Archive
Taiwan wins the World Cup
Its been a pretty good day. I got up early and got a little house cleaning in and made a couple of dishes for my world cup brunch. I made a fruit salad with half a cantaloupe, 3 peaches, an apple, and some raspberries. What made it special was the Gorgonzola cheese and walnuts. I also made a cucumber salad with of course cucumbers, yellow bell pepper, sweet onion, with a dressing made of sour cream, balsamic and white vinegar and some light brown sugar. Its not the best cucumber salad but it was good. Apple cider vinegar works better but i am out. I also chopped up some purple tomatoes and shredded some cheese ahead of time.
I had invited some Taiwanese psychology grad students in town for a month in an exchange program. One of them was sitting in on my batterers intervention group and we had hit it off a bit. Once I got them in and settled I browned some tenderized round steak sliced them up and then made fajitas in honor of Spain.
Lunch was a big hit (it was even photo worthy) and the game was a good one, in spite of what the commentators had to say. There were tornadoes south of us and they interrupted the coverage a bit but we didn’t miss anything important. Eric came by as did Sarah who brought the pickles we had made. They all sealed nicely and are looking very pretty. We did close to 20 lbs. dill and bread and butter. I can’t wait until they’re ready for eating, perhaps a month or so.
After the game the exchange students and myself went out for coffee and talked a little shop. In Taiwan batterers frequently divorce the victim because of family pressure and the shame which they place on the victim. A lot of dudes in the rural South buy mail order brides and then they just buy a new one if things don’t work out. Mostly though we all had similar experiences. Patriarchy is patriarchy.
It was a lot of fun having them over and showing them around town. We made vague plans for a cook out. Dad enjoyed having them over and invited them back. We talked about hiking. My first thought was Pinnacles but we had a lack of appropriate foot wear so I think we will probably go out to Devil’s Icebox and the Pierpont Store.
4th of July Memories
I am a lover of Summer and have many fond memories of the fourth of July. My dad drove truck and I started going with him since as long as I could remember. A lot of Fourths we would be out in the country somewhere and we would climb up on top of the truck and watch fireworks out in the distance. Sometimes we would see them in several different towns. I remember the anticipation of waiting for true dark when they would begin. I can only think of one time when we just came up empty.
My most memorable Fourth we were in St Petersburg. I was maybe eight and John would have been eleven. I don’t remember what Dad was doing but we were out on our own playing. They shot the fireworks out over the water and we were swimming in the warm Gulf pretending we were storming the beaches of Normandy or whatever.
As an adult the Detroit fireworks would sometimes draw me out. Impressive display. I would also catch Toledo’s over the river or in a pinch Monroe’s could be seen from our house on Roeder Street. Mom always kept the dog in, concerned about malicious children and explosive devices.
In 1994 I was with Sarah and Christa at our abandoned house (headquarters for Ozark Summer) in Black Missouri. It was nice to be away from crowds of people and we spent a leisurely day hanging out in the hammock. We drove down to a small town and watched their display. We took our kitten we had found and later lost again. That was such a bustling time of frenetic high jinks it just stands out as peaceful.
On the Fourth of July 1996 I was living in Berkeley. Phil and I dropped some acid and walked down to the Marina to watch the show. We were seated near several different groups of folks and some were speaking Mandarin and some Spanish and other languages and it started to freak us out. We moved to a quieter place and enjoyed the display. Walking out someone began throwing fire crackers into the crowd. Out of nowhere a squad of storm troopers in full riot gear game trotting in and snatched up some brothers. Very freaky.
Seven years ago I was in Mesquite Nevada. Dad was in the hospital in St George Utah with a necrotic kidney. I didn’t even go outside to watch the fireworks. Just sat in the crappy casino hotel room watching their crappy cable. Nevada is the only state with universally poor hotel cable. They don’t want you in your room watching TV. Gotta get out there and lose some money.
The last several years I have gone with friends to downtown Columbia and watch the fireworks over Faurout Field from a parking garage. Pretty fun and usually run into people I know.
This year I agreed to have people over. Dad and I took a morning trip to Boonville and had their crappy brunch buffet. We stopped and got some fireworks at a tent outside of town. Mostly cones that shoot sparks since I live in town. When we got home I cleaned up the rose bed. They have been sickly and was concerned about disease so I raked out the mulch, broke up the clay a bit, and planted a new one i got at the grocery store for six bucks. It came with a packet of fertilizer and I sprinkled it around all the roses because I put in a lot of compost when I planted it. I sprinkled more compost about.
After getting cleaned up guests began arriving. Eric not only brought Dad a six pack of gluten free beer (pretty good actually) but did chicken wings in rice flower. I didn’t have the heart to tell him there is gluten in Worcestershire Sauce. We pitched some horse shoes and more people came, around a dozen. I kept winning and we had some good first time players which was fun. Other folks broke out the Boccie Ball. Dad did the grilling smoked a turkey breast and did some local hot dogs and ground pork patties. Other folks brought brats. We did up a dozen yellow and a dozen white sweet corn. Pretty much the first of the season.
We broke up the party and most of us caravaned to Faurot Field to watch them up close. It was very fun being close and firework technology gets better and better. We were so close flaming debris fell around us. We shot the shit and shared some Fourth of July memories.
they paved the road to sutton’s bluff
This week found Harry, Dad, myself and Oni making a brief Ozarks excursion. We delayed a day to have an extra one to prepare and severe weather had been threatening and left on Tuesday. We set out around 9:30 and had an enjoyable drive down. The Black Eyed Susan was striking and it was nice to get out into the woods. Going gluten free and wanting shade for the dog kept us out of restaurants and it made me nostalgic for road trips past when we had made sandwiches on the road because we couldn’t afford to eat in restaurants. In 94 I had helped organize a summer long volunteer/protest/environmental education/camp out. We were a roving band of 8-60+ folks who met and did projects and hung out and camped and gave workshops and talked to locals. We worked on trails, repaired a dam, dumped saw dust at a national forest office, publicly threatened to disrupt an ATV race, got death threats, and were almost set up for a marijuana cultivation case we did not commit by a crooked sheriff in a small town. All in all it was a grand old time camping and hiking in beautiful country, learning about the natural world and how to live together and make it better. A lot of skinny dipping and a lot of driving. One of the places we liked to go was Sutton’s Bluff and I planned to check it out/camp near it and check out some tourist sites I gave short shift to back in the day, namely the recently re-opened Johnson’s Shut Ins.
We had a little trouble finding our road as forest service 2233 was being paved and was renamed county rd 917. We drove up it a few miles weaving around the paving crew then traveled down a forest service road for a couple of miles until we found an established camp site at a trail head for the Ozark Trail. It was a pretty site with some clearing, lots of shade, and some black eyed susans. We pitched our tents then drove to the shut ins but we didn’t have a lot of time and we were tired and the visitor center was closed so we never figured out how it worked.
Camp was nice though, made spaghetti and we had a smoky fire to keep away insects. Got up early made coffee. Thought our Kaldis Bolivian in the French Press quite likely the best cup of coffee in Reynolds County. Hiked the OT up from camp, nice. Found some fresh boar scat which i thought i had heard them snuffleupagussing in the night.
We headed out and drove up to Taumsauk and climbed the tower. Oni was game for it even though she wasn’t quite as tall as the step, but she climbed it like a champ. Beautiful 360 view. We also checked out an overlook than headed down to Elephant Rocks. I’ve seen bigger rock fields but it was cool for the Midwest, getting to scramble around on boulders. We checked out the ruins of an old engine house made of the granite pieces. I learned about Reg Granite which can can come from Missouri and Dad talked about how granite got going (black granite first used as ship ballast to even out loads until they had a surplus and decided to slice em up and sell them) and how they work it (1/4 mile long wires to give it time to cool). Elephant Rocks are the world’s preeminent place to see weathered red granite and it was pretty cool. There were some cliffs you could jump off into a quarry but i wasn’t quite hot enough and wanted to get back to dad and oni.
We then went to Johnson’s Shut Ins which were very cool and Harry and I slid/scrambled our way through that. Rock climbing in a waterfall, just a lot of fun in the water. Went back to camp and cooked again, i made an apple and ham wild rice dish that was impressive let alone for camp food.
Today we packed up, did out OT hike and cruised back. Caught a diner for lunch on the way home, they did a nice hamburger steak and we all made it home happy. Oni enjoyed camping, just thrilled to be living outside and loved the off leash hiking.
Today back in time to mow the front yard and get cleaned up for Batterer’s Group. The guys were rockin’ and we graduated a cool dude, biker type who teared up when I praised his progress. life is good, vacation is fun even when you’re working. Harry and I are both excited to be seeing mewithoutyou tomorrow night in Springfield. I remembered when I was hoping to leave work an hour early to make the show on time and now i’ve had all week off. Surely god works in mysterious ways.
“The Buddha Next Door”
This poem speaks for itself and takes its name from a Chad Osborne quote on what he was going to call his new album in late November 1996. I wrote the poem some years after, i think in preparation for ‘America: Its Land and Its People’, no book on notable americans would be complete without one.
Larger than life; my friend
such quick-witted genius belongs on the stage
Without pretense or ambition
Singing post-modern ballads
of what might be
what might’ve been.
Growing up in a small town
it is a gift to know you my friend
erudition without equal
and a hunger to Know
everything
about everything
asking for nothing
Spinning tales, absurd tales
All the stranger for being true.
The roll of the eyes
the arched eyebrow
the enigmatic smile
Speaking volumes on their own
the wit, the wit, the wit
that takes someone apart
but with the child like spirit
spritely innocent
the glee of the moment sparkles
that makes it all ok
better than ok
Its fucking hilarious
side splitting fun
that leaves you out of breath
and your cheeks hurting.
Please, please, please
no more
Filling the void with laughter
for its own sake
True Good at its finest
No malice
but a desire
to know
to take
risks.
To go out on the smallest limb
for no other reason
than to pluck the forbidden fruit
Of naming the unnamable
tasting the fruit of unadulterated interaction
the eternal quest for reaction
All in fun
All for fun
And the chips fall where they lay
A veritable Angel of Dionysus
We’ll run, run, run across the void
of empty convention
the rules, mores, norms
of the ones who dwell in the mud
Afraid to defy convention
Plucked into the Spotlight
of cross examination
lost in explication
of what your life really means.
Poetry Archive #2 (Johnny Watson poems)
John E. Watson is a larger than life character. He is an artist and craftsman and lovingly hapless. I’ve written 2 songs about Johnny and i found the rough draft of one of them, Hey Mister Painter Man, in the large sketch book. I’d forgotten all about it and dredged it back up out of memory. I sang it for an associate who was tunelessly singing Hey Mister Tambourine Man, and he said he’d like to write some music for it. Chicken Fried Johnny i recorded with Milk Carton but we never did anything with the recording. Johnny claims the song is insulting but he listens to it. I never got a copy but our studio guy Nick Ridgio burned him one. How is that for fair? I started it when i went to see Johnny and he had gotten a nasty gash on his finger. He was going to sew it up himself because he didn’t have insurance and had preceded to drink a bottle of whiskey in preperation, which like a lot of projects, was as far as he got.
Hey Mister Painter Man
How ’bout a pretty picture
One that’ll make me smile
And maybe then I’ll forget her
Maybe you have loved before
Then you may know
Love brings the greatest joys
But leaves the lowest lows
So how ’bout it Mr. Painter Man
Can you fix my soul
Paint a picture to fill me up
Where love has left a hole
Maybe you have loved before
Then you may know
A place where i can heal my heart
I am ready to go.
#######
Chicken Fried Johnny
I put a suture in my finger
Cuz i didn’t have the money
For the plastic surgeon’s fee
To come and take a look at me
But i keep searchin’
Looking for the reason
Why most folks struggle to survive
But others got six cars to drive
But i like my chicken fried boy
I like my chicken fried
If i can’t have steak and champaign
I’ll settle for a chicken wing
I like my chicken fried boy
I like my chicken fried
With no fat to remind me
This was a living thing
Well I saved up a bit of money
And since i don’t have a honey
I’m gonna buy myself a forty ounce beer
It sure beats shedding a tear
And i’m gonna get me some bugler to smoke
And maybe a little toke
Of some cheap-ass mexican weed
That’s mostly just stems and seeds
But i like my chicken fried boy
I like my chicken fried
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.
going crazy part 3
I had been spending the most time with Aaron. Aaron was in crisis. He had at first turned down Debbie’s invitation to return to Amsterdam as his business was pressing. He was a co-owner of a new marijuana dispensary and had a small grow operation in Marin keeping him busy. After he learned I was going he decided he could go. That fact later became important in my delusional system. Last year Aaron was the newbie this year I was.
Shortly after we arrived Aaron had learned his partner had declared him corrupt and taken control of the business and his grow operation saying they were company assets. His partner also called High Times and told them they were employing a swindler and wanting to avoid controversy they fired him before he started. Aaron was obsessed and went on and on about his troubles back home. As he was largely my guide to the city I was the recipient of his angst and tried my best to listen and provide guidance. I remember we had a long talk about “energy vampires” those who take and take without giving. There is a reason you never invite a vampire into your home.
Aaron and I had purchased some “organic ecstasy” from our host at the mind spa. That night we did a gram, sometime later we did another. Being crazy for me is a lot like being on ecstasy. That same sparkling of perception and words unbidden uncensored easy on the tongue. We stayed up all night mostly talking about Aaron’s situation. That day I worked the door at some Cannabis Cup event and did whatever we did, go to dinner smoke cannabis its all really a blur and truly I have little idea of what happened when or even what really happened and what was delusion. Keep that in mind throughout this narrative have the names have not been changed under the assumption that time and the statute of limitations protect the guilty, if there be any.
That night I was again hanging out with Aaron and he raved on in his obsessions and wanted to do the rest of the ecstasy. I didn’t want to do any because it was late and I hadn’t slept. Aaron said he would do it all (4 grams I believe and it was more intense than any I had ever done) if I didn’t do it with him. One of the bad things about ecstasy is the tripping dose and the fatal dose are just too damn close. So I did a gram and later another and again we stayed up all night talking about Aaron’s obsessions. Taking ecstasy was probably the last rational decision, poor though it was, that I made for months. On night three I did not need to take ecstasy to stay up all night nor did I sleep again in Amsterdam though it must have been another 8 or 9 days before I left.
I can’t really describe what I was feeling through this time. I had this rush of ideas, incredible confidence and energy to the point of laughable grandiosity and I was putting things together at an incredible rate. I was so intensely in the moment that a coherent narrative is impossible. Perhaps insanity at its core is the lack of a coherent personal narrative. Stan Davis my first sociology professor at good old Monroe County Community College called insanity a worldview of one. But that is insufficient as I often could easily explain my charged world view to folks and take them along with me to what I now believed. Because with the delusions of grandeur came an incredible charisma.
I believe I continued to work security for the Cup. At one point I was able to work the CAN table. Part of our deal with High Times was we got a free table at the vendors area. We brought no product, the heart of CAN’s fundraising was selling pot stickers, t-shirts and hemp products but we produced nothing and our vendors and their competitors had tables so we just had literature. We had our glossy flyers for the medical marijuana initiative and we had copies of the initiative. We were a bit of rock stars for just passing the most significant piece of marijuana law in the world. Aaron had been desultorily working the table as he was not allowed to work which left it all to Debbie and myself. At one point I worked the table for 45 minutes. Within minutes there was a crowd around the table as I gave my rap. This is how we passed it this is what we passed. That was the essence of it. We had a basket that people through coins in. I only worked the table for 45 minutes because Debbie felt we were endangering our place by taking business from the other vendors. The ones who had products. As we excitedly counted our take it came to 450 guilders or about $300. I had done 3 fair days of tabling income without any products to sell in 45 minutes. That’s when I realized that money was valueless. I felt I could sing it up out of the aether at will, and perhaps I could.
Later perhaps that same day I took a break from working the door and walked through the exhibition booth where there was an open mic. Rappers were bustin out rhymes and I thought I had important revelations to share. I took the mic and explained that the economy ran on magic and that money meant nothing. I said wild eyed that we could actualize the idea behind “that insight book” that if you see someone doing the right thing than give them money so they can keep doing it and we could be freed from the shackles of shameless commerce. I made the challenge that I had a pocket full of money that I would try to give away and that it could not be done because by doing the right thing it would flood back to me. I of course quickly found it was no problem at all to give away all my money.
I left the stage and an older hippy gentleman took me aside and told me that while he heard the truth and compassion in my speech that there was madness in my eyes and that I needed rest. I almost cried from his gentle hand on my shoulder and the care in his words. A young woman approached me for my money for some feminist cause. We talked and found her organization’s needs exceeded what was in my pocket and I gave her enough for a phone call and my number in Berkeley and promised to work with her to raise that money with an infallible plan that rose in my mind. Debbie approached and told me to cool it I was making a fool of myself. I pointed out the young woman who had been touched by my words and she said she just wanted my money.
Back at the mind spa I was scolded for interrupting a poetry event for speechifying. I announced I could write poetry though I had never been able too before. I knocked out one on the pains of being me on the spot. Jennifer saved it and later sent it to me and it was pretty good. I may still have it somewhere. My friends challenged my growing grandiosity and my challenge of their sacred cows. I had always felt an air of hypocrisy and shameless commerce ran through the drug legalization crowd and with the death of my self-censor I no longer held back.
They challenged my unequaled genius with comparing me to my host who spoke three languages flawlessly. After they slept I broke out the German English dictionary and wrote a haiku. I don’t remember it in German but in English it went:
Sunrise War
Around dying Autumnal fires
Until sleep intervenes
I was having flashes of what I felt was genetic memory. At least one night I walked all night. I felt my body had walked about Europe for millennia. I had vague memories of marching with compatriots a squad of warriors sleeping around campfires in piles like puppies for warmth. I wanted to capture the old warriors sitting about the fire telling horror stories through the night as one by one they drift off to uneasy dreams.
At some point I had picked up a nasty huge swelling bruise and was walking with a heavy limp. My friends wanted me to go to a hospital. I knew enough that I was too crazy to go to a hospital and not risk admission in some foreign system. By then I was afraid my friends were out to get me. To push me into insanity. To force me to wager my soul in an unholy game of Risk with our host. To induct me into an international secret organization of drug dealers. I felt that if I slept someone would be whispering hypnotizing words into my ears and I would be lost, damned or both. I vowed I would not sleep again until I was safely out of this infernal city. The damaged foot was a problem. I laid in a special relaxation chair, leather, like something you would see in a dental office. I breathed into my nose and out of my mouth slowly and evenly concentrating on the air going by my septum. I clenched my fingers and toes and felt all of the incredible tension of my wire taut body. I released all of it and felt the incredible sense of total relaxation. I visualized the swelling leaving my foot and it becoming perfectly whole. Time passed I guess. I looked at my foot and the bruise was gone. I showed my friends my foot whole and restored and they were unimpressed. They still wanted me to go to the hospital as I was clearly mad thinking I could heal my foot. They asked if I had slept and I told them I had. Later I would lay down and close my eyes and pretend to sleep to try to allay their concerns but would also drop hints that I was only pretending.
One night fairly close to when we were supposed to leave I came in from a day of wandering and found Jennifer dipping CD sized sheets of hash into a pot of wax bubbling on the stove. We discussed in a roundabout fashion drug commerce and my possible participation in it. I had always made a very clear distinction that I was comfortable possessing and using drugs but not in their commerce. Sanctions are too great, the rewards too tenuous. Jennifer said at one point: “Act out of love and not fear”, a great line. I responded with: “Love of what and fear of what? Love of money is the root of all evil and fear of God is the beginning of wisdom”. She was unimpressed. She did give me a 100 guilders because I had given all of my money away. She told me not to give it away but to spend it on something “frivolous”.
next: going crazy part 4
first: going crazy part 1
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.
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