🚀 go-pugleaf

GookCity, Part Two:  "Some Kind of Record"  (first of two posts)

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, imminently
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 a strip 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 resurerection 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 a coat 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 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 of 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 jiggling
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 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 just hours.  It was a mind trip.  After awhile 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 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 ends.  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
started, 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.
;^##