This is Thursday morning May 29, 2009, Sergeant Pepper day. You know, if this place were a restaurant they would long since have gone out of business. We had Raison Bran for breakfast with grape juice - - and after a protracted wait, pancakes and sausage. But there is this twenty minute or longer wait when you are just twiddling your thumbs. Marcus Blackwell once made the remark, “He who steals my time does me a grave injustice”. And yet around here all time stops while you wait for others to do their jobs like last night in the medication line. One longs for the scenario in Coocoo’s Nest where you each line up and are given your medication in ten seconds or so and the line moved on. Around here you wait a couple of minutes per person while whoever is in charge either looks for your medication they misplaced, or they get into arguments about when they can have their pain medication. Last night I had a dream about Gene Scott and the theme was “Pursuing the fight of Faith against all odds”. Many times, as in one of Gene’s sermons, Faith is like the case of Michelle, or something - -one of David’s wives, and David had ordered the deaths of five of her sons to satisfy a demand of Jehovah, so that it says “The five bodies hung before the Lord” and the mother would come by and look at the rotting corpses long past any rational point hoping they would be resurrected or something and she’d brush the flies away and chase the birds of prey away that would perch on the bodies. And finally King David was so impressed with a mother’s devotion that he ordered the bodies be given a proper burial. But this is what it’s like with your Faith sometimes. Like the whole snail mail thing was kept going despite it being an almost solo act on my part. In another part of this dream, and I’ve often dreamed something like this, I’d be writing a letter but something would be wrong. Either the pages would get wet on the way to the mail box, or in this case I ran out of ink in the typewriter ribbon and I would be pounding away at that last key sentence, that formed the keystone of the letter. Of course my snail mail letters (we’re leaving out Mark Campbell’s name for the purpose of this illustration) felt like a solo effort sometimes. But even when you’re alone, I guess Gene Scott would say you aren’t really alone but have God’s power with you. In this dream Gene told how he had to drive in a “Satanic direction” (in this case West) in order to go to church every Sunday, and what an obstical it was for him to overcome. Our snail letters went from weird to weirder in 1982 when we began using imagery from “Satanic Magesties Request” and there was a focus on just the two small “Red Birds”, which were like red Marinatha Doves, and the two stood for “The adequate witness” according to Gene Scott. And the “red birds” stood for Federation War Ships. There was writing which borrowed from Gene Scott’s teachings. These ranged from the book “Holy Blood Holy Grail” starting in September 1982 on through stuff about the Great Pyramid, to astrological stuff where Gene Scott taught there were 48 constelations and 12 zodiac signs each with three “attending decans”. And the whole Zodiac was designed to tell “God’s Story” to the world. But then the station Gene was on went off the air on May 24th. 1983. But we wrote stories on various themes. There was that “Sheep” Pink Floyd parody where I was transported to what I thought was Heaven, or maybe it was Hell. There was stuff on the mystic symbolism of the waterfall and once I wrote a story about how Christ and his Desciples went into a drug trance beneathe a waterfall at Ceceria Philipi. There was the “Stoned Imaculate” zone of the Universe, which featured a drawing done in bold purple ink of those “squares” from Blue Oyster Cult’s first album. And there was stuff involving black holes going back to at least 1981. When we bought the Rush album with Cygnus XI on it, there was a lot of dissertation on that, how a black hole could transform you. Those of you who have seen our rock compilation of “Going Retro” will note that Cygnus XI is about going back to the period of Greek Mythology. There was still the Zachary stuff but that was being choked out. Then in the summer of 1983 I began to write allegorical stories about being transported to the East Coast in sort of a mirror realm. There was stuff about looking at the crescent moon just above the ocean, and the impending Rapture. In the fall of 1983 I again started talking about a possible Rapture of taking away of the faithful. In the summer of 1983 there was new stuff about elements of the I Ching and the “eight directions” and that number theory and the 1, 2, 4, 8, 7, 5 - - progression and all the numerological mysteries waiting to be unlocked. There were then introduced elements from the Stephen King books, “Christine” and “Pet Cemetary” at the turn of the year 1984 and it just gets weirder and weirder. It’s a whole treasure trove of writings just waiting to be rediscovered at my parent’s house.
After mulling over my dream for a while I went out into the real world and talked to Wally and Richard and I realized “I’m among sane people now; I have to act sane now and can’t tell them the insane musings I’ve been having”. This is part of the problem when I moved into my apartment in July of 1988. I was in “fantasyland” for years and years dealing with people with a tenuous grip on the real world. Of course I no longer have the book “Flashbacks” by Timothy Leary, and a lot of others. When you’re living with a person who’s even more insane than you are you tend to withdraw. But even Clark Kent must from time to time have doubts about the “Double Life” he’s leading where he goes to a boring nine to five job you can almost sleep-walk you way through. (Not exactly, but you know what I mean) After the fall of 1987 I felt myself forced to start thinking about reality and my own future again. Much as it would be an adjustment I had to climb out of that Philip Kiriacus vault I’d been reposing in. Now it was time for me to start dating again. I could buy new clothes, but how was I going to get a new mind. Of course at my apartment I mistook the crowd for College Students since there was a College nearby. In reality they were young married couples, often with newborn babies, who were truckers, utility workers and other redneck occupations. They liked to get stoned on weed and party but they tended to be very clannish. My Romulan friends felt very uncomfortable and warned me I shouldn’t have moved in. Aside from the obvious things I’ve mentioned, there were allusions to possible Satanic activity.
Then we come to Gail Mc Nally’s poetry “My Inner Schizophrenic”. I am dedicating this Blog posting to her. What is poetry written by an insane person? I’m waiting with baited breath to get my hands on a copy of her book. Is it any different from poetry written by a person not diagnosed? You know, it’s been my experience that genuinely insane people really aren’t that creative. They usually get stuck in one groove- - often the “I’m OK but everybody else is an idiot” kick. Quite often, genuinely insane people, like Born Again Christians, become very authoritarian. Look at Marcus Blackwell. He regarded the upper patio as the deck of a ship and he was the commanding officer, and we were all his subjects. If I had the whole Marcus thing to do over again I would have stood up to him and challenged him a lot more. People tend to think of insane people having vivid imaginations when in reality this just isn’t the case. If a person is creative, he is probably sane. People think of
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