🚀 go-pugleaf

Part Two:  "Some Kind of Record"

                                       by GR4302@siucvmb.siu.edu


March 17  I learned something about genetics today I think.  Most
people are inclined to be grouchy; others find some kind of sanctity or
finally lose it I guess.  Another way to think of it:  For most people
if it doesn't come from the depths of their bowels and up through the
top of their own heads, then it's faking it.  A warped sense of honesty
based on some bad ideas about universals I guess, viz a viz, 1) Yes,
they exist; and 2) Yes, I understand reality because of the privileged
position of my reality system.  Hence they are motivated by little, and
having, then, little opportunity to exert the natural energies, siphon
them off in selfish little fits of bitterness and become the Grouchies.
The opposite I guess are those who can take any little suggestion of a
suggestion and focus on it, turn it, examine it, find some tentative
understanding and then shrink it down to be put aside till needed.
It's truly difficult, though, as Philosophers and Scientists well know,
to get an honest grip on things--that's why most people obsess on
themselves instead of the world around them and before them, a little
me of simple and true motivations and fears, please do not disturb.
Hmmm.... started this with genetics, where was I going?  Oh well, best
stay away from that topic anyway lest one be labeled a fascist
needlessly.  By the way, as this paragraph demonstrates, I'm trying it
again, OK?  We'll see how long it lasts this time....

March 18  Nothing to report.

March 22  Look this isn't going very well so just don't hassle me for
awhile.

May 5  Met this old man in Bath England.  What a killer.  I swear he
had the answer for everything and could put it to you in the most
astounding modern verse you've ever heard.  I think he was a musician
years ago in some band no-one's ever heard of--something about the
power of stars or.... Anyway he proposed to demonstrate to me that life
was indeed a conspiracy of the rich and powerful, but that this fact of
reality is generated by a terrible illusion about what indeed life is.
It sounded pretty typical from the description, but I was slightly
flattered by his intellectual attention, in a way, though I couldn't
say why I should consider his ramblings so intellectually important or
even worthy of attention--he seemed to readily assume that posture and
those around him, including myself, seemed equally comfortable and
willing to allow this mystical hierarchy.  Confounded I was.  He'd
convinced me of many things in his little cottage very quickly, and
strangely I felt more willing to get sexual with him than I had been
for some time, but he never asked and I never offered, though not from
any fear that he might be impotent; even at his age, talking to him,
there could be no doubt of his virility.  We talked all night, he
doesn't sleep.  He told me that he'll be dead in under two weeks, and I
can't but believe that I'll see his notice in the papers this month.
Oh I guess not, I'll be back in New York.

May 7  Did something wicked that I'll probably never even tell you
about.  It was delicious.

May 11  Back in New York something's stirring I can smell it.  Maybe
it's just the river.  Went to a butcher shop today.  You don't want to
hear this do you.  Ok.

May 12  Definitely something going on.  I don't know what it is, but
there's something boiling out there.  Maybe it's that guy who
gun-downed his Gramps a couple months ago.  The stiff was a rich man
who nobody liked--ran over a little girl or something like that years
ago.  When people get killed who nobody likes you'd think there'd be
rejoicing instead of bitterness.  I don't know, it's probably just this
gawdamn heat.  It's only May.  If this ain't global warming than I'm a
turnip in a teapot without a spout nor handle.

May 15  OK look I've decided that I don't care who sees this record.
Maybe something from Bath is finally sinking in or what, but I've
decided that if I'm going to write this I'm not going to play like I'm
living in a world of spies.  It's my game and I'm going to play like I
don't give a shit who knows what I know.  Notice:  anyone who willfully
copyrights this record is a slathering pitviper with no excuses left
for living.  I'll write about SDS if I want to--this is a place where
I'll stand and be counted.

May 15  Just had this dream about snakes.  Guess I shouldn't be so
fascist with my metaphors.  Imagine climbing a mountain and right as
you pull yourself up the last ledge a rattlesnake jumps right in your
face.  I fell and fell.  When they say you die if you hit bottom--it's
bullshit.  Holy-smokes the imagination can be terrifying.  Guess I'll
get up and wait for sunrise.

May 23  Decided to go out West and see some savages.  The Black Hills
are six billion years old.  I went down the Thieves Road to see where
the buffalo were slaughtered.  Went to Ft. Laramie where treaties were
signed to be broken.  Funny, everyone out East thinks the Indians are
gone.  Out here they're everywhere, though,  I suppose, eminently
ignorable by most.  I can't say why, but I'm convinced that someday
these people will pick up where we leave off.  Custer's Last Stand,
better Custer's Last Butcherous Blunder, is a type for the rest of
American history.  Look at a buffalo face to face and you can be
certain of your measliness.

May 24  Run in with the Goons.  I spent the night on the Pineridge
Reservation with some newly made friends and talked the night away.  On
the peak of understanding the dawn rose and the Goons kicked the door
down.  They seemed as shocked to see me as I was to see them.  They
jumped everyone in the room but me, beat them and hauled them away.
They pretended I wasn't even there.  I walked toward town until an old
Indian man gave me a ride.  I told him what had happened and he nodded
and shook his head and said 'yep' alot.  I'm sure he was drunk, but
somehow that was okay with me.

May 27  Spent the last three days trying to get those poor people out
of prison.  Damn this state is backward!  There's no justice here--just
like in New York.  All the time walking around from place to place I
kept wondering why I was trying to save these people from the police
and not rather trying to save their drunken compatriots that litter the
street.  Frustration deluxe.

May 29  I finally got to talk to the folks I've been trying to help.
They told me to leave them alone and get the Hell out of South Dakota.
It didn't make me angry.  I didn't understand, but in not understanding
understood.  "Save these people"--what an ass I've been!  Right now I'm
on a plane to Arizona.  Seven thousand feet in the air, hundreds of
miles per hour.  Here I am.

May 30  Came here looking for more Natives, found Hippies instead--at
least some variety of Hippie-like strangers.  Spent the night and today
at a party somewhere up in the mountains.  Hell I'm not even sure I'm
still in Arizona.  Must be though, these Western states never end.
There  was a woman there who I danced and talked with for hours who had
the most amazing drawings on her face and all over her body.  She
worshiped the memory of a Chinese-Mexican artist by the name of Salamon
Arando, and elsewhere I've written his life story as told to me by
Arion of Arizona (as I knew her).  If it is true that the dark
silhouette images that covered her body where indeed, as she said,
exact replicas of his work, then he was an artist worthy of the word.
Arando had in his early days been a boxer in Mexico City under the name
of Salamon Chon-ce.  His parents had emigrated from Shanghai starving
before he was born and later owned a chain of prestigious grocery
stores in the Querido district.  Because he'd been a boxer, she too
knew how to box and sparred with me and smacked me good--that'll teach
me.  Her grandfather used to tell her stories about Pancho Turley, a
miner who'd gone twenty-eight rounds, hands wrapped in cloth and strips
of leather, with Gentleman Jim Corbett, two fights before he beat
Sullivan and became Champion of the World.  "Pancho fought and mined
around here in these very hills for eleven years and then moved back
down to Old Mexico, where, it's said, he had three wives waiting."  I
remember these words exactly because I loved the sound, the resonance
of her intoning voice as she spoke these long rehearsed phrases before
me in the moonlight of the mountains.

June 2  Back in New York and feeling still slightly excited from my
last little jog West, though I fear it will wear off soon.  Something
strange going on--don't know what it is but I feel like somehow I
should.

June 3  Okay, no more of that.  The resurrection of SDS is going better
than I could've ever expected.  Surprisingly there are so many computer
heads at the meetings.  A new generation that, of course, breaks the
mold.  Good for me too, I think I'm getting the hang of this stuff.
You can easily apply idealism to the electronic world if you want
too--not so for the physical world.  Now how to make a computer do
pragmatics.  Aye there's the rub.  This is the problem:  I remember out
in Rosebud listening to an old Lakota woman talking about how she felt
at Crow Dog's funeral in 1985.  She was saying that in some way the old
people all died when he died.  She felt old at the time, though she's
since lived well beyond those years.  She said she felt so happy that
he was going back to the People, to be with the Grandfathers.  She said
she could feel everybody's thoughts and couldn't understand the sorrow
and fear coming from most present--except the drummers who could not
fear--while she was so happy to see him lying there all dead and ready
to be buried.  Now how can I communicate to you what it was like to
experience her communication of the feelings she felt and she believed
others felt so many years ago?  Now make a heuristic to interrogate all
these levels and I'll know what I'm doing.  It's not as impossible as
it seems, but it's a mountain, no doubt.

June 4  It is impossible.  I'm so glad.  I was a fool to think the
world was so small.  Never again.  Wait, maybe an approximation?  No--

June 11  Flew with this guy on his private jet to Nova Scotia to get a
glimpse of an eclipse.  No such luck.  Can you believe he had the gall
to pick up another woman there--probably because I wouldn't sleep with
him.  Oh well, who gives a shit, huh?  He gave me a ticket to New York;
I cashed it in for a bus ride to Toronto to talk to some people I'd met
there twenty-five years ago.  Draft resisters from the War in Southeast
Asia who never gave a thought to going back--to what?  Anyway, Luhina
and Fran were home, but didn't remember me.  Invited me in, we talked
for awhile.  Luhina finally confessed to recognizing me from the media
but hadn't remembered when I came up here with Jimmy during the early
riot years.  He said he knew I was resurrecting SDS and got pretty
defensive about his non-involvement with the things of the world, et al
ad nausea et cetera.  A rill drag.  Why did I come here?  Nothing's
ever popping in Canada.  I suppose that means I should head for Mexico
or the Caribbean.  Yeah, why not?

June 13  Back in New York for who knows what reason.  Was it another
SDS meeting?  These people don't even need me anymore--Hell my brain's
too old to keep up with their devious thought processes, but somehow
they always want my word on things and seem grateful for supplying
observations that they find fill in the missing pieces.  Is it all some
kind of mother fixation game?  I wish I could think so, but it's not.
I don't know--feel like I need to get the Hell out again.  Yeah, but
where this time?

June 14  I just remembered something I'd forgotten.  I talked to this
funny little man in Nova Scotia as we all stood there squinting at the
clouds.  It's like the things he said didn't mean anything at the time,
but were time-released into my bloodstream only this morning.  I'd
found this old raincoat on the walk across the rocks to the looking
place; it was kind of beat up, but I liked the color and it seemed
rather convenient, being that it was a blustery, threatening sky and
I'd brought nothing with me.  The man asked me for a cigarette, and
without thinking I pulled a pack out of the coat's left  pocket.  They
seemed okay, some French-Canadian brand, so I gave him one and smoked
one too.  He kept saying how I should go down to the caves by the shore
sometime.  He kept describing them in an intricate detail that'd
frighten a Robbe-Grillet, that would mute Faust in his tracks.  He
seemed able to give life with words to chaotic structures, to cave-wall
relief that would make a Mandelbrot hesitate, that would stampede a
heard of positivist realists up a tree, with such precision and
animation that I hardly noticed when he shifted his speaking to the
ensuing non-eclipse and some esoteric and bitter discussion of Sun-gods
in different phases in different parts of the world.  Hmmm, let's see,
there was some meaning there a moment ago that I felt I had to get
down....now where'd it go?  Hmmm...still, I don't know why I know it,
but he knew there were cigarettes in the coat, and he knew I'd found
the coat along the way.  Perhaps he'd found it too, earlier--I doubt
he'd worn it, it was too feminine--and'd stolen a cigarette from it
earlier.  But, no, he seemed to glare at me in a perverted sort of way,
a way that hinted that he knew things about that coat that spoke
perverse histories to which he alone was privy.  The whole time I was
with him I didn't feel like I was with a man at all--more like a
machine, some sort of device with limited function; though this is all
fantasy, of course, he was, indeed, real.  The way he broke away from
his diatribe when I showed the first disinterested shift of attention,
demonstrated an almost adolescent savantism for the mechanics of casual
conversation between strangers.  Nonetheless I now reflect on his words
and am simultaneously enlightened and confounded, like a day that
doesn't dawn on time and seems frozen in its first suggestion of a ray,
a great big bird's-eye hold that drains you blue in the face.  Blue as
that raincoat.  I lost it on the bus to Toronto.

June 17  Met some low-lifes down on the badside yesterday.  They
explained to me some helpful terminology for understanding the modern
world.  The world, the say, 's made up of Gooks, Chooks, and Goons.
Nothing else.  "Gooks is us all," says this likely-story face, "you
gook, me gook--rags and cribs don't mean shit.  Gooks is us waiting to
be had, dig?  Step in line, step right up, your time to kiss some ass
or gets stuck in the ribs with a pointy stick like a dog.  Dog's
another way to look at it see.  Gooks, dogs, y'know."  (I have this
handy new recording toy--I'll be quoting more often, better effect.)
"Chooks, is them shitheads on top what shit on us all.  Chooks tell the
Gooks when where to shit piss fuck trot and die.  Goons is us Gooks
done sold out to the Chooks with a gun and uniform, or a tie and an
axe-job.  Somebody steal yo' pension, or bust your head with a
night-stick, if he got a badge.  No badge?--just another Gook..."
Later somebody brought up the point that if there's Gooks and Goons,
then there must be Choons:  Chooks what got the bug so bad that they
don't want to just party and rub it in everybody's face, but want to go
out and be a super-Goon, a Choon, a shithead with an attitude and alot
of fancy toys.  I said it sounded like a fairytale.  They laughed at me
nervous-like.  "This is a dangerous place, y'know," one fellow Gook
said.  "Dangerous place," I said snorting, "what dangerous place?"  At
this point everybody's staring and snarling at each other--it's all
very boring and stupid--when somebody in the back yells "Yeah, she's
just a gawdamn Puke."  Somebody jabs him and yells "Shaddup;" you can
hear him grunt as he takes a blow, a couple of minor scuffles break
out.  "Sorry," the head hancho says in a macho sort of way, "we
disallowed people saying Pukes long time ago...no sexist offense
intended from anybody but the dingbat who just got goosed."  "Swell," I
retorted, and walked away swinging my hips.  When I got to the end of
the block I turned and yelled an obscenity in Arabic before sliding
into the rent-a-car and scooting away back uptown...yeah, back to the
wildside of Manhattan, where the days hop with the wonder of the world
rolling by and the nights are like a...wait just a minute, what is this
garbage--I better get a better chorus before I find my wit chin-deep in
one of those new hydro-hermetic landfills.  By the way, I later
discovered that Puke is a derogatory jargonism for a female, especially
as reduced to a merely sexual being, a somewhat undesirable, even
disgusting, sexual being at that, coming from the old punk-rock cliche
"My girlfriend/ She makes me wanna puke!"

June 27  Gawww, did someone slip something in my coffee.  Wait, I don't
drink coffee, do I?  Gosh I feel terrible.

July 7  Hh.  Reading the last few posts to see how I can pick this up
again and I can't believe how quickly reality's paced in this
post-post-post-modern world.  The head hancho guy of two entries ago is
Alfredo.  I met him in a upscale coffee club about a week after the
Gook and Chook lesson.  He was dressed very differently.  He comes up
to me and starts shouting in Arabic:  "Hey your the woman who called me
a bastard son of a goat the other day!  Who the hell do you think you
are?"  I was as startled to be confronted with this turn of events and
he must've been when I had sworn at him in the street.  Why'd I pick
Arabic there of thirteen-odd idioms at the tip of my tongue?  He
thought to seduce me. Instead, in record time, I'd converted him to the
cause.  He's now heading the Alfredo Faction of SDS.  Named after him
for damn good reason--he's got pull on both sides of the widening gulf
of economic disparity.  He's also a natural leader, and's doing things
with some of the more disaffected of our ranks that I believe haven't
been tried since Leary held magic court up at the Mansion, lo these
many years ago.  I still remember, Jimmy, I still remember all those
promises you made me when you had breath.  OK, no more of that.  I
asked Alfredo if Chooks had any connection with 'chuc's, as in
"pachucos" or punks.  "Sure," he said, "of course that's where it's
from--them street folks ain't stupid, they know who the shitheads rilly
are:  just a bunch of lousy punks!  Bunch of lousy Chooks!  Killers!"
He's dedicated, and why not?

July 8  Spent the day trying on clothes in my apartment.  Lately I want
to dress up when I go out at night.  I'm not sure why--it's almost a
morbid thing, but not actually, more sexual.  Just maybe, though, my
subconscious is trying to communicate with me--trying to trip myself
up, to reveal myself to myself somehow.  Holy smokes this is getting
terrible.  I'm going to a party tonight and I'm going to dress up.  I
feel ten years younger--but somehow I get this strange sense like I
ought to be annoyed at somebody for it.  Weird, I know.

July 9  They are going to try that little murderer.  Bet he'll get
life.  Strangely, the Computer Heads say there's better than good odds
that when this killing goes to trial sometime next year (or the next or
the next) it'll be an issue of some purport.  I can hardly believe it,
but looking at the shape of insanity in this city I'd say anything is
possible, most things are even likely.  Surprise has become almost a
necessary artform in NYC this side of the Information Age of boring
uselessness and crummy food.  And people wonder why there's guerrilla
warfare in the streets on weekends.  It's off to the wide world again
for me, though.  At first I was going to run off to Africa or Southeast
Asia, but now I don't feel like I should leave the Western Hemisphere
for awhile.  Maybe never again, huh?  I guess I'll head back to
Phoenix.

July 13  Never go through Monticello, Utah.  My uncle used to tell me
that.  Just take my word for it.  Never go through Monticello, Utah
unless you want some first-hand research on low-brow, bonehead police
ignorance.  It's that little town you see on the movies where everybody
gets pulled over.  I guess it's too close to the old uranium mines or
something.  But there was that other little town just south of there
where we got burgers.  They were so nice.

July 14  The shops in Phoenix turn me off.  I'm no longer interested in
their cheap imitation excitement.  Coming down the highway from Flag
and Sedona I caught this impression of just ignoring the border and
heading down the grand Chichimeca all the way to the Valley of Mexico.
That's what I'm going to do.  But I won't ignore the border.  I'll
ignore it in my mind, but get the correct papers anyway.  Hmmph, funny
how goods and services cross so freely.  I suppose if I were a
consumable instead of a consumer that things would be different.
Welllll, not me.

July 16  Tequila party on the desert.  Some delay on the paperwork to
get a car into Mexico.  Ignore the border--yeah.  Did some deadly
things last night.  Hey some of these Indians are as crazy as airline
pilots.  You know, there are roads everywhere.  I think we found some
lost city and goldmine last night and then lost it again.  I've learned
an amazing amount of things to say in various Apache and Yaqui dialects
in one night.  Head feels like I slept on a Howitzer in combat.  Don't
think I'm going to Mexico.  Don't know if my white ass can stand any
more tequila parties.

July 17  Paperwork came through but I'm already making plans to head
back to New York in a day or two.  I'm just going to check out a couple
more restaurants and then head back.  Sorry to be so boring.  It's the
dryness--that's it, my excuse for the day.

July 19  Made a good friend in one Alice Sinsil and have decided to go
with her into Mexico for at least a couple of days.  Might as well use
these tourist passes now that I have them.  We figure we'll just point
our noses down a south highway and see what happens.

July  21  Wow!  So we head down the highway into Mexico.  After about
two hours of driving in what seems to be the most vacant forsaken piece
of dirt on the planet we go up a few ridges to a squat plateau and find
ourselves in a little town where another highway comes through.  We
decide to live dangerously, so, popping a vioformo each, we go into
this roadside eatery for some local burritos.  They looked dangerous
and were delicious.  Here we meet some guy.  He looks American and
speaks English, but chuckles when we ask him where he's from.  "Around
here," he says.  We talk for awhile and Alice seems interested.  We say
we're looking for adventure and he offers to take us to some caves that
he knows back in the little foothills we've just come through.  I'm
instantly drawn by the notion, even though he indicates that we'll have
to make the first forty-foot descent by rope.  Alice obviously thinks
this will be a golden opportunity to get this white Mexican alone
somewhere in the dark and I'm amazed by her flamboyant sexual
overtures.  She's overdoing it terribly--something they say happens to
some when they cross the border.  Her innuendoes and body contortions
get to me too, and though I've no intention to sleep with either of
them, I feel a great sexual tension in the thought of lowering myself
into the earth and, of course, can't help but think about the seacaves
in Nova Scotia which I never got around to seeing.  I instantly want to
jump in the car and drive to Nova Scotia.  This is, of course, silly
and we proceed to climb into the cab of an old beatup pickup and head
off across the flats toward what seems to be nowhere at all.  It is
very exciting in a droll sort of way.  We are squeezed in rather
tightly, Alice in the middle, so the driver can't help but rub her
knees a bit as he shifts the gears.  She shakes slightly with each
shift and the sensation is transferred to me from my arm pressed
against her arm and right breast.  All the vibrations and bouncing make
it quite impossible to not touch each other in many unforeseen ways.  I
fight it for awhile and then give in to the feeling.  My tits get hard
and stick out.  I can see Alice's are too.  Here we are, our tits
sticking out, bouncing across the desert toward a whole in the earth.
Our tits are sticking out, our pussies our dripping, and the bumpy
washed-out road means the driver has to shift alot causing the nerves
in Alice's knees to send sparks all over us.  After awhile Alice even
starts to whimper and moan.  I stare out the window entranced by the
beauty of nothingness bouncing past me.  I'm going to have to stop here
and finish this entry tomorrow.  We did eventually make it to a hole in
the ground by a spring and descended into a cavern.  It was frightening
and awe-inspiring.  It was wonderful.

July 23  Somewhere in the Midwest, Illinois I think, or Kentucky.  I
didn't finish the last story, but well...hmmm.... How do I get here
from there?  Well I should just patch it up with a couple of images.
Descending down the big rope.  Exploring fantastic caverns, huge rooms,
indescribable formations.  Way down in a hole in a hole we found round
and phallic stalactites that hummed music when caressed.  I might've
been playing that crystalline music, under the earth, for days, but I'm
sure it was only hours.  It was a mind trip.  After a while we split up
in a big room and explored.  I remember seeing the man who brought us
praying in the dark.  I remember Alice being goofy, crazy.  I could
hear her laughing and moaning somewhere alone.  Later when we went back
up it was late night.  A flock a fruit bats were hovering in a cactus
patch, drinking nectar from the flowers.  Everybody says there aren't
fruit bats on the desert, but everybody's wrong.  We saw them feeding
and flying in the silvery brightness of a gibbous moon.  Afterwards I
recollected that I'd thought Mr. White Mexican Caveguide was after sex,
Alice sure was...I think.  But he didn't ever touch us except to help
us climb or descend.  I can't fathom it.  He left us off back where we
met.  Said he had to get home for 'The Celebration'.  What celebration?
Despite the innocent excitement of it all I can't deny that my
impressions of this 'out west' visit have been distinctly sexual.  It's
too late and I gotta get back to New York before this rent-a-car breaks
me.  How did I get here?  In a rent-a-car.  Left Alice in Phoenix and
have driven for hours....

July 27  Back in New York I've decided that this journal is getting
boring.  Think I'll inject some fiction into it.  Yeah, why not?  I
think I'll write a story in this journal when I'm bored.  Something
Gothic but nonetheless mundane and philosophical...no, something
stupid.  I'll come up with something.  Something is definitely brewing
in this city.  It's gonna take awhile, but I think this ageist
case--murder, I mean--is gonna take it's toll on this city.  Maybe blow
the whole damn thing apart.  Who'd've known there were so many
Morituri's Daughters still around?  The more radical ones have been
killing old people, and not the run-of-the-mill grandma on Social
Secretly mugged in the park type of hits--rich old people, executed
from cars with no robbing involved.  When rich people get slaughtered
and their fat wallets remain intact...well let's just say the Chooks
and the Goons get nervous.  Someone's also leaving smashed TVs in
prominent places on a regular basis.  It's New York, so, what need I
say?  If it hasn't happened here yet, wait around, it will soon.
Sooner or later everything will've happened here and I guess then the
whole damn thing WILL blow apart like a turd slogging down the pipe.  I
love this city!  At least the poor here have the decency to die away
from the camera--get these third world starvlings off my screen and
into some fanatic's army.  What year is it anyway??  Where's my green
jacket?  Did I ever mention that I've lived here all my life and I've
still never been to Radio City Music Hall.  Radio City, calling Radio
City, this is TV town, urgent reply requested communique from
Phoneville...

July 29  This City is definitely killing my brain.  I wish I knew
exactly how--that is beyond the usual blamers.  I'm gonna find out soon
though, and then watch out suckers!

July 31  "Satellite Sally/  How I wish you were mine/  You fly through
the heavens/  Keep the world on time...."

Aug 18  OK, here's the story.  The main character is a man in some
small town in Ohio.  His name's unimportant; I'll make one up when I
need it.  He comes to understand, he believes, that the Spirit World in
all about us and very close.  We learn as babies to ignore the Spirit
World in favor of the physical.  New Ghosts learn also to ignore us,
though it's easier for us than them.  So, one day our character is
walking down a path in a forest when he accidentally startles a family
of ghosts.  The momentary but intense reaction produced by this sudden
chance meeting propels our hero into a sensitivity of spirits, i.e., he
becomes a medium in a sense, but not like the stereotypes would have
you think.  He discovers eventually that those in the Spirit World who
have not successfully learned to ignore the Physical spend much effort
to try to attract the attention of the Physical world for some great
but unknown end.  OK, that's the setup.  I'll try to develop this.
Been having headaches and nausea, but I'm okay.  SDS is booming.
They're--I mean WE're doing things with computers and counting heads
I'd never've dreamed of a few years ago.  This nasty little case--you
know, what was his name?--IS going to blow a hole in this nasty city
and WE're going to be there in force.  Forget about who's right and
wrong--everyone is!  Human energy will be released.  It needs to be
harnessed.  This is it, folks!

Sept 1  Read this article today about UFOs.  The style was so
matter-o'-fact empiricist that I almost choked.  Using some pretty
sophisticated social theories this guy argues what Wilson and Whole
Earth said clear back in the dark ages, that UFOs all came from this
one source, 1947 or something....a picture book or something.  But, you
know, the smug tone of this study reveals, I suppose, what was wrong
with the argument in the first place--It just took some jerk with a PhD
to make it stink enough to smell it.  Now, I'm not going to make the
same mistake and say I have some kind of an answer, but I think it's
worth considering.  People make up bugaboos all the time.  Some catch
on, some never get beyond your bedroom closet.  Some creative egghead
might've made up some saucer stories out of the techno-gore of World
War II, but it wouldn't have meant anything to the world if people
weren't, in some ways, primed for the idea--the idea, being, of course,
that there are other people--or what have you--inhabiting other
star-systems.  Sure some people must've caught on to that idea a long
time ago.  Hopis claim they've known about other worlds forever and
used to communicate interstellarly with their sacred wells (murdered by
Peabody Coal).  I suppose it probably occurred to Newton and some of
his friends or even Copernicus...no, not Copernicus, but maybe Galileo,
huh?  Well, whatever, in 1947 I suppose most Americans had finally
reached Newton's Universe and were ready for extraterrestrial life.
Wow, I wonder what will happen when most people catch up with Einstein
and Heisenberg...hmmm....Let's dream up a new myth.

Sept 3  OK, so Harry, now being sensitized to the Ghost World (as he
calls it and because Spirit World sounds too bozoid) spends many long
hours staring into the fire in the fireplace at home, the house he was
born in, and stares at the swirling mass of spirits scurrying around in
their non-lives.  It's like searching a world with a VR, a huge world,
seemingly never ending.  One night almost by accidents Harry stumbles
on to a bird's eye view, so to speak, from which for a fleeting moment
he sees a spiritual beacon, like a simple but piercing, glowing candle
in the distance off to the side of his perception.  The sudden impulse
to move toward the candle is unmistakable, and Harry finds himself
quickly focusing in on a group of strange spirits standing in front of
some sort of wall that they have built.  Some are moaning, some
chanting, some discussing, most concentrating intensely with their
ghost eyes squeezed shut.  Several of the ghosts notice his coming and
a shout goes up.  Harry is startled, no ghosts have ever seen or wanted
to see him before as he explored, mentally, their realm.  The situation
is intense.  Ghosts are buzzing around.  Some are running toward Harry,
others are trying to revive the concentraters to join the welcoming
party, others are wringing their hangs and trying to stop those who are
trying to wake the trancers.  At once a breeze, a ghost breeze, blows
in and freezes them in their tracks.  When the breeze leaves they all
go back to what they were doing before.  They have forgotten Harry.
But no, not all.  Several ghosts come his way.  He can see that one of
them is his father.

Sept 4  What's a bird's-eye view?  Says one ghost to another.  What's a
bird's-eye view?  Harry's father says to him.  I don't know, says
Harry, I don't even want to know.  The ghost world is reaching out to
you say the chanters, from some he can feel love.  Before Harry has
only explored this realm as a VR sightseer, now he sits to talk.  How
does he talk to ghosts?  I think a bolt of lightning hit him when he
was a child.  I think he fell on his head on the way to the ball.  I
think he was flooped in a fly-away fie time, a woop in a wanna wanna
hey.  What is this?  What connection here?  Harry?  No...  Hmmm...

Sept 7  Been down long.  This is up.  Spent the last two days putting
up fliers for a big meeting.  We're organizing our computer resources
and delegating tasks.  When the shit hits the ventilation duct we want
to be ready for everything.  We're also dividing up along ideological
lines--no, this is good.  The observers will concentrate on observing;
the actors on acting; the servers on service, and the shit-slinging
pyro-techies on...well, their special brand of magick.  We have at
least seven more months--plenty of time to get the information we'll
need.  Projection=Time=Information=Power.  What'll we think of next?
'We', yeah, what a great word....
....Harry spent non-days and non-nights glued to the feet of his
newfound mentors.  The Dead, he learned--at least those dead that were
unwilling to accept the non-day to non-day mundaneness of death, that
yearned, as it were, for some golden promise spoken into their ears
long ago that said there'd be answers--these dead, he learned, were
always reaching out to the living.  And many of these did not
understand what they sought though they responded to the innate
motivation to send a message of some kind or another to the breathing
and bleeding hordes of human flesh.  Without understanding they reach
out desperately and vulgarly, haunting the fearful and mesmerizing the
faint of heart among the living.  Some, though, as Harry discovered,
had begun, non-eons ago, to organize efforts at developing theories and
practices for communication with life.  And, indeed, there was among
many such groups a belief that theory, method and an understanding of
what exactly they sought would coincide at some juncture.  Those ghosts
who remained aware of Harry dumped their summations of knowledge into
Harry at desperate, exhausting speeds and then collapse one by one.
(Here Harry begins to suspect that ultimately all existence, even the
spiritual, is material--he is right.)  Finally Harry is left alone with
his father.  The ghost stands, takes his son by the hand.  This is the
juncture, says Harry's ghost-father, I know now why we have worked lo
these many non-ages, and I know now why you are come to us.  Harry and
his father sit under the ghost of a dead juniper and discuss the
mysteries of being and becoming.

September 14th  Oo I wish I were a beatnik/ Living in the 50s/
Banging on bongodrums/  Oo oo like I'm hepcat in a hip pad/
I got heels to rock this universe/ A motion flow shone through/
The upside down side of the night!  Hah!
Harry?  He's an ass.  Doesn't know his tooter from his hooter.  That's
dangerous, my grabby friends.  His father, a ghost, yet still a fool.
Couldn't you tell by all the neoplatonic nonsense?  Didn't you see them
all wearing those silly flowing robes?  And you missed the one's
smoking fat ghost-cigars underneath the veranda?... Harry fell for it
all, and why not?  He'd been flying around in the ghost world so long
now that he almost didn't realize that he was becoming a plug zombie,
sans plug.  The fire in his hearth had gone out long ago and the itch
of his sweater finally brings Harry back to his wee senses--reduced,
that is, because of emaciation.  He doesn't know how long he's been on
the floor.  He flounders, wails.  At once jumps up and lurches into the
kitchen to eat a peach pie and stare nauseatedly at the cheap wallpaper
and mounted oriental trinkets.  The peach pie begins to work its
special brand of magic and instead of throwing up Harry smashes a
porcelain dog from the far east and is elated.  It's orientalism gone
in a blinding flash of insight and a desire to hear something break
apart here in the realm of the living, and the mix was perfect, nice
resonance to the ring, but the artistry was non-existent, replaced by a
machine, or worse, those half-human waifs, the robot majority.  Trinket
smashing keeps him active for at least seven minutes (his grandmother
would've needed half a day, her mother several seasons) which was time
enough for the peach pie trip to wear off into some gut wrenching
version of digestion.  Still half-frenzied, head hurts Harry, he reels
between tenses.  Intensely aware of this thing digestion, this
rendering of other beings into the sweat and shit of life among the
living.  Not too good, but still sweet in a way he cannot described and
wonders if he should desire, and feels driven to a slight but secret
revelling in this passage, this gasping grasping life.  A bath is in
order he decides and heads for the upstairs tub with a box of salts and
a frosty can of reverse-osmosis sparkling water.  While lying in steam
he remembers he has a cat and wonders if she's okay.  Who knows?  Who
knows how many days its been huh?  The thought is the opening to a gut
splitting notion of how bad his predicament might be and he doubles up
in pain.  The pie has not given up so easily, it is unsure if, under
the rules, it must yield to this creature, perhaps not much more living
than itself.  Abdominal revolts erupt ubiquitously.  Unable to lift
himself out of the suds Harry lies there naked and wet groaning and
twitching with each cramp, shaking and sobbing like a baby.  He thinks
about his mother and cries.  He never saw her in the ghost world.  He
never even tried.

Sept 17  Just missed another national holiday.  Was up in the
Adirondacks, what's left of them.  Came home just in time to see it
snow in September up to my ankles.  I feel like a lie.

Sept 23  Been there.  Yup.  Done that.  Yup.  Been there.  Yup.  Don't
wanna monkey on my back.

Oct 11  Tomorrow's Columbus Day ("heh heh," as we use to say) or was it
yesterday.  I'm gonna turn this whole town upsidedown to find out,
honey, I am.  What time is it anyway.  It's 10:23.  Ooo wee.  So, okay,
Harry, like, survives his run-in with the pie and the tub?  And, and he
gets to the point eventually that he can speak with some of the ghost
adepts, y'know, like, like his father and the other hipsters, like,
without having to like get all bulemic or whatever, y'know, cause, ah,
like, ah, that was a bad scene, y'know, see?   Well anyway it takes a
while but Harry's father, y'know?, he, uh, convinces him, uh, uh,
Harry, that, uh, he has got it figured out and, well, the bottom line
is that he wants to use Harry in an experiment that might be able to
bring the dead back to life, or some kind of life (not necessarily,
like, back here on Earth, which, y'know, would get, well uh, quite
crowded?, y'know?, ifin we start letting all these dead people come
back to life, y'know?) like in space or something, but he's just gotta
have Harry as the guineapig, see.  See, Harry's intuned so he won't go
crazy, and he's not, cause he's not going crazy, at least I don't think
he's going crazy, and he's got these dudes in his head all the time, or
well, like, not all the time, but, y'know.... Anyway, his dad, like,
he's a ghost, remember?, wants to somehow use his, Harry's, pattern,
like, his, like, pattern of life, like, to, uh, y'know (no, I guess you
don't, huh? haha), like, regenerate himself somehow so like he'll be
alive again, only this time it's him doing it for himself and so he
can't die again, see?  Immortality.  Anyways, things don't go so well
as youins might a' been suspiciousful of, on account of the stuff about
them intellectual ghosts, like, uh, being jackasses and, y'know.  So.
uh, uh, yeah, but you'll find about that alright, but, uh, later.

Oct 17  The big day came, and Harry went off to a remote logging camp
in the Adirondacks in order to be in top mental form for the ordeal,
for ordeal it promised to be.  Indeed.  His father (a ghost) planned to
clone himself anew be minutely focusing of the emanations of life
essence coming from the physical realm and as projected by the intuned
and focused gravity of Harry's existence--an ultimate medium.  But a
big breakfast didn't help much.
--Look I'm on to something.  This stuff I write--it's not all me.  I'm
almost sure of it.  Yesterday I walked past a dumpster, and certain
smells wafting my direction from it brought up memories so distinct yet
so shallow, so tangible yet so illusive, that I'm beginning to believe
my mind's being tampered with, like in 1969 when they held me in that
special cell for 17 hours and made it so I could never tell anyone.
Well, I guess it didn't work entirely.  My analyst saw to that.  I
could tell you all about it now but it's too pornographic for this
book.  No, I wasn't raped, not sexually.  I guess I was raped--rather
like being vulgarly assaulted by a strutting idiot too floppy to be
very dangerous.  See, I've let it seep in again.  I'm supposed to
repress these things, I know that somehow.--
All night long the spiritual lightning flashed over the scarred
mountaintop cabin where our hero lay buried in the emeshings of
history, of life and death, generation and evolution, the possibility
of new frontiers without the severance from reason demanded by the
churches and their alchemist minions. --I know this is therapeutic.--
Harry lay there still as Pygmalion's love while all night he found the
stirrings of his father deep within his soul.  Great forces of energy
stirred in the ghost world and the physical, and beneath the ambient
thunder the ghost college chanted about DNA and water.  As Harry
blinked off into the night sky he smelled the memory of anahydrous
ether and sensed that, Buddha-like, he was to reach the Nirvana of
nothingness.  In the morning he felt anticlimactic.  Rising to shave he
sensed nothing had happened, and sensed no connection with the spirit.
Instinctively he reached out to touch the ghost world and had the
startling sensation that no-one was home, that they all had gone into
hiding, and he could smell a faint odor that smelled like shame.  All
at once prickling sensations running up his neck burst into panic, as
when something under pressure is released in a sudden expansion, and he
fell into the empty tub in fear and confusion.  Gently from some hidden
ghost-corner red-ghost-faced Harry's father comes before him with the
bad news.  "Yes, Harry.  Yes, I'm right in front of our face cause I'm
right in you.  I don't know Harry.  I don't know if it ever even
would've worked in the first place.  If it does, I know I couldn't do
it.  But it was easy, eventually, to get inside of you, and I just
couldn't resist.  It was a siren call.  I didn't mean to stay, but I
stayed too long and now I'm in here for good, Harry, so you'd better
start getting used to it okay, son?"  In trying to become some shallow
souls' misguided version of a god, Harry's father, instead, became the
most boring of demons.  And so here's to you, Harry, in your black and
white suit and your work-a-day week.  Here's to all the many ex-people
who would like to crawl into your head for a ride, something destined,
I'll wager, to keep you cowered in the remotest corner of your social
psyche from now until doomsday.  What do you say, Harry, huh?
What is it?

Oct 22  This would be a day for speaking and writing if it were not a
day for the entrapment of the sanitized.  Think of it as a muck
dredging.

Oct 23  For some reason today I keep thinking about the words of a Hopi
man I met on one of my flings out West... what was his name?  He
claimed to have lived with the Arawak, though I could never get him to
explain how that could be.  Said he learned so much from seeing what he
called "the distance between us since we last parted."  I don't know,
I've been to the Arawak and don't remember hearing any of this weird
stuff that this guy--Bill, Bill... Runs Ahead is his name--was saying.
Probably just made it all up.  Well, anyway, it's my nightmare.  The
one I've been having.  It's like I'm slogging through a sewer with bats
and moaning all around and I know something's lurking in the depths,
something hideous.  The trip is sometimes better or worse (last
night's--wooo), and though I always manage to find and fight my way to
the exit, I hear this laughter booming behind me, laughing at the
futility of my escape--it knows I'll be back tomorrow night, or soon
enough.  The I wake up, like clockwork.  (Lately I don't know if I ever
dream anything else--guess I should try to check on that.)  Today I
woke up with Bill Runs Ahead's words in my mind:  "Y'konw, if not for
grace of the Great Spirit we would all become demons some day--
inevitable.  The Aztecs, like do many peoples, forgot about grace, and
so rightly seeing their destiny in demonhood, deemed that they should
seek to become adept at it, better to reign in Hell than to serve
there, better to be the torturers than the tortured.  Poor fools!"  He
was a devout Christian, though he wore traditional ceremonial clothes
all the time and hated to speak English. We conversed mainly in Indian
Spanish, and I learned some Hopi from him.  Come to think of it, I
think he did know a little Arawak.  Could've gotten it out of a book I
guess.

Oct 28  Met another life today.  Fascinating!  Went to a lecture on
SocioRadicalism at the University and began talking to this woman.
She'd run away from home at age 13 to keep from being raped and ended
up as a biker woman for six years.  At nineteen she'd tried to be a
model and ended up as a hooker.  Found out by accident one day that she
wasn't as dumb as people, including herself, thought.  Started
outsmarting the pimps and ended up with some money.  Was a pimp too for
awhile.  Sold drugs, ran some schemes, eventually escaped it all with
the help of a social worker and ended up with a PhD from Stanford.  She
spent seven months in the slam at 22.  Fascinating person,
unbelievable.  Then there's Stacy who I haven't even mentioned up to
now.  I met her, what, six weeks, ago?  I think.  She's twelve or
thirteen, I think.  We've become real pals.  She seems so moody but
never is.  She's definitely the best SDS recruit we've had in months.
I think.  And she's white.  I don't know why that should seem so
significant.  Guess I just don't meet many white people nowadays.  No,
that's not true.  But it is in a sense.  I know I'm not making sense.
I guess it's that she's young and white and living in New York instead
of Hong Kong or Dusseldorf.  Maybe that's why I've sworn off the Old
World.  Or maybe that's just another symptom.

Oct 31  Just had to do some Harry today.  You can probably guess what
life's been like for him lately.  Harry I'm thirsty!  Harry, why don't
you get a cat?  Harry how could you think such things?  Harry you're
life's a wreck!  Yup, says Harry, I'm a rilly big mess!  And when
Harry's Daddy is preoccupied Harry often thinks of a little silver gun
he has hidden upstairs in the chest.  Harry takes a vacation to
Arkansas to try to rid himself of his torment, but finds the torment
strengthened.  Daddy's never been to Arkansas before and he loves it
because he always liked to go places.  He tries booze and finds his
father enjoys it more than he does and starts to insist on it more and
more often.  The persistence of someone in your own head can be
horrendous and so Harry finds himself at first grudgingly and later
forcefully taken over by Papa's ghost to go on one of his "flings."
Harry's getting desperate, but he begins to notice that indeed his
father has grown lecherous.  Perhaps it was death, or who knows--he'd
been quite the prude in his life.  Harry notices that the porn scenes
in shows distract Daddy instinctively and so he begins to watch more
and more racy flicks which seem to give him some thinking space.  On a
whim he seduces a co-worker and at the last minute turns the action
over to his startled but very pleased voyeur father who proceeds head
long into chasms of intense delight leaving Harry breathing room he
hasn't had in seeming ages, breathing room in which he begins to plan
for his future.
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