands on. Growing up in the country or on the road with my truck driving daddy kids books weren’t always handy. I read what i could which was a lot of westerns, romance magazines, and books from garage sales. Reading changed my life. Opened me up to a whole ‘nother realm of experience. It helped make me smart which came to be a big part of my self identity and something to hold onto when the rest of life, not so much.
I still read, a lot. Usually i will crush 2 or 3 books a week. I mix it up with some nonfiction, some great literature, and a lot of crap genre fiction (sci fi and fantasy). Lately I have drifted away from the crap and have been reading several books a little more slowly and carefully than usual. All nonfiction. (the AA Big Book, a Jillian Michaels diet book of all things, some Foucalt) It slowed my pace down. Plus I’m back to reading magazines. Scientific American Mind is my new great read, so much interesting stuff and some interesting points for my groups and my clinical practice. The mind is well worth exploring and i like staying on top of new developments. Plus brother John got me a subscription to The Christian Science Monitor. I can stay on top of it as a weekly but it cuts into my book time. As does facebook.
All of that being said i started reading an S M Stirling novel of the change. Post apocalyptic fantasy, a little formulaic (but thats part of the charm, just ask fans of Law & Order) but likable characters and an intriguing world. I was away long enough to really appreciate staying up a bit later and getting up earlier to squeeze in more reading time. Makes me feel like a kid again.
a good american
Since I haven’t posted for a couple of weeks i feel an update is in order. It has been a pretty hairy couple of weeks and my down time has shrunk to virtually nil. I’m barely reading, even, and thats usually the last thing to go no matter how busy things get. Mostly I’ve been reading comic books of late. I bought a whole box of them for a dollar and i’ve been working my way through them slowly but surely. I am also reading Summerland by Michael Chabon which is a little disapointing. His The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay is one of my favorite books. Its about the early days of comic books, coincidentally enough, and two Jewish cousins who are comics artists and how they deal with Nazis and stuff. Its really great and has some interesting metaphysics talking about Superman (Kane & Schuster’s not Neitchze’s) as a golem. I also really like his newest The Yiddish Policeman’s Union a sort of alternative history where Jewish refugees had been settled in Alaska rather than denied sanctuary and left to the holocaust and a hard boiled Jewish detective is trying to solve the mystery of the murdered messiah. Also metaphysically interesting. Summerland, not so much. There’s too much baseball and the fantasy is a bit cheezy. I’d recommend comic books. Besides not reading and not blogging I’ve been spending a lot of time at the house. I am starting to settle in though I am ashamed to say i haven’t finished even some of the basics of a move in cleaning. I’ve been doing a lot of lawn stuff. Bought a push reel mower which is fun but a lot of work. i also bought a weed whip for the annoying tall grasses the push reel leaves behind. Its not as pretty as the manicured golf green types that surround the place but its better than most hippy lawns and the carbon foot print is a sight better. I have also been steadily turning over ground, the less to mow. I planted lilac bushes (struggling but normal i hear), a persimmon tree, some lillies (looking real sharp), plus a vegetable plot with cucumbers (I opened the last jar of bread & butter pickles to celebrate, when i was a kid we would plant some corn in the center of the hill for shade but this year i am going to try Cosmos), tomatoes (beef steaks – a hybrid), basil, marigolds (repels bugs from the tomatoes) and two rows of carrots and radishes (the radishes come up quick to mark the rows). Tomorrow i hope to put in some okra and i also have summer squash (2 kinds) and something else. I have been real pleased with the soil, its a little clayey but there is some definite topsoil action going on. I also got my compost bin up & running. Its been mostly fun hanging out with dad. It has been a huge struggle with smoking being around it all the time. I had a bad spell and went back on the chantix and am back on track which makes me feel good. It was really work that pushed me over the edge, coming back from Michigan and my cousin’s wedding to driving out at 9:30 at night to see a suicidal client was just too much. I’m becoming a little frayed. Last night i got a call our homeless client getting out of jail, 9:30 at night no place to take him. i let him crash on the floor of the guest room. It was too much to pick up his gear i was storing in the garage and take him out and put him out to camp in the wet somewhere. So had a client here when i went to bed and when i woke. Saw two other’s today, taking them to Oxford House (self run recovery cooperative houses) interviews. One got accepted which will make my life easier as i won’t have to run out to the sticks (styx?) to pick him up every other day. I think i am going to take a comp day on Thursday to make up for it. Working on the house and hanging with dad has made me realize how much energy i put into work (way too much). Nonetheless i am a good american, working in my yard, spending money i don’t have, enjoying the luxuries of 3 bedrooms, 2 baths and a 2 car garage. Last weekend i couldn’t help but think the honored war dead would be proud, for if i can’t buy top of the line appliances just because i don’t have the money than the terrorists will have won.
going crazy part 5
After a long night of restless wandering I returned to the mind spa. Everyone was up and rolling, cleaning up and packing. The first night we had arrived our host’s partner Rose had told us to “remember what it looks like” which in my then unspun mind was a simple admonition to clean the place up when we were done. Now i saw new implications of needing to remember what was here, what had transpired. I placed an Israel Regardie book on the shelf of metaphysical classics in thanks for the memories. Debbie seemed a little out of sorts as i put the last few of my things in my pack, doublechecked to make sure my ticket was still in my bag. I remember a couple of Aaron’s friends who hadn’t come over with us were there. I thought one of them might want to carry Debbie’s bag as they also only had one. I was remembering the Fishbone CDs left over from the show at the Melkveg. I was remembering Jennifer dipping CD sized sheets of hash into a large pot of boiling wax the night before. I was remembering that i’d brought Debbie’s bag over from the states. I felt very tired, that now i was ready to sleep, and told myself not yet. Its not yet safe. I’ll sleep on the plane when i know i’m safe. We left for the train station. Debbie was disgusted when i mentioned i was broke again. Jennifer asked what happened to the 100 guilders she had given me and i told her i spent it teaching an immigrant what “frivolous” meant. Debbie bought my ticket and we boarded the train to Schippol. I kept thinking about the 300 CDs, the CD sized sheets of hash, this whole extended dangerous practical joke i had fallen into, the vagaries of friendship – and who in fact where my friends? I had no clear plan but i knew i wasn’t rolling that bag through customs. My thoughts ran slowly through my sleep deprived befuddlement. As the train pulled into Shippol I pulled the roll away behind me, last in line, moving towards the door. I felt like i was walking through molasses. The doors closed before i could de-board the train with everyone else. Flooded with relief i waved to my dumbstruck friends as the train pulled away from the station. There was another passenger stuck behind me, seperated from her guy at the airport. She seemed nice and uninvolved in this mess. I thought i would ask her advice. We had decided, of course, to ride up to the next stop, change trains and return to the airport. On the ride I quickly explained i believed that i had fallen in with international drug smugglers and thought the bag i carried was filled with Hash and wondered on the ethics of checking. She considered my dilemma. She said, her guy would be at the airport when she returned however long it took because he loved her and would wait. If my friends were at the station i could trust them and if not then well….
We arrived at the airport and there was her guy, happy to see her and in a hurry to catch the flight. My “friends” were no where in sight. I pulled off my backpack to check the ticket for the time and gate. No ticket. I had seen it that morning, double checking it was in the flap it had rested through this whole ordeal, now it was gone. I checked the flight listings and went to the appropriate gate. We had been cutting it close and the flight was departed, no one was in sight. I was stunned, exhausted, not thinking clearly. I needed some air and went outside and sat on a bench to collect my thoughts. There was this rhythmic pounding of a huge piledriver at a nearby construction site. I felt drawn there. I had been thinking about the hypnotic quality of techno music and the risk involved in opening your mind to hypnotic suggestions enclosed in the “music”. I felt drawn there, i felt like our host would be waiting for some kind of final confrontation. As i walked towards the pounding i realized this was insane. He would not be there, trespassing on a construction site would only draw attention to me with possibly a huge amount of hash in my possession. I sat down more to think. I opened the large duffel and pulled out a cloth shopping bag with some of Debbie’s souveniers contained within. I consciously did not check the CDs. I felt it was safer not to know. I zipped the duffel back up, left it next to the bench and walked away. I saw an exit sign leading to a highway. I thought i would return to the known of hitchhiking. I saw i was on an on-ramp heading east. Home was to the West. Or was it, East would get me there too, it would just take a little longer. I felt ready for the journey. I felt beyond want, beyond fear, beyond even need. I walked as the 4 lanes of traffic, those funny little European cars whizzed by. I found a lighter in my pocket, from the Mind Spa. I wondered if this was how they tracked my movements? My sinuses were clogged, i felt like i could barely breathe, i felt exhausted. I thought if only my sinuses hadn’t been clogged i could have done progressive relaxation and shut off this barrage of thought and rested and i wouldn’t be so damn tired. I thought it would be over by now but here i was a stranger in a strange land still. I thought i didn’t know what was happening to me. Had I been drugged, hypnotized, had my mind blown by mindblowers. Had i touched the face of god? I felt powerful as i breathed air into my lungs. I felt i had to be a powerful magician to have survived or maybe i was an angel? I was uncertain, and i felt there was power in this uncertainty, that if i knew it would all crumble into dust. I realized i loved the unknown and did not fear it. I said quietly, “I whisper when i want to hypnotize and I shout when I want something”. I didn’t know if i was listened to by a microphone planted by mindfuckers or the god who made the universe or if i was being listened to at all but I was angry. Angry at my exhaustion, my clogged sinuses, my fear of pursuit as a drug smuggler though i had done nothing. I shouted, my spirit self grew to scrape the clouds, i found myself ten thousand feet tall and knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that at this moment i wielded all the power of the universe. I shouted. “If i don’t get a ride right now! I will destroy Phillip Morris”. Bamn, instantly a van in the far left lane cuts through 4 lanes of heavy traffic. “Would you like a ride?” the driver asked.
the week in review
It was a pretty good week here in COMO. The weather has been perfect, 80 & sunny, cool at night. It feels like a thunderstorm is blowing in and we do need the rain, its already gonna be a short color season.
Wednesday I went with Trevor to see the last poet laureate of New Jersey Amerie Baraka, which was pretty cool. He read his poem about 9/11 which led the garden state to abandon the post when he wouldn’t resign. It was pretty good asking a lot of piercing questions and bringing a lot of the ridiculous assumptions of The Black Iron Prison into question. It did bring up that tired old piece of propaganda about 3,000 jewish workers calling in sick that day, but he phrased it in the form of a question, and its one line in a long piece, but i could see why people would be offended. Mostly he just talked which was fine but i would’ve liked more poetry and less rhetoric.
Friday i went to a Shelter Happy Hour at my friend Nancy’s. We had good food and drinks and Nancy and Sarah Cleveland played guitar and sang songs. I did some poems and Rachel shared one that was particularly good. Leigh asked me to do a little poetry at The Voices multi-media installation on 10/18. I’ll be doing it if i can work it around my batterer intervention group.
Here’s one i didn’t read Friday but did a couple month’s back in Scout’s backyard. It would make a good John Fenn song (hint, hint, hint). I wrote it maybe a year ago after visiting my friend Harry’s church and really liking even Sunday School except the teacher made a couple of comments that i couldn’t really get behind. Later she said if you are silent people can assume consent so i raised my objections which were politely debated and i guess we had to agree to disagree on that one. I wanted to write her a letter and more carefully show how i think on the issue and wrote this song instead. The alternative title is Why I don’t go to Church.
Letter to a Sunday School Teacher
Hey Teacher, Hey Teacher
I went to your class and I heard
What could’ve been the holy word
You know beauty, truth, and love
And Heaven Up above
And Jesus, and forgiveness of sin
Well we had some of that
And you didn’t even pass the hat
And we talked and prayed
In beauty, truth, and love
But on more than one occasion
You said of the gay persuasion
The Church is way to tolerant of Them
Well i didn’t even know their was a Them
Because i thought there was an Us
You know, every single living human being
And the call goes out to all
And its the same Spirit that falls
Upon every heart that turns to God in prayer
And I’ve been to a church in San Francisco
And another across the Bay
Where the congregation was less straight than gay
And the same Spirit filled the hall
That it does when i pray with you all
Surely God does love her children all the same
And I call it a new circumcision
When you say you know with precision
Just how God does view every right and wrong
Cuz if a law was good enough
Jesus wouldn’t of had it so tough
To make salvation a free gift for all
And like meat sacrificed to idols
Lo’ all is permissable
If its done with love to the glory of God
Everyone who knows to do good
And does it not, that is sin
Love and only love is the highest law
Everyone who loves is a child of God
That’s how God’s love’s perfected
Love and only love is the highest law
And by their fruits you shall know them
Love and only love is the highest law
God says, love and only love is the highest law
In addition to the veritable frenzy of activities i also found time to crush some books. Last weekend i read “The Professor and the Madman” a historical acount of the Oxford English Dictionary, which was really excellent. It was plotted better than most novels and is i am sure inspirational to crazy people all over. I’ve also been reading some classic sci-fi; Asimov’s “The Gods Themselves” which is better than most of his, though “The Bicentennial Man” made me cry. I also read “Brain Wave” a Poul Anderson novel from 1958. It supposes that the Earth has been in a field that dampens electrical activity and we pass out of it and inexplicably everything with a brain has a huge intelligence increase. It managed to be both progressive in speculating instant world wide anarchy if people were smarter but never questioned the social order of the white male protagonists contending with whip smart farm animals, housewives, colonial subjects no longer stupidly complicit in the systems that exploit them. I wrote a little poem debuting here in the inside cover:
brain wave
He treats housewives like farm animals
They have capacity for growth
To make the present inequities meaningless
But they’re not the protagonist
That is reserved for the new men of genius
And the ernest every man
Fresh faced from the apotheosis of privilege
No, housewives and farm animals
Are not protagonists
But merely obstacles, hazards really
For even average man.
The whole human geology
The stratified edifice of
The way things have been
Unquestioned by its champions
Even as it crashes around their heads
From the democratization of power.
I know why I am not free
when others are oppressed
For oppressors should sleep uneasy at night.
If one’s necessary comforts
Arise out of exploitation
How’re ya gonna live,
When the meek done rose up,
And took what’s theirs?
Thank you readers and thanks for those who’ve emailed me comments. If you have a poem to share or some feedback on the blog please post a comment.
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.
Multiconstruct 
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