"AUTOBIOGRAPHY"

IF I CAN REDUCE HARM, I AM MORALLY OBLIGATED TO DO SO, WHETHER I AM PAID OR NOT.



(Poetry is not a joke.)


("My story isn't pleasant, it's not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories; it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves."

---Hermann Hesse, in DEMIAN: The Story of Emil Sinclair's Youth.)


("My past is so complicated you wouldn't believe it, man."

---Bob Dylan, quoted in Newsweek, 11.4. 1963.)


(We do not see things as THEY are, we see things as WE are. The same is true about what we do and do not sense when we hear, touch, smell, and taste.)


("Hallucinations have always had an important place in our mental lives and in our culture. Indeed, one must wonder to what extent hallucinatory experiences have given rise to our art, folklore, and even religion."

---Oliver Sacks, in his book HALLUCINATIONS. [From the back cover of the first Vintage Books edition, 2013: "To many people, hallucinations imply madness, but in fact they are a common part of the human experience."])


(“Each of us…constructs and lives a ‘narrative’ and is defined by this narrative.”

"I suspect that a feeling for stories, for narrative, is a universal human disposition..."

---Oliver Sacks, in his 2015 book ON THE MOVE: A Life.)


("You know, if I sit down with my grandmother right now, she's not going to give me a bunch of facts. She's going to tell me a story."

---Tonya Mosley, a black woman who is co-host of the National Public Radio (NPR) show Fresh Air, speaking with Jane C. Hu about using psychedelics to assist in the healing of racial trauma. [From The Microdose, the newsletter of the University of California, Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, 5.22. 2023.])



("Hallucinations that serve an understandable cultural function should be considered nonpathologic."

---Henry A. Nasrallah and Donald J. Smeltzer, in their 2002 book CONTEMPORARY DIAGNOSIS AND TREATMENT OF THE PATIENT WITH SCHIZOPHRENIA. [Publisher's note on back cover: "Supported by an unrestricted grant from AstraZeneca." Quetiapine, used for the treatment of schizophrenia, is sold under the trade name Seroquel. In 2010, the U.S. Department of Justice fined AstraZeneca $520 million because of the company's aggressive marketing of the drug.])


(Sometimes I think America is like the actor playing a schizophrenic in a TV advertisement for Ingrezza [valbenazine], a medication used to treat tardive dyskinesia, an involuntary movement disorder sometimes caused by the use of antipsychotic medications. I saw the advertisement on the "Start TV" channel in March 2020.)



("We're just in a completely different world right now. A lot of things are not going to go back to the way they were."

---Dr. Jennifer Payne, director of the Women's Mood Disorder Center at Johns Hopkins, quoted by Rhitu Chatterjee, NPR News ["Shots", with a hypodermic syringe logo], 5.6. 2021.)


("...global catastrophes like COVID-19...upend every aspect of daily life."

---Yasmin Tayag, Fortune, 9.7. 2021.)


("In March, 2020, as pandemic lockdowns began, Musk e-mailed Tesla employees, telling them that he intended to violate orders and show up at work, and downplaying the significance of COVID-19."

In April, 2020, after Alameda County "...officials extended shelter-in-place orders, Musk was on a call with outside financial analysts...:

'I would call it forcibly imprisoning people people in their homes against all of their constitutional rights,' he told the analysts, speaking of the lockdowns. 'What the fuck?' he added. 'It's an outrage. An outrage....This is fascist. This is not democratic. This is not freedom. Give people back their goddam freedom.'"

"Musk, who smoked pot on Joe Rogan's podcast, prompting a NASA safety review of SpaceX, has, perhaps understandably, declined to comment on the reporting that he uses ketamine, but he has not disputed it. 'Zombifying people with SSRIs for sure happens way too much,' he tweeted, referring to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, another category of depression treatment."

---Ronan Farrow, The New Yorker, 8.28. 2023, writing about Elon Musk, who

"is the wealthiest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of US$222 billion as of December 2023, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, and $244 billion according to Forbes, primarily from his ownership stakes in Tesla and SpaceX."

---Wikipedia

["During a 2022 interview on the 'Full Send' podcast, Musk shared the aftermath of his appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, revealing, 'The consequences for me and for SpaceX were actually not good, because (weed) is federally illegal and SpaceX had federal contracts.'

As a result, Musk found himself subjected to a series of drug tests.

'I had like a whole year of random drug tests.'"

---Jing Pan, Yahoo News, 1.29. 2024.])

("Washington state's liquor and cannabis board announced on Monday that it will allow adults to claim a free marijuana joint when they receive a COVID-19 vaccination shot. The promotion, called 'Joints for Jabs', is in effect now through July 12, and is part of the state's strategy to get more people vaccinated."

---Tre'Vaughn Howard, CBS News, 6.8. 2021, in "'Joints for Jabs': Washington state will give you free weed to get vaccinated".)

("Daily marijuana use outpaces daily drinking in the US, a new study says"

"Millions of people in the U.S. report using marijuana daily or nearly every day and those people now outnumber those who say they are daily or nearly-daily drinkers of alcohol, according to the study by Carnegie Mellon University."

---AP News, 5.22. 2024.)

("7-Eleven, the iconic convenience-store brand, plans to close more than 400 'underperforming' locations across North America, its Japanese-based parent disclosed...

Cigarette purchases, at one time a key sales category for convenience stores, have fallen 26% since 2019, with a shift in sales to other nicotine products not making up much of the difference, the chain noted."

---Kate Gibson, 10.12. 2024, CBS News.)


("There are sensations and feelings I can’t describe, but that I’ll never forget. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever experienced, but I can’t say what it was; it’s like trying to grab smoke."

---Jim Carroccio, 71, a retired home builder who may be the first person in America allowed to receive an expensive guided psychedelic session using psilocybin mushrooms. Carroccio had never taken a psychedelic substance before, and he said his experience in Oregon was extremely positive and VERY healing.

[The above quote is from an answer Carroccio gave to one of a series of questions he was asked by Jane C. Hu in a brief interview published in The Microdose, 7.31. 2023])

("...if you’re having trouble paying rent, how could you be thinking about spending hours of your day in a session?"

---Alissa Quart, a writer, in an interview with Jane C. Hu, commenting about one of the difficulties poor people have in obtaining psychedelic therapy. In The Microdose, 8.12. 2024.)


"Canadian senator Larry Campbell told the audience at last week’s Catalyst Psychedelics Summit in Ontario that his mood had mysteriously improved over a couple of weeks during the pandemic — and his wife admitted she’d been spiking his coffee with microdoses of psilocybin, writes Psychedelic Spotlight."

---Jane C. Hu, in The Microdose, 5.27. 2022.

(Unsuspecting people being secretly given microdoses of LSD is THE huge, huge "ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM" that people really do NOT want to think about or talk about.

It may well become an extremely common method of manipulating people in the workplace.

Unlike psilocybin mushrooms, a microdose of LSD has no taste or smell, and is not visible. A microdose of LSD is EXTREMELY inexpensive, costing at most 25 cents, usually much, MUCH less. LSD can easily be dissolved in water and dispensed using a small squirtgun or similar device.

I have heard of competitive people secretly LSD microdosing their office co-workers in order to make their co-workers appear a bit incompetent. And I know of instances where people secretly gave their boss at work microdoses of LSD, in what was said to be an effort to make the boss behave more kindly...)


("The BCSP’s free course is launching at a time when its inaugural University of California Berkeley Psychedelics Survey found that almost half [47 percent] of US registered voters had heard something about psychedelics recently. Of this group, 48 percent said they had heard about psychedelics’ use for mental health treatments. Over half [52 percent] reported a ‘first-degree’ connection to psychedelic use – that either they or someone close to them has used a psychedelic."

---"UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics Launches Online Course on Psychedelics and the Mind" [Posted by the BCSP on August 8, 2023.]

"'Psychedelics and the Mind' was developed with generous support from the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation."

[In 2013, the Steven A. Cohen-founded S.A.C. Capital Advisors pleaded guilty to insider trading and agreed to pay $1.8 billion in fines in one of the biggest criminal cases against a hedge fund.

In 2017, Cohen contributed $1 million to Donald Trump's inauguration.])


("...incendiary untruths can, and in some cases already have, led to physical harm, and worse."

---Judge Arthur Engoron, 10.20. 2023, VERY displeased that Donald Trump still had a derogatory comment about a member of the judge's staff posted on Trump's campaign website long after Engoron had ordered him to remove such comments. The judge, speaking in his courtroom, was explaining why he was fining Trump $5,000 and threatening to imprison him. [CBS News])


("58% of U.S. workers believe our society is uncivil."

---from the results of a survey made in April 2024. HR QUARTERLY, Summer 2024, published by the Society for Human Resource Management.)


("Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit, but he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they'll realize it."

---JD Vance, who was chosen by Trump to be his vice president in 2024, in an essay that Vance wrote that was published in The Atlantic on July 4, 2016.)

(“'Ma’am, I don’t need a teleprompter, I’ve actually got thoughts in my head, unlike Kamala Harris,' Vance told the crowd.

But the high didn’t last long. Moments later, Vance appeared to need a scripted reminder when he misremembered the name of Abbey Gate, the location of a horrific suicide bombing in 2021, for the location of The Beatles’ London recording studio."

---Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, 8.28. 2024, The New Republic.)


"My best advice to anyone who wants to raise a happy, mentally healthy child is:

Keep him or her as far away from a church as you can."

---Frank Zappa (from THE REAL FRANK ZAPPA BOOK.)


("Reason and common sense...just go out the windows sometimes when religious principles are involved."

--- Jim Archibold, defense attorney for a woman who was convicted of murdering two children, explaining in court why she did what she did. Reported by Jonathan Vigliotti, CBS News, 12.31. 2023, in "Lori Vallow Daybell guilty of unimaginable crimes".)


("Former Rep. Denver Riggleman, a Republican who represented a slice of Virginia from 2019 to 2021, says his mother texted him, 'I’m sorry you were ever elected,' after he came out against Trump.

'It was so soul-crushing to have a family member choose Donald Trump over you,' Riggleman continued. He said evangelical Trump supporters in his life saw Trump as being blessed by God. 'I was going directly against religious beliefs.'"

"Romney recounted to biographer McKay Coppins that Republican members of Congress confided to him they wanted Trump impeached and convicted but would vote against the charges because they were worried about threats to their families."

"...has led Republican officeholders to avoid criticizing Trump because of potential threats to their safety..."

---Alex Tabet, NBC News, 12.15. 2023.)


("Pollster Nate Silver suggested Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz [D] was 'sanewashing' his Republican rival, Sen. JD Vance [R-Ohio], in Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate.

'The term "sanewashing" is going around among liberal media critics, the idea that the media is too willing to normalize [former President] Trump and Vance’s behavior,' Silver said in a Substack post Wednesday. 'Wasn’t Walz sanewashing Vance? He said nothing about the Republican ticket’s conspiratorial claims about Haitian immigrants eating pets, for instance.'”

---Tara Suter, 10.2. 2024, The Hill.)


(Donald Trump was on stage at a campaign rally in Prarie du Chien, Wisconsin in late September 2024 and was speaking about a hat when he suddenly said

“Oh, there’s a fly. Oh, I wonder where the fly came from. See, two years ago, I wouldn’t have had a fly up here. But they’re changing rapidly. We can’t take it any longer.”)



("In the blistering heat, CBS News found children in Ghana as young as 5 years old using machetes nearly as big as themselves to harvest the cocoa beans that end up in some of America's most-loved chocolates."

---Debora Patta, Sarah Carter, Javier Guzman, and Kerry Breen, CBS News, 11.29. 2023, in an article they wrote about Mars, the candy company that makes M&Ms and Snickers.)


("A university in Canada is expected to remove a series of vending machines from campus after a student discovered a sign they used facial recognition technology."

"The smart vending machines at the University of Waterloo first gained attention this month when Reddit user SquidKid47 shared a photo. The photo purportedly showed an M&M-brand vending machine with an error code reading, 'Invenda.Vending. FacialRecognition.App.exe — Application error.'"

"...River Stanley, a writer for the local student publication MathNEWS...investigated the smart vending machines, discovering that they're provided by Adaria Vending Services and manufactured by Invenda Group. Canadian publication CTV News reported that Mars, owner of M&M's, owns the vending machines."

"MathNEWS reported that Invenda Group's FAQ said that 'only the final data, namely presence of a person, estimated age and estimated gender, is collected without any association with an individual.'"

---Lauren Edmonds, Business Insider, 2.25. 2024.)


("A South Carolina college apologized Monday after a faculty member, calling them 'happy pills,' handed out M&Ms in prescription drug bottles to little kids at a fun run over the weekend.

'While we know this professor meant the candy to serve as a treat, the method of distribution may have confused pre-school children whose parents have taught them not to take pills from pharmaceutical bottles,' Horry Georgetown Technical College, in East Conway near Myrtle Beach, said in a statement. 'We regret further that professors and administrators are human and, although eager to share information about growing careers, sometimes make mistakes. This particular mistake will not occur again.'

The faculty member, who wasn't identified, handed out the standard-issue prescription pill bottles to promote her medical technology program. The labels prescribed the 'Happy Pills' to "A Great Kid," instructing 'patients' to 'Take 1 m&m every 2 to 4 hours.'

'I know they had good intentions, but maybe it should have been handled in a different way,' Tiffany Myers, whose son got one of the bottles, told NBC station WMBF of Myrtle Beach. Myers said her husband is a firefighter and paramedic who 'comes across children that get into medicine bottles quite frequently, and it can be very damaging, or it can be life-threatening.'"

---M. Alex Johnson, NBC News, 2.16. 2015)


("...the DEA is cracking down, telling roughly 450 e-commerce sites to identify and report pill press purchases as required under federal law. Last month, eBay agreed to pay the Department of Justice $59 million — after the e-commerce site allegedly fell short of identifying and reporting pill press purchases."

"Drug dealers also buy fake punch kits and dyes, used to brand pills, allowing them to mimic real pills like oxycodone.

'What they do is they buy specific dyes and punch kits that have the markings that mimic pharmaceutical preparations,' DEA Deputy Assistant Administrator Scott Oulton said, noting the kits can be bought online and only cost about $40."

--- Nicole Sganga and Andres Triay, CBS News, 2.26. 2024 in their article "DEA cracks down on pill presses in latest front in the fight against fentanyl".


("With sales ranging from $163 billion to $217 billion per year, according to industry estimates, counterfeit pharmaceuticals are the most lucrative sector of the global trade in illegally copied goods. Fraudulent drugs harm or kill millions..."

"Authorities confiscated 4 million counterfeit tablets in 2015 in Germany alone. And in developing regions, such as Africa, the proportion of fake pharmaceuticals can rise to 70 percent. Roughly one-third of the world’s countries lack effective drug regulatory agencies."

"The World Health Organization [WHO] estimates that 50 percent of drugs sold online are fraudulent."

---Peter Behner, Marie-Lyn Hecht, and Fabian Wahl, in their paper "Fighting Counterfeit Pharmaceuticals: New Defenses for an Underestimated--and Growing--Menace", PWC dot com, 2017. [In 2002, IBM (International Business Machines Corporation) acquired the management consulting and technology services arm of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), according to Wikipedia.])


("More than 321,000 children lost a parent to overdose in just 10 years, study finds"

---Headline from a 5.8. 2024 online CBS News story reported by Kerry Breen.)


("Counterfeit drugs obtained during law enforcement seizures undergo comprehensive confirmatory toxicology testing. Results are generally not shared with the public."

---from a study,"Substances in Counterfeit Prescription Pills Seized by Law Enforcement, 2017-2022", published in the Journal of the American Medical Association [JAMA], 5.6. 2024. Fake medicines are being sold on the street and the police are often not telling the public what substances are in the fake medicines!)


(Costa Careyes is an exclusive gated community in Mexico. Each year, Careyes hosts a five-day festival [called Onalinda] for what a member of the founding family of Careyes described as being "rich people".."artists--successsful businessmen--you know, opinion leaders". The theme of the 2021 festival was mycelium and seven hundred and fifty people attended. Careyes says young people in the "twentysomething" age group were NOT invited.

"Among the offerings was a chocolate-fungi workshop." ["If we were going to add psilocybin, how much per bar should we do?"]

"Erika Valero Tlazohtiani, a shaman in a white gown, told attendees, 'Tobacco is a way to talk with God.' She led a cacao ceremony that involved drinking ritualistically prepared hot chocolate and taking a puff from a communal pipe."

"'That's a crazy-awesome outfit, even if you're not on a lot of drugs,' a guy in a glow-in-the-dark T-shirt said, watching a couple in matching sequinned tie-dyed jumpsuits. 'It's like adult recess on crack, but all the kids on the playground want to play with you,' a philanthropist named Gillian Wynn--the daughter of Steve Wynn--said."

The quotes are from a 1.24. 2022 article ["No Riffraff"] in The New Yorker that was written by Sheila Yasmin Marikar.)


(I was in Hayward, California 7.12. 2023 and bought something at a large Safeway supermarket there. The back of the cash register receipt they gave me had five large coupons outlined in red offering "25% off your order of $150 or more" at a local "Garden of Eden" marijuana store, which, of course, is named after a famous tale told in the Christian bible...

[Famous Apple logo of an apple with a bite taken out of it...])

(An uncolored Adam and Eve are depicted in an uncolored Garden of Eden. Adam is holding a RED apple that has a bite taken out of it. The words underneath the image: "How long before it kicks in?"

---from a cartoon drawn by Jason Adam Katzenstein that appeared on page 53 of The New Yorker, 8.28. 2023.)

(In early 1973, a young hippie woman I knew purchased a quantity of wonderful cannabis products at the Eden Hashish Centre in Kathmandu, Nepal and smuggled them into Canada. [The soft pinkish-blonde hash produced such vivid otherworldly effects!] We were very high for months. She also brought us a colorful calendar advertising the Eden Hashish Centre. ["Let Us Take Higher"] I called the telephone number on the calendar and was able to briefly speak with someone at the centre but was never able to complete the conversation. [The telephone company later told me that there had suddenly been a break in a telephone cable in a remote mountain area...])

("According to drummer Ron Bushy, organist-vocalist Doug Ingle of the band Iron Butterfly wrote the song In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida one evening while drinking an entire gallon of Red Mountain wine. When the inebriated Ingle then played the song for Bushy, who wrote down the lyrics for him, he was slurring his words so badly that what was supposed to be 'In the Garden of Eden' was interpreted by Bushy as 'In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida'."

---Wikipedia

[One of the comments that someone posted on YouTube about the full-length version of the song:

"I don't always listen to In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, but when I do, so do the neighbors."])


("What's the difference between vision and a vision? The former relates to something it's assumed you've seen, the latter to something it's assumed you haven't. Language is not always dependable either."

---Margaret Atwood, in her 1983 book MURDER IN THE DARK: Short Fictions and Prose Poems.)


("People are not persuaded by what we say, but rather by what they understand."

---from a fortune cookie I found on a sidewalk)


("...crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be."

---Toni Morrison, in her novel BELOVED.)


(The map is not the territory.)


("The spectator makes the picture."

---Marcel Duchamp)


("I quote...almost every day. Part of that is because if you dispense your own wisdom, others often dismiss it. If you offer wisdom from a third party, it seems less arrogant and more acceptable."

---Randy Pausch, in his best-selling book THE LAST LECTURE.)


("Zibaldone" is an Italian literary term that means "a heap of things".)


("In Medieval Latin, a florilegium was a compilation of excerpts from other writings."

---Wikipedia, 2021. The word florilegium literally means "a gathering of flowers".)


("A salad of many herbs"

---Giovanni Rucellai, describing a zibaldone.)


("If you take from one person, it's called stealing. If you take from many, it's called research."

---Carlos Santana, paraphrasing what singer Tony Bennett said about musicians and their musical "roots". CBS News, 8.16. 2019.)


("The standard of originality in intellectual property has, historically, been low, because everything, to some degree, copies at least part of something else."

---Jill Lepore, The New Yorker, 1.22. 2018.)


("Although I have milked many cows, the butter I churn is my own."

---Charles Lamb)


("The tale grew in the telling."

---George R. R. Martin, quoting J. R. R. Tolkien.)


("...the telling takes me home."

---Utah Phillips)



("If I could read your mind, love,
What a tale your thoughts could tell.
Just like a paperback novel,
The kind the drugstores sell."

---Gordon Lightfoot, in a song that he wrote in 1969, "If You Could Read My Mind", said to be about his first wife.)

(The song "Sundown" was written by Gordon Lightfoot and released in 1974. It is said to be about his former girlfriend Cathy Smith, who infamously injected comedian, actor, and musician John Belushi with a mix of cocaine and heroin in 1982, apparently causing him to die of an overdose.)



("If you're wondering how a nation will fall, look to the drug dealers."

---Bob Dylan, in his 2022 book THE PHILOSOPHY OF MODERN SONG, quoted by David Browne, Rolling Stone, 10.27. 2022. In the book, Dylan writes about other people's songs. Except for one 2003 Warren Zevon song, every tune Dylan discusses "... is from the 20th century. There's no modern hip hop." Browne notes that Dylan is NOT pleased by "...Thug Life press-on tattoos." [The title of Browne's review describes Dylan as being "A Master Gaslighter".])

("...and the classic line 'What a long, strange trip it's been.' A thought that anybody can relate to."

---Bob Dylan, in THE PHILOSOPHY OF MODERN SONG, quoting the Grateful Dead song "Truckin'", which was released in 1970. [Dylan gave his first performance of the song in a concert while in Tokyo, Japan in April 2023. Unfortunately, he jumbled the lyrics...])


("THE LONG, STRANGE TRIP OF THIS DRUG BEGAN WITH ITS SYNTHESIS ON NOV. 16, 1938"

---from the mainstream television game show "Jeopardy", 12.7. 2023.)



("President Trump thought he was pretty clever when he dubbed North Korean leader Kim Jong-un 'Rocket Man' last fall."

"While speaking to a crowd in Montana Thursday night, Trump abruptly brought up the singer in the middle of tangent about how no one gives him credit for being a great speaker.

'I have broken more Elton John records. He seems to have a lot of records. And I, by the way, I don’t have a musical instrument. I don’t have a guitar or an organ. No organ. Elton has an organ. And lots of other people helping. No, we’ve broken a lot of records. We’ve broken virtually every record. Because you know, look, I only need this space. They need much more room. For basketball, for hockey and all of the sports, they need a lot of room. We don’t need it. We have people in that space. So we break all of these records. Really, we do it without, like, the musical instruments. This is the only musical – the mouth. And hopefully the brain attached to the mouth, right? The brain. More important than the mouth is the brain. The brain is much more important.'”

---Ryan Bort, 7.6. 2018, Rolling Stone.)


("Donald Trump has uttered many colorful phrases. But his best-known may now become what this week's indictment reports he said when Vice President Mike Pence refused to comply with a scheme to overturn the lawful result of the 2020 election. Donald Trump told him, 'You're too honest.'"

---Scott Simon , National Public Radio [NPR], 8.5. 2023.)


("President Biden sought to steady his re-election campaign by talking with two Black radio hosts for interviews broadcast on Thursday, but he spoke haltingly at points during one interview and struggled to find the right phrase in the other, saying that he was proud to have been 'the first Black woman to serve with a Black president.'”

"Mr. Biden made the mistake on WURD radio, based in Philadelphia, as he tried to deliver a line that he has repeated before about having pride in serving as vice president for President Barack Obama."

---Michael D. Shear, The New York Times, 7.4. 2024. [A 7.7. 2024 google search of Biden's words "the first Black woman to serve with a Black president" yielded "about 12,900,000 results".])

("I wouldn’t have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president did I think she was not qualified to be president."

---Michael Williams, CNN, 7.11. 2023, quoting what President Joe Biden said at a press conference earlier the same day that followed his appearance at a NATO event.


“And now I want to hand it over to the President of Ukraine, who has as much courage as he has determination. Ladies and gentlemen, President Putin.”

---Rebecca Picciotto, CNBC, 7.11. 2024, quoting what Biden said at the NATO event on 7.11. 2024, less than an hour beore he was due to speak at the press conference. Putin is NOT the President of Ukraine.)


("In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”

“Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune."

---United States Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, speaking about what the Supreme Court ruled on 6.1. 2024, quoted by Devan Cole on CNN dot com.)


(December 12, 2023:

Brian Beals was released from prison in Illinois after serving 35 years for a murder he did not commit. Brian Beals was a college student and football player who was studying to become a police officer at the time of his arrest for the murder of a 6-year-old boy.

I think most intelligent Americans can probably accurately guess the color of Beals' skin.

The exoneration effort was a collaborative undertaking with the Illinois Innocence Project and the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, which has overturned over 250 wrongful convictions since 2016. Beals was the 521st individual to be exonerated in Illinois. Detective Thomas Ptak, the lead investigator 35 years ago, was linked to eight other proven wrongful convictions, with Beals becoming the ninth.

One of the lawyers who helped free Beals said “I went to law school because I knew the justice system was broken but the problems I saw in this case were orders of magnitude greater than what I had previously believed”.)


("In one case, it took a Stanford PhD student fighting a nine-year court battle to prove that she was wrongfully listed; the FBI finally admitted she was watchlisted by mistake because an agent had accidentally checked a wrong box."

---E.D. Cauchi and Imtiaz Tyab, CBS News, 12.14. 2023: "U.S. terrorist watchlist grows to 2 million people--nearly doubling in 6 years".)


("Trump's voters hold him as a source of true information, even more so than other sources, including conservative media figures, religious leaders, and even their own friends and family."

"Almost all his voters say he 'fights for people like me'."

--- Anthony Salvanto, Kabir Khanna, Jennifer de Pinto, Fred Backus, CBS News, 8.20. 2023. Article title: "CBS News poll finds Trump's big lead grows, as GOP voters dismiss indictments".)


("Enshittification is the pattern of decreasing quality observed in online services and products such as Amazon, Facebook, Google Search, Twitter, Bandcamp, Reddit, Uber, and Unity. The term was used by writer Cory Doctorow in November 2022, and the American Dialect Society selected it as its 2023 Word of the Year. Doctorow has also used the term platform decay to describe the same concept."

---Wikipedia, 6.2. 2024.

“The internet is filling up with shit, and it’s really bad for our societies,” David Harris told SFGATE. “It’s not just a minor irritation, like the junk mail flyers that I still seem to get every week in my actual mailbox. It’s a major, major threat to our information environment and our democracy.” [Harris is "a lecturer on AI ethics and social media at UC Berkeley and former misinformation researcher at Meta".]

---Timothy Karoff, SFGATE, 5.31. 2024.)

("I tested positive for Covid for the first time a few hours after doing this interview with SFGATE. Now wondering if my Covid-addled brain disinhibited me from swearing in an interview, something I believe that I don’t usually do.

But it turned out to be a really great story by Timothy Karoff, and I actually learned a lot from it. Thanks Cory Doctorow for the term."

---David Evan Harris, on Linkedin dot com.)


("Taylor Swift concerts, Pittsburgh Steelers games, and MAGA rallies. That is where 'religion' is happening in the lives of many people."

---Jay McDaniel, who is a Christian, in a 2023 essay "A Catholic looks at Taylor Swift", online in "The Migration of Religion to Popular Culture: Taylor Swift and Process Theology" on openhorizons dot org.)


("At one point he told crowds that he had 'OD’d' [overdosed] on himself, after appearing on television and in the news too often."

"'I'm OD’d, you know what that means? I'm OD’d on politics.'

He added: 'I'm OD’d on Trump. I turn on the television, Trump Trump, Trump Trump all different sorts of Trump, they're driving us crazy!'”

---Oliver O'Connell, Alex Woodward, Joe Sommerlad, and Gustaf Kilander, independent dot co dot uk, 5.23. 2024, in their news article "Trump fans gather in South Bronx for ex-president’s first New York rally in eight years".)


(The Merriam-Webster Word of the Year for 2022 was "gaslighting". The Collins English Dictionary Word of the Year for 2022 was "permacrisis".)


("...urban hippie lore...about the "Jackson Illusion Pepper," named after its inventor [discoverer?]. According to DRUGS FROM A TO Z: A DICTIONARY [1969] by Richard R. Lingeman, smoking a cigarette through a rotten green pepper was rumored to deliver a psychedelic experience."

---David Pescovitz, boingboing dot net, 7.26. 2023.)


"The U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2022 warned people not to cook their chicken in NyQuil..."

---Simrin Singh, CBS News, 1.26. 2024, referring to her article published 9.20, 2022. NyQuil is an over-the-counter medication used to treat the symptoms of the common cold.


("If you’ve been anywhere near social media, local news, or late-night talk shows in the last few days, you’ve probably heard something about 'NyQuil Chicken,' a supposedly viral TikTok 'challenge' that’s exactly what it sounds like: cooking chicken in a marinade of cold medicine.

News about the supposed trend is usually accompanied by vomit-inducing photos of raw chicken simmering in dark green syrup. It’s both disgusting and, as the FDA recently reminded the public, just as toxic as it looks. But it turns out NyQuil Chicken was neither new, nor particularly viral, and the FDA’s bizarrely-timed warning may have backfired, making the meme more popular than ever.

First, a bit of history: As reporter Ryan Borderick points out in his newsletter Garbage Day, NyQuil Chicken originated as a joke on 4Chan in 2017. The meme briefly resurfaced in January where it got some traction on TikTok before once again fading away.

Then, last week, the FDA — inexplicably — issued a press release warning about the dangers of cooking chicken in NyQuil. In a notice titled 'A Recipe for Danger: Social Media Challenges Involving Medicines,' the FDA refers to it as a 'recent' trend. But they cite no recent examples, and it’s unclear why they opted to push out a warning more than eight months after the meme had first appeared on TikTok.

Now, in what we can only hope will be a valuable lesson on unintended consequences, we know that it was likely the FDA’s warning about NyQuil chicken that pushed this 'challenge' to new levels of virality, at least on TikTok. TikTok has now confirmed that on September 14th, the day before the FDA notice, there were only five searches for 'NyQuil chicken' in the app. But by September 21st, that number skyrocketed 'by more than 1,400 times,' according to BuzzFeed News, which first reported the TikTok search data.

TikTok, which has recently taken steps to limit the spread of both dangerous 'challenges' and 'alarmist warnings' about hoaxes, is now blocking searches for 'NyQuil Chicken.' Searches now direct users to resources encouraging users to 'stop and take a moment to think' before pursuing a potentially dangerous 'challenge'.

As both BuzzFeed and Gizmodo note, there’s little evidence that people are actually cooking chicken in NyQuil, much less actually ingesting it. That’s a good thing because, as the FDA makes very clear, doing so is not only extremely gross, but highly toxic. But the whole thing is yet another example of why we should all be more skeptical of panic-inducing viral 'challenges.'"

---Karissa Bell, in her 9.22. 2022 article published online on engadget dot com, "The FDA may have unintentionally made 'NyQuil Chicken' go viral on TikTok".)


(FAFO ["Fuck Around and Find Out"] is said to have been chosen as the 2022 Word of the Year by students at the Nancy Dickinson Writing Center at Augustana University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. [Augustana is a private Lutheran university.])
(From "Why the scary, funny profane 'FAFO' was 2022's word of the year", an article by Amanda Katz, The Washington Post, 1.17. 2023.)



("The Beatles had first tried cannabis in 1964 when Bob Dylan introduced them to it..."

"Bob had listened to the lyrics of 'I Want to Hold Your Hand' and, thinking one of the lines was 'I get high,' had assumed this was a reference to drug-taking and that the boys were seasoned users. When he mentioned this to John, he was told that the line was in fact 'I can't hide' and that none of the Beatles had tried drugs..."

"That was when Bob offered to initiate them."

---Cynthia Lennon [John Lennon's ex-wife], in her 2006 book JOHN.)


(Actually, the Beatles HAD tried drugs. When they performed in Hamburg, Germany in the early 1960s they used Preludin [a stimulant] and alcohol. All of them had used caffeine [tea and coffee]. All of them had used nicotine [cigarettes].

 John Lennon apparently first took Benzedrine [amphetamine sulfate] in 1960. In those days, lots of musicians took "speed". As did many housewives.


Benzedrine was the first pharmaceutical drug to contain amphetamine, and was frequently referenced in beatnik culture and writings.


["Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine?"

---Harry Gibson, in a 1945 song.]


["Now what will that do? Just about nothing."

---Neal Cassady, after Mountain Girl asked him for a quarter of a tablet of Benzedrine. From "The Long Strange Trip of Mountain Girl" by David Kushner, 10.9. 2022, Business Insider. [Cassady went on to say "Why, I take four or five to go to sleep!."]


["And if you give me weed, whites and wine
And you show me a sign
I'll be willin' to be movin'"

---Lowell George, in the truckdriving song he wrote, "Willin'". "Whites" is a reference to white tablets containing Benzedrine. "Weed" is a reference to marijuana. The song was recorded by Little Feat in 1971, and by many others, including Seatrain, the Byrds, and Linda Ronstadt.]


[A Mini Thin is a tablet containing stimulant drugs. The original white Mini Thin tablets were meant to be a copy of the white "cross-top" Benzedrine tablets and contained the amphetamine precursor ephedrine. The Mini Thins being sold in 2022 contain approximately 200 milligrams of caffeine and no Benzedrine or ephedrine.

The very hate-filled song "Meth Labs and Moonshine" was released in 2013 by a disgusting and alarmingly ignorant white West Virginia rapper who calls himself Mini Thin. The extraordinarily ugly but much-viewed accompanying video openly celebrated racism and advocated extreme violence.])


("Well they'll stone you when your'e trying to be so good
They'll stone you just like they said they would..."

"But I would not feel so all alone
Everybody must get stoned"

---Bob Dylan, in his 1966 song "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35".)

("We believe we're seeing the world just fine until it's called to our attention that we're not."

---David Eagleman, in his book INCOGNITO--The Secret Lives of the Brain.)


("If you think the world is just fine as it is, then this is probably not the art for you."

---Lorraine Bonner, commenting about some of her sculptures she calls The Perpetrator Series. [The quote is from her website.])







"Tripping opens you to the idea that everything you know is wrong."







("There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which without art, we can't receive."

---Saul Bellow, 1976.)


("You hear this other deep reality singing to you all the time, and much of the time you can't decipher it."

---Leonard Cohen, at age 82, quoted by David Remnick in an article "How The Light Gets In". Remnick's article mentions Cohen's use of LSD. The New Yorker, 10.17. 2016. ["LSD" is d-lysergic acid diethylamide.])


("Sixteen years ago, Neşe Devenot was an undergraduate at Bard College when a friend offered her LSD. She ended up getting in trouble with the university... 'I was really struck by the sense that the most important and profound experience in my life was an experience I was not supposed to have,' she said."

---Jane C. Hu, The Microdose, 8.8. 2022. From "Capitalism and poetry: 5 Questions for psychedelics scholar Neşe Devenot".)







("I really don't know what I'm doing."

---Carol Jenkins, an abstract painter working in Berkeley, California, in her emailed monthly newsletter, 3.31. 2021. She went on to write:

"I love the way the writer George Saunders talks about the place of not knowing in art. He claims that 95% of what he does is based on intuition, not intention, calling it the great under-intelligence we all have that comes to the surface now and then.")


("Making my life the quest for the mystery behind the artful illusion."

---Angela O'Hara, on her Facebook page, 2021.)


("...LSD is perhaps the most popular psychedelic of all time, and it's never going away."

---Joseph Palamar, a drug researcher at NYU Langone Health, quoted by Rachel Nuwer in her article "Americans Increase LSD Use--And a Bleak Outlook for the World May Be to Blame", Scientific American, 7.10. 2020. From 2015 to 2018, the rate of LSD use is said to have "...increased more than 50% in the U.S.")


"One suspects that had LSD never been discovered, the world might look very different today than it does now, for better or worse, depending on one’s perspective."

---David Nichols, corresponding author, "Psychedelics", in Pharmacological Reviews, April 2016. On NCBI.NLM.NIH.GOV.


("Carey Turnbull went to college in the 1960s, so you might not be surprised to learn he experimented with psychedelics in his youth. 'Going to my college and not taking LSD would have been like joining a frat at a top 10 football school, being invited to have a beer at a football game, and saying, "I don't watch football,"' he says."

---Jane c. Hu, The Microdose, 1.31. 2022.)


("Christian Angermayer, one of the founders of ATAI Life Sciences, said that people 'meet themselves' when they have a psychedelic trip. 'Since we're born, society imposes on us how we should be, what we should look like, what we should wear/do/say,' he said. 'We put a lot of camouflage on our soul, on our character, on our inner self. Psychedelics take away all these things which were imposed on us. That is an extremely important thing because I am very convinced you need to know yourself.'"

---Sam Shead, CNBC, 11.23. 2020, writing that conservative right-wing billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel has invested in a company that is aiming to make psychedelic drugs for use in treating mental illness. ATAI Life Sciences was founded in 2018. People have invested more than $210 million in the Berlin company. The WHO estimates that nearly one billion people suffer from mental illness.)


("With Psych Wards Full, Mentally Ill Accused of Crimes Languish in Jail"

---headline, The Wall Street Journal, Memorial Day [5.29. 2023])


("It’s insane. There’s no common sense here. Women are being assaulted. Let’s not sugarcoat this. This kind of brazen random violence is unheard of in my existence. Who wants to live like this? It’s bullshit."

---woman, who said she is a senior, speaking out at a Oakland, California crime and violence prevention meeting held at Oakland Technical High School on 5.30. 2023 that was attended by a crowd of an estimated 200 people. The quotes are from a 5.31. 2023 article by by Emilie Raguso, The Berkeley Scanner. "Last week, OPD announced that the city had seen 100 robberies over a single week in May, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.")


("An Alameda County judge was robbed of his Rolex and wallet at gunpoint in a downtown Oakland parking garage Thursday morning, according to the sheriff's office."

---NBC News, 6.1. 2023.)


(Kaiser Permanente, an integrated managed care consortium, is said to be the largest employer in Oakland, California and is said to have recently issued a warning to its employees to "stay in their buildings for lunch and work" in response to street robberies of workers who went out to grab something to eat.

---Katie Dowd, sfgate dot com, 1.28. 2024.)


("A court filing from prosecutors says Orange County Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Ferguson texted: 'I just lost it. I just shot my wife. I won't be in tomorrow. I will be in custody. I'm so sorry.'

Prosecutors also say that 47 weapons and more than 26,000 rounds of ammunition were recovered during a search of his home, including the pistol used in the shooting. Authorities said the weapons were legally owned."

---CBS News, 8.11. 2023. Ferguson's adult son "...called 911 and said his father had been drinking too much and shot his mom...When officers arrived, Ferguson...told them, 'Oh man I can't believe I did this'..." Judge Ferguson's wife died shortly after being shot.

[A 6.20. 2024 Los Angeles Times news story by Caroline Petrow-Cohen and Matthew Ormseth said the judge killed his wife after the judge and his wife and their son "....watched 'Breaking Bad' together in the family room, as they did every night."])


("The suspect in a strange road rage incident on a Florida bridge, which snarled traffic on the span connecting Tampa and St. Petersburg, was identified Thursday as a former federal prosecutor.

Patrick Douglas Scruggs, whose 39th birthday was Thursday, was arrested and accused of armed burglary, aggravated assault and aggravated battery with a deadly weapon. The alleged meltdown happened on the Howard Frankland Bridge on Tuesday morning, a Florida Highway Patrol representative said.

Scruggs was an assistant U.S. attorney in the criminal division in Tampa from Sept. 9, 2012, to April 21 this year, a U.S. attorney's office spokesperson said.

Scruggs no longer works for the Justice Department, and the representative declined to reveal any additional details about him.
The incident started when a 35-year-old Tampa man called "Driver 1" was found slumped over in his car in a southbound lane of the Howard Frankland Bridge a little before 9:30 a.m. ET Tuesday, the Highway Patrol said.

A second car, driven by Ahmed Gahaf, 40, of Tampa, stopped in front of Driver 1 to see whether he was OK. That's when Driver 1 'awoke and drove forward, colliding with Driver 2's vehicle,' the Highway Patrol said.

'Driver 1 reversed and attempted to drive around Driver 2's (Gahaf's) vehicle' and then 'collided with Driver 3's vehicle which was passing the incident,' it said.

Driver 3 was Scruggs, who 'stopped, exited his vehicle, approached Driver 1, broke out a side window and began to stab Driver 1 multiple times with a pocket knife,' the Highway Patrol said.

When Gahaf and his wife tried to intervene, Scruggs allegedly 'diverted his attention' to them and tried to stab them, officials said.

'It surprised me why he did this,' Gahaf said. 'He said: "You with him? You two, you want to kill me?" That's when he came at me with the knife.'

The pair 'fled before being harmed,' and a passing St. Petersburg police officer came upon the brouhaha and arrested Scruggs, the Highway Patrol said."

"Scruggs was booked and released on a $65,000 bond, Pinellas County Jail records showed.

'He has no prior criminal history. This is a totally isolated incident,' his attorney John Nohlgren said.

'He's got tons of law enforcement and prosecutors who are reaching out and saying, 'This is not the Patrick Scruggs we know; something must have happened.' That's been the reaction so far. The portrayal that he's some guy who jumps out and starts stabbing a person is either not what happened but is also not [who] my client [is], not his personality.'"

---David K. Li, NBC News, 9.28. 2023, "Former federal prosecutor allegedly stabbed man on Florida bridge in road rage incident". "Allegedly"? In the video of the incident shown on CNN, the frenzied and EXTREMELY VIOLENT former federal prosecutor can very, VERY clearly be seen stabbing the victim many times.)


("Angry Football Fans Keep Punching Their TVs--And shooting them, and knifing them, and running them over with trucks"

was the title of an article by Jacob Stern that was published in The Atlantic in 2023.)


("Naked woman gets out of car at major Bay Area bridge and starts firing gun"

---CBS News headline, San Francisco, California. 7.26. 2023.)


(“I don’t want reality."

---Markwayne Mullin, a conservative Christian republican U.S. senator from Oklahoma, interrupting Cheryl Morman, president of the Virginia Alliance for Family Child Care Associations, who, indicating that she disagreed with Mullin, had tried to answer a question about religion and race that the senator asked her by saying to him "...Jesus is what we teach. But the reality is..."

[The above quotes are from an article by Julia Shapero, 6.2. 2023, The Hill.])

("Ruby Franke, popular Utah YouTuber, arrested on suspicion of child abuse after malnourished son escapes home, authorities say" ---CBS News headline, 9.1. 2023.

"A Utah woman who gave online parenting advice...was taken into custody at the home of Jodi Hildebrandt, who owns a counseling business that she says teaches people to improve their lives by being honest, responsible and humble."

"Franke's 12-year-old son climbed out of a window in Hildebrandt's residence in Ivins and ran to a neighbor's house Wednesday morning and asked for food and water, according to an affidavit filed by an officer...

The neighbor saw duct tape on the boy's ankles and wrists and called law enforcement, the affidavit said. The boy was taken to a hospital, where he was put on a medical hold 'due to his deep lacerations from being tied up with rope and from his malnourishment,' arrest records state."

"Franke's 10-year-old daughter was later found malnourished in Hildebrandt's house and was also taken to the hospital, officers said. Two other of Franke's children were in the custody of child protection services, the affidavit said."

Hildebrandt was also arrested. Both women have been denied bail.

[The title of a video seen online: "Ruby From 8 Passengers Has Meltdown Because Principal Of School Plays Secular Music".

Franke has a SERIOUS emotional freakout at 14:40 in the video, forcefully sobbing about how children are being treated "...you are NOT protecting them, you are introducing them to...to THE WORLD!!!"])


("Just Say No"

---In Oakland, California in 1984 at Longfellow Elementary School, Nancy Reagan launched an "anti-drug" campaign that used this slogan...)



(The June 2023 police bodycam video of the arrest of Chad Doerman [32 years old] at his home in Ohio just after he murdered his 3 young sons is, by far, the most frightening thing I have ever seen on a screen. If you do not think mental illness is a HUGE problem in this country, you need to watch it. If you think it is easy to tell who is severely mentally ill and who is not, you need to watch it...[On Facebook, not long before the murders, Doerman posted a photo of himself teaching one of his sons how to fish. In it, Doerman can be seen wearing a shirt with the words "Raven Mad Rum". The company slogan, printed on the shirt, is "When You Want to get a Little Crazy", although not all of those words are legible in Doerman's photo. "American Made".]

In the video Doerman tells the police "I'm completely sober" and "...I don't do drugs now"...

As the police are taking Doerman to a car, one of the officers says to him "You have the right to remain silent, fucking use it.")


("One ongoing national survey asks health care workers if they're having thoughts of self-harm or that life is not worth living. One out of every four says yes."

---Eilis O'Neill, a reporter for KUOW in Seattle, speaking on 6.7. 2022 on the National Public Radio news show "All Things Considered" about a current University of Washington study about the possibility of treating suicidal health care workers with psilocybin plus therapy. "Fred Barrett is a psychiatry professor and psychedelics researcher at Johns Hopkins University. He says psilocybin can feel like the next big thing in mental health care, but it's only been rigorously tested on a few hundred people.")


("What’s happening now is dangerous and insane — it's freaking nuts."

---psychologist Raquel Bennett, who suffered from debilitating depression for many years [and who founded the KRIYA Institute, an organization dedicated to the use of ketamine in psychiatry and psychotherapy], on the dangers of mail order "at-home" ketamine treatment.

The quote is from an interview by Jane C. Hu, The Microdose, 2.13. 2023.)


("...Michael has this one thing--it's like--a psychedelic trip is like 10,000 hours of psychotherapy packed into 4..."

---Christian Angermayer, speaking with Uma Thurman on milkeninstitute.org, 10.18. 2021, about Michael Pollan's 2018 book HOW TO CHANGE YOUR MIND--What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, which Angermayer highly recommends.)


("If you’ve been let into another person’s mind, tread very, very lightly and don’t leave any litter. Do not scrawl your name on the wall of their soul."

---Jules Evans, 9.6. 2024, substack dot com)


(According to the DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration] in their "Proposed Aggregate Production Quotas for Schedule I and II Controlled Substances and Assessment of Annual Needs for the List I Chemicals Ephedrine, Pseudoephedrine, and Phenylpropanolamine for 2023", published officially on federalregister.gov on 10.18. 2022, their proposed quota for the legal production of LSD in the United States in 2023 is 1,200 grams. [12 MILLION standard 100 microgram doses or 240 MILLION 5 microgram microdoses.])


("Big pharma is watching this all go down, when they move in, it's going to be a whole other world."

---William Leonard Pickard, who illicitly manufactured very large quantities of LSD, commenting about "the recent surge of corporate interest in psychedelics", in his answer to a question he was asked by Jane C. Hu, The Microdose, 1.10. 2023.)


("I take about 80 pills a day to help keep me healthy."

---Ray Kurzweil, Google futurist and author of the 2005 book THE SINGULARITY IS NEAR: When Humans Transcend Biology, in part of his answer to a question, "What is your own plan for immortality?" that he was asked by journalist Zoë Corbyn in an interview, "AI scientist Ray Kurzweil: ‘We are going to expand intelligence a millionfold by 2045’", published in The Guardian on 6.29. 2024.)


(BIG PHARMA:

My feet often hurt severely. A neurologist prescribed gabapentin for pain. The drug seemed to make my pain worse, so I soon stopped taking it.

["The only conditions for which gabapentin has been approved for adult use by the Food and Drug Administration are epileptic sezures, in 1993, and postherpetic neuralgia, the nerve pain that can linger after a bout of shingles, in 2022."

"'It's crazy how many indications it's used for,' said Dr. Michael Steinman, a geriatrician at the University of California, San Francisco..."

"Early on, Warner-Lambert, the manufacturer of gabapentin, pushed off-label prescriptions of the drug through aggressive marketing methods that the Justice Department deemed illegal and fraudulent; the company settled the government's suit for $430 million in 2004. Still, gabapentin use tripled between 2002 and 2015."

"It has become one of the nations's most widely prescribed drugs."


---The New York Times, 8.20. 2024])



("If convicted of the trafficking offense, Pallante and Patton face up to 30 years in prison."

---Buster Thompson, Citrus County Chronicle [in Florida], 10.25. 2021. After a vehicle was pulled over by police for making an improper stop, 196 doses of LSD were found inside. Because of the quantity of LSD, the occupants of the car were charged with trafficking.)


Under current U.S. laws, there is a penalty of a mandatory minimum of 5 years in prison for distributing or conspiring to distribute 1 gram of LSD. A person can be sentenced to up to 40 years in prison for distributing or conspiring to distribute 1 gram of LSD. There is a penalty of a mandatory minimum of 10 years in prison for distributing or conspiring to distribute 10 grams of LSD. A person can be sentenced to up to life in prison for distributing or conspiring to distribute 10 grams of LSD.


("An arrest for possession of 5 milligrams or more of LSD is classified as criminal possession...a...felony punishable by 1 to 9 years in prison. Second time offenders may face up to 12 years in jail..."

---law offices of Daniel McGuinness in New York, 2021, commenting on New York state LSD laws.


[Currently, a standard metric dose of LSD in the United States weighs approximately 100 micrograms. 40 slightly stronger 125 microgram doses weigh 5 milligrams. (At one point in the mid-1980s, most commercial doses of illicit LSD were said to weigh approximately 50 micrograms.)]


"100 doses of LSD weigh about 5 milligrams, enough to justify about a year in prison under federal sentencing guidelines. The same amount of LSD, dispersed in sugar cubes, can result in a sentence of nearly 20 years."

---Jim Newton, Los Angeles Times, 7.27. 1992, commenting on federal LSD laws.)


("Starting Feb. 1, 2021, Oregon’s new drug decriminalization measure takes effect..."

making it

"...a noncriminal violation similar to a traffic ticket to possess...less than 40 units of LSD."

---Noelle Crombie, The Oregonian, updated 11.27. 2020.

In April 2024, Oregon recriminalized the drugs that were decriminalized in 2020. Drug possession again became a misdemeanor violation, punishable by jail. Apparently some people were upset because some homeless people in Oregon use fentanyl.)


("We’ve seen Republicans getting behind psilocybin therapy, and we’re gearing up for a big push. We had some success last year in Maine; we had our bill for psilocybin therapy passed out of the Senate; we came back this year and it didn’t make it through, but we built a lot of positive relationships. And we just had an educational hearing in Indiana where clinicians and policy experts came to speak to this committee. As you can imagine, Indiana is dominated by Republicans but it went well. There’s no specific legislation there yet but we’re hopeful we can use that hearing as a springboard into the 2024 legislature.

Across the country, we’re finding that when you educate these groups, their eyes open — there are not many issues like this where an hour or even a half hour conversation about research and healing potential can transform how people think.")

---Jared Moffat, quoted by Jane C. Hu, in The Microdose, 9.25. 2023. Moffat is the deputy director of a political action committee dedicated to working for drug policy reform at the state level across the country.)


("...nobody deserves to go to jail for having a psychedelic experience."

---Karma Smart, a Berkeley Community Health Commissioner, quoted by Juan Pablo Pérez-Burgos, 11.29. 2022, Berkeleyside.com, in the article "Move to decriminalize LSD in Berkeley under discussion".)


("...hundreds of psychedelic start-ups were launched in 2021, dozens of others went public with IPOs, and an industry that did not exist five years ago is valued at more than $10 billion."

---Michael Pollan, The Microdose, 12.31. 2021, summing up some of what happened during the year.)


("Psychedelics are now a huge profit-making industry, part of the burgeoning wellness industry which is valued at--some say--a trillion dollars or more."

---Patricia Kubala, whose "... research interests include the anthropology of religion...", in "Psychedelics and Religion", a free two-part online educational course offered in a partnership between the University of California, Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics and the Graduate Theological Union in 2022.)


Psychiatrist Stephen N. Xenakis, a retired U.S. Army Brigadier General, was formerly the executive director of the American Psychedelic Practitioners Association.

("...I feel relieved to say that the so-called renaissance that captured the interest of mostly rich, white men has [hopefully] reached its peak."

"...when all the glamour and hype subsides, the mushrooms will remain where they have always been: in closets and freezers in simple homes all over the country, waiting to be enjoyed with friends approximately once a year."

---Katharine Maclean, a former psychedelic researcher who is an acquaintance of Michael Pollan, in answer to a question she was asked by Jules Evans, "Is the psychedelic renaissance over?", 10.5. 2024, substack dot com.)


("Scratch just beneath the surface of a masculine influencer gabbing about the life-changing power of psychedelics and you'll find a partnership with a company seeking to make money on the growing shroom boom."

---Cathy Reisenwitz, psychedelicspotlight dot com, 8.25. 2022.)


("...publicly, the Ultimate Fighting Championship [UFC] has started to openly discuss psychedelics and they are exploring collaborations with Johns Hopkins."

---Courtney Walton, a psychologist at the University of Melbourne, speaking with Jane C. Hu, The Microdose, 11.7. 2022.)


("The trouble didn't start after I ate the apple. It was after I ate the mushroom--that's when the snake started talking."

---A naked Eve, sitting under an apple tree, speaking with a naked Adam in the bibical Garden of Eden. [from the "Rhymes with Orange" comic strip by Hilary B. Price. In color. 12.12. 2021.])


("This week, Harris Bricken's Psychedelics Law Blog gives an overview of the open questions uncovered by Oregon's Psilocybin Advisory Board's licensing subcommittee regarding the advertisement of psilocybin..."

"...companies will be able to employ those amazing sign twirlers to stand on intersections, and, my favorite: 'the wacky wavy inflatable arm tube men frequently used on car lots.'"

---Jane C. Hu, The Microdose, 1.28. 2022.)


(The city of Oakland, California officially says that the acts of growing, distributing, and consuming psilocybin mushrooms have been decriminalized there. In May 2023 I obtained a "POLKADOT" Belgian chocolate candy bar made in Oakland that contained 4 grams of psilocybin mushrooms.

"MICRODOSE: 1-3 PIECES. STIMULATE THE MIND.
THERAPEUTIC: 4-9 PIECES. MINDFUL AND ELEVATED.
GOD MODE: 10-15 PIECES. WALLS MIGHT MELT."

I think that it is disturbingly WRONG that the colorful packaging included an image of Fred Flintstone from the popular television cartoon show aimed at children, and words from the cartoon: "YABBA DABBA DOO!")


(Somewhat more thoughtful instructions are seen on the packaging for a product labeled ODYSSEY, a vegan dark chocolate candy bar. Each bar is said to contain 3.5 grams psilocybin mushrooms] [Summer 2023, San Francisco, California bay area.]

"Dosing Guide:

MICRO [.05 gm--.3 gm (50 mg--300 mg)]
Mood boosting, stress reducing and possible increased focus or productivity. If you are doing a proper micro dose you should feel nothing out of the ordinary.

MINI [.3--.5 gm (300 mg--500 mg)]
Mildly euphoric and can open the mind to create more intospective awareness. Typically you can begin to feel them in your belly at this dose.

MUSEUM [.5 gm--1.5 gm (500 mg--1,500 mg)]
Mood enhancing, can induce euphoria, excitement and increased empathy accompanied by mild to moderate visuals. On this dose you can usually still participate in public activities [like going to the museum] without being too much of a weirdo.

MODERATE [1.5 gm--4.5 gm (1,500 mg--4,500 mg)]
At this dose you'll most likely feel strong euphoria or excitement, a sense of peace, synesthesia, finding otherwise mundane things funny or interesting, and you'll hopefully gain some life changing introspective and/or philosophical insight.

HEROIC [5 gm + (5,000 mg)]
This dose can facilitate ego death, increased flow of ideas and creativity, enhanced senses, a very strong body high, and everything listed above, but more intense. See you on the other side, fellow traveler.

TIPS AND TRICKS:

Start with a small amount, you can always take more.
REMEMBER-SET AND SETTING ARE IMPORTANT

Make sure you are in a space where you can be yourself comfortably

EVERYBODY IS DIFFERENT
Find YOUR dose")


(When used properly, LSD often seems to be a MUCH, MUCH, MUCH better psychedelic than psilocybin mushrooms.


The concept of a "microdose" of LSD, and my original use of the word in 1980, was meant to be specific to LSD. One can eat a very, very small dose of psilocybin mushrooms or peyote, but there is FAR, FAR TOO MUCH substance in such very, very small doses of psilocybin mushrooms or peyote [compared to the amount of substance in a microdose of LSD] for them to be accurately called a "microdose".

I suspect it is like what some of what behavioral psychologist Daniel Kahneman learned about peoples often wildly inaccurate perception of what numbers mean. People have a very, very difficult time understanding just how tiny [and non-toxic] a microdose of LSD is compared to how incredibly much larger a dose of psilocybin mushrooms or peyote is.


A microdose of LSD, which, by definition, contains only one substance, LSD, weighs 5 micrograms.

A megadose of mushrooms, which always contains a mix of various substances, weighs 5 grams, which is 5 million micrograms.

A megadose of mushrooms, which always contains a mix of various substances, WEIGHS ONE MILLION TIMES MORE than a microdose of LSD, which contains only one substance.

[The average marijuana cigarette weighs 1 gram. One million average marijuana cigarettes weigh 1000 kilograms (2,200 pounds).

IT IS ABOUT SCALE:

The difference between what a microdose of LSD weighs and what a megadose of psilocybin mushrooms weighs is the same as the difference between a single marijuana cigarette and a pile of marijuana that weighs more than a ton!])

("Almost always when folks tell me they are microdosing or otherwise consuming magic mushrooms and I ask them what species they have taken they usually don’t know."

---Eugenia Bone, on substack dot com, 6.1. 2024. This is the opening sentence in her excellent essay "Dosing Blind-- Magic mushrooms vary in potency and side effects depending on the species and the cultivar. So do you even know what you are taking?" https://substack.com/browse/recommendations/post/146116970)

(It seems that, as of July 2024, there are more than a few ignorant, misinformed, and extremely self-righteous but seriously stupid people who claim they can heal mentally ill people by giving them psilocybin mushrooms. Pushing feel-good pie-in-the-sky "spiritual" psychedelic nonsense on people suffering from mental illness can cause them to commit suicide.)

(It is well known that some kinds of psilocybin mushrooms can cause some people to experience temporary paralysis. Some users have experienced what they described as temporary "total paralysis" that lasted for quite a while. Luckily, so far no one is known to have been permanently harmed because of anything that happened to them while they were temporarily paralyzed. The paralysis seems to be caused by consuming psilocybin mushrooms that like growing on wood, hence the condition is sometimes called "Wood Lover's Paralysis". There are no known cases of anyone developing "Wood Lover's Paralysis" after eating Cubensis. As of late 2023, it is not known what substance or combination of substances is causing the paralysis.)

(Here are excerpts from a warning, posted by the editors of The Microdose [the newsletter of the University of California Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics] as a link on 7.28. 2023.

It was written by medical student Eric M. and published in The Shadow on 3.26. 2021:

"This time last year, I was a rising star in the medical field. I had survived residency and my entire life was ahead of me. I was working harder than ever, but enjoying it, blissfully unaware of the devastation to come. A few months later, a seemingly benign decision to try 'magic mushrooms' one weekend ruined my life.

You may be aware that we are in a psychedelic renaissance. These substances have once again entered the mainstream, this time co-signed by highly respected research institutions and lawmakers. Major medical schools are administering psilocybin and MDMA to human participants in well-funded studies; voters in Oregon just passed a ballot initiative making “magic mushrooms” legal for mental health purposes; and, if you’re under the age of 40 and live in California, Washington, Oregon or Colorado, chances are, at least 2 in 5 of your acquaintances either has a psilocybin chocolate bar in their freezer or knows how to acquire one rapidly.

Marketed as the least dangerous substance in the psychedelic category, psilocybin usage is widespread throughout young professionals, particularly in Oregon, where I live. After having read “How to Change Your Mind” by Michael Pollan, and the hundreds of articles exalting this topic across my timeline, I got the message: Psychedelics, and psilocybin in particular, have remarkable potential to improve quality of life with little to no side effects in a relatively short amount of time. As someone who had struggled with anxiety and depression in the past and has always been an existential thinker, I was especially interested in a non-pharmaceutical alternative to treatment.

On two occasions in the last year, I tried mushroom chocolates with friends to dip my toe in the water and make sure I had no adverse reactions. The experiences were of no consequence; a few chuckles and deeper appreciation for the trees around us. When the opportunity came to try the “real thing,” I felt I had done my due diligence [hint: I had not]. Based on my limited knowledge and anecdotal evidence from more experienced friends, I knew “set and setting” mattered. I was in a peaceful state of mind, a safe space, and surrounded by people who loved me. Worst case scenario, I’d have a few scary hours, be looked after by my sober friends, and go to sleep.

I’ll speed through the experience itself, because it’s what comes next that matters. I dosed slowly, under a friend’s direction (he had consumed from the same batch the weekend prior and had a wonderful experience), taking small pieces and waiting an hour each time before increasing the dosage. Eventually I got there, with an overall dose well below the 3.5 grams recommended for someone with my body weight. The experience was incredible. I began to identify patterns in my life from an objective and loving perspective, I painted, journaled, and took numerous walks around the property barefoot to inspect and admire every single plant’s nuances. I felt newly aware of and attached to the Wisdom inherent in the world around me. I was coherent and in flow. I did not experience hallucinations. My intention going into the experience had been to understand what my next step should be career-wise. And the answer came. I realized precisely how my prior passions and current training could be combined into a career that would not only fulfill me, but systematically improve society. It felt as though the idea had been divinely gifted to me. I realized how every single person in my life fit into the plan. All I had to do was connect the dots so we could all work together to better the world.

I stayed up to watch the sunrise and took in a deep breath of fresh air, then facetimed my mother at 7 AM to tell her excitedly about my experience. As soon as we hung up I facetimed a friend to tell her about my adventure. Soon afterwards I called my grandfather to tell him all about my new idea, and, well…you get it. Once these “urgent” calls were complete (around 8:45 AM), I decided it was absolutely necessary to run loads of laundry, create lists of groceries we would need and make the house perfect for the remaining guests to enjoy while I slept. After about 5 hours, I was back up and ready to roll. It felt essential to continue calling people who I knew would be excited about the idea so we could brainstorm and get it off the ground immediately — mentors, colleagues, old professors, previous therapists, exes — sky’s the limit! I had never been more articulate, more precise, more convincing, or more alarming. Unbeknownst to me, my friends and family quickly noticed I was not acting like myself. I’ve always been an upbeat and fast talker, but the vigor with which I was pursuing this idea was unlike anything they had seen before. I started to engage in forced speech — cutting people off whenever they would try to get a word in — and refused to hear even one ounce of “negativity.” At the same time, I was getting results! Incredibly accomplished individuals were entertaining the idea and offering guidance. I was doing an amazing job at work and receiving praise from my supervisors. My therapist cried tears of joy when I told her about my psilocybin experience. My psychiatrist agreed I could begin to wean off of SSRIs because I was 'cured'! I was finally stepping into my power.

About a week later, I felt a deep intuition that I could now channel spirits. I was scared but also felt a duty to help them... At that I went from exhibiting inordinate amounts of productivity, inspiration, socialization and deep gut-wrenching emotion to staring at a wall and barely feeding myself for weeks on end. 6 months and $50,000 of treatment later, I have barely improved.

...As they become more integrated into mainstream society, psychedelics should come with a black box warning of these clear contraindications, as should any articles or books touting their magnificence.

...You may not think it will happen to you. But drug-induced mania and drug-induced psychosis are well-documented phenomena. It is my greatest hope that in publishing this story, at least one person will be spared from the trauma I’ve experienced.")


(From a medical paper, a link to which was published on 9.4. 2024 in The Microdose:


"Penile Replantation after Self-Amputation Following Psilocybin-Induced Drug Psychosis"

by Andreas P Berger and Alfred Hobisch,
Department of Urology, Academic Teaching Hospital Feldkirch, Austria.

Published in the MEGA Journal of Surgery, 9.21. 2024.

"Penile self-amputation is a rare emergency that requires immediate replantation. Drug-induced psychosis has been described as a potential trigger for self-mutilation, including male genital amputation. We report the first psilocybin-triggered self-inflicted penile amputation with subsequent replantation. We present a case of a 37-year-old Caucasian man who consumed four or five dried magic mushrooms while staying alone in a holiday residence during an episode of depression. Under the influence of psilocybin, he decided to amputate his penis with a blunt axe, chopping the penile shaft into several pieces.")


("Off-duty pilot who tried to cut engines said he thought he was dreaming, had taken mushrooms"

---Claire Rush and Gene Johnson, 10.24. 2023, KCRA-TV, Sacramento, California.

44-year old Joseph David Emerson, from Pleasant Hill, California was jailed in Oregon and charged with 83 counts of attempted murder.

"An FBI agent wrote in a probable cause affidavit in support of the federal charge that Emerson 'said it was his first-time taking mushrooms.'”)

("I had a tweet about the airline pilot on mushrooms and suddenly my relies were full of peeps promoting where they were selling them."

---posted by a stranger on X [formerly Twitter], 10.25. 2023.)


(32-year old Betai Koffi was a Stanford graduate and engineer at Youtube.

"According to investigators, Koffi and five friends had rented a house in Bodega Bay for the long July Fourth weekend.

Koffi's friends told investigators he consumed two hits of LSD and became delusional.

They were able to calm him down, but a short time later Koffi took two additional hits of LSD and that's when things got out of control."

The 9-1-1 call featured in the Sheriff's video occurred at that time.

'We're really worried about him honestly,' pleads an unidentified friend to the dispatcher.

The friend then tells the dispatcher that Koffi had threatened suicide saying, 'He thought he was already dead... and that nothing mattered.

But we thought it was just, you know, drugs talking at the time,' explained the unidentified friend.

The next video featured in the clip shows Koffi being contacted by a private neighborhood security guard.

According to investigators, Koffi picked up a landscaping stake and stabbed the security guard with it, before knocking him to the ground.

The incident is captured on the video and the guard can be heard screaming for help.

'Help, code 30! Officer down. He's taking off in our patrol vehicle.'

Koffi then got into the security guard's truck and sped away.

The third clip shows Koffi in the truck hitting a man and a woman who were walking on the side of the road. The woman goes flying down the hill while a piece of the truck flies up in the air.

Seconds later in the corner of the video Koffi can be seen driving off the road and toward another couple who were standing on a bluff, hitting that woman.

The two women he's accused of running down are hospitalized with serious injuries, but both are expected to recover..."

"Investigators say Koffi kept driving, into a wall and through yards.

The final clip in the video captures the end of the chase on Pelican Loop and the deputy-involved shooting.

A CHP officer and Sonoma County Sheriff's Deputy got there about the same time and say Koffi tried to run down both officers.

The video shows the truck turning and coming toward the officers.

The deputy yells out of Koffi to stop and then he fires several shots.

In the video, the security guard's truck can then be seen smashed up against the CHP SUV."

'I shot him multiple times,' the deputy can be heard saying on the video. 'I don't know where I hit him... multiple shots to the head I think.'

"'He's a person that has zero criminal record, never been given a speeding ticket, never committed any crimes. His friends were completely shocked by his behavior,' Sonoma County Sheriff's Sgt. Brandon Cutting told ABC7 News on July 10."

Koffi survived being shot. His friends said that he had been drinking alcohol when he took the LSD.


---ABC7 News/KGO-TV, San Francisco, California, 7.6. 2019.)


(In September 2023 I ate part of a chocolate bar containing psilocybin mushrooms. Later I forgot I done so, and looking over at a cat, I was wonderfully astounded. I thought I was seeing a a supernatural creature that seemed part-raccoon, part-walrus, and part-Yoda!)


In 1972 Jack Leary told me about the day the first shipment of psilocybin came in the mail from Sandoz. His dad Tim was utterly ecstatic after taking some and insisted that Jack and every other living thing in the house had to take psilocybin, including the insects. Jack said Tim made him crawl around and dose the ants!


(The song "My Fault", by Eminem, 1999.)


("When presenting in public, they screen fellow panelists so they are not associated with 'someone with purple hair'."

---Alex Brown, Psymposia.com, 3.16. 2021, in his article "'Acid Revival' portrays a resurrected scientific field, notably more conservative than its historic predecessor", about Danielle Giffort's 2020 book ACID REVIVAL: The Psychedelic Renaissance and the Quest for Medical Legitimacy. Giffort is assistant professor of medical sociology at the St. Louis College of Pharmacy.

[I enjoyed dyeing my white hair purple. I used the color called "Purple Haze" from Manic Panic in New York City.])

("Ms. Koch is self-conscious about coming across as one of those 'hippy dippy woo-woo people', as she put it."

---from a 2.23. 2023 article by Brooks Barnes in The New York Times describing Elizabeth Koch, the daughter of right-wing billionaire Charles Koch. She says she has used psychedelics as a medicine and founded a foundation which has helped psychedelics organizations through funding.)


('It’s impossible not to piss someone off [in the psychedelic community]. It’s very personal, even sacramental.'”

--- Ben Lightburn, quoted by David Hillier, in Hillier's 3.21. 2023 psychedelics dot com article "Down The Rabbit Hole: How a Psychedelic Rabbi Became Lost in The Maze of U.S. Drug Laws". ["...Lightburn is CEO of Filament Health (in Vancouver), which develops naturally extracted, pharmaceutical-grade, psychedelic medicines."])


("One company's alleged maneuvering to seize the gains from psychedelic research is sparking serious concerns and deep feelings of betrayal."

---Olivia Goldhill, Quartz, 11.8. 2018, writing about London-based psychedelic company Compass Pathways.)


("Psychedelic company filing a patent for taking psilocybin while lying on a couch listening to music."

---Reilly Capps, on Twitter, 2.3. 2021, commenting on a tweet by Graham Pechenik that was about "Compass Pathways' application claims...")


("Delic Corp. Ramping Up Psychedelic Revenue"

"The PsycheDELIC Revolution is Here. Are You Ready?"

"Step 1: Acquire legally operating cash-flow psychedelic wellness clinics.

Step 2: Amplify revenues to those [already positive cash-flowing] clinics with their massive and far-reaching marketing arm.

Step 3: Use those clinics as an entry-point to offer novel treatments as regulations change to allow it."

---from a 6.29. 2021 Delic Corporation "Investment Opportunity" ad on Facebook from Momentum Letter dot com. The ad featured a large very colorful image of mushrooms and mentions "Ketamine Infusion Centers". Delic co-founder and CEO Matt Stang is a former owner of High Times magazine. Delic is currently small by comparison to some of the other apparently very well-funded psychedelic companies such as ATAI Life Sciences, Compass Pathways, MindMed, Cybin Inc, and Numinus Wellness.)


("To the extent psychedelic capitalism 'raises all boats', in so doing it floods other people's homes, washes away biodiversity, erodes the cliffs and, finally, your own house crumbles into the sea."

---Adam Knowles, on Twitter, 6.9. 2021.)


("I drank the 'Psychedelic Water' going viral on TikTok, and I felt my anxiety melt away."

---Andrea Michelson, businessinsider dot com, 7.24. 2021, via a link on Microsoft News. ["Psychedelic Water" contains kava root, damiana leaf, and green tea extracts.] "I nicknamed it 'influencer juice' because I couldn't stop telling my friends how much I loved it."

["Psychedelic is not just about mushrooms and tripping out. Psychedelic is a state of mind. It's a way of thinking, and we want people to embrace that."

---Keith Stein, the founder of the company that makes "Psychedelic Water".])


("DoubleBlind reflects on the partnership between Urban Outfitters and a brand called Psychedelic Water, whose water doesn’t actually contain psychedelics: 'Early psychonauts like Allen Ginsberg, who believed that psychedelics would help people re-imagine capitalist society, are rolling in their graves.'"

---Jane C. Hu, The Microdose, 4.29. 2022, describing and quoting a 4.22. 2022 DoubleBlind article by Delilah Friedler.

When one goes to the online version of DoubleBlind magazine, one immediately sees large colorful ads:

"GROW SHROOMS! GET OUR FREE GUIDE!" [Illustrated with a drawing of a Amanita muscaria mushroom, not a psilocybin mushroom...]

"Buy Spores!"

"Here's Your Free Microdosing Guide!")






("Facebook found that his posts stoked violence and posed a risk to public safety"

---CBS News, 6.4. 2021, "Facebook bans Trump for at least two years".

["...a serious risk to public safety..."]

"'At the end of this period, we will look to experts to assess whether the risk to public safety has receded,' Nick Clegg, Facebook's vice president of global affairs, wrote in a blog post.'If we determine that there is still a serious risk to public safety, we will extend the restriction for a set period of time and continue to re-evaluate until that risk has receded.'")


("Ex-NYPD officer found guilty of attacking D.C. cop with flag pole on Jan. 6"

---ABC News headline, 5.2. 2022)


("...obviously incredibly disturbing, literally in every aspect."

---retired Admiral Michael Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States Department of Defense, describing the situation at the White House after Trump lost the election, and how it was thought by General Mark Milley, the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and others that Trump might try to use the military to "...keep the president in power..." or that Trump might take military action against Iran in an attempt to stay in power. Mullen was interviewed on the 7.18. 2021 CBS show Face the Nation.)


("Text messages that helped lead Fox News to part ways with star host Tucker Carlson included one in which he declared that Trump supporters beating a protester was 'not how white men fight,' according to The New York Times. The text was one of a trove of messages from Carlson and other Fox News hosts uncovered in a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems against the network for airing false allegations that the company’s machines were used to steal the 2020 election from former President Donald Trump. The sides settled just as the trial was getting underway, with Fox agreeing to pay Dominion nearly $800 million. The Times reports that Carlson sent the text to a producer hours after Trump supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He describes a video he had seen a couple of weeks earlier of Trump supporters beating someone he described as 'an Antifa kid.' Carlson wrote about his conflicting emotions in watching the fight, which he described as 'three against one, at least. Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously,' he wrote, according to the Times. 'It’s not how white men fight. I should remember that somewhere somebody probably loves this kid, and would be crushed if he was killed,' Carlson wrote, after admitting part of him was rooting for the attackers."

---AP, 5.3. 2023, quotes excerpted from their article "Report: Racist text helped spur Fox to oust Tucker Carlson".)


("The Justice Department charged a former FBI agent with illegally entering the Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021 attack and three other misdemeanor counts after he allegedly called law enforcement guarding the building 'Nazis' and urged the mob outside to 'kill 'em,' court documents unsealed Tuesday revealed. Jared Wise, who was arrested in Oregon on Monday, worked for the FBI from 2004-2017, rising through the ranks to supervisory special agent at the time of his departure from the bureau. 'I'm former law enforcement,' Wise yelled, according to bodycam video described in the charging documents. 'You're disgusting. You are the Nazi. You are the Gestapo.' Prosecutors say Wise then observed members of the mob violently attack law enforcement and urged them on, allegedly shouting, 'Kill 'em! Kill 'em! Kill 'em!'"
---excerpts from an article by Robert Legare, CBS News, 5.4. 2023.)

("Prosecutors said Mark Ibrahim posed for photos throughout the day, at times flashing his DEA badge and service weapon at the camera."

"Court documents said Ibrahim entered restricted grounds outside the U.S. Capitol."

"The friend...said Ibrahim had gone to the rally in order to promote himself: he wanted to launch a...podcast and cigar brand, and hoped the protests would be a launching stage..."

---Cassidy McDonald, CBS News, in a 7.20. 2021 article "Off-duty DEA agent brought his government-issued gun to the Capitol riot, prosecutors say", about the events of 1.6. 2021 in Washington, D.C. Ibrahim was arrested for lying and for carrying a firearm in a restricted area, among other things.)



["Do not ever take LSD with assholes."

---Anthony Bourdain, in the 2020 documentary film Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics.])


("My friend did psychedelics and he's still a total dickhead"

[A very important truth, seen written on a favorite T-shirt.])



("...a 34-year-old woman, Roseanne Boyland, died of acute amphetamine intoxication."

---Cassidy McDonald, CBS News, 4.14. 2021, mentioning what happened to one of the pro-Trump rioters after she entered the Capitol on 1.6. 2021.)


(Coleman Thomas Blevins, 28, an alleged white-supremacist, was arrested in Kerrville, Texas and "...accused of plotting to carry out a mass shooting at a Walmart..."

"Authorities searched his home and...'firearms, ammunition, electronic evidence, concentrated THC, and radical ideology paraphernalia, including books, flags, and handwritten documents were seized.'"

---CBS News, 5.31. 2021.)


(In 1995, Aum Shinryko cultists carried out a sarin nerve gas terrorist attack on the Tokyo subway.

"They were synthesizing mustard gas and phosgene as well as manufacturing huge amounts of LSD and other drugs to help their brainwashing procedures."

---Newscientist dot com, 5.11. 1996.)


("As he climbed Aum Shinryko's devotional ladder, Takahashi Hidetoshi endured various rituals..."

One "...initiation meant taking 'Christ's bone powder', likely LSD, that prompted hours of hallucination and a gut-wrenching comedown."

---CNN, 2000.)




("'Listen, listen!' Susan said.
But her mother and father
couldn't hear what she heard.
'Susan,' they said,
'there is no bird,
there is no bird.'"

---Charlotte Zolotow, in her 1982 children's book THE SONG. A little girl hears a bird, but no one else does. Finally she meets a little boy and she asks him if he hears what she hears. "I hear a bird singing"
he says. "And he's singing of new grass and the smell of wet earth and the softness in the air.")









("...our lives are not inherently legible."

---Eva Hagberg Fisher, author of the memoir HOW TO BE LOVED, in a telephone interview with Brandon Yu, the San Francisco Chronicle, 2.7. 2019.)


("how shocking the obvious can be / if you're not ready for it."

---Vijay Seshadri)


("...a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest."

---Paul Simon, in his 1968 song "The Boxer".)

("Everything that you see is observer-determined."

---Robert Lanza, M.D.)


("All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream."

---Edgar A. Poe)


("I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours."

---Bob Dylan, 1963)


"Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

---Walt Whitman, a poet.


("...'can't tell if i contain multitudes or if i'm just full of shit'."

---unattributed Twitter post, used as the concluding words in a 9.17. 2020 article by penguinrandomhouse/UK.)


(“Bertrand Russell once remarked that the stars are in one’s brain.”

 ---R.D. Laing, in his 1967 book THE POLITICS OF EXPERIENCE.)


("The Brain---is wider than the Sky..."

---Emily Dickinson)


("In the distance, a knot of twisted trees flashes like cerebral circuitry."

---Karen Russell. This is the last sentence of her short story "Z.Z.'s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers ", in her 2006 book ST. LUCY'S HOME FOR GIRLS RAISED BY WOLVES.)


("When it is finished, [a picture] still goes on changing, according to the state of mind of whoever is looking at it. A picture lives a life like a living creature, undergoing the changes imposed on us by our life from day to day. This is natural enough, as the picture lives only through the man who is looking at it."

---Pablo Picasso)


(All "we experience directly is a virtual-reality rendering, conveniently generated for us by our unconscious mind from sensory data plus complex and acquired theories [i.e. programs] about how to interpret them."

---David Deutsch, in his 1997 book THE FABRIC OF REALITY.)


("Illusion is the only reality."

---Gustave Flaubert)


("Let us admit...the hallucinatory character of the world."

---Jorge Luis Borges, quoted by Judith Thurman.)


("The subject of painting is a state of mind."

---Frederick Gore, in his book PAINTING: Some Basic Principles.)


("Reality leaves a lot to the imagination."

---John Lennon)


("...what we know, or think we know, is perceived through a dense series of veils--culture, language, historical moment, and biological development. We and the world around us are always hidden from ourselves by ourselves."

---Wes "Scoop" Nisker, in his book CRAZY WISDOM.)


                      "...as unreal
as real roses."

---Denise Levertov, in her poem "The Gypsy's Window".


("That is the way we live nowadays: driving along a road between hallucination and amnesia. As long as you are moving you are O.K...."

---Romesh Gunesekera, in the short story "Road Kill". The New Yorker, 12.2. 2013.)


("I woke up in between
a memory and a dream"

"So let's get to the point,
let's roll another joint"

---Tom Petty, in his song "You Don't Know How It Feels".)


("The world presented to us by our senses is nothing like reality."

---Amanda Gefter, in her article "The Case Against Reality", about the research of cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman. The Atlantic, 4.26. 2016.)


("Reality is a matter of perception."

---from a 2016 brochure promoting Psy-Group, an international political espionage and "dirty tricks" firm that did things like creating false news to influence elections.)


("Reality is not what it is."

---Wallace Stevens)


("Neither the various appearances of things nor things themselves are reality."

---Pierre Soulages)


("...there is no such thing as an objective reality."

---Albert Hofmann [the chemist who invented LSD who was also the first person to have their consciousness altered by LSD], in the 1984 book THE OMNI INTERVIEWS, edited by Pamela Weintraub.)


("...psychology has...assumptions often so implicit, so removed from conscious awareness, that we don't know we have them."

"...our implicit assumptions affect the way we look at and control what we will find to be the 'meaningful' facts."

---Charles Tart, in his introduction to the 1975 book he edited, TRANSPERSONAL PSYCHOLOGIES.)


("I don't know. If I always knew what I meant, I'd be a genius."

---Dick Powell, playing Philip Marlowe in the 1944 film noir Murder, My Sweet. John Paxton wrote the screenplay, which was based on a novel by Raymond Chandler. Marlowe had been browbeating someone and they asked him what he meant.)


("...our awareness of the world around us is extraordinarily limited. We are all simply unconscious to an unbelievable degree."

---M. Esther Harding, in her 1965 book THE "I" AND THE "NOT-I"---A Study in the Development of Consciousness.)


("To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures."

---Flannery O'Connor)


("human kind cannot bear very much reality."

---T.S. Eliot)


("Justice Ginsburg recounted what her mother-in-law told her was the secret of a happy marriage, 'It helps every now and then to be a little deaf. So if an unkind or thoughtless word is spoken, you just tune it out. You don't hear it.'"

---KGO-TV, 10. 21. 2019, reporting on a speech that Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, gave on the campus of the University of California in Berkeley.)


("I have to admit that sometimes the artist's story, if I am informed of it, adds to and affects what I see."

---David Byrne, quoted by Michelle Broder Van Dyke, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, 10.14. 2009.)


("When I am asked a question, I tend to answer with a story."

---Bruce Conner, quoted by Kenneth Baker, the San Francisco Chronicle, summer 2009.)


("The universe is made of stories, not of atoms."

---Muriel Rukeyser, 1968.)


("...story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth."

---Tim O'Brien, in his book THE THINGS THEY CARRIED.)


("The Truth must dazzle gradually
or every man be blind."

---Emily Dickinson, in her poem "Tell All The Truth, But Tell It Slant".)


("I think stories are the basic unit of consciousness..."

---Steve Almond, author of BAD STORIES: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country, WBUR radio, Boston, Massachusetts, 2.2. 2018.)


("Stories only happen to people who can tell them."

---Allan Gurganus)


("...good stories change people..."

---Lewis Mehl-Madrona, M.D., Ph.D., of the Johns Hopkins Center for American Indian Health, in a 1.15. 2015 lecture.)


("Words can alter, for better or worse, the chemical transmitters and circuits of our brain, just as drugs or electroconvulsive therapy can. We still don't fully understand how this occurs."

---Jerome Groopman, M.D., The New Yorker, 5.27. 2019. Groopman is the Dina and Raphael Recanati Chair of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and the author of 5 books.)


("It's very hard to know what people are really eating.
They will lie to you if you ask them."

"...scientists really
don't know anything about consciousness."

---Michael Pollan, in a transcript of a video, August 2023. [In the free online version of the course "Psychedelics and the Mind", from the University of California, Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics. (The quotes are in Module 2, Part 3.)])


("Disinformation reached new heights in 2020. A recent study showed Facebook users interacted with deceptive posts more than one billion times in October, November, and December--almost twice the total leading up to the 2016 election."

"'It was a drug. It was absolutely a drug', says Jitarth Jideja, a former QAnon believer who said he lost almost 2 years of his life to the cult."

---Major Garrett, CBS News, 1.31. 2021.)


("I decided to specialize in psychiatry because I believe strongly in the influence of our thoughts and feelings on our well-being."

---Dr. Louise Forrest)


("There's nothing in the world more powerful than a good story."

---Peter Dinklage, playing Tyrion Lannister in the final episode [May 2019] of the television series "Game of Thrones", written by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. "Game of Thrones" was adapted from A SONG OF FIRE AND ICE, a series of fantasy novels by George R.R. Martin.)


("History's written from what can be found; what isn't saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by earth."

---Jill Lepore)


("In public, I feel I have an obligation to be, if not clear, vivid."

---Laurie Anderson)


("Live memorably."

---John Perry Barlow)


Marcel Duchamp noted that the significance of a work of art depends upon the context in which it is viewed. Both the location where the image is seen and its place in art history are important.







("Swallowing three pills at once is kind of unpleasant, especially because the vitamin D capsules I last bought are enormous. I can’t believe it took me years to figure this out, but: I don’t have to take all the pills at the same time! Sure, it takes slightly longer to swallow them individually, but there is no reason to endure discomfort for some marginal gain in efficiency."

---Jane C. Hu, Substack, 10.12. 2023. Hu, an award-winning science journalist, holds a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley and is the head writer of The Microdose, the newsletter of the Center for the Science of Psychedelics there.)


For more than 36 years, my "business" card has read: "MIND-ACTIVE DRUGS: INFORMATION, RESEARCH, AND CONSULTATION".


("To inform is to influence."

---Adam Brookes, in his 2014 spy novel NIGHT HERON.)


("You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion."

---Harlan Ellison)


(“A report in 2012 by The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse revealed that medical schools devoted little time to teaching addiction medicine — only a few hours over the course of four years.”

 ---Natalie Jacewicz, National Public Radio website, 7.27. 2017.

“...most medical professionals who should be providing addiction treatment are not sufficiently trained to diagnose or treat the disease…”

 ---from the 2012 CASAColumbia report.)


(“...there is little to no education within medical education curriculums around addiction…”

---Michael Botticelli, head of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

 “...medical schools have not done a good job in educating students about all of the complicated issues related to substance use, substance use disorder, and addictions.”

---Dr. Todd Griswold, director of medical student education in psychiatry, Harvard Medical School.

Both of the above quotes are from a 5.17. 2016 StatNews report by Melissa Bailey.)


(“...undergraduate medical education concerning substance abuse is woefully sparse.”

---Kothari, Gourevitch, Lee, Grossman, Truncali, Ark, and Kalet in Acad Med. 2011 Jan., online article: U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health.)


("Addictions are most difficult to treat."

"...many of these patients are doctors or doctors' wives. In the old days a very high percentage of drug addicts were doctors, nurses or doctor's wives. In my experience, the severe drug addict can be treated successfully only in a hospital..."

---Sidney Tarachow, M.D., commenting on opioid addiction, in the chapter "Acting Out and Psychopathy" in his 1953 book AN INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOTHERAPY.)


(“Many of us were even taught--incorrectly--that opioids are not addictive when prescribed for legitimate pain. The results have been devastating.”

 ---U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, quoted by Steven Reinberg, HealthDay News, 8.25. 2016.)


("Taylor Weyeneth, a twenty-three-year-old whose only previous employment was with the Trump campaign, became one of the White House's top-ranking officials addressing the opioid epidemic. He served as deputy chief of staff in the Office of National Drug Control Policy until January, when the Washington Post discovered that his resume listed a job at a law firm from which he had been discharged for not showing up and a master's degree he did not possess."

---Evan Osnos, in his article "Only The Best People", The New Yorker, 5. 21. 2018.)


("America's largest drug companies saturated the country with 76 billion oxycodone and hydrocodone pain pills from 2006 through 2012..."

"...the prescription opioid epidemic...has resulted in nearly 100,000 deaths from 2006 through 2012."

Approximately 22 companies "...are now being sued in federal court in Cleveland by nearly 2,000 cities, towns, and counties alleging that they conspired to flood the nation with opioids."

"The companies have paid more than $1 billion in fines to the Justice Department and the Food and Drug Administration over opioid-related issues, and hundreds of millions more to settle lawsuits."

"Purdue Pharma ended up paying a $634 million fine to the FDA for claiming oxycontin was less addictive than other pain medications."

"The drug companies, along with the DEA and the Justice Department, have fought furiously against the public release of a database maintained by the DEA [the 'Automation of Reports and Consolidated
Order System'] that tracks the path of every single pain pill sold in the United States..."

"The secrecy was finally lifted after the Post and HD Media waged a year-long legal battle for access to...documents and data..."

---Scott Higham, Sari Horwitz, and Steven Rich, in an article published in the Washington Post, 7.16. 2019.)


(More than 10,000 people in the San Francisco bay area have died from drug overdoses since 2006, according to a November 2019 report by the California Department of Public Health.)


("As humans we are not perfect, and mistakes will be made."

---San Jose, California police chief Anthony Mata, April 2022, announcing that one of his officers, De'Jon Packer, 24 years old and a former football star, had died because he overdosed on the fentanyl he was using.)


("Two Columbus police officers were arrested by the FBI and charged with crimes connected to the distribution of fentanyl. Both are officers in the department’s narcotics division."

In June and August 2021, officer Marco Merino, 44, allegedly distributed approximately seven and a half kilograms of fentanyl that officer John Kotchkoski, 33, provided to him.

"Court documents state Merino allegedly tried to recruit a confidential informant to traffic drugs with him..."

---Daniel Griffin and Joe Clark, 9.29. 2021, WCMH-TV [NBC], Columbus, Ohio. [Edited for clarity.])


("The CDC estimates that more than 93,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2020, up 29 percent from the year before. And since 1999, more than 840,000 Americans have died from overdoses."

---Jack Shuler, The Atlantic, 7.24. 2021.

["...ostracizing people who use drugs has become so normalized that some people no longer see them as human."

---Brooke Parker, a grassroots harm reduction advocate who is in recovery.])


("New study finds PFAS 'forever chemicals' in drinking water from 45% of faucets across U.S."

"The tests searched for the presence of 32 different per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances."

"...these 'forever chemicals' have been linked to a range of health problems, including certain forms of cancer."

"CBS News previously reported that research shows that more than 95% of Americans have 'detectable levels' of PFAS in their blood."

---Kerry Breen, CBS News, 7.6. 2023.


Twenty percent of modern pharmaceuticals are said to contain fluorine. In 2020, atorvastatin, which I currently take daily, was the most commonly prescribed medication in the United States. According to Wikipedia "pharmaceuticals such as atorvastatin contain carbon-fluorine bonds". According to some definitions, atorvastatin is a PFAS.


[“We don’t know very much about how pharmaceuticals degrade once they leave the body."

---Wendy Heiger-Bernays, a clinical professor of environmental health quoted by Jillian McKoy, Boston University, in a 3.18. 2022 article.])


("The EPA has stated there is no safe level of exposure to PFAS without risk of health impacts, but now it will require that public water utilities test for six different types of PFAS chemicals to reduce exposure in drinking water. The new standards will reduce PFAS exposure for 100 million people, according to the EPA, and prevent thousands of deaths and illnesses."

"'There's just a huge amount of political opposition from the chemical industry and, frankly, from some of the water utilities, that don't want EPA to regulate these chemicals, because they know that once EPA cracks down on them, it's going to cost them a lot of money, and they don't want to spend that money,' Erik D. Olson [senior strategic director of health at the Natural Resources Defense Council] said."

---Tracy J. Wholf, CBS News, 4.10. 2024. "EPA announces first-ever national regulations for 'forever chemicals' in drinking water".)



I am a psychedelicyberepidemiologist.

(PSYCHEDELICYBEREPIDEMIOLOGY: The study of how psychedelic states of consciousness are spread via the Internet.


["All colors affect us psychologically."

"They all have a major impact on the way we feel and act."

"Some reactions to color are physiological and completely involuntary."

"Many people are motivated by inner compulsions rather than by rational thought."

---from PANTONE HANDBOOK OF COLOR FOR INTERNET (1998).]


[The Apple Macintosh PowerBook 140, released in October 1991, was "...the very first notebook computer created by Apple..."

"Codenames for this model are: Tim Lite, Tim LC, and Leary."

---Wikipedia, 2015.]


["The impulse to use hallucinogens is a kind of empathy with the electronic environment."

---Marshall McLuhan]


["Apple exemplifies one strain of influence that is particularly unappreciated: the crossover between counterculture spirituality and tech culture."

"...this phase of Silicon Valley culture...was a distinct period from the 1970s hippie/tech crossover, which was documented...in John Markoff's book WHAT THE DORMOUSE SAID."

---Jaron Lanier, in his 2013 book WHO OWNS THE FUTURE?.]


["The Internet is...an expression of 1960s counterculture."

"It's...an electronic commune."

---Lev Grossman, TIME, 12.27. 2010.]


[“...you have the counterculture, the Grateful Dead, LSD, all happening in the same place that you get Apple computer and the internet born…”

 “...they had in mind recreating the commune."

 ---Franklin Foer, author of WORLD WITHOUT MIND: THE EXISTENTIAL THREAT OF BIG TECH, speaking with Michael Krasny, KQED, September 2017.]


["A Kind of Electronic LSD?"

---G. Pascal Zachary, in an article about "computer whiz" Jaron Lanier and "artificial reality". The Wall Street Journal, 1.23. 1990.]


[One of the "...cultural developments that distinguish the Second Psychedelic Revolution from the 1960s LSD and rock music revolution..." is "The popularization of the Internet, which allowed for the rapid and widespread dissemination of psychedelic culture."

"Now...we can witness psychedelic research slowly but surely re-entering the universities and research labs thanks to..." a number of reasons, including "...the birth of hundreds if not thousands of websites (Erowid, DMT-Nexus, etc.) that either promote psychedelics or are directly influenced by them; the dizzying number of new books on psychedelics on the shelves (or at least on Amazon); and the greatest array of psychedelics and entheogens--both natural and man-made--that has ever been available to any society in history."

---James Oroc, 7.9. 2019, evolver.net.]


["If you want to disseminate knowledge as widely as possible, then tech is the way to do it."

---Lindsay Aveilhé, quoted on microsoft dot com in a 2020 article about Sol LeWitt.]


["USCO was an American media art collective in the 1960s, founded by poet Gerd Stern, Michael Callahan, and Steve Durkee in New York. It was most active in the years 1964-1966. Stewart Brand, although not a formal member of the group, held close relations to USCO and was considered a peripheral member who played a major role in connecting countercultural networks with groups of researchers in the developing cyberculture."

---Wikipedia, 2020.


("Castalia Foundation and USCO press release for 'Psychedelic Exploration', a series of Monday night lectures, discussions, improvisations, and mixed media experiences dealing with 'the technology of consciousness expansion', at the New Theater in New York City, starting in June 1965."

"One page mimeograph announcing 'Psychedelic Explorations", presented by the Castalia Foundation and USCO, July 12, 1965. 'The projections and sound are comprised of various modern materials using contemporary technology. Nonetheless, we believe them to be in the true traditions of transcendental art media of the past.'"

---from a "small archive related to Timothy Leary, The Castalia Foundation, and the League for Spiritual Discovery in the 1960s" that was cataloged by Ken Lopez.)]


["Tim Scully is an American computer engineer, best known in the psychedelic underground for his work in the production of LSD from 1966 to 1969." His best known product was called "Orange Sunshine".

"In the eighth grade, he won honorable mention in the 1958 Bay Area Science Fair for designing and building a small computer." Six years later, after two years at the University of California, Berkeley "...his services as an electronic design consultant were in high demand. During this period, he first took LSD on April 15, 1965."

Caption under a photo of Scully with computers: "Tim Scully and his cat Merlin, fixing AutoCAD bugs for Autodesk on December 24, 2000."

---Wikipedia, November 2020.]


["In a side street in Berkeley California, the epicentre of the counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s, I found what could well be the birthplace of the phenomenon."

---Rory Cellan-Jones, BBC News, 1.25. 2011, in the article "Hackers and Hippies: The Origins of Social Networking". (In 1973, as part of the "Community Memory" project, a computer terminal was placed near a bulletin board in a record store in Berkeley and other places that were easily accessible by the public, allowing local users to communicate with each other, form groups, etc.)]


[According to Mike Power in his 2014 book DRUGS 2.0: THE WEB REVOLUTION THAT'S CHANGING HOW THE WORLD GETS HIGH, the first thing ever sold online, in 1972, was a bag of marijuana.])


("...distribution of cannabis is an essential medical service."

---Dr. Susan Philip, San Francisco Department of Public Health, press conference about the COVID-19 pandemic, KPIX-TV, 3.17. 2020.)


("The turkey."

---a Native American woman from Philadelphia, Mississippi, answering host Steve Harvey on the television show "Family Feud". Harvey had asked her "On Thanksgiving, what would you put marijuana in so that the family will be too mellow to argue?" KPIX-TV, 5.13. 2020 [CBS] San Francisco.

[Reminds me of the Simpsons episode where "Marge drinks some tapwater that is dosed with LSD and the walls appear to be melting and the turkey in the oven flies out the window."

Or another episode where a Turkish sailor tells Homer that they put hashish in Marge's food...])



("In 2019, boxing legend Mike Tyson smoked a drug derived from toad venom [5-MeO-DMT]. Ever since this earth-shattering experience with the psychedelic drug, Tyson has leveraged his large following to help advocate for psychedelic experiences..."

"Tyson says his 5-MeO-DMT experience is what led him into becoming a more open person and is what ultimately inspired his return to boxing."

---Mark Hazan, in his "100 Most Influential People in Psychedelics" list, 5.4. 2021, medium dot com, via a link posted on Amanda Feilding's Facebook page. [In the early 1990s Tyson, who was born in 1966, was convicted of raping a teenager and sent to prison. After he was released in 1995, he was disqualified during a professional fight because he bit another boxer, notoriously removing a portion of his opponent's ear. In 2007 Tyson was convicted for driving while drunk and possessing cocaine.])

(In 2022, Mike Tyson's cannabis company started selling ear-shaped edibles [with a portion of each ear missing] called "Mike Bites". Each gummy was said to contain 10 mg of THC.)


("'...I had taken time off social, hired a spiritual coach, and smoked a Bufo toad.', Haack, who turns 38 Friday, shared, explaining that it 'basically reset my brain and kicked out years of anxiety in 15 mins.'"

---Gabrielle Chang, People, 7.8. 2021 via a link on Microsoft News, quoting something real estate investor and TV personality from southern California Christina Haack had recently posted on Instagram. The title of Chang's article included the words "Smoked Psychedelic Toad Venom".)


(In BEAUTIFUL THINGS: A Memoir [2021], U.S. president Joe Biden's son Hunter writes that smoking toad venom in Mexico in 2014 kept him off crack cocaine and alcohol for over a year.)



("Whenever I design a chip, the first thing I want to do is look at it under a microscope--not because I think I can learn something new by looking at it but because I am always fascinated by how a pattern can create reality."

--- W. Daniel Hillis, in his 1998 book THE PATTERN ON THE STONE--The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work.)



("Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it."

---Niels Bohr)



(“Many scientists say that the American physiologist Benjamin Libet demonstrated in the 1980s that we have no free will. It was already known that electrical activity builds up in a person’s brain before she, for example, moves her hand; Libet showed that this buildup occurs before the person consciously makes a decision to move. The conscious experience of deciding to act, which we usually associate with free will, appears to be an add-on, a post hoc reconstruction of events that occurs AFTER the brain has already set the act in motion.”

 ---Stephen Cave, The Atlantic, June 2016.)


("He wondered if he controlled his tongue or if his tongue controlled itself..."

---Blindboy Boatclub, in a short story he wrote that was published in his 2023 book TOPOGRAPHIA HIBERNICA.)


("I don't think there is a shred of free will..."

---Robert Sapolsky, a professor of neurology and neurological sciences at Stanford University. TED Radio Hour, NPR, 3.8. 2019.)


("...a conscious decision to do something is preceded by unconscious activity in the brain."

"...brain processes outside of our awareness determine what we choose."

---Brian Hines, 5.30. 2016, writing in his blog about viewing a video showing Stephen Hawking's "replication of the famous Libet experiment.")


("...thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control."

---Sam Harris, in his 2012 book FREE WILL. Neuroscience "...reveals you to be a biochemical puppet.")


(I had a very painful toothache. I couldn't stop what I was doing and go to a dentist because I was in the middle of converting a large amount of pure crystal LSD into a large amount of very accurately measured individual doses. My partner gave me a small package of "Persian dust" [smokeable freebase heroin], saying one of my friends had given it to her months before and had told her to give it to me if I was ever in severe pain. I was able to safely finish packaging the LSD and I was able to get dental care a few days later. I no longer needed any pain medication, and since I am more than a little frightened of overdosing on or becoming addicted to opioids, I stashed the remaining "Persian dust" in case I had another emergency.

Two mornings later I was upstairs reading the newspaper as usual and then I was in the basement smoking "Persian dust". ["WHAT?!?! How did I get here????" I screamed. I had zero memory of unlocking the cabinet, getting the "Persian dust", or going downstairs!!!!] I immediately flushed the remaining "Persian dust" down the toilet and said aloud "It seems my conscious mind is not always in charge!")


(How much our bodies weigh "is distinctly outside our conscious control. People don't like to hear that. We all want to think we're in control..."

---Randy J. Seeley, a professor of surgery at the University of Michigan School of Medicine, 2020, in "The Truth About Fat", produced by WGBH Boston, and broadcast by PBS. The film was based on the book THE SECRET LIFE OF FAT by Sylvia Tara.)


("We find that being mentally drained causes glucose in the bloodstream to be used up by the brain, and so the brain lacks sufficient energy for self-control later on. A quick dose of sugar boosts self-control, at least temporarily."

---Matthew Gailliot, who studied Social Psychology for 4 years at Florida State University. Gailliot said his work focuses on "How people lose self-control..."

[Gailliot "...has been published in two dozen professional publications, and has been quoted in both Scientific American and Psychology Today."]

The above quotes are from a 7.1. 2007 article on the Florida State University website.

In April 2021, Gailliot, now a 40-year-old homeless man in Berkeley, California, was arrested and charged with 2 misdemeanors, "elder abuse" and "assault with force likely to produce great bodily injury" after he was alleged to have "tackled an 80-year old woman to the ground in an unprovoked attack"...)


(I am very, very fond of eating fried okra, and have been since I was very young. Sometime around 2001, I went to a restaurant in Berkeley and got some, and while I was there the brother of a waitress I was acquainted with came in and he was not pleased to see me speaking with his sister. He was a severely mentally ill [and apparently brain-damaged] delusional middle-aged methamphetamine addict and child molester named Arthur Herring who lived within sight of the restaurant in a cardboard box. Not long after that he sneak-attacked me inside a donut shop in nearby Albany. I never saw him coming and he knocked me down, straddling my back and repeatedly hit me as hard as he could on each side of my head until he was pulled off of me by other customers. Not long after that I was walking down the street and the next thing I knew I came to consciousness facedown in a pool of my own blood. Herring had again sneak-attacked me, punching me in the face as hard as he could. He waited at the scene in Albany for the police as an ambulance took me away. I have been in pain ever since. I suspect he may have permanently injured my spine in the attacks.)


When asked if he believed in free will, Isaac Bashevis Singer said "I have no choice."


("You speak of her with hate--with vindictive antipathy. It is cruel--she cannot help being mad."

---Jane, speaking to Rochester about his insane wife, in Charlotte Brontë's 1847 novel JANE EYRE.)


("It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation."

---Mark Fisher, in his 2008 book CAPITALIST REALISM--Is There No Alternative?

["We aim to publish books that make our readers uncomfortable."

---ZerO Books, the publisher of CAPITALIST REALISM.])


("There's a killer on the road
His brain is squirmin' like a toad"

---Jim Morrison, singing a song that was recorded by the Doors in December 1970.)


("...we are not aware of all that creates us."

---Mary Lamia, psychologist, interviewed by Michael Krasny, KQED, 7.18. 2017.)


("...and I did not make myself."

---Alice Moore, in a blues song recorded in 1929.)


("You are the sum total of everything you've ever seen, heard, eaten, smelled, been told, forgot...it's all there..."

---Maya Angelou

[And, of course, everything is connected: Maya Angelou dated Gerd Stern. I was once engaged to be married to a woman who told me she had once been engaged to be married to Stern. Gerd Stern met Allen Ginsberg when they were both patients in a mental hospital in the late 1940s, and, as an editor at ACE Books, Stern helped get William Burroughs' novel JUNKIE published in 1953.])

(In 2022, after I wrote the above about Maya Angelou, I found a a U.S. 25 cent coin in my pocket that has an image of her on it! I was unaware that such a coin had just been issued.)


(“You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.”

― Ansel Adams)



I am a hallucinographic designer and I write poetry.



("...drawing crazy patterns on your sheets"

---Bob Dylan, in his 1965 song "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue".)



("Poetry is nothing more than an intensification or illumination of common objects and everyday events until they shine with their singular nature..."

---Tom Robbins, in his 1976 novel EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES.)



("Poetry is a divisive thing. Some live and breathe it..."

"For them, poetry is a process of discovery, of delight, of searching among shadows."

"Others find the whole thing pretentious, inaccessible, boring even. Their common lament: Why not just say what you mean?"

---Katie Tandy, writing in The Monthly. March 2018.)



"jdyf333" is my nom de psychédélique. (I am also known as "Davivid Rose"...and many other names.)


("While fame impedes and restricts, obscurity wraps around a man like a mist; obscurity is dark, ample, and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded. Over the obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he alone is truthful; he alone is at peace."

---Virginia Woolf, in ORLANDO: A Biography.)


("My name is nobody"

---Stevie Wonder, in his song "Big Brother", released in late 1972.)


("Once a life becomes text, it no longer has a body. But it can live forever."

---Leslie Jamison, The New Yorker, 9.12. 2022, in the conclusion of her review of Kathryn Scanlan's novel KICK THE LATCH.

"Thorby was gentle, but when he got drunk he'd pick a fight with a cigarette machine or a jukebox."

---Kathryn Scanlan)



("Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."

---Oscar Wilde)


("A poem is good until one knows by whom it is."

---Karl Kraus)



("Language is a drug."

---Ben Marcus)



("...my art is to make uselessly beautiful artifacts."

---Jonathan Lethem, quoted by Leah Garchik, the San Francisco Chronicle, 10.30. 2009. Lethem, a writer, was answering a question Michael Lerner asked about "the artist's social responsibility".)



(Some of my work, published as a coloring book for adults:

LSD DOODLES--CATALOGUE NUMBER ONE
[Exploding Mandala Press, Berkeley, California, 1991.] Issued in a very tightly-controlled limited edition. Each copy came with a set of high-quality color pencils, a pencil sharpener, and a packet containing 25 doses of "CLEARLIGHT brand 'microdose' LSD". The text of the book included the product information leaflet that came with each packet of "CLEARLIGHT brand 'microdose' LSD".)



Ut pictura poesis ("as is painting, so is poetry")



(A copy of a 1981 chapbook of my poetry, A LANDSCAPE OF WRISTS, is in the Library of Congress, and in the libraries of the University of California at Berkeley, the University of California at Santa Cruz, the University of California at San Diego, and California State University--East Bay. A copy of a 1971 chapbook of my LSD poetry, STARVE THE MOTHS, is in the library of the University of California at Berkeley. A copy of a 1970 chapbook of my poetry, CROSSFIRE: 14 ACTS, is in the Bibliotheek Universiteit Van Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Copies of The Open Cell, a literary publication that published some of my poetry in 1969, are in the libraries of the University of California at Berkeley, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of California at Santa Cruz. Some of my poetry appeared in THE ANTHOLOGY OF UNDERGROUND POETRY [edited by Herman Berlandt, and published in Berkeley by Poets' Commune Publications, 1970].)



(Other chapbooks of my poetry:

VISIONS...VIOLET & PERSIMMON [1969]
LITTER FRAGMENTS INC [1970]
MAXIMUM BEVERAGES--HURRY! [1972]
MAPLE SYRUP [1973]
COLLECTED DRUG POEMS 1969-1975 [1975].)



I recently scanned and placed online approximately 4,000 pages of the 'poetry' I have hand-scribbled since 1969.




(“There’s a bad moon

                             
                                on the rise and I’ve got

 quite a stash”

 ---Cedar Sigo, in his 2010 poem “Stranger In Town”.)




("...no non-poetic account of reality can be complete."

---John Barrow, in his book THEORIES OF EVERYTHING: The Quest for Ultimate Explanation.)



("For poets, contradictions are not mistakes. They are compulsory."

---Fintan O' Toole, writing about W.H. Auden. The New York Review of Books, 10.22. 2017.)



("...he was in the middle of an endless jabber."

"...that never-ending, non-stop flow of words..."

"He was babbling away..."

"...his voice, going on and on..."

"Dylan loved telling stories that never ended..."

"I rarely got a word in edgewise..."

---from CAITLIN--Life with Dylan Thomas, by Caitlin Thomas [with George Tremlett].)




("...intense, as usual, smoking like mad and talking at his normal super-fast pace."

---T.R. Reid, author of THE CHIP, describing microchip co-inventor Robert Noyce.)




("...if you got into a discussion with him, you kind of had to pack a lunch."

---Bob Weir, describing LSD maker Owsley Stanley, in an article by Robert Greenfield, Rolling Stone, 7.12. 2007.)


("I was incredibly shy and never said a word. Then, when I was 28 I learned how to speak. It’s become my greatest accomplishment of my life and everybody else’s biggest nightmare.”

---Bill Walton, basketball star and Grateful Dead fan, quoted by Tim Reynolds, Associated Press/nba dot com, 5. 28. 2024, in an article noting that Walton, described as "larger than life", had recently died of cancer at age 71.)


("'...make up your mind you phony hippie,' Toucher added. 'Like are you really selling cars or you all about peace and love?'"

---Rick Tobey, Boston Herald, 4.29. 2024, quoting sports radio host Fred Toucher's criticism of Bill Walton, who had recently died. Walton had been paid to help sell Jeep Wranglers.)




("Berger often speaks in sentences that stretch to paragraph length and have many asides, footnotes, and complete diversions from the point."

---Jon Cohen, describing Theodore Berger, a biomedical engineer and neuroscientist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, in an article Cohen wrote titled "Memory Implants". MIT Technology Review, May/June 2013. The article is illustrated with a photograph of Berger drinking a Red Bull energy drink. ["They told me I was nuts a long time ago," Berger says with a laugh.])







(When I was 9 years old and living on a military base in South Carolina, I crashed my bicycle on the way to school and was knocked unconscious. An ambulance was called, and after I regained consciousness I was asked "What is your name?" I replied "My name is my name." I was then asked "What is your father's name?" I said "My father's name is my father's name." Then a man said "What is your mother's name?" My answer: "My mother's name is my mother's name, and the name of my canary is Orangeade..."

Years later, the first time I saw a marijuana plant it was familiar to me, because I remembered the hemp plants that grew where I dumped the birdseed that had spilled onto the bottom of Orangeade's cage.)







On October 10, 1971, high on LSD and driving the first (and only) car I ever owned, a 1954 Ford Mainliner (with the words "WHAT A RUSH!" painted across the back), I picked up poet Julia Vinograd (1943-2018) and drove to the "Festival of Underground Poetry" then being held at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum, and publicly read some of my poetry there. (As is printed on my "author's pass" from that day, William Everson [formerly known as Brother Antoninus] also read some of his poetry.)




("Funny, infuriating, dangerously familiar, hauntingly strange, way too intellectual, true despite itself: poetry is the same as it ever was."

---Marke B., San Francisco Bay Guardian, 5.1. 2013.)




("The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses."

"...even if, crazed, he ends up losing the understanding of his visions, at least he has seen them!"

---Arthur Rimbaud, 1871, in a letter to Paul Demeny.)




("The real voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."

---Marcel Proust)




("Words after all are symbols, and the significance of the symbols varies with the knowledge and experience of the mind receiving them..."

---Benjamin Cardozo, U. S. Supreme Court Justice.)




("Language is a tailor's shop where nothing fits."

---Rumi)




("...the deeper we go into this, both written and spoken language become less and less adequate as a medium of expression. If I could arrange it we would have a session of visions ourselves and you would then understand."

---Manuel Córdova-Rios, describing the effects of ayahuasca to F.B. Lamb in WIZARD OF THE UPPER AMAZON.)




("His notebook records the first psilocybin trip ever taken by a westerner. You can watch the handwriting disintegrate."

---Michael Pollan, describing viewing what Alvin Powell wrote was "R. Gordon Wasson's 1950's-era account, preserved in Harvard's Botany Libraries, of taking hallucinogenic mushrooms in a Mexican Mazatec ceremony." The Harvard Gazette, 5.2. 2016.)




("The Chinese...thought that the best way to write history was to obtain a real picture of a time moment in the past by collecting...coinciding events, which together give a readable picture of the archetypal situation existing at that time."

"...Western historians despised this way of writing, because they did not understand it. They said it was ridiculous to collect a few random facts and put them together, it was idiotic."

---Marie-Louise von Franz, in a 1969 lecture about synchronicity and "the psychology of meaningful chance".)






("The Indian tale...repeats itself regularly as an integral part of its nature."

"In modern times...we have a huge body of self-conscious, over-disciplined expression in which the main purpose of narrative, telling a good tale, gets lost."

---Tristram P. Coffin [editor], in INDIAN TALES OF NORTH AMERICA--An Anthology for the Adult Reader.)






("...my thinking spirals: it does not go ahead in a straight line."

"...I have found, in the process of teaching, that most students do not understand one's ideas unless they are repeated--under differing analogies or in varying forms of words, as a musician constructs variations on a theme."

---Alan Watts, in his 1973 book CLOUD-HIDDEN, WHEREABOUTS UNKNOWN--A Mountain Journal.)






("We live in a post-era era..."

"This new reality seems to have manifested in the literary world in what must undeniably be called a new literary genre. For lack of a better word, let's call it Translit."

Translit "...is not unlike watching a TV show that's simultaneously happening on multiple channels..."

"The Translit author assumes the reader has the wits to connect the dots and blend the perfumes."

"The Translit reader knows there is a spirituality lacking in the modern world that can only be squeezed out of other, more authentic eras."

---Douglas Coupland, in a 3.11. 2012 review of Hari Kunzru's book GODS WITHOUT MEN. The review, titled "Convergences", was published in The New York Times Book Review.)






("...most artists worthy of the name are loners and renegades. They operate without licenses---or Ph.D's---striving to be themselves as only they can, as clearly and intensely as possible. This is very hard work..."

---Roberta Smith, art reviewer, The New York Times, 11.12. 2010.)






Anton Chekhov believed that the role of an artist is to ask questions, not answer them.


("LSD doesn't give answers, just questions."

---Joe Bageant)






("Art shows us who we are."

---Nicole Buffett, 11.2. 2020, Topanga New Times.)


("A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want. Indeed, the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist."

---Doris Stricher, contemporary French visual artist and art historian.)


("You cannot be a creator and be hailed as one by the public...you have to choose between making art and being regarded as an artist. The one excludes the other."

"It is the desire to strengthen the existence of  my works that obliges me to show them."

---Jean Dubuffet, quoted by Lucienne Peiry in her book ART BRUT--The Origins of Outsider Art.)


("...the only value left is the belief in the artistic process itself on the grounds that in creativity alone resides true humanity."

---Horst de la Croix and Richard G. Tansey (revisers), in GARDNER'S ART THROUGH THE AGES.)


("A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity."

---Franz Kafka, in a 1922 letter to Max Brod.)


("Marketers and filmmakers are often quietly at war. 'The most common comment that you hear from filmmakers after we've done our work is "This is not my movie," Terry Press, a consultant who used to run marketing at DreamWorks SKG, says. 'I'd always say, "You're right--this is the movie America wants to see."'"

---Tad Friend, The New Yorker, 7.8. 2013.)






"I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum."

---Claes Oldenburg, 1961.



(“The only place to go in art is too far.”

 ---Gene Davis)






("Creating art is a search for truth, and viewing art can be a catalyst for profound understanding."

---Cay Lang, in her book TAKING THE LEAP.)






("Someone driven by an inner fire of artistry, irrespective of the world's rewards, was simply off the map of his reality."

---Alice Schroeder, describing Warren Buffett, in THE SNOWBALL: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life.)








("I had to decide whether to have too little or too much in my life...That was an easy one. I chose too much."

---Elaine Pagel, quoted in an article by David Remnick, The New Yorker, 4.3. 1995.)






("...a rich and hectic life..."

---Chrixcel, describing me in an article about doodles. [fatcap.com, 1.2. 2012].)






("jdyf333 is an outsider artist / poet / acid tester in California with a wicked sick drawing hand. His brilliant textures are secretly encoded alien circuits from the future, embedded with autonomous holy LSD patterns."

---Danny Glix [acidskull.com, 2.18. 2010].)



("A man is worked on by what he works on."

---Frederick Douglass)






("A mesmerizing group of pictures. The spatial illusions are endless, and scale and dimensions continually in flux."

---Roberta Weir, commenting on some of the images I have made. [facebook.com, 1.20. 2011].)






("...a mindblowing Flickr account..."

"...lysergically lovely imagery."

---Marke B, writing about my hallucinographic designs. [San Francisco Bay Guardian (sfbg.com, 10.17. 2007)].)









(Abstract art "represents direct manifestation of creative thought processes as they might appear in computer designs."

---Marshall McLuhan, in his 1964 book UNDERSTANDING MEDIA: THE EXTENSIONS OF MAN.)







("Uninterested in drawing by hand, much less in wielding a paintbrush, he describes himself as someone who makes paintings but does not consider himself to be a painter."

---from "Dots, Stripes, Scans", a positive review of "a beautiful show" featuring the computer-made art of Wade Guyton. The show, at the Whitney Museum, is called "Wade Guyton: OS". The review was written by Roberta Smith, The New York Times, 10.5. 2012.)







OMG
WTF
(Internet initialisms meaning "Oh My God!" and "What The Fuck?")



("...when purpose has been used to achieve purposelessness, the thing has been grasped."

---from THE SECRET OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER)



("The Tao that can be told is not the real Tao."

---Lao Tzu)



("Our earth is only one polka dot among a million stars in the cosmos. Polka dots are a way to infinity."

---Yayoi Kusama)


("Yayoi Kusama, now the top-selling female artist in the world...became famous for her polka dot hallucinogenic imagery."

"She developed mental illness, retreating to live in the peace of an asylum for the last 30 years."

She "...continues to create new work every day."

--- from a September 2018 Landmark Theatres promotional flyer for the movie Kusama--Infinity.)



...Hypnodelic Entheogasm...



("...merkin mounted with crazy glue."

---A.M. Homes, in DAYS OF AWE.)






("Banksy's work embodies everything I like about art."



"He has a gift: an ability to make almost anyone very uncomfortable."



---Shepard Fairey, writing about underground artist Banksy, whose identity remains unconfirmed. Fairey was quoted in TIME, 5.10. 2010. TIME named Banksy as one of "The 100 Most Influential People In The World".)






("He rarely missed an opportunity to be notorious and strange."

---Jaron Lanier, describing Nikola Tesla.)






("The more defiant something is of the instinctive, the typical, and the sufficient, the more highly it is prized. This is why we have the 'Guinness Book of World Records,' the Gautama Buddha, and the Museum of Modern Art. They represent the repudiation of the norm."

---Louis Menand, The New Yorker, 11.25. 2002.)






("To be creative, you can't have inhibition, and you can't do what everyone else is doing."

---Emily Zitek, Cornell University psychologist, quoted by Jacquie Itsines, Psychology Today, April 2015.)






("Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions."

---Henry James)






("Imperfection and incompleteness are the certain lot of all creative workers."

---H.G. Wells, in EXPERIMENT IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY.)





("Close as I can, this is how I remember it. I could be wrong about some things. Most everybody is. "

---Diane di Prima, in the "Author's Note" to RECOLLECTIONS OF MY LIFE AS A WOMAN: The New York Years.)





(I have done my best to be factually accurate in this "autobiography" because, as Antonio Munoz Molina once said, "A drop of fiction taints everything as fictional.")





("...writing for posterity and writing for simpletons can sound exactly the same."

---Janet Maslin, in her review of Mark Kurlansky's book READY FOR A BRAND NEW BEAT--How "Dancing In The Street" Became an Anthem for a Changing America. The New York Times, 7.5. 2013.)





("...a Stephen Jay Gould essay in Natural History magazine, in which Gould reflects...on how deceptive and inaccurate, when he has gone back to check, his own memory of things has sometimes proved."

"...memory being ever ingenious, self-serving, and unreliable...even when we think we remember something clearly..."

---Jay Neugeboren, in IMAGINING ROBERT--My Brother, Madness, and Survival.)





("...some recollections may vary..."

---Queen Elizabeth, 94, in a 3.9. 2021 statement issued in response to a broadcast of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry being interviewed by Oprah Winfrey. Meghan's mother is African American. Meghan and her husband said that a member of the royal family had expressed concerns about the color of the skin of the child Meghan was soon to give birth to.

[Decades ago, Queen Elizabeth's mother slowly drove past a house where I was staying. I was high on LSD. I gave her a big smile and waved at her and she gave me a big smile and waved back at me. Just before she drove past about 20 police officers suddenly came inside the house and made sure we had no weapons...])





("...the human mind is adept at sugar-coating the past by censoring unpleasant experiences..."

---Thomas B. Cole, M.D., in the Journal of the American Medical Association, 11.28. 2012.)





("A psychologically complete and honest confession of life...would require so much indiscretion [on my part as well as on that of others] about family, friends, and enemies, most of them still alive, that is simply out of the question. What makes all autobiographies worthless is, after all, their mendacity."

---Sigmund Freud, giving his reasons for refusing to write an autobiography.)


("Every autobiography is obviously a work of fiction."

"...because of the liability of memory, that just has to be true."

---Michael Chabon, quoted by Lou Fancher, Oakland Magazine, December 2016.)


("This is not how I recall it at all, but what do I know, I was only there."

---R. Weiser, in a 2016 Amazon dot com review he posted of the 2008 Nadya Zimmerman book COUNTERCULTURE KALEIDOSCOPE. The book is about 1960s counterculture in San Francisco.)


("Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful."

---George Orwell)


("It's not what you light, it's what you don't light."

---John Alton, cinematographer.)


("Non-fiction prose is tricky when one is writing about friends and peers who wish to remain anonymous, settings that are clandestine, and activities that are illegal."

---Amber Dawn, in the preface to her 2013 book HOW POETRY SAVED MY LIFE--A Hustler's Memoir.)







("James Joyce once said that all novelists have only one story, which they tell again and again."

---Joan Acocella, The New Yorker, 5.16. 2011.)






("What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given moment."

---David Foster Wallace, in his story "Good Old Neon".)


("'Jesus,' I said 'Does anybody tell the truth around here?'

'I do,' she said. 'You do.'

I looked at her and for a minute she was eight and I was ten and we were hiding in the doghouse while Ma and Pa and Aunt Toni, on mushrooms, trashed the patio."

---George Saunders, in the short story "Home" in his 2013 book TENTH OF DECEMBER.


"The person I'm highest on right now is George Saunders..."

---David Foster Wallace)


("'Danny?' he says.
He must be joking. We worked at the campus library together, took mushrooms in Disneyland with a bunch of people, went to Radiohead. He knows who I am."

---Richard Lange, in his 2015 book SWEET NOTHING: Stories.)


("Drunken men examined paintings rather too intensely."

---George Saunders, in his 2017 novel LINCOLN IN THE BARDO.)





("The poet remembers. You can kill one, but another is born."

---Czeslaw Milosz, 1950.)


I am a male who was born at an American military facility, Johnson Air Base in Japan (which was in the Tokyo area) in 1951 during the Korean War. Johnson Air Base had formerly been a Japanese base from which many kamikaze pilots made their final flight. (As of 2022, Tokyo is the most populated city in the world, with nearly 37.5 million residents.) Slightly less than a month after I was born, J.D. Salinger's novel THE CATCHER IN THE RYE was published.


("Chewing Gum and Chocolate" is a series of photos by Japanese post-WWII photographer Shomei Tomatsu that shows the meanness of postwar American occupiers.

"We were starving and they threw us chocolate and chewing gum" one survivor remembered...)


(My favorite Cy Twombly drawing, lala, was made in New York City in 1951. Twombly was a U.S. Army cryptologist in the early 1950s.)


(“Klaatu Barada Nikto”

 ---from the 1951 movie The Day the Earth Stood Still.)


(In 1951 a group of three people [Albert Hofmann, a pharmacologist, and a novelist] are said to have been the first to explore the effects of LSD in a nonlaboratory setting. The pharmacologist was Heribert Konzett. The novelist was Hofmann's friend the prolific, complex, contradictory, and much admired Ernst Jünger. Jünger, an ardent militarist, was a highly decorated war hero who served in the German army in WWI and WWII. Jünger [who, over a period of decades, used drugs such as hashish, cocaine, and mescaline] wrote the patriotic book STORM OF STEEL about his WWI combat experiences. According to Craig S. Smith, writing in The New York Times, 1.7. 2006, the participants in that first exploratory session each took 50 micrograms. Hofmann reported experiencing a "horror trip" in another LSD session with Jünger after Jünger gave him amphetamines before they took LSD.)

("It has been said that Ernst Jünger got high on two things: war and drugs."

---Henrik Dahl, writing in Psychedelic Press XXXVII, published in the UK in 2022.)


("Understanding comes through awareness."

---Alan Watts, in his 1951 book THE WISDOM OF INSECURITY.)


(The screenplay for the 1953 outlaw biker film The Wild One was based on "The Cyclists' Raid", a short story by Andy Rooney that was published in January 1951.

"What are you rebelling against, Johnny?"

"Whaddaya got?")


I grew up in North Carolina, South Carolina, France, and New Mexico. My parents claimed that the first thing they ever heard me say was "Keep your cotton-pickin' hands off me!!"

(“Of all that Orient lands can vaunt
Of marvels with our own competing,
The strangest is the Haschish plant,
And what will follow on its eating.”

---John Greenleaf Whittier, in the opening lines of his poem “The Haschish”, written in 1854. This poem was the first mention of cannabis by an American author.

“John Greenleaf Whittier’s antislavery poem ‘The Haschish’ deems cotton to be ‘The Haschish of the West’ because of its power to distort men’s minds is even greater than ‘the hempen Haschish of the East’.”

 ---Stephen Rachman, in his 2006 introduction to Fitz Hugh Ludlow’s 1857 book THE HASHEESH EATER--BEING PASSAGES FROM THE LIFE OF A PYTHAGOREAN.)


("David Bossie, a former deputy campaign manager for president Donald Trump, used a racist phrase to attack a black panelist on 'Fox & Friends' on Sunday. Bossie, president of the conservative advocacy group Citizens United, ripped into Democratic strategist Joel Payne during a heated discussion about liberals' reaction to the Trump administration's contentious immigration policies.

'You don't have to be a golden retriever to hear all the dog whistles coming out of the White House these days,' Payne said, accusing Trump of using racist rhetoric to rally his base around immigration.

'You're out of your cotton-picking mind,' Bossie told Payne.

'Cotton-picking mind?' Payne responded. 'Brother, let me tell you something. I got some relatives who picked cotton and I'm not going to sit here and allow you to attack me like that on TV. I'm not out of my cotton-picking mind.'"

---Hayley Miller, HuffPost, 6.24. 2018.)


My father was born in 1923 and died in 2016. His mother Nellie (1900-1979) was said to have been one of Andy Griffith's Sunday school teachers. Many years later, she became afflicted with senile dementia, and froze to death, naked, in a drainage ditch. My father's dad Brady (1890-1982) reminded me of the comic strip character "Snuffy Smith". He used Tube Rose brand snuff.


("EVEN HAD FLOWERS TO WEAR AND A CAKE! I DON'T REMEMBER WHAT I ATE BUT I AM SURE IT WAS GOOD!"

---from a mechanically typewritten letter my mother [1926-2021] sent me about her 79th birthday party.)


("'How long is this flight?'

'About an hour forty', Marcy said.

Paisley shrugged. 'Should we do a Griffith?'

'We could do a Griffith', Marcy said. 'It's several Griffiths long.'

Paisley stocks his plane with DVDs of 'The Andy Griffith Show'; he has loved the show since he was a boy, and its balance of wry humor and old-fashioned decency has become a touchstone for his life, and for his career."

---Kelefa Sanneh, writing about country music singer Brad Paisley. The New Yorker, 8.2. 2010.)


(Mount Airy, North Carolina ["Mayberry"], where my father was raised, was once well-known for the [illicit] "moonshine" liquor produced there. My mother told me that the first time we went there with my father, he immediately fetched her a taste of "moonshine".

One of my most vivid childhood memories is of the time my father showed me how to distill alcohol. He made "moonshine" from beer that South Carolina summer afternoon in the late 1950s. Later we went to a drive-in movie theater and saw Thunder Road, starring Robert Mitchum as a "moonshine" runner.

["Ooo eee ooo ah ah ting tang walla walla bing bang
Ooo eee ooo ah ah ting tang walla walla bing bang"

---"David Seville" (Ross Bagdasarian), in his 1958 hit song "Witch Doctor", repeating what he says a witch doctor has told him. The cover of a 1958 mono Liberty Records LP "The Witch Doctor" ["Transistorized-Spectra-Sonic-Sound"], which included the song, was created by Bill Pate and featured an illustration depicting a large brown-skinned witch doctor wearing an African-style mask acting as a puppet master, using strings to manipulate 7 small figures, including a barefoot man in tattered overalls preparing to drink from a jug of "moonshine"...]

My grandfather and my uncle Jack [1928-1991] in Mount Airy had associations with the illicit liquor business, according to my brother Bruce [1953-2014], who himself at one point in his youth was a crazily brave and skillful transporter of illegal booze. [My brother, two years younger than me, was a biker who said "I love to fight! I've lost a few fist fights, but I've never lost a knife fight or a gun fight!"

[The 1958 recording "Rumble" is the only instrumental song ever banned in the United States. Authorities in New York and elsewhere feared it would cause gang fights. "Rumble" was a hit record for guitarist Link Wray (1929-2005), and it was the record that popularized the "power chord". Many musicians, especially those into hard rock, heavy metal, and punk have said they were influenced by "Rumble", some apparently quite deeply.

Link Wray was born in the small city of Dunn, North Carolina. My brother graduated from Dunn High School.

Dunn was the last place I lived before I hitchhiked to California, and Dunn is mentioned in passing in Jack Kerouac's 1957 novel ON THE ROAD: A young male hitchhiker is picked up who says something about Dunn...]

("For a person who has no place to go, sleeping in public is kind of like breathing in public."

---U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, quoted by Melissa Quinn, CBS News 4.22. 2024. The court was hearing arguments about anti-homeless laws in Grants Pass, Oregon. "'Your statute says that a person cannot take himself and himself only and take a blanket and sleep some place without it being a crime,' Kagan said.")


I suspect that more than a few of the many people who have never personally experienced the serious problems being homeless frequently causes homeless people are not very clear that America is a police state where being poor is a crime.


 A law in Dunn, North Carolina when I was living there as a teenager in the late 1960s stated that if someone was 18 years old or older, it was a criminal offense for that person to not have a job. The law was later overturned.

"Dunn Chief of Police, Alton A. Cobb, deposed, stated Judge Hill had informed him he wanted all persons who didn't have a job, or were loafing on the street, to be brought in and charged with vagrancy."

"On July 10, 1967 defendant Hill instituted what he has referred to as a 'crack-down' on vagrants and loafers, stating, in part, that:

'Farmers and businessmen are crying for help; they desperately need people to work and vagrancy isn't going to be tolerated in this town.'"

---Smith v. Hill, 285 F. Supp. 556 (E.D.N.C. 1968)


("...they’re not going to leave Berkeley--a lot of them are from Berkeley. They don’t want to leave home.”

---Andrea Henson, a lawyer quoted by Riley Cooke in an article about the city of Berkeley cracking down on homeless people and making it illegal for them to sleep there. 9.5. 2024, KQED.)


(So many people seem to be homeless in 2024! Where I was once, for years, about the only homeless person politely and discreetly living on a street in an industrial area of Berkeley eventually became a block with dozens of vehicles housing a crowd of sick, injured, disabled, confused, drunk, bewildered, mentally ill, stupid, and angry people, some quite dangerous...)


(“'Unhoused people are some of the most politically powerless folks in society,' Ms. Eve Garrow [a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California] said. 'How do we stem the tide of cruelty against them if even ostensibly progressive cities like Berkeley are not on our side?'"

---Shawn Hubler, The New York Times, 11.16. 2024, in the article "Liberal Berkeley’s Toughened Stance on Homeless Camps Is a Bellwether--The progressive stronghold in California plans to target large encampments, relying on a Supreme Court decision handed down by a conservative majority."

“'This is us in an impossible situation, trying to be balanced and reasonable.'” said Berkeley city councilwoman Reshi Kesarwani.)




(My grandfather, a farmer who raised chickens, had a very tiny country store not far from his small farm. In the 1950's he converted it to a recording studio. I remember visiting there and seeing the walls and ceiling covered with gray egg crates. I thought one of the reasons they called what they were recording "country music" was because of the egg crates...


["As young Junior Johnson ran 'shine for his family, driving like a bat out of hell evolved into more than just a necessity. In order to outrun the cops, he built the fastest cars and invented gutsy driving moves...His racing savvy soon turned into his passion and Junior crossed over to NASCAR, where he became an instant star."

---from THE LAST REAL AMERICAN HERO, part of an explanatory essay about "Midnight Moon", a spirit produced by Piedmont Distillers, co-owned by Johnson and located a short drive from Mount Airy.]


["Now this ain't no ordinary Chevy
The motor and suspension ain't the same
Whiskey as you know is very heavy
And getting through is what they call the game"

---John Dawnson, in his song "Whiskey", recorded in 1972 by the New Riders of the Purple Sage.])



("...he feels like a giant when you give him a pint of that good old mountain dew."

---from the song "Good Old Mountain Dew", about illicit liquor. [The original 1928 lyrics by Bascom Lamar Lunsford were altered by Barry Wiseman in 1935.]

A version of the song was played on the "Live from Here" radio show that was recorded 1.19. 2019 in Durham, North Carolina, and broadcast on nearly 600 public radio stations. It was followed by a song "New Good Old Mountain Dew", about being in a Christian college, playing Ultimate Frisbee "for Jesus", and drinking "another couple two liters of" the popular high dose caffeine soft drink Mountain Dew. [After PepsiCo bought  Mountain Dew in 1964, they commissioned a set of advertisements featuring a barefooted rural man called "Willie the Hillbilly".]

The show included a comedy segment about sports with these words: "The white lines at Duke go up your noses."

The show also included live performances by the band Death Cab for Cutie:

"We shared a clove cigarette on the parapet
as the TVs glowed from the windows of the model homes"

---Ben Gibbard, in the 2018 Death Cab for Cutie song "Northern Lights".


"There's nothing elegant about being a drunk"

---Ben Gibbard, in the 2018 Death Cab for Cutie song "60 & Punk".


And

a cover of a song written by Lester Judson and Raymond Taylor that was originally recorded by Eartha Kitt in 1954, with these words:

"I've been made Miss Rheingold although I never touch beer".)



("My favorite...my favorite..."

---8-year-old Alan Kim, playing David Yi, the American-born son of two Korean immigrants trying to farm in Arkansas in 1983, speaking about the soft drink Mountain Dew in the wonderful 2020 drama film Minari.

"It's water from the mountains. Dad said it's good for your health."

---Noel Cho, playing Anne Yi, David's older sister, offering Mountain Dew to their grandmother.

The grandmother. perfectly played by Youn Yuh-jung, makes David take a cup of foul-tasting herbal medicine every day. In retaliation he tricks his grandmother into drinking some of his urine by making her think it is Mountain Dew. She immediately spits it out...


["I love the moment your character becomes obsessed with Mountain Dew."

---Jose Solis, 3.5. 2021, The Film Stage, speaking with Youn Yuh-jung.]


[""...that hyper-caffeinated soft drink."

---Esther Zuckerman, Thrillist, 2.26. 2021, mentioning Mountain Dew in an item about Minari.]


["...a film about the big things...family, spirituality, Mountain Dew."

---Kalos K. Chu, The Harvard Crimson, 2.23. 2021, in a highly positive review of Minari.])



(" While speaking about voter ID laws at a rally in Virginia, JD Vance told the audience, 'If you're going to cast a ballot, show a piece of identification.' He added, 'Democrats say that it is racist. Well, they say it's racist to do anything. I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today and I'm sure they're going to call that racist, too.'"

---Betsy Reed, 7.23. 2024, The Guardian.



[“'This is the good stuff here,' Vance said during an appearance on the conservative broadcast network Newscast. 'High caffeine, low calorie.'" ---Jessica Guynn, 8.6. 2024, USA TODAy.]



["Others took issue with the type of soda Vance--who shot to fame with his controversial memoir of growing up in Appalachia--claimed to be drinking.

'If JD Vance would have simply said "Mountain Dew" it would have been fine, relatable, even. Thats a regular Joe blue collar soda. What kind of sick freak drinks diet Mountain Dew.'"


---Virginia Chamlee, quoting an X user, 7.23. 2024, PEOPLE.]



["...the brand’s latest ad campaign--which revives its classic slogan 'Do the Dew'--features a longhaired 1970s rocker character called Mountain Dude.

'On the mountain, we’ve got a saying,' the Mountain Dude says in one commercial, 'Get off your ass.'"


---Brian Gallagher, 8.7. 2024, The New York Times.]



[On 7.14. 2024 someone on X posted "idk who needs to hear this but 52 oz of diet coke is a perfect way to start the morning".

On 7.25. 2024 Tim Walz commented on X "Make it a Diet Mountain Dew and I’m sold."]



Walz and Vance were both candidates for vice president when they mentioned Diet Mountain Dew.)



("Pennsylvania prosecutors have dropped a felony theft charge against a man who underpaid for a bottle of Mountain Dew by 43 cents."

"A judge ordered him held on $50,000 cash only bond. He was in jail for seven days before his public defender argued for his release..."

---AP, via Microsoft News, 10. 26. 2021.)



("The days of Mayberry are long gone."

---Paul Torres, former executive director of the Denver, Colorado Civil Service Commission, quoted in an article written by Jesse Katz, Los Angeles Times, 6.18. 2000. Torres was commenting on the fact that Denver hired Ellis "Max" Johnson to be a police officer, even though the police department knew he had used marijuana, crack cocaine, LSD, methamphetamine, PCP, mescaline, and Valium. ["84% of  Denver's police applicants--and at least 65% of its recent hires--have acknowledged some past experimentation..."])



("It captured a reality that never was."

---Ted Koppel, CBS News, describing "The Andy Griffith Show" in a story, produced by Dustin Stephens and edited by Ed Givnish, about the many fans who visit "Mayberry"-themed tourist attractions in Mount Airy, North Carolina, where Griffith was born and grew up, "A Trip to the Original 'Mayberry'", 9.19. 2021.

Here are a few quotes from the story:


"...it's strange to find so many people half a century later searching for what made America great in a copy of a town that never was."


"...the Foster family from Pomeroy, Ohio, showed up. It is no exaggeration to say that this re-creation verges, for the Fosters, on being a national monument.

Koppel asked the Fosters, 'You watch "The Andy Griffith Show" 4 hours a day?'

'More than that', said Bobby Foster."


Maggie Rosser, a black woman,, was born in Mount Airy. She remembered "'I moved back here, 1973. So, we wanted a sandwich. And we went in our Main Street, and they served us, but we had to go out and eat.'

'They wouldn't let you sit?' asked Koppel. 'So, even in 1973, or a little bit after?'

'A little bit after. Yes.' she said."


Later CBS spoke to a group of tourists in Mount Airy. Apparently, most of them still strongly support Trump.

"Koppel asked, 'One question, it's a serious question and I know you all will take it seriously: Tell me what you think happened on January 6 at Congress?'

The first man said, 'They showed truckloads of people they were bringing in for this. It was all staged. They even showed pictures of it on the news, about these vehicles coming in with all these BLM people.'

A woman said, 'I think it was staged. We've been to a lot of Trump rallies, and I don't understand why they're focusing so much on that one issue when there's so many cities that are being burned down every day by protesters.'

'Murder and kill everybody there--hang 'em, put 'em in jail', said the first man.")



("...we're not going to take it anymore. I see a civil war coming. I do. I see civil war coming."

---Lori Levi, a Trump supporter, speaking to MSNBC at a Trump rally in Iowa on 10.9. 2021. Newsweek via Microsoft News.

"'Civil War' Trends on Twitter After Iowa Trump Rally Attendee's Remarks Go Viral"

---headline, Newsweek via Microsoft News, 10.10. 2021.)



(On Fox News the "immediate reaction was apoplectic, with some hosts suggesting the indictment could lead to violence or even civil war. 'The country’s not gonna stand for it, and people better be careful,' warned host Jesse Watters. 'That’s all I’ll say about that.'"

---Caleb Ecarma, Vanity Fair, March 31, 2023.


["These Thugs and Radical Left Monsters have just INDICATED the 45th president..."

---Donald Trump, in a message after he was indicted.]


["...everyone has the right to a trial to prove innocence.”

---Nancy Pelosi, who seemingly does not understand that a very IMPORTANT principle of American law is that a person is considered to be innocent until they are proven to be guilty, commenting on Twitter (3.30. 2023) about the indictment of Donald Trump.])





("...on a mission from God to please pink-haired wokers who carry around Ziploc bags of kale."

---U.S. Senator John Kennedy, a Louisiana politician and a Methodist, speaking to Fox News host Tucker Carlson on 10.1. 2021 about President Joe Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.)





 In 1969, I hitchhiked from North Carolina to Berkeley, where, wearing my old penny loafers, I traded my high school graduation present, a cheap Timex wristwatch, for 2 orange tablets containing LSD.


(“...as is often said, nothing is strange in California.”

 ---Dame Shirley, in a 1851 letter from a gold mine.)


("I am listening to a rhythm which has been just the same for millions of years and it takes me out of a world of relentlessly ticking clocks."

---Alan Watts, describing "...the rhythm of the waves..." experienced while he was beside the sea, 1970.)


In mid-August 1969, right after my 18th birthday I bought a copy of a local underground newspaper, the Berkeley Tribe. On the front cover was a photo of a young counterculture woman holding a baby and a handgun and a young counterculture man holding a rifle. Both were members of the Red Mountain Tribe commune that produced the Berkeley Tribe. Above them were the words seen in official U.S. Army ads: "JOIN THE NEW ACTION ARMY!" Inside was a cartoon by Ron Cobb (1937-2020) depicting an extremely detailed doodle, a tricycle and a tortoise. The tricycle, referring to the doodle, says "Acid?" and the tortoise replies "No...schizophrenia". There was an announcement about a new literary publication, The Open Cell, which soon became the first place I had a poem published. (The Open Cell also published some art by Roger de Shon.) The Berkeley Tribe announced there would be a free music event that weekend put on by the East Bay Musicians Co-op at Pomponio Beach, approximately 42 miles south of San Francisco and approximately 100 miles north of Big Sur. People were urged to bring food and wine. Scheduled to play were the bands Joy of Cooking, Cleanliness and Godliness Skiffle Band, Lazarus, Fantasia, Wilderness, Ice, Joint Heads of Staff, Crabs, and Sky Blue. (A poster advertising a show by Joy of Cooking from around that time showed a lit candle with a spoon above it, a reference to preparing and injecting heroin.) Lazarus, like every Christian band I have ever had the horrible misfortune to hear, spewed weak-minded garbage. They were very closely associated with Peter Yarrow of the band Peter, Paul and Mary. Peter Yarrow was arrested, convicted, and imprisoned in 1970 for indecent sexual behavior with a 14-year old girl and her teenage sister. The Lazarus performance included a slideshow featuring images that included a bloody crucified hand projected onto bedsheets hanging behind them.) I had my first LSD trip there as the musicians played. (At one point I felt like I was in the scene depicted in the painting "The Persistence of Memory" by Salvador Dali...) Not long after I hitchhiked back to Berkeley, I was arrested there and held in the county jail in nearby Dublin and convicted of the crime of "Malicious Mischief" for the act of making a 2-inch line in a patch of wet cement. (I had intended to write the word "PEACE".) I was also charged with possessing a marijuana cigarette, but the prosecutor said he would dismiss the charge if I pleaded guilty to making the line in the wet cement. While in jail I was the victim of an unprovoked sexual assault. Beat unconscious and gang-raped.


("FCI Dublin is a minimum-security prison where most women have been convicted of drug trafficking."

"FCI Dublin has also been a national embarrassment as eight correctional officers have been charged with sex crimes; seven so far have been convicted and sentenced to prison themselves."

---Lisa Fernandez, KTVU television, 4.17. 2024, in an article about a federal correctional institution near San Francisco, California. The former warden of FCI Dublin was one of the officers convicted and sent to prison, as was the former prison chaplain, who had formerly served as a chaplain in the U.S. Army in Iraq and Afghanistan.)


("Anybody who tells you that he has some way of leading you to spiritual enlightenment is like somebody who picks your pocket and sells you your own watch."

---Alan Watts)


I TOOK LSD APPROXIMATELY 5,000 TIMES BETWEEN 1969 AND 1992.


(Joe Bageant first took LSD in 1965.

"Five years later I was still taking it at least once a week, and to this day I consider LSD the promethean spark of whatever awakening I have managed to accomplish in life."

"Despite the claims of graybeard stock brokers and aging realtors at cocktail parties, the majority never took part in the movement."

"Oh, they smoked pot, talked the talk, but that's about all."

---Bageant, in his 2009 essay "Skinny Dipping in Reality: The Great Hippy LSD Enlightenment Search Party".)


("Most of the people who walked around the Village looking like Beats in 1960, like most of the people who walked around San Francisco or Berkeley or Cambridge looking like hippies in 1967, were weekend dropouts. They were contingent rebels. They put on the costumes; they went to the concerts and got high; and then they went back to school or back to work. It was a life style, not a life."

---Louis Menand, The New Yorker, 8.24. 2015.)


("Most hippies were cafe communists at best. Very few people raised in good circumstances want to actually change the capitalist system that nurtured them."

---Chris Roden, quora dot com, 2017.)






("My generation understood that once a hippie, always a hippie."

"...there was a moment in time when we were full of hope and we thought we were going to change the world..."

---Paulo Coelho, born in 1947, speaking about his novel HIPPIE, in an interview with Lucas Wittmann, TIME, 10.15. 2018. Brazilian Coelho is "one of the world's best-selling authors".)






(A few of the well-known people who have lived in Berkeley:

Ben Affleck
Fritjof Capra
Francis Ford Coppola
Jay DeFeo
Richard Diebenkorn
Elmer Bischoff
David Park
R. Crumb
Robert Culp
Rita Moreno
Gregory Peck
Whoopi Goldberg
Richard Pryor
Jaron Lanier
Robert Duncan
Allen Ginsberg
Marion Zimmer Bradley
Jonathan Lethem
Patty Hearst
Theodore Kaczynski
Dorothea Lange
Robert Oppenheimer
Edward Teller
Thornton Wilder
Pauline Kael
Suze Orman
Eldridge Cleaver
Timothy Leary
Tim Scully
Owsley Stanley
Kary Mullis
Steve Wozniak
Gordon Moore
Philip K. Dick
Kamala Harris
Daniel Ellsberg
Bill Clinton
Hillary Clinton
Isadora Duncan)



("'He asked me, "What religion are you?" I remember thinking, I don't think you're supposed to ask me that. I answered it vaguely, and I think I was saying my family were Episcopalians and Lutherans when he stops me and says "Just tell me you don't believe any of that shit."'"

---Daryl Morey, describing being interviewed by Leslie Alexander, the owner of the Houston Rockets basketball team, who was interested in hiring Morey to be the general manager of the team. [Quoted in a 2017 book by Michael Lewis, THE UNDOING PROJECT-A Friendship That Changed Our Minds.]

[Also from THE UNDOING PROJECT:

"The Linda Problem":


Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.

Which of the following two alternatives is more probable?


1) Linda is a bank teller.

2) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.


(Answer number 1 ["Linda is a bank teller"] is more probable.)


John is an extremely poverty-stricken old man who has been sick with cancer for more than a decade. After suffering three strokes and two heart attacks, he requested that his family disconnect his life support system and let him die if his health became any worse. The very next day, John started to vomit blood and started having uncontrollable convulsions. He no longer recognized any member of his family.

Which is more probable--John will die within a week or die within a year?


(Answer: IT IS MORE PROBABLE THAT JOHN WILL DIE WITHIN A YEAR.)]



"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one."

---Voltaire, quoted by Lewis.


"Mind-blowing."

---blurb from USA Today, at the top of the front cover of Lewis' book. The author is said to live in the hills near Berkeley, California.)



("This is important: Philip K. Dick was not the amiable genius at the next table. He was, instead, the weirdo muttering in line at the grocery store. [Why is that man buying so much tuna fish?] I love his books, and yet, there is no doubt--none at all--that if I had met Philip K. Dick in Berkeley, I wouldn't have liked him. I would have found him annoying and tiresome. Awkward and intense.

It's so, so important that people are allowed to be awkward and intense."

---Robin Sloan, Berkeleyside, 11.25. 2020.)



(MY FEET ARE MOST DEFINITELY MADE OF CLAY!

I was interviewed by Hamilton Morris in April 2020. What I said to him may be heard here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxRWA3AnLi4

I spoke with him using a cheap cell phone I bought for $5 at a Walgreens drugstore almost 10 years before the interview.

["The boy took out one of them tiny black phones that are bought for throwing away, and disappeared into a shadow."

---Blindboy Boatclub, in his short story The Donkey, published in his book TOPOGRAPHIA HIBERNICA.]

MANY of my teeth are missing, including my 4 upper front ones, so sometimes it may be a little difficult to clearly hear what I am trying to say.

[After many years of homelessness, I had a very serious stroke in December 2019. I was then forced by the direness of my circumstances to rent a bed in a nasty Christian-flavored interim shelter that was later tagged as "unfit for habitation" by the county. Hamilton Morris recorded the telephone interview while I was confined there during California's COVID-19 "shelter-in-place" order.]

["...in the early days of the pandemic. It bears the marks of the feverish isolation of that time, conjuring a mid-century transatlantic world of left-wing intellectuals, the cultural Cold War, the C.I.A., mass culture, high culture, post-colonialism, and a whiff of conspiracy. Fittingly, it begins with '1984'—the book, not the year."

---Sarah Larson, The New Yorker, 5.21. 2024, writing about Benjamin Walker.]

"...you know.")


"People are always calling me about doing a podcast, but I can't talk for an hour without saying something fucked up."

---Samuel L. Jackson, speaking to interviewer Jonathan Dean, 2.26. 2022, The Sunday Times.)


("Someone once asked me well why do you like interviewing people? And I said cause I talk too much under normal circumstances--this gives me an opportunity to shut the fuck up and Listen."

---Errol Morris, speaking with Charlie Bright about Morris' 2020 documentary My Psychedelic Love Story.)


("The only things we perceive are our perceptions."

---George Berkeley

The city of Berkeley was named after George Berkeley, who was a racist, a bishop, and a slave owner.

["...few accepted George Berkeley's theory that nothing exists outside the mind."

---Wikipedia.

"If a tree falls in a forest and there is no one around to hear it fall, does it make a sound?"

Yes and No, depending on how"sound" is defined:

"In physics, sound is a vibration that propagates as an acoustic wave, through a transmission medium such as a gas, liquid, or solid.

In human physiology...sound is the reception of such waves and their perception by the brain."

---Wikipedia])


("On most issues in Berkeley there are as many views as there are speakers, and as many people to tell you the rest of them don't know what they are talking about."

---Susan Dunlap, in her 1993 novel TIME EXPIRED.)


("Worthington went so far as to call aspects of the city bureaucracy 'insane'..."

---Nick Miller, East Bay Express, 10.12. 2016. Kriss Worthington was a member of the Berkeley City Council at the time he was quoted.)

(I find some coincidences to be amusing.

I was viewing a Berkeley, California City Council meeting live online
www.berkeley.granicus.com/player/camera/37publish_id=1244... on 5.7. 2024. I paused to eat, and when I came back, the screen was frozen and on part of the page there was a small rectangle containing what was apparently closed captioning of something being said at the meeting:

"CRAZY.
BUT INDEED
THAT'S HOW IT
WORKS"

When I tried [repeatedly] to refresh the link, all that appeared were the words "Network error occurred, please refresh the page and try again". No transcript of what was said at the meeting was available. No copy of the video of the meeting was available. I have no idea of the context in which the words were written.)


(A former football player, and a former member of the military, Tom Bates was mayor of Berkeley from December 2002 to December 2016. After lying to the public and to the police about newspapers he stole [in an attempt to influence an election], Bates pleaded guilty to theft.)


"...kick that fucking door down."

---U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, who was born in Oakland, California and spent part of her childhood in Berkeley, in a speech to young Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders in Washington, D.C. on 5.13. 2024. “We have to know that sometimes people will open the door for you and leave it open. Sometimes they won’t. And then you need to kick that fucking door down.”


("Name a modern police technique or technology and there'e probably an influence that can be traced back to the once famous August Vollmer, Berkeley's top cop from 1906 to 1932. He's responsible for the squad car and police radio dispatch...he promoted fingerprinting for investigations...one of his officers even invented the lie detector. Vollmer hired the first female officer..."

---Darwin BondGraham, East Bay Express, 2017.


Vollmer also hired the first African American police officer in 1919.


[Unfortunately, Vollmer had some frighteningly ugly beliefs.


"Vollmer was a member of multiple eugenics societies...It is clear that he personally upheld white supremacy..."

---Berkeley City Councilmember Cheryl Davila.


"What shall be said of the children begotten of feeble-minded, insane, epileptic and other degenerate persons? Why not make an effort to prevent such defectives from reproducing their kind? Preventing the socially unfit from multiplying is...vital to national welfare and would greatly reduce crime statistics."

---August Vollmer, in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, May 1926.


(The above quotes are from an article by Tony Hicks, Berkeleyside, 9.15. 2020.)])


(When he was young, Vollmer lived for 2 years in Germany. Before becoming police chief, Vollmer had been a member of the U.S. Marines and fought in the Spanish-American War in the Philippines.)


(I became an enemy of a major LSD distributor [a former intravenous methamphetamine addict born in Austria, raised in Canada, and fluent in German] that I had known for decades after he severely shocked me by saying that the main reason he had distributed such huge quantities of LSD over such a long period of time was that he had always secretly believed that LSD amplifies the symptoms of mental illness and thus causes those who are so-afflicted to be much more likely to be institutionalized. He said it is a very, very good thing when someone who is schizophrenic, or bipolar, or suffers from depression commits suicide.

"It is critically important that defective people be removed from the gene pool!" He exclaimed.

According to him, the famous "Acid Tests" that happened in the 1960s were actually the beginnings of what he called "A much-needed program of 'acid eugenics'."

He was a trained practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming [NLP].

[In Santa Cruz, California, Richard Bandler co-created NLP, a once popular but now discredited 1970s psychotherapy "psychopablum" pseudoscience that tried to utilize things like parts of some of Milton Erickson's techniques of indirect hypnosis to change people's thoughts and behaviors. Bandler, who wrote many books, made a lot of money from pushing NLP. Because he claimed to be able to teach people how to do things like secretly hypnotize others, some thought that Bandler and his work attracted the attention of the CIA and other government groups and that he worked as a consultant and trainer for some of them. More than a few of Bandler's seemingly successful techniques were, of course, quietly adopted by criminals.

(Bandler and some of his large cult of followers seem to have spread many stories, not all of them true. One of the colorful stories about him that I have repeatedly heard told is that a man came to him and said he had a serious addiction to cigarettes and could not stop smoking, even though his doctor had told him he had a heart condition and would most definitely die soon if he continued smoking. The smoker wanted Bandler to use hypnosis to make him stop smoking, saying "It is a life or death situation!" Bandler replied that he could make the man stop smoking, but that the man had to sign a medical release form and pay before being treated. Bandler put the money and the signed medical release form in his desk drawer and then suddenly leaped across the desk, striking the man hard in the mouth with the handle of a large handgun, breaking a lot of the man's teeth, and then rammed the barrel of the gun down the man's throat, saying loudly "If you ever smoke again, I will find you and I WILL KILL YOU!" Bandler is later said to have said that the man clearly understood that Bandler genuinely meant what he said, and that the man was extremely grateful because Bandler had saved his life.)

In 1986 Bandler and his cocaine dealer, James Marino, went to the residence of Corine Christensen (1954-1986), a cocaine-dealing prostitute. Christensen died after being deliberately shot in the face with one of Bandler's guns. Quite a few hours later, Marino went to the police and said he saw Bandler kill Christensen. Bandler, high on cocaine, was arrested and charged with murder. His clothes were said to have been spattered with Christensen's blood. Marino became a witness for the prosecution and was not charged with committing any crime. Bandler said Marino killed Christensen. After a lurid and highly-publicized trial, Bandler was quickly found to be NOT GUILTY...])


(The Law of Jante has ten rules:

"You're not to think you are anything special.
You're not to think you are as good as we are.
You're not to think you are smarter than we are.
You're not to imagine yourself better than we are.
You're not to think you know more than we do.
You're not to think you are more important than we are.
You're not to think you are good at anything.
You're not to laugh at us.
You're not to think anyone cares about you.
You're not to think you can teach us anything."

An eleventh rule in the Law of Jante is:

"Perhaps you don't think we know a few things about you?"

---Danish-Norwegian author Aksel Sandemose, in his 1933 satirical novel A FUGITIVE CROSSES HIS TRACKS. According to Wikipedia, the very well-known "Law of Jante is a literary element that has been assumed by some to explain the egalitarian nature of Nordic countries."


[I saw cult bullies in communes and households in Berkeley brainwash and then control new recruits by convincing them to use LSD and live by the Law of Jante. "It's like Zen, man. You got to let go of your ego!"])


(In prisons, new inmates, especially young ones who think they are entitled to special treatment and act like they are better than others, are often emphatically told "You ain't got nothing coming!", a phrase that is said to have originally referred to packages that fortunate prisoners sometimes receive that are mailed to them by their families, usually around Thanksgiving, Christmas, or their birthday...)


("The 'tall poppy syndrome' is the cultural phenomenon of mocking people who think highly of themselves, 'cutting down the tall poppy'".

---Wikipedia


According to literature that is old, a tyrannical Roman king was asked by his son what he should do next. The king took a stick and swept it across his garden, cutting off the heads of the tallest poppies. The son then went and put to death all of the most eminent people in the lands that he ruled.)


("The nail that sticks out is hammered down."

---Japanese proverb


OTOH:


"The squeaky wheel gets the grease."

---American proverb)


(Bayer HealthCare "...is Berkeley's second-largest employer..."

"For 40 years, Berkeley has acted as a manufacturing hub for the company's biotechnology sector..."

---Alexa Vanhooser, Daily Cal, 10.8. 2018.

[In 1898, Bayer trademarked the name "Heroin" for the drug diacetylmorphine.])


("The summer seemed to last forever"

"Those were the best days of my life"

"I knew that it was now or never"

"O yeah, back in the summer of '69. Ah hah, it was the summer of '69, oh yeah, me and my baby in '69. Ohhh, it was the summer, summer, summer of '69, yeah."

---Bryan Adams and Jim Vallance, in the song they wrote, "Summer of '69", recorded in 1984.)


(The "Bryan Adams 'Summer of '69' Syndrome" is a very bad thing, according to an article written by Ian Williams, "Trash That Baby Boom", Washington Post Magazine, 1.2. 1994.)


("When Everything Happened. And Everything Changed."

---from the front cover of a "SUMMER OF '69" special magazine published by The New York Times in 2019 and sold for $15.00 per copy. Woodstock, Manson, Vietnam, etc. Front cover shows a young couple in a Volkswagen beetle.)


("The scene reminds me of the first lines of Dickins' A TALE OF TWO CITIES: 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.'"

---Berkeley photographer Nacio Jan Brown, in a comment to Tom Dalzell about Brown's heartbreakingly accurate photographs of some of the young people who frequented a small section of Telegraph Avenue near the University of California campus in the years 1969-1973. Berkeleyside, 4.14. 2016.)



(In 2019, just before the governor declared a state of emergency due to raging wildfires, angry Christian conservative [and Ted Nugent fan] Freddie Owen Graham, 68, flew to California from his home in Missouri, rented a vehicle, drove around and set more than a dozen fires near San Jose before attending a reunion for his high school graduating class of 1969. Graham posed for a photo at the reunion. On the table in front of him is a small model of a Volkswagen van on which is written GROOVY.)



("In 1969, the internet's predecessor, the Arpanet, sent the first message from a computer at the University of California, Los Angeles, to one at Stanford University in Palo Alto."

---Popular Science, special issue, "100 Inventions that Changed the World.")



("Just let it shine within your mind
And show you the colors that are real"

---David Clayton-Thomas, in his song "Spinning Wheel" that was on a Blood, Sweat & Tears album recorded in 1968. It was released as a single in 1969. Clayton-Thomas has been quoted as saying that the song was "...written in an age when psychedelic imagery was all over lyrics,,,")



("When the immense drugged universe explodes
In a cascade of unendurable color
And leaves us gasping naked,
This is no more than the ecstasy of chaos..."

---Robert Graves [from one of his poems that was published in his 1968 book POEMS 1965-1968.])



("zeitgeist--
The defining spirit or mood of a particular period of history as shown by the ideas and beliefs of the time.

'The story captured the zeitgeist of the late 1960s.'"

---Google Dictionary, 2019.)


("If the marijuana cigarette and the 'trip' were the symbols of the 60's, the jogging track and the health-food rack have become the symbols of the 80's."

---Norman Cousins, in his 1983 book THE HEALING HEART--Antidotes to Panic and Helplessness.)


("'LSD is like Ban deodorant', a student identified as 'a University of Michigan acidhead' told TIME in 1966. 'Ban takes the worry out of being close, LSD takes the worry out of being.'"

---Thomas Hine, The New York Times, 5.31. 2014, in an article about television commercials.)


("How do I nourish myself? I try to sleep. I try to eat well. I go to therapy...It's not just about the conscious mind...I do meditate. I do spend time in isolation. I have not dropped acid, though [laughs], of course, if it gets to that point, I'll consider it."

---Casey Gerald, a black author and businessman, interviewed by Tonya Mosely on the Here & Now radio program, WBUR, 8.21. 2019. Gerald, who was raised as a poor Baptist in Texas, studied at Yale, graduated from Harvard Business School, and was an intern at Lehman Brothers in 2008.)




(The novel HOUSE MADE OF DAWN was written by N. Scott Momaday, a Native American of Kiowa descent who was teaching at the University of California in Berkeley at the time the book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969.

"...the ecstasy of the drug called peyote."

---quote from the back cover of the first printing of the paperback edition.)



("The sack of peyote buttons beneath Delores's head was singing her awake, as it did each morning."

---Tom Robbins, in EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES.


"I hope the book...winds up changing the brainscape of America..."

---Thomas Pynchon, in a blurb published in a 1977 paperback edition of the Robbins novel.)




("I'm hostage to the reality of those times."

---Berkeley publisher Steve Wasserman, who is the same age as I am, commenting [in a 10.28. 2020 article in Berkeleyside that was written by Frances Dinkelspiel] on a recent movie about something that happened in late 1969. The movie, "The Trial of the Chicago 7", was written and directed by Aaron Sorkin. Wasserman said Sorkin "...trivialized the defendents, their political beliefs, and the antiwar movement." [Sorkin was born in 1961. According to Wikipedia, "On April 15, 2001, Sorkin was arrested when security guards at Hollywood Burbank Airport found hallucinogenic mushrooms, marijuana, and crack cocaine in his carry-on bag, and a metal crack pipe was detected by a magnetometer."])




("Forty-four percent of Americans say they have tried cannabis, according to a new Gallup poll.

The American research-based consulting company, which is best known for its opinion polls, says this is the highest percentage to admit having tried the drug since it first started asking the question in 1969--when only 4 percent said they had sampled it."

---Michael Walsh, Yahoo News, 7.22. 2015.)




("It's hard to overstate the tension that crackled through the country back then."

---Amanda Ripley, describing 1969, in The Atlantic, November 2016.)




("To say 1969 was an eventful, even turbulent year, would be an understatement."

---Roger Mullen, the Fayetteville Observer [Fayetteville, North Carolina], 7.27. 2019.)




("Jesus...think if you had brother who was born in '69 or something...They'd be...fucking bonkers..."

---Marc, a junkie, in THE RULES OF ATTRACTION, a 1987 novel by Bret Easton Ellis, after saying that president Kennedy was assassinated while Marc and his associate were both still in their mother's wombs. The novel is set in late 1985.)




("In an aunt of mine's 1973 high school yearbook, and keep in mind she went to high school deep in the boondocks of the rural Midwest, most of the guys have hair basically to their shoulders. My aunt tells me that most of her high school friends smoked "grass' [as they called it], a few used psychedelics, and most of the high school had the hairstyles and wore the faded jeans of 1967 Golden Gate Park flower children. What had been totally shocking to her rural Midwestern parents and their cohort in the late 1960s, as they watched hippies on Walter Cronkite, became the new normal in their own small town several years later."

---Joe Roberts, quora dot com, 2015, in answer to the question "What ended the hippie era?"


["Having graduated high school in a small town in the mid-70s, Joe is completely right about the hair, clothes and pot. Anybody wearing pre-Beatles haircuts and dressing like the Beach Boys circa 1960 wouldn't stand a chance with most of the girls."

---Kevin Robinson, commenting on what Joe Roberts wrote.])




(The American worldwide clothing company The Gap was established in San Francisco in 1969. The company was named after the "generation gap".

 ["The sociological theory of a generation gap first came to light in the 1960s, when the younger generation seemed to go against everything their parents had previously believed in terms of music, values, governmental and political views."

---Wikipedia]

"Gap 1969" is the name of a line of jeans they sell. "Made in China".)




(Two images that I feel strongly evoke those times:

One of the photographs that Arthur Schatz made in 1969 of Jack Nicholson smoking marijuana and listening to a record. Nicholson is holding a joint up, away from his face, and looking "directly" at the camera. His mouth is partly open in the beginning of a slightly lopsided grin.

A classic photograph that Nacio Jan Brown made around the same time, of Jack Leary, with his arms crossed, seriously gazing at the photographer while standing on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley.


[Of all the aliases I have used, "Jack" is my favorite...])






("The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or be black, but by getting the public to associate hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities, we could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

---John Ehrlichman, domestic policy chief for president Richard Nixon when the administration declared its War On Drugs in 1971. Ehrlichman, speaking in 1994, was quoted by Dan Baum in Harper's Magazine, 2016.)



("You know, it's a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana are Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with Jews, Bob? What's the matter with them? I suppose it's because most of them are psychiatrists."

---Richard Nixon, President of the United States of America, 5.26. 1971, speaking to H.R. Haldeman. [ABC News, 3.22. 2002, in a report about the latest release of White House tape recordings.] Apparently Nixon believed that he could take the recordings with him when he left the White House and that the public would never hear what he said.)



("To erase the grim legacy of Woodstock, we need a total war against drugs. Total war means war on all fronts against an enemy with many faces."

---Richard Nixon, in his 1990 book IN THE ARENA: A Memoir of Victory, Defeat, and Renewal.)



I went even further underground in early 1972 when I was 20 years old, after being brutally beat and threatened with death by federal agents who said they were angry because I declined to cooperate with them following my arrest for alleged involvement in a MDA (methylenedioxyamphetamine) deal. (Before fleeing to Mexico City, I appeared in the courtroom of federal judge Samuel Conti and pleaded NOT GUILTY.) MDA, called "The Love Drug" by some users in the 1960s and 1970s, was code-named EA1298 by the U.S. military. The "EA" in the code-name is an abbreviation of Edgewood Arsenal, a site in Maryland where chemical agents were stockpiled and tested on human subjects.

(At the time, MDA seemed to me to be unlikely to be a substance that most people would use more than a very few times, because my personal experience of using it was that it was that it usually left me extremely, and distressingly, drained of energy the day after my use. The severe "crash", as the local drug users called it, was unusually unpleasant.

The effects of MDMA, which, years later, was widely distributed and became globally popular, seemed to me to be utterly different than MDA, especially in that, if used properly, there seemed to be very few, if any, negative effects experienced the day after use. Nonetheless, I have always refused to buy, sell, or manufacture MDMA because the name of the drug 3,4-Methyl​enedioxy​methamphetamine contains the name "methamphetamine".)




(Lloyd Nichols Clifton, Jr. [1942-2013] was a police officer in Berkeley, California who was known to be violent. He disliked me intensely. He joined the federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs [BNDD] before it became the Drug Enforcement Administration [DEA]. In 1972, VERY soon after I was arrested by the BNDD, Clifton shot an unarmed young man, Dirk Dickenson, in the back as he ran away during a drug raid that was witnessed by members of the press. The young man died. A search of the victim's house turned up a small amount of marijuana and a little bit of peyote, along with 2 tablets of LSD. [A person linked to Dickenson was arrested the day of the raid on PCP charges and was later convicted of the charges.] The BNDD later said that a day after the shooting a tableting machine was found near Dickenson's house. After a brief investigation, the U.S. Department of Justice declined to file any charges against Clifton.

Not long after that, Clifton became the first federal drug agent in the U.S. to ever be charged with murder for shooting someone while acting in an official capacity.

The charge against Clifton was filed by the state of California. President Richard Nixon was displeased by the California charge against Clifton and told his attorney general to help get the charge against Clifton dismissed. In later legal filings, it was alleged that the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California, Robert Browning, met with Conti [a Nixon appointee] and asked Conti to rule that Clifton could not be charged or tried for murder by the state of California. Conti did so, and the charge against Clifton was dismissed.)

(According to William Grimes, writing in The New York Times on 5.12. 2017, Conti was known as "Hanging Sam". [Because of "his penchant for sentencing convicts to death", according to Wikipedia.] [During the Brotherhood of Eternal Love trial, Conti "...complained...that the death penalty was not available to him..."])

("The lead agent in the Dickenson raid had previously arrested Owsley Stanley, the Grateful Dead's soundman and one of the biggest acid cooks in the country."

"...the agency's annual budget has ballooned from $75 million to $3.2 billion. The DEA currently operates 90 foreign offices in 67 countries. It has seized billions of dollars in drugs, cash, vehicles, and real property. Since 1986, it has arrested more than 1 million people for manufacturing, distributing, or possessing illegal drugs. Yet in 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] counted more than 107,600 drug-related deaths—an all-time high. The DEA's own data show a steady, gradual decline in price and rise in purity for most street drugs since the 1980s."

"In a televised 1989 speech, President George H.W. Bush announced yet another escalation of the war on drugs while waving a plastic baggie of crack purchased from a dealer whom DEA agents had lured to 'a park just across the street from the White House.' The dealer got almost a decade in prison, and Bush got his prop. Describing illegal drug use as 'the gravest domestic threat facing our nation,' he said 'we won't have safe neighborhoods unless we are tough on drug criminals—much tougher than we are now.'

Tapped to deliver the Democratic Party's response, then-Sen. Joe Biden [D–Del.] complained that Bush was not tough enough. 'The president said he wants to wage a war on drugs,' Biden said. 'But if that's true, what we need is another D-Day, not another Vietnam; not another limited war fought on the cheap and destined for stalemate and human tragedy.'"

---C.J. Ciaramella, August 2023, reason dot com: "After 50 Years, the DEA Is Still Losing the War on Drugs".)


(James S. Ketchum was a U.S. Army psychiatrist who studied the effects of LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs on American soldiers, overseeing classified Cold War-era experiments. [Norman Vincent Peale was the delusional pastor of a church in New York City. He wrote the factually false bestselling book THE POWER OF POSITIVE THINKING, which psychologically damaged MANY people.  Ketchum's father was a deacon at Peale's church. Richard Nixon attended this church, as did Donald Trump.] While a member of the U.S. Army, Ketchum worked as a psychiatrist at the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic in San Francisco in the late 1960s, and he knew Sasha Shulgin. In his 2006 memoir CHEMICAL WARFARE: Secrets Almost Forgotten--A Personal Story of Medical Testing of Army Volunteers with Incapacitating Chemical Agents During the Cold War [1955-1975] [With a foreword by Shulgin], Ketchum describes the mysterious appearance in his office at the Edgewood Arsenal in 1969 of a large black steel barrel that contained a huge amount of pure LSD--at least 30 pounds by his estimate, enough to "intoxicate several hundred million people". The barrel soon mysteriously disappeared...

["Ketchum began taking ten milligrams of Dexedrine, first intermittently, then 3 times a day--a habit he maintained for decades..." (Dexedrine is amphetamine ["speed"].)

("I was smoking dope and having sex every night."

---Ketchum, recalling 1969 at the Edgewood Arsenal.)

"LSD Forever" and "The Black Drum" are titles from a series of half-finished manuscripts written by Ketchum before he wrote his memoir.

Ketchum said he asked a soldier who was on BZ "Why do they have taxes, income taxes, things like that?"
He said the soldier replied "You see, that would be difficult for me to answer, because I don't like rice."

---information from an article, "Operation Delirium", that was written by Raffi Khatchadourian and published in The New Yorker, 12.17. 2012.])


("In the early 1960s, practically every LSD investigator in the nation had taken LSD at least once, if only to become familiar with the subjective effects. Many, of course, took it innumerable times, incorporating it into their life style and self-concept. It was not until 1965 that I worked up the courage to try it myself."

"Oscar Bing had taken 20 mcg...and described the effects as similar to '20 cups of coffee.'”

"I consulted Dr. Abramson, one of the nation’s pioneer researchers on the effects of LSD. When I asked him how much I should take, he casually commented: 'if you take 50 mcg, you’ll probably get horny, and if you take 100 mcg you’ll probably get a little anxious.'”

"I decided to compromise. If I took 1.0 mcg/kg, [80 mcg] things should work out okay. I didn’t want to become a management problem or become terrified, thinking I might never come back to the real world."

"I saw no bizarre illusions or beautiful colors."

"Things seemed a little unreal, but I can’t say just what kind of unreality it was."

"It was all quite interesting, and I thought that perhaps I could figure it all out someday. I can’t remember much else, except at the end of the test, I took a Thorazine tab [the fashionable way to come down in those days] and went home. Maybe it’s because I’m not the transcendental type, but sadly, I didn’t have any great insights".

---James Ketchum, in CHEMICAL WARFARE: SECRETS ALMOST FORGOTTEN.)


("When an undeclared Acid Head War breaks out, Britain is the first to be devastated by Psycho-Chemical Aerosols..."

---Wikipedia, describing the wildly experimental Brian Aldiss 1969 psychedelic sci-fi novel BAREFOOT IN THE HEAD.)


At the time I was arrested, I did not know that MDA had been made illegal approximately a year before.


("...they all took MDA and predictably fell in love with each other."

---Mark Vonnegut, in his first autobiography, THE EDEN EXPRESS, 1975.)


("The drug is said to promote harmonious interpersonal relationships."

---Eugene Schoenfeld, M.D., writing about MDA in his 1968 book DEAR DOCTOR HIP POCRATES.)


I fled the country more than once.



("A strict observance of written laws is doubtless one of the highest duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation...are of higher obligation."

---Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to John B. Colvin, 1810.)


("Don't be too sure I'm as crooked as I'm supposed to be."

---Humphrey Bogart, playing investigator Sam Spade in the 1941 movie The Maltese Falcon.)


(A wise person once wrote "The Holocaust was legal. Slavery was legal. Legality is a matter of power, not justice.")


("I know not what course others may take but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"

---Patrick Henry)


("...I'd rather be a free man in my grave, than living as a puppet or a slave."

---Jimmy Cliff, in his song "The Harder They Come".)


("The creak of a stair that had not creaked before; the rustle of a shutter when no wind was blowing; the car with a different number plate but the same scratch on the offside wing; the face on the underground that you know you have seen somewhere before: for years at a time these were the signs he had lived by; any one of them was reason enough to move, change towns, identities. For in that profession there is no such thing as coincidence."

---"John Le Carré" [David Cornwell] in his 1974 novel TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY.

Indeed, if people were not extremely skilled at playing "Spy-vs-Spy", I often refused to associate with them when I was part of the illegal psychedelic drug world...)


("Only the paranoid survive."

---Andrew Grove, CEO of Intel.)


("...the price he paid for still living was a certain uncomfortable amount of anxiety."

---"Kickaha", in Philip José Farmer's 1967 novel A PRIVATE COSMOS.)


("You don't even know my real name"

"This ain't no party, this ain't no disco, this ain't no foolin around"

---David Byrne, in the words he wrote for the song "Life During Wartime", recorded in 1979 by Talking Heads.)


(Late one night when I was a fugitive, not long before my final arrest, my favorite taxi driver told me the DEA was following me. I went back to the cheap apartment I rented in a shady part of Emeryville [once called "The least prestigious place to live in the bay area" according to writer Will McCarthy], and without turning on the lights, I cut and dyed my hair, shaved off my mustache, and put on a suit and tie. Leaving behind more than a million squares of perforated blotter paper that had not yet been soaked with liquid containing LSD, I placed my copy of the 1965 U.S. Army field manual SURVIVAL EVASION AND ESCAPE just inside the door of my apartment, so that it would be the first thing the narcs saw if they entered…

A week later, a dear and brave friend [a psychedelic grandmother] went to the apartment and retrieved the unsoaked blotter paper. As the Beatles sang--”I get by with a little help from my friends...I get high with a little help from my friends…”)


("...in the grand tradition of artists and criminals everywhere, I'd used a lot of names..."

---"Ryder", in Richard Kadrey's novel KAMIKAZE L'AMOUR.)


("The most serious danger in clandestine operations comes not from spies or infiltrators but from the inadequacy of the human beings who compose the underground. One of the most critical areas of underground work is the teaching of members to maintain silence. Normal curiosity leads members to find out more information than they should know."

---A.R. Molnar, J.M. Tinker, and J.D. LeNoir, in HUMAN FACTORS CONSIDERATIONS OF UNDERGROUNDS IN INSURGENCIES, a 1966 U.S. Army pamphlet.)


("...poetry...should pay no attention to its real name."

---Brian Patten, in PENGUIN MODERN POETS 10--THE MERSEY SOUND--ADRIAN HENRI--ROGER MCGOUGH--BRIAN PATTEN, a 1974 revised and enlarged edition of a book first published in 1967.)


(..."Faith Popcorn"...)


(Sixties political and social activist Abbie Hoffman was arrested and charged with intent to sell cocaine in 1973. He declined to go to court and became a fugitive in 1974. He surrendered to authorities in 1980. He once said the efforts of his friends to protect, hide, and transport him was the purest love he had ever experienced. That was my experience also. I will forever be grateful to all the many people who, at great risk to themselves, helped to keep me from being caught.)


After being a fugitive for almost 16 years, I was arrested on a federal charge of "Conspiracy to Distribute LSD". I was in possession of very small amounts of 2C-B (4-bromo-2,5-dimethoxyphenethylamine) with a handwritten note and explanatory diagram by the academic chemist who made it and gave it to me.


("2C-B is a psychedelic similar to mescaline, but in the club, it can be something else entirely: 'tucibi' is often marketed as 'pink cocaine,' and while it does sometimes contain mescaline, it also can contain a cocktail of other drugs, including ketamine, MDMA, and caffeine."

---Jane C. Hu, 1.8. 2024, The Microdose, quote from "Drug use at the nightclub: 5 questions for drug epidemiologist Joseph Palamar." [2C-B was first synthesized by Sasha Shulgin in 1974.]),


samples of 4 differnet batches of MDMA (methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or "ecstasy", which became a Schedule I controlled substance days after my arrest in June 1985.)

(My entire life I have steadfastly refused to buy, sell, distribute, or manufacture MDMA, because I refuse to traffic in any substance whose name contains the word "methamphetamine", although it does seem possible that MDMA might sometimes be useful in psychotherapy...

["Berlin's annual Love Parade, which had begun in July 1989, saw a million people dancing in the city's Tiergarten in 1997, with this number swelling to about one and a half million by the end of the decade."

---Ben Gook, in his November 2015 essay "Dancing at the End of History: The Fall of the Berlin Wall and Ecstasy in Berlin", published by the Australian Research Council, based at the Western Universities of Australia. People taking MDMA and dancing in a group seems to sometimes cause what Simon Reynolds called "...a strange and wondrous atmosphere of collective intimacy, an electric sense of connection between complete strangers."]

["The album is like the faded ten year-old tag of a kid whose rave dreams have been crushed by a series of dead end jobs."

---Mark Fisher, in his 2014 book GHOSTS OF MY LIFE--Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, describing, in 2006, the album "Burial".

("...MDMA flashbacks bring London to unlife...")

("...a wounded city, populated by ecstasy casualties on day release from psychiatric units...")


("...wanting an angel to be watching over you when there's nowhere to go and all you can do is sit in McDonalds late at night, not answering your phone."

---Burial, quoted by Mark Fisher in late 2007.)]),


marijuana, a psilocybin mushroom, codeine, Valium, and traces of powders containing cocaine and heroin. Also, very pure LSD in crystalline form and a quantity of gelatin pyramids containing LSD. I was never told why I had been charged with "Conspiracy to Distribute LSD", and I was never told why the charge was later dismissed. (Perhaps the prosecutor had been wearing a tinfoil hat.) For reasons unknown to me, I was never charged with possessing any of the drugs. The MDA charges were apparently dismissed because I demanded my "Right to a Speedy Trial" and it took the prosecutor too long to find the legal records of my 1972 case.






("Often it is not possible to dissipate the compulsive need for an addiction. In such cases the destructive craving can be rechanneled into a positive beneficial addiction..."

---Michael Lesser, M.D., in his book NUTRITION AND VITAMIN THERAPY, 1980.)


Michael Lesser treated me for chronic kidney stones in the 1980s. Before I was scheduled to appear in 1986 before federal Judge Samuel Conti to face the 1972 charge of "Failure to Appear in Court", I wrote the judge a letter containing the above quote by Dr. Lesser. I knew the judge had probably read a transcript of a telephone conversation DEA agents had recorded in which I said to a heroin addict that perhaps he should take LSD instead of heroin. I explained to Conti that many people I had known died from using heroin, but I did not know of any instance where someone had died from using LSD. I wrote that some radical Berkeley rioters I knew told me that MDA was a drug that made them feel intense affectionate love for everyone they met, especially police officers, and that it seemed to me that it was better for people to hug than to break windows and set fires. Because I did not want to give the judge the satisfaction of being cruel to me, and because my attorney told me that it was certain that I would receive the maximum sentence, my attorney made an agreement with the prosecutor stating that I would accept a sentence of five years in prison for "Failure to Appear In Court", a felony, but when it came time for sentencing, Conti surprised my attorney by refusing to accept the agreement, and he sentenced me to two years in prison instead. I served 15 months. And I was made infamous forever.






("I've had one myself, and it's so horrible it makes you want to die."

---Steven Kaplan, MD, director of the Iris Cantor Men's Health Center at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City, describing kidney stones. Kaplan was quoted by Richard Laliberte and Gail Saltz in an article in Women's Day, "10 Symptoms He Shouldn't Ignore", 6.7. 2011.)






I was not issued a Social Security number until I was 35 years old (1986).


Capitalism is a deadly form of greed, although on a well-regulated and very small scale capitalism might sometimes be beneficial to a community. I am vehemently opposed to large-scale capitalism.


("A chaste and consistent selfishness ran like a pattern through their every idea."

---F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his short story "A Diamond as Big as the Ritz", first published in book form in TALES OF THE JAZZ AGE, 1922.)


("...a father whose scrupulous honesty had ruined his professional prospects..."

---Sax Rohmer [Arthur Henry Ward, an English writer who was a racist], in his 1919 novel DOPE: A Story of Chinatown and the Drug Traffic.)

(In their 1998 book SHADOW SYNDROMES: The Mild Forms of Major Mental Disorders That Sabotage Us, John J. Ratey and Catherine Johnson note that honesty can be a symptom of some mild forms of autism.)


("...by the year 2020 the inhabitants of the world will all be insane."

---from a January 29, 1914 article, "Capitalist Insanity", that was published in The Commonwealth, a newspaper in Everett, Washington.)


(Supermarket Sweep is a nakedly capitalist television show that was first broadcast in America in 1965. Each episode features displays of grotesquely competitive shopping frenzy, almost always disgustingly noisy, frantic, and crass. Over the decades, in various forms and locations, there have been more than 1,100 episodes broadcast as of mid-2021. It makes me physically ill to be in a room where this show is on television and the sound is turned up.)


("Gun sales hit all-time high amid flurry of mass shootings"

---CBS News headline, 4.21. 2021, the day after white former Minneapolis, Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murder in the grotesquely brutal death of George Floyd, a black man.)



Americans are only 5% of the world's population. It is extremely clear that many of the other 95% of humans, the "broader public", have been horribly exploited and harmed by American capitalists. I STRONGLY support anything that nonviolently "damages" the capitalist American economy because the hard truth is that such damage may be the only thing that can save the planet.)



("Call It Psychedelic And It Will Sell..."

---The Wall Street Journal, 2.9. 1967.)


I have never owned or worn anything tie-dyed.


("THIS TRIP IS FOR REAL!"

---from a poster for the cheap pseudo-hippie exploitation pornographic film Psychedelic Sex Kicks, made in 1967 in San Francisco, California.)


("Their psychedelic sin-trip passed the point of no return."

---quote from the front cover of the 1967 pornographic novel LSD ORGY by Marcus Miller.)


("Peace, Love, and Vines"is a limited edition package of candy made by the American Licorice Company in 2019. Decorated with images of a hippie-style Volkswagen van, peace symbols, a dove, hearts, and stars. American Licorice is but one of the MANY companies that have used 60s counterculture symbols to push their products.)


("The way to make money is to buy when blood is running in the streets."

---John D. Rockefeller)


("I'm running a business."

---Heather Bresch, CEO of Mylan, "explaining why the pharmaceutical company raised the price of the EpiPen, a lifesaving portable injector for those with severe allergies, from $100 to more than $600 each..." TIME, 9.12. 2016.)


("Some of the loneliest, most miserable, neurotic, despicable people we know have been the most successful in the world."

---Anne Lamott, in her book BIRD BY BIRD--Some Instructions on Writing and Life.)


("...hard-driving vicious cutthroat financial killers, the kind of people who leave blood all over the boardroom table..."

"Those are exactly the kind of negotiators the United States needs..."

---Donald Trump, in his 2016 presidential campaign.)


("...money doesn't talk, it swears."

---Bob Dylan, in his 1965 song "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)".)


("If you start talking to people out here about the environment, they'll punch you. They'll get violent. They're here to make money."

---Oil worker in Fort McMurray, in the Canadian province of Alberta, 2012, speaking to Ken Ilgunas in Ilgunas' 2016 book TRESPASSING ACROSS AMERICA--One Man's Epic, Never-Done-Before (And Sort Of Illegal) Hike Across the Heartland.)


("We're just so not out of the woods with this pandemic..."

---Kevin Riley, director of the Labor Occupational Safety and Health Program at UCLA, quoted by Fiona Kelliher, Bay Area News Group, 9.12. 2021, in her article "California Senate passes bill allowing state to keep details of COVID outbreaks secret", published in The Mercury News.

"...a win for business groups after key transparency clauses were slashed at the last minute.")


("...thousands of the bank's employees used customer data to open more than two million fake bank accounts, including more than five hundred thousand credit-card accounts."

"...the egregious fraud indicated a corporate culture gone badly awry..."

---James Surowiecki, The New Yorker, 11.7. 2016, describing what Wells Fargo bank did from 2011 to mid-2016.)


("Wells Fargo agreed Friday to pay $3 billion to settle criminal and civil investigations into a long-running practice whereby company employees opened millions of unauthorized bank accounts in order to meet unrealistic sales goals."

---Ken Sweet and Stefanie Dazio, the Associated Press, 3.3. 2020, Tri-City Voice, in the San Francisco Bay Area.)


(Prominent and trusted Wall Street moneyman Bernard Madoff was arrested in late 2008. He was later found to have stolen approximately $18 billion from investors.)


(Saying that some ants, when ground into a powder, are an aphrodisiac and general cure-all, over an eight-year period the Yilishen Tianxi Group in China recruited "as many as one million would-be ant farmers, collecting about $1.2 billion" by promising them a more than 30% annual return. In December 2007, the company filed for bankruptcy.

"...the ants apparently were little more than bait for a vast pyramid scheme."

---from a 1.12. 2008 article by Mark Magnier, the Los Angeles Times .)


(“...the Department of Justice is open for business…”

 ---Jeff Sessions, Attorney General of the United States, news conference, 8.4. 2017. Sessions was nominated for the job by Donald Trump…)


("...the chief business of the American people is business."

---Calvin Coolidge)


(Hunbots!

"A 'hunbot' is typically a young to middle-aged mother who proclaims to have her own business but actually fell prey to multi-level marketing schemes."

---urbandictionary dot com, May 2021. Such women often [in a somewhat robot-like fashion] call prospective customers or recruits "hun", originally a genuinely affectionate abbreviation of the word "honey".)


("I believe in God, family, and McDonald's--and in the office that order is reversed."

---Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald's. "We're not in the hamburger business. We're in show business.")


("It's showtime, folks!"

---Joe Gideon, speaking to the bathroom mirror each morning after he takes dextroamphetamine. Joe Gideon is a character [based on Bob Fosse] who is played by Roy Scheider in the 1979 film All That Jazz, which is about Fosse's making of the 1974 film Lenny, which is about comedian Lenny Bruce, who used amphetamine and opioids. Bruce died of a morphine overdose at age 40.)

(Famous ego-tripping bully and convicted murderer Phil Spector died in prison. He played the lead guitar solo on The Drifters' 1963 hit version of the song "On Broadway".

"Ha! They say I won't last too long
On Broadway"

"But oh! They're dead wrong, I know they are
'Cause I can play this here guitar
And I won't quit till I'm a star
On Broadway"

"I'll be a big, big, big man
On Broadway")


("This stange move I made away from the enormous acceptance and potential I'd worked so diligently to achieve left me hanging in nowheresville but I may have saved my sanity by doing it."

---songwriter Beverly Ross [1935-2022], in her 2013 memoir I WAS THE FIRST WOMAN PHIL SPECTOR KILLED. Songwriter Ross worked with and ended up greatly disliking Phil Spector. The quote was included in her obituary in The New York Times.

"He loves to kiss me till I can't see straight
Gee, my lollipop is great"

---from the song "Lollipop", written in 1958 by Beverly Ross and Julius Dixon.)


("The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads."

---Jeff Hammerbacher, a young "Silicon Valley tech whiz", who was an early employee of Facebook, quoted in Bloomberg Businessweek, April 2007.

The quote refers to the famous opening words of Allen Ginsberg's famous poem "Howl", which was written 1954-1955:

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix..."

["According to Ginsberg's bibliographer and archivist Bill Morgan, it was a terrifying peyote vision that was the principal inspiration for 'Howl'."

--Wikipedia])


("There is no market for facts."

---Dave Ross, KCBS, 5.30. 2019, explaining why American politicians lie.)


("It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

---Upton Sinclair)


("His job appears to be to convince a generation of people who want to do good and do well to learn, instead, remorselessness. Forget rules, obligations, your conscience, loyalty, a sense of the commonweal. If you start a business and it succeeds, Linkner advises, sell it and take the cash. Don't look back."

---Jill Lepore, describing award-winning entrepreneur and author Josh Linkner. The New Yorker, 6.23. 2014.)


("I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul."

---William Ernest Henley, in his famous inspirational poem "Invictus", written in 1875. What Henley wrote is NOT true.)


("It's my life and I'll do what I want [Don't push me]...
It's my mind and I'll think what I want [You can't tell me]"

---Roger Atkins, in the words he wrote for the song "It's My Life". Eric Burdon and The Animals recorded it in 1965. The words they sang so emphatically were NOT true, and have never been true.)


("If you work hard and play by the rules, this country is truly open to you. You can achieve anything."

---Arnold Schwarzenegger, when he was governor of California. What Schwarzenegger said is NOT true.)


("...it's an article of faith that people succeed or fail because that's what they deserve."

"If you believe that net worth is a reflection of merit, then any attempt to curb inequality looks unfair."

---James Surowiecki, a financial writer, The New Yorker, 7.7. 2014.)


(Insanely conservative syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell, a cruel senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, angrily wrote that "Working at a homeless shelter", which is "...widely regarded as 'community service'..." is "...aiding and abetting vagrancy..."

---West County Times, 12.5. 2008.)


(In a 2017 survey, CareerBuilder, a leading job site, found that "78% of workers in the United States live paycheck to paycheck".

---Zack Friedman, Forbes.com, 1.11. 2019.)


("[God must be just, right?] In a series of surveys, respondents religiosity correlated with belief in a just world, belief that capitalism is fair, social and economic conservatism, acceptance of income equality, and belief in the fairness of the American social system.

No, life's not fair. And in a cruel twist, our wish to see it as fair keeps us from making it so."

---Matthew Hutson, The Atlantic, June 2016.)


("...emphasis on sharing in subsistence economies can be readily explained by the fact that an individual householder can do little else with his surplus but share it with his kin and neighbors."

---Scarlett Epstein, in her essay "A Sociological Analysis of Witch Beliefs in a Mysore Village", published in the periodical The Eastern Anthropologist, 1959.


"It can be stated as a theorem valid in a high percentage of cases, that the greater opportunity for profit in any social-cultural situation, the weaker the ties of social kinship become."

---R. Linton, in the essay "Cultural and Personality Factors Affecting Economic Growth", published in THE PROGRESS OF UNDERDEVELOPED AREAS, edited by B.G. Hoselitz, 1952, and quoted by Epstein in her essay.)


(Tobacco grower George Washington, the first president of the United States, inherited his first 10 slaves in 1743 when he was 11 years old. Washington later built and owned one of the largest distilleries in the country, producing large quantities of whiskey. He ended up paying taxes on 135 of his slaves by 1774. Washington owned many slaves until his death in 1799.

---from GEORGE WASHINGTON AND SLAVERY: A DOCUMENTARY PORTRAYAL, a book by Fritz Hirschfeld that was published by the University of Missouri Press in 1997.


["The book...follows the changeable, inconsistent, sometimes flagrantly dishonest Washington through a morass of contradictory gestures..."

---reviewer Janet Maslin, The New York Times, 9.28. 2010, writing about what a book by Ron Chernow, WASHINGTON: A LIFE (based on a University of Virginia research project, "The Papers of George Washington") had to say about George Washington's attitudes about slavery. The research project  has been underway since 1968 and has produced more than 60 volumes.]


George Washington's picture appears on the front side of every $1 bill in America. More than 2 billion of them were printed by the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing in 2012. His picture is also on the front of each 25 cent coin made since 1934. Approximately 1.5 billion 25 cent coins were made in 2013.)


("...during his lifetime, Thomas Jefferson owned more than 600 slaves..."

"Upon his death, he did not free the people he enslaved..." Instead, he had most of them sold "to pay off his debts."

The "man who wrote that 'all men are created equal'..."never did much to make those words come true."

---Lucian K. Truscott, IV, a direct descendant of Thomas Jefferson, calling for the removal of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., The New York Times, 7.6. 2020. The National Park Service says the Jefferson Memorial is a "shrine to freedom"...)


DNA tests have shown that Thomas Jefferson fathered at least six children with his slave Sally Hemings.

Thomas Jefferson's picture appears on the front of every 5 cent coin made since 1938. Approximately 1.6 billion 5 cent coins were made in 2015.)


("George Washington, the most popular U.S. stamp subject of all time, has appeared on more than 300 different stamp issues, including one of the first U.S. stamp issues."

---Jennifer Lynch, 6.17. 2017, on the United States Postal Service offical blog.


[After being elected president, George Washington took his oath of office while standing on the balcony of Federal Hall on Wall Street in New York City.


("With the aggressive increase in the slave trade and the expansion of the city, an official slave market opened in 1711 by the East River on Wall Street between Pearl and Water Streets. By 1730, 42 percent of the population owned slaves, a higher percentage than in any other city in the country except Charleston, South Carolina."

"The slave market on Wall Street closed in 1762 but men, women, and children continued to be bought and sold throughout the city."

---Sylviane A. Diouf, New York Public Library org blog, 6.29. 2015.)]


Thomas Jefferson has also appeared on a number of U.S. stamp issues.)


("I'll tell you why I like the cigarette business. It costs a penny to make. Sell it for a dollar. It's addictive. And there's fantastic brand loyalty."

---Warren Buffett, once one of the largest shareholders in the RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company, speaking to John Gutfreund in 1987. The quote is from BARBARIANS AT THE GATE: The Fall of RJR Nabisco, written by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar in 1989. The book was a New York Times bestseller.)


("...demand for it made viable the early American colony of Virginia, supercharged the Atlantic slave trade, and helped reshape the world economy."

---David Sim, history professor, University College London, writing about tobacco, in response to the question "What is the most significant fad of all time?" The Atlantic, April 2017.)


(After Brenda Fitzgerald became the director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] in mid-2017, she bought stock in a tobacco company. She resigned in 2018 almost immediately after reporters learned of her investment.)


("...most professors are named by some rich benefactor--so you become the, you know, the "Lucky Strike Professor of History", or something..."

"...in late-stage capitalism, Money Talks..."

---California Governor Jerry Brown, in an interview with Marisa Lagos and Scott Shafer, KQED, 12.20. 2018. ["Lucky Strike" is the name of a brand of unfiltered tobacco cigarettes.])


("...I'm gonna smoke a cigarette that's nine miles long"

---John Prine, in his song "When I Get to Heaven", released in 2018.)


(“James W. Johnston: ‘Cigarette smoking is no more “addictive” than coffee, tea or Twinkies.’

R.J. Reynolds CEO’s written testimony for a 1994 congressional hearings denied what the tobacco industry had known for decades: Nicotine is addictive.”

 ---Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, National Geographic, June 2017, in the article he wrote “Why We Lie”.)







I STRONGLY BELIEVE IN HARM REDUCTION.

("Circumspecte" has been translated as "with caution" or "with meticulous care". It was the personal motto of the very beautifully long-haired male Dutch pharmacist depicted in the 1667 painting "Portrait of the Pharmacist Dr Ysbrand Ysbrandsz", by Cornelis de Man.)


("'I hate to say this, but we're really probably one big tragedy away from people realizing how serious this is.'

---Marty Lee Hendrick, the executive director of Oklahoma's pharmacy board, on the exposure to scorching heat for many mail-order prescription medications."

---The New York Times, 8.20. 2024.

[For many years I have noticed that very large quantities of LSD, usually made into tablets or soaked into sheets of paper, are being distributed via mailed letters and packages. The LSD in tablets and blotters can turn brown and even black when it is altered by heat. NOT A GOOD THING!]

[I stored LSD in completely sealed bags in the freezer compartment of refrigerators. Eventually I bought a commercial freezer and put it in the air-conditioned garage at the house I rented. For quite a while I was the driver of my young daughter's carpool, taking her and her friends to school in the mornings. I got up very early each schoolday, and because I was not a coffee drinker, to make sure I was alert, I took what most people would consider to be a very large dose of LSD, which, because of my at the time MASSIVE tolerance to the usual effects of LSD, merely acted as an excellent performance-enhancing stimulant. I then put sealed bags containing very large quantities of LSD, surrounded by blue ice packs, in ice chests that I thoroughly sealed with tape. I then placed the ice chests in the trunk of the car and covered the ice chests with MANY layers of blankets and rugs. Because I was a federal fugitive and had no driver license, I placed the key to the car trunk in my shoe in case I was pulled over by the police.])

For two decades I earned my keep by doing nonprofit quality control work for psychedelic drug manufacturers and distributors, cannabis growers and distributors, and others. (My conscious motivation for involvement was definitely to contribute to the "common good". My involvement was NOT for "private gain".) It turned out to be a WAY more dangerous occupation than I thought it would be! Some people did NOT agree with my insistence that drugs obviously contaminated with unknown, untested, toxic, or possibly toxic substances should have the contaminant or contaminants 100% removed. They also strongly disagreed with my insistence that if the contaminant or contaminants could not be removed, then the drug should be destroyed. I have destroyed huge amounts of very contaminated cheap Mexican marijuana. And I have destroyed plenty of contaminated marijuana grown in California. Each time, I told the people who owned the marijuana and asked me to check it out that if I found contaminants I would destroy the contaminated marijuana to prevent it from being distributed and I did in fact destroy it.

One of the people who strongly disagreed with my insistance on strict quality control, a wannabe cocaine smuggler named David Albrecht, who had recently been in Colombia, got way crazed on cocaine and alcohol and drove his sports car to outside of where my partner and I were living in 1977 in an upstairs apartment in Berkeley and quickly fired a double-barreled shotgun twice at my window while I was in the middle of extracting marijuana oil. Very glad my partner was not home. First, my windows exploded into fragments, then lead hit the wall inches from my head, THEN I heard the sound of the gunshots. VERY lucky for me that I happened to be sitting in a far corner of the room at the time.

(Necessitas non habet legem ["necessity knows no law"]: When I learned about the quite vast quantity of LSD being clandestinely manufactured, I realized that attempting to influence things like the amount of LSD in each tablet and the flow of the flood was a far better harm reduction strategy than stupidly trying to stick my finger in the dike.)


("If a tsunami is coming we don't try to stop the tsunami, we just try to ensure that the minimum number of people are harmed by it."

---Dr. Thomas House, a statistician from the University of Manchester, quoted by Noel Titheradge and Dr. Faye Kirkland, BBC News, 7.20. 2020.)


("The pursuit of a drug-free society seems quixotic, and its nobility is tarnished by the associated hatred and contempt for drug users."

---Robert MacCoun and Peter Reuter, in their excellent book DRUG WAR HERESIES--Learning from Other Vices, Times, and Places.)


("...tolerance to the drug develops rapidly if used daily, rendering its repeated ingestion useless, and cannot be overcome by ingestion of increased dosages."

"...belief in the beneficent properties of LSD has been, over the years, as strong a motivating factor in the production and distribution of the drug as the profits to be made from its sale."

---from a mention of the influence the beliefs of "certain psychedelic generation gurus" have had on LSD production and distribution, in "LSD in the United States--Drug Intelligence Report", prepared by the Domestic Unit of the Strategic Intelligence Section of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration, dated October, 1995.

"LSD is manufactured illegally within the United States, primarily in northern California, and is trafficked domestically as well as internationally by small, close-knit criminal organizations that successfully have evaded drug law enforcement authorities for many years. DEA is committed to dismantling the highest level LSD trafficking organizations. DEA's San Francisco Field Division, in cooperation with the California Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement and the San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley Police Departments, has taken the lead in this effort."

---Thomas A. Constantine, United States Drug Enforcement Administration administrator, in the report.)


(The findings from a study that used information collected over 13 years about 480,000 American adults to investigate the relationship between psychedelic drug use and criminal behavior were published October 17, 2017 in the Journal of Psychopharmacology. [“The Relationships of Classic Psychedelic Use with Criminal Behavior in the United States Adult Population” by Peter S. Hendricks, Michael Scott Crawford, Karen L. Cropsey, Heith Copes, N Wiles Sweat, Zach Walsh, and Gregory Pavela.]

 “Having ever used a classic psychedelic (LSD, DMT, mescaline, psilocybin, etc.) was associated with a 27 percent decrease in the odds of committing larceny/theft, a 12 percent decrease in the odds of committing assault, a 22 percent decrease in the odds of arrest for a property crime, and an 18 percent decrease in the odds of arrest for a violent crime in the past year.”)


("I had been hearing about acid all year, but tended to discount it."

Then, in New York City on New Year's Eve, 1963, she ate a sugar cube containing LSD, and had her first "trip".

"I looked at him, and for the first time I saw him clearly. I saw him moving down a dead end street, saw how desperately he needed this acid, or something, anything, to open him to possibility...he was drying out, cut off from his sources of nurture, relentlessly driving himself...I again offered him some acid. Though this was hardly the right moment, I tried to tell him about the flames all matter was, but that just made him nervous. He put his small hand up against his fine, thin nose, in one of his characteristic gestures that signaled that he was at his wit's end. Then I did something that shocked me, even then: I tried to force a cube between his lips, but he clenched his teeth. I felt I was trying beyond all reason to save his life, and perhaps it was true. I gave up after that, amazed that I had actually tried to use force."

"'I don't want' I said to Jo, 'to ever come down'. And it was then she gave me a great gift, something I carry with me to this day.
'You won't', said Jo.
And somehow I knew she was right. I never would."

---Diane di Prima, in RECOLLECTIONS OF MY LIFE AS A WOMAN--The New York Years.)


("John talked me into investing the $150...in the...LSD business so that we could get motorcycles for Christmas, but I gave away all the acid the same night I got it."

---Pam Tent, describing late summer 1968 in San Francisco, in the 2004 book MIDNIGHT AT THE PALACE--My Life As a Fabulous Cockette.)


("Mr. Frye is watching the ceiling fan as though it were the most fascinating thing on earth. Antonia assumes this has to do with some sort of scientific study of speed or light, but in fact it's directly related to the experiences of Ben Frye's youth, when he went out to San Francisco to visit a friend and stayed for nearly ten years, during which time he worked for a rather well-known maker of LSD. Such was his introduction to science. It is also the reason why there are times he has to slow the world down. That's when he stops and stares, at things like ceiling fans and raindrops on window glass."

---Alice Hoffman, in her 1995 novel PRACTICAL MAGIC, describing a biology teacher. To make money, the villain in this book, Jimmy, sells "highly toxic weeds" to college students, telling them that the substance is LSD. Three of the students die.)


"The trouble is, LSD attracts unstable therapists..."

"It gives them an intoxicating sense of power to bestow such a fabulous experience on others."

---Sidney Cohen (From "The Dangerous Magic of LSD", 11.2. 1963, The Saturday Evening Post. The article is mentioned by Stephen Siff in his 2015 book ACID HYPE: American News Media and the Psychedelic Experience.


"...ultimately psychedelic experience was associated as much with its expression through media as the drugged state that had been its inspiration."

---Thomas B. Roberts, in his review of Siff's book, discussing the media coverage of LSD from the early 1950s through 1968.)


("...LSD therapists '...have included an excessive proportion of psychopathic individuals.'"

---Sidney Cohen, [to William Harlan Hale] 1.18. 1963, quoted by Steven J. Novak in Novak's 1997 article "LSD Before Leary--Cohen's Critique of 1950s psychedelic drug research".)


 An avid reader, I eventually amassed a 10,000+ item drug research library.


(One of my favorite book titles: EVERYTHING I KNOW I LEARNED ON ACID, a collection of quotes [John Lennon, Andy Warhol, Jack Kerouac, Groucho Marx, and others]. The book, by Coco Pekelis, was published in 1996. And I like the 1963 book THE DISCOVERY OF LOVE: A Psychedelic Experience with LSD-25, by Malden Grange Bishop.)


("There's no way to truly say how much I loved LSD. I've never had a bum trip."

---Ralph "Sonny" Barger, in the 2000 book he wrote [with Keith and Kent Zimmerman] HELL'S ANGEL--The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club.)



My entire lifetime "earnings", according to the IRS: $2,143.

(All that I inherited from my parents was a laquerware mushroom-shaped drinking game that they bought in Japan in 1950. Strange, because I have had a strong dislike of alcohol all of my life...)

(I have always been one of "...the vast crowd that bears on its back the label 'No money' from the cradle to the grave...", as a wealthy man described poor people in the 1931 novel AFTER LEAVING MR. MACKENZIE by Jean Rhys.)


(From the perspective of a Japanese woman who just "drank a quart of sake":

"I've been to Nagasaki, Hiroshima, too!
The things I did to them baby, I can do to you!
'Cause I'm a Fujiyama Mama
And I'm just about to blow my top!"

---"Jack Hammer" [Earl Solomon Burroughs], in his 1954 song "Fujiyama Mama". A version was recorded by rockabilly singer Wanda Jackson and was a number 1 hit in Japan in 1958. I was born in a place that was in sight of Fujiyama, Japan's iconic volcano.)


After I officially became homeless in January 1993, I applied for (and continue to receive) disability payments. I lived on the streets for decades.


(“It has always seemed strange to me...The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.”

---John Steinbeck, in his novel CANNERY ROW, published in 1945.)


("Between January 2016 to August 2019, dozens of residential care facilities for the elderly closed in Alameda County, according to Dr. Robert Ratner, the housing services director at the Alameda County Health Care Services Agency. The remaining facilities normally cost more than $4,000 per person per month to stay in, Ratner said."

---Jade Yamazaki Stewart, EastBayExpress.com, 10.2. 2019, in "The New Face of Homelessness: Elderly and Disabled", an article about 3 older homeless brothers who have "lived in Berkeley our whole lives.")


"Melissa Hickson says her husband was denied potentially life-saving treatment because doctors at the hospital made a decision based on their biases that, because of his disabilities, Michael Hickson had a 'low quality of life'."

---Joseph Shapiro, NPR.com, 7.31. 2020, in an article about the death of a 46-year-old black man in Texas, "One Man's COVID-19 Death Raises the Worst Fears of Many People With Disabilities".


("It's hell, to be honest."

---35-year-old Ivy LeGrand, who "struggles with mental health and substance abuse issues", describing being homeless in Vermont. LeGrand was misquoted as saying "It's hell to be honest." in a 6.27. 2021 article by Associated Press writers Kelli Kennedy and Lisa Rathke, KCRA dot com.)


("'A lot of our clients just want to be treated like a human being', LifeLong Medical Care social worker Elese Lorentzen said."

---Eden Teller, 12.23. 2020, Berkeleyside, in an article about homeless people. Teller visited a homeless encampment located near the intersection of Eighth Street and Harrison Street. I spent more than 18 years living as a homeless person in that part of Berkeley.)


("...it is possible to live on the smell of an oily rag and stay just about sane."

---Nicky Melville, an older retired person in Australia who does not have much money. quora dot com, 3.4. 2019.)


("As millions face eviction, both tenants and landlords feel pressure"

"Buffett has made $100 billion on his investment in Apple"

---CBS News headlines, 3.1. 2021)


(The word "outlandish" originally described being from anywhere that was NOT England.

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary [2023] lists "spaced-out" as a synonym for "outlandish".

Their definition of "spaced-out [or spaced]":

1: dazed or stupefied by or as if by a narcotic substance: HIGH.

2: of very strange character: WEIRD.

"A spaced-out fantasy.")


(The Social Services Agency of Alameda County required me to stay in a homeless shelter ["Human Outreach--Shelter for Men" located at 22425 Flagg Street in Hayward and operated by a Christian who called himself "Reverend Bliss"] in January 1993 for a month before they would allow me to be issued General Assistance payments. Three open door bedrooms and MANY bunk beds. Each bedroom had a LOUD TV and each was tuned to a different station. Torture! While I was there many of my housemates were very old addicts who had recently been released from prison after serving insanely long sentences. They frequently injected drugs in the bathrooms. Each night we had the same thing for dinner: spaghetti. [No lunch was served. Breakfast consisted of an exceptionally small sweet roll that was way past the expiration date.] According to an article in the local newspaper, the addict who cooked dinner each night for us was dying of AIDS and very angry. He was caught mixing his tainted blood into the spaghetti sauce and serving it to us! [It took far too many years of dishonesty, abuse, and severe mismanagement before the shelter was finally shut down.])


("Hayward was the PCP [angel dust] capital of the world in the 70's."

---Geoff K., on Yelp, 1.26. 2008. Geoff wrote that he "...taught in Hayward for 32 years...")


(Before he became famous, Tom Hanks attended high school in Oakland, California and then spent two years studying theater in nearby Hayward.

["When I read the script for Forrest Gump, I saw it as one of those kind of grand, hopeful movies that the audience can go to and feel...some hope for their lot and their position in life...I got that from the movies a hundred million times when I was a kid. I still do."

---Tom Hanks, quoted by William Grimes in an article "Forrest Gump Triumphs with 6 Academy Awards", The New York Times, 3.28. 1995.]

["I must say that when I go to church--and I do go to church--I ponder the mystery. I meditate on the 'why?' of 'why people are as they are' and 'why bad things happen to good people' and 'why good things happen to bad people'...The mystery is what I think is, almost, the grand unifying theory of all mankind."

---Tom Hanks, a member of the Greek Orthodox Church, quoted by Terry Mattingly, 3.25. 2009, "Tom Hanks talks about religion", Scripps Howard News Service.])


("Police say a man under the influence of the hallucinogenic drug PCP apparently believed he was a gopher, burrowed into a hole and suffocated. His mother said he was depressed because he couldn't get a job."

---San Francisco Chronicle, 1983.)


("BERKELEY-Police found a naked man running around in the rain Tuesday and subsequently arrested him on suspicion of manufacturing the banned chemical substances called PCBs in his home."

---Oakland Tribune, 1982. The writer of the article thinks that "...polychlorinated biphenyls, once used to insulate electrical equipment..." are the street drug PCP...)


("New Mexico citizens are outraged by reports that local drug users are painting babies and then passing them around as they sniff the paint fumes to get high."

---San Francisco Chronicle, 2.10. 1983: "Getting High on Painted Babies")


("DRUG CRAZED teenagers who will do anything for a high are slashing their arms and rubbing peanut butter into the bloody wounds."

---Cliff Linedecker, National Examiner [tabloid], 10.12. 1982. "New Teenage High--Peanut Butter")


("Ahoskie, North Carolina--The town council has discarded a plan to use LSD as a means of driving pigeons away from Ahoskie. It was dropped after Mayor Merrill Evans said he had received letters from across the nation protesting."

---San Francisco Examiner, 7.13. 1980.)



THE WORLD IS MY ART STUDIO!


("I'm a man of means by no means, king of the road"

---Roger Miller in his song "King of the Road", recorded in 1964.)


("...integrity won't buy you a beach house..."

---host Peter Sagal, on the "Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!" news quiz show, broadcast from the Chase Bank Auditorium in Chicago, Illinois. 2.29. 2020. From WBEZ in Chicago and National Public Radio.)

("Not all those who wander are lost..."

---J. R. R. Tolkien in THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING.)


("If we'd been successful, I'd probably be dead."

---Wayne Kramer, who was a guitarist with the late 1960s Detroit band MC5, speaking with Nick Paumgarten, The New Yorker, 12.17. 2018. [Kramer became very addicted to heroin.])

("'Hey, mister, can you tell me where a man might find a bed?'
He just grinned and shook my hand and, 'No' was all he said"

---from the song "The Weight", which was written by Robbie Robertson and was recorded by The Band in 1968.)


("I said 'look man I'm outdoors you know, can I stay with you maybe a couple days?' He said 'Uh, let me go and ask my wife.' He come out of the house. I could see in his face. I knew that it was no. He said 'I don't know man, ah she kinda funny, you know.' I said 'I know, everybody funny, now you funny too.'"

---from George Thorogood's version of a John Lee Hooker song "House Rent Boogie".)


("What am I in the eyes of most people--a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person--someone who has no position in society and will never have..."

---Vincent van Gogh, 1882, in a letter to his brother.)


(I suspect that a large part of why I am still alive is that most people misunderstand me.)


(Every time I have been detained or arrested or in jail or in any kind of legal trouble, I have refused to give any information or assistance to any law enforcement officers or prosecutors. I believe it is morally wrong in such circumstances for a person to cooperate with the authorities in order to save their own skin, although I try not to judge how other people may behave in such circumstances because every time I was arrested I was able to post bail [if necessary], change my name, and flee. I have never been in a situation where I would have had to set up, provide information about, or testify against anyone to avoid a lengthy prison sentence.)

(Psychedelic drug communities are a magnet for predators. There are many "wolves in sheep's clothing" in these communities. [One of the worst was Charles Manson.] It would seem obvious that a person distributing illegal drugs definitely does NOT ever have license to injure or kill, but I have observed quite a few users deliberately and repeatedly ignore that fact when their favorite drug supplier was behaving in a way that caused harm.)


"...where to draw the line between loyalty to a community and resistance to evil."

---Freeman Dyson, writing about the question faced by theoretical physicist Max Planck, who was the originator of quantum theory. Planck, a German, was very loyal to his country. He refused to flee Germany during World War II, and acted in obedience to the "murderous whims" of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.


("Uneducated, and lacking any mystical or spiritual interest, many young people have travelled from across the country to find money, stimulation and easy sex in the Haight and to exploit the flower people they assume are still living there. Some have grown long hair and assimilated the hip jargon in the process, but they resemble true hippies in no real way."

---David E. Smith, the Medical Director of the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, 1970.)


("I think they were just so diluted with wannabe hippies that no one could tell the real ones from the fake ones."

---Terry Crihfield, quora dot com, in answer to the question "What ended the hippie era?")


("The transient and homeless of present day South Campus have little in common with the hippies of the past."

---Telegraph Avenue bookseller Fred Cody, in the introduction to Down and Out in Berkeley: An Overview of a Study of Street People in Berkeley by Jim Bamouhl and Henry Miller. [A report prepared for the City of Berkeley--University of California Community Affairs Committee, June 1974.])


("In 1968, self-described hippies represented just under 0.2% of the U. S. population and dwindled away by the mid-1970s."

---Wikipedia, 6.12. 2019.)


("...the wild delusional cycles that have taken me from obsessing over the value of zero to creating a hippie cult [my uniform: bell-bottoms, psychedelic sports bra and body glitter, head to toe]."

---Jaime Lowe, who says she suffers from bipolar disorder, in her article "I Don't Believe in God, but I Believe in Lithium", The New York Times, 6.25. 2015.)


("After mania, it's hard not to want to be buried for a decade, until everyone forgets you tried to start a hippie cult covered in glitter and war paint."

---Jaime Lowe, speaking with her therapist Debra Kaysen. The "This American Life" program, WBEZ, 8.23. 2019. Lowe's book MENTAL--Lithium, Love, and Losing my Mind was published in 2019.)


("...Telegraph Avenue before her fall from grace..."

---Tom Dalzell, describing the 1960-1972 photographs of Elio De Pisa, Berkeley Times, 4.11. 2019.)


("'I remember when keeping your mouth closed was part of the honor code of the streets. Nowadays, everybody only cares about their damn self. What happened to go on and do your time?' This was truth if I'd ever heard it. Somewhere along the line, snitching had become part of many people's corrupt version of 'the game'".

---D. Mitchell, in his 2006 novel CHAOS IN THE CAPITAL CITY, which is about racial tensions and violent black drug dealers who murder and rob in Washington, D.C. "Extreme Christian Fiction", very anti-marijuana, told from the viewpoint of a young black killer. At the back of the book is an ad for a novel, DOGISM, about a selfish man who cannot stop cheating on his wife.)


("'If you want to do things like gender ideology, go to Berkeley,' DeSantis said..."

---Yacob Reyes, Axios dot com, 5.15. 2023. Sickeningly conservative republican Florida governor Ron DeSantis urged people he strongly disagrees with to "go to Berkeley". For more than 5 decades, it seems that conservative bigots across America have been urging people they strongly disagree with to "go to Berkeley", in some cases [said to often involve small-town cops and judges] apparently telling them they are being given a choice: a one-way bus ticket to Berkeley, or jail...)


(Apparently many drunks realized that if they moved to Berkeley, grew long hair and did not shave, people would be more likely to tolerate them, thinking they were gentle "hippies".)


(55-year-old Kevin Freeman, a homeless alcoholic I was acquainted with in Berkeley, had been diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia. He was beaten to death in jail in 2003 by Ryan Lee Raper, a young man doctors said was schizophrenic. The murder was so violent that bits of Freeman's brain were found spattered on cell walls.

"If you asked what his favorite color was, he'd say 'yes' or 'no'."

---RJ Sansoni, describing Raper in an article by John Geluardi, the East Bay Express, 7.30. 2003.)


("It's clear that the city's mental health care system is devastatingly broken. We've all seen mentally ill homeless people released from San Francisco General still wearing their hospital gowns wandering into traffic or screaming at nobody in particular."

---Heather Knight, the San Francisco Chronicle, front page headline story, 5.28. 2019.)


("4,000 mental health workers at Kaiser Permanente will go on strike at facilities throughout California..."

"The main issue, National Union of HealthCare Workers says, is Kaiser being too slow to enable its patients to access mental health care."

"In 2013, Kaiser was fined $4 million by the California Department of Managed Health Care for 'serious deficiencies in providing access to mental health services'."

---James Peltz, the Los Angeles Times, 6.6. 2019.


"We've heard from our therapists regarding the dramatic increase in mental health care demand..."

---from "Statement on NUHW Strike", kaiserpermanente.org, 6.4. 2019.


"According to the union, increases in mental health staffing have left Kaiser's ratio of full-time therapists to Kaiser members basically unchanged: 1 therapist for every 3,000 members."

---Ben Caldwell, psychotherapynotes.com., 6.3. 2019.)


(MINDFUCKERS: A Source Book on the Rise of Acid Fascism in America, Including Material on Charles Manson, Mel Lyman, Victor Baranco and Their Followers. Written by David Felton, Robin Green, and David Dalton. Published in 1972.)


("As I like to say when I tell people about my background, 'It wasn't all acid and orgies.' [Acid was used by adults, as a tool for spiritual growth. To my knowledge, there were no orgies.]"

---Guinevere Turner, about being born into The Lyman Family in 1968, a cult whose members apparently believed that they were going to be taken to live on the planet Venus. From an article in The New Yorker, 5.6. 2019.)


(Alfred M. Hubbard is said to have been the "Johnny Appleseed" of LSD in the early 1950s. He gave MANY important people such as Aldous Huxley their first LSD experience. It has been said that when he saw what he considered to be the degradation of the LSD scene, he reacted by becoming a special agent of the FDA and helped raid clandestine laboratories.

["A shadowy figure who played both sides of the street."

---the Seattle Star newspaper, describing Hubbard. The quote is from Brad Holden's 2021 book SEATTLE MYSTIC ALFRED M. HUBBARD: Inventor, Bootlegger & Psychedelic Pioneer.

"Hubbard was, as the old saying goes, 'a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.'"

---Brad Holden, the Seattle Times, 8.8. 2021.])

("Over the course of the year I worked at [a retail store], we got into tons of brawls with Haight Street acid trip casualties who would come in and harass us over one thing or another."

---Ayn Imperato, a punk, in her 1999 book DIRTY MONEY and Other Stories. The quote is from the first page of the first story in the book. I suspect that many punks have never met a true hippie, as David Smith called them. There were EXTREMELY few true hippies. Many punks mistakenly believe that the alcohol-abusing and methamphetamine-addicted predators who came to rip-off the true hippies ARE true hippies. The punks I have met seem to be quite stupid. The punks I have met appear to love getting drunk on alcohol and violence. The punks I have met tend to stink of sweat, vomit, piss, and shit.)


(["in the 1980s"]..."I noticed quickly that most of the foot soldiers" of the punk "camp"..."held special contempt for hippies--we saw them as posers."

"Hippies were perceived as ineffectual, narcissistic, and horribly stuck in the past."

---arrrgh-bot eggplant, in Slingshot, summer 2016, Berkeley. These quotes are another example of the sad fact that punks, and many others, suffer from the delusion that the predators that came to take advantage of the true hippies [and the many lost and mentally ill people who, in a desperate attempt to find social acceptance, mimicked the extremely distorted image of what the ignorant and prejudiced mass media had taught them that a hippie was] WERE true hippies.)


(Some hippies liked the music of the Grateful Dead. The many, many Grateful Dead fans I have associated with and closely observed over the decades are often called "deadheads", and although usually harmless, they definitely are NOT hippies. A number of them appear to be what a member of the band once called "misfits".)


(And there are the long-haired "heshers", who also are very clearly NOT hippies, and are often called "total losers". [In the American Revolutionary War, a type of mercenary German soldier called a Hessian fought for the British against the Americans. They were quite feared because of their violence. A Hessian is mentioned in Washington Irving's 1820 story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow".] The word "hesher" came from the word "hessian", and was often used by hippie women to describe disgusting predators who wanted to sexually assault them. Heshers are into "sleeveless Slayer T-shirts and bitchin Chevrolet Camaros". They "live, breathe, fight, and die for Metal". [The "Heavy Metal" groups Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Deep Purple were all founded in 1968.] Heshers smoke marijuana and they frequently drink a lot of alcohol. They are said by some to have a "war-like personality".

["He's willful, obscene, offensive and easily angered..."

---Roger Ebert, in his 5.11. 2011 review of the movie Hesher. The long-haired hesher character has a tattoo on his back of "an upraised middle finger" and one on his chest of "a man shooting his brains out".]

["We sold that hesher oregano! Look, he's acting like he'e all stoned!"

---\0|0/, 4.5. 2006, Urban Dictionary dot com, giving an example of how the word "hesher" is used.])


("I done acid and shrooms when I was a freshman in high school. It's mind expanding and very sad that psychologists don't prescribe it for mentally ill patients. It would cure all insanity."

---Dr. Jason Brip, in the foreword to TIM & ERIC'S ZONE THEORY--7 Easy Steps to Achieve a Perfect Life, a 2015 "cringe comedy" book by Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim. I think satire is  more effective than hate when describing fools.)


("We will never know everything, and we will never be able to explain or document the full scope of what we consider to be 'real'. But that's OK."

---Amelia Williams, "a freelance writer", in her review of the 2022 book HOW PSYCHEDELICS CAN HELP SAVE THE WORLD: Visionary and Indigenous Voices Speak Out, edited by Stephen Gray. The review of Gray's "anthology of essays written by a diverse cast" appeared in GreenState, a periodical published by the San Francisco Chronicle.)


("Big is a skillful punkrocker musician who also makes LSD in his room in my friends' house, and sells it."

----Sick Puppy, a sadistic young republican who goes to a Keith Jarrett concert with punks who are tripping, in the 1989 short story Girl With Curious Hair by David Foster Wallace.)


("Every town must have a place
Where phony hippies meet.
Psychedelic dungeons
Popping up on every street."

---Frank Zappa, 1968.)


("You know the dealer, the dealer is a man
With the love grass in his hand
Oh but the pusher is a monster
Good God, he's not a natural man
The dealer for a nickel
Lord, will sell you lots of sweet dreams
Ah, but the pusher ruin your body
Lord, he'll leave your, he'll leave your mind to scream

God damn, The Pusher
God damn, God damn The Pusher
I said God damn, God, God damn The Pusher man"

---Hoyt Axton, 1968, in his song The Pusher, recorded by the band Steppenwolf.)


("The hardcore scene died toward the end of the eighties. 'It got too violent,' Tollett said. 'Bands like Circle One, Suicidal Tendencies--their posses were nasty.'"

---John Seabrook, in his article about Paul Tollett, the impresario [and former promoter of punk music] who stages the Coachella music festival. The New Yorker, 4.17. 2017.)


("What I quickly discovered...was that the word hippie for a lot of baby boomers is still very charged. I had a few people who sort of read me the riot act for even using it. 'We didn't know any hippies! They were the long-haired drop-outs! Everyone I knew in the food world was industrious and very purposeful.' So, yeah, that word still means dirty to people in the baby boom generation."

---Jonathan Kauffman, the author of HIPPIE FOOD: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat, in an interview with Paul Kilduff, The Monthly, November 2018. Kauffman was born in 1971 in Indiana, and raised by Mennonite parents.)







In my life, any minimization of complicity has been more the result of luck than will.



(And I doubt the amazing and precious luxury of walking deserted city streets, speaking to no one for many months at a time, of being seriously able, every waking minute of every day, "To see a world in a grain of sand" while standing thunderstruck in the middle of a sidewalk, 'happy as a bird with a french fry' would have been afforded me if I had not been a quietly polite clean-shaven Older White Male in Berkeley...)

(Greek philosopher Diogenes lived circa 400 BC. He begged for a living and often slept in the marketplace. He was famous for carrying a lamp during the day, claiming to be looking for an honest man.

"...the felicity of Diogenes' life, which he seems to have credited to his own wisdom, was largely due to favoring circumstances over which he had no control. Greece has a mild and equable climate which favors life in the open; the governments of Corinth and Athens were liberal to aliens and vagrants, and the Greeks of that period seem to have been generous to beggars..."

---Farrand Sayre, a critic of Diogenes, quoted by Luis E. Navia in his 1998 book DIOGENES OF SINOPE--The Man in the Tub, quoted by Jenny Odell in her urgently thoughtful 2019 book HOW TO DO NOTHING--Resisting the Attention Economy.)


(In 1873, Berkeley was first called "The Athens of the West" by Newton Booth, the governor of California.)


("San Francisco, where the homeless are most at home---"

---Vijay Seshadri, in "Visiting San Francisco", a poem published in The New Yorker, 5.13. 2019.)


(In 1969 when I was a senior in high school, my "study hall" teacher was a sexy young woman who said she was 23 years old. Instead of studying, I spoke with her for around an hour most school days. She knew that I was, at best, a misfit, and that I was going to have a difficult time if I tried to live in mainstream America. She convinced me that I should head for Berkeley as soon as it became possible. An Athenian solution, so to speak.)


(In 1969 I was living in a crashpad in the basement of a soon-to-be-demolished house. One night a very good-looking tall mysterious straight woman wearing expensive clothes, perfume, and makeup showed up at the house with brand-new suitcases. Not a hippie. Not a runaway. Not like anyone any of us had ever met in counterculture circles. After I moved out of the crashpad a week or two later, I met the mysterious straight woman on the street and she took me to where she was now living. She gave me a capsule of a drug I had not heard of that she called MDA. We listened to rock music and had sex. Last I saw of her she was living with a person who was distributing large quantities of psychedelic drugs.)






My current online "bibliography" consists of 4,482 scans of the covers of some of the books, etc. that I have attempted to study.



("If we didn't have books, people wouldn't think at all."

---Jason Epstein, speaking to C-SPAN. Epstein was 23 years old in the early 1950s "...when he conceived an idea that revolutionized how books were sold...": he convinced Doubleday to publish inexpensive paperback editions of classic literature and criticism.

---quotes from an item written by Matt Shudel, the Washington Post, 2.4. 2022, noting Epstein's death.)



("No one who is lacking legal authorization should attempt the synthesis of any of the compounds described in these files, with the intent to give them to man. To do so is to risk legal action which might lead to the tragic ruination of a life. It should also be noted that any person anywhere who experiments on himself, or on another human being, with any of the drugs described herein, without being familiar with that drug's action and aware of the physical and/or mental disturbance or harm it might cause, is acting irresponsibly and immorally, whether or not he is doing so within the bounds of the law."

---from a book by Sasha Shulgin.)



(Many people have an axe to grind, and seek to use psychedelics as a whetstone...)






I have always seen patterns, both superimposed on things when my eyes are open, and in the dark. The patterns changed after I started taking LSD, becoming more sharply geometric, and the colors have changed as the years have passed. Except when I am on high doses of LSD, I usually have quite a bit of control over the patterns and I can make them disappear if necessary. Although the patterns I draw are based on what I see, I find it impossible to accurately draw the multi-dimensional patterns and shapes that I perceive! My father was in the U.S. military and I was raised on military bases until 12 years old. It turns out that many of the places we lived were, at the times we lived there, places where the U.S. government conducted secret experiments on soldiers and others, without the subjects permission or knowledge, using LSD and other hallucinogenic substances. At "The Church Committee Hearings" in the U.S. Congress in 1976, the CIA said that they had done such things, but not to American children. Both of my parents were Caucasian American-born United States citizens at the time of my birth. (Around the time the CIA was apparently conducting some of its first experiments with LSD in Japan, Projects Bluebird and Artichoke...) Interestingly, and for reasons unknown, I did not become a U.S. citizen until I was 9 years old. (I guess I had been "a boy without a country".) I had to go to Washington, D.C. and answer questions posed by a judge before I received a Naturalization and Immigration certificate. My parents, with myself present as an infant, had contact with a CIA agent while we were in Japan. The agent was an uninvited guest at their first wedding anniversary party, which they recall as being quite a memorable affair. Only years later did they discover that the guest at the party was a CIA agent. They attributed his presence to the fact that my mother was a librarian at the base and she had refused to divulge to military intelligence officers the names of soldiers who read certain communist publications which they had planted there. Only years after forming this theory did they realize that the father of my Japanese nursemaids was a doctor who had served in the Japanese military in the infamous Unit 731 that was based in Manchuria. The doctors of Unit 731 had done gruesome and horrific experiments on many Chinese, Mongolian, Russian, and Korean prisoners. U.S. military authorities secretly gave amnesty to all of the Unit 731 doctors because they said it was extremely important to American security to know what these doctors had learned. My parents concluded that perhaps these U.S. military authorities were concerned that my parents knew and might accidentally leak information about this top-secret amnesty program...




When I was a youth, I spent time every summer with my mother's mother and my mother's father in Greensboro, North Carolina. I attended Vacation Bible School there each year, and frequently walked over to the nearby Woolworth's store to have a snack at the lunch counter. (I was not consciously aware at the time that African Americans were not allowed to sit there.) In the 1950's, Woolworth's is said to have been the leading retailer of gun ammunition in the U.S. In early 1960, there were "sit-in" protests by African American college students at this "whites only" Woolworth's lunch counter, which soon spread to other southern cities. The protests received significant media attention and the President of the United States expressed his support. Eventually the Woolworth's stores were forced to abandon their extremely wrongful policy of racial segregation. A section of the lunch counter is now preserved in the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History.

(“...I couldn’t see why, if a black person could buy a comb at a counter, they shouldn’t be allowed to sit down at the lunch counter.”

 ---Brigadier General James R. Townsend [retired], my grandmother's brother, in a 1978 interview conducted by Eugene Pfaff. Townsend was the commanding officer of Camp Haan in California during World War II. Camp Haan housed more than 80,000 people, including German and Italian prisoners of war. He went on to become the city manager of Greensboro from 1946 to 1961. When I asked my mother how she ended up being a U.S. military officer in Japan before she was married, she said one of life's most important lessons is that "It's not what you know but who you know" that counts.])





(When I was between six and twelve years old I sometimes walked while sleeping. I remember we went on a family camping trip to Doughton Park, in the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina, where one night we saw a HUGE meteor, a fireball that lit up most of the sky. Later I went to sleep and dreamed that I was dripping wet and walking down a stream with steep rock walls on each side and a full moon in the sky above. I walked under a bridge and as I came back out into the moonlight I looked down and near the moving reflections of the moon on the surface of the water I saw several snakes, which freaked me out. I woke up and realized I had not been dreaming, that it was the middle of the night and I was standing in moving water near a bridge that was quite far from the tent I was sharing with my brother.

["Up on the Blue Ridge Mountains, there I'll take my stand"

---line from the traditional outlaw ballad "I've Been All Around This World".])





("Sleep paralysis is a state, during waking up or falling asleep, in which a person is aware but unable to move or speak. During an episode, one may hallucinate, which often results in fear."

---Wikipedia, 2020.


I read a newspaper article in 1996 about sleep paralysis, and about how it is thought to be a reason why some people report being abducted by aliens. In early 1972 in Berkeley, I experienced multiple intense episodes of sleep paralysis. After reading the 1996 article, I recalled the last sleep paralysis episode, which occurred in June 1972 when I was a federal fugitive living in a whorehouse in Mexico City. I looked in my poetry notebook from that time and I had written that I woke up totally paralyzed and heard a sound at the window. Severely frightened, I could see large gray monkeys sawing the frame of the window, and they came inside and put me on a broomstick and we went flying up into the sky. I could see the buildings and the streets and then we went up so high I could see the curvature of the earth. I wrote in double-underlined very large letters across the bottom of the notebook page "THIS WAS NOT A DREAM."


Last week, I used Google Search to find images similar to one of my hallucinographic designs titled "Are Everywhere". The first image Google showed me was a very colorful vector map showing the streets of Mexico City...)





("In my last nightmare, a monster lit my cigarette."

---Richard Krech, poet, speaking to me one afternoon as we got high in Berkeley in 1972.

Richard was the son of UC Berkeley professor David Krech, a well-known experimental and social psychologist. Richard, who wrote "The Hashish Scarab", appeared briefly in the 1967 movie The Graduate, seen leaving an engagement ring store with his partner, a young woman carrying a child in her arms.)

(The mothers of approximately 10% of children born in 1967 in the U.S. were unmarried. The mothers of approximately 40% of the children born in the U.S. in 2018 were unmarried.)

One of the most beautiful books I have ever had the pleasure to hold in my hands and read is "Ephemera: A Memoir", by Richard Krech's daughter, Oakland resident Briana Loewinsohn. The images, the words, and the story are all truly moving. I very highly recommend this book, which was published in 2023. It will give your life more meaning and more grace!





(George McGovern, a Democrat, was a U.S. presidential nominee in 1972. He ran against incumbent president Richard Nixon.

["McGovern became tagged with the label 'Amnesty, Abortions, and Acid,' supposedly reflecting his positions."

---Wikipedia, 2020. "Amnesty" referred to amnesty for draft evaders. "Abortions"referred to the fact that in 1972 abortions were not legal nationwide. "Acid" referred to to the fact that McGovern's daughter was alleged to be a drug-user.]


McGovern's choice for vice-president was Thomas Eagleton from Missouri.

["...Eagleton had been hospitalized and received electroshock therapy for 'nervous exhaustion' and 'depression' several times during the early to mid-1960s."

---Wikipedia, 2020. Although McGovern initially expressed very, very strong support for Eagleton after learning of Eagleton's mental problems, he quickly changed his mind and replaced Eagleton with Sargent Shriver.])

When I was 12 years old and living in France, my parents took me to visit the Douaumont ossuary. Through the dirty windows of the basement of the building I viewed the remains of 130,000 of the approximately 230,000 soldiers who died nearby during in the Battle of Verdun in 1916. Piles of skulls and bones stacked to the ceiling. In front of the building lies a cemetery with 25,000 graves. I was very shocked (in fact I became "white as a sheet", and had to be given emergency medical aid), and I have been very, very deeply opposed to war ever since.



I visited the sites of many U.S. Civil War battles with my parents when I was young. Especially distressing was visiting where the bloody battles of Bull Run were fought in Virginia in 1861 and 1862.





I am NOT a Christian. But I do very strongly believe in following the Christian commandment that "THOU SHALT NOT KILL". Obviously the commandment also means that one should never in any way support killing. To follow the commandment "THOU SHALT NOT KILL" means that one absolutely cannot give money or support to the military, and that one cannot give money or support to (or vote for) any member of any political party that supports the military or capital punishment. There are many ways to stop people who are doing great harm. Killing may sometimes seem cost-effective, but there are far better solutions.

("I don't kill sick people. I cure them."

---Spoken by an actor, in the 1948 movie The Dark Past, portraying a police psychiatrist who is being held captive by a violent killer. The psychiatrist has an opportunity to kill the killer but does not do so.)


I believe in The Golden Rule: "DO UNTO OTHERS AS YOU WOULD HAVE THEM DO UNTO YOU."


("He kills journalists that don't agree with him."

---Joe Scarborough, host of the "Morning Joe" program, describing Vladimir Putin, in an interview with Donald Trump.

"Well, I think our country does plenty of killing too, Joe."

---Donald Trump

--- the above quotes are from an article by Philip Bump, the Washington Post, 12.18. 2015.)


("Putin is a killer."

---Bill O'Reilly, describing Russia's leader, in an interview with Donald Trump.

"There are a lot of killers. We have a lot of killers. Well, you think our country is so innocent?"

---Donald Trump

---the above quotes are from an article by Abby Phillip, the Washington Post, 2.4. 2017.)


("...public shootings became commonplace..."

---Paige Williams, The New Yorker, 4.8. 2019, describing America after Donald Trump became president.)


("...when the looting starts, the shooting starts."

---Donald Trump, in a tweet he sent to the American public, 5.29. 2020. Trump was threatening the extremely angry protesters who turned to rioting in reaction to a video of the callous and deliberately brutal public murder of a black man, George Floyd, by white police officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, Minnesota.


"Twitter said Trump and the White House official Twitter account, which posted the same message, violated the platform's rules against glorifying violence. A warning label has been added to both tweets--the first time such a measure has been taken against the accounts."


"After stoking the fires of white supremacy and racism your entire presidency, you have the nerve to feign moral superiority before threatening violence? 'When the looting starts, the shooting starts'???"

---entertainer Taylor Swift, in a tweet addressed to Trump. In August 2019, Swift told a newspaper that Trump "is gaslighting the American public".


The quotes above are from an article by Jessica Campisi, CNN, that was published in the East Bay Times [San Francisco, California bay area] 5.30. 2020.


"President Donald Trump wanted U.S. troops to shoot protesters during racial justice demonstrations in 2020, according to a new book from former Defense Secretary Mark Esper.

'Can't you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?' Esper quotes Trump saying. The then president allegedly made the remark as protesters descended on Washington, D.C., following the murder of George Floyd..."

---Christopher Wilson, Yahoo News, 5.1. 2022.)


"White House officials in February 2020 declared the coronavirus was contained and not a risk to the American public."

---The Associated Press, The East Bay Times, 5.30. 2020.


("There is nothing accidental about our heightened states of fear, mistrust, and anxiety. Unease is what we are meant to feel, what the stimuli we receive from our president, our media outlets, our twenty-first century world are meant to engender."

---Ruejeko Hockley, in a catalogue essay for the Whitney Biennial art show, 2019.)



("Thomas Hargrove is a homicide archivist. For the past seven years, he has been collecting municipal records of murders, and he now has the largest catalog of killings in the country--751,785 murders carried out since 1976..."

---Alec Wilkinson, The New Yorker, 11. 27. 2017.)



(“We burned down a whole lot of hooches today of these people who don’t cooperate with us, you know? I don’t really understand it because if they are, you know, not VC and we do that to them--you know, treat them bad--then they’re going to turn VC. The Army does everything backwards.”

---MIchael Holmes, sent to Vietnam in 1968, in an audio recording he sent to his parents, family, and friends in Williamsville, Missouri. Holmes was later killed in Vietnam. [From the 2017 documentary "The Vietnam War", directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick.])



("...Burns's new documentary series, about the Vietnam War, begins with the claim that the war 'was begun in good faith, by decent people, out of fateful misunderstandings.'"

"...to make such a claim is incredibly distressing, given that there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary."

---Greg King, in a letter to The New Yorker that was published in November 2017.)



("...I don't think it's worth fighting for and I don't think we can get out."

---U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson, in a May 1964 tape recording, speaking about Vietnam to National-Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy.

"In public, Johnson confidently reassured the country that the war in Vietnam was going well."

---Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, in an article in The Atlantic, October 2017.)



("...where ignorant armies clash by night."

---Matthew Arnold)



On my first "trip", the intensely realistic LSD hallucinations of bloody violence I saw showed me that I should NEVER, whether under the influence of drugs or not, consciously take ANY violent action against anyone, because I might be wrongfully basing such action on some extremely vivid hallucination. (Some LSD researchers say that hallucinations of bloody violence such as I saw may be related to recalling elements of the birth experience, which can be bloody and involve a powerful struggle...)


(When I turned 18, I wrote a letter to the Selective Service System saying that I was VERY, VERY strongly opposed to the war in Vietnam and the draft. I wrote that I had been born at a U.S. military base in Japan during the Korean War to military parents and had spent the first twelve years of my life living on and near military bases.

["On 22 February 1952, the North Korean Foreign Minister, Bak Hon Yon, made a formal allegation that American planes had been dropping infected insects onto North Korea. He added that the Americans were 'openly collaborating with the Japanese bacteriological war criminals...'"

---Wikipedia, 2021]

I explained that I was going to adopt an alias, go underground, and take whatever nonviolent actions I thought necessary to help stop the military from continuing to, as Thoreau wrote, “...commit violence and shed innocent blood.”

My parents told me FBI agents came to their house looking for me in 1969.)


("When I copied the Pentagon Papers in 1969, I had every reason to think I would be spending the rest of my life behind bars. It was a fate I would gladly have accepted if it meant hastening the end of the Vietnam War, unlikely as that seemed [and was]. Yet in the end, that action...did have an impact on shortening the war."

---Daniel Ellsberg, in early 2023, just before his 92nd birthday.)


(The 2005 documentary film "Brats: Our Journey Home" is about military brats, and closes with these words from former military brat Pat Conroy:

"We spent our entire childhoods in the service of our country and no one even knew we were there."

[Conroy had several breakdowns. He attempted suicide in the mid-1970s while writing THE GREAT SANTINI, which was published in 1976 and is about a military brat and his military aviator dad in South Carolina in 1962.

(I was a military brat in South Carolina in 1962.)])



("I was a coward. I went to the war."

---the final words in Tim O'Brien's powerful short story "On the Rainy River", set in 1968. A young man, knowing that the Vietnam war is horribly wrong, lacks the moral courage to do what is right. He is afraid his family and friends will ostracize him.  In O'Brien's book THE THINGS THEY CARRIED.)



("In 1977, one day after his inauguration, President Jimmy Carter fulfilled a campaign promise by offering pardons to anyone who had evaded the draft and requested one. It antagonized critics on both sides, with the right complaining that those pardoned payed no penalty and the left complaining that requesting a pardon required the admission of a crime."

---Wikipedia, 2020.)



("...man is bound to the first and most fundamental command of the Bible, not to kill..."

---Erich Fromm, in his book PSYCHOANALYSIS AND RELIGION.)



("No killing is the first precept of Buddhism and must never be violated."

---Li Decheng)



("...don't invade a foreign country unless you really have to. Because no matter how careful you think you are, you are going to have to kill a tremendous number of civilians. And there is no forgiveness for that."

---journalist Peter Maass, 4.12. 2018, Public Radio International, commenting on what the U.S. military did in Iraq.)



("I stabbed myself in the neck and wrist."

"That's what the Marine Corp trains you to be--a fighter and a killer. And that's who I had become to survive those deployments."

---former marine Scott Ostrom, who served two tours in Iraq, and who suffered from acute Post-traumatic Stress Disorder [PTSD].

"With the aid of two psychotherapists, Ostrom was able to come to terms with it."

["After three MDMA sessions, I haven't had a nightmare about the war since."

---Scott Ostrom]

The above is from a CBS News report, 11.14. 2021.)


(I was a patient of a dentist in Oakland, California in the mid-1970s. In 2021 his Yale-educated son, 38, and also an Oakland dentist [an oral surgeon], was sentenced to 16 years in prison after pleading guilty to attempted sex trafficking of a child, attempted production of child pornography, traveling with the intent to engage in illicit sexual conduct, and the receipt of child pornography. The son had borrowed $700,000 from someone in Walnut Creek, and in late 2019 he approached a woman and her two daughters, 10 and 11 years old, in a parking lot and tried to buy her daughters for the night for $30,000. The mother immediately called the police. When my former dentist's son was arrested days later, he was found to be in possession of over 100 videos of child pornography, some of which depicted the sexual abuse of infants or toddlers.

He later claimed that at the time he tried to buy the little girls in the parking lot he had been very high on MDMA ["ecstasy"] that had been adulterated with methamphetamine...)


("He had already swallowed a hit of Little Buddha ecstasy, downed a few shots of Jaiegermeister and smoked a bowl–-all this on top of his daily dose of Ritalin."

"...he started shooting, pointing the gun at the car. He says he saw 'white stuff' fly out of the head of one of the boys."

The boy's "...head had exploded all over the inside of the car when two hollow-point bullets ripped into it."

---Evan Wright, in an article about the true story of a high school double murder in Everett, Washington, Rolling Stone, 11.23. 2000. I took some of the "Little Buddha" MDMA tablets that were around at that time. They were white and each featured a beautiful image of the Buddha.)



(A baby was named Reality Winner by her parents in Texas in 1991. She joined the U.S. military when she was a teenager. The secret work she ended up doing had to do with drones in Afghanistan. She was given a medal for "...600 enemies killed in action..." According to Scott Pelley on the 12.5. 2021 episode of "60 Minutes" [CBS], she felt guilt because, as she tells him "...our mission had a very high civilian casualty rating". Later Reality Winner was employed by a civilian contractor working for the NSA [National Security Agency] translating documents about Iran. In a 2017 interview, President Trump raised doubt that Russia had attacked the 2016 election. Reality Winner knew Trump was lying because she had read the Top Secret document stating, in detail, that Russia had in fact very clearly attacked the 2016 election. She made a copy of the document and sent it to the media. She was immediately arrested, convicted and hit with the longest sentence ever imposed on a civilian for leaking classified information to the media. She served 4 years behind bars, becoming addicted to drugs while she was locked up.)



("...the Mercer Family Foundation, founded by the family of Robert Mercer, hedge fund executive, and his daughter Rebekah Mercer, announced that it will make a $1 million contribution to the non-profit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies [MAPS]."

"The purpose of the grant is to help complete funding for MAPS upcoming Phase 3 clinical trials of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for the treatment of chronic severe post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD]. The grant is restricted to costs associated with study participants who are American military veterans."

---from a press release by MAPS, 2.14. 2018. The Mercer family are extremely conservative republicans, and are said to have played a major role in the election of Donald Trump in 2016. The Mercer family were the people who first introduced Steve Bannon to Trump. The Mercer family are major financial benefactors for Breitbart News, and have invested in Cambridge Analytica.)


("Denver, June 15, 2023 -- Psychedelic Science 2023, the breakthrough psychedelic conference hosted by Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies [MAPS] announced today that former Texas Governor Rick Perry will be in Denver on Wednesday, June 21st to help kick off the largest psychedelic science conference ever assembled."

Rick Perry is a conservative Christian republican. He is famously a big-time ASSHOLE. Obviously MAPS waited until just before Perry spoke before announcing he would be there, so that decent people would not have time to organize a protest. At least Rick Doblin and MAPS have finally made their disgustingly greedy and dishonest capitalist intentions very clear...

[Perry ",,,said he believed in the inerrancy of the Bible and that those who do not accept Jesus as their Savior will go to hell."

---Christy Hoppe, "Perry believes non-Christians are doomed", the Dallas Morning News, 11.6. 2006. ("Biblical inerrancy" is the belief that the Bible contains no errors, whether theological, moral, historical, or scientific.)])


(Rick Perry, "dressed in all black", appeared onstage "right after" the conference's opening comments by Rick Doblin.

"'You've seen the light. I'm the dark, knuckle-dragging, right-wing former governor of the state of Texas,' Perry told the crowd. 'The idea that he and I are together is a bit of magic.'

Perry says he doesn't consider himself a full-on advocate of psychedelics, but became interested in natural medicine's potential to treat post-traumatic stress after meeting former Navy SEAL and Lone Survivor author Marcus Luttrell in 2006. Subsequent talks with Luttrell and other military veterans suffering from trauma made Perry a believer in the potential of mental health benefits from psilocybin, MDMA and other psychedelic substances."

---Thomas Mitchell, Westward, 6.21. 2023. Westward is a periodical in Denver, Colorado. His article about "Psychedelic Science 2023" [said to have been attended by "around 12,000" people] was illustrated with an image of a photo that was on a large screen behind Doblin while he was on stage. The photo showed a road sign in Chicago: TAKE LSD. [LSD, in this instance, standing for Lake Shore Drive.])

("While Trump has not directly addressed his stance on psychedelics, vice president-elect JD Vance appeared on podcaster Joe Rogan’s show last week, where the two discussed the possibility of using psychedelics to treat veterans. In their conversation, Rogan summarized the FDA’s rejection of MDMA and mentioned anecdotes of veterans who had found relief in trying psilocybin. 'This is the first time I’ve heard about this,' Vance claimed."

---Jane C. Hu, 11.8. 2024, The Microdose.)


(Cambridge Analytica's analysis methods are said to be based on work done at the Psychometrics Centre of Cambridge University. I took a Psychometrics Centre test in 2017. They said, based on what they saw on my Facebook page, that "Your digital footprint suggests that..."
...you are "more intelligent than 99% of the population".
...you are "the epitome of femininity".
...you are "unlikely to be gay".)


("Research published...in the British journal The Lancet found that after two sessions of psychotherapy with the party drug officially known as MDMA, a majority of 26 combat veterans and first responders with chronic PTSD [Post Traumatic Stress Disorder] who had not been helped by traditional methods saw dramatic decreases in symptoms."

"'I was finally able to process all the dark stuff that happened,' Nicholas Blackston, 32, a study participant who had been a Marine machine-gunner in Iraq said in an interview. 'I was able to forgive myself. It was like a clean sweep.'"

"'I was actually able to forgive myself,' said Nigel McCourry, 36, a Marine veteran who was deployed in 2004 to Falluja, Iraq, whose experiences mirrored those of three other patients interviewed."

---Dave Philipps, The New York Times, 5.1. 2018.)


(LSD "...showed me that what I thought of as reality was merely a mental construct, limited by habit and conditioning."

---Tim Lott, quoted by the staff of theweek.com, 5.8. 2008.

3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine [also known as MDMA or "ecstasy"] only "...offers 'a one-dimensional, blissfully brainless high'---no frightening journeys into alternate realities, just a pleasant new way of experiencing the life you already know. Come to think of it, that's the same promise offered by Prozac. Americans, it seems, no longer want to expand their minds. They'd rather be comfortably numb."

---final words in theweek.com article.)


("Do you take recreational drugs, and, if so, which one would you recommend to someone new to that kind of thing who is looking for a fun, no-freakout kind of time?"

---doctor, speaking to a patient, in a cartoon by Zachary Kanin. The New Yorker, 4.30. 2018.)




I am a vegetarian. (When I was in jail in Oakland, California, the other inmates and the guards were enraged because I did not eat meat. The guards mixed bacon bits in all of my food, including orange juice. I survived on peanuts that I bought at the commissary, and the vitamins and sandwiches that my lawyer smuggled into the jail.)


("All-you-can-eat devolved into all-you-can-beat at a Golden Corral restaurant. Viral video footage showed dozens of customers punching each other, shouting, jumping--and even swinging and throwing high chairs--inside the Bensalem, Pennsylvania restaurant. The fight reportedly broke out after the buffet ran out of steak."

---Nicole Lyn Pesce, Marketwatch, 2.1. 2022, "40-person brawl breaks out over steak shortage".)


(I was not always a vegetarian. One of the most transcendent and profound experiences of my entire life, pleasurable to the point that it always put me in a powerfully positive and long lasting psychedelic state of consciousness, was eating the world's BEST fried chicken and drinking the world's most stunningly strong iced tea, PERFECTLY tasty, both made by a much-loved and much-respected 38-year-old black cook, Mrs. Flora Bulls, at a Boy Scout summer camp called Camp Coker in South Carolina in the very early 1960s when I was 9 or 10 years old.)



(“If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.”

 ---Paul McCartney. [In the late 1960s and the early 1970s, television screens became kind of like glass walls, with news programs for the first time ever giving the public an immediate glimpse of the horrifying death and destruction that war brings.])




("I will...never do harm to anyone."

---from the Hippocratic Oath, written between the fifth and third centuries BC., which is an oath historically taken by by doctors and other healthcare professionals. [Translated from the Greek original by Michael North.]


"Primum non nocere" is one of the principal precepts of modern medical ethics.
[It is a Latin phrase that means "First, do no harm."])


(For years [way before I came to Berkeley and for a long time after I lived in Berkeley] I thought the "hip" in the word "hippie" was a reference to the Hippocratic oath. Apparently there are many theories concerning the origin of the word "hippie". I do not know which is correct. At the moment I like the theory that it comes from "on your hip", said to describe the characteristic position of a person smoking opium.)


("...this is where the baby boomer hippie crowd has landed. Many of the younger 1960s crowd lived what they considered a humanist, moral existence that respected the environment. Without training as doctors, it seemed they respected the Hippocratic oath to 'do no harm'."

---from a 2018 reader review, on Amazon dot com, of the 2017 Jessica Bruder book NOMADLAND: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century. The book is about old people who live in vans and RVs and work hard for low wages at temporary jobs.)




(Brutal communist dictator Joseph Stalin ordered the deaths of between 10 and 20 million of his fellow Russians. During World War II, the United States allied itself with Stalin in the war against Germany and the Axis. American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt justified the alliance by saying "It is permitted in times of grave danger to walk with the devil until you have crossed the bridge."


["I think legally speaking there's a very solid case for impeaching every American president since the Second  World War. They have all been either outright war criminals or involved in serious war crimes."

---Noam Chomsky, author of many, many books and Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).]


My father was a togglier in the American Army Air Forces during World War II. [A togglier is the person on a bomber aircraft who personally toggles the switch and releases the bombs.] He flew many missions and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. He used a LOT of amphetamine ["speed"]. He told me he participated in the fire-bombing of both Dresden and Tokyo.

Late one night in 1991 when I was 40 years old, my mother and I were in a car that my father was driving. He kept falling asleep and running off the road. He refused to stop driving, so I said to him "I am going to wake you up." [My authoritarian dad, who could be quite violently ill-tempered, is NOT the kind of person I would have ever argued with. He is also NOT the kind of person I would have ever used curse words around.] I then said "Over and over and over when I was growing up, you told war stories about how, in addition to attacking military targets in World War II, you dropped bombs that killed many, many civilians in Germany, Japan, and North Korea. For decades I have wanted to say something to you, and here it is: You are a fucking mass murderer! How can you live with yourself?" My father stopped falling asleep. He said that the first time he and and the other crew members were ordered to bomb non-military sites they became quite enraged, because they felt they should be attacking soldiers, not mass murdering women and children. He said that after the war his fellow soldiers told him that if he pretended that he had a mild case of "shell shock" he would get to go and recuperate at the large world-famous luxury Biltmore hotel in Florida that had been converted into a military hospital. They told him it was a sunny place that had a huge swimming pool and that a lot of good-looking women hung out there. My father said it sounded like an excellent idea to him, and got on a train with other military men who were headed to the same place. He said they were about halfway to Florida when he had the intense realization that something was VERY WRONG with him mentally and that he definitely needed to be hospitalized...

["With the onset of World War II, the War Department took over the famed Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, converting it to a 1200-bed hospital in November 1942. The building was transferred to the Army in 1946 and renamed Pratt General Hospital. Many of the windows were sealed with concrete, and the marble floors covered with government-issue linoleum. The hospital was transferred from the Army to the Veterans Administration in July 1947."

According to the cover of a booklet of photos (published in the 1940s), part of the Biltmore in Coral Gables was at one time known as "AAF Regional Hospital No. 1". I assume "AAF" is an initialism for Army Air Force.

Visitors to the Biltmore before it became a hospital had "included the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Ginger Rogers, Judy Garland, Bing Crosby, Al Capone, and assorted Roosevelts and Vanderbilts...Franklin D. Roosevelt had a temporary White House office set up at the hotel when he vacationed in Miami."

There are photos of Babe Ruth playing golf at the Biltmore.

Johnny Weissmuller, before he was known for his role in Tarzan, broke a world record at the Biltmore swimming pool, which was the largest on earth at that time.

After being a hospital, the Biltmore was vacated in 1968 and sat empty for years. Some local children considered it to be haunted. It was restored at a cost of approximately $25 million and reopened as a luxury hotel in December 1987. It can be seen in an episode of Miami Vice, "Line of Fire". It can also be seen in Bad Boys, The Specialist, Shock Waves, CSI: Miami, and Popi.])


("...the U.S. military has long been taught that the laws of war prevent intentionally targeting civilians or carrying out strikes where the anticipated scale of bystander deaths is disproportionate to the combat aim."

---Eric Schmitt, Charlie Savage, and Azmat Khan, The New York Times, 1.27. 2022.)

("The target will be a purely military one, and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives."

"...soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children."

---U.S. president Harry S. Truman, in his journal, 7.25. 1945, writing about the atomic bomb that was later dropped on Hiroshima, causing the deaths of 90,000--146,000 people.)


("...thunderstorms as righteously aloof as a B-52 pilot over an orphanage..."

---Tom Robbins, in EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES.)


(James Forrestal was the first U.S. Secretary of Defense. After receiving insulin shock treatment for depression, he was alleged to have committed suicide in March 1949 by leaping from a 16th floor window in a mental hospital.

[The chief of the U.S. Secret Service, U.E. Baughman, told Harry Truman that the extremely paranoid Forrestal was suffering from "...a total psychotic breakdown..."

---quote from the 1975 book GOING CRAZY--An Inquiry into Madness in our Time by Otto Friedrich.])


(The first non-farm job I ever had was being a fundraiser for SANE/FREEZE [Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy and Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign] in 1986. I worked there briefly while I was in a halfway house in San Francisco after being released from prison.)


("From the earliest childhood, American boys are taught that it is wrong--the greatest wrong--to kill."

---from "Psychology for the Fighting Man, Prepared for the Fighting Man Himself". A team of psychologists cooperated with the military to produce this document, which was widely distributed to soldiers during World War II.)


("The mystery to me is that anybody at all, no matter how strong, can keep his spirit from breaking down in battle."

---Ernie Pyle, writing during World War II.)


My father also participated in the Korean War.


("An incendiary gel that sticks to skin and burns to the bone, napalm was, from its earliest days, tested with civilian targets in mind."

"In early trials...researchers experimented not on mock-ups of enemy weapons systems, vehicles or even armaments factories, but 'full-scale replica German houses'--complete with furnishings. They even scoured the West Coast for 'traditional tatami straw mat flooring' to outfit similar Japanese model homes."

"...on March 9, 1945, almost 700,000 pounds of napalm fell on Tokyo in less than an hour..."

American forces dropped "an estimated 32,000 tons" of napalm on Korea. "We killed over a million civilian Koreans..."

"...388,000 tons of napalm bombs" were dropped on Southeast Asia by America and its allies during the Vietnam war."

---Nick Turse, the author of KILL ANYTHING THAT MOVES: The Real American War in Vietnam, in a review of Robert M. Neer's book NAPALM--An American Biography. The review was published in the San Francisco Chronicle, 3.29. 2013.)



("Christian butchers"

---"Mark Twain" [Samuel Clemens], describing the U.S. Army, in a 1906 essay about the Moro massacre in the Philippines.)



(In Vietnam in 1972, Nick Ut took a photograph, "The Terror of War", showing terrified children, including an injured 9-year-old girl, fleeing a U.S. aerial napalm attack. The photograph won a Pulitzer prize. In September 2016 the Prime Minister of Norway posted the picture on Facebook, and Facebook removed her post. [After much public complaint, Facebook restored the post...]

Banksy made a powerful work of art in 2004 called NAPALM. It shows the Ut image of the injured 9-year-old girl with a large Mickey Mouse grabbing her right arm and a large Ronald McDonald grabbing her left arm.)



("...a righteous war is so rare that it is almost unknown in history..."

---"Mark Twain" [Samuel Clemens], in a 1900 speech.)



(Dow Chemical Company was the manufacturer of napalm. On 3. 22. 1969, Rev. Robert Begin, Rev. Michael Dougherty, Joanne Malone, Rev. Arthur Melville, Catherine Melville, Father Meyer, Rev. Dennis Moloney, Rev. Joseph O'Rourke, and Michael Siaski were arrested in Washington, D.C. at a Dow Chemical Company office where they had smashed glass, hurled files out a fourth floor window, and poured blood on the remaining files and furniture. Their actions were similar to those of the Berrigan brothers, who used civil disobedience to disrupt the Selective Service System.

On 5.7. 1970, the nine were sentenced to terms ranging from three months to six years in prison. Their lawyer, Philip Hirchkop, was censured and sentenced to 30 days in jail for his trial conduct. Seven of the nine later appealed and won a reversal of their convictions. Hirchkop was later cleared of the contempt charge.

Shortly after my 18th birthday I went underground. For a brief period I was able to disguise myself and receive mail at the Berkeley Free Church. In late 1969 [the last time I went there] Rev. Richard York told me that there was a letter for me from the Dow Chemical Company. In the letter, their "Chief Special Detective" wrote that I had stolen from the company, and unless I paid them back, I would be prosecuted. I did NOT pay them back.)



(Micah Johnson, who in 2016 killed five police officers in Texas, and wounded seven other police officers, was formerly in the military, and served in Afghanistan.

Gavin Long, who in 2016 killed three police officers in Louisiana, was formerly in the military, and served in Iraq.

Fred Hopkins, who in 2018 killed one police officer in South Carolina and wounded 6 other police officers, was formerly in the military, and served in Vietnam.

Sgt. Stephen Carillo, of the United States Air Force, killed a sheriff's deputy and wounded another in Ben Lomond, California. He also shot two federal security officers in Oakland, killing one of them. 2020

Timothy McVeigh, a former member of the U.S. Army and a Gulf War veteran, killed 168 people in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.)

("In the last 18 months, there were two instances of US veterans taking psychedelics unsupervised and then shooting at people. In one case, a veteran took mushrooms at a festival, thought the world was ending, and shot into the crowd, killing two people."

---Jules Evans, substack dot com, 8.16. 2024: "Not all veterans feel better after psychedelics--For some, suicidal feelings increase, or appear for the first time."

[Soldier accused of killings at Gorge campground was high on mushrooms, police say

by Cameron Probert

6.21. 2023, Tri-City Herald

"A U.S. Army specialist believed the world was ending when he began shooting people in the Gorge Amphitheatre campground.

James M. Kelly’s bad trip while on psilocybin mushrooms at the Beyond Wonderland electronic dance music festival on Saturday ended with him killing a Seattle couple and injuring three other people, including his girlfriend, according to a Washington State Patrol report.

His rampage ended in a farm field near the campgrounds when a veteran Moses Lake police detective shot him once.

He is now in the Grant County jail facing two counts of first-degree murder, two counts of first-degree assault and one count of first-degree assault with a domestic violence aggravating circumstance.

The trip to the music festival began peacefully, Kelly and his girlfriend Lily M. Luksich, 20, told investigators. They went to the Gorge Amphitheatre outside of George, Wash., in his 2012 Dodge Ram pickup and set up in the campgrounds.

While they were at the concert, Kelly took a dose of mushrooms. He told detectives that he previously had a bad trip while taking mushrooms from this source.

'As Kelly’s hallucination "trip" got going, he began to believe that the world was ending and that he needed to return to his camp immediately with Luksich,' Sgt. David Kiehl wrote. 'Kelly and Luksich hurried back to their campsite. During that time, Luksich said Kelly made multiple statements to the effect of "this is the end."’

Kelly got into his truck and grabbed a handgun from a locked box in the center console. He loaded a magazine and stepped out from behind the driver’s door.

Kelly first came across Josilyn Ruiz, 26, and her fiance Brandy P. Escamilla, 29, shortly after 8:20 p.m. as they were walking through the campground together, according to court documents.

When their paths crossed, he allegedly fired several shots, hitting and killing the couple.

Andrew J. Cuadra, 31, heard the shots and started moving toward them. As he neared Kelly, the soldier allegedly fired at least one shot, hitting the man in the shoulder, according to court documents.

Kelly left the area around his pickup and started moving through the campground. Luksich followed him, and tried to call 911. She was able to tell dispatchers that “her man had a gun,” but then Kelly grabbed the cellphone and threw it away.
They moved northeast toward the outer fence line of the campground.

A Polaris Ranger utility vehicle with multiple Crowd Management Services employees on it was responding to the shots being fired when they crossed paths with Kelly. Employee Lori L. Williams was driving along the fence line when Kelly allegedly fired several shots, according to the court documents.

One of those punched through the windshield, and hit her glasses. Her glasses shattered, and she was cut and bruised. A second bullet hit the front bumper of the Polaris.

Kelly and Luksich moved into the farm field next to the campground where Grant County sheriff’s deputies found them. The deputies flew a drone over them and Kelly fired several times at it.

At multiple points while they were at the fence line, Luksich lay down on the ground. Kelly either sat on her, or sat next to her and leaned over.

'At one point, Luksich began to walk north, away from Kelly, turned around with her hands raised in the air and walked back to Kelly,' Kiehl wrote.

He then shot her once in the foot, and then a second time in the upper leg. The second shot caused life-threatening injuries that resulted in what investigators say will be permanent injuries.

Police then closed in on the couple and Moses Lake police Detective Edgar Salazar shot him once. He was treated at Sacred Heart Medical Center in Spokane."]


[S.F. man was on psychedelic mushrooms during Richmond District shooting: ‘He was calling me Satan’

by Nora Mishanec

2.9. 2024, San Francisco Chronicle

"A Marine Corps veteran accused of stripping himself naked at his Richmond District home on New Year’s Eve, firing a gun and threatening to kill his landlord — while his wife shielded the couple’s infant and tried to calm him with prayer — was hallucinating on psychedelic mushrooms.

That is the account the man’s attorney provided in San Francisco Superior Court last month, blaming a combination of psilocybin mushrooms and other medications for causing Evan Supinski’s 'psychotic' break that made the 33-year-old believe he was 'in the Garden of Eden', according to court records obtained by the Chronicle.

Weighing the threat that Supinski posed to public safety, a judge agreed to release him from jail last month to a veteran’s rehabilitation program while he faces charges. Supinksi’s landlord, who is also a Marine Corps veteran, opposed the release, testifying that Supinski had threatened to shoot him and called him “Satan” during the daytime shooting spree that resulted in gunfire damage to two cars and a neighbor’s home, court records show.

Supinski pleaded not guilty to 10 charges last month, including the illegal possession of a gun, vandalism, making criminal threats, negligent discharge of a firearm within city limits and shooting an inhabited dwelling.

The cornerstone of Supinski’s legal defense, court documents show, is that he was under the influence of a large dose of psilocybin mushrooms, also known as 'magic' mushrooms, during his apparent break with reality.

According to his attorney, Supinksi’s mushroom-fueled 'psychotic' episode began on the morning of Dec. 31, when he stood naked on top of a car parked on 41st Avenue, fired an unregistered gun and made the threats against his landlord, who had attempted to intervene, before being subdued and taken away by police, court record show. Supinski’s wife and baby were home at the time.

Supinksi’s attorney, Rebecca Young, told a judge last month that Supinski is a Marine combat veteran who served in Afghanistan and whose medication for post-traumatic stress disorder may have adversely interfered with the mushrooms he consumed around 10:30 a.m. that day, according to court documents. Fungi containing psilocybin act on the brain’s serotonin system to produce hallucinations and, at high doses, can cause panic and psychosis.

When reached for comment, Young called Supinski 'a loving and devoted father' and 'decorated Marine Corp veteran diagnosed with service connected, combat-related PTSD who had a complete mental breakdown after ingesting an inordinate amount of psilocybin.'

Young’s arguments persuaded the judge to release him under strict conditions to Fresh Start, a transitional living program for veterans in the Sunset District. San Francisco Superior Court Judge Teresa Caffese agreed to the release on the grounds that there are few mental health services available to inmates at the San Francisco jail.

The court proceedings come amid renewed attention to psychedelic drugs, as state Sen. Scott Wiener attempts for the third time to legalize their use under supervised treatment. Wiener has said his bill aims to help combat veterans dealing with trauma. In October, an Alaska Airlines pilot told investigators he was taking mushrooms when he tried to bring down a San Francisco-bound airplane.

Two days before the New Year’s Eve incident, Supinski “received a double dose of his medication” for PTSD, his attorney told the judge. It was unclear what that medication was or how he received it. It was also unclear how Supinksi obtained the mushrooms.

'But on the morning of December 31, at approximately 10:30 in the morning Mr. Supinski consumed three large psilocybin mushrooms. So that by 11:30 a.m., he was hallucinating. He was delusional,' Young told the court.

Supinski’s landlord, Daniel Grogg, testified that Supinski’s wife told him over text message that 'her husband ate a lot of mushrooms, and she was worried because he was making death fantasies, according to court documents. Grogg, who lives above them and identified himself in court as a former military police officer, said he offered to try to help.

'As soon as I stepped in … he started yelling profanities at me to get the F out of his house,” Grogg told the court. The wife then 'brought the baby up and asked (my family) to hold the baby while she went back down to talk to him.'

Supinski’s wife, Debora Supinski, testified that her husband retrieved the gun during the brief time she was asking the landlord to watch the baby. 'Unfortunately, when I went upstairs with the baby, that’s when Evan took the gun, Debora Supinski testified. 'He was alone in the house. I could not stop him.'

Supinski 'removed all his clothing and tried to convince his wife to remove her clothing because they were in the Garden of Eden,' attorney Young told the court. 'He went out into the middle of the street and was encountering people, telling people that he loved them, believed the heavens were opening and other delusional things showing an extreme state of unconsciousness.'

Grogg testified that after taking in the baby, he next saw Supinski naked in the backyard, and moments later, in the street with a gun.

'He was shooting shots out front into my car with the intention of drawing me outside,' Grogg testified. 'He was yelling for me to come outside so he could kill me. He shot rounds into my neighbor’s car two houses away. … He was calling me Satan.'

According to Grogg, Debora Supinski later that day told him that Supinski 'was having fantasies of killing his family and committing suicide so they could go to heaven and see God.'

'It is my true belief that if I had not intervened, they would have all been dead,' Grogg told the court.

Debora Supinski testified that she convinced her husband to put down the gun and pray.

'And from that moment on, when I took that gun from him, he completely changed,' she told the court. 'Now he was telling all neighbors around that he loved them … that we all were going to go to heaven because, you know, it was the apocalypse.'

Police officers responded to 41st Avenue after residents called 911 shortly before noon. The exterior of one home had been hit by a bullet that struck the stucco between two panes of glass in a picture window, while at least two cars were damaged by bullets. Prosecutors allege Supinski fired four shots from the unregistered gun.

Young said that Supinksi was 'jibbering and speaking nonsense' when police arrived.

Young, in urging the judge to release Supinski, said she believed his actions were 'an interaction between his medication, the increased dosage of his medication and his overconsumption of psilocybin.'

Debora Supinski also blamed the mushrooms and told the judge she had not witnessed anything similar during their eight years as a couple.

'I know that in that moment, it was not him, and that it was something going on in his mind due to the mushrooms, probably due to his medication that he was taking, compounded by his PTSD history,” she testified.

Grogg urged the judge not to release Supinski, saying he feared for his family’s safety.

'I understand PTSD and mushrooms are a terrible cocktail, terrible combination,' he said in court. 'But as was expressed, this was a choice he made: a loaded gun in his house and a 5-month-old baby.'

The judge called the decision 'a difficult one' and said she had 'given considerable thought' to the question of whether Supinski still posed a threat to public safety following what she called 'a bad trip.'

'It is clear that the defendant was suffering from a psychotic break from the result most likely of taking the psilocybin,' Caffese said, according to court records.

Caffese said she weighed Supinski’s history of service in Afghanistan as a member of the Marines and noted that he had no prior criminal record. She released him to Fresh Start with electronic ankle monitoring and ordered that he participate in rehabilitation services and provide weekly urine tests. Supinski is due back in court on Tuesday, Feb. 13, to determine whether his case can be sent to San Francisco’s Veterans Justice Court, a specialized court for veterans facing criminal charges."])


("We need them in times of war. If we don't have enough, we manufacture an artificial pathology in their basic training. As long as they're confined to a military life or a combative sport, or even a police force, we can keep them in stock. If you put them out in the civilian population, they'll cull the weak, the stragglers, and the elderly."

---a character in Carol O'Connell's 1994 novel MALLORY'S ORACLE, describing sociopaths.)



In 1968, U.S. Army soldiers in My Lai, Vietnam killed more than 350 unarmed civilians, mostly women, children, and elderly people. Some of the people slaughtered were raped before being killed. Some of the bodies were mutilated after the people were raped and killed. A U.S. helicopter pilot, Hugh Thompson, saw what was happening and, by pointing a gun at the U.S. soldiers, was able to stop the slaughter. In the fall of 1969 news of the killings was published in the United States, and I, like almost every decent American, was sickened and deeply outraged. After U.S. Army officer William L. Calley, Jr. was convicted in the United States for the premeditated murder of 22 Vietnamese civilians in My Lai, he served 3 and a half years of house arrest. In 1974, Richard Nixon issued Calley a limited Presidential Pardon.

"I was ordered to go in there and destroy the enemy. That was my job that day. That was the mission I was given. I did not sit down and think in terms of men, women, and children. They were all classified as the same, and that's the classification we dealt with over there, just as the enemy. I felt then and I still do that I acted as I was directed, and that I carried out the order I was given and I do not feel wrong in doing so."

---Calley, in a courtroom statement.

"An atom bomb on Hiroshima isn't a massacre, but a hundred people is a massacre. I don't understand."

---Calley, in an interview with John Sack, Esquire, November 1970.


(According to The New York Times, 4.4. 1971, a Gallup poll commissioned by Newsweek magazine showed "The overwhelming majority of Americans--79 per cent--disapprove of the court-martial finding that Lt. William L. Calley was guilty of the prmeditated murder of at least 22 South Vietnamese at My Lai in 1968." 83 per cent approved of president Richard Nixon's action when he released Calley from the stockade where he was imprisoned. 20% said what Calley did was not a crime. A patriotic country song written in support of Calley and his actions, "Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley", was released in 1971 and sold more than one million copies in just 4 days. Eventually more than 2 million copies were sold.)

(25% of Americans said they did not think former police officer Derek Chauvin should have been found guilty of the horrific and well-documented public murder of George Floyd. 46% of republicans said they do not think Chauvin should have been convicted.

---Jemima McEvoy, 4.25. 2022, Forbes, reporting the results of a CBS News poll.)



("I would like to talk on behalf of all those veterans and say that several months ago in Detroit we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged, and many very highly decorated, veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia. These were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit - the emotions in the room and the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.

They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country."

---John Kerry, 4.22. 1971, in part of his testimony before a U.S. Senate committee in Washington, D.C.)




(Former Nazi Kurt Waldheim was the Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1972 to 1981. There was an international controversy in 1985 when it came to light that he had lied about his military history.

["Yes, I knew. I was horrified. But what could I do? I had either to continue to serve or be executed."

---Kurt Waldheim, in answer to a question about Nazi massacres. TIME, 4.7. 1986.]

The original signatory copies of the United Nations Charter were printed in Berkeley in 1945.)



("During Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's November 1983 visit to the U.S., Ronald Reagan told Shamir that during his service in the U.S. Army Film Corps, he and fellow members of his unit personally shot footage of the Nazi concentration camps as they were liberated. Reagan would tell this story again to others, including holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal. But Reagan was never present at the liberation of the camps. Instead, he spent the war in Culver City, California where he processed footage from the liberation of the camps."

---Luke Brinker, Salon, 2.7. 2015.)



("You are murdering people! I saw what we did to people. I saw."

---protester who identified himself as an Iraq War veteran, shouting at American Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, 10.13. 2011, at a House Armed Services Committee hearing. [Quoted by Jill Lepore, The New Yorker, 1.28. 2013.])


("Stabbing a defenseless teenage captive to death. Picking off a school-age girl and an old man from a sniper's roost. Indiscriminately spraying neighborhoods with rockets and machine-gun fire. Navy SEAL commandos from Team 7's Alpha Platoon said they had seen their highly decorated platoon chief commit shocking acts in Iraq."

---Dave Philipps, in his front page article in The New York Times, 4.24. 2019. "Claiming Atrocities by Leader, SEALS Were Told To 'LET IT GO''.


[Navy SEAL commando Edward Gallagher was later charged and acquitted on murder and other war crimes charges by a military jury in the case. He was convicted of posing for a trophy photo of a captive teenager that he murdered.

("We don't care about living conditions. We just want to kill as many people as possible."

---Edward Gallagher, in a text he sent to the SEAL master chief making assignments.)


Donald Trump then ordered Gallagher's punishment reversed and fired the Secretary of the Navy.

---from a New York Times front page article, 12.1. 2019.])





("Vice Adm. Scott Stearney, who oversaw U.S. naval operations in the Middle East, was found dead in his residence in Bahrain, officials said. Defense officials told CBS News they are calling it an 'apparent suicide'."

---CBS News, in a report that was updated on 12.3. 2018.)


("We were attempting to be fact-based and getting it wrong. That's different from what's going on now, where reality is something that some people believe they can create for their own convenience."

---Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA under George W. Bush, speaking to interviewer Audie Cornish about the Iraq War. The New York Times Magazine, 5.6. 2018.)


("...Nixon's 'madman theory': our enemies should recognize that we are crazed and unpredictable with extraordinary destructive forces at our command, so they will bend to our will in fear. The concept was apparently devised in Israel in the 1950s by the governing Labor Party whose leaders 'preached in favor of acts of madness,' Prime Minister Moshe Sharett records in his diary, warning that 'we will go crazy' if crossed..."

---Noam Chomsky, in his 2000 book ROGUE STATES--The Rule of Force in World Affairs.


"KRAZY KILLA"

---inscribed on a broken wooden ruler that had belonged to a young student. Found in 2005 in an alley in a very low-income neighborhood in the San Francisco bay area. The inscription was probably inspired by one or more of the references to one or more of the pop culture versions of the "madman theory" that I seem to often hear being expressed in "gangsta music".)


"...made ourselves hypocrites through unconditional military support for Israel’s bombardment of civilians in Gaza."

---Ben Rhodes, who was deputy national security adviser under President Barack Obama, describing the Democratic party in "I Study Guys Like Trump. There’s a Reason They Keep Winning", an essay published in The New York Times, 11.8. 2024.

Israel deliberately and NEEDLESSLY mass-murdered MANY, MANY innocent children in Gaza!


("'I never thought leopards would eat MY face, sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party."

---Adrian Bott, twitter dot com, 10.18. 2015.)





("...he had a haircut like Tarzan, walked like Jane, and smelled like Cheetah."

---Ronald Reagan [in a speech filmed in Milwaukee, Wisconsin , 9.30. 1967] describing a hippie in the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco.)



("To see those, those monkeys from those African countries. Damn them, they're still uncomfortable wearing shoes."

---Ronald Reagan, in a recorded telephone conversation with Richard Nixon in October 1971, reportedly in reference to members of the Tanzanian delegation in the United Nations General Assembly. The National Archives first released audio of the Reagan-Nixon call in 2000, but Reagan's racist comment was redacted.

After speaking with Reagan, Nixon called then Secretary of State William Rogers and said Reagan "saw these cannibals on television last night and he says 'Christ, they weren't even wearing shoes...'")



("If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with."

---Governor Ronald Reagan, April 7, 1970, in a speech to the California Growers Council in Yosemite. Reagan had in fact ordered law enforcement officers to silence protesters in Berkeley. After placing tape over their badges and name tags, some of the officers started shooting the protesters. One person was killed [James Rector], one was blinded [Alan Blanchard], and many protesters were wounded by law enforcement gunfire. Most of the victims were shot in the back as they fled.)



(On May 4, 1970 at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, Army National Guardsmen fired 67 shots at unarmed demonstrators who were protesting against the war in Vietnam. Four students were killed [Jeffrey Miller, Allison Krause, William Schroeder, Sandra Scheuer] and nine others were wounded, one of whom [Dean Kahler] suffered permanent paralysis. Student John Filo made a photograph of a fourteen-year old girl screaming over the body of Jeffrey Miller. The photograph won a Pulitzer Prize.)



("All of a sudden, the man who called for a bloodbath on our college campuses is supposed to be Dudley 'God-damn' Do-Right?"

---Gil Scott-Heron, in his 1981 song "B"-Movie, commenting about newly-elected president Ronald Reagan.)



(Chesa Boudin [b. 1980] became the District Attorney of San Francisco in January 2020. In June 2022 he left office after 55% of voters called for his removal. His parents, Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, received long prison sentences when he was very young for being the getaway drivers in a Brinks robbery where two police officers and a security guard were killed. His extremely misguided parents were members of the self-described communist organization the Weather Underground, which committed acts of terrorism by planting bombs.

After Boudin's parents were jailed, he was raised by two of their creepy friends who were leaders of the Weather Underground, Bill Ayers [b. 1944] and Bernardine Dohrn [b. 1942]. Ayers, a rich kid, went on to become an education professor. Dohrn, who had been on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list, went on to become a law professor.

[The Weather Underground took their name from the lyrics of an early 1965 Bob Dylan song, "Subterranean Homesick Blues":

"Don't take No Doz"

"Keep a clean nose
Watch the plain clothes
You don't need a weatherman
To know which way the wind blows"])


(Patty Hearst, a granddaughter of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, was studying art history at UC Berkeley when she was kidnapped in early 1974 by a group of violent American terrorists. Later she was photographed inside a bank with a gun yelling "Up, up, up against the wall, motherfuckers!" Two innocent men were shot and wounded in the robbery. In another bank robbery where Hearst was a getaway driver, an innocent woman was shot to death. Hearst was arrested in September 1975, listing her occupation as "Urban Guerilla". She was convicted of bank robbery and sentenced to 35 years in prison, later reduced to 7 years. Hearst claimed she was brainwashed and her sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter. She was later pardoned by President Bill Clinton.)



("Remembered as a war that was lost because of betrayal at home, Vietnam becomes a modern-day Alamo that must be avenged."

---Jerry Lembcke, who wrote the book THE SPITTING IMAGE: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam. Lembcke shows that the story that antiwar demonstrators spat upon returning veterans was a lie. Many people believed the lie, which still feeds the ugly and unreasonable backlash against the 60s.)



("If this is the place where America goes looking for its national soul, then this is where America finds that its soul, after stewing in the primal resentment of the backlash, has gone all sour and wrong. If Kansas is the concentrated essence of normality, then here is where we can see the deranged gradually become normal, where we look into that handsome, confident, reassuring, all-American face--class president, quarterback, Rhodes scholar, bond trader, builder of industry--and realize we are staring into the eyes of a lunatic."

---Thomas Frank, in his 2004 book WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America.)



("The truth is, facts don't matter anymore. Trump supporters know their president is insane. They just don't give a shit."

---Peter Wade, Esquire, 4.29. 2017.)



("...the very fact of aspiration to high office is ipso facto proof of mental derangement."

---Russel V. Lee of Stanford Medical School, saying what some people think. Lee was quoted in Otto Friedrich's 1976 book GOING CRAZY--An Inquiry into Madness in our Time.)



("More than fifty thousand mental-health professionals have signed a petition stating that Trump is 'too seriously mentally ill to perform the duties of president and should be removed'..."

"'This issue is not whether Donald Trump is mentally ill but whether he's dangerous,' James Gilligan, a professor of psychiatry at New York University, told attendees at a recent public meeting at Yale School of Medicine on the topic of Trump's mental health. 'He publicly boasts of violence and has threatened violence. He has urged followers to beat up protesters. He approves of torture. He has boasted of his ability to commit and get away with sexual assault,' Gilligan said."

---Evan Osnos, The New Yorker, 5.8. 2017.)




(In late July 2020, Donald Trump shared a video with the American public. The video featured Texas pediatrician Dr. Stella Immanuel, who is also a minister. Dr. Immanuel, a fervent Trump supporter, has said that demons are secretly impregnating Americans while they sleep ["There are people in this nation that are not even human", that are "half human and half ET"]. She has stated that doctors are mixing "alien DNA" into some of the the medicines we take. In the video, Dr. Immanuel yells that we have a cure for COVID-19. She says it is not necessary for people to wear masks. That Donald Trump, Jr. said the video featuring Dr. Immanuel that the president promoted is a "Must watch!!!" is extremely scary. That Donald Trump  publicly defended Dr. Immanuel defines the word "frightening".


[Dr. Immanuel says doctors are "trying to create a vaccine to make people immune from becoming religious."

---reporter Kaitlin Collins, CNN, in a question she asked Donald Trump at a White House press conference. She also mentioned what Dr. Immanuel said about "alien DNA".]


[The Christian gospels have many stories that mention demons.

"In one of the most prominent stories told in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus encounters a man possessed by a group of demons who call themselves 'Legion' and sends them into a nearby herd of pigs who stampede off a cliff."

---Brandon Hawk, an English professor at Rhode Island College, theconversation.com, 8.1. 2020.])



(Saying "demonic confederacies" were attempting to steal the election from Trump, Mississippi-born Paula White [a popular Christian televangelist who is Donald Trump's "spiritual" advisor] led an impassioned prayer service on November 4, 2020. After FRANTICALLY and repetitively chanting that God was sending angels from Africa and South America to make sure that Trump was reelected, she became even more bizarrely agitated and started speaking in tongues...)



("Former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon arrested on fraud charges"

---headline, Yahoo news, late August 2020. Bannon was arrested while on a yacht owned by fugitive Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui.)


("Darkness is good: Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That's power. It only helps us when they [liberals] get it wrong. When they're blind to who we are and what we're doing."

---CNN, 11.18. 2016, reporting what Steve Bannon said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. The quote "was published widely in the media".)



("TRUMP: 'Remember, Miami Cubans gave me the highly honored Bay of Pigs Award for all I have done for our great Cuban Population!'

---tweet, 9.13. 2020.


THE FACTS: No such award exists."

---Hope Yen and Calvin Woodward, AP, 9.13. 2020.)



(Kimberly Guilfoyle, a LIAR who was once married to Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, spoke at the Republican National Convention in August 2020.

"Guilfoyle, one of Trump's top fundraisers, described California as a socialist wasteland of 'discarded heroin needles in parks, riots in streets, and blackouts in homes.'"

---Martha Ross, Bay Area News Group, 8.26. 2020.)





(“I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock…”

 “Reince is a fucking paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac.”

 “What I want to do is kill the fucking leakers…”

 ---Anthony Scaramucci, White House communications director, in a July 2017 telephone conversation with Ryan Lizza, of The New Yorker. [Published: The New Yorker, July 27, 2017.] [Reince Priebus is the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, and also served as White House chief of staff.])




(In November 2016, Lieutenant General Michael Flynn posted messages on Twitter alleging that Hillary Clinton's campaign manager John Podesta drank the blood and bodily fluids of other humans in satanic rituals. Flynn also accused Clinton and her aides of child-sex trafficking. Flynn was the United States National Security Adviser to Donald Trump in early 2017, after being director of the Defense Intelligence Agency for more than 2 years. In December 2017, Flynn pleaded guilty to "willfully and knowingly" making "false, fictional and fraudulent statements" to the FBI about 2 discussions he had with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States in December 2016, when Flynn was still a private citizen and before Trump had taken office..)



(With 57% of the vote, Marjorie Taylor Greene won the Republican nomination for Georgia's 14th Congressional District in August 2020. She strongly supported Donald Trump and the pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy, according to a June 2020 report in the Washington Post.


["Followers of "Q" often believe the world is controlled by elite members of a secretive satanic child sex-trafficking ring."

---Camila Domonoske, NPR.org, 8.12. 2020.]


["There's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of satan-worshipping pedophiles out, and I think we have the president to do it."

---Marjorie Taylor Greene, in a 11.26. 2017 video.]


Trump congratulated Greene on her win, and on 8.12. 2020 said she is "a future Republican Star" who is "strong on everything".)


("President Trump gave a major boost to the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory..."

---opening words in a 8.19. 2019 article by Colby Itkowitz, Isaac Stanley-Becker, Lori Rozsa, and Rachael Bade in the Washington Post. The article was about a White House press briefing where Trump said "I don't know much about the movement; I understand they like me very much, which I appreciate." The president also said "I've heard that these are people that love our country.")


("In November 2018 California was hit with the worst wildfire in the state's history. [On 11. 17. 2018] future congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, wrote a bizarre Facebook post that...falsely claimed that the real and hidden culprit behind the disaster was a laser from space..."

"She...speculated that a vice chairman at 'Rothschild Inc. international investment banking firm' was somehow involved, and suggested the fire was caused by a beam from 'space solar generators'".

"Greene wrote on Facebook 'That is all true' after someone wrote 'none of the school shootings were real or done by the ones who were supposed to be arrested for them.'

"Rep. Greene agreed with a 2018 Facebook comment that the deadly mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida was actually a 'false flag' planned event."

"In a separate Facebook post in 2018, Greene also claimed 'I am told that Nancy Pelosi tells Hillary Clinton several times a month that "We need another school shooting" in order to persuade the public to want strict gun control.'"

Greene falsely claims that a plane did not hit the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, and that there was "never any evidence" that a plane hit the Pentagon.

---the above quotes are from Eric Hananoki, Media Matters dot com, January 2021.)


("Before she joined the house this month, Greene supported Facebook posts that advocated violence against Democrats and the FBI. One suggested shooting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the head. In response to a post raising the prospect of hanging Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, Greene responded that the 'stage is being set.'"

"Greene's online agitation, meanwhile, goes beyond past Facebook posts--including making a video that falsely suggested the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting that killed 58 people was staged to advance gun control legislation."

"Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi denounced GOP leaders for placing Greene, who has 'mocked the killing of little children', on the chamber's education committee."

---Will Weissert and Brian Slodysko, Chicago Tribune, 1.28. 2021, in their article "Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene Routinely Expressed Support for Executing Democrats in Facebook Posts".)


(Author Naomi Wolf said COVID-19 vaccines are "a software platform that can receive uploads", and "that the urine and faeces of people who had received" a COVID-19 vaccine shot "needed to be separated from general sewage supplies while tests were done to measure its impact on non-vaccinated people through drinking water."

---BBC News, 6.6. 2021, writing that Twitter suspended Naomi Wolf's account because she was spreading harmful misinformation.)


("The document claims that a scientist describes seeing 'a living organism with tentacles. This creature moves around, lifts itself up, and even seems to be self-aware' when the vaccine is viewed underneath a microscope."

"'The sight of this and the thought that these unknown, octopus-like creatures are being injected into millions of children worldwide, caused [the doctor] to weep', the document said."

---Darragh Roche, Newsweeek via Microsoft News, 10.9. 2021. Republican Ken Wyler, a state represenative in New Hampshire "who disseminated a document claiming COVID-19 vaccines contained tentacled creatures that enter the human body has resigned from two committees of the state legislature." [The document also claims that governments want to "steal our very own thoughts and feelings through 5G".])







DESTABILIZED PERCEPTION



("I mean, anything can be anything, you know."

---very confused man, who mistakenly thought he was hearing "false news" when he was told that Donald Trump is a fan of Alex Jones, the extremely dishonest [and much listened to] far right conspiracy theorist. From the "This American Life" show. KQED, 3.16. 2019.)



("Everything we know is being disrupted."

---Rich Moran, "In the Workplace" segment, KCBS, 4.14. 2019.)




("...I popped the cork on a bottle of ice-cold Prosecco, and poured a glass for all the grown ups."

"...Matthew [the author's son, who is described as having Asperger's Syndrome] had warmed up the Beatles Rock Band Game..."

"The wine flowed generously."

"At one point I went to the kitchen to fetch another bottle of wine, and came back to see a room full of family, all singing the Beatles together. 'Here comes the sun,' my family sang in unison. 'It's all ri-i-ight.'"

---Rod Dreher, in his 2013 book THE LITTLE WAY OF RUTHIE LEMING, describing Christmas in a small town in Louisiana after his sister Ruthie, who was born in 1969, died of cancer. She was married to an Iraq war veteran, and she liked football and deer hunting. Dreher, who was born in 1968, is a confused and very ignorant conservative Christian. His first book was CRUNCHY CONS: THE NEW CONSERVATIVE COUNTERCULTURE AND ITS RETURN TO ROOTS.)




("...she was swept up in a vision of a time before this one, composed in equal parts of Saturday Evening Post covers, Lassie reruns and a nostalgia for what she’d never known.”

---T. Coraghessan Boyle, in his 1995 novel THE TORTILLA CURTAIN, describing a woman who sells real estate in wealthy communities near Topanga, California.)




("I eat fatback. I spank my children."

"I want mothers who smell like bacon, fathers who smell like pipe tobacco."

"I want to think about God."

---Suzanne Britt Jordan, a writer who lives in North Carolina. Excerpted from an article that Jordan wrote that was published in The New York Times and reprinted in Reader's Digest, June 1976. It is clear that Jordan has serious mental health issues.)




("You know what these are for? These are for people that don't want to listen and don't know how to act."

---Montgomery County, Maryland police officer, in a 1.14. 2020 body camera video, as he handcuffed a 5-year-old boy who had thrown a temper tantrum and walked away from his school. When the boy's mother arrived at the school, 2 police officers encouraged her to beat her son. The shocked mother mentioned prison. One of the officers responded "You don't go to prison for beating your child." Later, one of the officers, a female, after she had screamed VERY loudly in the child's face, said to the boy's mother "You can beat your child in Montgomery County, Maryland. In front of him [the other officer] and eveybody else you can beat him. And please don't leave no cuts or crazy cigarette burns, nothing like that. We're good, alright? Meeting adjourned." The female officer had also said, in front of the child, "Oh my God, I'd beat him so bad."

[Both of the police officers, the 5-year-old boy, and his mother are black.]

["Beating your child is against the law in Montgomery County Maryland, and is fundamentally wrong."

---Montgomery County Council member Will Jawando in a press release after the video was first released to the public in March 2021.])




(Amphetamine user Jeffrey R. Macdonald was a U.S. Army Special Forces ["Green Berets"] doctor who brutally murdered his pregnant wife and his 2 children, aged 5 and 2, in early 1970 at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. [Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega received psychological-operations training at Fort Bragg in the nineteen-sixties.] Macdonald lied in court, saying that "hippies" killed his family, and that one of the killers had chanted "Acid is groovy, kill the pigs".)




("Commanders at Fort Bragg said they were reviewing Captain Emily Rainey's involvement in last week's events in the nation's capital, but she said she acted within military regulations and that no one in her group broke the law."

"Rainey had resigned her commission after receiving a career-ending letter of reprimand for her actions at an earlier protest in the Fort Bragg area...

Because the process takes time, Rainey was still on active duty when she led a group of protestors to Washington and is due to leave the army next month."

"Rainey, 30, is assigned to the 4th Psychological Operations Group at Fort Bragg, according to Maj. Daniel Lessard, a spokesperson for 1st Special Forces Command. Known as PSYOPS, the group uses information and disinformation to shape the emotions, decision-making and actions of American adversaries.

Rainey made headlines back in May after she posted a video online of her pulling down a caution tape at a playground that was closed under North Carolina's COVID-19 restrictions. Police in Southern Pines, a community about 30 miles west of Fort Bragg, charged her with injury to personal property over the incident. The police told WRAL-TV that they let her off with a warning twice before after she tore down the tape closing-off the playground."

---Jake Bleiberg, Sarah Blake Morgan, and James Laporta, AP News 1.11. 2021.)




(35-year-old Ashli Babbitt, a passionate Trump supporter and QAnon fan, was extremely against people people wearing protective face masks. She was an active duty member of the United States Air Force for 4 years. She served in Afghanistan and Iraq. She was a member of the Air Force Reserve from 2008 to 2010 and a member of the Air National Guard from 2010 to 2016.

["In August 2016, Babbitt was charged with reckless endangerment for hitting a woman's car 3 times and pursuing her through the streets in what's described as 'road rage'. She was acquitted months later."

---CBS Baltimore (WJZ), 1.7. 2021.]

On January 7, 2021 Babbitt, who was a strong supporter of the "right to bear arms", was shot and killed by police as she illegally tried to enter a guarded area of the Capitol in Washington, D.C.)




("...people on acid saying 'Wow' while their toddlers set fire to the living room."

"She genuinely loathed the hippies, whom she associated with characters like Charles Manson..."

---Louis Menand, The New Yorker, 8.24. 2015, describing the contents of a very influential 1967 Saturday Evening Post article "The Hippie Generation: Slouching Towards Bethlehem", written by Joan Didion. She had previously contributed to William F. Buckley's conservative weekly The National Review, and she was a big fan of John Wayne. She was also an amphetamine user.

"...for twenty and twenty-one hours a day I drank gin-and-hot-water...and took Dexedrine...and wrote the piece."

---Joan Didion [describing writing "The Hippie Generation: Slouching Towards Bethlehem"] in the preface to her 1981 paperback that included the article.)





("...the Pentagon Papers showed conclusively that the government had perpetrated a vast deception on the American public."

---Alice Schroeder, in THE SNOWBALL: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life. The Pentagon Papers, a secret study commissioned by U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, showed that the U.S. would lose the war in Vietnam. They were leaked by Daniel Ellsberg to The New York Times and the first excerpts were published in 1971.)



("Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."

---Martin Luther King, Jr., 1963.)



("I am not only a pacifist, but a militant pacifist."

---Albert Einstein)



("If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a bloody and violent measure, as it would be to pay them and enable the state to commit violence and shed innocent blood."

---Henry David Thoreau, in his pamphlet CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE. Two postage stamps honoring Thoreau have been issued by the United States Postal Service, one in 1967, and one in 2017.)


("But if you want money for people with minds that hate..."

---John Lennon and Paul McCartney, 1968. ["Revolution" became the first Beatles recording to be licensed for use in a television commercial. In 1987, Nike paid for the right to use the song for a limited period of time. The first commercials using the song aired in March of that year.])


("It's still our biggest hit, and we get nice royalty checks from it four times a year. It's ironic, 'cause one of the checks comes in just before April 15th. I sign it right over to the government, so my taxes are paid by the song they tried to ban."

---Michael Brewer, co-writer of the 1971 song "One Toke Over the Line", which was about marijuana. United States vice-president Spiro Agnew did NOT like the song and thought it had a bad effect on American young people.)


(Thoreau's pamphlet was one of 16 books selected by Robert B. Downs, former president of the American Library Association, for his 1956 book BOOKS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD.
["The number one criterion: the book must have had a great and continuing impact on human thought and action, not for a single nation, but for a major segment of the world."

---from the introduction]

The ideas expressed in CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE, which I was required to study in public school when I was young, definitely changed my life.)



"For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder?" is the title of a 1980 album by the English band The Pop Group.



(According to David Cortright in his 2008 book PEACE: A History of Movements and Ideas [Cambridge University Press], during the Vietnam War era approximately 570,000 people were classified as Selective Service [draft] offenders. Approximately 210,000 were formally accused. Approximately 8,750 were convicted. Approximately 3,250 were jailed. Martin Anderson [the head of Richard Nixon's task force on an all-volunteer army] reported in 1970 that the number of draft resisters was "expanding at an alarming rate" and that the government was "almost powerless to apprehend and prosecute them".)



("Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble."

---civil rights leader John Lewis, in a message he posted to Twitter in June 2018 that was quoted in USA TODAY, 7.1. 2020.)



("Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth."

---Albert Einstein, in a 1901 letter to Josh Winteler, quoted in THE PRIVATE LIVES OF ALBERT EINSTEIN by Roger Drude and Paul Carter, 1993.)



("...it is because we disagree that science progresses."

---Xijun Ni, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Hebei GEO University in Shijiazhuang, China, quoted by Pallab Ghosh, BBC News, 6.25. 2021, in an article about an ancient skull.)



("John Lewis was arrested more than 40 times protesting segregation."

---Debbie Elliot, National Public Radio, 7.19. 2020.)



("I do not fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists."

---Chris Hedges)


(I have been repeatedly told that I am "stupid" and "unrealistic" to think that Thoreau was right when he refused to "...enable the state to commit violence and shed innocent blood."

My reply:

"I do not disagree with those who enable the state to commit violence and shed innocent blood because I will win. I disagree with those who enable the state to commit violence and shed innocent blood because they enable the state to commit violence and shed innocent blood.")



("Under Alabama's accomplice liability law, Smith is considered just as culpable in Washington's death as if he had pulled the trigger himself."

---Jessica Lussenhop, BBC News, in an article "In the US, you don't have to kill to be a murderer". 4.9. 2018. Smith and Washington were caught burglarizing a house. Washington was shot to death by the police.)


("...a person can be an accomplice if he or she lends tools, weapons, money or other instruments necessary to commit the crime in question. An accomplice does not need to be present at the scene of the crime to be found guilty of the crime. An accomplice can be found to have provided aid before, during or after the crime."

---legal services website HG.org.)



("...precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society."

---James Baldwin)

("If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor."

---Desmond Tutu)



SILENCE IS CONSENT









("...there is already developing a sort of 'LSD underground man', in the Dostoevskian sense of the term---a man who, in Dostoevsky's words, 'would rather that his hand wither off than that he carry a single brick to build the crystal palace'..."

---Frank Barron, in CREATIVITY AND PERSONAL FREEDOM, 1968. Barron, who formerly taught at Harvard University, was a research psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley.)



"He took a (probably LSD-inspired) vow of poverty long ago..."

"On principle, he refuses to pay taxes, which has landed him in prison twice."

---Jocelyn Silver, writing about famous San Francisco defense attorney J. Tony Serra, who was more than 80 years old when Silver wrote about him. VICE, 7.10. 2015. J. Tony Serra is the brother of prominent sculptor Richard Serra.



("1 in 3: The number of U.S. adults [more than 70 million] with a criminal record."

---National Employment Law Project, RAND Corporation, quoted in HR Magazine, published by the Society for Human Resources Management, spring 2019.)



("The lower I am, the more proper my place seems; and the higher I am, the stronger my suspicion that there has been some mistake."

---Vaclav Havel)



("Outside of society--that's where I want to be..."

---Patti Smith, in a song.)



("American colleges came into being with the express purpose of training young men for the ministry."

---Caitlin Flanagan, Atlantic, March 2014.)



("...schools are organized enterprises designed to reproduce the established order..."

---Ivan Illich, author of DESCHOOLING SOCIETY.)



("A 'lie-to-children' is a useful oversimplification that starts one on the path to better knowledge."

---Robert M. Corless, a mathematician, in 2004.

["Lies-to-children" is a common teaching technique. I agree with those who have noted that the technique is obviously VERY WRONG.])



("It's like an elaborate con to sideline people in the full flow tide of their energies and hypnotize them into believing that tedious trivia is really significant..."

---Morgan Russell, describing the life of a university student, in VANITAS 2, 2006. He thought it might be better to "...just jump in and do real stuff without preface.")



(Politician Janet Napolitano, the fourth person to serve as United States Secretary of Homeland Security, was selected in 2013 to be the President of the University of California system.)



(Jon Bain-Chekal, "a longtime UC Berkeley employee who oversaw high-level campus budget operations" was charged with possession of child pornography.

---the quote is from an article by Emilie Raguso, Berkeleyside, 10.5. 2020.)



(In mid-November 2020, "NorCal Rapist" Roy Waller, 60, a white male, was "...found guilty on 46 counts, including rape, sodomy and kidnapping, related to the assaults of nine women in six counties across Northern California."

"Waller had been an employee at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked as a safety specialist in the Environment, Health and Safety department."

---David K. Li, Yahoo News, 11.18. 2020.)



("The arts have always had vexed relations with the money that pays for them. The cash that built the museum, the concert hall, the ballet theater, the university campus, was probably the fruit of cruelty, exploitation, and theft, but the blood and dirt was laundered out of it from one generation to the next until it smelled sweet."

---Edward Mendelson, in his review of a book about Nicolas Nabokov. [Nabokov was secretary-general of the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was founded in 1950 and shown to be linked to the CIA in 1966.] The New York Review of Books, 9.24. 2015.)



("...every brushstroke testified to the usury, extortion, and downright dirtiness that was essential to every fortune made."

---Alexander Lee, in his 2015 book THE UGLY RENAISSANCE--Sex, Greed, Violence, and Depravity in an Age of Beauty.)



("This is what you should do: Love the earth and sun and animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone who asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward people, re-examine all you have been told in school, in church, or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your very soul, and your flesh shall become a great poem."

---Walt Whitman [from the preface to the 1855 edition of LEAVES OF GRASS])



("There is no money in poetry, but there is no poetry in money..."

---Robert Graves)



("It's selfish to pursue your passion, unless it's going to make you a lot of money, in which case it isn't selfish at all."

---William Deresiewicz, formerly a professor at Yale, derisively describing one of the assumptions of mainstream people who are obsessed with accumulating wealth. The quote is from his book EXCELLENT SHEEP: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life.)







One afternoon in 1965, I was folding newspapers for my newspaper route when suddenly I heard my voice on the television. I looked up and was amazed to view, on an education news special, about 20 minutes of myself (holding a plastic model of a human brain) speaking about my theories of how ESP might possibly be explained...




When I went back to North Carolina in 1991 to very briefly visit my parents for the first time in 22 years (in fact the only time I was able to afford to visit them), they picked me up at the airport. Instead of taking me directly to their house in Winston-Salem (a city they moved to long after I went to California), they took me to the site of a building that had at one time been a hospital, asking me if I remembered what happened there in 1965. They said that when I went there I was one person, and that when I came out, I was an entirely different person, and that they suspected that the government had in some way "programmed " me while I was there. When we went to my parents house, they gave me letters (that they had saved for 26 years) from the research facility that rather vaguely explained what the researchers planned to involve me in.


("...one of the purposes of the North Carolina Advancement School is to try to find out some important things about how our children learn, and also some of the things that might make learning difficult for them. In order to do this, it will often be desirable for your son to take part in various learning studies."

"If you have any objection...please contact the school as soon as possible."

---from a letter L.F. Conant ["Director of Research and Development"] sent to my parents.)


("North Carolina Advancement School: A New Approach to the Student Who Can...But Doesn't" by Chester Davis, in Southern Education Report, July-August 1965...)


("...supported by funds from the federal government...major research projects of J.A. Gergen have included...EEG studies of underachieving male adolescents in collaboration with the late L.F. Conant [psychology]."

Some of the research was done at "Bowman Gray School of Medicine, Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina".

---from "IBRO Survey of Research Facilities and Manpower in Brain Sciences in the United States" [sponsored by the International Brain Research Organization] published in June 1968.)


(["...some of the things that might make learning difficult for them."] Calls to mind an infamous and horrific experiment: Dr. Wendell Johnson, a speech pathologist at the University of Iowa in 1939, studied stuttering. Experimenting on children at an orphanage, he and an assistant were able to cause severe and permanent negative effects in some of the children. Some of these orphans suffered greatly for the rest of their lives. [Johnson thought that if he could cause people to stutter, he might then be able to learn how to cure people of stuttering. I wonder if something similar was going on at the North Carolina Advancement School--perhaps Gergen and Conant thought that if they could cause students to underachieve, they might then be able to learn how to help students who were underachieving...])


(Also a bit reminiscent of this:

 “ ...a Harvard University laboratory in which staff members of the Department of Social Relations conducted research on human subjects. There, from the fall of 1959 through the spring of 1962, Harvard psychologists, led by Henry A. Murray, conducted a disturbing and what would now be seen as ethically indefensible experiment on twenty-two undergraduates. To preserve the anonymity of these student guinea pigs, experimenters referred to individuals by code name only. One of these students, whom they dubbed "Lawful," was Theodore John Kaczynski, who would one day be known as the Unabomber, and who would later mail or deliver sixteen package bombs to scientists, academicians, and others over seventeen years, killing three people and injuring twenty-three.”

 “...among its other purposes, Henry Murray's experiment was intended to measure how people react under stress. Murray subjected his unwitting students, including Kaczynski, to intensive interrogation -- what Murray himself called 'vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive' attacks, assaulting his subjects' egos and most-cherished ideals and beliefs.”

 “By the late 1950s, according to some, Murray had become quite interested in hallucinogenics, including LSD and psilocybin. And soon after Murray's experiments on Kaczynski and his classmates were under way, in 1960, Timothy Leary returned to Harvard and, with Murray's blessing, began his experiments with psilocybin. In his autobiography, Flashbacks (1983), Leary, who would dedicate the rest of his life to promoting hallucinogenic drugs, described Murray as ‘the wizard of personality assessment who, as OSS chief psychologist, had monitored military experiments on brainwashing and sodium amytal interrogation. Murray expressed great interest in our drug-research project and offered his support.’”

 ---Alston Chase, The Atlantic, June 2000.)


(A Google search shows that a J.A. Gergen was interested in "War Crimes and State Immunity...". I have been unable to determine if it is the same J.A. Gergen who may have experimented on me...)


("What might have happened" can sometimes be reasonable conjecture. When "what might have happened" becomes "what must have happened", it is a delusion, and can sometimes be a symptom of serious mental illness such as schizophrenia. Correlation does not imply causation.)




(Former LOOK magazine editor George Leonard, author of WALKING ON THE EDGE OF THE WORLD: A Memoir of the Sixties and Beyond, visited the facility while I was there as part of his research for an article on education.)




What happened was that when I was 13 years old and in the eighth grade, my parents were told that I was going to fail that year and have to do the eighth grade again unless I was allowed to go for several months to Winston-Salem and participate in a residential "education experiment" called the "North Carolina Advancement School" (NCAS). I had never visited Winston-Salem.


("While I was onstage doing my act to churchlike silence, a guy said to his date, loud enough that we all heard it, 'I don't understand any of this.'"

---Steve Martin, in his autobiography BORN STANDING UP--A COMIC'S LIFE, 2007. Martin was describing performing in Winston-Salem ["This town smells like a cigarette"] in June, 1975.)


("According to the Independent Order of Odd Fellows website, the group is now based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina."

"...the exact date of its founding 'is lost in the fogs of antiquity.' Some historians trace its roots back to the Medieval Trade Guilds of the 12th and 13th Centuries. Other estimates say the group existed before 1650. The website said there were Odd Fellow groups in England in the 1700s."

---from "Box of human bones found in Ohio garage are over a century old and were used in rituals, police say", by Antonio Planas, NBC News 3.28. 2022. "The bones were named 'Frieda'...")


(In 2014, 49 years after I arrived at NCAS, I took a 25-question quiz put online by The New York Times. The "personal dialect map" I was then shown indicated my dialect was very similar to that spoken in "Winston-Salem".)


When I arrived at the school, I asked why I had been selected and I was told that I had the lowest grades of anyone in the eighth grade class at my school, but that when I had been given an IQ test I had made a "perfect" (?) score, answering all questions correctly (?). I told the NCAS people that I doubted the IQ test results were accurate, since, because my dad had been in the military, I had gone to many schools (I attended the 5th grade in South Carolina, the 6th grade in France, and the 7th grade in New Mexico) and had thus taken the same IQ test many times. I told them that in the instance they were referring to, knowing already that I was plenty smart (because of the previous test results) I only answered every fifth question and then penciled in the answers to all of the other multiple-choice questions what I consciously thought to be an utterly random fashion.




After extensive testing I was told that I was to be part of an experiment in self-education. It was called "Group O". I was given an office, unlimited funding, and absolutely no adult supervision, free to come and go from the campus and the dorms as I saw fit. My family, who lived in a city quite distant from Winston-Salem, were NOT allowed to visit. I really had FUN! My research project was a study on the subject of ESP (extrasensory perception). I was already well-read on the subject and I contacted some researchers at a parapsychology lab at Duke University and J.B. Rhine and associates at the Foundation For Research On The Nature Of Man gave me valuable assistance in my work. (When I was in junior high school I realized that my eyes were not the same as most of my classmates. I very rarely blinked, and could go for long, long periods time without blinking. My eyes were extremely light-sensitive and I had to wear prescription sunglasses. After studying several books about hypnosis, I discovered that in a conducive setting I could easily hypnotize suscepible people by staring into their eyes without blinking while speaking in a quietly persuasive manner. I very frequently hypnotized my classmates in the months before I was selected for NCAS and that may have been one of the reasons why I as selected.) I designed and did tests for telepathy, precognition, psychokinesis, etc. using other students that I had hypnotized as subjects.

(A few months before I went to NCAS, my classmates in Goldsboro, North Carolina helped me do an experiment. SweeTARTS candy was sold in the form of tablets. I secretly altered a piece of the candy by rubbing the letter "S" off the tablet and then gave it to a gullible classmate, telling him it was a mild dose of LSD and cajoled him into eating it. After about 15 minutes, the many classmates who were assisting me in the experiment began telling the gullible student that he was "acting strange!", that his eyes looked weird and were "jumping around", that he was sitting at an unusual angle at his desk, etc., and that he had better start acting normal or the teacher would know he was "high" and he might be expelled from school. The student left the classroom and came back about about 10 minutes later with his mother and a police officer. Gasping for breath, the student looked completely terrified, was VERY pale and shaking uncontrollably. The police officer said they were taking him to the hospital to "have his stomach pumped". After I explained that the class was playing a joke on the student, he "came down" from his "trip" and was okay...)


(In Charleston, South Carolina, 7.18. 2013, police reported finding LSD-laced "Sweet Tarts". In Mt. Pleasant, Pennsylvania, 11.15. 2013, police said they seized "Sweet Tarts" containing LSD.

"LSD is a very dangerous drug that has absolutely no place in our schools. It causes hallucinations and forces the user to lose control of his or her faculties, potentially causing the user to want to murder someone."

---DA's investigator in Ponca City, Oklahoma, after a teenager there was arrested for distributing "Sweet Tarts" that tested positive for LSD.)


When I read a report of experiments using LSD, etc. in ESP tests, I was fascinated. Having no access to LSD, I designed tests where I had my subjects (some hypnotized and some not) sniff glue. In other tests I administered electric shocks, sometimes in addition to hypnosis and glue-sniffing...


("...you are opening the gates of hell!!!..."

---powerful North Carolina legislator's wife, yelling at me about my ESP research, during her visit to NCAS.)


("The intake of drugs in connection with divinatory practices is probably as old as mankind."

---Cavanna, Roberto and Servadio, Emilio in 
ESP EXPERIMENTS WITH LSD-25 AND PSILOCYBIN: A Methodological Approach, 1964.)



("The results indicated accurate comparisons in approximately 1 in 3 of the targets for LSD, with a rate of only 1 in 10 for the no-drug control condition."

---David P. Luke, commenting on the research by Cavanna and Servadio, in "Psychedelic Substances and Paranormal Phenomena: A Review of the Research", the Rhine Research Center, in the Journal of Parapsychology, Durham, North Carolina, 2008. [Rhine had once intended to become a Christian minister...NO OTHER RESEARCHERS WERE EVER ABLE TO DUPLICATE THE RESULTS OF THE EXPERIMENTS THAT RHINE ALLEGED SHOWED THAT ESP EXISTS, AND IT HAS BEEN SAID THAT SOME OF HIS ASSOCIATES FALSIFIED DATA. I definitely do NOT trust what Rhine wrote and said about ESP, or what the Rhine Research Center or any of its associates has written or said about ESP.])


("In 1964, Federico Fellini experimented with LSD under the supervision of Emilio Servadio, his psychoanalyst during the 1954 production of La Strada."

---Wikipedia)


("HALLUCINOGEN---An intoxicant and narcotic, according to the additives used. It produces telepathy, fantastic visions, hallucinations, and other psychic effects. It is precognitive and psychic in its results."

---from page H-3, TABER'S CYCLOPEDIC MEDICAL DICTIONARY by Clarence Wilbur Taber [10th edition, 1965]. [I think the above definition is rather weird...])


("MORE THAN HUMAN is a sci-fi novel by Theodore Sturgeon...in which a band of exceptional people 'blesh' [that is, blend and mesh] their consciousness to create a kind of super-being. 'I turned everyone on to that book in, like, 1965...This is what we can do; this is what we can be.'"

---Phil Lesh, quoted by Nick Paumgarten, The New Yorker, 11.26. 2012.)


("...in 1965...Garcia recruited him to play bass in a fledgling rock band called The Warlocks. When Lesh told Garcia he didn’t play the bass, the musician asked, 'Didn’t you used to play violin?' When he said yes Garcia told him, 'There you go, man.'"

---John Rogers, Associated Press, 10.25. 2024, noting the death of Phil Lesh, a founding member of the Grateful Dead.)



Two things I "learned": One was that one of my subjects appeared to me to be able to influence the flight paths of model rockets (Estes Industries brand solid fuel). The other thing was that when doing the standard ESP card test (where I kept a written record of each trial), one of my subjects appeared to me to have twice guessed the EXACT order of the Zener test cards before the deck had been shuffled, even though in the real time tests his scores were never any better than chance.

(I now realize that my ESP experiments were so unscientific that the results were meaningless. [Although it is clear that just because something is difficult to study in a lab setting does not mean that it does not exist. A good example is the effects of substances like LSD which have the potential to trigger profound psychedelic experiences. Because many of the effects of such substances are well-known to be determined by set and setting, scientists in a sterile lab run by a researcher who may have had a huge argument with his wife earlier in the day may observe phenomena in a test subject who has been given LSD that is extremely different from the phenomena that might be seen when a test subject ingests LSD in, for instance, a beautiful house in a natural setting with the test subjects dear friends present.] At the time, I was a big fan of science-fiction novels. More than a few of them mentioned J.B. Rhine and his ESP research. I was quite thrilled to have made contact with Rhine, and I am rather certain that I was unconsciously driven to inaccurately interpret my so-called "evidence" in such a way as to make it appear that ESP exists.)

("Nearly half of the adults in the United States believe in the existence of ESP."

---Amy Lavoie, The Harvard Crimson, 1.3. 2008.)


I HAVE NEVER SEEN [OR HEARD OF] ANY EVIDENCE THAT "GOD" EXISTS. I HAVE NEVER SEEN [OR HEARD OF] ANY EVIDENCE THAT TELEPATHY, PRECOGNITION, CLAIRVOYANCE, REMOTE VIEWING, OR PSYCHOKINESIS EXISTS. I HAVE NEVER SEEN [OR HEARD OF] ANY EVIDENCE THAT GHOSTS EXIST. I HAVE NEVER SEEN [OR HEARD OF] ANY EVIDENCE THAT "FREE WILL" EXISTS.

I HAVE NEVER SEEN [OR HEARD OF] ANY EVIDENCE THAT I AM, IN ANY WAY, BETTER THAN ANY OTHER HUMAN BEING.


(Myron J. Stolaroff [1920-2013] was an engineer who co-designed the Ampex model 200A reel-to-reel tape recorder which "revolutionized the radio and recording industries". The Ampex 200A was used to record Bill Haley performing "(We're Gonna) Rock Around The Clock" in 1954. Stolaroff had his first LSD experience wth Al Hubbard in 1956. Between 1960 and 1965 he helped conduct studies with LSD and mescaline. He was the author of the 1994 book THANATOS TO EROS-35 Years of Psychedelic Exploration. Stolaroff said he believed in God.

["...I don't have any doubt about the survival of consciousness."

---Myron J. Stolaroff, commenting on life after death, in HIGHER WISDOM--Eminent Elders Explore the Continuing Impact of Psychedelics, edited by Roger Walsh and Charles Grob, 2005.]

I attended some seances conducted in the Santa Cruz, California area by Theresa Stolaroff, the wife of Myron J. Stolaroff's son Jerry. She claimed she channelled the spirit of a dead "holy man", Sri Yukteshwar, who once lived in India. It seemed very creepy and totally FAKE to me. Some of the people who came were the usual sad "little old ladies" desperately hoping to be able to speak with their dead relatives.


["The Berkeley Psychic Institute (BPI) is a school for spiritual development, founded in 1973 by Lewis S. Bostwick in Berkeley, California and is also the workshop of the seminary of the Church of the Divine Man. The institute claims to have taught thousands of people to read auras and study channeling, one of the most popular classes being the Clairvoyant Training Program. The institute has contributed progressive ideas to the interfaith movement and has also contributed to a growth in number of enlightenment schools and metaphysical institutions."

---Wikipedia, 2022.

One of my Berkeley friends was "taught" at the Berkeley Psychic Institute in the 1970s and then went to England where she conducted seances, etc. She told me she was able to make quite a bit of money by convincing old women that she was able to contact their dead relatives. She said her conscience eventually forced her to stop committing such disgusting fraud.]


[Jeffrey Mishlove won a $500,000 prize in 2021 for his essay which he claimed proved that there is life after death. His essay did NOT provide any evidence that there is life after death! The prize money came from a very wealthy man, 78 years old, whose dear wife had recently died.]


[For decades, William A. Richards has been an extremely experienced and ultra-respected member of the religious and psychedelic communities. He is a member of the Psychiatry Department of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and has many formal academic theological credentials. Unfortunately, he believes in God, and is thus clearly delusional. The author of the 2016 book SACRED KNOWLEDGE: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences, Richards apparently does not not believe low doses of psychedelics are very useful, mentioning what he called the "...meaningless mental imagery typically encountered with low dosage..."])


(Tweet by Max Wolff [@trpwolff], February 25, 2023, about the grotesquely inappropriate religiosity of some of the many arrogantly clueless young wannabe psychotherapists who want to give psilocybin mushrooms to people who are suffering from mental illness):

"Would you trust a surgeon who refers to one of her tools, such as a bone saw, as 'the sacred instrument'?")


(“they simply couldn’t tell me that they didn’t have a cigarette. they had to give me their pitch, their religion: cigarettes were for cubes. they were going to Malibu, to some seeming loose and easy shack in Malibu and burn a bit of grass. they remind me, in a sense, of old ladies standing on a corner selling “The Watchtower.” the whole LSD, STP, marijuana, heroin, hashish, prescription cough medicine crowd suffers from the “Watchtower” itch: you gotta be with us, man, or you’re out, you’re dead. this pitch is a continual and seeming MUST with those who use the stuff.”

---Charles Bukowski, a nasty drunk who apparently was severely addicted to alcohol, in his 1972 book ERECTIONS, EJACULATIONS, AND GENERAL TALES OF ORDINARY MADNESS.)




At the time I was researching precognition, I thought that perhaps "time" is not what it seems to be...


("...the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one."

---Albert Einstein)


("Independent theoretical physicist Julian Barbour goes so far as to suggest that time does not exist..."

---Marcus Chown, NewScientist, 10.1. 2011.)


("...the present is the only thing that has no end."

---Erwin Schrödinger, in his book MY VIEW OF THE WORLD.)


("...hauntology---the notion of how the present is haunted by both past and future..."

---BAM/PFA [University of California, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive] ["Art Notes"] Sept/Oct 2010.)


("...we are haunted by futures that failed to happen."

---from the back cover of GHOSTS OF MY LIFE--Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures by Mark Fisher.

"Those on acid trips were externalizing the workings of their own brain, and potentially learning how to use their brains differently."

---Mark Fisher, 2016, in the unfinished introduction to a book [ACID COMMUNISM] he was working on at the time of his suicide at age 48. The quote is in THE COLLECTED UNPUBLISHED WRITINGS OF MARK FISHER by Darren Ambrose, 2018.)


("...creating half-baked memories of things that never were..."

---"hypnagogic pop", described in the Wikipedia "hauntology" article.


("Could today be tomorrow?"

---Surrealist Dorothea Tanning, in a poem published at age 101.)


("The past is never dead. It's not even past."

---William Faulkner, in REQUIEM FOR A NUN.)


("Forever---is composed of Nows---"

---Emily Dickinson)


("The present--was the passing second of time..."

---Jane, in JANE EYRE by Charlotte Brontë.)



(At the time of my research, I did not consciously realize how intensely interested the government might be in such matters. I now suspect the person who appeared to me to have altered the flight paths of the model rockets, and the person who appeared to me to have guessed the exact order of the cards before they were shuffled may well have ended up being removed from their homes and placed in government custody for further study...Yikes!!)




("We want them to generate a particular type of thought."

---teacher at NCAS, quoted in "The Development and Evaluation of a School for High Potential Underachievers 1964 - 1967" [USOE Cooperative Research Project #H-173]. This research paper about NCAS also mentions a encephalographic study of brain waves.)



("You are capable of much more than you think you are. You are capable of almost anything."

"I can put you in a situation where you'll pull a trigger and kill someone you don't know."

---Richard Farson, quoted by Rasa Gustaitis in her 1969 book TURNING ON. Psychologist Farson was one of the founders of the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute in 1958 in La Jolla, California. Prominent associates at the institute included Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow.)





In 1992, I told my NCAS story to Alex Raybin, a very intelligent man who had been one of my large-quantity crystal LSD suppliers in Berkeley many years before. (Raybin, who truly loved DMT, had known Nick Sand when they were both young in New York City. Sand went on to become one of the world's most famous psychedelic drug cooks, eventually making approximately 140 million 100 microgram doses of LSD, according to Tim Scully.) Raybin amazed me by showing me that he had been involved with ESP research at Duke at the same time that I had contact with the researchers there... and then had come to Berkeley where he became an associate of Jack Leary. (The earliest mention of Raybin at Duke [class of 1966] that I found was a November 6, 1962 article in The Duke Chronicle newspaper in Durham, North Carolina that stated he was a member of the school debate team. [Coincidentally, one of the front page headlines in The Duke Chronicle that day was "Allen Dulles Opens a 4-Day Symposium" (Dulles had been the director of the Central Intelligence Agency from February 1953 until November 1961)].) From a April 3, 1968 article in The Duke Chronicle about the closing of the Celestial Omnibus coffee house due to drug dealing there: "Poet Alex Raybin...was arrested for drug abuse at his downtown home." (Duke University was named in honor of Washington Duke, a rich industrialist whose fortune came from the production and sales of tobacco. According to Wikipedia, his company became "the largest tobacco manufacturer in the world.") Raybin was the editor of Archive, the school literary magazine. He appeared in the 1968 book 31 NEW AMERICAN POETS. "Alex Raybin, Duke's poetic claim to fame. Removed himself twice from Duke; the cops came and carried him out the third time." (The quote is from a later issue of Archive.)



In 1993 I finally recalled making many reports to my ex-advisor at NCAS, esperanto advocate Dr. Hazel Naugle, about LSD and the Berkeley counterculture in 1969, using a payphone in the Student Union building on the UC Berkeley campus to call her in North Carolina.


(The director of the North Carolina Advancement School was Gordon Leslie McAndrew. He was born in 1926 in Oakland, California, served in the United States Army Air Forces, attended the University of California in Berkeley, earning a PhD, and was an educational administrator working in Oakland public schools in 1964.)




("Abrams completed his psychology degree at the University of Chicago, his hometown, where he was president of the Parapsychology Laboratory between 1957 and 1960. He began to work as a visiting research fellow during his summer breaks with the patriarch of parapsychology at that time, J.B. Rhine, at his famous laboratory at Duke University in North Carolina. Upon completing his degree, Abrams moved to the UK and became an advanced student at St. Catherine's College at Oxford University from 1960 to 1967. He headed a parapsychology laboratory at the university's Department of Biometry and, having some skill in hypnosis, he investigated extrasensory stimulation of conditioned reflexes in hypnotized subjects. He was also responsible for organizing the first conference outside of the U.S. of the American-based Parapsychological Association at Oxford University in 1964. His PhD studies at Oxford were part-funded by the CIA via the Human Ecology Fund, a secret front organization for the CIA's MK-Ultra mind control project. It was under the auspices of MK-Ultra that the CIA funded numerous academic projects investigating LSD and other methods of altering consciousness, with the aim of finding truth serums and techniques for interrogation and brainwashing."

---David Luke, in his 2013 Stephen Irwin Abrams obituary.


Abrams [1938--2012] was a prominent cannabis rights activist. He increased his activism following the February 1967 drug arrests of Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, calling Pete Brown at the Beatles Apple Records office, who agreed to pay for a July 24, 1967 full-page ad in the London newspaper The Times calling for the legalization of cannabis. "The law against marijuana is immoral in principle and unworkable in practice."


["A week after the ad appeared, Richards' cannabis conviction was quashed, and Jagger's prison sentence for possession of amphetamine tablets was reduced to a conditional discharge."

---Wikipedia].


[Worth reading: Chapter 8--"Unwitting CIA Anthropologist Collaborators--MK-Ultra, Human Ecology, and Buying a Piece of Anthropology" (in)
COLD WAR ANTHROPOLOGY: The CIA, the Pentagon, and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology by David H. Price, Duke University Press, 2016.

"The Human Ecology Fund closed its doors on June 30, 1965", days after I graduated from NCAS.])





I did a google search of NCAS and it turned out one of my dorm advisers (some of them, recruited to work at the school from east coast ivy-league schools, had very long hair and were obvious hippie-types) at NCAS, Damon Rarey, had died. In Memorium to him the following was written:




"Damon Franz Rarey "created the first nationally broadcast computer animations" and "...co-founded Aurora Systems, the first company devoted to the design and manufacture of computer videographic systems..."

---Howard E. Daniel, Yale Class of 1966.




"Rarey's co-counselors at NCAS included Sandy Blount, Greg Teague, Robert L. (Reebee) Garofalo"




"Damon deserves to be remembered in the history books as the first graphic artist to use computer graphics on a regular basis in television."

---Dick Shoup, co-founder of Aurora Systems.




"Damon and I and our friends were never big druggies. We mostly only got stoned on special occasions, like it being Tuesday or something like that. I only remember one truly memorable stone. I guess that's something of an oxymoron, isn't it? In his senior year at Yale, Damon was living with Reebee and another roommate in an apartment in New Haven. Sometime during that year Connie moved in with him. At some point, some of us who were the North Carolina wing of our group came up to visit. It was just when "Sgt. Pepper" came out. None of us had heard it, except maybe Reebee. Reebee had made a light machine. It was a work of art and a work of love. It was a 4 x 8' plexiglass sheet stamped so as to refract light, the kind you could put in the window of a bathroom. The little refracting surfaces broke up any image behind it. Out of a second sheet of the same stuff, Reebee had cut four large circles. He had mounted them at the corners on the back of the main sheet, each one on a spindle so it could turn. Each was connected to a large makeshift belt that was connected to a small electric motor. When the motor turned, all the wheels turned very slowly. The light going through the two layers of Plexiglas constantly changed refractions like in a kaleidoscope. Behind the center of the sheet and behind each of the circles, he had mounted different colored Christmas lights in various arrangements. The lights were wired to a keyboard so that each key lit a different color and/or a different part of the board. So . . . there we were, having gotten stoned, sitting on the couch, all leaning back listening to Sgt. Pepper for the first time in the dark watching the light machine that took up much of the opposite wall being played by a professional percussionist who was totally in tune with the music. When the first guitar intro started for the first cut of Sgt. Pepper and the lights came on, in time with the music and changing color and pattern to fit the mood and story of the music, our little minds melted and ran out our little ears. We all knew it was a special day in the history of the species."

---Sandy Blount



"We were working at a brand new residential school for 'underachieving' eighth grade boys from all over the state of North Carolina. We were in an old hospital building in Winston-Salem, my hometown. The school was Capital 'I' Important, funded by Ford and Carnegie and the Office of Education. It was the first integrated residential school in the South..."

---Sandy Blount (Blount later became a prominent psychologist at the University of Massachusetts.)


("On the Frontlines of Social Change Worldwide..."

---from a 2019 National Public Radio mention of The Ford Foundation.)



(Part of my education at NCAS was to meet under a tree on the far side of the campus two afternoons a week with an attractive young woman who said she was a college student. She told me to read two books, A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA by Richard Hughes and LORD OF THE FLIES by William Golding. We had lengthy conversations about the meanings of these books.)



Hypnotic facts:



("In addition to the sensory effects, hallucinogens create mental states in which patients become unusually open to suggestion."

---Charles S. Grob, UCLA psychiatrist, quoted by Denise Gellene, the Los Angeles Times, 11.19. 2006, in an article about legal medical research conducted by Grob using psilocybin, the active ingredient in "magic mushrooms". [The psilocybin was produced in small quantities under special Drug Enforcement Administration permits.])





(Psychologist Charles Tart once stated that all states of consciousness are trances, and that what we call "normal" waking consciousness is just "consensus trance".)





(While I was in prison in Arizona in 1986, I continued my ongoing study of "covert hypnosis" [also known as "indirect hypnosis"]. Through inter-library loans from the University of Arizona, I was able to obtain unpublished papers written by psychiatrist Milton H. Erickson, who was a founding president of the American Society for Clinical Hypnosis. I was a member of a group of prisoners who were secretly engaged in learning about hypnosis. [We were able to experience the necessary privacy while hypnotizing people because we used a classroom that we had rigged so that it could be locked from the inside.]

"Respectful awareness of the capacity of the patient's unconscious mind to perceive the meaningfulness of the therapist's own unconscious behavior is a governing principle in psychotherapy. The patient's unconscious mind is listening and understanding much better than is possible for his conscious mind."

---Milton H. Erickson)





("The way we perceive the world and experience reality can be dramatically altered by hypnotic suggestion."

"Through hypnotic suggestion a person can be led to believe something that is not there, or fail to perceive something that is there."

"Each of us is subjected, from infancy onward, to a complex set of suggestions from our social environment, and they in effect teach us how we should perceive the world."

"Each of us is literally hypnotized from infancy to perceive the world the way the people in our culture perceive it."

---Willis Harman, in THE REAL AND THE IMAGINARY--A New Approach to Physics [Edited by Jean Charon].)



(Experiments in neuroscientist Philip Corlett's lab at the Yale School of Medicine "...set up new 'beliefs' in healthy subjects that encourage them to hallucinate stimuli they previously experienced. [For instance, in one experiment, the scientists conditioned participants to associate a tone with a visual pattern. The subjects continued to hear the tone when they saw the pattern, even when there was no sound at all.] The researchers are trying to unravel how those beliefs translate into perception. Through these studies 'we've got evidence suggesting that perception and cognition are not that separate,' Corlett said. 'New beliefs can be taught and can change what you perceive.'"

---Jordana Cepelewicz, Quanta magazine, 7.10. 2018.)



("We may have less control over our thoughts than previously assumed."

---title of a brief item about a San Francisco State University study. The item was on ScienceDaily.com, 7.16. 2018. "...most thoughts enter our brains as a result of subliminal processes we don't totally control.")








In 1969 when I was 17 years old, I was very acutely "mainstream". So much so that I received a congratulatory letter from the White House after being awarded the "God and Country Award" by the Boy Scouts (after, among many other things, helping a Methodist minister's wife cut white Wonder Bread into small cubes to be used as a symbol of Christ's body in the rite of Holy Communion) and was a member of a "Police-Specialty" Explorer post sponsored by the local Police Department and the U.S. Army Special Forces ("Green Berets") at Fort Bragg near Fayetteville, North Carolina. I was wearing my green beret the day I arrived in Berkeley...

(Snake Eater can mean "a member or former member of the United States Army Special Forces. This nickname was acquired due to the Special Forces serving snake meat at the Gabriel Demonstration Area on Fort Bragg, for visiting VIPs, the press, etc."

---Wikipedia, 2023.

The Green Berets taught me how to catch and cook snakes, which I found to be quite tasty!

They also taught me how to swim into the middle of a big lake and rescue a large, very strong, and intensely panicked drowning man. To prove that I was capable of saving the life of such a person, I had to surreptitiously approach [under water] a Green Beret who was playing the role of the freaked-out drowning man, kick him VERY, VERY HARD in the testicles [he was wearing a well-padded protective device], put him in a rescue hold and bring him to shore. To pass the course, I had to do such a rescue three times.)


The 1967 "Better Living Through Chemistry" poster was a print of a photo by Edmund Skea of four "hip" young drug users standing in a street in San Francisco. Behind them, with other vehicles on the side of the street, is a Wonder Bread truck.

(When I was in federal prison I noticed that many of the large-scale drug smugglers I met were former members of the Order of the Arrow, a "secret camp fraternity" of Boy Scouts that was founded in 1915. The traditions and rituals of the Order of the Arrow were influenced by Freemasonry. I was disgusted by the grotesquely racist way that Native American culture was portrayed by the members of the Order of the Arrow and did not like being elected to membership. I enjoyed frequently camping and learned a lot doing so, but I did NOT like the military aspects of the Boy Scouts.

["We were in the Boy Scouts together."

---Robert Ressler, the pioneering FBI profiler who is credited with coining the term "serial killer", speaking about John Wayne Gacy, a clown who murdered 33 young men and boys. The quote is from a 9.16. 2021 article by Tom Fordy, The Telegraph.)]

"82,500 men" have claimed they were victims of sex-abuse when they were in the Boy Scouts, according to an article, "Boy Scouts' Deal With Sex Victims Can Go Forward", by Becky Yerak and Andrew Scurria, The New York Times, 8.20. 2021.)



An excellent marksman, I was a member of the National Rifle Association (NRA). After I arrived in Berkeley and first got high on marijuana (I was told it was from Vietnam), I went with my friends to the roof of the Berkeley Inn, a hotel on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. It was late at night and I had a paranoid hallucination: I briefly perceived the capped vent pipes on the roof as being Vietnamese soldiers squatting.

Braxton Bragg was a soldier and violent traitor who fought against the U.S. in the Civil War. He was also a racist and a slave owner, and, by almost all descriptions, a very nasty and disagreeable loser. Fort Bragg, North Carolina, near Fayetteville, is, by population, the largest military installation in the world, and it was named in honor of Braxton Bragg. I lived in Fayetteville during the Vietnam War when I was a teenager, not long before I went to Berkeley and became a federal fugitive because of my anti-war activities.

(I met "Green Beret" Barry Sadler, whose song "The Ballad of the Green Berets" was a #1 single, selling more than a million copies in 1966. I was with some Boy Scouts who took a patriotic train ride with him in North Carolina around the time his record was a hit. In 1978, in a dispute over a woman, Sadler shot and killed an unarmed man, then planted a gun in his victim's car. Sadler later suffered from a serious gunshot wound in Guatemala City. He died at age 49 from his injuries.)


(Duke Webb, a 37-year-old white male member of the U.S. Army Special Forces ["Green Berets"] walked into a bar above a bowling alley in Rockford, Illinois on 12.26. 2020 and, in an apparently random attack, shot 6 people, killing 3 of them. At the time of the shootings, Webb had been in the U.S. Army for more than 12 years.)





The 1969 Woodstock music festival was happening right around the time I became 18 years old in Berkeley.


("The fabric of American society...seemed to be coming apart at the seams."

---description of what life was like in 1969 at the time of the Woodstock music festival, USA TODAY, 8.14. 2009.)


("A pivotal event in 20th century popular culture and a signature moment in a generation's legend of itself."

---Mick LaSalle, describing Woodstock, the San Francisco Chronicle, 6.12. 2009.)


"You may take it with however many grains of salt you wish (but) the brown acid that's circulating around us is not specifically too good. It's suggested that you do stay away from that."

---Chip Monck, MC at Woodstock, speaking from the stage on day 2.


("He thought the neck of his guitar was an electric snake." [Laughter]

---Barack Obama, at the 2013 Kennedy Center Honors reception at the White House, describing Carlos Santana performing on a psychedelic drug at Woodstock. From Joe Garofali's article "Obama Riffs on Santana Tripping at Woodstock", SFGate, 12.9. 2013.)


(Interviewer #1: "But you've admitted you were actually hallucinating in that performance."

Carlos Santana: "I'm STILL hallucinating!"

Interviewer #2: "But on that day you were REALLY hallucinating!"

---CBS News, 8.16. 2019, speaking with Santana about his performance at Woodstock in 1969.)


"Cocaine is horrible. It's nature's way of telling people they have too much money. It makes them mean to their friends and their kids."

---famous counterculture clown and Berkeley, California resident Wavy Gravy (Hugh Romney Jr., born in 1936), quoted by Sheila Lennon, The Providence Journal, 8.15. 2009.

(At a music festival in Texas not long after Woodstock, Romney had been asked, by blues musician B.B. King, "Are you Wavy Gravy?" Romney says he replied "Yes, sir." He has used the name ever since. [Ben & Jerry's Wavy Gravy ice cream flavor is named for Romney.])


(According to Joni Mitchell's website, as of 2019 there are 351 recorded versions of her 1969 song "Woodstock". This Christian song about the music festival is extremely starry-eyed and insanely optimistic. The first line of the song mentions "God". The "devil" and "the garden" [of Eden] are also mentioned in the lyrics.)





([We are currently in "...an age full of descriptions of good and bad trips..."

"After THE TEACHINGS OF DON JUAN: A YAQUI WAY OF KNOWLEDGE became an underground bestseller, it was widely supposed that its author was El Freako the Acid Academic, all buckskin fringe and pinball eye, his brain a charred labyrinth lit by mysterious alkaloids, tripping through the desert with a crow on his hat."

---TIME, March 3, 1973. From an article about Carlos Castaneda.]


[Henry R. Luce, the American magazine magnate, launched and (as editor-in-chief) supervised a number of popular magazines, including TIME, LIFE, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated. He and his wife Clare Boothe Luce both said they greatly enjoyed taking LSD when it was legal.]


["I've always maintained that Henry Luce did much more to popularize acid than Timothy Leary."

---Abbie Hoffman, in his 1980 book SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE.]


Indeed, I have learned that I am not the only person who read the March 25, 1966 issue of LIFE, saw the photograph of a young person in San Francisco high on LSD staring in intense amazement at a light bulb, and was inspired by the photograph to go to California and take LSD!


[“The March 1966 LIFE magazine cover article on LSD led to the psychedelic drug being made illegal by October. But the genie was out of the bottle.”

 ---Joel Selvin, the San Francisco Chronicle, 5.21. 2007.])


("The 'Retro Age Vintage Fabrics Flickr Pool' has gobs and gobs of paisley prints, florals, geometrics, op-artish-moire-patterny eyeblinders, and other dayglo hallucinations.

Once upon a time, at some point likely between 20 and 40 years ago, these patterns all fell onto people's clothing while they were having acid trips and stuck there."

---counterculturevulture dot wordpress dot com, who buys such fabrics at thrift stores so that she "...can keep the hallucinations alive a little longer. Hallucinations stay alive by being seen by people--whether inside or outside their brains; they die when no one looks at them any more for long enough. However, with enough love and/or drugs, they can be resurrected.")





(In 1972 I hid in southern Mexico and took Psilocybe Aztecorum mushrooms that I obtained from an old woman who was a curandera in a small village not far from the volcano Popocatépetl. Triple-WOW! [Knowing no one in Mexico City, I had taken off my business suit, put on my "hippie" clothes and gone for a stroll. My faded bluejeans had mushroom-shaped patches a young woman in Berkeley had made for me using colorful block-printed paisley-patterned cotton cloth cut from a bedspread made in India. Within a few minutes several of the local marijuana users had approached me, pointed to my patches, and asked me if I wanted to get high with them. After about a week they took me to the village get high on "magic mushrooms".] After the mushroom journey, my new friends took me to see the absolutely amazing art at the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City, which influenced me greatly...[Please see book THE MEXICAN NATIONAL MUSEUM OF ANTHROPOLOGY by Ignacio Bernal, Román Piña-Chán, and Fernando Cámara-Barbachano, revised edition copyright 1970 by Thames and Hudson, London, England. Illustrated with many photographs of the beautiful art displayed in the museum, including the famous statue of Xochipilli.])

(For years I had a brief newspaper article [from the San Francisco Chronicle?] on my wall [from around the same time in 1972] about the "first" bay area magic mushroom bust. It turned out that the mushrooms seized were not actually psilocybin mushrooms, just mushrooms that were bought at a grocery store and then were soaked with liquid containing LSD.)



("...hadn't he once been offered a cartload of green bananas plus a full can of potoguaya for her and turned the whole deal down? But before letting that offer go he had taken a look at the tea, that had been of a light greenish cast. 'If it had been the real boge,' he admitted later, 'I couldn't have answered for my actions.' Meaning, by boge, the deep-purple plant that only grows on Mount Popocatepetl."

---Nelson Algren, in his 1956 novel A WALK ON THE WILD SIDE, quoting a pimp in New Orleans. This is the earliest published mention of purple marijuana that I have been able to find. The marijuana that I smoked in 1972 that was grown on Popocatépetl was not purple, but it was Quite Excellently Psychedelic...)



(Pulque is a fermented mild alcoholic beverage made from the sap of the agave plant. I found fresh pulque to be uniquely tasty and quite refreshing when I was with my friends on a hot day in a tiny Mexican village. A pulqueria is a tavern that serves pulque.

"...step into a neon-lit pulqueria in rural Mexico."

---Anthony Bourdain, describing an example of one of the things he wanted to do in his life.)



When I visited my parents they took me on a tour of places where we had lived. As we approached the house where I had lived just prior to being suddenly disowned by my parents, I was looking at the sky and my mom said "Do you remember what happened here?" I suddenly had a vision of a door opening in the clouds, and then suddenly closing. (I was immediately reminded of the squarish and rectangular impasto shapes Vincent van Gogh placed in the far right part of his depiction of the sky in his painting of his home in Arles, "The Yellow House".) I replied to my mom "No! What happened here!" It turned out that not long before being forced by my parents to flee, I had been home alone, when suddenly a naked woman ran up onto the front porch outside my bedroom window and pounded on the front door. Before I could answer, her psychotically-enraged husband, a uniformed police officer who had just caught her in bed with another man, ran up to the porch and started to choke her. The woman's father ran up behind the officer, took his gun and saved his daughter's life by shooting the officer in the head, which killed him instantly. I was found inside our house, speechlessly curled into a fetal position... Until my parents told me the story, I had absolutely no conscious recall of the incident! I had repressed it completely. After they told me, I slowly started to remember...(Learning about the incident helped to explain to me why my entire adult life I had such a powerful fear and dislike of policemen, guns, and women who cheat. They were all issues which threatened to dredge-up a terrifying memory...)



My parents later showed me my base I.D. card from when I was 12 years old and we lived at Holloman Air Force Base near Alamogordo, New Mexico in 1963 and 1964 (Alamogordo is near where the first atomic bomb was detonated and was at one time the home of spy Edward Lee Howard, born the same year I was. His father was a U.S. Air Force Sergeant, same as my dad was. Howard was a fellow Boy Scout, and later a drug user. In 1985 he became the first CIA officer to defect to the Soviet Union. Holloman AFB was near the site of the Air Force's Missile Test Center ["Reach For The Sky"], where some ex-nazi missile scientists, who had been given amnesty after World War II because of their scientific expertise [Operation Paperclip], helped the U.S. develop America's space and weapons programs.) Holloman AFB is also very near White Sands National Park. White Sands, kind of a scary place to me, is a strange 275 square mile field of sand that is composed of gypsum crystals. It is seen in a number of movies, including The Man Who Fell to Earth and The Men Who Stare at Goats. (From the original soundtrack of The Man Who Fell To Earth: "Memory of Hiroshima", a song composed and recorded by Stomu Yamashta.)


("He, of all people, knows what's real and what's not."

---A.M. Homes, in her short story "Brother on Sunday", included in her 2018 book DAYS OF AWE. [After buying the book in 2021 at a 99 cent store, I (consciously) noticed that the dust jacket has a 1964 photo by Garry Winogrand, "White Sands Monument", which shows much sand, a large car, and 4 people at a rather sparsely equipped picnic area.])


("Literally miles of white sand"

---a displeased tourist describing White Sands National Park in an online post, quoted by designer Amber Share on one of her humorous posters in her series "Subpar Parks". Commenting about the poster I wrote "Literally many many many MANY miles of white sand. As far as your eye can see in all directions. Like, for real, SCARY because you could get lost and then the wind could cover you in sand. And, for real, difficult to walk on GIANT dunes. Nothing but dunes, forever! Exhausted, thirsty, going blind in the insane burning heat. One visit was more than enough, but they made me go there over and over. Some nights when my parents took us there to watch missiles being launched from a nearby military area, it was very windy and cold as death."

["White Sands 'Endless' In Lost Child's View" (From the front page of the Alamogordo Daily News, 2.18. 1969. The headline story that day was "Estimated $175,000 Marijuana Seized" ["After High Speed Chase"].)])


My I.D. card was marked "TOP SECRET". When I questioned my parents about why my card had those words written on it, they told me that it was so that I could go visit my dad where he worked, a classified area on the base. (Like J. Robert Oppenheimer, I was [and will always be] a dedicated ROCKHOUND! [my favorite specimen in my rock collection was a piece of trinitite, a pale green glassy material that was formed from melted sand and dirt during the first atomic explosion] and on hikes to an isolated area of the base in search of rocks I sometimes found typewritten carbon paper that the wind had blown against the surrounding fence. When I held the carbon paper up to the sun I could read what was on each page. Often they were "SECRET" documents. Not wanting to cause any trouble, I kept what I learned to myself and destroyed the pages...

["In 1947 (Oppenheimer) said, 'If there is another world war, this civilization may go under.'

'The national security establishment is appalled that the father of the atomic bomb is coming out in public giving speeches against these weapons,' said Bird."

"...Albert Einstein...tried to talk Oppenheimer out of fighting a battle he couldn't win. Bird recalled: 'Oppenheimer walks away from Einstein, and Albert Einstein turns to his secretary and says, "There goes a nar," the Yiddish for "fool."'"

---from a news item by David Martin [produced by David Rothman and edited by Joseph Frandino] "Christopher Nolan on J. Robert Oppenheimer, 'the most important person who ever lived'", CBS News 7.16. 2023. (Kai Bird is co-author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Oppenheimer, "American Prometheus".)])

I went to the base library every few days and checked out and read the maximum number of books allowed. I worked through many shelves. The 1964 book MARTIAN TIME SLIP by Philip K. Dick, which had just been published, blew my mind! I remember one non-fiction book I checked out and read was HOW TO MAKE AN ATOMIC BOMB IN YOUR KITCHEN--WELL, PRACTICALLY, written by Bob Bale and published in 1951… For years, I had carried with me the memory of visiting the home of one of my schoolmates when we lived at Holloman. The classmate's parents were from Germany. At the classmates house he showed me the new issue of SUPERBOY comics. Superboy had changed his "secret identity" from Clark Kent to someone with MY first and last name!!! It seriously amazed me! Such a strangely empowering coincidence! After I became an adult, I spent many hours in comicbook stores trying to find a copy of that comicbook, but I never could. I finally decided that perhaps my memory, though very vivid, had been false, although, as far as I could tell, I had never experienced any false memories.
(I had read about Jean Piaget, the great child psychologist, who had claimed that his earliest memory was of nearly being kidnapped at the age of 2. He remembered details such as sitting in his baby carriage, watching the nurse defend herself against the kidnapper, scratches on the nurse's face, and a police officer with a short cloak and a white baton chasing the kidnapper away. The story was reinforced by the nurse and the family and others who had heard the story. Piaget was convinced that he remembered the event. However, it never happened. Thirteen years after the alleged kidnapping attempt, Piaget's former nurse wrote to his parents to confess that she had made up the entire story. Piaget later wrote: "I therefore must have heard, as a child, the account of this story...and projected it into the past in the form of a visual memory, which was a memory of a memory, but false". I had also read the story, recently covered [in 2009] by CBS news, about Ronald Cotton, who spent 11 years in prison after he was wrongly convicted of raping Jennifer Thompson. Cotton and Thompson are now friends and give joint lectures about how memory and eyewitness testimony can be wrong. In front of the camera, using a series of photographs and questions, they implanted a false memory in the mind of the CBS interviewer to demonstrate how easily such a thing can be done. The interviewer was utterly flabbergasted, and more than a little embarrassed...)

(In a famous study by psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, she "...gave two dozen subjects a journal filled with details of three events from their childhoods. To make memories as accurate and compelling as possible, Loftus enlisted family members to assemble the information. She then added a fourth, completely fictitious experience that described how, at the age of five, each child had been lost in a mall and finally rescued by an elderly stranger. Loftus seeded the false memories with plausible information, such as the name of the mall each subject would have visited. When she interviewed the subjects later, a quarter of them recalled having been lost in the mall, and some did so in remarkable detail."

---Michael Specter, in his article "Partial Recall", The New Yorker, 5.19. 2014. Loftus later said that memory is "...a little bit...like a Wikipedia page. You can go in there and change it, but so can other people." Elizabeth Phelps, the Silver Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at N.Y.U. said "The notion of the unreliability of memory has changed courtrooms in America, and it is completely owing to Elizabeth's persistence in the face of a very harsh backlash.")

("In Chrobak and Zaragoza [2008], participants were asked to describe entire fictitious events that they had never witnessed. Results showed that over time, half the participants developed false memories of these fictitious events."

---Danielle Polage, in her paper "The Effects of Telling Lies on Belief in the Truth", 11.30. 2017, published in Europe's Journal of Psychology, Vol.13 [4]. The paper by Chrobak, Q.M. and Zaragoza, M.S. was published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 15 [6].)

(I am one week older than Berkeley writer Meredith Maran, who accused her father of sexually molesting her, and did not speak to him for eight years. Maran later realized that the accusation was not true. She wrote a book about false memory, MY LIE, that was published in 2010:

"How could it happen that people who never suffered such harrowing experiences would come to believe that they had?")

("People can recall events that never happened."

"All memories are inaccurate to some degree."

"Identifying false memories may be next to impossible."

---Josefin Dolsten, in an article about the book THE MEMORY ILLUSION: Remembering, Forgetting, and the Science of False Memory, by psychologist Julia Shaw. The title of Dolsten's article is "Don't Believe Everything You Remember". Psychology Today, May/June 2016.)

WHEN I WENT ON THE INTERNET AND DID A GOOGLE-SEARCH, I IMMEDIATELY FOUND THE SUPERBOY COMICBOOK WHERE SUPERBOY CHANGED HIS SECRET IDENTITY TO SOMEONE WITH THE SAME NAME AS MINE! MY MEMORY WAS ACCURATE, NOT FALSE.










("Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill-provider..."

---Ralph Waldo Emerson)




I have not been able to obtain much in the way of gainful employment.


(I do NOT eat pig meat. I am not good at "bringing home the bacon".


["The Garfield County Health Department blamed her restaurant for sickening at least 80 people at the annual Garfield County Rodeo in the summer of 2017. Health Department records show she had failed to obtain a license to serve food at the event and that 'improper food practices' likely led to the poisonings from pork sliders she had served. The Health Department investigated after receiving a rash of calls the morning after the rodeo from those suffering severe diarrhea."

---Esther Wang, Jezebel via MSN News, 9.14. 2020, writing about 33-year-old liar and Colorado congressional candidate Lauren Boebert, a conservative republican. Boebert owns a restaurant in Rifle, Colorado called Shooters Grill, where the waiters have guns. Boebert is a supporter of the insane QAnon conspiracy cult and she loudly protested against COVID-19 protective measures.])


 In my life, the job I had for the longest period of time was being an agricultural worker, hand-harvesting tobacco in rural Johnston County, North Carolina, near where actress Ava Gardner was born.

("They would sell you anything they had, which was nothing, and kill you over anything they didn't understand, which was everything. They had come, mostly by Ford from North Carolina, to work in the tobacco warehouses and cigarette factories."

---Tom Robbins, in EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES.)


("And a pack of Camels."

---Winona Ryder, as Joyce Byers [a single mom in the TV series Stranger Things who is freaked-out because one of her sons has disappeared] after asking a local businessman for credit and telling him a list of the essential things she needs. Camel cigarettes, a blend of Turkish tobacco and Virginia tobacco, are made in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. When I was there in 1991 visiting my parents, we went to the RJ Reynolds cigarette factory on a day that they were packaging Camels to be sold in the communist USSR. The USSR disintegrated not long after my visit and became Russia.)


(RJ Reynolds VERY successfully used the advertising slogan "Us Tareyton Smokers Would Rather Fight Than Switch" from 1963 until 1981. Each ad showed someone with fake "black eye" [bruising due to an injury to the face]. Martha Stewart told Larry King in a 2003 interview that she appeared in a commercial for Tareyton cigarettes.

"Violence is as American as cherry pie."

---H. Rap Brown, a former chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, in an often quoted statement he made at a 1967 press conference in Washington, D.C. Born under the name Hubert Gerold Brown, he converted to Islam in the 1970s and changed his name to Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin. He was convicted of shooting 2 sheriff's deputies in 2000. One of the deputies died. The alleged shooter and both the deputies were black.)


("In the United States, if someone is unemployed, we see that as an indication of bad character."

---Jonathan Singer, an associate professor of social work at Loyola University in Chicago, and president of the American Association of Suicidology, quoted by Olga Khazan in her article "The Millenial Mental-Health Crisis", The Atlantic, 6.11. 2020.)


(The county seat of Johnston County is Smithfield. When I lived there as a teenager in the late 1960s with my parents and family, there were large racist billboards beside the road as you entered and exited the town. These billboards showed a man on a horse wearing a hooded robe brandishing a flaming cross and had the words "Help Fight Communism and Integration--Join and Support the United Klans of America--Welcome to Smithfield"...)


("The bus passed a building site for an apartment complex named Warm City. In English, its billboard said IF WHITE AMERICA TOLD THE TRUTH FOR ONE DAY ITS WORLD WOULD FALL APART. That's the title of a song by the Welsh rock group Manic Street Preachers."

---Michael Meyer, describing Jilin, China, in his 2015 book IN MANCHURIA--A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China.)


The New York Times reported that Aero Contractors, Ltd. in Smithfield was heavily involved in "extraordinary rendition", the transport of terrorism suspects to countries where they can be tortured to extract information.

("...a kind of Mayberry 'cloak-and-dagger'..."

---Smithfield resident Allyson Caison, quoted by Joby Warrick, the Washington Post, 2.9. 2012.)




I also worked briefly at, among other places, a Post Office, a downtown San Francisco popcorn factory, a used-book store in Berkeley, a restaurant, and a service station.


(I was released on parole in 1986 after spending a relatively short time in prison. I was 35 years old and there were no records showing that I had ever been employed. There were no records showing that I had ever owned property or paid rent. [I had become a fugitive soon after my 18th birthday.] I applied to more than 120 places, desperately seeking a job, any job, but no one would hire me. MCDONALD'S REFUSED TO LET ME WORK SCRUBBING THEIR TOILETS! The halfway house where I was forced to stay came close to sending me back to prison but I was finally able to get a very temporary very low-wage job.)



("I have 20 years of experience, but I can't afford to fix my car, see a doctor for my headaches or save for my child's future."

---a school teacher in Raleigh, North Carolina, quoted on the front cover of TIME, 9.24. 2018.)



("He would've had a bigger career if he'd been able to swallow shit, if he'd been able to play the game."

---Nan Goldin, speaking about photographer Peter Hujar. The quote is from an article by Edward Guthmann, San Francisco Chronicle, 1.19. 2014.)



("There has to be a point at which you don't compromise anymore, but that may mean that you won't get anyone to sell your paintings..."

---Stephen Sondheim, quoted in The New Yorker, 6.23. 2014.)



("To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered."

---Voltaire)






("I had never handled money. Not even a penny. Money was the key to everything that was wrong with the world..."

"Rain and I weren't sports fans, what with the obsession over winning and losing."

"Her sigh cut me off. 'Maybe you're better off at Camp Purple Haze. I hate to think of what would happen to you in the real world.'"

---Cap, in Gordon Corman's 2007 novel SCHOOLED. A hippie, raised in isolation by his grandmother named Rain in the remnants of a rural commune, is suddenly thrust into 8th grade classes in a public school. In the end, the hippie kid becomes the school hero. The book was written for young people. "Cap had never watched television." [Back cover blurb.])



("...we didn't grow up in wheatgrass-covered huts on some hippie commune."

"FUCK. ALL. THAT. We live in the real world."

---Michelle Davis and Matt Holloway, in their book THUG KITCHEN: The Official Cookbook: Eat Like You Give A Fuck. The authors were each 29 years old, white, and living in Hollywood, California in 2014 when the book of vegan recipes was published. They have a wildly popular blog, and the book was a "#1 New York Times bestseller".)



("The drugs are too good to stay only in the jungle or in the expensive yurts of exclusive trustifarian psychonaut set-ups. Too many people who cannot access such places need these medicines."

---psychiatrist Ben Sessa, writing about psilocybin, MDMA, and similar substances. Facebook, August 2018.)






One of my cellmates in the federal section of the jail in Oakland, California where I was incarcerated in 1985 (before being convicted of "Failure To Appear In Court" 13 years previously) was the spy Jerry Alfred Whitworth, a former Senior Chief Radioman in the U.S. Navy. He was part of the Walker spy ring which operated for 18 years. Whitworth was a rather stupid and acutely selfish person who sincerely believed he was quite smart. (He very much reminded me of a stereotypical Republican.) He used to toss cheese toast to me in the dining hall like the toast was a frisbee. So surreal!


Whitworth was found guilty and sentenced to 365 years in prison.


("The government justified the severity of Whitworth's punishment by contending that he was the 'principal agent of collection' for the secrets relayed to the KGB.")


("'Jerry Whitworth is a zero at the bone' who betrayed his country because 'he believes in nothing.'"

--Sentencing Judge John Vukasin.)


("...the KGB regarded the Walker-Whitworth operation to be the most important...in the KGB's history."

--Vitaly Yurchenko, KGB officer.)


("Billions of...dollars were expended to repair leaks created by Walker and his network..."

--Fredric L. Rice)





Paul Sjeklocha, a.k.a. Paul Cutter, is someone I knew because he was a fellow prisoner (and a fellow member of TOASTMASTERS) at Safford Federal Correctional Institute in Arizona, where I served time after being convicted of Failure To Appear In Court. (Safford FCI is where Watergate conspirator John Ehrlichman [former Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs in Nixon's White House] was imprisoned...It is also where prominent anti-Vietnam war activist and draft-resister David Harris served part of his sentence. Harris, who was once married to singer Joan Baez, wrote the 1982 autobiographical book DREAMS DIE HARD--Three Men's Journey Through the Sixties, detailing how he, Dennis Sweeny, and Allard Lowenstein were at Stanford University and worked together as civil rights activists and anti-war organizers. Years later, Sweeny, a paranoid schizophrenic, murdered Lowenstein, a one-term congressman.) Paul (a quite manic but very convincing teller of endless stories of his incredible bravery in the face of a slew of dangerous situations in far away exotic places) had been convicted in 1985 of unlawfully selling missiles to Iran. Paul was known to privately say that he was working hand-in-hand with the CIA at the time he made the sale, and that he had their permission to do so. Shortly after I was released from Safford FCI, the 1985-1986 "Iran-Contra Scandal" came to light. (High-ranking members of the Reagan administration secretly orchestrated the the sale of weapons to Iran. The U.S. Congress had forbidden what the Reagan administration officials considered to be important funding to support a war that, with the assistance of the CIA, was being waged by the "Contra" rebels against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. The Reagan administration officials secretly diverted some of the money from the sale of weapons to Iran and used it to help fund the "Contra" rebels. Eventually 11 of the officials, including the U.S. Secretary of Defense, were indicted for committing crimes related to the "Iran-Contra Scandal".) In the wake of "Iran-Contra Scandal" revelations, Paul was released from Safford FCI on Appeal. Paul then failed to appear in court and became a fugitive. He was arrested in March 1996 in Arkansas.





Gary Webb, a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News newspaper in San Jose, California, wrote the "Dark Alliance" series of articles in 1996, which detailed how cocaine-dealing Nicaraguans (such as "Norwin Meneses", whose family was close to deposed Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza) were linked to the CIA-backed "Contra" rebels. Webb accurately showed that the CIA deliberately ignored cocaine smuggling by its "Contra" rebel-linked associates. I was friends with 2 Meneses brothers, fellow prisoners when I was at Safford FCI. One of them was a prison librarian, and both of them were members of the TOASTMASTERS group. Many years before the "Dark Alliance" articles by Webb, they told me that the CIA had cleared the way for their large-scale cocaine-smuggling activities. Webb spoke to me on the telephone from his home in Sacramento, California not long before he committed suicide in 2004, still quite upset that the San Jose Mercury News and the Los Angeles Times had falsely stated that he had recanted the facts of his investigation...








Perhaps because of the important reproductive programming that is shared by all animals, including human beings, many people mistakenly believe that an orgasm is the highest high that can be experienced.




("...most modern music is all about sex. Because sex is the electric current that keeps us moving and makes us human. Sexual love is the closest many of us get to transcendence, which is why it occupies such a huge portion of art and literature..."

---Mary McNamara, the Los Angeles Times, 10.1. 2009.)



(One of my favorite books is EROTIC ART--A Survey of Erotic Fact and Fantasy in the Fine Arts. Compiled by Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen, and published in 1968.

["This landmark book...sold in excess of 500,000 copies in its cloth edition."])



("There are more than 500 million copies of her books in print."

---back cover blurb on FIRST SNOW, a 2018 "contemporary romance" by Nora Roberts.)



(I have enjoyed viewing and reading the 1997 book DREAMS OF SPRING--EROTIC ART IN CHINA. The images were collected by Ferdinand M. Bertholet, with text by Reverend Yimen.)


(When I was 7 years old, I found a 16 mm film on the military base where I lived. I took it to my parents because my dad had a 16 mm projector. I watched the very short film with my parents. At night, two East Asian women clothed in flimsy yet chaste dresses passionately embraced one another while rolling around on a beach in Japan as small waves broke over them under a full moon. I saw these impressively beautiful images as being about ART and the mystery of the "forces of nature". My parents added the film to their tiny collection of home movies.)



("Sex and creative thought, the same kind of high. That's why Einstein looked just so loaded all the time."

---Robin Williams)



("I wanted to depict pleasure...physical pleasure...sensual...tactile."

---Mario Vargas Llosa)



("I spent two years working on this highly complex movie, loaded with FX and C.G.I. stuff, and the most memorable visual turns out to be Amy's, uh, rear in her jodhpurs."

---Shawn Levy, director of the 2009 movie Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, describing the audience reaction to actor Amy Adams, who played Amelia Earhart in the movie. The quote is from "Art Attack", by Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 6.1. 2009.)



("These fantasies and thoughts exist in every person. Why is it that people are willing to go to a movie and watch someone get blown to bits for no reason and nobody wants to see two girls kissing or two men snuggling?"

---Madonna)



("You had a billion dollars' worth of art on the walls, and I'm the only guy that was ever there that didn't ooh and aah over the art. I'd just as soon have a bunch of old Playboy covers on the wall."

---Warren Buffett, quoted by Alice Schroeder in THE SNOWBALL: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life. Buffett was describing spending a weekend with Ronald and Nancy Reagan at the residence of Walter Annenberg.)



("Lets face it--sex makes people crazy."

---Ward Cates, M.D.)


("Everybody plays the fool sometime
There's no exception to the rule"

"I want to say it again
Everybody plays the fool"

---J.R. Bailey, Rudy Clark, and Ken Williams, in the song they wrote "Everybody Plays the Fool", which was recorded by The Main Ingredient and released in 1972.)



("Reginald Finger, an Evangelical member of the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, recently announced that he would consider opposing an HIV vaccine--thereby condemning millions of men and women to die unnecessarily from AIDS each year--because such a vaccine would encourage premarital sex by making it less risky."

---Sam Harris, in his 2006 book LETTER TO A CHRISTIAN NATION.)



...TWERKING...



("They thought I was shallow, but this shit is deep as fuck!"

---Lady Gaga, at a show in Las Vegas, quoted in Rolling Stone magazine in February 2019.)



("metallic liquid lip paint" from "Love Junkee cosmetics". Manufactured in China for "Tattoo Junkee" in Oxnard, California, 2019. The box is illustrated with a print of a photo of snarling purple lips, pierced with a metal ring.)



("Both are by law felony crimes punishable by long prison terms."

---Eugene Schoenfeld, M.D., writing about cunnilingus and fellatio [oral sex] in his 1968 book DEAR DOCTOR HIP POCRATES.)



("Strangely my attitude changed after I turned sixty, as if I had been freed from some demonic curse. I could see the world clearly. I felt I had put on an entirely new pair of glasses. Why was this? To put it succinctly it was because I could no longer involve myself in romantic affairs, no matter how much I clamoured and fumed. As soon as I realized this, the world, which earlier I could barely see through the swirling fogs of romance, became perfectly clear, as if the fog had melted away to clear sky."

"Now I see all that I have done up to this point as clearly and indifferently as if I were beholding the life of a stranger. When I was in the whirlpool I could not think at all."

---Uno Chiyo, translated from the Japanese by Rebecca Copeland. [From the introduction to THE STORY OF A SINGLE WOMAN.])



("The lights are on but you're not home, Your mind is not your own."

---Robert Palmer, in his song "Addicted to Love".)



("She looked up and saw his smile. It should carry a mental health warning: one glimpse and you'll forget your own will."

---the first words in HAVING THE BILLIONAIRE'S BABY, a 2009 romance novel by Sandra Hyatt.)



("...we do what we do for reasons that are, to us, both unknown and unknowable."

---my paraphrase of a something that I remember sex columnist and therapist Isadora Alman writing in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.)



("Next to pornography, supernatural horror is the most durable staple in our popular culture."

---Theodore Roszak)



("I feel you cannot have art without risk. If you can, it is not worth it. I am more concerned with mediocrity than pornography."

---Fred Grandy, actor who became a politician.)



("In Stanley v Georgia, 344 U.S. 557 (1969), the Court struck down a law prohibiting obscene media as 'wholly inconsistent with the First Amendment'. In so doing, Justice Marshall declared:

'Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving the government the power to control man's mind.'"

---Casey William Hardison, an American underground chemist who was convicted in 2005 of illegally making psychedelic drugs in the United Kingdom and who is alleged to have sold marijuana to an undercover law enforcement officer in Wyoming in 2018, in his October 12, 2020 Notice of Motion to Dismiss Indictment.)



("In early September 2012, The New Yorker found its Facebook page blocked for violating the site's nudity and sex standards. Its offense: a cartoon of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Eve's bared nipples failed Facebook's decency test."

---Evgeny Morozov, "You Can't Say That on the Internet", 11.16. 2012, The New York Times.)



("We are so terrified of inspiration that sometimes we are moved to suppression."

---Anna Quindlen)



("I'll take my clothes off and it will be
shameless,
'cause everyone knows that's how you get
famous."

---Lily Allen)



("Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented."

---Willem de Kooning)



("The pleasures of sex count in his work of the sixties."

---Peter Schjeldahl, describing the art of Willem de Kooning.)



("Fashions may change, but sex appeal is always in style."

---Frederick [of Hollywood] Mellinger)



("WAP", an EXTREMELY explicit song about sex, was recorded by American rapper Cardi B, featuring vocals by American rapper Megan Thee Stallion. It was released through Atlantic Records on August 7, 2020.

"WAP" debuted at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

"WAP" was the most-acclaimed song of 2020, according to a compilation of rankings made by the BBC.

"WAP" had the most-searched lyrics on Google in 2020.)



("If you're hungry, you don't wait until your partner gets home to have a slice of toast."

---Lily Allen, speaking about masturbation in an interview with Sinead Garvan, late 2020, via BBC.)



(I greatly admire the 1866 painting by Gustave Courbet, "L'Origine du Monde"...

I also greatly admire the short story “The Metal Bowl” by Miranda July [born in 1974], published in The New Yorker, 9.4. 2017.

[The psychedelic art book AYAHUASCA VISIONS: THE RELIGIOUS ICONOGRAPHY OF A PERUVIAN SHAMAN by Pablo Amaringo and Luis Luna was published by North Atlantic Books in 1991. (I have ingested ayahuasca made by Pablo Amaringo.) In the 1990s the unmarked warehouse/offices of North Atlantic Books (and MONDO 2000 magazine) were located approximately one block from the 924 Gilman punk music club. (On Gilman Street around 1999 or 2000 approximately a block from North Atlantic Books was a large colorful mural showing dinosaurs playing cards that was painted by cartoonist Larry Todd, who drew and wrote the "Dr. Atomic" underground comix, including the 1974 classic "Dr. Atomic's Marijuana Multiplier" which allegedly showed how to chemically "isomerize" marijuana extracts and "...increase...potency up to 5 or 6 times!" In 1975 he drew the cover and illustrated THE BOOK OF ACID by Adam Gottlieb. ["The One" was marijuana oil mixed with powdered marijuana leaf and originally was sold in pre-loaded glass pipes. Each pipe had a glass bubble with a small hole instead of a bowl. I was used to smoking cheap ($85 per kilogram) Mexican marijuana and had never heard of smoking marijuana oil.

(From The December 1970 issue of MICROGRAM, published by the federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs: "'The One', a black resinous substance purported to be natural tetrahydrocannabinol and resin extracted from marijuana, has been seen in northeastern United States. The material is believed to be spread on bread and eaten, and is also reportedly smoked in a pipe.")

I first smoked "The One" in 1971 in Oakland, California at the house of Peter Hans Loschan where I was living with several other people. Peter paid the rent by working as a very skilled glassblower making complex laboratory equipment at R & D, a company in Berkeley. I have forgotten why the people with "The One" came to the house, but I assume it was to get Peter to make more glass pipes for them, which he did, quite a few. I became a hardcore cannabis oil user for decades. I owned several of the 1975 "Isomerizer" machines like the ones seen in ads in High Times magazine from that time. (NOT the space-age looking "Isomerizer" model that came later.) The process of "isomerization', as described by the manufacturer, required the use of a very toxic chemical and did NOT seem to increase potency. I was fond of the machines (instead of using them to "isomerize" cannabis oils, I used them to make simple "full spectrum" cannabis oils) because they were very easy to operate (although they required a lot of ice) and could be set up in a bathroom in less than 3 minutes.]) The computer book publisher Peachpit Press was located directly across the intersection from 924 Gilman. One of their books on computer graphics from the 1990s showed how they designed a psychedelic poster for an event featuring Timothy Leary. ("Lucy" is sometimes considered to be the most famous fossilized bones ever found. Discovered in 1974 in Ethiopia and at the time the oldest human remains known, they were said to have been named after the Beatles song that was playing on a tape machine as they were found, "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds". The team of paleoanthropologists that first saw the "Lucy" bones founded the Institute of Human Origins in Berkeley. The IHO was located in the same building as Peachpit Press.) For several years, nearly every night I went and searched through the dumpster outside the North Atlantic Books/MONDO 2000 warehouse. I found many interesting items (corrected manuscripts, unsolicited submissions, photographs, alternate versions of covers, etc.). Miranda July, who wrote plays that were staged at 924 Gilman, is the daughter of Richard Grossinger, the author who founded North Atlantic Books. July grew up in Berkeley.])

(Parapsychologist Jean Millay co-invented stereo brain wave biofeedback light sculpture with former LSD cook Tim Scully which was demonstrated at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1972.

"In the late 1970s we conducted another study designed to examine the possible effects that smoking cannabis had on the EEG of volunteers. In this study we used...two Aquarius Electronics brainwave biofeedback analyzers with the phase comparator, designed by Tim Scully."

---Jean Millay, in "The Influence of Psychedelics on Remote Viewing". Millay served as the president of the Parapsychology Research Group in San Francisco for 6 years. She wrote the 1999 book MULTIDIMENSIONAL MIND: REMOTE VIEWING IN HYPERSPACE, which was published by North Atlantic Books. The cover of the book has a blurb by Uri Geller, who has been proven to be a liar and a fraud...)

("A worker from Berkeley’s Urban Ore has opened a museum celebrating...wingnuts.

Started by employees of the salvage store during a union drive, the Wingnut Museum — honoring both the tiny metal doodads and the 'freaks and weirdos' of the world — now has a permanent Berkeley home."

---Nathan Dalton, 8.9. 2024, Berkeleyside.


I often wear a wingnut on a chain as a necklace.

For years, I lived in a vehicle very near Urban Ore on Gilman Street. I once owned a rare first edition, first printing of Allen Ginsberg's HOWL that I found in a bin of used books at Urban Ore and bought from them for a dollar. It had a signed inscription to Ginsberg's former neighbor, noting that the neighbor had watched Ginsberg through their windows as the poem was being written. The former neighbor was mentioned by name in an early version of the poem. [I sold the book to rare book dealer Jeffrey Pressman.])



(In May 2010 the Picasso painting "Nude, Green Leaves and Bust" sold for $106.5 Million...)



(It has been said that the "paisley" design is a stylized representation of a curled palm frond, a very ancient symbol of fertility.)



("What really counts is to strip the soul naked. Painting or poetry is made as one makes love--a total experience, all prudence thrown to the winds, nothing held back."

---Joan Miró)



("...more than anything, I believe in love."

---Sandy Stier, a lesbian living in Berkeley.)



("Ilona is one of the greatest artists in the world. She is a great liberator. Other artists use a paintbrush. Ilona uses her genitalia."

---Jeff Koons)



("Sex, and more specifically, group sex, became ways in which to become one with the universe, or 'self-obliterate'. Kusama's obsession with orgies, then, is no different from her obsession with polka dots or Infinity rooms."

---Gunseli Yalcinkaya, dazeddigital, 5.26. 2020, writing about the late 1960s activities of the artist Yayoi Kusama.)



("That was something that happened when couples took acid with other couples. What part about being a hippie don't you understand?"

---Stephen Gaskin, replying to Jim Windolf, who had asked what a "four marriage" was. Vanity Fair, 4.5. 2007.)



("I am not interested in money. I just want to be wonderful."

---rumored to have been said by Marilyn Monroe. From the 1988 book MARILYN: NORMA JEANE, written by Gloria Steinem, who is said to have worked for the CIA before she became a feminist leader.

In the 1950s when I was around 5 years old, my father showed me a copy of the famous "Golden Dreams" nude Marilyn Monroe calendar photograph, saying "Don't tell your mother.")



("I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees."

---Pablo Neruda)



("...men's testosterone levels jump when a new woman enters the room. The simple fact of her novelty is physically exciting. But the same is true for women and their hormones when a new man enters the room. For social, moral, aesthetic, parental, religious, or even mystical reasons, we may choose to live with one partner for life, but our instincts nag at us. There is nothing like being new for someone."

---Diane Ackerman, in A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SENSES.)



("I have a deep everlasting love of rough looking Hell's Angel kind of guys..."

"The other guys were all tripping, but he was not into that."

---Stacy Kreutzmann Quinn, daughter of Grateful Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann, describing how, when she was young, she loved Pig Pen. From deadessays dot blogspot dot com.)



("I'm hooked on a feelin', I'm high on believin' that you're in love with me."

---from 1968 pop song lyrics written by Mark James.)



("We try to take off our clothes but are unable to take off the idea of them."

---Geoffrey O'Brien, in DREAM TIME--Chapters from the Sixties.)



I love making erotic hallucinographic designs!



("LOVE IS HELLA DEEP"

---carved into a bus-stop bench)



("When you're looking for someone, you're looking for some aspect of yourself, even if you don't know it. What we're searching for is what we lack."

---Sam Shepard.)



Please Note:

WOMEN OWN THEIR BODIES. Any man who tries to impose his will or belief system on any woman or any man is acting wrongfully. Any politician who tries to impose their will or belief system on any woman or any man is acting wrongfully. Any religious leader who tries to impose their will or belief system on any woman or any man is acting wrongfully. Sexual harassment, sexual assault, and rape are far more common than many people want to admit. For that reason, and for MANY other important reasons, it is absolutely essential that ALL women have access to safe abortions!!!



("MAGA Lawmaker Censured for Calling Fatal Child Abuse a ‘Benefit to Society’"

by Ryan Bort, Rolling Stone, February 23, 2023.


"It’s hard to imagine a Republican politician saying something so abhorrent that the party would actually discipline them for it. The GOP has tolerated if not condoned white nationalism, calling for violence against political opponents, an attempt to overthrow the democratic process, and fabricating an entire backstory to con voters in a swing district.

The party, at least in Alaska, seems to have drawn a line at touting the benefits of children dying from rampant abuse, with the state House voting 35-1 on Wednesday to censure Rep. David Eastman for doing just that during a committee hearing on Monday. Eastman cast the lone dissenting vote.

'In the case where child abuse is fatal, obviously it’s not good for the child, but it’s actually a benefit to society because there aren’t needs for government services and whatnot over the whole course of the child’s life,' Eastman said during the hearing on Monday.

Eastman was asked to clarify. 'talking dollars,' he said, adding that 'it gets argued periodically that it’s actually a cost savings because that child is not going to need any of those government services that they might otherwise be entitled to receive.'

Eastman is a die-hard Trump supporter with ties to the Oath Keepers. He recently fought off an effort to boot him from the state legislature for violating the 'disloyalty clause' in Alaska’s constitution by rallying for Trump in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021, although he says he never entered the Capitol.

Eastman has been censured before, too. The Alaska state House, then controlled by Democrats, voted in 2017 to rebuke Eastman for telling multiple news outlets that some women get pregnant on purpose so they can travel to a big city. 'We have folks who try to get pregnant in this state so that they can get a free trip to the city, and we have folks who want to carry their baby past the point of being able to have an abortion in this state so that they can have a free trip to Seattle,' he told the Associated Press.
'You have individuals who are in villages and are glad to be pregnant, so that they can have an abortion because there’s a free trip to Anchorage involved,' he later told Alaska Public Media.

Eastman has lashed out at Democrats this week for criticizing his position that children dying from abuse is a good thing, arguing that he could never 'support child abuse when I’ve staked my entire political career arguing for the opposite,' according to the AP.
Eastman described abortion as the 'ultimate form of child abuse' in a 2017 resolution.")




 


I intensely dislike politics. I intensely dislike organized religion. I intensely dislike sports. I intensely dislike video games and computer games. I intensely dislike gambling. I intensely dislike drinking beverages that contain alcohol. I intensely dislike using methamphetamine. I intensely dislike Frank Sinatra, and I intensely dislike Frank Sinatra's singing. I intensely dislike Elvis Presley, and I intensely dislike Elvis Presley's singing.


(American kitsch "poet" Rod McKuen [1933-2015] was apparently very popular with some of the many stupid and tasteless people who called America home in the late 1960s, selling more than 60 million books. He also wrote and sang songs, selling more than 100 million records. McKuen had no talent and was dishonest. He brazenly lied to promote his mostly meaningless feel-good garbage. I never met anyone in Berkeley who said they liked his product.

Thomas Kinkade [1928-2012] was a so-called "artist" who painted hideously sentimental trash. He became very popular by appealing to clueless mainstream fools. He said that one in every 20 homes in America had a copy of one of his disgustingly ugly paintings. He died of acute intoxication caused by alcohol and diazepam.)


(As part of modern recruitment efforts, the U.S Army [and the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Air Force] have launched eSports teams that play computer games like "Call of Duty: Warzone" for public viewing.

"No, I won't stand for that. I'm bigger than you."

---Green Beret bully Joshua David [aka "Strotnium"], an official full-time army game-player, in a message to someone who had asked him about the massacre at My Lai.

[from a 7.9. 2020 vice.com article by Matthew Gault.])


I INTENSELY DISLIKE THE 2019 "NEOTRADITIONAL-STYLE" COUNTRY MUSIC ALBUM "HEARTACHE MEDICATION" BY JON PARDI. HE AND HIS TRULY DISGUSTING LYRICS CAUSE MUCH HARM BY PROMOTING THE USE OF ALCOHOL. HIS INSANELY IGNORANT AND SELFISH PHILOSOPHY LITERALLY CAUSES ME TO VOMIT.


("...the over-produced nothingburgers that currently dominate airwaves."

---Madison Vain, Esquire, 7.8. 2020, describing much American country music. Example: "Luke Bryant earned his 25th No. 1 cut this week with 'One Margarita'". ["Tiki bars tik'n, pouring all weekend/ Clouds ain't leakin' no rain"])


("I stopped off at a Texaco
Bought a Slim Jim and a Coke"

---James Earl Yeary, Lance Alan Miller, and Marvin Green, in a 2020 song they wrote that was performed by Tim McGraw at the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville, Tennessee for the Academy of Country Music Awards show seen on television on September 16, 2020.)


("Ain't gotta listen to me' but all I'm sayin',
Ain't nothin that a beer can't fix
Ain't no pain it can't wash away"

---Julian Bunetta, Ryan Tedder, Thomas Rhett, and Zachary Philip Skelton, in a 2019 song they wrote that was performed by Thomas Rhett at the Grand Ole Opry House in Nashville, Tennessee for the Academy of Country Music Awards show seen on television on September 16, 2020.)


("You've got a million dollar talent, son, but a ten-cent brain."

---Roy Acuff, speaking to Hank Williams about Williams' alcohol problems. The quote is from a 2005 book by Paul Hemphill LOVESICK BLUES: The Life of Hank Williams.)







("...Hitler's orders were followed until the very end, even when they were plainly mad and cost millions of lives, including those of his own soldiers. From Stalin to Mao to Idi Amin, the twentieth century surely gave plenty of proof that psychotic leaders...can sometimes infect whole populations with their madness."

---Adam Kirsch, The New Yorker, 1.9. 2012.)




(TO HATE LIKE THIS IS TO BE HAPPY FOREVER by Will Blythe, 2006, is a genuinely disgusting book about the Duke-North Carolina basketball rivalry. It appears that the author, most of his associates and most of his heroes are all utterly unaware that they are suffering from very serious mental illness. The dust jacket photo of the sports fan author shows him holding a bottle of beer...



["Sports is like war without the killing."

---Ted Turner, paraphrasing George Orwell.]



["You hallucinate a lot. I have seen snakes and mountain lions that weren't there. I once saw a fluffy dog and thought it was a baby bear. I freaked-out thinking the mama bear was going to be near."

---Hellah Sidibe, a 30-year-old Mali-born former professional football player who was running from California to New York, quoted by Libby Dawes, BBC News, 4.20. 2021. "Most terrifyingly, and sadly not a hallucination, Sidibe was also chased by a woman threatening him with a knife...he has no idea why..."]



["Many young people are not joining the alcoholic brotherhood of their parents."

"This rejection of alcohol as a socializer...acted to create distance and ill will between parent and child."

---Marc Pilisuk, Lilyan Binder, Claire Brady, Sandra Broemel, Robert Hart, Ann Ohren, William Smolak, and Susan Cady in their essay "Becky and the Telegraph Avenue Lifestyle", which was published in the 1971 book POOR AMERICANS: How the White Poor Live. The essay, first published in the periodical "Transaction: Social Science and Modern Society", was about a young woman and what she experienced while frequenting a section of Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, California in an area that is very close to the University of California, Berkeley campus. Becky was interviewed between November 1969 and January 1970.]



["Despite...avoiding alcohol becoming more socially acceptable...those choosing not to drink this holiday season are often still hit with...'Why aren't you drinking?'"

---Sara Moniuszko, CBS News, 11.22. 2023. Note that she writes that avoiding alcohol is "becoming" more socially acceptable. (According to CBS News, apparently it is currently NOT socially acceptable for people in Biden and Trump's mainstream America to avoid alcohol...)]



["When I was in high school, I was never exposed to any drinking. A little marijuana and a drop of LSD, but no drinking. Even in college, there was virtually no drinking. An occasional bottle of Boonesfarm was seen and someone made mead in his dormroom, but basically, drinking was something that 'frat boys' did and a frat boy was persona non grata in the Residential College in 1969. Drinking was for old people. It was for frat boys, squares, and your parents."

---law professor Ann Althouse, who was born in 1951. Althouse.blogspot.com, 9.22. 2018.

"Exactly. Drinkers were lame."

---wild chicken, in a comment.]


[Indeed, genuine hippies were not into using alcohol. Most of the many counterculture people who were into using alcohol seemed to call themselves "freaks". For instance, in 1969 the radicals who published the underground newspaper the Berkeley Tribe lived in a local commune called the "Red Mountain Tribe", named after Gallo's cheap Red Mountain wine that came in one gallon jugs.]



["...I don't want to say Mickey was drunk, but he spent about half an hour trying to make a phone call from a grandfather clock..."

---former major league pitcher Jim Bouton, describing Mickey Mantle, in a 1984 National Public Radio interview with Terry Gross. Bouton wrote the 1970 book BALL FOUR. NPR host Dave Davies said the book mentioned New York Yankees baseball players "...popping amphetamines like candy...", 7.12. 2019.]



("Masked cheerleaders in an empty stadium."

---KCBS, 5.10. 2020, describing sports on Mother's Day in South Korea.)



["DUI murder prosecutions in California are based on a 1981 state Supreme Court ruling that allowed fatal drunken driving crashes to be charged as second-degree murders. The state's high court ruled that DUI meets the malice standard required for murder because it shows a conscious disregard for human life."

---Gillian Flaccus, West County Times, 9.29. 2010.]



[Researchers Pal-Orjan Johansen and Teri Krebs from Norway's University of Science and Technology in Trondheim said "...in a report published last year in the British Journal of Psychopharmacology that a single dose of LSD was a highly effective treatment for alcoholism."

---Tony Paterson, The Independent, 9.4. 2013.]



["...dangerously belligerent..."

---Sports Journalist Bill Plaschke, describing baseball fans in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times, 4.21. 2011. Plaschke has been named National Sports Columnist of the Year by the Associated Press four times.]



["League vows review after wild brawl erupts between Mississippi State and Tulsa at end of Armed Services Bowl"

---CBS News morning headline, January 1, 2021, about a football game in Texas.

"...the teams became involved in a large brawl on the field, with players punching and kicking one another."

"'The one thing I'll say is our program, our guys, we're a team that are going to stand up for each other and we're going to battle', Tulsa coach Greg Montgomery said. 'We talk about faith, family, football, and family's going to take care of family. We're a team that has battled all year long. We battled again today.'"]



[Some people "...use sports to vent inchoate, barely acknowledged hostility..."

---Reviewer Mick LaSalle (writing about the movie Big Fan), the San Francisco Chronicle, 10.23. 2009.]



[Larry Nassar, a former doctor for USA Gymnastics who was also a teacher and sports medicine physician at Michigan State University, pleaded guilty to sexual assault and child pornography charges. His crimes were committed over a period of more than 20 years. More than 150 people who said they had been victimized by Nassar testified at his sentencing hearing in 2018.]



[The National Football League agreed to pay $765 million to settle thousands of player lawsuits over brain damage they got from playing football. The plaintiffs included 10 members of the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

---from an article by Tracy Connor, NBC News, 8.29. 2013.]



["...the 'winning is everything' sports culture..."

---the Journal of the American Medical Association, March 2011, describing America's obsession with sports.]



["Winners at war!"

---TV ad for the TV series "Survivor". The ad was shown during a 2.16. 2020 broadcast of a Michigan Wolverines vs. Indiana Hoosiers college basketball game.]



["Brian Z. France, the chairman and chief executive of Nascar, announced on Monday that he was taking an indefinite leave of absence 'to focus on my personal affairs' after being arrested on charges of drunken driving and drug possession."

---Kevin Draper, The New York Times, 8.7. 2018. (Nascar is the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing.)]



["What we don't get is how often winners will do whatever it takes to win."

---David Denby, in a review of the movie The Armstrong Lie, about Lance Armstrong, seven-time winner of the Tour de France bicycle race who cheated by secretly taking performance-enhancing drugs, and then repeatedly lied about his drug use. Denby writes about Armstrong that "His attitude is: Don't you get it?" He also writes that "What's most alive" in Armstrong "is his contempt for 'dickheads'--anyone who has ever held him responsible for anything." The New Yorker, 12.2. 2013.]



["...it's an ugly species we belong to and often we overlook the fact that football games and a lot of beer tend to bring out the worst."

---Peter Richmond, an author who likes sports, in an interview with Paul Kilduff, the East Bay Monthly, December 2011.]



(One of the many things I dislike about sports:

"'...play-by-play specialists who wallow in gee-whiz banality...'

— Jack Gould."

[from the Merriam-Webster dictionary])



["In 2014 forty-five of the fifty top-rated television broadcasts were football games."

---David Cook, The Sun, September 2015.]



["Our allegiance to football legitimizes and even fosters within us a tolerance for violence, greed, racism, and homophobia."

---Steve Almond, in AGAINST FOOTBALL--One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto.]



["'We're out on the field getting the Tigers ready for another successful run at a state title,' chirps the voicemail for the Katy High School athletics department. Before being asked to leave your 'growl' and 'pawprint,' you'll learn what the school's marching band sounds like, the number of national (three) and state (eight) football championships the Tigers have won and that Gary Joseph serves as both the head of the athletic department and the head football coach—all without anyone answering the phone. It's an understatement to say football is important to the Houston suburb, and if the impressive voicemail greeting doesn't convince you, consider the $72 million the district just spent on a new stadium. Yes, for high schoolers."

---Natalie Weiner, 8. 25. 2017, thebleacherreport dot com]



["Maybe it is time to ask why so many young, multimillionaire professional athletes commit violent assaults."

"...the fanatical importance we attach to winning sports competitions--from little league and grade school on up."

"...many of our most popular spectator sports are unabashed celebrations of violence."

"...the current culture and economy of sports invite the ugly results we so often read about."

"Are our lives otherwise so dull or devoid of meaning that we must cheer winners at any cost?"

---law professor Jay Sterling Silver, writing about a murder committed by football player Jovan Belcher. After the murder, Belcher killed himself. The San Francisco Chronicle, 12. 5. 2012.]



["Before I  put another notch on my lipstick case
Better make sure you put me in my place
Hit me with your best shot
C'mon hit me with your best shot
Fire away"

"Put up your dukes lets get down to it"

"Knock me down its all in vain
I get right back on my feet again"

---Edward Schwartz, in his 1980 hit song Hit Me With Your Best Shot, which was performed by Pat Benatar. "...heard at many baseball and soccer games..." according to Wikipedia.)



["...games, regardless of how much we may love them, are by definition trivial and superfluous..."

---Nick Paumgarten, The New Yorker, 2010.]



["When you come to the ballpark, you're walking into a place that is all deception and lies...There's nothing truthful at the ballpark."

---Barry Bonds, quoted in Jeff Chang's book CAN'T STOP WON'T STOP--A History of the Hip-Hop Generation.]



["It would seem we reward the careers closest to childhood skill levels---throwing and kicking balls, or make-believe and play-acting."

---Pamela Boyd, in a letter to the editor, USA TODAY, 11.13. 2009. Boyd was criticizing the extremely high salaries paid to some sports coaches.]



["If you told nine guys to sit down in a waiting room in a dental office, they'll probably start talking about sports."

"Men, to the best of my knowledge, don't even read. When's the last time you heard a man say, 'I've been reading a great book, you'd really like it'?"

---Bryan Goldberg, who, with a few of his friends started the sports website Bleacher Report, which later sold for more than $200 million. Goldberg then founded Bustle, an online publication for women. The quotes are from an article by Lizzie Widdicombe, The New Yorker, 9.23. 2013.]



["Randall Brent Woodfield was the handsome scion of a respected family on the Oregon coast--a sports prodigy, a former president of the Christian Athletes at Portland State University, a one-time draft choice of the Green Bay Packers...and a convicted voyeur, exposer, rapist, and killer of women."

---Ann Rule (who knew and worked with serial killer Ted Bundy before he was arrested) in her book SMALL SACRIFICES--A True Story of Passion and Murder.]


["You will never stop fighting for me
(You will never stop)
You will never stop fighting for me"

---the last words in the 2019 Christian song "Fighting for Me" recorded by Riley Clemmons, and written by Clemmons, Jordan Sapp and Ethan Hulse.]



[Peter Rosenberg is "one of the most influential hosts on hip-hop radio."

"...one of the two or three books Peter has read."

---Andrew Marantz, The New Yorker, 4.7. 2014.]



["Kid can't read at 17,
The words he knows are all obscene..."

---Robert Hunter, in the lyrics he wrote for the song "Touch of Grey", which was first performed by the Grateful Dead in 1982. A 1987 recording of the song became the first and only hit record released by the band.]



["...she read a lot (unlike Trecartin, whose knowledge of literature and art history comes mostly from talking with people like Fitch)."

---Calvin Tomkins, describing Lizzie Fitch, who works with "video artist visionary" Ryan Trecartin. Influential art critic Peter Schjeldahl called Trecartin "the most consequential artist to have emerged since the nineteen-eighties." The New Yorker, 3.24. 2014.]







["A terrifying display of human idiocy."

---activist, describing the Running of the Bulls. KCBS, 8.3. 2013.]



[Ayn Rand was an advocate of the insanity of ego and competition. More than 25 million copies of her books have been sold. Still very much admired by many conservatives and capitalists, Rand was an amphetamine addict.


(Ayn Rand..."saw altruism as evil and selfishness as good."

She..."lived to see Alan Greenspan, a follower, lead President Gerald Ford's Council of Economic Advisors."

----from a review by T.J. Stiles of the book AYN RAND AND THE WORLD SHE MADE by Anne C. Heller [Nan A. Talese/Doubleday.] The San Francisco Chronicle , 11.1. 2009. Also see the book GODDESS OF THE MARKET: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns [Oxford University Press.])


("...Rand fueled her endless writing sessions...with amphetamines and by sticking herself with a needle to maintain 'focus'..."

---Nick Gillespie, in a review of the above-mentioned books in WILSON QUARTERLY, Autumn, 2009.)]




Competition is the problem, NOT the solution. COOPERATION IS THE SOLUTION!



["The only winning move is not to play."

---line from the 1983 movie Wargames.])













("The medium is the message."

---Marshall McLuhan)




Television is the tent-pole of America's national identity.




("Americans view...five hours of TV each day..."

---Alice Park, in an article about a report by a Harvard-led group. The report was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. TIME, 6.27. 2011)



("23 Fake Reality Shows That Everyone Believed Were Real"

---[disguised advertisement], Microsoft News, 1.19. 2021.)



("What to expect when you're expecting a teenager:

Binge-Watching"

---from a large ad for adoptUSkids.org depicting 2 female teenagers on a couch. One is unconscious with a TV remote control in her hand. The other is eating from a bowl of popcorn. The ad was at the "Pill Hill" bus stop [so-named because it is near multiple medical facilities] on San Pablo Avenue in Oakland, and was sponsored by The AD Council and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, September, 2019.)



("...YouTube...has been reckoning with the vast troves of misinformation...on its platform."

---Kevin Roose, The New York Times, 2.19. 2019.)




("...TV evangelists...pornographic bottoms...purple felt dinosaurs and insane white puppies..."

---A.S. Byatt, describing a few of the things that the "airwaves" are filled with. From the title story in her book THE DJINN IN THE NIGHTINGALE'S EYE.)


("...about a woman's right to be 'weird, dark, and crazy'."

---Charlotte O'Sullivan, Evening Standard, 7.21. 2023, in her very positive review of the film Barbie.)


("We were casually cruel to each other, and torment became a game for us. But that's nothing unusual. You see it on TV every day."

---Richard Lange, in SWEET NOTHING: Stories.)




("Watching television in the afternoon
Wasting my life away"

---John Balance and Peter Christopherson, in their song "Restless Day", recorded by the band Coil in 1984.)




("...it is impossible in the early 1980s to hear a sentence spoken by a child without an allusion to something shown on TV."

---Gary Shteyngart, in his book LITTLE FAILURE: A MEMOIR, describing living in New York City.)




("...frequently displaying the ugly sight of children being brainwashed by their parents."

---from the back cover blurb of the 1975 paperback reprint of SANITY, MADNESS, AND THE FAMILY--Families of Schizophrenics by R.D. Laing and A. Esterson.)




I am pretty certain that watching television (or movies) is not a good idea! Unfortunately, to make sense of most of what is being presented on a television or movie screen, people have to suspend the  disbelief they obviously should have.


("...much of self-identity is generated by television..."

---Steve Seid, in BAM/PFA [University of California, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive] ["FilmNotes"] Jan/Feb 2011.)


Apparently it doesn't take long for most people to forget that they are suspending disbelief and as a consequence actually buy into delusional mainstream propaganda....(Television "programs"...television "programming"...yikes!!!)


 ACTORS AND ACTRESSES ARE, BY DEFINITION, LIARS. PEOPLE WHO ENJOY BEING LIED TO ARE FOOLS. (INCLUDING ME.)


("You always love--you love anything you're watching if you're trapped."

---actor and director Jason Bateman, NPR, 4.14. 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many people were told to stay at home in order to slow down the spread of the virus. "...if you're like me, when you're trapped on an airplane, you've never seen a movie that was bad." Bateman stars in the Netflix series "Ozark". He plays a money launderer for the second largest Mexican drug cartel.)


One of the most horrible things about being held as a prisoner in a county jail was that from early in the morning until late at night, seven days a week, all the prisoners were forced to be in a cell with a loud TV showing mainstream programming. It was clear to me that we were being brainwashed. And tortured.


("...it's not a lie if you believe it."

---Jason Alexander, playing the character George Costanza in the TV series "Seinfeld".)


(In mid-2022 a libel trial involving Johnny Depp and his ex-wife Amber Heard was much discussed in America. Heard said that Depp sexually assaulted her with a glass liquor bottle while he was intoxicated on alcohol. [When he was younger, Depp dated Winona Ryder, and he got a tattoo reading "Winona Forever". After they were no longer a couple, Depp changed the tattoo to "Wino Forever". Heard said that the first time Depp hit her was after she laughed at the tattoo.]

["We drank together, we've had cocaine together, maybe a couple of times."

---Depp, testifying that he used drugs with his friend Marilyn Manson. Depp also said "I once gave Marilyn Manson a pill so he would stop talking so much."]

["You want to see crazy? I'll give you fucking crazy-"

---Depp, in a video, angrily speaking to Heard while pouring himself a glass of wine.]

["One hashtag, #JusticeForJohnnyDepp, has garnered more than 11 billion views globally, while just the actor’s name has more than 19 billion, and #JohnnyDeppisInnocent has garnered more than 3 billion."

---Sara Ashley O'Brien, CNN Business, 5.15. 2022.])


("Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities."

---Voltaire)


("'It doesn't happen by fairy dust.'

---Dr. Eric Topol, head of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, explaining that the reason there was a shortage of COVID-19 vaccine is that "Problems started with the Trump administration's 'fatal mistake' of not ordering enough vaccine... They also '...didn't provide the necessary funding.'"

---Carla K. Johnson, Brian Melley, and Karen Matthews (AP), San Jose Mercury News, 1.21. 2021, revised 1.22. 2021. Topol said the vaccine rollout so far had been a "major disappointment".

["In the play and novel Peter Pan, Peter teaches the Darling children to fly, using a combination of 'lovely wonderful thoughts' and fairy dust. In J.M. Barrie's 1928 Dedication to the play Peter Pan, The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, the author attributes the idea of fairy dust being necessary for flight to practical needs:

'...after the first production I had to add something to the play at the request of parents [who thus showed that they thought me the responsible person] about no one being able to fly until the fairy dust had been blown on him; so many children having gone home and tried from their beds and needed surgical attention.'"

---Wikipedia]

[My parents claimed that after I saw Peter Pan on TV in the 1950s when I was quite young I was completely convinced I could fly and that after hurrying to a bedroom, they caught me mid air as I jumped from the top bunk of some bunk beds, saving me from possible injury.])


 When Picasso accurately noted that "art is the lie that shows us the truth", he was referring to genuine art, not to movies or television. The extent to which disbelief must be suspended in order to comprehend and/or enjoy a movie or a television show is much, much, much greater than the extent to which disbelief must be suspended, if at all, in order to understand and/or enjoy a drawing or a painting. In the painting of a tobacco pipe, "La trahison des images" ("The Treachery of Images") by Belgian surrealist René Magritte, the words "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" ("This is not a pipe") are written beneath the image of the pipe. To contemplate and/or enjoy the meanings of the painting does not require the viewer to assume the depiction is really a pipe even for a moment. (I am not, of course, entirely able to avoid viewing television and movies, but mostly I try to limit myself to reading written reviews so that I can be well-educated about American television and movie "culture". Indeed, how could I resist reading a review titled "Conspiracies Abound, But Dear Old Dad Just Wants To Make LSD"?? [The review, by Tim Goodman, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, 9.8. 2008, was of the television series "Fringe" ...])





("In films, a tense, fast heartbeat is often mixed in with the musical score for scenes designed to be scary."

---Diane Ackerman, in A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SENSES.)





("TV has screwed up millions of people with their little rounded-off stories. Because that is not the way life is."

---Walker Percy)





("...cinema is not a passive presence relegated to the screen, but a dynamic force that leaps off the screen to enter our lives."

---from an item mentioning a book by David Thomson, THE BIG SCREEN: The Story of the Movies--And What They Have Done To Us, in BAM / PFA [University of California, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive] ["Readings On Cinema"] Nov/Dec 2012.)





("As long as I have cute Disney fabric, I'm going to keep making and wearing masks."

---Amber Elby, a novelist in Austin, Texas, quoted by Alexander Nazaryan, Yahoo News, 6.7. 2021.)





("Wonderful memories
Come into view
While cleanin' my rifle
And dreamin'of you"

---actor and singer Roy Rogers, the "King of the Cowboys", in his love song "Cleanin' My Rifle (And Dreamin' of You)", recorded in 1946. I liked watching Rogers [and his horse "Trigger" and his dog "Bullet"] on his television show in 1956 when I was 5 years old in North Carolina. Our family was interviewed by a reporter from the Goldsboro News-Argus, and I was quoted as saying that I wanted to be Roy Rogers when I grew up. [After graduating college, Andy Griffith taught music and drama at Goldsboro High School. Carl Kassel was the news announcer on the National Public Radio program "Morning Edition" from 1979 through 2009. Kassel was mentored by Griffith when Kassel was a student at Goldsboro High.]

 "Happy Trails" was the well-known theme song of the Rogers show.

["The 'trails' in Happy Trails refers to the multi-image visual effect that would occur from LSD use. For example, if you waved your hand in front of your face, you would see images of your hand from where the wave began to where it ended."

---Lyserger, on psychedelicsight.com, commenting on why a 1969 Quicksilver Messenger Service album was called "Happy Trails".])





("...a slippery, mutating world that harks back to the kaleidoscopically paranoid work of Philip K. Dick..."

---John Powers, in his review of the Netflix television series "Maniac", a show about 2 people taking part in the trial of an experimental drug. Vogue, October 2018.)





(Worth reading: THE MOMENT OF PSYCHO--How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America To Love Murder. By David Thomson, 2009. About the 1960 movie Psycho.)





(One of my lovers was a psychiatric nurse. I helped her operate a large antiques collective she owned in the Niles area of Fremont, California. I had many intensely memorable experiences with her at a cabin she owned in nearby Sunol. Niles was an early site of the American movie industry and many films were shot there, including The Tramp, featuring Charlie Chaplin. Bosco was the name of a dog in Sunol who was elected honorary mayor and served until his death in 1994. In 1990, the Chinese newspaper the People's Daily reported Bosco's tenure as an alleged example of the failings of the American electoral process.)

("A restaurant calling itself Bosco's Bones and Brew opened in Sunol in 1999. It features a specially engineered Bosco-like stuffed dead dog behind the bar. The bartender lifts the dog's left rear leg to draw a pint of beer."

---RoadsideAmerica dot com.)




("What was that show Florence was on? With Mel's Diner? What the hell's the name of that show? I'm stumped. Now I won't be able to sleep today till I find out what the name of that show was."

---Norman Knudsen, a police officer, wearing a bulletproof vest while taking a break in a diner in Chicago at 0500 hours. WBEZ, "This American Life", 11.17. 2000.)




("We suffer under a mass national hallucination."

"Americans, regardless of income or social position, now live in a culture entirely perceived inside a self-referential media hologram of a nation and world that does not exist."

"Our national reality is staged and held together by media, chiefly movie and television images. We live in a 'theater state'."

"
In our theater state, we know the world through media productions which are edited and shaped to instruct us on how to look and behave and view the outside world."



---Joe Bageant, in a lecture, 2009.)





("Words were pulled like rabbits from a hat but nothing was said"

"It's just another movie, another song and dance"

---Pat MacDonald, in his song "Just Another Movie", released by Timbuk3 in 1986.)






I have never seen David Letterman or his television show.

I have never seen Oprah Winfrey or her television show.






("There is no difference in result between our entertainment industry and Asian or Soviet brainwashing programs. Our revulsion at these is irrational as we have developed more complex and subtle ways of achieving the same end. Far from being a conscious conspiracy, this is a nightmare dream from which we would do well to awaken at once..."

---Marshall McLuhan)





("Unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudorealities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms."

---Philip K. Dick, in a 1978 essay quoted by Michelle Dean, The New York Times Magazine, 3. 27. 2018. "He was talking, back then, about television and the Disney corporation.")





("Acting is different from posing or pretending. When done with precision, it bears a striking resemblance to lying. Stripped of the costumes and grand gestures, it presents itself as an unquestionable truth."

---David Sedaris)





("Acting is fundamentally a childish thing to pursue. Quitting acting--that is the mark of maturity."

---Marlon Brando)





("...I think I've been around long enough to know what's what."

---74-year-old actor Tom Selleck, saying that he can be trusted, in a TV commercial for a loan company. This "reverse-mortgage" ad is aimed at senior citizens. [Just curious--what EXACTLY is "what"? And how old do you have to be before the meaning of "what" becomes clear?])





("It's not the bloodletting that people come to see in the movies. It's vengeance. Getting even is important to the public. They go to work every day for some guy who's rude and they can't stand, and they just have to take it. Then they go see me on the screen and I kick the shit out of him."

---Clint Eastwood)





("...even though most folks will say they go to the movies to be entertained, if the truth be told lots of us, myself included, go to the movies to learn stuff. Often what we learn is life-transforming in some way. I have never heard anyone say that they chose to go to a movie hoping it would change them utterly---that they would leave the theater and their lives would never be the same---and yet there are individuals who testify that after seeing a particular film they were not the same."

"...there are certain 'received' messages that are rarely mediated by the will of the audience."

"The fact that some folks may attend films as 'resisting spectators' does not really change the reality that most of us, no matter how sophisticated our strategies of critique and intervention, are usually seduced, at least for a time, by the images we see on the screen."

"Whether we like it or not, cinema assumes a pedagogical role in the lives of many people."

---bell hooks, in her book REEL TO REAL--Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies.)





("All he needed to do was watch TV shows and movies, and take from them performances he liked--memorizing the lines, studying the body language, the facial expressions. He then practiced making the expressions in front of a mirror."

---Diane Belfrey, in her essay "Adrift", describing what her boyfriend, who was extremely clueless in social situations, discovered at the age of ten. The New Yorker, 11.7. 2016. [Children of immigrants have told me they used the same technique to learn how to be "American". And sadly, some children born to sixties "counterculture" parents have also described doing the same thing because they so desperately wanted to be like all their mainstream classmates.])



("...he was a great consumer of movies..."

"...I think of him as a kind of vampire of cinema..."

"...a very classic American archetype--a self-made man by turning himself into sort of his ideal fictional character--he's a storyteller of his own life where his personality is made up as a composite of all his favorite movie characters--they aren't necessarily heroic characters..."

---Sandi Tan, a critic, writer, and maker of films, describing Georges Cardona. When Tan was 19 and living in Singapore, she wrote and starred in a film, Shirkers, that was directed in Singapore by Cardona, who was then 40. Apparently Cardona was not a reliable person. He stole and hid the only copy of the film, and it was only discovered decades later, after Cardona died. KQED, 11.14. 2018.)



("'You should be an actress', people used to tell Abigail.

'You should be yourself', Cheryl says.

'No idea how to do that', Abigail confesses."

---A.M. Homes, in a short story set in Los Angeles in her book DAYS OF AWE.)





("Decades before the advent of the personal webcam, historian Christopher Lasch observed that his fellow Americans behaved as if they were perpetually on camera, posing and vamping. LOOK AT ME. Today, many of us behave as if life were a nonstop reality show."

"How did we come to see ourselves as stars?"

"'THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSON' was an educational cartoon series produced in 1972 by Sutherland Learning Associates. It was funded by a U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Office of Child Development grant, and screened regularly on the popular kiddie show 'Captain Kangaroo'."

"Each episode was accompanied by the same theme song that went 'The Most Important Person in the Whole Wide World is YOU'."

---Anneli Rufus, in her book STUCK: WHY WE CAN'T [OR WON'T] MOVE ON.)





("'The Truman Show Delusion' is a type of persecutory/grandiose delusion in which patients believe their lives are staged plays or reality television shows. The term was coined in 2008 after the 1998 film The Truman Show."

"There have been over 40 recorded instances of people suffering from 'The Truman Show Delusion' in the U.S., the U.K., and elsewhere." [As of September 2013.]

"One patient said 'I realized that I was and am the center, the focus of attention by millions and millions of people...my family and everyone I knew were and are actors in a script, a charade whose entire purpose is to make me the focus of the world's attention.'"

---Wikipedia


"'Given the recent feedback about our work, 'The Truman Show Delusion' may be more widespread than we know,' Dr. Joel Gold says."

---from a WebMd article by Suzanne Wright, 2013.)




("The role of knowledge and art, as the ancient Greeks understood, is to create ekstasis, which means standing outside one’s self to give our individual life and struggle meaning and perspective."

"Art and scholarship allow us to see the underlying structures and assumptions used to manipulate and control us."

"The vast stage of entertainment that envelops our culture is intended to impart the opposite of ekstasis."

"We have been conditioned to believe...that the aim of life is not to understand but to be entertained."

---Chris Hedges, "Retribution for a World Lost in Screens", truthdig.com, 9.27. 2010.)




("If reality can be obscured by entertainment, it makes confronting our problems much more difficult."

---Jay Youngdahl, the East Bay Express, 5.16. 2012.)



(Felix Kjellberg, a video game commentator born in Sweden in 1989, is better known as PewDiePie. As of July 2019, his YouTube channel has more than 98 million subscribers and 22 billion video views. In 2016, TIME named him one of the "The 100 Most Influential People In The World".)




(Taylor Swift? I kind of remember her. Wasn't she that promising young singer who got caught making pornography? So sad.


["More than 95,000 deepfake videos were disseminated online in 2023..."

---Elizabeth Napolitano, CBS News, 1.29. 2024.])




("Pollyannaism Kills"

---Cintra Wilson)


(It is worth noting that sometimes some forms of pollyannaism, such as religion, may provide some short-term benefits to some people, because when forced by logic to accept certain truths, such as the apparent fact that THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS FREE WILL and the fact that LIFE IS NOT FAIR, some people become very stressed, which can make them ill.

[A study of the surviving victims of the Wenchuan earthquake, which killed nearly 90,000 people, found that "...those who continued to believe the universe was fair suffered the least anxiety and depression."

---Matthew Hudson, The Atlantic, June 2016.])


("In Oliver Wendell Holmes's phrase, I 'rounded the sharp corners of the truth'..."

---Norman Cousins, in THE HEALING HEART, describing reassuring a distressed patient whose heart was beating too rapidly and irregularly. The patient's heartbeat soon slowed and became more regular.

Cousins wrote that Hans Zinsser wrote that one of Zinsser's colleagues believed that, when telling a patient their diagnosis, "absolute, uncompromising truthfulness is the only justifiable position, however cruel." Zinsser disagreed, writing that sometimes one should "adjust the truth to the judgement of wise kindness."

["Good feeling helps society make liars of most of us--not absolute liars, but such careless handlers of truth that its sharp corners get terribly rounded."

---Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes in his 1858 book THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST TABLE.]

Cousins also mentioned "...Louis Jolyn West, my boss in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences in the School of Medicine at the University of California-Los Angeles."

"He lectured on Rachmaninoff..."

[Cousins at that time also worked with the Brain Research Institute at UCLA.]

[Louis Jolyn ("Jolly") West is said to have been an officer in the United States Air Force Medical Service 1948-1956. He studied airmen who had been captured and brainwashed by Chinese Communists during the Korean War.

In 1962, he infamously injected an elephant with a large dose of LSD. After the elephant began having seizures, he gave it a large dose of an antipsychotic medication. The elephant died.

West was "professor and head, Department of Psychiatry, Neurology, and Behaviorial Sciences, Oklahoma University School of Medicine" in 1967 when an article he wrote with James R. Allen, MD, "The Green Rebellion--Notes on the Life and Times of American Hippies" was published in Sooner magazine. (The "Green" in "Green Rebellion" referred to marijuana.) The article was "...based on studies supported in part by a grant from the Foundations Fund for Research in Psychiatry, Inc." (said by some to have been a conduit for CIA funds), "by Dr. West's Fellowship Award at The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California", and by "NIMH".

West went to the San Francisco Bay area in September 1966, obtaining a large apartment in the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco. He and his associates set up a "...semi-permanent observation post. For the next six months an ongoing program of intensive interdisciplinary study into the life and times of the hippies was undertaken." The authors accurately noted "substantial" differences between counterculture types in Berkeley and hippies in San Francisco. In apartments along Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley "Old clothes, beards, beads, buttons, and bare feet abound. The aroma of marijuana can be discerned in the ambient air." There is "...a ferment of talk, quotation, counter-quotation, disputations...and generally noisy uproar. The walls are lined with books and background music is either ignored or, when attended, ranges from Bach to Brubeck to Baez." By contrast, in San Francisco the authors found that hippies had "...very few books..." and that in their apartments there the "music...is often deafening and precludes conversation." The article stated that for "ceremonial group intoxication" hippies in San Francisco used drugs like "psylocibin" and "bufotamine".

In 1969 West was hired by UCLA.

(West had studied people like Jack Ruby and he went on to study people like Patty Hearst.)

In the early 1970s West, with the enthusiastic support of Ronald Reagan, proposed establishing a "Center for the Study of Interpersonal Violence". Early drafts of the proposal described "brain surgery to change behavior". Many people protested against the proposal, including Black Panther leader Huey Newton. West met with Newton at Newton's apartment in Oakland, but was unable to change Newton's mind...

("Dr. West was among the first in psychiatry to demonstrate in scientific papers that inflicting painful punishment was not a necessary part of good child-rearing."

---Philip J. Hilts, The New York Times, 1.9. 1999.)])




("The 1983 Chic album "Take It Off" featured the song 'Your Love is Canceled' which compared a break-up to the cancellation of TV shows. The song was written by Nile Rodgers after a bad date Rodgers had with a woman who expected him to misuse his celebrity status on her behalf. 'Your Love Is Canceled' inspired screenwriter Barry Michael Cooper to include a reference to a woman being 'canceled' in the 1991 movie New Jack City."

---Wikipedia, late April 2021, in an article explaining some of the origins of the term "Cancel Culture"...)




("...It's like that drug trip I saw in a movie while I was on a drug trip..."

---Character in the animated science fiction sitcom Futurama.)




("Back in Renaissance Italy, town squares were packed with charlatans who sold all kinds of concoctions by exaggerating their therapeutic claims."

"'The first description we ever have in any European language of puppets on a string is a description of a charlatan troupe', says David Gentilcore, a historian in University of Venice Ca'Foscari who has extensively studied charlatans' role in the history of medicine."

---from a 6.30. 2021 BBC News article by Jose Luis Penarredonda.)




(In 1969 I was on LSD in a cafe on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley and a trippy-looking long-haired bearded young Jewish man from New York City walked in. I pretended to be a movie director and finger-framed him with my thumbs and index fingers. After we conversed, he invited me to his apartment, where the first thing I saw was a dried large flowering top of a marijuana plant nailed to the wall. Around the flowertop had been drawn a 13-cent U.S. postage stamp "Cannabis Sativa". The young man from New York was a quantity marijuana dealer, the first I had ever met. He loved late 1950s Cadillacs and playing blues harp. Within the next few days I started distributing pounds of Mexican marijuana that he and his partner "Kathy Kilo" fronted me.)




("Ghosts on drugs!"

---reviewer Kelly Vance, describing the movie Enter The Void, which director Gaspar Noe called a "psychedelic melodrama". East Bay Express, 10.6. 2010.)




("'I'm just glad he's on the inside of the set, and I'm on the outside, and I can turn him off whenever I want.'"

Muffy holds her drink up to the window's light and looks at it.

'And of course you never lie there awake in the dark considering the possibility that it's the other way around.'"

---David Foster Wallace, in his short story "Little Expressionless Animals", in his book GIRL WITH CURIOUS HAIR.)




("Kids like hallucinogenic weirdness, too."

---Announcer on KCBS radio, 11.27. 2018, speaking about the death of Stephen Hillburg, the creator of the cartoon show SpongeBob SquarePants.)




(Seth Rogen "...is best known for playing lovably goofy stoners..."

---Naomi Fry, The New Yorker, 5.14. 2018.)




("...to seek the limelight through a hoax is a sad commentary about what some people will do to get on TV."

"...abandoning adult behavior to the god of Being On TV is a serious matter with serious consequences."

---editorial [about Richard Heene and his wife, who falsely stated that that their young son had been accidentally sent aloft in a balloon], USA TODAY, 10.19. 2009.)




("In the Peacock series 'Killing It,' Brock [Scott MacArthur], an Everglades snake hunter and would-be YouTube influencer, gets shot in the face in an altercation over a sack of python eggs. It is the best thing that has ever happened to him.

The shooting leaves Brock minus one eye. But it’s captured on video, and the upload gets millions of views, giving him the lucrative viral success he’s wanted for years.

'American dream!' he says, beaming. 'Getting shot in the face!'"

---James Poniewozik, The New York Times, 12.26. 2022)




("it's not quite 'reality star says something self-aware' level of refreshing, but with three key electrolytes, it's pretty gosh darn refreshing."

---from the 2023 label on a bottle of "tropical mango"-flavored Vitamin Water.)




(Young boy, speaking to his mother: "Kids need candy! It's food energy! They said so on T.V.!"

Mother, speaking to herself: "How can you argue with The Gospel According to T.V.?"

---from the comic strip "For Better or for Worse", Lynn Johnston, the San Francisco Chronicle, 10.17. 2009.)




("...TV becomes church, with everyone shushing the non-believers."

---Emily Nussbaum, in a review of a television show. The New Yorker, 7.7. 2014.)




("Gazing at a soap opera on the restaurant TV, he remarks, 'I can't tell if this series is interesting, or if my own life is uninteresting.' Rarely has the fatal attraction of television been so concisely defined."

---Anthony Lake, in a movie review in The New Yorker, 8.28. 2023, describing "a waiter who stands idle" in a "lowly joint" in Fremont, California in the film Fremont.)




("'We must show the world there are true democrats in Turkey,' said Turgut Bey. He spoke fast because the soap opera was about to resume."

---Orhan Pamuk, in his 2002 novel SNOW, in a translation by Maureen Freely that was published in 2004. Bey, a former communist activist, is watching a popular Mexican television show with his daughter.)




("I'm someone who needs to be a part of something--Disney is kind of like a religious experience for me, only better."

---young woman employed at Disneyland, in a short story in A.M. Homes' DAYS OF AWE.)




("Oh greatest of the mass media, thank you for elevating emotion, reducing thought, and stifling imagination. Thank you for the artificiality of quick solutions and for the insidious manipulation of human desires for commercial purposes."

---six-year-old Calvin, 8.7. 1992, standing in front of a television set in the comic strip "Calvin and Hobbes", created by Bill Watterson. Calvin then places a bowl on the floor and gets on his hands and knees with his head on the floor, praying to the television set: "This bowl of lukewarm tapioca represents my brain. I offer it in humble sacrifice. Bestow thy flickering light forever.")




("It's only when the TV is on that I get a break to hear myself think."

---anonymous mother, in a letter to Parent's Press, July 2017.)




("...long-term exposure to the language of TV news is detrimental to a person's thought processes."

---Donna Woolfolk Cross, MEDIASPEAK--How Television Makes Up Your Mind.)




("'Dumbing down' is the deliberate oversimplification of intellectual content in education, literature, cinema, news, and culture. The term 'dumbing down' was originally movie-business slang, first used by screenplay writers around 1933, meaning '[[to] revise so as to appeal to those of little education or intelligence.'"

---Wikipedia, May 2021.


["In 2003, the UK Minister for Universities, Margaret Hodge, criticised 'Mickey Mouse' degrees as a negative consequence of universities 'dumbing down' their courses to meet 'the needs of the market'."])




(“Kenneth, what is the frequency?”

 --- William Tager, as he violently attacked television news anchor Dan Rather in 1986. Tager had the delusional belief that he personally was the target of harmful electronic signals that he was convinced were being beamed into his brain by CBS News.)




(Trump's participation in the presidential campaign "...may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS."

---CBS CEO Les Moonves, in a 2016 speech at a Morgan Stanley investors conference.)




("During a November 2018 episode of Saturday Night Live, comedian Pete Davidson [whose father was a firefighter that died in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001] joked about republican candidates' appearance, and said of Dan Crenshaw [a conservative republican who lost an eye in Afghanistan while serving in the U.S. military] "You may be surprised to hear that he's a congressional candidate from Texas and not a hit man in a porno movie. I'm sorry, I know he lost his eye in war or whatever..." Apparently many people were outraged by Davidson's comments, and he apologized in person to Crenshaw on the next episode of Saturday Night Live. Crenshaw then good-naturedly said of Davidson "He looks like if the meth from Breaking Bad was a person.")




("...photography may blind us to the beauty of a Vermeer painting, or an electronic keyboard may make us forget the magnificence of a Horowitz sonata..."

---James Randi, in the foreword to SECRETS OF MENTAL MATH, a book written by Arthur Benjamin and Michael Shermer.)






Here is a list of some of the movies I have viewed, in no particular order:


Un Chien Andalou
C'mon C'mon
Rebel Without a Cause
In the Mood for Love
Sorry to Bother You
Thunder Road
The Tramp
Gaslight
On the Beach

 ("I thought I heard a baby cry this morning"

  ---Bonnie Dobson, in her 1961 post-apocalyptic song "Morning Dew", which she wrote after seeing On the Beach, a 1959 movie that very deeply influenced me. My father made a 16mm film of my mother holding me as an infant near an area of Nagasaki devastated by an atomic bomb dropped by the United States. As a military brat growing up in the 1950s, almost every day I experienced INTENSE and EXTREME fear, thinking that nuclear war was imminent. [For years I ALWAYS kept a wet washcloth nearby when I slept because I had been told that if I put one over my nose and mouth after a nuclear explosion it would keep radioactive dust from going into my lungs...] "Morning Dew" was the opening song when the Grateful Dead played at the Human Be-In in San Francisco in 1967.

"...I...couldn't hear anything...then later...I heard a baby cry...hurt burned baby...that opened my ear and mind."

---Shigeko Sasamori [speaking to UCLA professor James Yamazaki in December 2004] describing what it was like to be a 13-year-old schoolgirl badly burned by the explosion of an atomic bomb that the U.S. military dropped on Hiroshima, Japan in 1945. Shigeko Sasamori was adopted by the American writer and peace activist Norman Cousins and she underwent more than 30 operations to repair some of the damage the explosion of the bomb caused. I spoke with Shigeko Sasamori and Norman Cousins' daughter, Oakland psychoanalytic psychologist Candis Cousins at an April 12, 2007 event honoring both of them and celebrating the 50th anniversary of Peace Action West.)

(The film On the Beach was based on the 1957 novel ON THE BEACH by Nevil Shute. The first edition of the book contained extracts from T.S. Eliot's 1925 poem "The Hollow Men", including "...on this beach..." and
"This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper"

Morrissey's words in the song "Everyday is Like Sunday", which was released in 1988, are said to have been inspired by Shute's novel.

A video I saw of the emotional reaction of a huge audience to Morrissey performing the song at the Move festival in Manchester, England in 2004 is INTENSE!)

The Day the Earth Stood Still (original)
Metropolis
Dancer in the Dark
Moonrise Kingdom
2001: A Space Odyssey

 (Alan Turing's paper "Can a Machine Think?" was published the same year I was born. In the paper, he predicted that computers would be having "human" conversations with people and other machines "in about 50 years". Filmmaker Stanley Kubrick later read what Turing had written, did the math, and made this 1968 movie.

"...in 2011, Samsung fought an injunction from Apple over alleged patent violations by citing the technology in '2001' as a predecessor for its designs."

---Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker, 4.23. 2018.)

The Wizard of Oz
Fantasia
A Clockwork Orange
Casablanca
Night of the Living Dead
The Royal Tenenbaums
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Groundhog Day
Gone with the Wind
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
The French Connection
Traffic
The Nice Guys
Let It Be
Kes
The Birds
Woodstock
The NeverEnding Story
A Scanner Darkly
Mandy

 ("A PRIMAL, PSYCHEDELIC RAGE-SCREAM OF A MOVIE"---Slash Film. [blurb from the front cover of the 2018 DVD package.])

Conspiracy Theory

(I saw it on TV while jailed in Berkeley, California for refusing to sign a ticket. The charge was dismissed the next day...)

Don't Look Back
La Chimera
Blade Runner
Blade Runner 2049
The Menu
Dune (2021 version)

(A "...significant source of inspiration for Dune was author Frank Herbert's experiences with psilocybin...", according to Paul Stamets in his book "MYCELIUM RUNNING: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World".

"The character Lieutenant Commander Paul Stamets on the CBS series 'Star Trek: Discovery' was named after the real Stamets. The fictional version is a astromycologist and engineer aboard the USS Discovery, and is credited with discovering how to navigate a mycelial network in space using a 'spore drive'."

---Wikipedia, 2022)

Dune: Part Two

(Zendaya [Zendaya Maree Stoermer Coleman, who was born and raised in Oakland, California] appears in Dune: Part Two. In 2022, she was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by TIME magazine.)

Scarface (cocaine version)
Donnie Darko
Dream Scenario

("catnip for lunatics"

is a quote from Dream Scenario. It is NOT a good thing to be catnip for lunatics.)

All the President's Men
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
Witness
Capturing the Friedmans
American Grafitti
All That Jazz
Secretary
The Matrix

("In The Matrix, Morpheus, a cool bald guy wearing sunglasses and a black crocodile trench coat, offers Keanu Reeves [and, by extension, the audience] a choice. Morpheus has just shown us that the world we thought was real is merely a simulation, and that the actual real world is mired in an interminable, violent power struggle between robots and humans. He proffers two capsules, one in each hand [they are reflected in his tiny sunglass lenses]. 'You take the blue pill,' he says, 'the story ends—you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.'”

---Caleb Madison, 12.13. 2021, The Atlantic.)

The Blues Brothers
Rock Around the Clock
American Beauty
Where the Crawdads Sing
Adaptation
The Gods Must Be Crazy

(The plot of this comedy involves a glass Coca-Cola bottle that is thrown from an airplane, changing the lives of an African tribe. A 1989 TV commercial for Irish Spring parodies The Gods Must Be Crazy by depicting a small box containing a bar of soap falling from an airplane onto the head of a member of a group of shirtless white "primitive" tribesmen. "Refreshing! Refreshing! Refreshing!")

Genghis Blues
Network
Ondine
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
How to Blow Up a Pipeline
Matilda the Musical (film)

(I like the brief video I saw posted onlne that cleverly synchronizes the Rob Zombie song "Dragula" with parts of the Revolting Children dance from this film.)

The Family Man
Dead Poets Society
Goldfinger
From Russia with Love
Frankenstein (original)
Bride of Frankenstein
I am Curious (Yellow)
Satyricon
Caligula
Cool Hand Luke
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?
When Harry Met Sally
The Big Lebowski
Nomadland
Tár
Minari
Princess Mononoke
The Phantom of Liberty

("But how can we not lie?")

The Men Who Stare at Goats
Everything Everywhere All at Once
Pride & Prejudice
The Cat Returns
Office Space
The Ladykillers (Coen version)
The Manchurian Candidate (2004 version)
Amélie
Coco
Sleepy Hollow
Mommie Dearest
Blackboard Jungle
Dick
Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery
Napoleon Dynamite
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
Borat
Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
A Day Without a Mexican
Do the Right Thing
Super Size Me
The Terminator
Pumping Iron

 (The 25th Anniversary Edition DVD, which includes an interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger, who says he smoked marijuana and used steroids.

"Was the brunette's roid-rat ex snarling in some unnoticed corner?"

---Toby, a character in the 2018 novel THE WITCH ELM by Tana French.)

Star Wars
Ben-Hur
The Breakfast Club
Garden State
Batman
Heathers
Sergeant York
The Longest Day
The Lord of the Rings (trilogy)
The Lost Weekend
Lady Sings the Blues
Yellow Submarine
Pecker
Whale Rider
King Kong (original)
Invaders from Mars (original)

("Gee Whiz!"

---Jimmy Hunt, playing 10-year old David MacLean in Invaders from Mars [1953], after seeing an alien spaceship. This movie frightened me when I was very young. [The interjection "gee whiz" is said to be a euphemistic alternative of the word "jesus".])

Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Rocky
Blue Sunshine

 (This is a cheap “trip-sploitation” 1978 horror movie about an imagined side effect of what, in 1972, was my favorite kind of LSD tablet, Blue Sunshine.)

 (“The sky was yellow and the sun was blue”

 ---Robert Hunter, in the words he wrote for the song "Scarlet Begonias", first performed live by the Grateful Dead in 1974. [I was very high on hashish and nitrous oxide at the office of my cool dentist, listening to a recording of this song, and he asked me if I wanted him to put a picture on the artificial crown he was placing on one of my teeth. “Yes--a blue sun!” I replied.])

The 40-Year Old Virgin
Arachnophobia
Peter Pan
Road to Morocco
Road to Bali
The Harder They Come
Easy Rider
The Wild One
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb
Flatliners
Dazed and Confused
Pulp Fiction
The China Syndrome
The Devil's Rain
Marjoe
Kumaré
HyperNormalisation

("...like a man who's two dozen browser tabs into a major Wikipedia binge."

---Charlie Lyne, reviewer, The Guardian, 10.15. 2016, describing Adam Curtis, who made the documentary HyperNormalisation.)

Clear History
Drugstore Cowboy
The Man Who Fell To Earth
The Trip
Ponyo
Okja
RRR
Rye Lane
Licorice Pizza
The Game
Bonnie and Clyde

(Michael J. Pollard [1939-2019] was an actor who played a sidekick of Bonnie and Clyde in the 1967 movie. He was also on the TV shows Lost in Space, Star Trek, I Spy, Gunsmoke, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, and the Andy Griffith Show. In 1971, he was said to have come up with the title "The Low Spark of High Heel Boys" that the band Traffic used for both a song and an album. In late 1972 the film Dirty Little Billy, starring Pollard playing the famous New Mexico outlaw Billy the Kid [1859-1891] was released. Pollard was in Toronto in 1973 and a local newspaper captioned a photo of him "...the nervous nutty-putty grin caroms crazily." I met Pollard, who called himself a "hippie", when he was buying powder containing cocaine from one of my Canadian drug connections. He was a fervent intravenous user of the drug at the time the bestselling novel The Seven-Per-Cent Solution by Nicholas Meyer [which prominently features Sherlock Holmes quitting his habit of shooting up cocaine) was being written. Apparently Pollard struggled with very serious drug problems for years, but was said to have eventually completely stopped using them.)

Funny Girl
Psycho
GoodFellas
Twelve O'Clock High
Exodus
Some Like It Hot
Midnight Cowboy
Trash
Bowling for Columbine
Crumb
Miracle on 34th Street
Heidi
The Dark Past
Fail Safe
The Nutty Professor
Ride 'Em Cowboy
Convoy
Wild in the Streets
Bambi
The Bad Seed
Dirty Little Billy
The Empire Strikes Back
The Toxic Avenger
The Satan Bug
Jaws

("Spielberg needs to work on character. He knows, flatly, zero. Consider. He is a 26-year-old who grew up with movies.

He has no knowledge of reality but the movies.

He is B-movie literate. When he must make decisions about the small ways people behave, he reaches for movie cliches of the forties and fifties."

---Peter Benchley, who wrote the book JAWS, speaking to the Los Angeles Times in 1974 about Steven Spielberg, who directed the film.)

Mean Streets
Whistle Down the Wind
The Bridge on the River Kwai
Sixteen Candles
Pretty in Pink
Fahrenheit 9/11
Waking Life
The Avengers
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
The Addams Family
Back to the Future
Pump Up the Volume
Beverly Hills Cop
Clifford
The Evil Dead
Ghostbusters
E.T.--The Extraterrestrial
The Absent-Minded Professor
Around the World in 80 Days (original)
Swiss Family Robinson
Confessions of an Opium Eater
The Narcotic Story (the full-length version of "Goofballs and Tea")
Reefer Madness
Angel and the Badman

(I am NOT a fan of John Wayne, and I am NOT a fan of religion, but I think this 1947 movie is Important. Wayne plays a badman in the old west who falls in love with a young Quaker woman, and ends up believing nonviolence is the right way to live. As an actor playing a lawman says in the movie  "Only a man who carries a gun ever needs one."

I also find it fascinating that Wayne's character, in a deliriously altered state of consciousness, speaks about smoking corn silk when he was a kid, and then compares the hair of one of his female friends to corn silk. [My father insisted that I smoke some corn silk in a corn cob pipe when I was 8 years old, saying that he did so when he was young. I did not like smoking corn silk, so he showed me something else he smoked when he was young, rabbit tobacco (Pseudognaphalium obtusifolium). I liked smoking rabbit tobacco and did so for nearly 8 years. I did not consciously inhale the superbly fragrant smoke, I just liked to watch it rise and swirl. It made my tent smell good.

("Tradition has it that American Indians smoked rabbit tobacco. It was said to be especially popular among Cherokees in North Carolina."

"...when I was a boy, smoking native substances was a rite of passage."

---Ben Windham, "The simple pleasures of rabbit tobacco", Tuscaloosa News, 5.18. 2008.)

("...an illicit smoke behind the barn for generations of country children."

---Darryl Patton, thesouthernherbalist dot com, writing about rabbit tobacco.)])

The Grateful Dead Movie
Bad Trip
All Dogs Go to Heaven
Old Yeller
Demetrius and the Gladiators
10
My Big Fat Berkeley Homeless Movie
ANOTHER Big Fat Berkeley Homeless Movie
Magic Trip ("documentary")
The Legend of Cocaine Island (documentary)
The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. MacNamara (documentary)
Country Music (documentary)
A Chairy Tale (short 1957 film that includes music by Ravi Shankar)
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (short 1962 film)
Skaterdater (short 1965 film)
Hobo with a Shotgun
Parasite




The experimental films made by artist Bruce Connor that I viewed at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.




Death in the West
(A 32 minute documentary made in 1976 that vividly exposes the horrific lies told by tobacco companies. This film was very vigorously suppressed by the tobacco industry, whose product is responsible for millions of deaths. [435,000 deaths in the United States in the year 2000 alone, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association.] Philip Morris company, the makers of Marlboro cigarettes, got a court to order that this movie never again be shown.)




LSD--A Case Study
(A brief [less than 4 minutes long] anti-drug film by Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, made in 1969.
[A woman takes LSD, then goes to a hotdog stand in San Francisco and buys a hotdog. As she prepares to eat, the hotdog turns into a little "troll" and begs her not to eat him, that he has a wife and 7 kids. She ends up biting into the hotdog anyway and it screams VERY loudly. She throws it on the ground and stomps it to death...])


("There is an unverifiable drug-scare story dating to the 1960s of a hippie babysitter girl putting a baby in the oven and a turkey in the bassinet. This myth is parodied in The Simpsons episode 'The Secret War of Lisa Simpson', in which the children go on a school field trip to a 'scared straight' wax museum at the local police station. One exhibit contains a wax dummy of a hippie woman eating a sandwich with a baby in it. Chief Wiggum says 'That's right, she's got the munchies for a California Cheeseburger!'"

---Wikipedia, 9.12. 2024. [The episode, written by Ricard Appel, first aired in 1997.])



Signal 30
(A driving safety film produced in cooperation with the Ohio State Highway Patrol in 1959. Many mutilated, injured and dead people shown.)






Here is a list of some TV series I have viewed:


The Fugitive (all)
The Ed Sullivan Show (American debut of the Beatles)
The Twilight Zone

("...first thing you've got to learn is not to imagine things."

---The last words in the final scene of "The last rites of Jeff Myrtlebank", spoken by Jeff to his soon-to-be wife, who, amazed, has just seen him light his pipe with a match that he did not strike, and asked "How did you DO that??" This episode of The Twilight Zone was written and directed by Montgomery Pittman and first appeared on television on February 23, 1962. At the very end, Jeff and the female walk toward Jeff's house, and she does not see that he has closed he gate behind them, apparently using only his mind. SPOOKY GASLIGHT....)

The Avengers (all episodes with Diana Rigg)
Seinfeld (all)
Weeds (first season)
Kung Fu
Star Trek
The Prisoner
The Man from U.N.C.L.E
Arrested Development
I Dream of Jeannie
The Invaders
The Outer Limits

("The Chameleon" is my favorite episode of The Outer Limits. The episode first aired in 1964. Robert Duvall plays an American spy who enters and tries to infiltrate an alien spacecraft that has landed in a rural part of the United States. His character decides to join forces with the pacifist aliens, and the military [having been told that the aliens say they came in peace and have no weapons of mass destruction] allows him to leave with them!)

My Favorite Martian

("Another device can take memories and store them in pill form to 'relearn' them later."

---Wikipedia, 2024, in a description of the television series "My Favorite Martian", the first episode of which aired on 9.29. 1963.

[In "The Chameleon", a sample of alien genetic material is recovered from under one of the fingernails of a slain American soldier. It is modified and injected into a spy, who then physically becomes an alien. Unfortunately for the military, the brain of the spy has also become partially alien, and has alien memories: he knows where things are in their spacecraft, and what the things are used for.])

The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour
The Monkees
The Untouchables
Breaking Bad
The Honeymooners
Miami Vice
Leave it to Beaver
That Girl
Danger is my Business
My Living Doll

(This series, first appearing in 1964, is about a robot that appears to be an attractive young woman. She is said to be the first character to say "does not compute".)

Lost in Space

(This series, first appearing in 1965, popularized the phrase "does not compute".)

The Munsters
You Bet Your Life
Gunsmoke

(In a 1969 episode ["The Still", written by Calvin Clements, Sr.], the rascals set up a still in a school basement, and then sell the alcohol they produce there to a local barkeeper. The 18-year-old schoolteacher gets drunk and amorous, and she and a 26-year-old man fall into a lake while passionately kissing.)

The Beverly Hillbillies
Zorro
Have Gun, Will Travel
The Three Stooges
Gilligan's Island
The Little Rascals (1929-1938 shorts from "Our Gang Comedies")
Laugh-In
Saturday Night Live (first several seasons)
I Love Lucy
The Lieutenant
Dragnet
Match Game 76
Bewitched
Mission: Impossible
I Spy
The Amos 'n' Andy Show
Hee-Haw (first season)
Maverick
Father Knows Best
The Donna Reed Show
All in the Family
The Rifleman
The Jack Benny Program
77 Sunset Strip
The Lone Ranger
Rawhide

("Hell-bent for leather"

"Though they're disapproving,
Keep them dawwgies movin', Rawhide.
Don't try to understand them,
Just rope, throw and brand 'em.
Soon we'll be living high and wide."

---Ned Washington

The song "Rawhide" was recorded by Frankie Laine in 1958. The music was composed by Dimitri Tiomkin.

In the television series [1959-1965], Clint Eastwood played a cowboy named "Rowdy", a Texan who had joined the Confederate States Army at 16, been held in a federal prison camp, and was now working on a cattle drive.)

The Roy Rogers Show
Wagon Train
The Wild Wild West
F-Troop
Bonanza
Dr. Kildare
House
Hogan's Heroes
Superman
The Andy Griffith Show
Mayberry R.F.D.
Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.
My Three Sons
The Addams Family
Get Smart
Twelve O'Clock High
The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis
The Untouchables
Perry Mason
Happy Days
Lassie
Gidget
Sky King
The F.B.I.
Sea Hunt
Mr. Wizard
Candid Camera
The Defenders (original)
The Office
Ghost Whisperer
My Name is Earl
Chappelle's Show
Sesame Street

(Actress Edie Falco was on the "Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!" show, 4. 21. 2018. Broadcast on WBEZ in Chicago and National Public Radio. After Falco said she was once hired to be the Cookie Monster at a wedding, one of the people on the show laughingly asked "Who hired the Cookie Monster for an adult wedding? Were they tripping on acid?")

Captain Kangaroo
Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood
The Yogi Bear Show
The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show
Game of Thrones (all 73 episodes)

(I was invited to a long series of visits to the residence of my excellent daughter and her excellent husband. Each time we ate a delicious dinner and communicated with their excellent cats, eventually watching all of the episodes of Game of Thrones. My daughter is a VERY talented cook and makes such perfectly tasty food!)

King of the Hill
Futurama
South Park
Family Guy
The Flintstones
The Jetsons
The Roadrunner
The Simpsons (all to 2007)

("The only thing I'm high on is love! Love for my son and daughters. Yes, a little L.S.D. is all I need."

---Marge Simpson, in the "Home Sweet Homediddily-Dum-Doodily" episode of the The Simpsons, which was written by John Vitti and aired on 10.1. 1995.)

Stranger Things
Black Mirror

Episode 3, The Witness, of the 18-episode animated anthology television series "Love, Death & Robots". 12 minutes long. Netfix, March 15, 2019.











On more than one occasion I had the honor of being invited to visit backstage with master pianist Vladimir Horowitz and his wife, Wanda Toscanini Horowitz. After hearing his truly awe-inspiring performance, shaking the hand of such a genius was a profound experience!



("The recorded performance by Vladimir Horowitz is superlative beyond all description."

---David Hall, commenting on the record "Variations on 'La Ricordanza'" in THE RECORD BOOK--A Guide to the World of the Phonograph, 1948.)


("'PIANIST CREATES FUROR' was a headline in the Times when Vladimir Horowitz first played at Carnegie Hall, in 1928.

---Alex Ross, The New Yorker, 1.9. 2017.)


The hours I spent at the residence of my friend Tom Constanten (TC), composer and former Grateful Dead keyboard player, listening in psychedelic rapture as he made music, were intensely inspiring...


in 1976 in Oakland, two of the young women living in the house we rented on Oceanview Street were washing clothes at a local laundromat and another woman there noticed their Grateful Dead t-shirts and said "My partner is Tom Constanten and he used to be a member of the Grateful Dead--we live just around the corner--come and visit!". We all did.

Months later, a rock band called Sky Wheel and a group of their enthusiastic young friends from New York moved into a house near the one where we lived. One weekend they played at a block party on Blake Street in Berkeley and TC came. He saw a piano near a window in a house on the block and the people who lived there let him come inside, open the windows wide, and play their piano with Skywheel.

I will never forget the times TC and his partner Sea went with us to my partner's parents' house in Sacramento. My partner's father was a friend of the great pianist Vladamir Horowitz and TC played a Steinway piano that my partner's parents owned.


(I went to a Thomas Mapfumo concert in Berkeley in 2016. I have seen him perform a number of times and I find his music induces an inspiring trance-like state. During the break I went outside, sat down, lit a joint, and started to read a 2001 Jonathan Franzen novel, THE CORRECTIONS, that my daughter had lent me. The first sentence I read mentioned Thomas Mapfumo!)


Here is a list of a very few of the MANY musicians I have had the great pleasure to hear perform live:


Jean-Pierre Rampal
Lightnin' Hopkins
The Pretenders

(Greek Theatre, Berkeley, 1984, in a concert that included Simple Minds. Of all the shows I have heard, this was MY FAVORITE!

"Like a break in the battle was your part...
in the wretched life of a lonely heart"

---Chrissie Hynde, singing "Back on the Chain Gang". [Hynde was born in 1951, less than a month after I was.])

The Grateful Dead (Many shows)

(I believe some of the things I heard the Grateful Dead do cannot be explained. Or even described.)

The Rolling Stones (Multiple shows, beginning with the concert at Altamont)
Jefferson Airplane
New Riders of the Purple Sage
The Who
Bob Dylan
Santana
The Band
Quicksilver Messenger Service
Jerry Garcia Band

(Including a show I saw while high on LSD at a college in Oberlin, Ohio in 1976.

"The college's architecture is designed for LSD and psychedelic-mushroom experimentation, as it makes sense only when its melting"

"The nice sophomore next door teaches an introductory course on the Beatles."

"Sometimes we'll drop acid and try to puzzle out "And Your Bird Can Sing" while walking up to various buildings and leaning on them."

---Gary Shteyngart, describing being a student at Oberlin College in 1991.)

Joy of Cooking
Asleep at the Wheel (when they lived in Oakland, California in the early 1970s)
Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen
Hot Tuna
Country Joe and the Fish
Neil Young
Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young
The Rowan Brothers
Paula Fuga
Depeche Mode
Maria Muldaur
B.B. King
Albert King
Mimi Farina
Sun Ra
John Lee Hooker
Richie Havens
Jesse Winchester

("I left Tennessee in a hurry, dear."

---Jesse Winchester, quoted by Jimmy Buffett in his 1998 book A PIRATE LOOKS AT FIFTY.)

Bill Evans and Megan Lynch
Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee
Big Mama Thornton
Herbie Hancock
Janis Joplin
Jimi Hendrix
Patti Smith
The Coup

("...The Coup's late Pam the Funkstress once said she wouldn't DJ for Too $hort because of his pimp persona..."

---Sam Lefebvre, East Bay Express, 3.28. 2018, in an article he wrote, "Hip-Hop Culture Unravels", about about a show, "RESPECT: Hip-Hop Style & Wisdom", at the Oakland Museum of California.)

They Might Be Giants

("...and the truth is, we don't know anything..."

---John Flansburgh and John Linnell, in their song "Ana Ng", recorded in 1988 by They Might Be Giants.)

The Tubes
The Youngbloods (5.19. 1970, Provo Park in Berkeley)
(Tom Constanten [Piano] + Robert Hunter [Words], Ray Manzarek [Piano] + Michael McClure [Words])
Babyland (at the punk club "924 Gilman". I also heard Thee Hobo Gobbelins there.

[“The system that we have today, well, it’s sick. There’s something vastly wrong with getting up every day and doing something that you really don’t want to do.”

---Dan Abbott, of the band Thee Hobo Gobbelins, quoted by Christine G.K. LaPado-Breglia, Chico News & Review, 6.25. 2009.]

From early 1997 through 2002 I listened to approximately 200 shows at 924 Gilman, almost all while outside the building.)



("The impetus to do something, anything, to get out of this stagnating place came from punk; but the other part, the more poetic part, the thing that filled us with yearning, came from psychedelic music and books of poetry."

---Lol Tolhurst, born in 1959, and a founding member of The Cure, describing what it was like being a teenager in Thatcher's Britain. From his 2023 book GOTH: A History.)



("When I got here in '99, I immediately went to [924] Gilman. I worked the door as a bouncer..."

---Jack Dorsey, the self-described "punk" co-founder and current [as of February 2019] CEO of Twitter, who is a billionaire, in an interview with Brian Hiatt that was published in Rolling Stone magazine in February 2019. I remember often speaking with Dorsey. I was arrested for an act of civil disobedience very, very near 924 Gilman in 1999 [I refused to sign 2 tickets, because the charges were false]. I made a poster for a 924 Gilman show by the band Babyland in December 1998.)



("There's no such thing as cheating in a loser's game."

---MDC, a local hardcore band. [Quoted by Donna Gaines in her 1991 book TEENAGE WASTELAND--Suburbia's Dead End Kids.])



("You can't always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream."

---Frank Zappa)



(There was a deeply peaceful and VERY hidden but publicly accessible place in an otherwise VERY ugly and grimy garbage-strewn industrial area below San Pablo Avenue close to 924 Gilman Street. For many years it was my favorite place to smoke marijuana and meditate, watching Codornices Creek flow. I never told anyone about this location, and I seriously doubt most people had any idea that it existed...It was less than a minute from a rather drab and unnoticeable business, a chemical company where, over the years, I had purchased some of the chemicals I used when producing illegal drugs. The famous LSD cook Owsley had also obtained some of the chemicals he used to produce some of his LSD in the 1960s from this company, according to what someone who worked with him told me decades later. Owsley's product was widely distributed at home and abroad.)

(In early 2019, Tesla opened a service center at 901 Gilman Street, with an entrance on Eighth Street at Harrison Street.)


("I was once married to a musician. I knew what that life was like--a lot of drugs and cheap motels."

---Anna de Leon, who had been the wife of the extraordinarily skilled, inspired, and prolific blues musician Taj Mahal [Henry St. Claire Fredericks, Jr.], quoted by Janis Mara, Berkeleyside, 2.20. 2022.)



(Two of my favorite music videos are "You Know I'm No Good" by Amy Winehouse [official video released 6.30. 2015] and "Something Good" by Utah Saints [official video released in 1992].)



("*WIFE PUTS
ON BEATLES*
ME: I'LL
CRASH THIS
CAR AND
KILL US ALL
*WIFE PUTS
MERENGUE
BACK ON*"

---comedian @thekidmero, on Twitter, 8.15. 2012.)


("I love the chaoticness and craziness of it all."

---Vincent Boac, a student at Arroyo High School in San Lorenzo, California who is vice president of the metal club there, describing Iron Front concerts. Boac was quoted by Sarah Amani, another student, in the school newspaper Dry Gulch Gazette, 2.26. 2020.)


("Jamar Zelaya, a 19-year-old YouTuber who was waiting outside Cookies N' Kicks planned to capture footage for his channel. 'The chaos, the entertainment, the electricity--people want to see people wild out and look stupid.' Zelaya said. 'If you don't go, you're missing out on history.'"

---Taylor Lorenz, The New York Times, 5.25. 2021, in her article "How a 17-Year-Old's Birthday Party Became the Biggest Thing on the Internet".

["Kai Watson, 20, content director of The Sync, a podcast network, was at Huntington Beach in California and described the scene as a 'zombie apocalypse' of '17-to-19-year olds'."])


("TONY HAWK IS SELLING SKATEBOARDS INFUSED WITH HIS BLOOD FOR $500 EACH" was a Rap TV Instagram post in August 2021. In response, Lil Nas X wrote "nah he tweakin". Tony Hawk [b. 1968], a white man, is a legendary skateboard super-champion. Lil Nas X [b. 1999], is an extraordinarily influential black gay American rapper.

["In the last 12 hours 'nah he tweakin' has generated more than 11 million public interactions on Instagram, according to data from Crowdtangle."

---BBC News, August 2021.]

TIME named Lil Nas X one of the 25 most influential people on the internet in 2019.

["Tweakin" is often defined as being "very high on a drug or drugs and doing crazy stuff". I have frequently heard the term used to describe the behavior of someone who has taken too much methamphetamine or crack cocaine. Sometimes the word is used to describe a person who is suffering from mental illness.]

In March 2021, in partnership with the New York-based art collective MSCHF, Lil Nas X released a modified pair of Nike shoes they called "Satan Shoes". Each shoe contained a drop of human blood. They cost $1,018 a pair. 666 pairs were made and they sold out in less than one minute. Nike took legal action to stop any further sales of the unauthorized footwear.)


Sylvester (with the Cockettes, 1969. Everyone had taken LSD....)
Goa Gil (He was born approximately 2 months after I was, and died in late October 2023. He appears in the 2001 film "Last Hippie Standing".)


I danced while listening to more than 1.000 shows from outside of a world music venue (Ashkenaz) on San Pablo Avenue near Gilman Street in Berkeley. (Balkan, Reggae, Latin, Cajun/Zydeco, African, Middle Eastern, Bluegrass, Folk, Swing, 60's Rock, etc.) Ashkenaz was founded in 1973 by David Nadel, a performance artist and political activist who was an acquaintance from when I sold art on Telegraph Avenue during the holidays. In late 1996 Nadel was shot to death at Ashkenaz after he made someone leave because they were being rowdy. In 2013 I was present at Ashkenaz when my friend the managing director was shot in the head during a robbery. Another friend who worked there was also shot. Both of them recovered.

(MY FAVORITE SONG EVER is the version of "Give Voice" that is on the 2010 album "Misery's End" by Paula Fuga. [I saw her perform at Ashkenaz.] I am also very fond of one of the versions of the Beatles song "Tomorrow Never Knows" performed by Marshmallow Overcoat. And I love the 1961 Patsy Cline version of "Crazy", written by Willie Nelson. [According to the 2019 Ken Burns documentary film Country Music, Cline's version of "Crazy" became "...the number one jukebox song of all time."])


("Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes."

---musician Jack Bruce and poet Pete Brown, in their song "White Room", performed by the band Cream and released in 1968. LISTEN to this song AT MAXIMUM VOLUME WHILE WEARING HEADPHONES!)


(The 1971 marijuana song "One Toke Over the Line" was written and performed by Michael Brewer and Tom Shipley. An apparently unintentionally bizarre cover of the song was sung by Gail Farrell and Dick Dale on The Lawrence Welk Show in 1971 after they were asked to do so by Lawrence Welk, and OMG--it is well worth watching! Welk, the epitome of a wholesome mainstream entertainer, apparently did not understand that the song was about marijuana, and called it "a modern spiritual". Later Welk blamed ABC for pressuring him to include the song...)


(The record that I most liked listening to when I was doing physical labor in the early 1980s was the 1979 album "The B-52's".)


"Quite unfortunately, I lived in a van on 10th Street near Gilman just a few feet away from this dumpster for more than a decade. MANY of the people who congregate at the dumpster are extremely violent. MANY of them use methamphetamine. I will never forget the time I saw a man climb into the dumpster and then not come out. I went over to see if he was okay and saw that he was on his hands and knees inside the mostly empty dumpster, lapping up the nasty wastewater on the bottom like he was a dog. He looked up at me with a huge grin, like he thought he was in heaven..."

---my comment, posted 3.19. 2022 on Berkeleyside, in response to a news article there about a man being stabbed at a dumpster in Berkeley.

("UCPD looking for an individual who was screaming without pants"

---Scanner Berkeley [a news website], on Twitter, 2.12. 2023. [UCPD are the University of California Police Department in Berkeley, California.])

(On March 1, 2023 a 42 year old man from Utah [who reportedly was mentally ill and yelled "Mormon Mafia!"] was seen in Sproul Plaza on the University of California campus in Berkeley after he apparently deliberately set himself on fire. He died after being taken to a hospital. It is said that within 24 hours a video of the incident had been viewed online more than 350,000 times.)


("These Mormons Have Found a New Faith--In Magic Mushrooms"

"Worshippers are leaving the Church Of Latter-day Saints in record numbers and some are finding solace with an apostate band of psilocybin-loving spiritual explorers looking for God--one trip at a time"

---Cassady Rosenblum, Rolling Stone, 6.28. 2022.)


("In 1823, Joseph Smith said he was visited by an angel who directed him to a buried book of golden plates [on a hill near Smith's home in Manchester, New York] inscribed with a Judeo-Christian history of an ancient American civilization."

"In 1826, Smith was brought before a Chenango County court for 'glass-looking', or pretending to find lost treasure..."

"In 1830, Smith published the Book of Mormon, which he described as an English translation of the golden plates he found.")




(When I was very young, one of my father's favorite songs was "The ShotGun Boogie", written by Tennessee Ernie Ford in 1949.)




("George is one of those people who can't tolerate happiness."

---Tammy Wynette, describing George Jones.)




("...if you have trouble with the mike, just smile real loud."

---Maybelle Carter, speaking about performing live.)




("Take Me to the River" [about baptism] is one of the songs sung by the novelty toy Big Mouth Billy Bass. Al Green later said the singing fish [featuring vocals by Steve Haas] generated more royalties than any other recorded version of the song...)




("God, please fuck my mind for good"

---Don Van Vliet (Captain Beefheart), in a 1980 song.


"Why Doesn't Somebody Get Him a Pepsi?"

---Frank Zappa, title of a 1975 song.)




4'33"




(One afternoon when I was 16 years old in 1967, I went to a 7-Eleven convenience store in Fayetteville, North Carolina near Fort Liberty

["Fort Bragg shed its Confederate namesake Friday to become Fort Liberty..."

---2023 AP news story about one of the largest military installations in the world (by population).]

and bought my first record, a Jefferson Airplane 45 with "White Rabbit" on one side and "Plastic Fantastic Lover" on the other. Over the next year or so I played the record so many times I almost wore it out...)

(I like viewing and listening to the 5:20-long video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeHlvXvG6vA] of a 2023 performance, in costume, by Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway, of a bluegrass version of "White Rabbit".)




("I look for hair styles and beards on a band. If they've got long hair and beards they're likely to make better records. Especially those big seventies bands with eight of them in--half  white and half  black, and they look like they all take acid."

---Norman Cook, on how to build a record collection, in HOW TO DJ [PROPERLY]-The Art and Science of Playing Records, by Frank Broughton and Bill Brewster, 2002.

 Also from the book:

 "Each time you pull out a track it should hold memories as powerful as your first kiss/pill/marriage/arrest.")







("Well I met a girl called Sandoz
And she taught me many, many things
Good things, very good things, sweet things

I met her one sunny morning
It was hot but the snow lay on the ground
Strange things, very strange things, my mind has wings
Sandoz, Sandoz who taught me love
Sandoz, Sandoz heavens above
They could all learn something from your mind
Yeah baby

She is very old
You may think she's young
One kiss from her
And you know your time has come
Good times, for all time, Sandoz
Sandoz
Sandoz"

---Eric Burdon and The Animals, 1966. Sandoz is the name of the Swiss pharmaceutical company where LSD was invented.)



("The short-lived first era of rock festivals began in San Francisco. The incubator was Stewart Brand and Ramon Sender's three-day Trips Festival, a kind of 'super acid test,' in Tom Wolfe's famed account. Bill Graham staged the show in the Longshoreman's Hall, in January, 1966."

---John Seabrook, in his article "Immaculate Lineup", The New Yorker, 4.17. 2017.



("Why did the counterculture decline?

In an effort to quash the movement, government authorities banned the psychedelic drug LSD..."

---Google, answering a question "...people commonly search on Goggle.", 3.9. 2021. [I had goggled the word "counterculture", and Google had included their "People also ask" section in their search results.])



"...the job of an artist in society. It's not to paint pretty pictures, it's to say something, even if it's only Fuck You."

---Richard H. Kirk (1956-2021), a prolific and influential genius who made electronic music. Sandoz was one of the many aliases that Kirk used. A 2009 Sandoz album was called Acid Editions (303 Excursions).



(Mark Edwards: "On the back cover [of Brian Eno's diary A YEAR With Swollen Appendices] is a list of words or phrases describing yourself. One of them is 'a drifting clarifier'. What is that?"

Brian Eno [in conference with CompuServe on 7.4. 1996 at Eno's London studio]: "That was Stewart Brand's description...he meant to describe me as someone who generally helps out in thinking situations, but is not stuck to one in particular.")




("Can a person be human without LSD? Or, lets say, without the psychedelic experience? The answer, as far as the writer of this article can see, is a highly qualified, cautiously rendered, but emphatic, definitely NOT."

---Joel Meltz, in The East Village Other, 10.5. 1967.)







("...I saw a documentary showing...people who were taking LSD. The film showed this artist who was just drawing lines, and he was obviously very moved...I thought 'God, that looks like such fun!'".

---Jerry Garcia)


("...portrayed...in the press as...higher than Jerry Garcia."

---David Remnick, describing Hamid Karzai, the former leader of Afghanistan. Remnick was having a conversation with Steve Coll, a Pultizer Prize winner. The New Yorker Radio Hour, WNYC, 2.9. 2018. Garcia, in his later years widely known to be a heroin addict, was the lead guitarist in the band the Grateful Dead.)


(Bill Clinton and Al Gore both own and have worn neckties that feature prints of art made by Jerry Garcia.)


("In a tidbit so delicious, so horrifying to Rush Limbaugh fans, so straight out of central casting that it couldn't go unmentioned, it turns out the new House speaker is a Deadhead."

"Nancy Pelosi, the person second in line for the presidency, is a fan of the late Jerry Garcia. That's 'Captain Trips' to those of us in the Bay Area, and 'Captain Hide the Women and Children' to most of the Midwest [and Texas]."

"'Ms. Pelosi is a huge Dead fan', her spokeswoman said."

Grateful Dead musicians Mickey Hart, Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann, Bruce Hornsby, and Warren Haynes played at a $1,000-a-plate fundraising party in Washington, opening with the song "Shakedown Street".

---from a 1.7. 2007 article in the San Jose Mercury News, "Speaker Pelosi hosts day of the Dead in D.C.".)







("A flock of birds took about half an hour to fly across my vision, an incredible fluttering, and I could see every feather. And they looked at me while they did it like, 'Try that on for size.'"

"There's not much you can really say about acid except God, what a trip!"

---Keith Richards, in his 2010 autobiography LIFE [written with James Fox].)







(“I felt like I was tripping.”

 ---Chris Thile, host of the 1.21. 2017 A Prairie Home Companion show, speaking to Aoife O’ Donovan about hearing her song "The King of All Birds" for the first time.

 “Maybe you were.”

 ---Aoife O’ Donovan, in reply to Thile’s comment. Show recorded in Pasadena, California.)




("...dropped acid on my tongue
tripped upon the land 'til enough was enough"

---Jenny Lewis, in her 2008 song "Acid Tongue". The cover of the album was an image of a sheet of blotter LSD. In 2016, Lewis was a member of the all-female trio Nice As Fuck.)



("'I'm tripping right now. What is going on?'"

---BBC News headline, 3.26. 2021, quoting someone who indicated they were in an altered state of consciousness from viewing the debris from a SpaceX rocket that was lighting up U.S. skies.)



("Sheet One" is the title of a 1993 CD by Richie Hawtin [as Plastikman]. Each CD booklet came with a perforated sheet of blotter paper that did NOT contain LSD. In 1994, a young man was arrested and jailed in Texas because the police believed that the "Sheet One" blotter artwork they found in his car might contain "controlled substances"...

"Silence is as important as sound."

---Richie Hawtin, quoted in HOW TO DJ [PROPERLY].)



("Think back to the first time you tripped out on the surreal beauty of a supermarket--the geometric stacks of products and the ominous yet soothing march of logos down the aisles and your brain twitched with conflicting messages, from 'This is some weird shit' to 'I could use a little of that'. It's the kind of revelation that happens late at night, perhaps inspired by something illegal placed on the tongue, and it's the domain of photographer Brian Ulrich."

---Michael Leverton, in a review, the San Francisco Weekly, 7.5. 2006.)



(Revive Kombucha is running a magazine ad insert printed on LSD blotter paper...minus the LSD.
The insert will appear this month in 26,000 San Francisco area copies of Rolling Stone..."

"...the insert was printed with vegetable ink, on edible blotter paper, by Zane Kesey."

---Karlene Lukovitz, Mediapost.com, 2.7. 2019. "Expand Your Tongue's Mind" is the ad slogan. Each blotter sheet has 900 perforated squares, each with an image of a bottle of Revive Kombucha. Peet's Coffee is the majority stakeholder in the company that makes Revive Kombucha in Windsor, California. [Windsor is near where Tim Scully and Nick Sand made Orange Sunshine LSD.])







A few band names:

Rich Kids On LSD
Gaye Bykers On Acid
Lords Of Acid
Acid Mothers Temple
Ratz On Acid
LSD March
Bad Acid Trip

(I saw Bad Acid Trip at 924 Gilman.)


(In 1976 "John Krivine...started and managed a band called LSD..."

---Cosey Fanni Tutti, who was born approximately 2 months after I was, in her 2017 autobiography ART SEX MUSIC. [Billy Idol was a member of LSD.])


("...art damaged acid-heads..."

---K. Lee, describing Cosey Fanni Tutti and Genesis P-Orridge, on amazon.com, in a 2010 review of the book WRECKERS OF CIVILISATION--The Story of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle by Simon Ford.)


(LSD, a group formed in 2018. Members are Labrinth, Sia, and Diplo. Their product appears to be poorly-made irritating pseudo-psychedelic kitsch.)




("Psychedelic Country Music Star Margo Price Picks Between Shrooms, Acid or DMT"

---headline from a VICE mention of a video interview with Price, 7.10. 2020.)


("I ate some acid last night and it hasn't worn off yet...seems like a good time for a Q & A! Ask me anything for the next ten min and I'll do my best to answer it..."

---Margo Price, on Twitter, 8.25. 2018.)


(Rolling Stone: "You wrote 'Mother' on acid. Ever have a bad trip?"

Award-winning country music singer and songwriter Kacey Musgraves: "I have had kind of a weird trip before, and it was super Halloween-y and just weird vibes, but that's rare."

---from Rolling Stone magazine, 5.1. 2018.)





(When my parents came to see me in California in the late 1980s, one of the first things I did after they arrived was to pick up my guitar and play a song for them:

"Coming into Los Angeles
Bringing in a couple of keys
Don't touch my bags if you please
Mister Customs Man"

The song, "Coming Into Los Angeles", was written by Arlo Guthrie, Woody Guthrie's son, and was recorded by Arlo in 1969. Several years after my parents visited me, a friend introduced me to another of Woody Guthrie's sons, Arlo's brother Joady Guthrie.)





("I've tried everything; I'm a musician, come on."

---Billy Joel, in reply to interviewer Dotson Rader's question "What about drugs?" Parade magazine, 7.15. 2018.

Gerald Ford was the President of the United States from 1974 to January 1977. His wife Betty had a long-running battle with alcohol and opioid abuse that is said to have started in the early 1960s.

["I liked alcohol...And I loved pills."

---Betty Ford, in her 1987 autobiography.]

In 1978, the Ford family staged an intervention, and forced her into treatment. She went on to found the Betty Ford Center, a residential chemical dependency recovery facility where, in 2005, Billy Joel was treated for alcohol-related problems.)







("'The Wild One,' 'Blackboard Jungle,' and 'Rock Around the Clock' caused youth riots in both East and West Germany in 1955 and 1956. In the notorious 'cultural cold war,' during which the C.I.A. covertly supported--and the State Department and American museums and foundations overtly funded--the dissemination of American art, books, literary and intellectual journalism, dance, theatre, and music, the one product that can plausibly be argued to have made a difference in the eventual overthrow of Communism was rock and roll."

---Louis Menand, The New Yorker, 11.12. 2012.)



("Coming into popularity in the early 1990s, Jungle was ridiculously upbeat, intense, and even discombobulating. Simon Reynolds compared the effect to that of 'a shrew on the verge of a coronary, or, more to the point, a raver's heartbeat after necking three E's.'"

---Wikipedia, 2019.The quote is from Reynolds' 2012 book ENERGY FLASH: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture.)







("She's built like a car,
She's got a hub cap diamond star halo"

---Marc Bolan, in the 1971 hit song he wrote "Get it On", which was performed by T. Rex.)







("Anybody can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple."

---Charles Mingus)







"T69 Collapse"
by Aphex Twin.







"Angels Pharmacy"
by Actress







"Paisley Pointillism"
by Paris Strother.







("It could sing you to sleep"

---Kate Bush, in her 1986 song and video "Experiment IV".

["We were working secretly for the military"

"They told us all they wanted
Was a sound that could kill someone from a distance"])







("A central motif in contemporary hip-hop is rapping about drug dealing by artists who may not actually sell narcotics."

"It's typically impossible to determine whether they are telling the truth about themselves or simply the truth about their environment, and it's never been clear whether listeners care."

---Sasha Frere-Jones, The New Yorker, 2.13. 2012.)



("Atlanta's 21 Savage, 25, has criticized older 'O.G. rappers' for scapegoating the new generation. 'They say we make drug-user music,' he wrote in November 2017. 'Like making drug-selling music is better.'"

---Neil Shah in an article he wrote that was published in The Wall Street Journal 1.17. 2018. It is extraordinarily disgusting and VERY wrong that The Wall Street Journal supports large-scale capitalism and the presidency of Donald Trump.)



(Jaime Lowe: "A sizable portion of your autobiography, RAW: My Journey into the Wu-Tang, is about dealing drugs on Staten Island."

U-God: "I don't want to glorify that. Now I understand what happened and why. And I'm kind of pissed-off. I watched 'American Made' with Tom Cruise. A lot of my friends have not come home. Some people got 150 years."

Jaime Lowe: "Do you mean in terms of how drugs were reportedly brought in to the U.S. from Central America by the C.I.A.?"

U-God: "Yes. Like it was all a setup. But at the same time, it was a gold mine. It was a means of feeding my family."

---from an interview in The New York Times Magazine, "U-God Wishes He Had Sold Legal Drugs", 3.18. 2018.)



("Rapper Lil Loaded has died aged 20. His lawyer...confirmed the death...saying the artist, real name Dashawn Robertson, had taken his own life. The Dallas rapper was arrested in 2020 on a murder charge in connection with the shooting of 18-year-old Khalil Walker."

Lil Loaded's song "Gang Unit" was a hit "...with over 39 million YouTube views. He said he had the 'dopest fanbase on Earth' in an Instagram post..."

---BBC News, 6.1. 2021.)



("Music is sometimes a medication from reality..."

---DJ Kool Herc, in the introduction to Jeff Chang's book CAN'T STOP WON'T STOP--A History of the Hip-Hop Generation.)



PUSSY RIOT






("All greatness comes from pain."

---Raoul Felder, in a movie about his brother [the legendary songwriter Jerome Solon Felder], "A.K.A. Doc Pomus".)



("Music has never been number one. I'm mostly into words and hats."

---Peter Doherty, a member of the band The Libertines, speaking to Jessica Smith, in an article that was published in the East London Advertiser. The article was reproduced in Doherty's 2007 THE BOOKS OF ALBION--THE COLLECTED WRITINGS OF PETER DOHERTY.)









Here is a list of a very few of some of the people, things, and events that I think have influenced me:




The birth of my truly WONDERFUL daughter!



Presenting my daughter to her husband-to-be at their exquisitely joyful wedding ceremony.


(One afternoon when my daughter was about 4 years old, she said to me, with intense seriousness, "Daddy, what is more real--the inside of the curtain, or the outside of the curtain?")


The family gatherings where I was able to spend time with my daughter, her mother, her mother’s mother, and her mother’s mother’s mother. Four generations together!


My intense sorrow that so MANY of my friends suffered and died from HIV/AIDS. There are no words powerful enough to express my immense sadness.


(I was listening to the radio on Labor Day in 2019 and over the air I heard my daughter playing a recording of the 1980 Dolly Parton song "9 to 5":

"They just use your mind and you never get the credit
It's enough to drive you crazy if you let it"

I had never heard my DJ daughter on the radio and I did not know she was going to be on the show. Such a magic surprise!)



(When I was very young, my babysitter and godfather was Willis Regan, who worked at Bell Laboratories around the time of the invention of the transistor there. Willis, an inventor himself, spoke about how distracted some of the scientists were. He said he saw one of them walk into a wall one afternoon. [Recent research by scientists using brain-imaging technology seems to indicate that just prior to the time of a sudden and profound insight there is a temporary decrease in the amount of visual information received by the brain.] In the late 1960s my mother, father, sister, brother, and I visited Willis' widow in Red Bank, New Jersey. I spent hours in his office reading and being impressed by some of the philosophy books he had studied.)



Viewing the "Anxious Visions" exhibit of Surrealist art at the University Art Museum, Berkeley, 1990.


("As beautiful as the chance encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissection table."

---"Comte de Lautréamont" [Isadore Lucien Ducasse], in LES CHANTS DE MALDOROR.)


("surreal"

---dictionary Merriam-Webster's "Word of the Year", December 2016.)


(Asleep in my vehicle middle of the night outside a church in Oakland. Man starts singing the words "Holy Ghost" over and over gospel-style for 3 hours non-stop. Hypnotically strange sounds.

Woke up, drove to Berkeley, and saw my friend, who, missing some of his upper teeth, had gone to a Halloween costume store, bought some fake teeth, and using a cigarette lighter to melt toy plastic soldiers, made himself dentures.)


("Since the real is so hard to name, we continually teeter on the edge of the surreal."

---Clair Wills, in her review of the novels of Anna Burns, which are set in Ireland during the Troubles. The New York Review of Books, 3.21. 2019.)


("Pope Francis once likened sorting out the Vatican's tangled accounts to 'cleaning the Sphinx of Egypt with a toothbrush'.

---Catherine Marciano and Alexandra Sage, 9.30. 2020, in an article about Catholic financial corruption.)


("Sigmund Freud describes 'the question of where babies come from' as a riddle of the Sphinx."

---Wikipedia)


("These people would deep fry their toothpaste if they could."

---character on the television series "FBI: Most Wanted", describing the eating habits of people in "rural Ohio". Episode written by Rick Eid and Joe Halpin and broadcast 5.11. 2021.)


("Millenials...declare that they will not be taking fashion advice from 'the generation that ate Tide pods'." [Generation Z]

---Maura Judkis and Abha Bhattarai, the Washington Post, 5.10. 2021, in an article about pants. ["Millenials" are people born between 1981 and 1996. "Generation Z" are people born between 1997 and 2012. Tide pods are a toxic laundry detergent and should NEVER be placed in a mouth.])


(Small "CAT nativity" plastic figures "Mama and Kitten", "Adoring Dad", "King Kittytreats", "King Catnipmouse", and "King Yarn", based on the Christian nativity scene, with a kitten as baby Jesus. Only $150 from bradfordexchange.com! A full-color ad for this was in the periodical Parade, 9.15. 2019.)


("Sing it over and over and over again, Frosty Morn!
Sing it over and over and over again, Frosty Morn!"

---Television ad for Frosty Morn bacon. Unfortunately I heard this so many times, over and over and over again when I was a child that it feels like it is burned into my brain! In 1960 in South Carolina, at Shaw Heights Elementary School on Shaw Air Force Base, my 4th grade teacher [a very old and very wise woman named Mrs. Price] noticed that I was much more interested in reading books than I was in watching television. She changed my life by taking me aside and telling me that she thought watching television was definitely harming the brains of my classmates, and that many of them seemed to already have what she thought might be permanent damage. She told me that it was IMPORTANT that I read as much as possible and that I should avoid watching television and movies whenever possible. I have never forgotten her excellent advice. She also changed my life in an even more important way. She had me read "Walden" by Henry David Thoreau because she knew I was a big fan of camping and nature. Then she had me read "Civil Disobedience" by Thoreau. I resolved to do my best to not "...enable the state to commit violence and shed innocent blood." I also resolved to do my best to avoid associating with people who "...enable the state to commit violence and shed innocent blood." Mrs. Price often spoke about how her family had been horribly wronged by victorious Union soldiers who came to their farm, soldiers that she said murdered the men, raped the women, burned the houses and barns, destroyed the crops and livestock, and polluted the river and the well. She was extremely bitter about it. I now suspect she may have deliberately planted an anti-military attitude in my mind, knowing at the time that my dad was an active member of the U.S. military...) )



(Between March 1945 and early 1946, Shaw Army Airfield [later known as Shaw Air Force Base] was a prisoner-of-war camp. 175 Nazis worked on local farms. After being repatriated to Germany, some of them came back to the area and obtained U.S. citizenship. In the late 1950s and early 1960s my father knew some of them and considered himself to be quite fortunate because he was able to obtain some of his favorite German sausages from them. It was meat that he had developed a taste for when he was stationed with the U.S. military in Germany. The Germans who sold him the food did so clandestinely, from their homes. None of the local butchers carried such items.)



(Riding my father's 1958 Vespa, a 125cc Italian-made motor scooter, when I was 9 years old. One day I was speeding across a football field and I saw I was being watched by a girl from my school. I got so distracted while showing off that I crashed head-on into a large and very solid metal pole. Glad I was wearing a sturdy padded helmet!)



Viewing the "Exhibition of Artifacts from the Tomb of Tutankhamun" at the de Young Museum, San Francisco, 1979.



NETSUKE!!!



Viewing the amazing art of Van Gogh, Klimt, and many others at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.



Viewing "Stations of the Cross--Lema Sabachthani", a series of fourteen black and white paintings made by Barnett Newman between 1958 and 1966. I looked at these paintings at the de Young museum in San Francisco in August 2014 and I was unexpectedly overcome by intense emotion. By the end of the series I was seeing SO MANY NEW COLORS! Sobbing uncontrollably, and barely able to catch my breath, I exclaimed to my daughter and her husband "I have never before been in the presence of such BEAUTY!"


("In a 2008 exhibition catalog for Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art in Chicago, where Lee Godie's art has been shown, the curator Jessica Moss conveyed Godie's rapture over a French Impressionist show at the Art Institute. 'To save herself from passing out in such a revered institution,' Moss wrote, 'she devoured a small piece of cheese that she had been saving in her armpit in case of an emergency.'"

---Jeremy Lybarger, The New York Times, 1.21. 2022)



Visits to Manuel Neri's studio in Benicia, California in the early 1970s with artist Peter Hans Loschan. Watching Neri sculpt, and then viewing the truly extraordinary art Neri had collected and placed on the walls of the bathroom.



A visit to the di Rosa residence in the Napa Valley area of California in the early 1970s with Peter Hans Loschan to view some absolutely inspiring San Francisco bay area art.



("It was at the Richmond Art Center in Richmond, California that I came upon the fabulous BEAUTIFUL TOAST DREAM by a woman whose name I can't remember."

[The entire work consisted of a typed document describing a dream a woman had about toast...]

---Tom Wolfe, in his 1975 book THE PAINTED WORD.

Reminds me of one of my very favorite works of art. In 1969 I was living in the basement of an abandoned house on Idaho Street in Berkeley. My friend the feral artist Michael Speakes accidentally burned a piece of toast. He scratched the words BOW WOW on it, and then neatly nailed it to a kitchen wall.)



The Geysers, located in a remote area north of the San Francisco bay area, is the world's largest geothermal field. For about 12,000 years, Native Americans built steambaths there. It is a powerfully healthy place. Among the people who went to The Geysers Resort were Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, and "Mark Twain" (Samuel Clemens). I hid there among the ruins of the resort for a while when I was a fugitive. I met many Soulful Women there.



Riding, high on LSD in 1969, on the back of a stripped-down 650cc BSA motorcycle going VERY fast through the Webster Street Tube, an underwater tunnel between Oakland and Alameda. Perinatal!



Making many, many hallucinographic designs at my favorite coffee house in Santa Cruz, California. The most deliciously strong coffee I have ever enjoyed, served by a posse of vividly charming University of California students. Everywhere a fantastic music of ideas.


Visiting Luray Caverns in Virginia and Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico.



While I was a federal fugitive, being a parent-volunteer at Berkeley Hills Nursery School when my daughter was a student there.



The painting "Half-Past Three (The Poet)", made by Marc Chagall in 1911.



The painting "Diary of a Seducer", made by Arshile Gorky in 1945.



The painting "Door to the River", made by Willem de Kooning in 1960.



The painting "Indefinite Divisibility", made by Yves Tanguy in 1942.



David P. Klein, born in 1950, is a self taught artist living in Wisconsin. His painting "Never-ending Journey" (which depicts a bike chained to a tree near railroad tracks leading into a tunnel) is one of the most wonderful works of art I have ever seen! I saw an image of it on the photo-sharing website Flickr in 2022. Klein's description of the painting: "Story of who went to war in the belief in common for the weekend. In World War I chaining his bike to the tree."



MY APPLE ALUMINUM POWERBOOK G4 NOTEBOOK COMPUTER!!! (What THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO used...)

My Apple iPhone 3G!!!


("The democratization of taste, abetted by the web, coincides with the democratization of creativity. The makers have the means to sell, but everybody has the means to make. And everybody's using them. Everybody seems to fancy himself a writer, a musician, a visual artist. Apple figured this out a long time ago: that the best way to sell us its expensive tools is to convince us that we all have something unique and urgent to express."

---William Deresiewicz, The Atlantic, January 2015.)


("...what the digital-art pioneer Cory Arcangel has termed 'fourteen-year-old Finnish-kid syndrome', in which any teen-ager with an iPhone can make something attention-grabbing."

---Adrien Chen, The New Yorker, 1.30. 2017.)



(My serrated unadorned stainless steel "Dragon" table knife, 8.25 inches long, designed by Carl-Gustaf Jahnsson, manufactured in China in 2008, and sold by the Swedish company IKEA. Quite inexpensive and beautifully utilitarian, it is a perfect tool that will last many lifetimes. [After years of owning this simple implement and often admiring it, one day, as I was using it to reflect sunlight into a dark corner of a kitchen cabinet, I was astounded to see printing on the blade: "IKEA/stainless steel/made in China". It makes me wonder what else is permanently written in such a subliminal way in my environment.])



While I was a federal fugitive, being a Sunday-school teacher at the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists. (At a time when the church was secretly [and illegally] hiding a group of political refugees that had fled Central America.) After I was arrested, the minister of the church, the Rev. Paul Sawyer, visited me in jail while he was out on bail. A peace and social justice activist, he was arrested more than 60 times.

Paul was also a poet. I was familiar with his poetry before I met him.


(Sawyer "...believed that one's values weren't worth anything unless one was prepared to go to jail for them."

---Dennis McLellan, the Los Angeles Times, 6.11. 2010 obituary.)


In 1966, Sawyer let the Merry Pranksters put on one of their Acid Tests at a southern California church where he was the minister.



While I was a federal fugitive, being the carpool driver for 2 years for my young daughter and some of her classmates. (I think I am a good driver. I drove for more than fifty years. I have a clean record with the Department of Motor Vehicles. I have no moving violations.) Before I went to court to be sentenced for Failure to Appear, some of the parents of the children I had so often driven to school wrote letters to the judge informing him that they had trusted me to transport their children, and that they still trusted me.



Studying the extraordinarily excellent drug-literature catalogs issued by Michael Horowitz, the father of actress Winona Ryder.



The months I spent taking LSD and sleeping in an upper area of Bowles Hall in 1970 on the University of California campus in Berkeley. Built in 1928, Bowles Hall, according to Wikipedia, has the "appearance of a medieval castle". The roof was a perfect place to smoke cannabis early each morning and observe the local deer.



("They electrocute the night
And it's always quite a sight
Down at Barrington Hall"

---Les Claypool, in the song "Barrington Hall", which was recorded by Les Claypool's Fearless Flying Frog Brigade in 2002.

"When Barrington starts to breathe again"

---Les Claypool, in the 1989 song "Frizzle Fry", recorded by Primus.

Barrington Hall was an UC Berkeley student co-op, where, over the years, MANY drugs were consumed and  MANY drugs were distributed. Barrington was infamous for the wild LSD-laced "wine punch" parties that were held there. [Primus released an album, "Tales from the Punchbowl" in 1995.]

In 1972, I lived in an apartment building next to Barrington. My associates and I distributed VERY large amounts of LSD and cannabis there.

Over the years, I was awed by the art at Barrington.

"Every surface in Barrington was covered with psychedelic murals and layer upon layer of graffiti."

---from an obituary for Ian Ray [1964--1997], in Slingshot, Issue 59.

Just inside the front entrance to the building:

"Welcome to Barrington, Kids! Please keep your hands and arms inside the ride at all times."

["Students at Barrington didn't just read and write poetry--they lived it."

---Alison ApRoberts, who moved into Barrington in 1973. She was quoted in California Monthly, November 2003.]

[From my annotated list of drug publications I owned:

"What Drug Should I Do Today?" is a 13-page 1984 manifesto written and self-published at Barrington by a smelly and weird non-student drug user dude who lived there for nearly a decade. The front cover shows a pie chart, the slices of which are labeled "LSD, TV, Coffee, Pot, Pocket Western, Crank, Romance, Aspirin Coke", etc. (A widespread 1950s urban legend among young people was that if you mixed aspirin and Coca-Cola and then drank it it could get you drunk or "high".) The author of "What Drug Should I Do Today?", Ron "Pink Cloud" Brown (1946-2022), was mentioned in a RICO ("Racketeer-Influenced Corrupt Organization") lawsuit that was filed against Barrington Hall by one of their neighbors, Sebastian Orfali, a well-known publisher of pro-drug books, including MARIJUANA GROWER'S GUIDE and PSYCHEDELICS ENCYCLOPEDIA. Orfali claimed residents of Barrington used and sold illegal drugs and repeatedly vandalized his property, etc. "Pink Cloud" appeared briefly in the documentary My Big Fat Berkeley Homeless Movie (2007).])


ROCHDALE!!!

An experimental school, funded by the government of Canada, Rochdale College became "an unrivaled cannabis and psychedelics superstore". Rochdale was a large 18-storey building in Toronto. It had its own long-haired stoner security guards, and there were waterpipes with large bowls and multiple hoses in the elevators. (Each Rochdale degree, printed by Coach House Press, bore a union notice "PRINTED IN CANADA/ON CANADIAN PAPER by mindless acid freaks".) In the early 1970s when I was a frequent visitor, the price of a pound of marijuana, hashish, or hash oil in Rochdale was less than half of what it sold for most everywhere else in the city. Quite a bit of LSD flowed through the building and there was a lot of stunningly psychedelic art. I still have a t-shirt I bought there depicting a bottle of hash oil. I not only visited Rochdale to purchase hash oil, I also hung out there to establish social and business relationships with some of the many, many drug dealers who passed through. Not everyone there was groovy, of course. According to Tom Bates in his 1992 book RADS: THE 1970 BOMBING OF THE ARMY MATH RESEARCH CENTER AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN AND ITS AFTERMATH, one of the conspirators fled to Canada, where he researched how to illegally manufacture psychedelic drugs because he said he wanted to make money to fund further terrorist activities. Bates wrote that this "radical" fugitive visited Rochdale College.



Listening to some broadcasts featuring boundary-pushing radio performer Joe Frank.



Ctrl-F (My favorite keyboard shortcut.)



When I was a child I stood on the sidewalk outside of the White House. It was a sweltering hot summer afternoon and far away, Eisenhower walked across the lawn. I will never forget how the bright sunlight reflected from his bald head.



A friend was familiar with Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, having been arrested for "trafficking" marijuana there around 2 years before I met him in Berkeley.

("Hippie haunts raided again by drug squad", The Province, 2.11. 1968.)

In early 1973, following a series of high profile 1972 Brotherhood of Eternal Love LSD and cannabis arrests, my friend and I fled Berkeley and drove to Vancouver, where we hid out on "Chemical Row" at the house of a band named Brain Damage. I have such an unforgettable memory of taking a much-needed shower there. The spectacularly fresh smell of the Dr. Bronner's Peppermint Castile "ALL-ONE" liquid soap seemed to penetrate to the very core of my being. Later we turned the band on to some intensely powerful Punta Roja Colombian marijuana we had mailed from California, and they got very angry because the pot was so strong that they said they kept injuring themselves by falling down, walking into things, etc...



Appearing in a video, "Siberia", made (using a Fairlight Computer Video Instrument) at the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC) in Oakland in 1984 by gifted poet, author, imagemaker, and mother Dominica Kriz, whose father was the noted Czech Surrealist photographer Vilem Kriz. Dominica's 2000 book OCEAN OF MERCY was written under the pseudonym Atoma Ziv.

("The book was extremely personal and mythic at the same time. Reading it was like an acid trip. It found its way into my dreams and sections of it continue to haunt me in the best sense of the word. My boyfriend said it re-defines channeling and manages to offend everybody. I didn't find any of it offensive though. For me it was like a love affair."

---Christina Fawn, amazon dot com, in her five-star 9.17. 2000 review of OCEAN OF MERCY, "A hallucinogenic journey".)

Dominica was the very first person I met when I arrived in Berkeley at age 17. (Many years later,in 1984, I was in a store in Berkeley and a young woman came in. She had a colorful tattoo of a phoenix on her upper arm. I looked at her and I said "I once knew someone who had a tattoo of a grim reaper in the same spot on her arm." The woman said "What is your name?? " I told her, and it turned out that she was Dominica, who was the person who had had the tattoo of a grim reaper. I had not seen her since we were both very young. On a beautiful sunny day a week later, I visited her at CCAC, and we went to a nearby graveyard and smoked some marijuana. I asked her about another tattoo that she had when she was a teenager. (It was on one of her buttocks, and it was the words "PROPERTY OF" [and the name of a young man who had saved her life.]) She slid her bluejeans down and showed me the charming tattoos of Chinese clouds that were where the words "PROPERTY OF" had once been...

("What a fucking nightmare."

---Dominica Kriz, on Facebook, commenting in 2016 on the election of Donald Trump.)



(Two photos about "coming of age" rituals that were in the October 1991 issue of LIFE magazine. One photo showed a young girl smoking a large marijuana cigarette in a church in Jamaica. The other photo was taken in America, and showed a father and son with guns, walking in the forest on their way to kill some animals.

I went hunting with my father when I was young. He shot a crow and then made me pick it up and bring it to him. I thought it was WRONG, but I said nothing because I did not want to get beaten.

Several times he took me to the city dump where he enjoyed shooting rats.

Another time we were visiting my grandparents in Mount Airy and my father shot some squirrels and my grandmother served them for dinner. Tasted nasty with a rubbery gristle-like texture.)



Reading the short 'Personal History' essay "ECSTASY--Losing Religion and Doing Drugs in Houston"
by Jia Tolentino, which was published in The New Yorker, 5.27. 2019. If people want to understand  young people who live in America in 2019, I think it is quite IMPORTANT that they read this profound essay at least 3 times.

"OH but to think of the insanity of even thinking for a minute that I could have even touched more than a surface of what this actually is no matter how hard I'll ever try"

---Jia Tolentino, in a handwritten "...note that I wrote to myself on acid a few weeks ago" that she photographed and posted to her Twitter account 5.22. 2019.



DREAMS!!!



(Two of the non-car vehicles that I have owned: One was a white 1991 Ford E-250 panel van that I lived in alone for almost 12 years. ["Man-in-a-white-van"-phobia is not a joke. Women and children often seemed to look at me with real fear. And methamphetamine-crazed people beat me on multiple occasions, each time INSISTING I was a narc spying on them.]

["Living in a van will throw you into many uncomfortable scenarios that will force you to confront yourself at the deepest level."

---"John and Jayme", a pair of young people on gnomadhome dot com, 2022. Their absurd statement, seen on their grossly commercial pro-van website, is NOT true. For most people, living in a van is certainly NOT some unique rolling form of positive "do-it-yourself" deep psychotherapy. Living in a van will NOT necessarily improve your life.]

The other was a class A motorhome, a wonderfully comfy and well-equipped 26-foot 1981 Winnebago Brave, complete with an Onan generator and an 8-track sound system, including a collection of 8-track tapes. I spent really, really a LOT of money repairing the Winnebago, making sure that all the mechanical and electrical systems were in top-notch shape. All of the expensive tires were brand new. All 5 batteries were brand new. I lived alone, making hallucinographic designs in the Winnebago for 2 years, until a VERY drunk Berkeley police officer with a grudge against me, Guillermo "Memo" Robles, helped other officers take it from me in 1999.

[An almost identical 1981 Winnebago Brave is driven by the evil mother in the 2010 horror movie Mother's Day, a very loose remake of Charles Kaufman's violent 1980 film of the same name.]

Later, an employee of the tow yard told me the tow yard sold my Winnebago for $400 [through a middleman] to one of the officers who took it from me. When I complained to other officers who knew the officer who bought it, they told me to shut up and one of the officers said "It would be very easy to have you killed." I shut up.

Alarmingly, it was NOT the first time I had received what I always think is definitely wise for me to consider to be to be a CREDIBLE death threat: one made by a law enforcement officer or officers...)


("32,542 people were killed by police in the U.S. since 2000."

---DemocracyNow dot org, 6.1. 2021, quoting an approximate figure from the Raza Database Project.)



The charming and AWESOME women who have loved, inspired, and supported me!!! Without their help, I never would have survived! The first woman I ever lived with, in 1971 when I was 20, was Jacqueline Lenoir-Rolland, who came to Berkeley from Montreal. I lived with another woman for approximately 10 years. My next relationship with a woman lasted an intense 5 years. I lived for 4 years with the most recent woman I was in a relationship with.



(In late 1986 when I was in a halfway house [Eclectic Communications, Inc.] in San Francisco after being released from prison, Kevin Gillan, a former maker of LSD, gave me a copy of the federal "Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986". The new laws, creating things like mandatory minimum sentencing, were insanely harsh and went on to needlessly destroy many, many lives.


["It was a type of penalty that had been removed from federal law in 1970 after extensive and careful consideration. But in 1986, no hearings were held on this idea."

"Only a few comments were received on an informal basis. After bouncing back and forth between the Democratic-controlled House and the Republican-controlled Senate as each party jockeyed for poitical advantage, The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 finally passed both houses a few weeks before the November elections."

---Eric E. Sterling, a lawyer who, very much to his regret, "...participated in the passage of the mandatory minimum sentencing laws", on the "Frontline" TV show (PBS), 1.12. 1999.

"Since 1993, almost one in three federal drug defendants have earned sentence reductions" by becoming informants...]


["Currently, the weight of LSD is determined by combining the actual number of doses of LSD seized (each dose arbitrarily considered to weigh 50 micrograms) with the weight of whatever carrier medium is used to distribute the LSD. For example, one dose of LSD on blotter paper is considered for sentencing purposes to be less LSD than one dose of LSD on a sugar cube, which weighs considerably more."

---Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) newsletter, 7.1. 1993.]


["...the United State Supreme Court held in Chapman v. United States that the weight of the blotter paper containing LSD, and not the weight of the pure LSD itself, is what triggers the mandatory minimum. Since there is a five year mandatory minimum under federal law for more than one gram of blotter paper containing LSD, and a sheet of paper weighs approximately 4.5 grams, less than a quarter of a page of blotter paper containing LSD would hypothetically trigger the five year mandatory minimum, even if the total weight of the pure LSD in the blotter paper is no more than a tiny fraction of a gram. Similarly, there is a ten year mandatory minimum under federal law for more than ten grams of carrier medium containing LSD, so three sugar cubes (each weighing approximately 4 grams) with one dose in each sugar cube would weigh a total of twelve grams. In other words, three sugar cubes containing a total of three doses of LSD could trigger a potential ten year mandatory minimum sentence."

---Omar Figueroa, a defense attorney, 1.14. 2021.])



When I was in prison, the head guard called me into his office and said "where are you from?" I replied "Berkeley". The guard then said "Too bad--I am going to make your life A LIVING HELL!!" (It turned out that several years before, the guard had been dosed with LSD by inmates who had put so much of the substance in his coffee that the guard later had to be placed in a psychiatric hospital.) And indeed, for many, many long months, the guard tortured me relentlessly. My life became a hideous nightmare of pain, both physical and mental. To make a very long story short, one day I reached the breaking point. I no longer could bear the weight of the cruelty of the guard and the burden of my intense anger and resentment at how I was being treated. I came to realize the only way I could survive was to GENUINELY AND UNCONDITIONALLY LOVE the guard. I opened my heart, for real, and let the true compassion I knew was there flow into my being, head-to-toe. WOW!!!!!!! What an amazing sensation I experienced!!! Like a gigantic weight had been lifted from my shoulders!!! I looked down at the floor thinking I had actually left the ground and was floating!!! (The rest of the time I was in the prison my life was filled with [relative] happiness. I actually blew the mind of the guard with my new attitude, and he seemed to become a considerably happier person, much to the benefit of all the inmates.)

("Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage."

---Richard Lovelace, 1642, in a poem he wrote while in prison.)



(I was a very well-behaved child. My father had a violent temper. When he was older he became a huge fan of Rush Limbaugh, and he greatly admired Sarah Palin. I was often terrified of him because he beat me and whipped me, and in other ways punished me, sometimes severely, often for no logical reason I could discern. My father was fond of alcohol, and I saw him drink it daily, but I do not remember ever seeing him drunk, or even slightly high. Once, when we were on a family trip, a black cat crossed the road in front of us. My father immediately stopped the car, turned around and drove back the way we came, driving 280 miles out of the way. His actions that day and the frighteningly grim look on his face made me think his insanity was becoming worse. Around the time I completed grade school, my parents made it clear that they did NOT like me or my poetry! When I lived with my parents, my brother, and my sister, I was a polite and respectful teenager. I did not drink beverages containing alcohol, and I had never used an illegal drug, not even marijuana. Clean-shaven and short-haired, I was active in the Methodist church, the Boy Scouts. and the Teen Age Republicans. I was due to start a manual labor job at a pickle factory. I was enrolled in a local community college with plans to study civil engineering but never got a chance to attend. One evening in 1969 in North Carolina when I was 17 years old, shortly after I graduated from high school, we sat down for a family dinner at home and my father, without any provocation, launched into a bizarre tirade about how I was a bad person. He then punched me in the face, breaking several of my teeth, and stormed out of the house. My mother told me I must leave immediately and she said "don't come back".  15 years passed before I had any further contact with my parents. [I called them from jail.])



I met the astoundingly brilliant artist Roger de Shon in Berkeley in 1969. I was very much impressed by his intricate drawings then, and I continue to be very much influenced by his more recent drawings that he so kindly shows me now, more than 47 years later, along with the secret and powerfully revelatory poetry that he finds hidden in a wide variety of prose.



Hearing William Burroughs read his work in 1974 in Berkeley in a room at the Co-op store on Telegraph at Ashby while I was very high on codeine and hashish.



Hearing Allen Ginsberg read his poetry in Berkeley at a benefit for the Tibetan Nyingmapa Meditation Center in the summer of 1970 while I was very high on LSD and hashish. (After the reading, while I was eating dinner I saw Ginsberg come in and sit down near where I was at the Mel's Diner on Channing Way at Shattuck Avenue. With my hands in my pockets, I nervously went up to his table to thank him for the reading and he freaked-out, thinking I might have a gun in my pocket, and dove underneath the table, begging me not to shoot him...I immediately left the diner.)


("Once when Kerouac was high on psychedelics with Timothy Leary, he looked out the window and said 'Walking on water wasn't built in a day.'"

---Allen Ginsberg)


("...the visions holy the hallucinations holy..."

---Allen Ginsberg, in Berkeley, 1955.)



Reading MANY science fiction novels when I was a teenager. (I was also influenced by the intense futuristic art made by Paul Lehr that was on the covers of a lot of these novels. Decades later I became friends with one of Paul Lehr's sons.)


One day When I was 12, in October 1963, I was at the base library checking out many science fiction novels as usual and I saw the new (October 4) issue of LIFE magazine had arrived. I almost always enjoyed reading LIFE and considered it to be a source of accurate information. The cover showed a model of a DNA molecule, with the words "Scientists close in on The Secret of Life". In the article about DNA written by Alicia Hills and Albert Rosenfeld I read "When well-trained planarians are cut up and fed to untrained planarians, the cannabalistic worms learn much faster than those on a less educated diet." My memory of sitting there immobilized, thinking that the world as I knew it had just changed in a way that was frighteningly IMPORTANT is extraordinarily vivid. The implications were so incredibly huge! I went on to read about "The new power to change heredity". The concluding words in the article were "As they contemplate the golden opportunities the new powers will give man, scientists also stop to think about the opportunities for the abuse of these powers--and when they do, their thoughts sometimes make them shudder."

University of Michigan biologist and animal psychologist James V. McConnell was the person who fed the planarians to the other planarians in March 1960. He had written a number of science fiction stories, such as "Life Sentence" which was published in the periodical Galaxy Science Fiction in January 1953. (Galaxy Science Fiction is where Robert Heinlein's "The Puppet Masters" appeared in September, October, and November 1951.) McConnell, of course, received MUCH media attention for his planarian research, which apparently helped his career. McConnell wrongly believed that memories are encoded in the structure of molecules. Other scientists could not replicate his results because his results WERE NOT TRUE. Memory was NOT transferred. What Larry Stern called "The Memory-Transfer Episode" soon ended. According to Wikipedia, McConnell provocatively said he "...believed that...in the future humanity would be programmed by drugs. He once commented that he would rather be 'a programmer than a programmee'".

(The American terrorist Theodore Kaczynski earned two mathematics degrees at the University of Michigan. He once lived in Berkeley and taught at the University of California there. He mailed a bomb to McConnell in 1985, which, when it exploded while McConnell's assistant was opening it, injured the assistant and caused harm to McConnell's ears.)

(Jeff Eldridge and Josh White, writing in Michigan Daily on 4.4. 1996, the day after Kaczynski's arrest:

"McConnell...was considered a leader in the psychological area of behavioralism. 'It [behavioralism] takes the view that human beings are largely controllable,' Psychology professor Charles Morris said."

"In his manifesto, the Unabomber condemned 'genetic engineering'... He also referred to 'the manipulation of an individual to adjust him to the system.'")



Seeing Mikhail Baryshnikov dance in a ballet performance in San Francisco.



TATTOOS!!!

(I have no tattoos but I greatly enjoy seeing them on other people.)


("...fireworks in his eyes..."

---artist Don Ed Hardy, describing a sailor who was tripping on LSD as Hardy tattooed him. From an interview by Mina Kim, KQED-FM, 11.4. 2016.)



(I enjoy making photos. Here is a list of a few of the tools I have owned:

Argus Model C3 [aka "the Brick"] 35mm camera
Nikon FE 35mm SLR camera with 50mm Nikkor lens
Nikon Lite Touch 35mm compact autofocus camera with 28mm f/3.5 lens
Minolta XG-7 35mm SLR camera with 50mm lens
Olympus Stylus 35mm compact autofocus camera
Polaroid Model 150 bellows camera
Polaroid Model 103 bellows camera
Polaroid Model 20 "Swinger" camera
cheap [circa 1989] Polaroid camera
Fujifilm FinePix A500 digital camera
Canon PowerShot SD750 digital camera
Apple iPhone 3G with digital camera
Wiko cellphone [Android] with digital camera
Apple iPad Mini [first generation] with digital camera)



(The many hallucinations I see when I use my Integrating Stimulating Intensity Stroboscope [I.S.I.S.], said to have been invented in 1968 or 1969 by Jack Schwarz.)



(While walking to school one morning in South Carolina when I was very young I realized that A DRAINAGE DITCH COULD BE THE MOST BEAUTIFUL THING IN THE WORLD. I became obsessed with the idea. I still think it is absolutely true.)



Mind-opening unpublished research information about the history of underground LSD manufacture that "Orange Sunshine" maker Tim Scully provided to me, especially the stories about Owsley and Nick Sand. (Scully has noted that he and Owsley preferred to think of themselves as "cooks" rather than "chemists"...)


("I remember the first time I took acid and walked outside and the cars were kissing the parking meters."

---Owsley, about something that happened in Berkeley in 1964, in an article by Robert Greenfield, Rolling Stone, 7.12. 2007.)


("Orange Sunshine" maker Nick Sand produced millions of doses of LSD in a career that spanned decades. His heroic efforts made life better for many, many people. His first LSD-related arrest was in 1967. His final arrest, at an LSD lab in Canada, occurred in 1996. Sand was the son of Clarence Hiskey (birth name: Clarence Szczechowski), who was a member of the Communist party. Hiskey was a chemist who worked on the Manhattan Project that produced the atomic bomb. Apparently Hiskey flirted with spying for the Soviet Union. When called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he refused to answer questions about his Communist associations and espionage, and was cited for contempt of Congress.

In 1977, while a federal fugitive, Sand became a follower of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. In 1984, in the largest documented bioterrorist attack in modern American history, some followers of Rajneesh in Oregon attempted to influence local elections, sickening 751 people by using Salmonella to contaminate salad bars in 10 restaurants.

 [Early North American settlers infamously distributed smallpox-infected blankets to native Americans...

"The Nazis were not wrong to cite American precedents. Enslavement of African Americans was written into the U.S. Constitution. Thomas Jefferson spoke of the need to 'eliminate' or 'extirpate' Native Americans. In 1856, an Oregonian settler wrote, 'Extermination, however unchristianlike it may appear, seems to be the only resort left for the protection of life and property.' General Philip Sheridan spoke of 'annihilation, obliteration, and complete destruction.'"

"...between 1500 and 1900 the Native population of U.S. territories dropped from many millions to around two hundred thousand."

---Alex Ross, in an article "The Hitler Vortex", The New Yorker, 4.30. 2018.])


("When I took LSD, the experience was so magical that I wanted to share it with everyone and make it available to everyone who wanted it. I believed that this would make the world a better place...I believed that others would have experiences similar to those I had, if they tried LSD, and I believed that such an experience would make people gentler, more caring, more conscious and at one with the universe. Now, in hindsight, it appears that LSD doesn't carry a specific message with it. I like the model presented in ACID DREAMS, that LSD is an amplifier."

"I have met many people who took LSD. The vast majority believe they benefited from the experience."

---Tim Scully, in a 2003 email message to Henrik Dahl that was published in The Oak Tree Review, May 2009.)


("One story features a snake-oil salesman--Professor Atmos P. H. Ear--offloading an odorless, colorless, tasteless chemical called "Ever-So-Much-More-So" that when sprinkled on things, supposedly enhances everything; a soft bed would become softer, a fast car becomes faster, and so on."

---Wikipedia, re: the children's book CENTERBURG TALES by Robert McCloskey, 1951.


"The people of the town shake it over everything, and are amazed to find that their water gets wetter, a squeaky spring becomes squeakier, and people's individual characteristics such as a stutter or a tendency toward pomposity become more pronounced. Everything touched by Ever-So-Much-More-So becomes it's heightened self.

Two curious boys finally open the product's container, which appears to be empty. Of course the stranger is long gone, and the townspeople wonder if they have been swindled, but one older man pours it over the earth, and celebrates as the grass becomes greener, the birds sing more clearly, and the world becomes profoundly itself in every way. So is it suggestion or is it real? The story ends ambiguously..."

---Susanna Harwood Rubin)


("...Wilkin's Mead cures boredom through a simple process of intensifying your reception to all stimuli."

"...you have never really seen a sunset, enjoyed a kiss...until you have first had Wilkin's Mead."

---John D. MacDonald, in his science fiction novel WINE OF THE DREAMERS, written in 1950.)


("Miracles, he explains, result from 'our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.'"

---Alex Ross, The New Yorker, 10.2. 2017, quoting what Willa Cather wrote in her 1927 novel DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP.)


("The symbolists, who were avid drug takers, delighted in the way hallucinogens intensified all their senses simultaneously."

---Diane Ackerman, in her book A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SENSES.)


("...touted as a 'rejuvenator' because, in common with children, its users seem to be especially sensitive to color, sound, smell, and touch."

---Eugene Schoenfeld, M.D., writing in 1968 about how marijuana was regarded in the 1800s.)


(In the 2015 documentary THE SUNSHINE MAKERS, Tim Scully, Nick Sand, and others are shown making LSD at a clandestine laboratory in Windsor, California in 1969. In a memorable scene, Nick Sand briefly but very humorously pretends to be a "mad scientist", making "crazy" facial expressions and weird hand motions over a piece of lab glassware...)


("...the Watts Acid Test, which took place in a warehouse in south Los Angeles on February 12, 1966" featured containers full of Kool-Aid that had "no signs on them indicating that they contained LSD..."

"'It became apparent that there were people freaking out' remembers Tim Scully.

"In the middle of the warehouse a woman began screaming 'Who cares?! Who cares?! Who cares?!' Rather than comfort her--or care--some of the Merry Pranksters shoved a microphone into her face.

'Don Douglas and I agreed that was deeply unethical. That was like raping people' recalls Scully...you couldn't just give it to unsuspecting people."


"I have been involved with the law for thirty years, and I have never in my life seen any case that was so damaging to society as this case was."

---federal judge Samuel Conti, in the late 1970s, opposing an early parole hearing for Tim Scully. [After being sentenced to twenty years, Scully was released in May 1979 after serving three and a half years.]


"The bad thing about scattering it to the four winds the way that we did is that there was no control to keep people who shouldn't be given LSD access to it, like very young children, adolescents and teenagers."

---Tim Scully


---quotes from "Acid Trip: Denver's Secret LSD Labs Fueled the Psychedelic Revolution", an article by Chris Walker, Westwind. Denver, Colorado, 10.31. 2017.)


Otto Ambros (1901-1990) was a German chemist and a convicted Nazi war criminal. He is known for his wartime work on the nerve gas sarin and his use of slave labor. (The name "sarin" is formed from the initials of the discoverers, with Ambros being the "a".) After his early release from prison, Ambros was hired to work as an advisor at Dow Chemical Company.

(2,5-Dimethoxy-4-methylamphetamine, also known as DOM, was first synthesized and tested in 1963 by Alexander "Sasha" Shulgin when he worked for Dow Chemical Company. [Dow manufactured Napalm and Agent Orange.])

In mid-1967, tablets containing DOM were widely distributed in the Haight-Ashbury District of San Francisco under the name of STP, having been manufactured by underground chemists Owsley Stanley and Tim Scully. The appearance of DOM on the black market proved disastrous. The tablets contained an excessively high dose of the chemical. This, combined with DOM's slow onset of action, encouraged some users, familiar with drugs that have quicker onsets, such as LSD, to re-dose. DOM was initially distributed at the Golden Gate Park summer solstice festival in 1967, and its remarkably long duration caused many users to panic and sent some to local emergency rooms. Treatment of such overdoses was complicated by the fact that no one at the time knew that the tablets called STP were, in fact, DOM.

---Wikipedia

(“Unbeknownst to us, Bear kept a deep, dark secret for years because he didn’t want to get Sasha in hot water. But Sasha had given him DOM."

---Tim Scully

["According to Tim Scully, a former LSD chemist who worked closely with Owsley Stanley (Bear) (who was himself a disciple of Shulgin), Shulgin had personally given a large stash of DOM to Owsley Stanley to do with as he saw fit. How large a stash, you may wonder? 'Something like 50 grams,' Scully recalled." (Enough to make more than 10,000 doses.)

---Eric Sinclair, writing about a 2019 recorded interview he conducted with his former Autodesk workmate Tim Scully.])

("...it is particularly mysterious why Shulgin agreed to help Stanley..."

---Matthew J. Baggott, in his paper "Learning about STP--A Forgotten Psychedelic from the Summer of Love", published online in History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals Vol. 65, Issue 1, Oct 2023, University of Wisconsin.

Baggott writes that "In Kleps’s report of early STP use, Stanley recommended 30 mg doses." [When I was jailed in San Francisco in 1985, one of my cellmates was Arthur Kleps. I was the only prisoner there who knew who he was. A very deeply angry man, Kleps refused to discuss his past with me and told me to "shut the fuck up!" Kleps was the author of THE BOO-HOO BIBLE: The Neo-American Church Catechism and Handbook and MILLBROOK: A Narrative of the Early Years of American Psychedelianism.]

"Reporter David Pearlman wrote a story about STP for the San Francisco Chronicle that ran with the headline, 'A War Drug on LSD Scene' on June 7, 1967 ...the article endorses the theory that STP was developed under contract by the army." ["...the San Francisco Examiner’s coverage emphasized the military theory with the headline 'New Hippie Drug—Army Ancestry'..."])



("OK, I'll fess up. I've never had a good trip--never. We would all begin our trips communally at a great time--the fireplace is going. The music's playing. We're laughing. Everything's great. We're seeing things. Everybody else will have crashed. And I would be up, you know, with the snakes crawling out of my stomach for the next six hours."

---T. Coraghessan Boyle, interviewed on NPR, 5.12. 2019 regarding his novel about hallucinogenic drug experiments OUTSIDE LOOKING IN. [The title of the novel is from a 1968 Moody Blues song "Legend of a Mind" ("Timothy Leary's dead--no, he's on the outside looking in").])


("Me, I was just a druggie--I wasn't looking for enlightenment."

 "The LSD we took, the mescaline and so on, it's just bought from some guy on the street corner, we didn't know what it was."

---T. Coraghessan Boyle, in an article by Nellie Bowles, The New York Times, "The Highs and Lows of LSD Literature", 6.12. 2019.)


(CHILDREN OF THE ATOM is a 1953 science fiction novel written by Wilmar H. Shiras that is set in a future America of 1972. In an email message, Tim Scully recently reminded me of this influential book, which I read in 1961 when I was ten years old.)



Hitchhiking from the East Coast across the United States to San Francisco in 1969.


Hitchhiking from Mexico City to San Francisco in 1972.


(I hitchhiked almost every day in the early 1970s. It was fun and many, many people did it. But then I started seeing mainstream predators pulling over with the bumpersticker "Gas, Grass, or Ass--Nobody Rides For Free". I stopped hitchhiking when I noticed that some of my counterculture friends were permanently disappearing after getting into the cars of strangers. I still wonder how many of them were murdered and their bodies never found.)


My first car ride, from the hospital where I had just been born, to my parent's quarters on the base. My mother filmed the trip, and then filmed my father as he carried me, and, balancing me on one of his arms, unlocked the door. Their small and very excited dog started barking.


A journey I took via boat from Japan to Hawaii to San Francisco that began when I was around six weeks old. My father filmed the Golden Gate Bridge as we passed beneath it, and then bought a car and drove us across the country to Mount Airy, North Carolina.


("In man, the sensory experiences during the early post-natal period are of decisive importance for material structuring of the brain, for the acquisition of cerebral mechanisms, and for the symbolization, perception, and comprehension of sensory stimuli."

---José M. R. Delgado in THE REAL AND THE IMAGINARY--A New Approach to Physics [Edited by Jean Charon].)


Experiencing the vastness of the sea, while flying on a propeller-driven airplane between Prestwick, Scotland and Reykjavik, Iceland in the early 1960s.



MOUNTAINS!!!


("'Boonies' is a diminutive form of 'boondocks', itself borrowed from Tagalog 'bundók' [mountain] during the Philippine-American war. 'Boonies' seems to have gained concurrence during the Vietnam war among American soldiers to denote rural areas of Vietnam." [2017 definition on reddit dot com].)



(I have never been an athlete, but when I was a teenager I earned the Mile Swim patch at a Boy Scout camp one hot summer day in North Carolina. When I finished the swim I was so exhausted that I could not fully pull myself from the lake and spent hours with only my head and shoulders on the shore...)



DOGS ON ROOFS!!! (I am a member of an online photography group with that name.)



(A doctor suggested I see an acupuncturist in the mid-1970s. There were said to be issues with the legality of acupuncture at that time so I had to be very discreet when I went to what appeared to be a family residence in the Oakland hills. I knocked on the front door and a woman let me into a normal living room. She then took me down a hall, unlocked a door and took me downstairs into what appeared to be a large and very well-equipped Chinese medical center with many beds. I greatly enjoyed the treatments. I always saw beautiful geometric hallucinations before drifting into a VERY relaxed and highly altered state of consciousness.

In the late 1980s I was treated by two truly wonderful and extraordinarily caring acupuncturists in San Francisco, Susan Lo and Hansen Mok. Their treatments also relaxed me and caused me to see excellent hallucinations.)



Monday Night Classes with Stephen Gaskin at The Family Dog in San Francisco. Many sessions.

("Rock'n'roll is church music on The Farm, saying just as much as words."

---words shown on screen, with a poster for "Stephen and The Farm Band", in a Swedish documentary film that was shot in Tennessee in 1973. I saw Stephen perform with The Farm Band at the Golden Gate Park Bandshell in the mid-1970s.)

(Since 1973 "Times have changed..."

"...in 1983...The Farm reached an economic crisis point and turned to personal earnings and collective contributions as part of what is called 'the changeover'."

"...The Farm went from an 'all-for-one commune' to being a collective. Instead of giving all their earnings to The Farm and having proceeds split equally, residents began keeping money for their own families and paying $105 a month to the board for necessities--water, electricity and the like."

---Tim Ghianni, the Nashville Ledger, 10.21. 2016.)


(I lived in a commune with 6 friends in 1973. We would all silently get up before dawn, light candles, and sit on the living room floor gazing at a 12-inch by 12-inch vinyl floor tile with a geometric mandala-like design printed on it. When the sun came up, we would smoke some psychedelic hashish...)



(Playing the lead role in the elementary school operetta "Cowboy on the Moon" in 1961 when I was 10 years old and in the 4th grade at Shaw Heights Elementary School on Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina. [I sang that I was "A cowboy in the sky, riding high"...]

At the time, one of my father's jobs was to load and unload the cameras on U2 spy planes. According to the CIA, Shaw Air Force Base was once one of the main places they recruited pilots. According to the CIA, the pilots were taken to Area 51, shown some of the secret high-tech experimental airplanes the government owned and were asked if they wanted to learn how to fly them.)



More than 3 decades ago, after hearing that I was collecting LSD-influenced books of poetry, Diane di Prima very kindly gave me a copy of the small press book MILLBROOK THANKSGIVING that was signed by the poet that wrote it, Walter Schneider.

("The League for Spiritual Discovery charter, stating purposes, methods, and administrative and legal structure. Timothy Leary is named as 'First Guide'. Includes a guide roster of 17 guides [including poet Diane di Prima and her then-husband] and an application for membership."

---from a "small archive related to Timothy Leary, the Castalia Foundation, and the League for Spiritual Discovery in the 1960s" that was cataloged by Ken Lopez.)



Visiting the birthplace of Joan of Arc when I was a young person in France. She had intense religious hallucinations and successfully led the French army to victory over the English. Her enemies burned her at the stake in 1431 when she was 19 years old.


Visiting Lincoln, New Mexico in 1964. Outlaw and gunfighter Billy the Kid made his most famous escape from the old Lincoln County Courthouse there. Billy the Kid, also known as William Bonney, killed 8 men before he was fatally shot in 1881 when he was 21 years old.



Observing as Alan H. Curtis made near-perfect paintings in Novato, California in the mid-1980s. Listening to the near-perfect stories he told as he worked.



The 1972 San Francisco east bay area murder of Karen Long and the related murder of quantity cocaine dealer Patrick Smith. They were dear friends that I liked very much.



(Studying Swiss Artist Ferdinand Hodler's essay on "Parallelism" [which he defined as the repetition of similar forms].)



(Reading Keith Critchlow's 1976 art book ISLAMIC PATTERNS: An Analytical and Cosmological Approach.)



Cultural and historical facts I learned from Rabbi Michael Lerner when I attended Beyt Tikkun in Berkeley. (Lerner has claimed that former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover once called him "one of the most dangerous criminals in America" because of Lerner's antiwar activism.)


("On a Friday night in June 1966, two days before my ordination as a rabbi, I ingested a sugar cube laced with the psychoactive entheogen, LSD. I began a slow ascent to a state of consciousness in which all my normal cares and anxieties simply lifted away. As these boundaries dissolved, being became a vast transparent center of awareness, totally open, accepting, loving and ecstatic--an entirely blessed and holy state. My 'I' had disappeared, replaced instead with this center of awareness that was intimately linked with everything, one with the entirety of the universe, a small part of a vast oneness my 'I' had always termed 'God'..."

---Burt Jacobson, TIKKUN, May/June 2004.


"The experiences I had more than thirty years ago using LSD while listening to music first awakened in me a felt sense of the sacred."

---Michael Ziegler, TIKKUN, January/February 2004.)


("Saul discovers LSD and Jewish mysticism at the same time, a chance concurrence that strengthens the validity of both. During his acid trips, Saul experiences the same sense of time displacement and receptivity described in the texts."

"His scholarship is revoked during his freshman year when, in the name of mental exploration, he convinces his roommate to place a tab on his tongue and the resultant bad trip leads to said roommate painting his naked body blue and white and running into the dean's office to declare himself the new Israeli Prime Minister."

---Myla Goldberg, in BEE SEASON--A Novel.)



There was a tiny coffeeshop in Santa Cruz, California that was a very mainstream place, often frequented by elderly retired people. One afternoon when I went to get coffee I saw an old woman whose back was toward me. She was happily cooing at a nearby baby. The old woman turned to face me. It was Nina Graboi, someone I knew. I saw timeless cosmic love RADIATING from her eyes. There was no need for her to speak.

(Nina was born in 1918, and fled the Nazi takeover of Austria when she was a young woman, spending 3 months in a detention camp. She had her first psychedelic experience in the company of Alan Watts and frequently spent time with the people who were studying LSD and other psychedelics at the Millbrook estate. In the 1960s she was Director of the New York Center of the League for Spiritual Discovery. She was the author of ONE FOOT IN THE FUTURE: A Woman's Spiritual Journey.)



Art lessons from Roy Edwards when we were housemates in 1992 at a marijuana stash house in Occidental, California. (Roy had been one of Mark Rothko's studio assistants.)


(In 2012, Rothko's 1961 painting "Orange, Red, Yellow" was sold by Christie's in New York for more than $86.8 million.)


("To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risks.

This world of imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense.

It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way--not his way."

---Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, in a 1943 letter to the art editor of The New York Times.)


(Snapshot, Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, California, 1971: I saw a young man with long hair who was wearing lizardskin cowboy boots and carrying 2 very large suitcases. He looked at me and said "help!" It turned out he was from Texas and both suitcases were filled with "bricks" of Mexican marijuana. I sold the pot and became good friends with the Texan, whose name was Bill. Over the next decade I met many of Bill's crew of marijuana dealers and their many friends and associates from Texas.)


(Snapshot, Occidental, late 1992: I saw Terence McKenna picking up his mail. His vehicle had a personalized California license plate with the letters NN DMT. Big grin!)


(Snapshot, Occidental, late 1992: I was at the marijuana stash house waiting for Roy Edwards. I heard sirens and an amplified voice "PULL THE VEHICLE OVER! PULL THE VEHICLE OVER NOW!" Roy's VW van came skidding down the driveway and hit a small tree. I was in a room next to the road, a room that was piled to the ceiling with marijuana. No curtains on the windows. From their vantage point, the police officers who pulled their car over could see me. We made eye contact, and they turned their car around and left. [I called the owner of the house, and left a recorded message: "Excellent!"]

I left the stash house and returned to my art studio in Berkeley.

Soon after that, a Texan helping distribute the load of marijuana was arrested nearby with a quantity of the drug.

[Previously I had, at the request of the owner of the stash house, strip-searched the Texan to make sure he was not wearing a wire. He showed me his ID ("William Wright"), which he said was fake, and explained that recently he had assisted the feds in arresting some of the members of the organization that was the source of the Mexican marijuana at the stash house. The members had murdered a number of people, and the Texan said the feds had agreed to let him distribute the load.]

The arresting officers convinced him to give up some of his local distributors, and a media crew made videos of him helping the police arrest the distributors. Shortly thereafter, the videos appeared on a national television series called "American Detective". Almost all mentions of the series have been removed from the internet and replaced with mentions of an entirely different television series with the same name that appeared later. Videos of the episode that showed the bust of the Texan and his distributors are absolutely impossible to find...)


(Snapshot: In early 2009, former state governor and Oakland mayor California Attorney General Jerry Brown called a press conference to announce that the owner of the stash house in Occidental had been arrested elsewhere at what was at the time said to be one of the largest MDMA labs ever seized in California.)


It is a VERY IMPORTANT legal principle in America that a person must be "presumed to be innocent of committing a crime until that person is found to be guilty of committing a crime."

After a lengthy and exhaustive search, conducted over a period of years, I have never seen any evidence that the owner of the stash house in Occidental has ever been convicted of committing any crime.


(Roy Edwards was a devoted member of the Krishna cult [ISKON-International Society for Krishna Consciousness], a group that was founded in the mid-1960s. When I was an underage teenager in Berkeley in 1969 they gave delicious free vegetarian meals at their temple near Telegraph Avenue. I was not into joining their cult, but while on LSD I had several unusually high-energy encounters with A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, who founded the group and was sometimes at the Berkeley temple. Beatle George Harrison, a Krishna devotee, produced a single "Hare Krishna Mantra" with the Radha Krishna Temple. It featured Harrison singing with the Krishnas and was released by Apple records in mid-1969, doing much to popularize the Krishnas. Unfortunately, it soon became clear that a number of serious criminals had joined. At first it seemed like a positive thing, because they smuggled and distributed quantities of potent cannabis products like hash oil. They also bought and sold LSD. [While visiting Canada in the early 1970s I obtained cannabis from a Krishna who smuggled it there from their temple in West Virginia.] Things went downhill fast. In March 1980 a lot of guns and ammunition was seized from Krishnas in Lake County, California and in El Cerrito, near Berkeley. A few months later the Berkeley police found a submachine gun, 2 assault rifles, and 3 loaded pistols in an unregistered Mercedes. [I knew the owner of the car...] The head of the Berkeley temple, Hansadutta, was arrested. In August 1984, Hansadutta ran amok and shot up Ledgers liquor store in Berkeley and then drove to the McNevin Cadillac showroom and shot it up. When arrested soon after, Hansadutta had 4 loaded guns and much ammunition. He also had $8,200 in cash.

Roy was a friend of Hansadutta. Roy often talked about Rothko. He said he had been at the studio around the time Rothko committed suicide. Roy had a "terrible" methamphetamine addiction at that period in his life and was injecting himself with the drug day and night. The way he told the story implied he may have killed Rothko. He said he was never interviewed by the police and went to India and hooked up with the Krishnas there immediately following Rothko's death. The next day I went to the bay area and looked at many books about Rothko. I arrived back at the stash house late at night. I did not turn on the lights. I quietly went up the stairs to my room, pausing mid-way to retrieve a piece of metal pipe I had hidden in case I needed to defend myself. The pipe felt wet. It had not been wet when I hid it. I went into my room and used the flame from a cigarette lighter to examine the pipe, which was dripping paint that was the color of blood. I heard a loud maniacal laugh from the next room. "Now you know what art is!" Roy exclaimed...)


("A painter here has sued CBS Inc. and its New York publishing house, charging that it implicated him in the death of the artist Mark Rothko.

The painter, Roy Edwards, seeks $1.25 million in compensatory and punitive damagess from CBS, its publishing subsidiary, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, and Lee Seldes, an author. The plaintiff charges them with having made libelous statements about him in Mrs. Seldes’ book, 'The Legacy of Mark Rothko,' published last year. The suit contends that Mr. Edwards has suffered damage to his reputation and career as a result of 'malicious, false, scandalous and defamatory' references in which he was said to have been involved in 'a successful plot to murder' Rothko. The Abstract Expressionist artist died in 1970 at the age of 66 in his New York City studio. The death was ruled a suicide.

Mrs. Seldes denied any link between Rothko's death and Mr. Edwards. 'There is no plot in the book at all, except the fact that Rothko was pushed to suicide,' she said. 'That is my scenario and I stand by it.'"

---The New York Times, 3.1. 1979, "CBS Is Sued by Painter Over a Book on Rothko".)



("In his review of my book, The Legacy of Mark Rothko [NYR, December 21, 1978], Robert Hughes..."

"...charges that I, on the basis of 'gossip,' state that Rothko did not commit suicide but was 'assassinated.' Neither of these charges is true. I believe that Rothko’s death almost certainly was self-inflicted and much of the book is devoted to the many reasons for his suicide. The major pressure on Rothko was, as I state repeatedly, 'the forced selection and sale of his paintings to Marlborough' scheduled for the day of his death. [Hughes, though he has chosen to adopt much of my biographical and medical research on the matter as his own, neglects to mention this crucial motivation.]

In the penultimate chapter of the book I have attempted to resolve public and private speculations about the circumstances surrounding Rothko’s death. That he might have been murdered had been voiced publicly, not only by Agnes Martin, but, as recounted by Paul Gardner in New York [February 7, 1977], by Kate Rothko’s lawyer, Edward J. Ross, and others. The subject of possible murder having been raised, it would have been irresponsible, I believe, not to explore the facts as fully as possible, which I did. Apparently Hughes did not read the detailed autopsy notes of the pathologists’ views that I quoted from, because he states that Rothko cut 'his elbow veins with a razor.' In fact Rothko did not [that would have taken much longer]. Having taken a massive overdose of drugs, he somehow managed to chop through the ligaments and the artery in his right arm with only the aid of a double-edged razor blade, one edge wrapped in Kleenex. According to a well-known surgeon this is not possible without the aid of a scalpel or a blade with a handle for leverage. The ligaments and the ante-cubital fossae are far too tough to be severed with just a razor blade. But, as I wrote, at that moment in his drive to die, Rothko must have possessed superhuman strength. Still the questions of how drugged he was at the time and how he performed all this without the aid of his glasses remain unresolved. Since the possibility of homicide could not be completely ruled out—however unlikely—I reported these facts in detail in what I believe to be a straightforward and unsensational exposition. It is my view, as stated in the book, that Rothko almost certainly committed suicide, pushed to the brink by the Marlborough deal. Nowhere did I suggest or imply that any individual was the 'hitman.'"

---Lee Seldes, in a letter to the editors of The New York Review of Books, 2.8. 1979.

"Most of her objections are trivial, but one substantial matter is her defense of the chapter in which she strove, by innuendo, to suggest Rothko was murdered on behalf of Marlborough. 'The subject having been raised,' she now claims, 'it would have been irresponsible…not to explore the facts as fully as possible.' But who actually raised the subject? One magazine writer, who knew nothing about the matter; one painter, who knew less. If the lawyer Edward Ross did raise the question he showed no evidence for it. To slip a journalist your fantasies is not to offer proof; and that was all Ross did. The idea that Rothko was murdered was never considered by the court. It was not suggested by the forensic experts who examined his body. The autopsy produced no evidence for it. It was, quite simply, not an issue. Yet Ms. Seldes, using phrases like 'If Rothko was not murdered, he was pressured into taking his own life…. It was at best a kind of remote control killing' (p. 317), saw fit to spend a whole chapter dragging this red herring to and fro, instead of giving it the brief paragraph it might have deserved. There was, I think, only one reason for her tendentious performance. She is so obsessed with the evils of the art world that her villains cannot possibly be black enough. They must be murderers as well as thieves."

---Robert Hughes, in a letter to the editors of The New York Review of Books, 2.8. 1979, written in reply to Lee Seldes.)



Taking a "cedar enzyme bath" at the Osmosis spa in tiny Freestone, California, very near Occidental. Finely-ground cedar wood mixed with rice bran and enzymes generates a lot of heat by biological fermentation. One gets in a tub filled with the ground wood mixture and the attendant covers your naked body with it for 20 minutes, frequently wiping your face with a towel soaked in cold water. These baths have been used in Japan for many years, becoming more popular after they were offered to athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Sapporo. ("Christo and Jeanne-Claude: The Tom Golden Collection" includes over 100 original drawings, sculptures, collages and photographs that trace the careers of a pair of impressively influential artists. Golden was the mayor of Freestone and a friend of Christo and Jeanne-Claude.)



The times when I was a teenager that I got high with Richard Pryor outside of an all-night restaurant on University Avenue in Berkeley. Outrageously hilarious! (His comedy routine "Acid" was written in 1973. The version on his 1976 record is dazzling. The original version is even more profound.)



(A winter visit to Sun Valley, Idaho to help the son of my friend while the son was in a residential drug abuse treatment program there. The pure beauty of the snow, the sky, and the mountains! The air!

It is frightening how much wealth there is in Sun Valley. Driving around, high on LSD at dawn, the roads eerily glittering with ice crystals, I was reminded of

"...a highway of diamonds with nobody on it."

---Bob Dylan, in his 1962 song "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall".)



GRAFFITI!!!


("He wrote about the difficulty in asserting individual personality within the dimensions of metropolitan life. One solution was to adopt 'tendentious peculiarities,' mannerisms, [of dress, speech, etc.] or other extravagances to attract attention and thus bolster self-esteem."

---Elihu Rubin, who teaches urbanism at the Yale School of Architecture, commenting on the book THE METROPOLIS AND MENTAL LIFE, written by Georg Simmel in Berlin in 1903. Rubin was quoted by Lauren Collins in an article in The New Yorker, 12.5. 2011. The article was about the unusual names that people sometimes use to label their wireless networks.)


(PHYSICAL GRAFFITI was a tiny but VERY colorful and trippy-looking vintage clothing store in New York that I took a photo of in 2006 while in a psychedelic state of mind. Before I posted the photo on Facebook in September 2023 I did not know that the building housing the store had famously been on the front cover of the 1975 Led Zeppelin album "Physical Graffiti"...

I also did not know that in the Rolling Stones’ 1981 “Waiting On A Friend” music video, Mick Jagger was filmed waiting for Keith Richards on the stoop there...)


Dutifully distributing many fake identification documents to many draft resisters in Berkeley in the early 1970s.



Smoking cannabis oil with Ed Rosenthal at his house in Oakland. Ed is the world's leading marijuana cultivation expert. The author of many books about cannabis, Ed loves and respects plants more than anyone I have ever met.



Berkeley artist David Lance Goines.



The psychedelic art of Isaac Abrams.



Alphonse Mucha, artist.



Sulamith Wulfing, artist.



Eric Drooker, artist.



Andy Goldsworthy, artist.



Reading the 1973 book MAXFIELD PARRISH by Coy Ludwig.



Eating my very first croissant one delightfully sunny morning in our room at a hotel near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris in the early 1960s.



(I have loved orange juice ever since I was knee-high to a grasshopper!)



Castelvetrano olives!



A perfect dinner at Chez Panisse in Berkeley.



A delicious sandwich I ate at Katz's Delicatessen in New York City.

(In the 1989 romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally, a woman, seated at a table in Katz's Delicatessen, is noisily showing her friend how to fake an orgasm. When the waiter asks a woman at a nearby table what she wants, she replies "I'll have what she's having.", referring to the woman who is faking an orgasm.)



Blissful knishes I ate at Yonah Schimmel's Knish Bakery in New York City.



A most excellent dinner at Pastis in New York City.

("I think everything hangs by a thread, whether it's a relationship or one's business or one's health."

---Keith McNally, creator of Pastis.)



(On the eighth day of December in 1980 John Lennon was murdered in New York City by born-again Christian Mark David Chapman.

"...the ex-Beatle was holding a fresh mix of "Walking On Thin Ice"--a danceable new wave track recorded by his Japanese American wife Yoko Ono that contained lines about the fragility of life--at the time of the shooting."

---Tim Lawrence, in his 2016 book LIFE AND DEATH ON THE NEW YORK DANCE FLOOR 1980-1983.)



ROLLERSKATING!!!



(I was at a Thai restaurant on Telegraph Avenue near Berkeley with Roger de Shon and my extremely dear friend Simone Richmond in 2007 and I looked up and saw 2 men enter the restaurant. They stepped behind some potted plants and came out wearing ski masks. They had big guns which they pointed at us and they said "This is a takeover! Everybody get on the floor!" We did not get on the floor. One of the robbers came to the table and took Roger and Simone's wallets at gunpoint. The robber demanded my wallet, but all I had was a very tattered plastic bag containing my ID and quite a bit of money. I gave it to him, but he threw it back on the table with disgust without even opening it. Then one of the robbers, who at that point was in the kitchen trying to get the owner of the restaurant to open a safe, called the other robber, by his first name, into the kitchen and told him to kill the owner if the owner did not open the safe. At that point we got on the floor with the other diners. Nobody got shot and the robbers left. When the Oakland police arrived, they said we were "silly" to be upset, that no one had been harmed...)



Visiting artist Mark McCloud at his house in San Francisco and viewing his unsurpassed and historically significant collection of LSD blotter art. Mark is an exceptionally kind person, and a true psychedelic gentleman.



(The time in the very early 1970s that I took LSD and Peter Hans Loschan drove us from Berkeley to Cotati with our good friend the antiwar protester "General Waste More Land" [Tom Dunphy] to visit "Suzy Creamcheese" and Vito, both well-known because they were mentioned in a song by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. On 8.2. 1976, the San Francisco Examiner reported that Tom Dunphy's close associate "General Hershey Bar" claimed in court that Dunphy was "...in reality a CIA domestic spy..." Dunphy often carried a tennis racket and displayed a newspaper with the headline "WAR IS A RACKET".)

("I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer; a gangster for capitalism."

---Smedley Butler, in the November 1935 issue of the magazine Common Sense. Major General Butler [1881-1940], a Marine, was at the time of his death the most decorated Marine in U.S. history. He received the Medal of Honor twice. Butler wrote the 1935 exposé WAR IS A RACKET. [Weirdly, in Virginia in 1921 Butler, acting on a tip, found Confederate general "Stonewall" Jackson's arm where it had been buried in a field since the Civil War. He reburied the arm and placed a plaque at the site...])


Standing with Elizabeth Gips in the backyard of her house in Santa Cruz, gazing at the moon. Inside the house everyone was celebrating Elizabeth's 74th birthday. She turned to me and said "There has been so much more pain than I thought there would be..."

(Elizabeth was the author of SCRAPBOOK OF A HAIGHT ASHBURY PILGRIM: Spirit, Sacraments and Sex in 1967/68.)



Observing Mescalero Apache ceremonial dances at their reservation in the Sacramento Mountains in New Mexico, and without my parents present, attending a Native American religious ceremony there when I was 12 years old.


("In a study published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an international research team reports that 400-year-old chewed-up wads of datura, a plant with powerful psychoactive properties, have been found stuffed into the cracks of the ceiling of a sacred cave."

"'There's this theory that the rock art in California is often made by shamans on private retreats,' David Robinson says. The paintings thus represented the psychedelic visions these shamans, who were typically male, received during their hallucinogenic trance, and as a result those rock art sites became supernaturally powerful places...

This theory has often been driven by the fact that the art 'looks so surrealistic that it had to be made by someone tripping,' says Devlin Gandy."

---Megan Gannon, 11.23. 2020, National Geographic.)


("The largest organized church founded on psychedelics is the Native American Church, which grew out of the peyotism of the Mescalero Apaches..."

---Frank Barron, in CREATIVITY AND PERSONAL FREEDOM.)


("...a person shares whatever is available to share, knowing that when there is nothing to share others in the community will provide what is needed."

---Claire Farrer, in her book THUNDER RIDES A BLACK HORSE--Mescalero Apaches and the Mythic Present.)


("We can share what we got of yours cause we done shared all of mine."

---Robert Hunter, in the lyrics he wrote for the Grateful Dead song "Jack Straw".)


("A young girl sat down next to me and handed me a canteen of cool water. 'Here,' she said, 'have a drink.' I drank it down and passed it to Skip who passed it to someone else. That was the feeling that day. We all seemed to be sharing everything."

---peace activist Ron Kovic, describing being at an anti-war rally, in his 1976 book BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. Kovic had been a very mainstream, very patriotic American before he joined the United States Marine Corps, went to Vietnam, was severely wounded and ended up being paralyzed from the chest down.)


(When I was 12, my father encouraged me and my brother, who was 10, to ride our matching 1962 Schwinn 3-speed racer bicycles on part of the highway between Cloudcroft, New Mexico [in the mountains near the Mescalero Apache reservation] and the small town of La Luz in the desert 16 miles away, not far from Alamogordo. During our approximately 14 mile long [but very brief!] ride we descended almost 4,000 feet. Much of the highway went so sharply downhill there was no way to use brakes. We went way, way faster than most of the cars on the road, who were all kind enough to make room for us and cheer us on. My father tried to follow us in a Volkswagen bus but it was impossible for him to keep up. I will never forget how much FUN that ride was and how happy I was that my father helped us do it.)



UNDERGROUND COMIX!!!

(Especially issue number one [1969] of "Mother's Oats Comix"!)


(The first cartoon depiction of a marijuana smoker I saw in a mainstream newspaper was Zonker Harris, a character who first appeared in 1971 in Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury comic strip. In late 1996, just before California voted to legalize marijuana for medical use, conservative Dan Lundgren, the California Attorney General, became quite upset at the pro-marijuana [and anti-Lundgren] sentments expressed in Doonesbury, and publicly called on newspapers not to publish the strip, saying at a news conference in Sacramento “Make no mistake about it. These strips contribute to the national wink-and-nod attitude toward drug use.”)



(The Chateau of the Indelible Dream, on Telegraph Avenue.)



143 is my favorite 1990s pager numeronym. It means "I love you". ("I"= 1 letter, "love"= 4 letters, "you"= 3 letters.)



DICTIONARIES!!! (Such as the thin photocopied and stapled slang dictionary published in Richmond, California that I found in the 1990s at Urban Ore, a recycling company in Berkeley that was then located near 924 Gilman. It defined the word "Hank" as a jail term meaning a "nervous middle-aged white man with short hair".)



Attending performances at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco.


("All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts..."

---Shakespeare, in "As You Like It".)


("Those roles which, being neither those of Hero nor Heroine, Confidante nor Villain, but which were nonetheless essential to bring about the Recognition or the dénouement, were called the Fifth Business in drama and opera companies organized according to the old style..."

---Robertson Davies)


(Perhaps my "autobiography" is but

"...a tale told by an idiot--full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

---Shakespeare, in "Macbeth".)


(“I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions.”

 ---Augusten Burroughs, in his book MAGICAL THINKING: TRUE STORIES.)



Tasty dinners at the Julia Morgan-designed Berkeley City Club when I was a member.



CATS!!!



Getting two COVID-19 vaccination injections in California from camouflage-clad members of the National Guard at the Oakland Coliseum parking lot in 2021.



Watching Fireball Roberts drive in some of the stock car races that my father took us to in the early 1960s in South Carolina.



Working as a volunteer in the late 1980s with older severely developmentally disabled people on a locked ward at Agnews Developmental Center in Santa Clara County in California.



Conversations I had with Eldridge Cleaver during the many occasions he sold used books to me.



Camping trips with my parents and family to many locations across the United States (Death Valley, Grand Canyon, Mesa Verde, Petrified Forest, Yellowstone, Yosemite, etc.) and travelling with them throughout France, and to Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, and Luxembourg. (Stephen Mather, the first director of the National Park Service, was a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley.)

(When our family was traveling in foreign countries, my father always had us pretend to be Canadians, because he said that in most of the world, Americans were considered to be greedy, crass, and inconsiderate.)



Attending "Expo 67" (The 1967 International and Universal Exposition) in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Especially interesting was the U.S pavilion, a geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller.

("...Fuller's self-mythology was an elastic tool he stretched to suit the audience and the occasion at hand."

---Gemma Tarlach, Discover, May 2016.)

 I was intrigued by the Soviet Union's exhibit, and by "Habitat 67", a modular housing complex designed by architect Moshe Safdie. I was impressed by seeing and listening to a long-haired young man there playing a guitar. A little over 2 years later in Berkeley I met and became a friend of the person I saw making music that day!



The Philips 4-track reel-to-reel tape recorder my father bought in Amsterdam in 1963. From 1964 through 1966 I used it to make looped multi-track recordings of my voice reading school textbooks, etc. which I listened to over and over while I slept each night.



TRIPPING IN JAIL: It was...unusual...! And they served me meals for free! (Not that I ate much...) And there were guards who were said to be able to protect me if necessary! For once in my life I was not afraid I would get arrested and put in jail...LOL...My associates had sent me a paperback book that had been soaked with much LSD. None of my cellmates knew that I was high, they just thought I was crazy...I was laughing a lot!! My laughter protected me--the genuine "bad guys" were scared of me because they perceived me as being VERY unpredictable...I would look at the bars, and blink my eyes, and then I would change the position of my head and look at the bars again and blink again...I was able to construct extraordinarily beautiful geometric designs from the lingering afterimages of the bars...



"...you got to go through hell before you get to heaven."

---Paul Pena, in the song he wrote, "Jet Airliner", which was a 1977 hit for the Steve Miller Band. I greatly enjoyed my visits to the San Francisco apartment of Paul and his dear wife. Paul, who was blind, later appeared in the documentary "Genghis Blues", after he taught himself Tuvan throat-singing. (The first time he heard Tuvan throat-singing was when he was listening to Radio Moscow.)

(In the early 1960s I spent MANY hours listening to Radio Moscow and Radio Havana on my Hallicrafters S-38 shortwave receiver. I was an amateur radio enthusiast, and I still know Morse code...)

("dit dah dit dit / dit dit dit / dah dit dit " is "LSD")



("So, so you think you can tell
Heaven from hell"

---Roger Waters, in the lyrics he wrote for the 1975 song "Wish You Were Here", recorded by Pink Floyd.)



("The closer you get to the meaning
The sooner you'll know you are dreaming"

---Ronnie James Dio, in the lyrics he wrote for the song "Heaven and Hell" that was recorded by Black Sabbath in 1979.)



Blind keyboardist Jay Spell (Jacob Astor Spell, Jr.) was born in Spivey's Corner, North Carolina.

(I attended the first National Hollerin' Contest in Spivey's Corner [population: 48] in June 1969. ["Hollerin'" is what farmers did to communicate over distances before the widespread adoption of telephones.])

He married my Hope Mills High School classmate Billie Wooten. I listened to him perform at the Pink Pussycat in Fayetteville. Because I suspected that my very conservative parents would consider the poetry I was writing to be proof of insanity, I kept it stashed at Billie and Jay's residence before I departed for Berkeley.

("The president of the military court, reading in his notes that the defendant hoped to become a writer, asked him what he wrote. 'Poetry,' answered the defendant. He later recounted the court's reaction: 'And they looked at each other with a wild surmise and said "Well, send him to a psychiatrist. He's clearly mad."' The psychiatrist's report led to his transfer to...a mental asylum."

---Charles Glass, in his very important 2013 book THE DESERTERS--A Hidden History of World War II, describing what happened to British deserter John Bain. Glass wrote the book, in part, for those who were "nurtured on false tales" about World War II.

[The poet W.S. Merwin was put in a "psycho ward" in a hospital around 1946 because he was a pacifist. Merwin later became the Poet Laureate of the United States. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1971 and in 2009.])


Jay Spell later played with Jimmy Buffett, Emmylou Harris, John Mayall, Judy Collins, Canned Heat, Tower of Power, Conway Twitty, Ronnie Milsap, Michelle Shocked, and Jose Feliciano.


Blind people can sometimes hear MUCH better than people who have vision!


(And deaf people frequently have better visual acuity than people who can hear.

"These two deaf beings saw the world, visualized abstractions, and thought with their eyes with a speed and clarity my hearing brain could not approach."

"Not only do deaf minds develop visual skills and visual thinking beyond the usual capacity of a hearing mind, visual thinkers collectively create an amazingly rich visual culture..."

---Susan Schaller, in her book A MAN WITHOUT WORDS.)


("It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see."

---Henry David Thoreau)


("...to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time."

---Georgia O'Keeffe)



(When I was a child in the late 1950s and early 1960s, living on Shaw AFB, I would frequently hike in the woods and gather many sassafras roots, which I took home and made into a tea. I would then, by boiling, remove as much of the water from the tea as I could and add sugar and lemon juice to the resulting syrup. After chilling the syrup in a freezer until it was ice-cold, I would consume large quantities of it and feel VERY, VERY GOOD.

Then I would climb, barefoot, to the very top of a very tall sweetgum tree. Sometimes I would spend hours there, gently swaying in the breeze. A flying squirrel lived in a birdhouse I had built and put on the tree. It was cool to watch him glide from tree to tree. Although I am not fond of heights, I always felt safe in this particular tree. It was so ALIVE! And it was my friend! [Decades later, my parents told me that it freaked them out severely when they saw me sitting at the top of the tree...]

Sassafras contains an oil called safrole. In 1960, the FDA banned the use of safrole in food products because they said it could cause liver damage and cancer. Safrole is a precursor for the clandestine manufacture of both MDA and MDMA ["Ecstasy"], and the first "Ecstasy" I ever took tasted like sassafras.

[Sasha Shulgin once suggested to me that I should include the above anecdote in my autobiography.]

[In February 2020, President Trump mentioned conservative politician Steve Scalise, an opponent of gun control, who was shot by a mentally ill man while while Scalise was playing baseball in 2017. Then Trump mentioned Bobby Richardson, who once played for the New York Yankees. Around 1960, Richardson visited Shaw Heights Elementary School on the base and I spoke with him after he played ball with us. Richardson was born in Sumter, the closest town to the base.]

There was an outlet pipe from the base storm drain system near where we lived. Because I was quite small, I could walk into the pipe if I bent over. I often traveled to locations all over the base, and then exited the pipe through smaller pipes that I had to crawl through.

["We would descend into the network of storm drains under the city. We learned our way around that dark Subterranean labyrinth. It always frightened us. And we always loved it."

---Kary Mullis, describing his childhood in South Carolina in the 1950s.The quote is from his 12.8. 1993 Nobel lecture "The Polymerase Chain Reaction". In the lecture he mentions speaking with Albert Hofmann at a party at Mullis' friend's house in California in the 1980s.]

[Reading about "TRIPPING ON UTOPIA: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science", a book by Benjamin Breen, a University of California, Santa Cruz history professor, and reading excerpts from, and reviews about, the book made me remember when I was around 7 years old in 1958. The military police came to our quarters late one night and asked me to go into the storm drain pipes (where adults were too large to fit) and try to find one of my school classmates. I think they knew that little boys on military bases tend to be VERY loyal to each other, so they strongly emphasized that if I found him, he would NOT be punished. They said there was something wrong with his brain, and that he was going to be taken to California. They said a drug had been discovered that made normal people go crazy, and that doctors thought if they gave it to crazy people they might become normal again...

I was unable to find my classmate. He had permanently disappeared.]

Several years later, when my family lived in the French village of Corny, I was still small enough to squeeze myself through the tiny opening of a hidden cave that my brother and I discovered on the side of a small ravine near the village of Dornot. The charcoal-drawn primitive art on the walls of the cave seemed to be very old. I did not go very far into the cave because I was fearful there might be wild animals there. Corny was located on the Moselle river. There were many vineyards in the area.

["In Bride of Frankenstein...Dr. Pretorius...using as a table an empty coffin...proceeds to have his gourmet supper by candlelight, the meal thoroughly washed down with a good Moselle, properly chilled."

"...when he is calmly sipping his coffee...(he) notices the Monster..."

"Undaunted...(he) offers...'Have a cigar.'"

---Guillermo Cabrera Infante, on the first page of his 1985 book HOLY SMOKE. Alcohol. Coffee. Tobacco. As an editor of National Geographic magazine long ago noted, when talking about America it is not accurate or useful to speak of "drug subculture", when, in fact, MAINSTREAM AMERICA IS A DRUG CULTURE.])



("Fizzies" were tablets that, when placed in a glass of water, produced a "carbonated" beverage. They were invented in 1957 by the Emerson Drug Company, and, after some regional sales, began to be sold nationally in 1962. Because of their TV ad campaign when I was 10 years old, I REALLY wanted to try Fizzies. My parents made me do a lot of chores [like pulling up weeds and scrubbing walls] before I was finally allowed to have one. It was supposed to taste like root beer.

[Root beer containing an extract of the sassafras plant was being made by Native Americans before Europeans arrived in North America. Traditional root beer was a fermented beverage with very little alcohol that contained sassafras, among other things. In 1875, a pharmacist was the first person to successfully market a commercial brand of root beer. It contained an extract of sassafras.]

[One version of the packaging for the root beer flavor was labeled "Mystic Soft Drink Tablets" and showed an image of a snake charmer. The orange flavor was labeled "Bewitching" and showed an image of a witch. The lemon-lime flavor was labeled "Spellbinding" and showed an image what appeared to be an African shaman. One label had what appeared to be a depiction of a mad scientist, and another had a Native American and the words "Heap Big Soft Drink Tablets".]

Unfortunately, Fizzies were one of the worst things I had ever tasted. Undrinkable! I resolved to be very, very cautious about believing anything I might see in a ad on TV.

The manufacturers of Fizzies knew they tasted bad, so they had tried to make their product taste better by adding sodium cyclamate, an artificial sweetener.

[In 1937, Michael Sveda was working in a lab. He put the cigarette he was smoking down on a lab bench for a moment and some of the sodium cyclamate he was working with got on the cigarette. When he put the cigarette to his mouth he tasted something sweet. Eureka! In the early 1950s Abbott Laboratories researched sodium cyclamate, thinking that it might mask the severely bitter taste of the drug pentabarbital.

(Soon after I came to Berkeley in 1969, someone gave me a capsule of secobarbital [seconal]. Such capsules were called "reds". Having observed that, after taking secobarbital, some people slobbered, drooled, fell down, and acted sickeningly drunk, I did not ingest the capsule. I did, however, open it and place an exceptionally microscopic amount of the powder on my tongue. YUCK! Secobarbital is, by far, the most unbelieveably nasty, toxic, poisonous substance I have ever tasted! It took hours for the taste to leave my mouth.

In 1986, when I was incarcerated in Arizona, the federal parole board, much to my dismay, quoted a prosecutor's report saying that at the time of my 1985 Oakland arrest I was an addict and had a history of injecting myself with secobarbital. I do not shoot up drugs. I have no needle marks. I have never used secobarbital and I told them so.

As of 2020, secobarbital is said to be the drug of choice in physician-assisted suicide in the U.S.

The price of a dose of secobarbital increased dramatically between 2008 and 2015. Some feel that greed fueled the increase.)]

Because it is cheap, sodium cyclamate has been widely used. In 1969, annual sales of sodium cyclamate reached $1 billion. Because of health concerns, in 1970 all sodium cyclamate was banned from foods and drugs in the U.S.)



Traveling from Acapulco to Mexico City in 1972 when I was a federal fugitive and smoking a joint of "Acapulco Gold" marijuana (that I had rolled using a page from the Bible as a cigarette paper) while listening to a recording of the song "Heart of Gold" by Neil Young. The song seemed to go on forever...



(I had an art studio in Berkeley in the basement of Redwood Center Psychology Associates, Inc., located at 2428 Dwight Way, very near Telegraph Avenue. [When I was quietly making art, I could often very clearly hear every word of the therapy sessions being conducted above me.] The landlady, a psychologist named Karen Saeger, hired Western Exterminator Company to rid the building of rats. The person Western Exterminator Company sent was a cocaine addict who claimed to have been a narc in Peru. He told very lurid stories about torturing and killing people and then dumping the bodies into sewers. Without my knowledge or my permission, the landlady gave the exterminator a key so he could enter my studio. One evening I came back to the studio and when I went through one of the doorways at the back, powdered rat poison that the exterminator had placed in the area over the doorway rained down on me and I accidentally inhaled quite a bit of it. I went back into the room where I usually worked, and feeling strangely euphoric, I laid on the floor on my back, with my arms on the floor and my hands palms up. I saw bright rays of light shooting out of tips of each of my fingers. The rays wove together and converged mid-air in an area below my feet, forming a spiraling tunnel of light. I thought "Wow! This looks sort of like some of Alex Grey's paintings!" I began to have the sensation that I was floating through the tunnel toward something that was indescribable and yet extremely familiar. I really wanted to continue the journey but I realized that I apparently had "left my body" and that I might be dying. Several very specific things that I had promised friends that I would do later in the week came to mind and I realized that if I died I would not be able to fulfill my promises. I then seemed to float in reverse out of the tunnel back into my body...! I later complained, in writing, about having possibly been poisoned, in a letter to the landlady, who was a well-credentialed psychologist. She was so stupid as to reply, in writing, with the lie that the cocaine-addicted exterminator had never been hired, that such a person had never been on the property, and that no rat poison had been used.

The landlady had hired a scruffy transient as a handyman and apparently manipulated him into hitting me on multiple occasions. A young acquaintance who had just become an attorney represented me pro bono, and a restraining order was issued that stated that it was illegal for the violent transient to come near me. [He hit me again, DIRECTLY IN FRONT OF A POLICE OFFICER, who laughed when I showed him the restraining order and would not tell the transient to stop hitting me.] I refused to leave until the landlady cleaned up all of the areas of the art studio that were contaminated by rat poison. She refused to clean up the studio and, in 1992, sued me for Unlawful Detainer. We went to court. The case was heard by Judge Julie Conger and the landlady lost. Karen Saeger made a futile attempt to bully me into agreeing that I would not ever disclose any of the facts of the case to anyone.

[Karen Saeger had her lawyer, Peter Kerman, send a warning letter to my lawyer, Hugo Torbet, in which her lawyer stated, among other things, that Karen Saeger told him she was concerned that I might harm her, that she thought I might be like "Rosebud Denovo". I did NOT know or associate with Rosebud Denovo or any of her friends. (Teenager Rosebud Denovo [1973-1992] had very recently been shot and killed by an Oakland police officer after she allegedly lunged at him while waving a machete after she broke into the residence of the chancellor on the nearby University of California campus.)]


["JURY CONVICTS BERKELEY MAN FOR BRUTAL ATTACK ON SPEAKER EMERITA PELOSI’S HUSBAND"

---6.24. 2024 press release from the San Francisco District Attorney's Office. David DePape, now 44 years old, broke into the Pelosi residence in 2022 and, in what DePape said was a politically-motivated attack, struck 84 year old Paul Pelosi with a hammer, fracturing his skull.]


["After Trump became the first U.S. president to be convicted of a crime, his supporters responded with dozens of violent online posts, according to a Reuters review of comments on three Trump-aligned websites: the former president's own Truth Social platform, Patriots.Win and the Gateway Pundit.

Some called for attacks on jurors, the execution of the judge, Justice Juan Merchan, or outright civil war and armed insurrection.
'Someone in NY with nothing to lose needs to take care of Merchan,' wrote one commentator on Patriots.Win. 'Hopefully he gets met with illegals with a machete,' the post said in reference to illegal immigrants.

On Gateway Pundit, one poster suggested shooting liberals after the verdict. 'Time to start capping some leftys,” said the post. “This cannot be fixed by voting.'"

---Joseph Tanfani, Ned Parker and Peter Eisler, Reuters, 5.31. 2024, in their report that was published online with the headline "Trump supporters call for riots and violent retribution after verdict".]


[At the time of her death, Denovo was awaiting trial after being charged with possessing explosives. My lawyer told me I could not sue Karen Saeger for defaming me because the law specifically states that nothing her lawyer wrote to my lawyer can be used as evidence in a defamation lawsuit. I immediately showed the letter to a Berkeley police officer and convinced him to go with me to her office, because I wanted her to repeat to the officer her false accusation that I had been stalking her. Karen Saeger's receptionist told us Karen Saeger was not there...])



("The artist's primary medium is consciousness..."

---Alex Grey, in his 1990 book SACRED MIRRORS--The Visionary Art of Alex Grey.)



All of the poetry readings where I have heard such inspiring words!







("Like Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase...I can see the afterimages of my past gesticulating in an overlapping succession of familiarity..."

---Mati Klarwein. From the 2012 book ELECTRICAL BANANA: Masters of Psychedelic Art, by Norman Hathaway and Dan Nadel.)






I often think of the famous quote by Hans Asperger: "...for success in science or art, a dash of autism is essential."



("Many of the great advances in science and art have been achieved by people with Asperger's syndrome."

---Tony Attwood, in his 1998 book ASPERGER'S SYNDROME--A Guide For Parents and Professionals.


"The way they perceive the world makes sense to them...but it often brings them into conflict with conventional [that is, majority] ways of thinking..."

---Lorna Wing, in the foreword to the above book.


Attwood notes that Bill Gates has some traits and characteristics associated with the syndrome, as did Vincent van Gogh.)

("I think Steve Jobs was on the autism spectrum; Albert Einstein definitely would be today."

---Temple Grandin, 2016.)


("...the social cues were not intuitive, so I was just very bookish..."

“I would just tend to take things very literally...but then that turned out to be wrong — [people were not] simply saying exactly what they mean, there's all sorts of other things that are meant, and [it] took me a while to figure that out."

---Elon Musk, onstage at the TED2022 conference in Vancouver in April 2022, speaking about what it was like for him to grow up having Asperger's Syndrome [Autism Spectrum Disorder]. As of 5.10, 2022, Musk was the richest man in the world.)



("'I love non-autistic people when they're on acid,' he says, because they can, finally, 'come and play in my world with me.'"

---Nick Walker, a doctoral student studying neurodiversity. Walker, who is also an aikido sensei, is autistic. He was quoted by Brandon R. Reynolds in his article "Changing Minds: Advocates Reshape How We Think About Autism", San Francisco Weekly, 10.31. 2012.)



("You start realizing that it really just takes one person who is not seeing things right."

---Psychiatrist Dr. David R. Spiegel, describing his very serious fear of being injured or killed by Johnny Depp fans after he testified in the Heard vs. Depp defamation trial. "The backlash has been horrific." NEWSWEEK, 6.3. 2022.)


("The only difference between me and a madman is I am not mad."

---Salvador Dali)


(My mother told me that my father made her stop breastfeeding me when I was very, very young. He also did not want her to feed me with a bottle. He told her that it might make me become homosexual to suck on things. I happily became a thumbsucker and I [usually very discreetly] sucked my thumb until I was almost 18 years old. Just before my 18th birthday in Berkeley I smoked my first joint of marijuana. The urge to suck my thumb immediately and completely disappeared and never came back. I do not think I have sucked my thumb since that night.


When I was seven years old, in a public elementary school in the 1950s in South Carolina, not much was known about some of the milder forms of Autism Spectrum Disorder like what was called Asperger's Syndrome in 1998.


["The idea of ‘mildly autistic’ did not exist then.”

---Temple Grandin, describing 1986, when her memoir EMERGENCE: LABELED AUTISTIC was published.

(Grandin was quoted by Arlene Bouranova, 3.17. 2022, in "BU Today" [Boston University].)]


Some of my teachers noticed that some of my behavior was not what they thought to be "normal" and told my parents. I had become obsessed with collecting and intensely studying rocks, minerals, and fossils. A lot of my fellow students liked my rock collection and that I was so enthusiastic about sharing what I had learned. They, like my teachers, seemed to mistakenly think I was extremely intelligent and seemed to admire me because of it, so I then followed my innate tendencies and became very, very preoccupied with reading and libraries.

I do NOT think I have ever been autistic enough to be diagnosed as having even the mildest described form of Autism Spectrum Disorder. I most definitely DO think I have always had what Hans Asperger described as a "dash" of autism.)



(After many extremely painful years of suffering from kidney stones and other physical ailments I began receiving disability payments in the early 1990s. I thought my primary disability was chronic kidney stones. I also saw my lack of education as a serious disability made much worse by my very noticeable lifelong stupidity. As I became an adult, people repeatedly told me that it is clear that I have a low IQ.



["Nobody's crazy in this institution. They're just feeble in their minds."

---Tom, who helps serve food to fifty-five "droolers" on the mental institution ward where he lives. "They're very low-grade."

"Feeb? Oh, that's feeble-minded."

"We're all feebs in here."

"But I'm a high-grade feeb. Dr. Dalrymple says I'm too smart to be in the Home."

(The above is from the short story "Told on the Drooling Ward", written by Jack London in 1914 and published in THE TURTLES OF TASMAN in 1916.)]



Several years after I began receiving disability payments I noticed that doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals seemed to think I was crazy. Each time I asked why I was receiving disability payments, each healthcare provider smoothly and cleverly changed the subject without answering my question. After quite a few years of very politely asking the question, a social worker got a folder of my medical records and showed me that psychiatrists said I am schizophrenic. It turns out that under California laws, a patient has the legal right to see all of their medical records, UNLESS the records have to do with the patient's mental health. It is said to be thought by some that receiving a diagnosis of mental illness might seriously harm a patient by stigmatizing them.


["Driver with schizophrenia ruled not responsible for Times Square rampage"

---headline of a Courthouse News Service 6.23. 2022 article about the verdict in the trial of a young Navy veteran who purposely drove a car through crowds of pedestrians on sidewalks in New York, killing one and injuring 22 others. The jury found him to be “not responsible by reason of mental disease or defect". News stories such as this are one of the reasons that it can be VERY difficult for a person diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia to do things like rent a room or find a job...]


Another reason often given for not allowing a patient to know their psychiatric diagnosis or what a mental health professional has said about them is that it is thought that mentally ill patients sometimes have a tendency to "become the label".

Evading the enquiries of a patient who has been diagnosed as schizophrenic is seen by some psychiatric professionals to be a humane practice. [The words "TREATING THE UNTREATABLE" are in the title of a 2009 book about "schizophrenic or delusional patients" written by psychiatrist Ira Steinman.])


("'If a diagnosis is not adequately explained by their provider, a client can have significant anxiety about it,'” said Evan Lieberman, a mental health and addiction therapist based in Minnesota, adding that the resulting stress could worsen one’s symptoms.

The same is true for when someone does not receive adequate therapy or other interventions—they could just be left more confused and overwhelmed by their diagnosis.

'Now they have this disorder, they do not fully understand [it] or how to manage it on their own. It would be like telling someone they have a spinal condition that explains their chronic pain, then proceeding not to educate or treat the condition,' said Lieberman."

"Teens watching TikToks like 'Things you didn’t know were ADHD' or 'Signs you’re depressed' may relate to one of the symptoms and be convinced they have ADHD or depression.

Lieberman said it’s kind of like when WebMD arrived and people started thinking every little stomachache was a symptom of an incurable illness. 'As they say, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.'"

---from "Does Getting Diagnosed With a Mental Disorder Make Your Symptoms Worse? Mental health professionals explain why you shouldn’t fear diagnosis" by Romano Santos, VICE, 2.26. 2023.)


("Few of us escape the ravages of mental illness."

---Andrew Scull, a sociologist. The first sentence in his preface to his 2022 book [Harvard University Press] DESPERATE REMEDIES--Psychiatry's Turbulent Quest To Cure Mental Illness, quoted by Daphne Merkin, The Atlantic, 7.10. 2022, in her review of Scull's book. The title of Merkin's review is "CAN YOU CURE MENTAL ILLNESS? TWO CENTURIES OF TRYING SAYS NO. A new book looks at the long and sordid history of psychiatry and its attempt to help those living with mental illness".)


(I do NOT think I am schizophrenic. I do NOT think I have any other form of mental illness.

I have never been hospitalized or in any other way institutionalized for any mental illness. I have never received any psychiatric treatment. I have never been prescribed any psychiatric medication [antipsychotics, tranquilizers, antidepressants, etc.] and I do not use any psychiatric medication.

I am not a medical professional, however, thus I am definitely not qualified to make an accurate diagnosis or seriously disagree with a diagnosis made by a doctor. [I am told that people afflicted with schizophrenia so often think that they are not schizophrenic that such a belief is considered by some doctors to be an actual symptom of the disorder.])


(Jonah Roper, a mentally ill man with a VERY lengthy record of violence and drug use was arrested in Berkeley, California in September 2023 on 9th Street near Gilman Street and charged with murdering his mother and other crimes. The Berkeley Scanner published a detailed story about Roper. Here is a comment "perpetua" posted about the story on September 26:

"This man was diagnosed with schizophrenia. About 1% of people are diagnosed with schizophrenia in the USA, but 10% of murders are committed by people who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia.

It is true in general that people with a mental illness are not more violent than the norm and are even in more danger of violence being committed against them than that they will commit violence against someone else. But this is not true of schizophrenics. It is the extreme opposite for schizophrenics.

Our mental health and justice systems need to recognise the extreme danger people diagnosed with schizophrenia present. Just half a mile from this murder, Peter Cukor was murdered by the diagnosed schizophrenic Daniel DeWitt. More recently, we had the murder in Oakland of Dilma Spruill by the diagnosed schizophrenic Wilbert Winchester.")


(Desperately seeking housing after years of being homeless, I spoke with a social worker, Ellen Starbird, at the West Berkeley LifeLong Medical Care location on Addison Street in Berkeley. [LifeLong says they serve 66,000 patients a year in the San Francisco, California bay area.] She told me that she thought I might be helped by a local community program, but that I had to make an appointment to see a psychiatrist working at the West Berkeley location named Dr. Louise Forrest to make sure that I qualified. After my appointment with Dr. Forrest, she said I did not need to see her again. Not long after that I received a voicemail message from Yolanda, one of the LifeLong Medical Care appointment schedulers. I called Yolanda back and she said I needed to make an appointment to see Dr. Forrest again. I did so, and went for my second appointment with Dr. Forrest, which was pleasant. I did not understand the point of seeing her again, but I politely did raise any questions. Again Dr. Forrest said I did not need to see her any more. Not long after that I received another voicemail message from Yolanda, saying that I needed to make another appointment to see Dr. Forrest. I immediately called Dr. Forrest's telephone number and left a voicemail message saying that Yolanda had just left me a voicemail message saying that I needed to make yet another appointment to see Dr. Forrest, and that I did not understand why, since Dr. Forrest had twice told me I needed no further appointments with her. Dr. Forrest then left me a quite dramatic voicemail message saying that I was having a serious mental health crisis, that I had lost touch with reality and was hallucinating. Dr. Forrest said she asked Yolanda if Yolanda had left me a voicemail message earlier that day saying that I needed to make another appointment to see Dr. Forrest, and that Yolanda emphatically said she did NOT. Dr. Forrest went on to say that after Yolanda went home, she went to Yolanda's office and checked Yolanda's log of the phone calls Yolanda made that day. "Yolanda definitely did NOT call your telephone number." Dr. Forrest said she thought I might need immediate hospitalization. I called Dr. Forrest and left this voicemail message for her: "Dear Dr. Forrest--here is what a hallucination sounds like-" and I played a recording of the voicemail message that Yolanda had left for me earlier in the day saying that I needed to make another appointment to see Dr. Forrest. Dr. Forrest then left me a voicemail message saying "OH MY GOD! I AM SO SORRY!" I never spoke with Dr. Forrest again. The local community program did NOT try to help me find any housing.)


(My doctor at LifeLong prescribed medicine to treat athlete's foot. I took the prescription to a local Walgreens pharmacy, who provided me with 2 tubes of ointment. They did not cost me anything. Walgreens charged Medicare approximately $40 for each of the 2 tubes of ointment. [Total: approximately $80] An hour later I was at a Dollar Tree store next to the Walgreens and bought 2 tubes of EXACTLY the same ointment over-the-counter for one dollar a tube. [Total: $2] The only difference was that the tubes from the Dollar Tree store were larger and contained more medicine than the tubes from Walgreens.

Clearly, Walgreens is ripping off the taxpayers big time!)


("It was a crazy day, as usual."

---my doctor at LifeLong, in a 2021 voicemail message.)


("Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around--nobody big, I mean--except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff--I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy."

---Holden Caulfield, in J.D. Salinger's novel THE CATCHER IN THE RYE.)



("Research suggests that the month in which an athlete was born has a significant effect on how likely they are to be successful in sports."

---Jaime Duffek, USA TODAY, 5.3. 2017.


Students born in August are "More likely to be labeled as a problem student."

---Kate Barrington, Public School Review, 5.21. 2022.


I became 6 years old in mid-August 1957. I was quite a small kid. On September 1, 1957, as required by law, I began attending public school as a first grade student. Before the first week of school was over one of my classmates became 7 years old. He looked very large to me, and he seemed to know MUCH more about everything than I did.

Obviously, older and larger students are more likely to succeed in sports, and are encouraged to do so. Very young small not-so-strong students were not chosen by the other students to be on sports teams. I was considered to be a weakling and a loser.

It appeared to me at the time that my teachers thought the much older students were smarter than I was, and the teachers seemed less interested in helping me learn because they did not wish to waste their time trying to deal with someone that they saw as being intellectually inferior...)



("...started messing up her hair, pulling strands so that they'd stick out in all directions. 'This way, everybody gonna think I'm crazy' she said. 'No one gonna come up to me, this way. No one gonna hurt me.'

---Ben Taub, The New Yorker, 5.7. 2018, describing and quoting a mentally ill woman that a local police officer [who had formerly been employed by the CIA] dropped off at an all-night restaurant in Savannah, Georgia.

"Although schizophrenia affects a little more than one per cent of Americans, it's a factor in a large percentage of police calls.")


(According to Paige Winfield-Cunningham, in an article that she wrote that was published in the Washington Post on August 6, 2019, Stephen Paddock [who killed 58 people and wounded 422 others in Las Vegas, Nevada in October 2017] had no known mental illness. And no known motive.)






("When your brain isn't working correctly, you don't know that; you can't possibly know your brain is not working correctly--just like someone with Alzheimer's, they don't realize what's going on, they are not able to think, their cognition is gone..."

---Gloria Hill, a former adult family coordinator for the Mental Health Division of Contra Costa Health Services, describing schizophrenia and other serious mental illnesses. Hill was quoted by Ed Connolly in an article, "Emergency Call", the East Bay Express, 3.6. 2012.)




(According to a brief 4.27. 1922 article in the Oakland Tribune, police said a man in Sacramento, California shot people for no reason because he "became suddenly insane." [These final words in the article were the end of the story.])




("...the truest sign of insanity: insane people are always sure they're just fine."

---Nora Ephron)




Dr. Nidal Hasan, a psychiatrist, shot and killed 13 people and wounded at least 29 others in Texas in 2009.
(Hasan, a member of the U.S. Army, is paid approximately $80,000 a year. The Army has paid him approximately $300,000 since his arrest.

---from an ABC news item written by Ned Berkowitz, 7.23. 2013.)




("One of the most disturbing facts that came out in the Eichmann trial was that a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane."

"It is the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim the missiles and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared."

---Thomas Merton, in RAIDS ON THE UNSPEAKABLE, 1964.)




Dr. William Ayres, a psychiatrist, was sentenced to 8 years in prison in 2013 for sexually molesting multiple children.




(Sometimes a diagnosis of schizophrenia can be seen as an accusation. If a psychiatrist strongly disagrees with the political [and/or aesthetic] opinions of someone, it is not impossible that the psychiatrist may attempt to marginalize that person. Sadly, people are very rarely taken seriously if they disagree with an assessment made by a psychiatrist...)


(After being arrested in 1985 for conspiracy to distribute LSD, DEA agents indicated to me that they thought I might be "crazy". When I told them that I am NOT mentally ill, one of the agents replied "you are not qualified to make that judgement, and neither are we.")

When I was placed in jail I was wearing a Nino Cerruti suit that I had bought at a thrift store for $15. [Italian clothing producer Nino Cerruti's first men's collection, Hitman, was shown in 1957.] The other prisoners insisted I was a rich dope dealer because of the suit and they refused to believe I paid so little for it...)


("...insane as usual..."

---Patricia Highsmith, describing a pair of flies, in her 1970 novel RIPLEY UNDER GROUND. The flies start mating and Ripley sets them on fire, mentioning the remains that were found of people who were having sex at the time a volcano erupted in Pompeii.)

("You know that it would be untrue
You know that I would be a liar
If I was to say to you
Girl we couldn't get much higher"

"...Try now we can only lose
And our love become a funeral pyre"

---Jim Morrison and Robbie Krieger in the song they wrote, "Light My Fire", which was recorded by The Doors in 1966. In 1967 The Doors were invited to perform the song live on The Ed Sullivan Show, but were told they had to change the line "Girl we couldn't get much higher" because it was thought to refer to drugs. The band agreed, but when they performed the song, Morrison did NOT change the line.)




("...people don't like the idea that homelessness might have resulted from anything other than a supposed 'behavioral flaw or character defect'."

---Andy Pope, Street Spirit, April 2019.)


("Schizophrenia entails a high risk for most of the misfortunes of modern life. Social consequences include isolation, ostracism, prejudiced mistreatment, unemployment, substandard housing, homelessness, poor education, and lack of essential human services. Legal adversities include being treated as a criminal rather than as a sick person, as well as being an easy victim of crime...and losing basic constitutional and human rights."

---Henry A. Nasrallah and Donald J. Smeltzer.)




"I think our society is run by insane people for insane objectives...I am liable to be put away as insane for expressing that."

---John Lennon, 6.6. 1968, in a filmed interview with Peter Lewis.




("Fluorescence was the only LSD test we had until...the Siamese Fight Fish Test. LSD made them swim upside down."

"Marijuana was visually identified under the stereoscopic microscope. A single fragment found in the vacuum sweepings from a car was sufficient to seize the vehicle."

---Jerry Chisum, in a October 2000 speech, describing how some drugs were identified in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The text of the speech was published in the first quarter of 2001 in CACNews [the California Association of Criminalists journal].)


(From Science, Vol. 120, Issue 3128, December 10, 1954: "Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD 25): II. "Psychobiological Effects on  the Siamese Fighting Fish" by Harold A. Abramson and Llewellyn T. Evans.)



(From 1956: Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by the Horns of her Own Chastity, a painting by Salvador Dali.)


(Salvador Dali was on The Ed Sullivan Show on January 29, 1961. In this remarkable appearance on national television, Dali used a gun [designed to shoot drug-filled hypodermic syringes] to shoot paint onto a painting of Jesus on the cross...)



("Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad...mathematicians go mad."

---G.K. Chesterton, who had serious mental health issues.)




("...the kinds of injustice that thrive when the illusion of justice is perfected, and the emotional costs to the artist who cries foul."

---Dan Chiasson, in a review of a new volume of poetry by Claudia Rankine. The New Yorker, 10.27. 2014.)




("...motivation shapes perception."

---Daniel Murrie, of the University of Virginia School of Medicine, explaining that "expert psychiatric witnesses" paid by the prosecution or the defense often give testimony that is biased in favor of the people who have paid them. Psychology Today, May/June 2016.)




("295.60   RESIDUAL TYPE

A type of schizophrenia in which the following criteria are met:

A.   Absence of prominent delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, and grossly disorganized or catatonic behavior.

B.   There is continuing evidence of the disturbance, as indicated by the presence of negative symptoms or two or more symptoms listed in Criterion A for Schizophrenia, present in an attenuated form [e.g., odd beliefs, unusual perceptual experiences]."


---from DIAGNOSTIC CRITERIA from DIAGNOSTIC AND STATISTICAL MANUAL OF MENTAL DISORDERS, FOURTH EDITION, 1994, American Psychiatric Association.

["Odd beliefs"? "Unusual perceptual experiences"? It seems to me that the diagnostic criteria cited could easily be interpreted as meaning that what the psychiatrists were saying is that they believe that people who make psychedelic art are mentally ill...])



("Gertrude Stein wrote that Picasso stopped his practice of figurative painting in part because of a loss of faith in what the eyes saw."

---Shayla Love, in The New Yorker, 8.1. 2024. What Love wrote calls to mind nonrepresentational art produced by people who have used LSD.)


("...someone with...strong visual imagination will see more colour, and give to colour greater meaning..."

---Frederick Gore, in PAINTING: Some Basic Principles.)




("The principle...described by Leonardo da Vinci in his Treatise on Painting, where he recommended to his fellow artists that they could quicken 'the spirit of invention' by staring fixedly at the stains and discoloration on old walls, until they discovered there 'divine landscapes...battles and strange figures in violent action, expression of faces, and clothes and an infinity of things.'"

---Cal Tomkins and the editors of Time-Life Books, in THE WORLD OF MARCEL DUCHAMP.)





("'I love silence,' he said. 'I love to be by myself. I could spend all afternoon looking at the flames in the fire, and when my wife asks me, "what are you looking at?," I tell her, "I'm looking at the world!"'"

---Brunello Cucinelli, fashion designer, quoted by John Seabrook, The New Yorker, 9.10. 2012.)





(The great painting, "Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2", made by Marcel Duchamp, was exhibited in New York as part of the much-publicized 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art. The American public was scandalized.


"That's not art!"

---U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt.


"...INSANITY..."

---The New York Times, 3.16. 1913.)






("Art Brut is not just the work of the mentally ill, but also that done by those who resist cultural conditioning, original creators, dissidents..."

---Michel Thévoz, 1980, quoted by Lucienne Peiry in ART BRUT--The Origins of Outsider Art.)

("What a crazy sound"

---Chuck Berry, 1958)


("I was working on a novel which was going to be about a period in the 1920s when psychiatrists had become very interested in art produced by patients in asylums, one of the first concerted efforts to understand patient experience from the patient's side and I was really drawn into that."

---Daniel Mason, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, and a novelist who wrote the book THE WINTER SOLDIER, which is set in a military hospital during World War I. Mason was interviewed by Michael Krasny, KQED, 11.15. 2018.)






("Between 1968 and 1981, Valium was the most frequently prescribed medication in the world."

"IMS Health, a company that gathers data on health care, reports that in the United States in 2008 a hundred sixty-four million prescriptions were written for antidepressants, and sales totalled $9.6 billion."

"Greenberg basically regards the pathologizing of melancholy and despair, and the invention of pills designed to relieve people of those feelings, as a vast capitalist conspiracy to paste a big smiley face over a world that we have good reason to feel sick about."

"He calls cognitive-behavioral therapy 'a method of indoctrination into the pieties of American optimism, an ideology as much as a medical treatment.'"

"...Greenberg seems to believe that contemporary psychiatry in most of its forms...is mainly about getting people to accept current arrangements."

And that psychiatrists are "...in the game in order to protect the status quo."

He "is repeating a common criticism of contemporary psychiatry, which is that the profession is creating ever more expansive criteria for mental illness that end up labelling as sick people who are just different."

"The profession has been the perennial target of critics who...accuse it of...confusing health with conformity."

---Louis Menand, in a review of two books, MANUFACTURING DEPRESSION by psychologist Gary Greenberg and THE EMPEROR'S NEW DRUG by Irving Kirsch. The New Yorker, 3.1. 2012.)



("...better to freak people out so they really understand..."

---Dominic Packer, author of THE POWER OF US: Harnessing our Shared Identities to Improve Performance, Increase Cooperation, and promote Social Harmony, quoted by Alia Dastagir, USA TODAY, 8.25. 2021. Packer was talking about the COVID-19 pandemic, and how Republicans and Democrats are in "stark disagreement" about the threat of the virus "and what should be done to mitigate its spread".)



(It has been said that when you meet someone, 6 people are present: There is the person you think you are, there is the person the other person thinks you are, there is the person you really are, there is the person the other person thinks he is, there is the person you think the other person is, and there is the person the other person really is.)






("There may be as many as 7,000 people who die every year from medication errors..."

---from an Institute of Medicine report quoted by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, August 3, 2006.


"'Medication nonadherance is pretty widely recognized as a massive problem,' said Matthew Blum. Nearly 50% of Americans are on one or more prescription medicines and about half are taking them incorrectly..."

---Victoria Colliver, the San Francisco Chronicle, 5.25. 2016.


According to a March 2010 article in American Nurse Today, errors made by medical professionals "...injure 1.5 million Americans a year...")


("In your book, you candidly detail how your mother was misdiagnosed with depression when in fact she had breast cancer."

---Kirsi Goldynia, CNN, 7.26. 2021, speaking with Leana Wen, M.D., the author of LIFELINES--A Doctor's Journey in the Fight for Public Health. [Wen also wrote WHEN DOCTORS DON'T LISTEN: How to Avoid Misdiagnoses and Unnecessary Tests.] Wen was a Rhodes scholar, and has "...amassed the title of physician, medical analyst for CNN, contributing columnist for the Washington Post, professor of public health at the George Washington University, fellow at the Brookings Institution, and former health commissioner of Baltimore."

["...doctors often interrupt patients within seconds after they start speaking about what is going on with their health."

---Leana Wen])


("We're paying for a fully loaded Lamborghini and receiving a drunk monkey on roller skates."

---John Oliver, speaking about the cost of treatment for kidney disease in America. "Last Week Tonight" [television program] 5.14. 2017.)


("...makes absolutely no sense to me..."

"...how really irrational..."

---Dr. Mark Fendrick, University of Michigan, "who studies medical service pricing", commenting on how it is sometimes difficult for at-risk people to obtain some desperately needed diagnostic tests. [From an article by Anne Werner, CBS News, 6.28. 2021, about colon cancer screening.])


("The extent to which the medical establishment is compromised by disorganization...is severely underestimated."

---quora dot com commenter who caught COVID-19, 5.22. 2020.)


("...a bureaucratic nightmare the very sick have found themselves in when trying to get help--the nightmare of communicating their health history from one doctor to the next, one medical center to the next."

"'...what I do is electronic records', said Anil Sethi. 'Health care is still using a lot of fax and pagers, and this is the 21st century.'"

"Disparate medical-record keeping in the 21st century" is "a gut punch..."

---CBS News, 7.24. 2021.)


("'You have an IRS that doesn't answer a lot of its calls, if not most of its calls. You have an IRS that can't even process paper returns, you have an IRS that can't deal with questions people have', said Martin Davidoff, partner in charge of tax-controversy practice at accounting firm Prager Metis."

---Irina Ivanova, CBS News, 10.19. 2021.)


("'You have to be able to trust science, you have to be able to trust the health care system, you have to be able to trust the people you are around', said Dr Margot Kushel, professor of medicine and director of the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations."

"Santa Rosa reported a major outbreak earlier this month at Samuel Jones Hall, where about half of the shelter's 156 residents had COVID or were suspected of catching the virus. Many of the infected residents had been vaccinated--including six who were hospitalized despite having their shots."

---Marisa Kendall, Bay Area News Group, 7.19. 2021, "COVID vaccinations lag, outbreaks spread in Bay Area homeless shelters".

[People "...have just been fed this nonstop diet of misinformation..."

"...what we need to do is give people the facts."

"At this point, if you are fully vaccinated you are not going to end up in the hospital."

---Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown University's School of Public Health, on "CBS This Morning", 7.26. 2021.])


("Johnson & Johnson paid a steep price this year for claims that its celebrated baby powder was contaminated with asbestos. A jury ordered the company in July to pay $4.69 billion to 22 women who blamed the talc-based product for causing their ovarian cancer. The prospect of similar judgments helped erase $45 billion in Johnson & Johnson's market value."

"...internal documents showing company officials have known since the 1970s that some of the talc used in baby powder contained asbestos."

---Jef Feeley and Margaret Cronin Fisk, Los Angeles Times, 12.25. 2018.)





("You must understand that some of the malpractice out there is so grievous, offensive, and implausible as to beggar the imagination."

---Barry H. Schifrin, M.D., in remarks before the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in 1985. Reported by Ralph Nader, Harper's Magazine, April 2016.)





("The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male" was an infamous and unethical clinical study conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service between 1932 and 1972. The purpose of the study was to observe the natural history of untreated syphilis. 399 of the men had syphilis when the study started. None of the men were told they had the disease. By 1947 it was known that penicillin was an effective cure for syphilis. Many of the men studied died of syphilis, 40 wives contracted the disease, and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis before the study ended in November 1972.)


("American scientists deliberately infected prisoners and patients in a mental hospital in Guatemala with syphilis 60 years ago, a recently unearthed experiment that prompted U.S. officials to apologize Friday and declare outrage over 'such reprehensible research'."

"The NIH-funded experiment...was uncovered by a Wellesley College medical historian."

---Lauran Neergaard, Associated Press, West County Times, 10.2. 2010. The NIH [National Institutes of Health] is an agency of the United States Government.)


(Martin Shkreli is the founder and former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals. In September 2015, he received widespread criticism when Turing obtained the manufacturing license for the antiparasitic drug Daraprim, which is very inexpensive to make, and raised its price from $13.50 per tablet to $750 per tablet.)








("The modern drug business was built on brain medicines: Valium was the first blockbuster, selling 2 billion tablets in 1978, and Prozac defined the industry in the 1990s."

---Matthew Herper, Forbes, 3.2. 2015.)








(Hammy the Squirrel: "T-Tell me all about the North Pole, S-S-Santa!"

RJ the Raccoon: "Keep it real, dude."

Verne the Turtle, impersonating Santa Claus: "Real?...Okay...well...its cold... and its dark all day this time of year...fortunately Santa's elves make lots of antidepressants..."

Hammy the Squirrel: "S-Santa...are you okay?"

Verne the turtle: "No, not really...its a stressful job...Mrs. Claus left for her mother's...its a long story..."

RJ the Raccoon: "Too real! WAY too real!"

---from the syndicated comic strip Over The Hedge, written by Michael Fry, and drawn by T. Lewis. 12.19. 2018.)








("They say I'm crazy, but I have a good time."

---Joe Walsh, in his 1978 song "Life's Been Good".)





(“Contemporary life requires adaptability.”

 “...each society has a vital interest in the indoctrination of infants who form its new recruits.”

 ---T. Lidz, in his 1964 book THE FAMILY AND HUMAN ADAPTATION.


 “Adaptation to what? To society? To a world gone mad?”

 ---R.D. Laing, commenting on what Lidz wrote.)







("...those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."

---Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche)




("The caterpillar cannot understand the butterfly.")




("The whole universe is completely insane!"

---Mr. Natural, the character drawn by R. Crumb that appears in Zap Comix #1, 1967.)




(The author of the 1957 book BATTLE FOR THE MIND: A Physiology of Conversion and Brainwashing, William Sargant, was a liar. Some of his horrible and bizarre methods of treating people who were mentally ill maimed and killed them. I think some of what he wrote in the book, however, is very important. Especially the parts about how Christians brainwash people. I read the book in 1964 when I was 12 years old, after checking it out of the base library at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, and it had a large influence on my thinking at that time. Born in England, William Sargant [1907-1988] was the grandson of a Methodist minister. [His grandfather was from a wealthy family of Welsh people who manufactured beverages containing alcohol.] Five of Sargant's uncles were ministers.

[My parents, who seemed VERY unreligious, forced me to go to church regularly the entire time I lived with them. They seemed to think that membership in a local Christian church was a pleasant social NECESSITY. I never heard them express any religious beliefs about "God" or "Jesus". I never heard my father use either word, except VERY disrespectfully when he was cursing, and in the mumbled less-than-two-second prayer he mumbled before each meal. I never heard them quote the Bible and in fact I never saw a Bible anywhere in any place we lived, except a cheap one I owned that was given to me in sunday school. When I was quite young my father influenced me DEEPLY when he declared that the ONLY reason he went to church was that he greatly enjoyed singing in the choir.

The only obvious "spiritual" things my parents owned were two beautiful standing Quan Yin statues made of porcelain, with seemingly perfect little hands whose positions could be changed. These statues, which they got in Japan, were always displayed in very prominent locations in the main room of each place we lived.

Having met and gotten married in Japan, my parents were fascinated by Japanese culture, especially Shinto. Obsessed, even! As I grew up, my parents often made presentations about Shinto at various Christian churches we belonged to. Both my mom and my dad were excellent cooks, and they prepared lavish dinners of extraordinarily tasty Japanese food for the people who attended their presentations. My father said he was very aware that if you teach someone something and give them something DELICIOUS to eat at the same time, they later have much better recall of what you taught them.

I suspect the intense urge my father for MANY years had for us to travel and visit various parks, monuments, and "power" locations throughout almost all of the continental U.S. and parts of Europe, Canada, and Juarez was somehow related to the thoughts and emotions my parents had about Shinto. Some of the decisions my father made while we were traveling were based on superstition. Once, when he was driving us in Switzerland, a black cat crossed the road in front of us. My father seriously freaked-out, stopped the car, then turned it around and drove us in a different direction, adding around 22 hours extra time to a drive which would have otherwise only have taken 3 hours...]

["Religion is like a blind man looking in a black room for a black cat that isn't there, and finding it."

---Oscar Wilde]


[Ivan Pavlov, an atheist, was the son of a Christian minister.


Sargant once wrote that if the world had had our modern psychiatric treatments when Jesus lived, perhaps Christ could have been cured and "...might simply have returned to carpentry..."]

Sargant was a genuinely fanatical advocate of shock treatment, using both electroconvulsive therapy and insulin shock therapy. [In 1934, before he became a psychiatrist, Sargant had a breakdown and had to be placed in a mental hospital for a while.]

Around 1938, Sargant was at Harvard Medical School. Around 1947 [the year the CIA was formed], Sargant spent a year as a visiting professor of psychiatry at Duke University. He was fascinated by the unhinged behavior of some of the members of Christian "snake handler" cults in North Carolina. Illustrations in Sargant's book include photos of snake handlers and a photo of young people at a rock and roll show in Great Britain. Sargant writes that the intense emotional effects rock and roll sometimes causes young people to experience are "somewhat similar" to the intense emotional effects some religious people experience when they handle snakes in church ceremonies.

The book contains many mentions of John Wesley [1703-1791], the English founder of Methodism. Wesley was an enthusiastic believer in the healing properties of electricity, and used several machines to administer electric shocks. Over the course of many years, Wesley conducted an outrageously large number of revival meetings, using weapons-grade MINDFUCK techniques to convert many, many stupid and ignorant people to his religion. Lots of people at the revival meetings were strongly affected by Wesley's violent fire-and-brimstone sermons and they went into convulsions and fell down. [The book contains an illustration showing people freaking out while Wesley preaches.] Apparently Wesley was not an honest man. According to Wikipedia, when he was caught plagiarizing, he denied he had stolen someone else's writing, but later he was forced to admit he was a thief, and then "apologized.")



(In the cartoon "Carpe Diem" by Niklas Eriksson, published in October 2015, a patient in a psychiatric treatment room has gotten up from the couch and is looking at a certificate on the wall. The patient says "Just a minute! It says here you're a qualified PLUMBER." The fake psychiatrist replies "You're hallucinating again, Mr. Burrows.")



("I was trained as a child growing up in the city to NEVER EVER look a stranger in the eye, because they could be a NUT!!!"

---Roz Chast, in a cartoon. The New Yorker, 10.2. 2017.)




(Recently I smoked one toke of some extremely potent marijuana. In a room illuminated by the flame of a single candle I unfocused my eyes and as I gazed at some light-reflecting wrinkles in a sheet of black plastic they were transformed into what looked like an astoundingly realistic painting of a woman playing a piano. Every detail of the scene was extremely clear, every detail of the room in which she sat and of the listeners there was so sharp! I looked away from the scene, got up, moved around, came back and looked again and I could still see the "painting". I have had many thousands of similarly wonderful experiences over the years, usually triggered by hallucinogenic substances.)



("...a delusional disorder, which means you believe things that can't be proved."

---quote from a "WebMD Medical Reference from Healthwise", 8.19. 2010.)



("Man can see what is not there, and see it exact."

---Alexander Eliot, in his 1960 book SIGHT AND INSIGHT. Eliot was describing ancient cave paintings.)





(“It just makes me kind of feel small because its like you realize that everything is so big.”

 ---Quentin, a fifth grade student at an elementary school in Illinois, as he observed a total solar eclipse. National Public Radio, 8.21. 2017.

 “the wonder as day and night become one.”

 ---the last line of a poem Ron Nash wrote about the eclipse and read on a National Public Radio show.)



("I remember visions (when in bed but not asleep yet) of very big objects becoming very small and of very small objects becoming very big."

---Joe Brainard, in his book I REMEMBER.


I also remember experiencing hypnagogic visions when I was young. In the one I remember most vividly, there was a falling drop of water that seemed both infinitely large and infinitely small at exactly the same time. After having a hypnagogic visual recently, I wrote "I just had a clear look sideways into a place that wasn't there."


"She can wade in a drop of dew"

---Robert Hunter and Bob Weir, in their 1970 song "Sugar Magnolia", performed by the Grateful Dead.)







("Just because you have eyes does not mean you can see."

---director Peter Greenaway, in his 2008 film REMBRANDT'S J'ACCUSE.)




("Upon learning to see a man becomes everything by becoming nothing."

---don Juan, in Carlos Castaneda's book A SEPARATE REALITY--Further Conversations with Don Juan.)

(A musician can sometimes hear a melody in things like the sound of water rushing down a stream. Certainly, I have experienced the sound of squealing tires blending with the noise made by wind-blown leaves and the murmurs of passersby as perfect and very pure music, a delightful concert of the random!)


("My ears are sensitized to more than the sound of / the wind."

---Marianne Moore)






("You can't lie to people with schizophrenia. They're like people on acid--they can see right through you."

---Thom Hartmann, nationally-syndicated radio host, New York Times bestselling author, and former psychotherapist, 3.9. 2012. Most radio hosts have very little credibility, but I think there is some truth in what Hartmann said...)






The bats in my belfry are paisley!






Once, when I was on LSD, I thought my mustache was a spider crawling across my lip!






("Deborah Kass told me that when she was going to art school in the '70s, she tripped on LSD almost every week and she said she felt it was her 'moral duty as an artist to take the trip.'"

---Ken Johnson, in "How the Drugs of the 60s Changed Art" By Emanuella Grinberg [CNN, 7.16. 2011], an interview with The New York Times art critic Johnson, whose 2011 book is titled ARE YOU EXPERIENCED? HOW PSYCHEDELIC CONSCIOUSNESS TRANSFORMED MODERN ART.)




("LSD is the most dreamlike drug..."

---Harper's Magazine, April 2018, paraphrasing what researchers concluded in a study that was published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience on January 22, 2018.)





("Fluorescent dodecahedrons whistled past him in a thick meteor shower which was clearly about to smash apart the spaceship of his identity."

"'I see what you mean,' he said.

Each gasped word, particularly "I', 'see', 'you' and 'mean' seemed to lead down hazardous mineshafts of communication designed by narrow conventions, held up by rotting props and filled with dead canaries. 'What' preserved a comparative innocence."

---Edward St. Aubyn, describing some of the effects of a mixture of mescaline and psilocybin, in his 1998 novel ON THE EDGE.)






("I think a certain degree of obsessive-compulsive behavior is crucial for an artist."

---Loran Speck, quoted by Karen Haber, American Artist, February 1994.)






(Dr. Oscar Janiger, a psychiatrist who gave moderate doses of pharmaceutical LSD to a number of artists and others [including Cary Grant and Anaïs Nin] when the drug was legal, stated that artists could sometimes "maintain a certain balance, riding the edge" while they made art as they tripped.


"In my LSD experiments we ran close to a thousand people, and we found that psychiatrists tended to have negative experiences. The ministers were next. The artists had the most positive experiences. It would seem that the psychiatrist has a strong investment in a particular norm or standard of reality."

---Oscar Janiger, in a 1990 interview with David Jay Brown and Jeanne St. Peter.)






("I wish I could talk in Technicolor.

I can't tell you about it. If you can't see it, you'll never know it. I feel sorry for you."

---from a short film of a mainstream American housewife high on LSD during an experiment at the Veteran's Administration Hospital in Los Angeles, California in 1956. [Don Lattin, the author of THE HARVARD PSYCHEDELIC CLUB: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America, found the film during his research.])






(Artist Tom Shannon cites the "indelible reference point of LSD" as one of the inspirations for his new work.

---quote from an article by Steve Silberman, Wired, April 2010.)





("The intense emotions surrounding LSD make it forever difficult to objectively judge the artistic merit..."

---Carlo McCormick, in an essay that accompanied the first public exhibit of Mark McCloud's blotter art collection.)





("There's a bit by comedian Bill Hicks from 1989, where he asks 'wouldn't you like to see a positive drug story in the news?' Then, he does an impression of a newscaster, reporting about a young man on LSD who...realizes we are all one consciousness.

'There's no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we're the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather,' Hicks quipped."

---Blake Gillespie, in her article "Trip for the Cure". about "the largest psychedelic drug conference in history" in Oakland, California. The East Bay Express, 4.19. 2017.)








("If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."

---Henry David Thoreau)





("These are the days ...when originality is taken to be a mark of instability..."

---John Kenneth Galbraith)





("The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

---George Bernard Shaw)





("We've been too polite. If you don't make enemies, you're not being effective."

---Herb Gunther, director, Public Media Center)





("It isn't often that people take a close look at themselves."

---Swedish novelist Åsa Larsson [translated by Marlaine Delargy].)





("To explore strange new worlds"

[The mission of the Starship Enterprise on the Star Trek television series.])






("SINGING NAKED IN A SUPERMARKET

'Schizophrenia, one of psychiatry's deepest enigmas, is a little better understood today due to a recent epidemic of craziness... The epidemic began with the admission of a young man who was violently hallucinating, followed by another young man whom police brought in after they arrested him for singing naked in a supermarket. It was learned that in each case the patient had been using phencyclidine (PCP), a hallucinogenic drug.'

----NEWS ITEM"

---From the poet Harold Witt's preface to a poem in
A HAROLD WITT CELEBRATION, 1992.)



My research and observation has convinced me that PCP [which has also been called "angel dust"] is a toxic substance that should NEVER be used!!! In the late 1960's and the early 1970's large quantities of ersatz "mescaline" tablets were manufactured and sold in Berkeley, California by viciously irresponsible criminals. Instead of mescaline, these tablets contained a uneven mixture of chemicals that included LSD and PCP. The greedy amateur chemists who concocted these tablets knew that LSD, especially when contaminated with manufacturing byproducts, can make people physically uncomfortable, especially in the initial stages of the trip. Adding PCP, which, in low doses taken by mouth, can have a tranquilizing effect, was thought to make the trip "smoother". Dealers found that people were frequently willing to pay more for what they were told was mescaline than for what they were told was LSD. Some ignorant and/or naive users were reported to have taken too many tablets and suffered a PCP overdose.

["...the mescaline, which feels like acid."

---Sandra Thompson, in her story "L.A.", which is set in 1969. "...pink tablets...Pure organic California mesc." From her 1984 collection of short stories CLOSE-UPS.]

I do not understand what the writer of the article means by "violently hallucinating". Perhaps he meant the person was violent AND the person was hallucinating? And as for "singing naked", well, most people have done so while taking a shower. Surely, singing is usually a sign that a person is happy! Being naked in a supermarket, however, can cause people with guns to handcuff you and lock you up. I very strongly suspect that the writer of the article knew very little about hallucinogens or schizophrenia, and even less about how the two might possibly be related...

[In Canada, while part of  the movie Titanic was being filmed in August 1996, more than 60 people working on the project were dosed with PCP that was in chowder they had been served. Director James Cameron, who apparently was stabbed in the face with a pen, later said "It was like The Twilight Zone." At a local hospital, some of the crew were reported to have gone down the hall dancing in a highly vocal conga line...])




("As we sort through incoming Ask Erowid questions and reader- submitted Experience Reports, some myths and misunderstandings stand out as persistent and widespread.

One of these myths, which we ourselves heard when we were teens in the 1980s, is that "taking LSD seven times makes you legally insane."

The proposed number of times varies but is usually under ten.
 Unfortunately, it is difficult to narrow down the earliest date of this word-of-mouth myth. Informal surveys of some of the educated subculture reveal that it was around by the early 1970s and was widespread by 1980."

---from Erowid.org, 2003.)



(“Hello, my name is Tina Strongman and I work at a police station, as a phone operator for 911. Lately, we’ve received many phone calls pertaining to a new sort of problem that has arisen in the inner cities, and is now working it’s way to smaller towns. It seems that a new form of gang initiation is to go find as many pay phones as possible and put a mixture of LSD and Strychnine onto the buttons. This mixture is deadly to the human touch, and apparently, this has killed some people on the east coast. Strychnine is a chemical used in rat poison and is easily separated from the rest of the chemicals. When mixed with LSD, it creates a substance that is easily absorbed into the human flesh, and highly fatal.”

 ---widely circulated but COMPLETELY FALSE story, circa 1999.)







I was asked by someone in the "BERKELEY" group on Flickr: "I don't understand what your images have to do with Berkeley?"

Here is my reply:
Myron J. Stolaroff, the former Ampex executive, noted in 1999 that LSD was the most important invention of the last 1,000 years. No intelligent well-informed person would disagree. Berkeley was world headquarters for LSD, a substance which the government once conservatively estimated that more than 90 million people have taken. In 1993 a ranking DEA official, Gene Haislip, stated that the entire global supply was controlled by a group of approximately 100 people in the San Francisco Bay Area.


(Some LSD distributors I knew in Berkeley called themselves the "Sherwin-Williams" group, after the Sherwin-Williams paint company logo, which shows a globe over which red paint has been poured and the words "COVER THE EARTH". They had maps on their walls with pins showing countries and cities where LSD obtained from them had been distributed.)


I was present when much LSD was delivered to the very tiny Buttercup Bakery in Berkeley. A manager of the Buttercup was Kary Mullis, the inventor of the ultra-important polymerase chain reaction DNA test.

("...he had used psychedelics enough so that he could go down inside the molecules and look around."

---James Fadiman, in a April 2012 interview with Matt Cardin, describing something LSD user Mullis said.)


("...according to reporter Alun Reese, Francis Crick, who discovered DNA along with James Watson, told friends that he first saw the double-helix structure while tripping on LSD. It's no secret that Crick took acid; he also publicly advocated the legalization of marijuana. Reese, who reported the story for a British wire service after Crick's death, said that when he spoke with Crick about what he he'd heard from the scientist's friends, he 'listened with rapt, amused attention' and 'gave no intimation of surprise. When I had finished, he said "Print a word of it and I'll sue."'"

---Ryan Grim, HuffPost.com, 8.8. 2009, updated 10.6. 2011, "...adapted from a new book, THIS IS YOUR COUNTRY ON DRUGS: The Secret History of Getting High in America".)


A waitress at the Buttercup was Suze Orman, who at one point lived in a van. She later became a bestselling financial author and had her own TV show. She is now wealthy. Orman was frequently annoyed at 2 customers, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who were poor and tried to get free coffee. When asked how Apple got the jump on IBM, Jobs famously said "Maybe they didn't take enough acid." (Or check out the cover story in Fortune, "The Edison of the Internet", about long-hair Bill Joy and the U.C. Berkeley computer group.) A google search I just did shows 26,200 results for the quote "There are 2 major products that come out of Berkeley--LSD and UNIX." There was a reason the President of the United States, Richard Nixon, labeled former Berkeley resident Timothy Leary "the most dangerous man in America". The reason, of course, was Leary's advocacy of LSD. (I think Leary had an amazing brain. Some of what he wrote was utterly brilliant. His life, however, was apparently such an intense game-playing ego-circus that we may never truly know if he worked for [or cared about] anybody other than "TIM LEARY". Did Leary associate with persons linked to the CIA and other intelligence agencies? Yes, of course! So did I. There were more than a few spooks in the Berkeley LSD scene, and since you never knew who they were, the possibility of association with them was absolutely unavoidable. I did my best to have NO contact with Tim. I did not want to get arrested or murdered. I was friends with his son, Jack, who supplied quantities of  crystalline LSD. [It was the only kind I have ever taken that caused me to hallucinate actual paisley patterns!] More than once, Jack said to me, with a great deal of emotion, "My father is a LIAR!")

 In the words of a popular song from that time ("San Francisco [be sure to wear some flowers in your hair]" by Scott Mckenzie, 1967): "ALL ACROSS THE NATION, SUCH A STRANGE VIBRATION"...


("A new day is coming"

"...open your mind"

"It's a new vibration
Crystal blue persuasion"

---Eddie Morley Gray, Mike Vale, and Tommy James, in their song "Crystal Blue Persuasion", recorded by Tommy James and the Shondells and released in June 1969.)




(Playboy: "Ever take LSD?"
Bill Gates: "My errant youth ended a long time ago."
Playboy: "What does that mean?"
Bill Gates: "That means there were things I did under the age of 25 that I ended up not doing subsequently."
Playboy: "One LSD story involved you staring at a table and thinking the corner was going to plunge into your eye."
Bill Gates: [Smiles]
Playboy: "Ah, a glimmer of recognition."
Bill Gates: "That was on the other side of that boundary."

Bill Gates: "The young mind can deal with certain kinds of gooping around that I don't think at this age I could. I don't think you're as capable of handling the lack of sleep or whatever challenges you throw at your body as you get older. However, I never missed a day of work."

---from a 1994 Playboy magazine interview.)




(At one time MUCH LSD was being illicitly manufactured and it was extremely inexpensive, like $500-600 per gram of pure crystal, wholesale. It was not uncommon for each gram to be made into between 20,000-40,000 doses. [$500 divided by 40,000 doses equals a little bit more than a penny per 25 microgram dose.] [$500 divided by 10,000 doses equals five cents per 100 microgram dose.])




("Just after the election of John Kennedy to the presidency, a pediatrician of English extraction working in New York City wrote the pharmaceutical company Sandoz on New York Hospital letterhead requesting a gram of LSD. A package came by return mail to Dr. John Beresford, with a bill for $285..."

---Peter Stafford, in PSYCHEDELICS ENCYCLOPEDIA


Among the many people who tripped on LSD from that gram were Donovan, Paul McCartney, Keith Richards, Paul Krassner, Charles Mingus, Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert [Ram Dass], Ralph Metzner, and Alan Watts.


I met Dr. John Beresford at Peter Stafford's residence in Santa Cruz in the mid-1990s.)



(In early 1970 when I was a teenager, I started living rent-free in a vacant simple wooden candlelit toolshed undeneath a powerfully alive tall redwood tree in the backyard of 1924 Blake Street [near Milvia Street] in Berkeley. I was there for most of 1970 and part of 1971. One night a neighbor I had never met came while I was outside underneath the redwood smoking a joint and handed me a very large churchwarden pipe with a meerschaum bowl filled with at least 5 grams of primo hashish from Afghanistan. He also gave me 500 LSD tablets. "Ten cents per tab," he said. "Minimum order 4,000 tabs.")






("If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."

---William Blake)






("...color so vivid they can't even find words for it..."

---John McNally, describing what many people said they saw when they had "near-death experiences", the East Bay Express, 12.2. 2009)






("...a stream of fantastic images of extraordinary plasticity and vividness and accompanied by an intense kaleidoscopic play of colors."



---Albert Hofmann, describing what he saw during his first LSD experience. The first measured dose of LSD taken by Hofmann weighed 250 micrograms. The second measured dose of LSD was taken by Hofmann's associate Ernst Rothlin, and it weighed 60 micrograms.)





("...living, changing arabesques, moving in rhythm over a geometric background, with infinite variety of form."

---Manuel Córdova-Rios, describing the effects of ayahuasca to F.B. Lamb in WIZARD OF THE UPPER AMAZON.)






Textbooks are still being published that state what has been asserted for more than 45 years: LSD cannot be addictive because after the third day of using LSD, a person can no longer experience any effects. The people who wrote that in the textbooks are, of course, mistaken. I learned that if I radically increased the dosage each day, I could continue to experience psychedelic effects. My self-experiments, which involved taking LSD more than 5,000 times, (often in very, very high doses) were conducted over the course of more than 20 years. After working up to taking 5,000 micrograms per day, I found a safe location, stockpiled babyfood and water, locked the door and made it so that it would be impossible for me to get the door open again unless I was in a competent state of mind. Wearing diapers, I sniffed an initial dose of 10,000 micrograms of the 100,000 micrograms of crystal LSD I intended to take. The rest of the experience is curiously fragmented...so I cannot be sure how much of the other 90,000 micrograms I took, just that when I able to check 11 days later, none was left. My intention was to STRENGTHEN THE PATH between my usual LSD-induced state of consciousness and the mega-dose state of consciousness, so that I could more easily go back and forth between the two. I was not seeking to permanently be in the mega-dose state of consciousness--I cannot perform the basic tasks that are absolutely necessary for day-to-day life when I am that high. After much, much, much vomiting and much, much, much diarrhea, extremely profuse sweating and more than a few convulsions, my headspace was not that much different than from when I (after having developed a huge tolerance) took 2,000 micrograms. But the hallucinations!!! Beyond WOW!!!! Absolutely indescribable synesthesia!!!!! And so many layers on layers on layers on layers of extraordinarily fluid and magnificently intricate 3-D (4-D? 5-D?) patterns!!!! I could not even see my hand when it was directly in front of my face....and after that the hallucinations ceased and all there was, inside and out, was what I had experienced many times before: the classic Intense, Very Pure, and Absolutely Radiant White Light. There was no difference between "me" and the Light.




("Despite all the publicity surrounding LSD, the white light with its karmic accoutrements never assumed as much importance for journalists as it did for acid heads. It was too hard to get a handle on something about which absolutely nothing could be said. Finally there was nothing to say but: See for yourself."

---Geoffrey O'Brien, in his book DREAM TIME--Chapters from the Sixties.)


("I even volunteered as a guinea pig on one occasion."

---Peter Wright, commenting on LSD experiments conducted in the 1950s by the British government, in the 1987 book he co-authored with Paul Greengrass, SPYCATCHER: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer. The British government banned the publication of the book, and took legal actions against newspapers that attempted to report  Wright's allegations about the British intelligence community. In 1988, after it had been published elsewhere, the book was cleared for legitimate sale in England. The above quote is all that Wright wrote about his LSD trip, perhaps because it is IMPOSSIBLE to use words to even begin to accurately describe the effects of LSD...)




("...the light was going mad, the brightness had lost all reason..."

---Maurice Blanchot, translated by Lydia Davis)


("Here I am, safely returned over these peaks from a journey far more beautiful and strange than anything I had hoped for or imagined--how is it that this safe return brings such regret?"

---Peter Matthiessen)




("Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream.
It is not dying, it is not dying.
Lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void.
It is shining, it is shining."

---John Lennon, in the Beatles song he wrote, "Tomorrow Never Knows" [1966].)




("...observing several situations in which even a drastic increase of dosage - in one instance to 15,000 micrograms given intramuscularly - did not result in a fully developed LSD experience, it became obvious that high psychological resistance to LSD cannot be overcome just by an increase in dosage..."

---Stanislav Grof, M.D., Ph.D., in his 1980 book LSD PSYCHOTHERAPY. Grof made many hugely valuable contributions to LSD research. Some of his theories and speculations are in fact just theories and speculations, and have NOT been shown to be true. It is quite harmful and quite wrong that in this book Grof wrote that "male homosexuality" is a "psychopathological syndrome" associated with birth trauma.)




("...mostly taking acid was like, well, playing a really good game of softball. Ultimately. Long view. Fun and sweaty..."

---Jon Carroll, born in 1943, in reply to a question about LSD and the 1960s. The San Francisco Chronicle, 7.8. 1998. Many of my LSD experiences have apparently been EXTREMELY different than Jon Carroll's LSD experiences...)





("Grass and hashish were used more often than acid since 'the longer one drops acid, the less effect it has.'"

---Marc Pilisuk et al, in their essay "Becky and the Telegraph Avenue Lifestyle". Becky was interviewed between November 1969 and January 1970.)





("...scientists at the University of Toronto have discovered that creative people possess little to no 'latent inhibition', the unconscious ability to reject unimportant or irrelevant stimuli. As University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson puts it, 'This means that creative individuals remain in contact with the extra information constantly streaming in from the environment. The normal person classifies an object, and then forgets about it, even though that object is much more complex and interesting than he or she thinks.'"

--- ScienceDaily, 10.1. 2003, about a study published in the September 2003 issue of The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.)





(HORROR VACUI:
"The entheogen-inspired visionary art of certain indigenous peoples, such as the Huichol yarn paintings and the ayahuasca-inspired art of Pablo Amaringo, often exhibits this style, as does the psychedelic art movement of the 1960s counterculture. Sometimes the patterned art in clothing of indigenous peoples of Middle and South America exhibits horror vacui. For example the geometric molas of Kuna people and the traditional clothing on Shipibo-Conibo people."

---Wikipedia

[Indeed, on my walls are reproductions of Huichol art, reproductions of the work of Pablo Amaringo, reproductions of 1960s psychedelic art, an original mola cloth, and an original Shipibo cloth.])




("...all you can do is draw incomprehensible weirdnesses..."

---Don, describing tripping on "windowpane" LSD. [From the 1997 book RETRO HELL: Life in the '70s and '80s, from Afros to Zotz, by the editors of "Ben is Dead" magazine.])





("A well-kept secret of the mainstream art world is the role that psychedelic drugs have played in shaping and altering the course of art since the 1960s."



"For the most part, mainstream discourse about art goes on as if the psychedelic revolution were just a minor, tangential distraction."



---Ken Johnson, The New York Times, 12.19. 2008.)



("But where, in this 'Summer of Love Experience,' is LSD itself? Because...without that, none of this."

---James Parker, in his article "What Inspired the Summer of Love?", published in The Atlantic, July 2017. The article was about an exhibition ["The Summer of Love Experience: Art, Fashion, and Rock & Roll"] at San Francisco's de Young Museum, marking the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Summer of Love.)




("...visionary experiences are inescapable to anyone who closes their eyes during the psychedelic experience."

"My art is based on what I saw..."

---Alex Grey, in an interview with Rob Sidon, Common Ground, June 2013.)




("It is unlikely one can fully grasp the radical alterations of consciousness produced by psychochemicals without having had a profound psychedelic experience. And after such an exposure, any suggestion that 'all art is psychedelic', or that artists are naturally endowed with a full-fledged 'psychedelic consciousness', lacks credibility."

---Robert E.L. Masters and Jean Houston, in PSYCHEDELIC ART.)




I draw my time using hallucinations as evidence. 









("One of the things I find thrilling about Rembrandt's portraits is all he leaves unpainted..."

"It isn't necessary to paint anything but the front brim of a boy's hat; the first dozen times you see the painting, you won't notice that all Rembrandt painted was a gesture, the merest insinuation of a hat, which the viewer's mind completes from its own experience."

---Diane Ackerman, in A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SENSES.)



"What is perceived to be seen comes from much more than light entering the retina."

---Flickr user Lachfranque.



(And "...Inattentional Blindness Suggests That Unless We Pay Close Attention, We Can Miss Even The Most Conspicuous Events"

---Siri Carpenter, American Psychological Association website, April 2001.

Inattentional Blindness was discovered by Berkeley researchers Arien Mack and Irvin Rock, and described in their 1998 book INATTENTIONAL BLINDNESS.)



YOU SEE WITH YOUR MIND, NOT WITH YOUR EYES...





("I sometimes wonder if our culture, acting in the manner of a single organism---in the way a crowd of people or a classroom of students sometimes can---somehow senses a deep threat to its own philosophical foundations residing in the psychedelic experience. This might help account for the otherwise irrational hatred and repression of the use of hallucinogens, and the smirking dismissal of the psychedelic experience as trivial by so many of our intellectuals."

---Paul Devereux, in his book THE LONG TRIP.)





("Human beings gain a sense of security, false though it may be, from conformity, from the lack of startling differences that would force us to contemplate who we really are. Like Snow White's witch, we don't want to face a mirror that tells the whole truth."

---Susan Schaller, in A MAN WITHOUT WORDS.)





(They "did nothing less than inspire a generation of Americans to redefine the nature of reality."

---Don Lattin, in THE HARVARD PSYCHEDELIC CLUB.)





("Think Different."

---Apple Computer advertising slogan, created by Craig Tanimoto, 1997.)

("think DIFFERENTLY about dessert"

---from a 2022 ad for "Cheesecake Moonshine", an icecream containing 7% alcohol that is made in South Carolina.)


("Believe it or not, there was a time when technology was a fringe industry that was desperate for attention. Steve Jobs used to call reporters at home to persuade them to care more about stuff that Apple was doing. Technology companies embraced their outsider and underdog status. It was cool to be different and unwanted.

That's not reality anymore. Technology won, and it's everything and everywhere. Human communications are inseparable from tech."

---Shira Ovide, The New York Times, 2.18. 2022.)



("Steve Jobs has never been shy about his use of psychedelics, famously calling his LSD experiences 'one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life.'"


---Ryan Grim, HuffPost.com)


("According to a recent survey of 1,000 teens by Junior Achievement, Steve Jobs is the most admired entrepreneur, ahead of Oprah Winfrey. Sixty-one percent of respondents chose Jobs because they said he 'made a difference in/improved people's lives or made the world a better place'...



---Ryan Kim, the San Francisco Chronicle, 10.14. 2009.)


("All of a sudden, the wheat field was playing Bach."

---Steve Jobs, describing the effects of LSD. [Quoted by Jay Cocks, TIME, January 1983.)


("LSD shows you that there's another side to the coin, and you can't remember it when it wears off, but you know it."

---Steve Jobs, quoted by Walter Isaacson in the 2011 biography he wrote, STEVE JOBS.)


("I have no words to explain the effect LSD had on me, although I can say it was a positive life-changing experience for me and I am glad I went through that experience."

---Steve Jobs, in a 1988 signed statement for a U.S. Department of Defense Top Secret security clearance.)


("His influence on global culture cannot be overestimated."

---Stephanie N. Mehta, writing about Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, Fortune, 11.23. 2009. Jobs was named "CEO of the Decade" by the magazine.)


("Apple is the first U.S. company to be worth $2 trillion"

---CBS News headline, 8.21. 2020)


(At the behest of Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies [MAPS] founder Rick Doblin in 2007, Albert Hofmann, then 101 years old, wrote a letter to Steve Jobs requesting financial support for LSD research.

"The letter led to a roughly 30-minute conversation between Doblin and Jobs, says Doblin, but no contribution to the cause. 'He was still thinking "Let's put it in the water supply and turn everybody on,"' recalls a disappointed Doblin..."

---Ryan Grim, HuffPost.com, 8.8.2009, updated 10.6. 2011. ["...adapted from a new book THIS IS YOUR COUNTRY ON DRUGS: The Secret History of Getting High in America"])


("Very aesthetic, very pleasing...no other acid had that quality."

---Jack Boulware, quoting a veteran tripper's description of "Clearlight LSD", San Francisco Weekly, 8.21. 1996


"Clearlight LSD" became popular in the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1970s. At that time, most LSD was being distributed either in the form of tablets or paper into which liquid LSD had been soaked. [The first mention of gelatin LSD doses by the federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) in its MICROGRAM publication was in the June 1970 issue. They called them gelatin "flakes" and said each dose contained 120 micrograms of LSD. The second mention was in the October 1970 issue, where the doses were still called gelatin "flakes". This October 1970 issue is the first time the BNDD said the gelatin doses were called "Clear Lights". The third mention was in the January 1971 issue where the doses were more accurately described as "LSD gelatin squares, known as 'Clear Lights'". "Clearlight LSD" was a major innovation in LSD packaging. It appeared in the form of tiny machine-cut squares of clear hard gelatin, each of which contained very high quality LSD. Quantities of "Clearlight LSD" were packaged in beautiful wooden boxes. Each box contained 40 tiny bottles. Each bottle contained 100 doses of "Clearlight LSD". It was often sold for approximately $1,200 for each 4,000 dose box. Weak doses of "commercial grade" LSD tablets were often sold for approximately $500 for 4,000 doses. Very strong doses of crumbly "Orange Sunshine LSD" tablets were often sold for approximately $800 for 4,000 doses.

(Buddhist Denis Kelly [1942-2021] was the head of the group that produced and sold "Clearlight LSD". "...we made around 30 million doses..." He was a fugitive for years and eventually voluntarily surrendered and pleaded guilty to manufacturing, possessing, and distributing LSD. He served ten and a half months in prison in 1981, and became an ordained Zen priest in 1984. Later, he became the head of a monastery he founded. [LSD cook Owsley Stanley was of the opinion that clear gelatin was NOT a good way to package doses of LSD. "This was the argument I had with Owsley. He felt strongly about not exposing it to light, and I was more interested in preventing people from polluting the product." After it was put into gelatin, dried, and cut into squares "...you could no longer adulterate the product." (At the time, it was commonly thought that many dealers were buying tablets of "Orange Sunshine LSD", grinding them up, mixing the powdered LSD with things like Nestle Quick powdered chocolate milk, and selling the resultant product as "chocolate mescaline", etc. Each tablet of "Orange Sunshine LSD" could be made into 5 strong "commercial grade" capsules...)]

The above quotes are from Kelly [except the ones about "Nestle Quick", "commercial grade" capsules, "Orange Sunshine LSD", and "chocolate mescaline"] and are in the 2019 book A HEART BLOWN OPEN: The Life and Practice of Junpo Denis Kelly Roshi by Keith Martin-Smith. Kelly is quoted as saying that "Clearlight LSD" contained "250 micrograms" of LSD, which is NOT true. Kelly was a an excellent storyteller, but he apparently was not always honest.


"I'm a zealot."

---Denis Kelly, in a dialogue with Ken Wilber, 3.3. 2012, integrallife.


[Kelly's former associate Waldron Voorhees, also known as "Captain Clearlight", bragged that he was the "LSD king" because he "made 250 million" doses of "Clearlight LSD". After a 1992 LSD arrest, Voorhees betrayed his co-defendants by pleading guilty and he also decided to help the DEA "...in return for a lighter sentence. Voorhees agreed to be wired for sound and walk through the upper Haight to attract street dealers."

---Jack Boulware, "The Electric Clearlight Acid Mess", SF Weekly, 8.21. 1996.])


(It is IMPORTANT to note that "Clearlight LSD" [each tiny GELATIN square was said to contain more than 100 micrograms of LSD] was NOT the same as "Clearlight brand 'microdose' LSD" [each much larger PAPER square contained approximately 5 micrograms of LSD].)


(The original doses of "Clearlight LSD" [which first came in white plastic boxes and were larger gelatin squares, and then, prior to the appearance of the wooden boxes containing tiny bottles, came in the standard size smaller squares which were packaged in heat-sealed sections of clear surgical tubing, each section containing 100 doses] were, to me, amazing beyond all description and very, very clean.)



"I used LSD from approximately 1972 to 1974. I would ingest the LSD...in a hard form of gelatin."

---Steve Jobs, in his 1988 U.S. Department of Defense interview.


UNFORGETTABLE: the look on Steve Jobs’ face when I showed him a box of "Clearlight LSD"!


I think it is probable that much of the design and marketing of Apple computers was inspired both by the way Jobs saw that "Clearlight LSD" was being packaged and so successfully marketed and by his use of "Clearlight LSD".)


("...in 2000 British visual artist and art world superstar Damien Hirst...made an artwork titled Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD). The motif, which features a number of colored dots, has been reproduced on several commercial products, including an 'LSD' iPhone case..."

---Henrik Dahl, in his 2015 essay "A Brief History of LSD in the Twenty-First Century".)


(“OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW."

 ---the last words of Steve Jobs. [From an eulogy written by his sister. The New York Times, 10. 30. 2011.])


("'I'm on acid,' he explained later.
'What?'
'Windowpane. Three hits.'
The drug had made everything seem as if it were happening in slow motion."

---young man in Jeffrey Eugenides' 2002 novel MIDDLESEX, who had just "beaten" his father in a game of ping-pong. "Windowpane" was the secular name for "Clearlight LSD".

[Professional baseball player Dock Phillip Ellis, Jr. threw a no-hitter on June 12, 1970, and later said that he accomplished the feat while he was high on LSD.

 ---From an article published in the Eugene Register-Guard (Oregon), Associated Press, 4.8. 1984.])


(In a low-end thrift store near a recreational marijuana store in a poverty-stricken area of the east San Francisco bay area in 2020 I found a copy of the  premier issue of NeXTWORLD magazine, published in January 1991. Steve Jobs is on the cover with a NeXT computer. On the screen of the computer is a reproduction of a famous self-portrait of Vincent Van Gogh, showing the artist with a bandaged ear, smoking a pipe. The magazine includes an image of a MRI brainscan and also a review of the William Gibson novel NEUROMANCER, which was published by ACE books.

"Making use of a NeXT computer, English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1990 at CERN in Switzerland."

---Wikipedia)






(Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain, in their detailed history of LSD [ACID DREAMS: The Complete Social History of LSD, the CIA, the Sixties and Beyond] remark that

"The LSD story is inseparable from the cherished hopes and shattered dreams of the sixties generation".)



("It was a time when the underpinnings of the universe were questioned."

---Ted Kaptchuk, a prominent professor at Harvard Medical School, describing the sixties. The quote is from an article by Michael Specter, The New Yorker, 12.12. 2011.)



("The major hallucinogens are extraordinary tools for stripping your mind bare and showing you things that are normally not seen and dislodging your sense of self. That is not for everybody."

---Susan Blackmore, quoted by Hara Estroff Marano, Psychology Today, January/February 2015.)





("Do you know how many thousands of people all over the world committed suicide after taking LSD?"



"If you promote these activities you're criminals and murderers..."



---excerpts from a letter someone wrote to the editor of Open Exchange Magazine, published in Berkeley in October 2009. [Open Exchange Magazine, said to have more than 330,000 readers per issue, has been published for more than 35 years.]



Here is the editor's reply to the above letter:



"...as for 'thousands' of people dying from acid...the facts don't bear that out..."

"According to 'The Consumers Union Report on Licit and Illicit Drugs by Edward M. Brecher and the Editors of Consumer Reports Magazine, 1972,' reviewing over 25,000 documented uses of LSD by nearly 5,000 people: 'No instance of serious, prolonged physical side effects was found either in the literature or in the answers to the questionnaires.' Furthermore, the published LSD literature 'directly records only one suicide and that in a schizophrenic patient.' One LSD death! Compare that to alcohol, which is responsible for about 25,000 roadside deaths each and every year---and it's a legal drug!")



("'Coca-Cola, like other sodas, causes enormous suffering and premature death by increasing the risks of obesity, diabetes, heart attacks, gout, and cavities,' Harvard University nutrition expert Dr. Walter Willett said."

---Lindsey Tanner, Associated Press, the San Francisco Chronicle, 11.5. 2009.)



Coca-Cola is said to be the most recognized brand name in the world.



("The 3 things I love the most are Coca-Cola, Jesus, and Spam!"

---brain-damaged senior citizen, speaking to me as she watched a soap opera on television. She was not joking.)



(The word "Coca" refers to the coca plant, from which cocaine is extracted. Originally Coca-Cola contained cocaine, but now the Coca-Cola being sold contains an extract of coca leaves from which the cocaine has been removed.)



"...seeing a person drinking a Coke is the most normal, natural, common thing you'll see on earth..."

---from a letter to columnist Rich Heldenfels, the Akron Beacon Journal, Akron, Ohio, 10.8. 2011.



("...silly crazy things-running around the orchard and stealing oranges and taking Cokes out of the refrigerator and crazy things..."

---a very young Roman Catholic woman in California in the late 1960s, describing a few of her reactions to the rapid changes happening in her life as she became a nun. [from "The Century of the Self", a 2002 British television documentary series.])



("'What do you think about the legalization of marijuana?' Greg asked, while constructing a makeshift pipe out of a Coca-Cola can..."

---Ken Ilgunas, writing about an electrician he met in South Dakota in 2012. From Ilgunas' 2016 book TRESPASSING ACROSS AMERICA.)



("...he shoot Coca-Cola..."

---John Lennon, in the song he wrote, "Come Together".

LSD advocate Timothy Leary was running for Governor of California in 1969, and the song was written by Lennon for Leary's campaign. It was recorded by the Beatles and was included on their album "Abbey Road", released in late 1969.)



(In "The Gods Must Be Crazy", a 1980 comedy film, a Coca-Cola bottle is thrown from an airplane, causing problems for a tribe of Africans...)



("Let's go have a Coca-Cola."

---Bing Crosby's last words, 1977.)



("Let's Go Crazy"

---Coca-Cola advertising slogan, January 2013.)



Andy Warhol's picture on canvas of a bottle of Coca-Cola, "Coca-Cola (4) (Large Coca-Cola)", was sold for $35.36 million in 2010.




William Halstead was a brilliant American surgeon in the late 1800s. He became addicted to cocaine, and in spite of two long hospitalizations, failed in his attempts to break the habit.

"The operating technique of the now reclusive surgeon had become meticulous to the point of painstaking slowness, characterized by minute attention to detail that enabled him to perceive the physiological characteristics of tissues and of wound healing that eluded his speedier, less observant colleagues. Working with single-minded patience, he developed a wide range of unique methods whose therapeutic results, abetted by the punctilious, biologically-based skills that became known as Halsteadian technique, were remarkably improved over those reported by hospitals elsewhere. The cocaine habit that had resulted in his many peculiarities and his aversion to colleagues was now, with masterful self-control, being used in the service of his art."

---Sherwin Nuland, in a 7.24. 2011 review of Howard Markel's book AN ANATOMY OF ADDICTION-Sigmund Freud, William Halstead, and the Miracle Drug Cocaine, 2011. The review, titled "Blow to the Ego", was published in The New York Times Book Review.




(The Mystery of the Leaping Fish was a short [25 minutes] 1916 silent comedy film starring Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. as "Coke Ennyday", a detective who frequently injects himself with cocaine.)




("In the 1970s, if you were the sort of person who did drugs, there was no classier drug than cocaine. Beloved by rock stars and movie stars, ballplayers and even the occasional politician, cocaine was a drug of power and panache."

---Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner in their 2005 book FREAKONOMICS--A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.)




(Michael Alan Weiner, born in 1942, was a not-very-bright writer. In 1984 he advocated using coffee enemas to treat cocaine addiction in his book GETTING OFF COCAINE-30 Days to Freedom-The Step-by-Step Program of Nutrition and Exercise. He became a grotesquely rage-filled hate-spewing racist conservative nationally-syndicated radio talk show host calling himself "Michael Savage". In 2009 he was on approximately 400 stations across the United States and had an audience of approximately 20 million listeners. That same year he was permanently banned from entering the United Kingdom because he was "seeking to provoke others to serious criminal acts and fostering hatred.")




("Everybody knows that you live forever, ah, after you've done a line or two..."

---Leonard Cohen, in the 1988 song "Everybody Knows", written by Cohen and Sharon Robinson.)




(“‘We’re smoking coca leaves for your cocktail’...the sommelier...said...holding a tubed black device he called a smoking gun. ‘I don’t know if it gets you high, but we’ll find out.’”

 “...a former student...aimed the gun into a glass of foamy pink liquid and topped it off with smoke, then added a coca-leaf garnish.”

 ---Carolyn Korman, describing dining at Gustu, a very upscale gourmet restaurant in La Paz, Bolivia. The meal included coca tea, coca bread, and coca butter. The New Yorker, 4.4. 2016.)




(I found powder containing cocaine to be a VERY, VERY addictive drug. I have seen MANY people ruin their lives by using powder containing cocaine!!! I STRONGLY advise people to NEVER use powder containing cocaine, not even once!!!

["With cocaine, one snort, and it just owned me body and soul. Something in my system wanted that, and once cocaine was there it was like the missing link: click. Like when you turn on lights it's on or off, there's no half way. Cocaine was like my 'on' switch. I started in 79 I guess. Did it for about eight years."

"I wrote. I don't remember a lot of it."

"I like to think my coke addiction was a blessing in disguise, because I think without coke, I'd have gone on drinking until about the age of fifty-five and it would have been in the New York Times, 'writer Steven King dies of stroke'."

---Stephen King, interviewed by Tim Adams. The Guardian, 9.18. 2000.]

I found that sniffing powder containing cocaine sometimes seemed to be helpful when I was doing extremely detailed work. I think that the focused hyper-awareness I accessed by sniffing powder containing cocaine, smoking potent marijuana, and using LSD simultaneously usually assisted me in successfully evading the attention of law-enforcement officials when I, working by myself, was involved in nonprofit quality-control work with LSD, work which required me to accurately measure and package large quantities of doses.

It has been many years since I have sniffed any powder containing cocaine, and I have absolutely no desire to ever sniff any powder containing cocaine again. But I suspect the permanent effects of my use can be seen in some of my ultra-detailed doodles...)




(I was in a halfway house with José Chepito Areas in San Francisco in 1986 following my release from prison. Chepito, a timbales player, was a member of the band Santana from 1969 to 1980. My conversations with him as he sadly strolled the halls in the middle of the night strengthened my belief that cocaine can be a very dangerous substance.)




(The base form of cocaine ["freebase", "crack", "rock"] is EXTREMELY addictive and EXTREMELY toxic. It is usually smoked and it affects the central nervous system VERY rapidly. The salt form of cocaine, which is usually sniffed through the nose, affects the central nervous system much more slowly. EVERYONE that I know that has regularly used "freebase" or "crack" has experienced SEVERE problems because of their use!


["Crack killed Applejack
he jumped in and he couldn't jump back
he was just too blind to see that
DEATH LIVES IN THE ROCK HOUSE"

---Mitch McDowell, whose 1986 song was performed and recorded by General Kane.])


("...on my hands and knees picking through rugs, smoking anything that even remotely resembled crack cocaine. I probably smoked more Parmesan cheese than anyone you know, I'm sure... I mean, I went one time for 13 days without sleeping, and smoking crack and drinking vodka exclusively throughout that whole time."

---Hunter Biden, the son of U.S. president Joe Biden, speaking to correspondent Tracy Smith.

[CBS News item, 4.4. 2021, produced by John D'Amelio and edited by Steven Tyler. Hunter Biden claims he has not used crack cocaine or alcohol since 2019.])


(Addiction can certainly make people behave in ways that are harmful. Someone I know, urgently seeking more marijuana after she smoked up her stash, got down and frantically searched the floor, and ended up smoking a piece of urine-soaked cat litter box filler because she thought it was a piece of a marijuana flower.)






For many years I consumed much coffee, especially coffee prepared as espresso. I now prefer to use caffeine tablets.


("Tumble out of bed and stumble to the kitchen
Pour myself a cup of ambition..."

---Dolly Parton, in her song "9 to 5".)


("...I sipped a cup of Marxism brand instant coffee ['God's Favored Coffee!' the package promised in English]."

---Michael Meyer, in IN MANCHURIA, describing a recent train ride in China.)


("She was really in need of caffeine."

"'I anticipate needing some caffeine,' Dr. Blasey told the Senate Judiciary Committee."

"She would go through two cups of coffee and a bottle of Coke before her turn in the national spotlight was over."

---Julie Hirschfield Davis, The New York Times, in her 9.27. 2018 article "With Caffeine and Determination, Christine Blasey Ford Relives Her Trauma". [Dr. Blasey testified that she had been sexually-assaulted by U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.])


("COFFEE with a COP"

"Join your neighbors and police officers for coffee and conversation."

"The mission of Coffee with a Cop is to break down the barriers between police officers and the citizens they serve. By removing agendas and allowing opportunities to ask questions, voice concerns, and get to know the officers in your neighborhood."

---from a 2018 flyer distributed by the local police department and coffeewithacop.com.)







THIS DOCUMENT IS IN NO WAY MEANT TO ENCOURAGE THE USE OF ANY DRUG, LEGAL OR ILLEGAL. QUITE THE OPPOSITE IS TRUE! MORE THAN THREE DOZEN OF MY FRIENDS DIED BECAUSE THEY USED DRUGS IRRESPONSIBLY. ALMOST ALL OF THEM WERE VERY GOOD PEOPLE. PLEASE DO NOT MAKE THE SAME MISTAKE THEY DID!!!


(Under California law, it is a crime "to practice, attempt to practice, or advertise practicing any treatment of the sick including diagnosis, operation, or prescription for an ailment, blemish, deformity, disease, disfigurement, disorder, injury, or any other physical or mental condition without a valid certificate or authorization for doing so." Violations are punishable by a fine of up to $10,000 and possible imprisonment in a county jail for up to one year.)





I believe people should ALWAYS use extreme caution when drinking beverages containing the poison alcohol!

("There's 'No Safe Level of Alcohol' Major New Study Concludes"

---Ashley Welch, CBS News, 8.23. 2018. The study, by Dr. Max Griswold, of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, looked at data on 28 million people worldwide.

"The conclusions of the study are clear and unambiguous..."

---Dr. Robyn Burton, of King's College London.)


(When I lived in a small village in France with my parents when I was a child, we drank white wine [in unlabeled bottles from a nearby village, Dornot]. We never drank the local water because it was said that it might make us sick.)


("Many people cannot function without their daily glass of wine..."

---Mark Miodownik, in his 2019 book LIQUID RULES--The Delightful And Dangerous Substances That Flow Through Our Lives.

"...it damages your body and damages your brain."

---Mark Miodownik, describing the effects of alcohol. NPR, the Science Friday program, produced by WNYC. [KQED, 2.15. 2019.])


(In 1969, astronaut Buzz Aldrin was the second man to walk on the moon. Aldrin, a former fighter pilot who served in the Korean War, an active Republican, and a devout Christian, drank wine from a sacramental chalice and ate a communion wafer after he landed on the moon. His mental illness became even worse when he returned to earth. Suffering from alcoholism and acute depression, he was treated at an addiction treatment center in 1975. Later, he was arrested for disorderly conduct after breaking in his girlfriend's door when he was drunk. When he was old, Aldrin urged people to vote for Donald Trump.)


("A 'blackout' is a phenomenon caused by the intake of alcohol...in which long-term memory creation is impaired or there is a complete inability to recall the past. 'Blacking out' is not to be confused with... 'passing out', which means loss of consciousness. 'Blackouts' can generally be divided into two categories, 'en bloc blackouts' and 'fragmentary blackouts'. 'En bloc blackouts' are classified by the inability to recall any memories from the intoxication period, even when prompted. 'Fragmentary blackouts' are characterized by the ability to recall certain events from an intoxication period, yet be unaware that other memories are missing until reminded of the existence of these 'gaps' in memory. ...surveys of drinkers experiencing 'blackouts' have indicated that they are NOT DIRECTLY RELATED TO THE AMOUNT OF ALCOHOL CONSUMED. ...a person experiencing an 'en bloc blackout' may not appear to be doing so, as they can carry on conversations or even manage to accomplish difficult feats. In a 2002 survey of college students by researchers at Duke University Medical Center, 40% of those surveyed who had consumed alcohol recently reported having experienced a 'blackout' within the preceding year."

---Wikipedia


I have known people who were very upset by the possibility that they had committed acts of violence, even murder, during a 'blackout'.

I have never known anyone to experience a 'blackout' after using marijuana. I have never heard of anyone experiencing a 'blackout' after using hashish or any other cannabis preparation.

In 1980, I was reading a medical textbook and was shocked to see a photo of a child that looked almost exactly like the young daughter of one of my alcohol-drinking friends. The photo was of a child that has fetal alcohol syndrome [FAS], which was specifically identified and named in 1973. Children suffering from FAS have brain damage, as do children who suffer from the far more widespread fetal alcohol spectrum disorders.)

("He was 11 or 12 with the look of parents who drank."

---Blindboy Boatclub, in TOPOGRAPHIA HIBERNICA.)

("I was an unapologetic wine-sipper during pregnancy. But, after speaking to doctors who have treated fetal alcohol syndrome, I wished that I could take back even the tiniest drop."

---Lizzie Widdicombe, in her article "Don't Worry, Baby". The New Yorker, 6.3. 2019.)


(It is not possible to understand American culture unless you understand how important beverages containing alcohol are to many Americans.


["You can get drunk on Tintoretto..."

"I did the other day..."

"I've sobered up a bit since then, but the effect lingers."

---Peter Schjeldahl, in The New Yorker, 4.1. 2019. Schjeldahl went on to write that the artist Tintoretto was currently "...super-charging my faith in art as a means to invigorate the world."]


["The perfect novel to drink martinis by."

---The New York Times, quoted on the back cover of the 1957 paperback edition of COMFORT ME WITH APPLES by Peter De Vries.]


["Of course, I want to drink wine all the time. I want to have fun and feel good and catch myself in fleeting moments of untouchable youth where time stands still just long enough for you to realize you are truly free. Not in an 'I'm popping Molly at Coachella!' way. That is seriously the last thing in the whole fucking world I want to do, second only to popping Molly at Stagecoach, an actual circle of hell. But in a genuine living-in-the-moment type of way, where you're so present that even for a split second, all that matters is the company around you, that glass in front of you and the feeling of endless happiness in those few minutes."

---Marissa A. Ross, in her 2017 book WINE. all the time. the casual guide to confident drinking, published in New York by PLUME, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. ("popping Molly" means using the drug MDMA. "Coachella" is a music festival in California. "Stagecoach" is a country music festival in California.)]


I believe people should NEVER smoke tobacco. (I spent many years being addicted to nicotine.)

I believe most people should never use methamphetamine.

("Swiss-cheese brain..."

---former police officer who was addicted to amphetamines, describing what he felt to be one of the effects of his use of "speed". Quote from the 2002 crime novel THE MURDER BOOK, by clinical psychologist and very popular author Jonathan Kellerman.)

I believe people should never use ketamine or PCP except under strict medical supervision. (Some of the negative effects these related substances can have on people seem to be permanent in some of the instances I have observed.)


("Originally derived from PCP, or 'angel dust,' ketamine has been used in hospitals and veterinary clinics as an anesthetic for decades. It's also been cited as a drug of misuse under the moniker 'special K.'"

---Harvard Medical School, 2024, https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/ketamine-for-treatment-resistant-depression-when-and-where-is-it-safe-202208092797)

("...the risks of ketamine have been severely underestimated."

---"Olivia", who had recently been in rehab, quoted by Jane C. Hu in her description of the contents of an Altered States podcast featuring some of the results of the research of journalist Anna Silman, "What if Ketamine is More Addictive Than We Thought?", The Microdose, 10.8. 2024.)

("Gil Scott Heron’s cautionary 1978 song Angel Dust reflected attitudes that it was a drug best avoided."

"In the 1984 film The Terminator, when Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character punches through a windscreen suffering no pain, the police presume he must be high on PCP."

"In 2014 rapper Andre Johnson, a Wu Tang associate, cut off his genitals while high on PCP."

"Julie Holland, a psychopharmacologist and author who headed the psychiatric emergency room at Bellevue Hospital in New York for nine years and has consulted on several rape and murder cases in DC involving PCP, said in her experience the drug does have a propensity to spark extreme behaviour.'We had a guy at Bellevue who was just sharing a joint outside a bar, next thing he knows, he's dancing naked on a car, so police brought him in. He had smoked PCP without knowing. We had a saying at Bellevue in the psych ER and toxicology program: "Naked running is PCP, until proven otherwise".'".

---Max Daly, VICE, 3.22. 2021. According to Wikipedia in July 2024, Julie Holland was the weekend head of the psychiatric emergency room at Bellvue.)


I believe people should never use heroin. The potential for overdose and addiction is far too great. The same is true for other opioids such as OxyContin (oxycodone), which should only be used under strict medical supervision.

(Federal Judge Monti Belot, in sentencing Dr. Stephen Schneider to 30 years in prison for illegally prescribing narcotic drugs [more than 60 people linked to Schneider's clinic were alleged to have died from accidental overdoses] "...concluded that Schneider deserved a harsher punishment than ordinary drug dealers, because they have no duty or obligation, legal or otherwise, to do no harm to their customers."

"Mark Sullivan, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Washington, told me that in poor, rural regions doctors are using opioids to treat a 'complex mixture of physical and emotional distress.'"

"Some of these patients could be said to be suffering from what his colleague calls 'terribly-sad-life-syndrome'. 'These patients are at a dead end, life has stymied them, they are hurting. They want to be numb.'"

---Rachel Aviv, in an article she wrote, "Prescription for Disaster--The Heartland's Pain-Pill Problem". The New Yorker, 5.5. 2014.)

("Nicknamed 'gas station heroin' due to its wide availability in convenience stores and other small retailers, several states have taken steps to curb sales of the drug. Other brands of tianeptine the FDA has previously warned about include Za Za and Tianna Red."

---Alexander Tin, CBS News, 11.22. 2023.)


("...the failure of Trump's economic policies is evident in the decline of average life expectancy among Americans over the past 3 years.

'A lot of it is what they call the depths of despair. Suicide, drug overdose, alcoholism--it's not a pretty picture.'"

---Max Zahn, reporter for Yahoo Finance, 1.29. 2020, quoting Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, who had spoken at the annual World Economic Forum on 1.24. 2020 and sharply refuted Trump's claim, made at a January 2020 meeting of business and political leaders in Davos, Switzerland that "The American Dream is back--bigger, better, and stronger than before. No one is benefitting more than America's middle class." Stiglitz said Trump is "just wrong".)

("Vicodin, a potent narcotic painkiller, is the No. 1-selling prescription drug in the country. The U.S.--nearly 5 percent of the world's population--ingests 80 percent of its narcotics."

---Tony Dajer, Discover, March 2015.)

I believe people should be VERY cautious when using benzodiazepines, which include Valium, Xanax, and Klonopin. When people become addicted to these substances, the withdrawal symptoms can be severe and quite long-lasting.

I believe people should never use Amanita muscaria mushrooms. Toxic reactions can result, especially since the amounts of active substances can vary greatly from mushroom to mushroom. The so-called "high" does NOT seem to be worth the risk.

I believe people should never use DOB, DOM, or DOC. There are much better ways of altering consciousness!

I believe people should never use "research chemicals" unless they are a very well-educated legitimate researcher.

MDMA ("Ecstasy") seems to have the potential to be a useful substance when administered by a skilled medical professional in an appropriate setting, but I believe people should never use it recreationally. The same is true of peyote, mescaline, psilocybin mushrooms, psilocybin, DMT, and ayahuasca.

(5-MeO-DMT:

When I was doing time in a federal correctional institution in Arizona, one of my fellow inmates found what he said was a DMT toad and rather thoroughly licked it.

He had an extraordinarily violent screaming fit and was placed in solitary confinement ["the hole"]. It was my job the next day, after the inmate had been taken to a hospital, to clean up the cell where he had been confined during his "trip".

The cell had had a metal bed welded to a metal wall, and a steel toilet welded to a metal wall. The inmate, displaying what might be described as awesomely superhuman strength, had, in his howling rage, apparently ripped the bed from the wall, and then used it to completely smash the toilet, detaching it from the wall, and leaving it in pieces strewn about the cell...THERE WAS A LOT OF BLOOD.)

(In the late 1950s and early 1960s when I was a child living in South Carolina, there were MANY toads living in the woods behind our apartment. I greatly enjoyed studying and handling them. Quite a few had an extra leg! At the time I thought exposure to pesticides might have caused the deformities. It is currently said that ALL toads secrete poisons, and for that reason should not be handled. I do not recall experiencing any illness from my years-long and very extensive daily physical contact with toads.)



(Here is something I wrote describing a photo I made of a tag I found drawn over the letters "sing" on a "No Trespassing" sign in Berkeley in 2019:

The lightning bolt at the bottom right of the tag refers to the well-known LSD-related 13-point "lightning bolt in skull" logo that was designed in 1969 by Owsley Stanley and rendered by his friend the artist Bob Thomas. The logo was designed to be put on the equipment cases used when the Grateful Dead played concerts where there were many bands performing so as to make the Grateful Dead equipment cases more easily identifiable in what were often very stoned circumstances.

In 1969 in Berkeley a young musician friend [Ethan Feldman, aka "Rabbi"] told me that he had acquired the power to control the weather with his mind after he suffered a strong electric shock while changing a lightbulb while he was high on LSD... In the mid-1970s, he joined the Children of God, a surprisingly large Christian cult famous for their practice of "flirty fishing", a form of evangelistic prostitution practiced by some of the female members, who engaged in sex and sexual activities with men to lure them into the cult. In the early 1980s, he took heroin and nodded-out while inhaling nitrous oxide ["laughing gas"] from a tank while in bed. In the middle of the night his wife rolled over, tried to hug him and was nearly impaled by the ice crystals that had grown on his frozen chest. She later met with me in her Edsel and gave me the Grateful Dead "Steal Your Face" T-shirt with the "lightning bolt in skull" logo he was wearing when he died.)



(Another photo I made, in 2020, "Microwave Buddha", is of a small idol of a black Buddha [made of plastic in communist China, and bought at a Ross store in California] sitting atop my microwave oven. The timer on the oven reads "0:00". [One of my favorite brand names is Timeless Time, tobacco cigarettes made in South Korea...])






(DIFFERENT DRUGS USED IN DIFFERENT WAYS IN DIFFERENT DOSES DO DIFFERENT THINGS TO DIFFERENT PEOPLE WITH DIFFERENT BODIES AND DIFFERENT MINDS AT DIFFERENT TIMES AND DIFFERENT PLACES.)


("...after having a massive life changing experience on half a tab 2 years ago..."

---Reddit user mentioning LSD, quoted by Jules Evans, 1.12. 2024, in his article "A theology of 'meh' experiences", published online in Evans' newsletter on substack dot com.)


("No person is ever justified in speaking of the psychedelic experience, as there is great variation among individual experiences."

---Pahnke, W.N. and Richards, W.A., in their article Implications of LSD and Experimental Mysticism, published in the periodical Religion and Health [1966]. Something that is very, very often NOT mentioned: in the famous 1962 Marsh Chapel "Good Friday" psilocybin experiment designed by Pahnke, several of the very small group of Christian divinity students who were participants suffered "acute anxiety" and it is said that "one had to be restrained and injected with Thorazine [chlorpromazine] after he had fled the chapel convinced he was chosen to announce the return of the Messiah...")


(Decriminalize Nature was co-founded in Oakland, California by Carlos Plazola, who made the hideously dishonest claim in 2021 that there were "...no reports of anyone ‘taking mushrooms and doing something stupid’"...

---quote is by Jules Evans, from a July 21, 2023 article he wrote on substack dot com. A link to the article was published online on July 28, 2023 in The Microdose.)


("...dogs trotting across the road were suddenly big trucks. Old ladies turned into moving vans. Everything was too bright, but very funny and made for my delight."

---American food writer M.F.K. Fisher, who loved tea, describing what happened in California in 1942 after she drank a lot of tea on an empty stomach and then started driving. [First published in The New Yorker, 7.12. 1982, in her essay "The Total Abstainer".]

After the incident, M.F.K. Fisher never drank tea again.

[M.F.K. Fisher was a founder of the Napa Valley Wine Library.])


It has been said that Picasso wasn't breathing when he was born, and his face was so blue that the midwife left him for dead. An uncle is said to have revived him by blowing cigar smoke into his face.


("...the title of the world's oldest person ever goes to a cigarette-loving French woman named Jeanne Louise Calment, who lived to 122."

---S. O'Grady, the Washington Post, 7.28. 2018.)


("An assistant principal in North Dakota warned the Grand Forks Herald about the dangers of e-cigarette liquid, which he had inadvertently touched after confiscating a bottle that he found in a student's backpack. Soon afterward, he began to feel nauseated and 'real emotional' he said."

---Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker, 5.14. 2018.)


("The drowsy man slowly begins to open his eyes once more earlier than saying 'potato salad'."

---"Bhvishya Patel for mailonline", 7.29. 2021, in an article about a video of a patient in Clarksburg, West Virginia speaking with his wife at a hospital as he returned to consciousness following anesthesia on 7.21. 2021.)




(Intoxication by inhaling fumes:

"Experts say a number of today's teens are abusing a variety of household products---some 1,400 have been identified---many of which have no odor and are hard to detect, said local and national authorities."

---Carla Rivera, the Los Angeles Times, 7.23. 2009.)




(FOLIE À DEUX:

In 1971 a friend of mine went to a party in Berkeley and took LSD. After he got high, he said he looked across the room and saw another man, a stranger, who was also on LSD. Suddenly my friend found himself looking across the room at himself. He apparently had switched bodies with the stranger! For months my friend and the stranger were inseparable associates. Even though they had never spoken to each other, they each seemed to know exactly what the other was thinking. It was mind-blowing to be around them! When they spoke to me, one of them would start saying something and the other would seamlessly finish the sentence. They never looked at each other and when they strolled down the street, they were perfectly in step. They somehow got recruited into a bizarre cult centered in a large house in Oakland. The cult was led by an old man who had a barrel of the toxic industrial solvent toluene, a substance that "glue-sniffers" frequently inhale. My friend became the high priest of the cult, and it was his job each morning during the insane worship services to reach into a box, remove clean white cotton washcloths, which the cult leader called "The Lamb", dip each washcloth in toluene, and after placing each washcloth in a ziploc bag, solemnly hand them out to the "Believers". My friend and his associate came to the apartment where I was staying, knocked on the door and, after sniffing toluene from their bags, tried to convince me to join the cult. I said "NO!!", snatched their bags from their hands and threw the bags on the roof of the apartment house. They climbed up on the roof, retrieved their bags and left. Not long after that they finally spoke to each other for the first time and the spell that seemed to possess them was broken. They also quit the poisonous toluene cult.)


(The first known mention of glue-sniffing in print was in 1959. The report was followed by many lurid newspaper stories about glue-sniffing. Because of the widespread media coverage, glue-sniffing, which had been extremely uncommon, soon became a fad. I remember that I heard about it in 1960 when I was nine years old, and that I immediately tried it...)








(LSD is the ultimate "double-edged sword": The more something has the potential to heal you, the more it has the potential to slay you...)



(When used properly, LSD can GREATLY increase intelligence and compassion. It is quite unfortunate that there are so many people who have not experienced [or cannot or should not experience] LSD and thus are suffering from both "Pre-LSD Cognitive Disorder" and "Pre-LSD Perception Disorder"...)



("These sacraments should be used with the utmost caution..."

---Alex Grey)







("...up until LSD, I never realized there was anything beyond this state of consciousness."

"The first time I took it, it just blew everything away. I had such an overwhelming sense of well-being."

"For me, 1966 was the time when the whole world opened up and had a greater meaning...that was a direct result of LSD. It was like opening the door, really, and before, you didn't even know the door was there."

"...those years did seem to be a thousand years long. Time just got elongated. Sometimes I felt like I was a thousand years old."


---George Harrison, in a 1987 interview with Anthony DeCurtis, Rolling Stone.)



("And the more I go inside, the more there is to see"

---George Harrison, in his song "It's All Too Much", written in 1967. The song was on a Beatles album released in 1969.)







("Time often seems to slow down dramatically...and minutes often turn into hours or days."

---John Santrock [describing one of the effects of LSD] in his book PSYCHOLOGY.)







("After I took it [LSD], it opened my eyes. We only use one-tenth of our brain. Just think what we could accomplish if we could only tap that hidden part. It would mean a whole new world."

---Paul McCartney, quoted by Thomas Thompson in an article about the Beatles, LIFE, 6.16. 1967.)







("And what a boon to my art!"

---R. Crumb, writing about his LSD experiences in THE COMPLETE CRUMB COMICS--VOLUME 4. ["...minds are made to be blown."])







("Purple haze all in my brain
Lately things just don't seem the same
Actin' funny, but I don't know why
'Scuse me while I kiss the sky"

---Jimi Hendrix, in his song "Purple Haze", recorded in in 1967.)



("...not necessarily stoned, but Beautiful..."

---Jimi Hendrix, in his song "Are You Experienced?", released in 1967.)







In one week in 1970 I was offered more than 100 different types of LSD tabs. Police reports from that time estimated 45 different bay area tablet-making machines were in operation. Dripping doses onto paper with an eyedropper was not practical since so many millions of doses were being distributed in Berkeley. The invention in the early 1970's of soak-blotting perforated sheets of paper changed the situation. By the early 1990's the ideal standard unit had become metric, i.e. 100 micrograms of LSD in a tiny perforated square of paper. A "gram" of LSD came to mean 10,000 such squares.


("...a Jewish legend about Rabbi Loew of Prague who, in the sixteenth century, made a golem out of clay and brought it to life by placing a piece of paper in its mouth on which was written the secret name of God..."

---Arthur Naiman)




You never know for sure what you are getting in the underground marketplace...thus EXTREME CAUTION is urged. That being said, I will make a couple of observations. I have noticed that a lot of blotters, tabs, and gels are unevenly dosed. I have observed that sometimes one dose will contain as much as twice as much LSD as another dose that looks identically the same. In the sixties in San Francisco, doses were frequently 250 micrograms, sometimes 300 micrograms, and even as high as 500-1000 micrograms. In the late 1970s and the 1980s doses went down to 25-50 micrograms on the average (so-called "disco doses"), although at that time I knew of MANY instances when the dose was 7-15 micrograms. In the 1990s the doses went up to about 60-80 micrograms, sometimes as high as 100 micrograms. Currently, there is a lot less LSD on the market. My observation is that the average dose of genuine LSD is weak.



RECENTLY THERE HAVE BEEN MANY REPORTS OF CHEMICALS OTHER THAN LSD BEING SOLD AS LSD. SOME OF THESE FAKE "LSD BLOTTER" DOSES CONTAIN SUBSTANCES THAT CAN BE VERY, VERY TOXIC!!!


(Perforated squares of blotter paper [stamped with the image of a witch] containing fentanyl were seized by police in 2017. Fentanyl is 50 to 100 times stronger than morphine. Perforated squares of blotter paper containing carfentanil were seized in 2016. Carfentanil is 10,000 times stronger than morphine. Carfentanil is marketed as an anesthetic for large animals. Until March 1, 2017, the manufacture and sale of carfentanil was legal in China. Very large amounts are suspected to have been sold over the internet.)


(“Like many a military brat before him, John experimented with the counterculture. He smoked pot, dropped acid and ate magic mushrooms.”

 “By the time he graduated from high school, his primary interests were computer hacking, skateboarding, and the voracious consumption of psychedelics.”

 ---Graeme Wood, in his article “American Jihadi”, in The Atlantic, March 2017. “John Georgelas  was...a precocious underachiever born in Texas. Now he is a leader within the Islamic State.”)


 (Georgelas [born 1983] very strongly advocates terrorism. He is likely to be quite familiar with blotter LSD and how it is distributed. And I think it is almost certain that he knows about carfentanil.

 Within a few months of arriving in Berkeley in 1969 I became consciously aware that very large amounts of LSD were being distributed in the San Francisco bay area, and that there existed a frightening possibility that military enemies of the United States [or psychopaths] might infiltrate the distribution chain, and deliberately contaminate a large quantity of LSD tablets with toxic substances…)


(23 year old Berkeley High School graduate Amer Sinan Alhaggagi pleaded guilty to attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist group.

"Federal prosecutors said Alhaggagi, in chats with an undercover FBI agent, discussed plans of using...cocaine laced with rat poison to kill people on the UC Berkeley campus."

---David DeBolt, East Bay Times, 7.19. 2018.)


(Anthropologist John Buettner-Janusch was the author of the 1966 textbook ORIGINS OF MAN. He became the chairman of the anthropology department at New York University. He was convicted in 1980 of harboring an illegal drug operation in his lab, where his assistants manufactured LSD and methaqualone. In 1987 Buettner-Janusch anonymously sent poisoned Valentine's Day chocolates to the judge who had sentenced him. The judge's wife became ill after eating some of the chocolates. Buettner-Janusch was sent back to prison, where he died.)




Descriptions people have recently given me of their LSD trips sound like they took between 15 to 25 micrograms. Likewise, my observation of people at raves makes me think they are taking very low doses. The danger is not only that one might get a substance other than LSD, but also that one might inadvertently get a psychedelic 250 microgram dose when one is used to a low 15 to 25 microgram dose.

("The threshold dose of LSD is commonly accepted to be 15 micrograms..."

---Maximo Baquiran, in a 2023 paper, "Lysergic Acid Diethylamide Toxicity", on https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK553216/, "An official website of the United States government".

[A threshold dose for a given effect can be defined as a dose below which the effect does not occur.])


(I have seen people under the influence of a high dose of LSD who, at the time, did not recall that they had taken LSD and "freaked-out" because they thought they had become insane.)


("Loss of ego may be confused with physical death."

"...a person may panic..."

---R. D. Laing, in THE POLITICS OF EXPERIENCE.)



(Survival Systems USA provides team-building sessions for employees of corporations. These employees are placed in the hull of a wrecked airplane, and then submerged upside-down in a pool of cold water to see if the employees can be team players. The CEO of Survival Systems USA says the sessions lead to people discovering capabilities that they don't know they have.

 “Yeah--like crushing Rene in accounting's windpipe if she blocks your way out of the death tomb.”

 ---from the “Wait Wait...Don’t Tell Me!” show. WBEZ in Chicago and National Public Radio, 1.14. 2017. I have observed high dose LSD sessions where people became very DANGEROUSLY panicked and quite VIOLENTLY demanded to be immediately taken to a hospital emergency room because they were absolutely certain that they were dying. These severely panicked people definitely seemed capable of killing anyone that they perceived as blocking their “way out of the death tomb”.)



(LSD is not the only substance that can cause a strong panic reaction:

"...as the Scottish surgeon Arthur Fergusson McGill noted in 1873 in the British Medical Journal, ether often aroused 'great struggling', requiring three or four assistants to hold down the patient..."

---Richard Davenport-Hines, in his book THE PURSUIT OF OBLIVION--A Social History of Drugs.)







("Whenever there is a reaching down into innermost experience, into the nucleus of the personality, most people are overcome by fear and many run away...The risk of inner experience, the adventure of the spirit, is in any case alien to most human beings. The possibility that such experiences might have psychic reality is anathema to them."

---Carl Jung, in his book MEMORIES, DREAMS, REFLECTIONS.


["...not everyone can stand the strain of gazing down too long into the personal crater, with its scene of Hieronymus Bosch activities taking place in the depths."

---novelist Anthony Powell, in his memoir, about why he said nothing about certain aspects of his life.]


"People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls."

---Carl Jung)


(THE RED BOOK: LIBER NOVUS by Carl Jung "recounts and comments upon Jung's imaginative experiences" between 1913 and 1916.

---Wikipedia)

(Some reproductions of photographs that Rob Sidon made of some of Jung's memorably trippy must-see art that appears in THE RED BOOK: LIBER NOVUS can be found in the May/June 2019 issue of Common Ground, a free magazine circulated in the San Francisco bay area.)



("I really like the shape of the mycelium. It's really trippy. It's like spider nets, but it's really, really, really white and it goes into all directions, and you feel like it's infinite, that it's never ending."

---Mahmoud Kuhail, a Palestinian who grows food mushrooms in Jericho, showing reporter Shaina Shealy beds of compost covered with fungus. From the "Reveal" radio program from The Center For Investigative Reporting, broadcast on KQED 9.7. 2019.)







("When psychoactive drugs are used to amplify the psychotherapy process, the use of low-intensity graduated doses, the 'psycholytic' approach, is preferable to the high-dose 'psychedelic' paradigm---with the possible exception of the treatment of alcohol or drug addiction, where the high-dose intense experience may provide longer-lasting relief from relentless cravings and withdrawal sensations."

---Ralph Metzner, in his 2009 book ALCHEMICAL DIVINATION: Accessing Your Spiritual Intelligence for Healing and Guidance.)






(Here is the text of a "Product Information Leaflet" that came with a brand of LSD that was distributed in Berkeley, California in the 1980s:


                                             

                    CLEARLIGHT brand "MICRODOSE" LSD

MANUFACTURE:

Utilizing unique variations of modern homeopathic techniques while working in a dry, dark, low-temperature environment, each of these perforated thin sheets of food-grade sterile paper is evenly saturated with a cold solution containing a highly-refined form of pure pharmaceutical d-lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), rapidly cold-dried, and immediately sealed in airtight packages. During the drying process, various bells and cymbals are used to ecstatically consecrate each batch. The result of twenty-five years of intense research, these paper squares contain absolutely no binders, buffers, disintegrants, coatings, lubricants, fillers, colors, inks, dyes, sugars, wheat, corn, gelatin, or artificial flavors.

SUGGESTED USES:

These squares are amazingly versatile psychic tools that have a wide variety of uses. For example, there are numerous ways in which these squares may be employed by a bona-fide healer to catalyze a balanced physical/mental restructuring. Some people consider these squares to be an excellent sacrament if used in an appropriate religious setting. These squares may also prove to be of great value to an intelligent user who is seriously interested in exploring her or his creative potential.

DOSAGE:

Each one-quarter inch by one-quarter inch square of paper contains approximately five micrograms of active LSD. This is usually considered to be an extremely low dose (One microgram is one-millionth of a gram). Many, many, many studies of the effects of LSD have been made by the scientific community. The doses given to people by "legitimate" researchers have ranged from ten micrograms to fifteen thousand micrograms per dose. The dosage most often mentioned in popular literature is one-hundred micrograms. The first measured dose of LSD taken by a human was two-hundred and fifty micrograms. Quite a few of the people who have made a serious study of the subject think that in some cases the appropriate dose  is one that weighs between three-hundred and five-hundred micrograms. Some people seem to feel an effect after taking as little as one-quarter of a single square of CLEARLIGHT brand "MICRODOSE" LSD.

INSTRUCTIONS:

    1.  Rinse your mouth thoroughly with room-temperature distilled water.

    2.  Using clean stainless steel tweezers, detach one square from sheet. Place this one square under your tongue.

    3.  Keep your mouth closed for twenty-five minutes, occasionally using your tongue to gently move the square from one side of your mouth to the other. Very gently chew the square between your teeth for three minutes.

    4.  Remove the square from your mouth. Discard the square.

    5.   Swallow one mouthful of room-temperature distilled water. (Distilled water is available at most grocery stores.)

GENERAL INFORMATION:

If you follow the instructions provided in this "Product Information Leaflet", between thirty and ninety minutes after placing one of these squares in your mouth you will usually begin to feel its effect. No matter what the dose, the immediate effects of LSD usually last for between eight and twelve hours. The most important factors determining the course of an LSD experience are "set" and "setting". "Set" refers to the user's psychological "attitude". "Setting" may be defined as the physical and social environment surrounding and interacting with the user at the time he or she is using LSD. It is crucial that you have at least two quiet days to prepare yourself before taking this substance, that you have no pressing personal or business matters to distract you on the day you use these squares, and that you spend at least several days following your use meditating, contemplating, and integrating. It is extremely important that you do not use these squares until you have read and studied all of the following books:

    1.   THE NATURAL MIND: A NEW WAY OF LOOKING AT DRUGS AND THE HIGHER CONSCIOUSNESS by A. Weil. Published by Houghton-Mifflin, 1972.

    2.   LSD PSYCHOTHERAPY by S. Grof. Published by Hunter House, 1980.

    3.   THE ROAD TO ELEUSIS: UNVEILING THE SECRETS OF THE MYSTERIES by R.G. Wasson, C. Ruck, and A. Hofmann. Published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.

    4.   REALMS OF THE HUMAN UNCONSCIOUS: OBSERVATIONS FROM LSD RESEARCH by S. Grof. Published by Viking, 1975.

    5.   PSYCHEDELICS: THE USES AND IMPLICATIONS OF HALLUCINOGENIC DRUGS by B. Aaronson and H. Osmond. Published by Doubleday, 1975.

    6.   THE JOYOUS COSMOLOGY: ADVENTURES IN THE CHEMISTRY OF CONSCIOUSNESS by A. Watts. Published by Pantheon, 1962.

    7.   THE HUMAN ENCOUNTER WITH DEATH by S. Grof and J. Halifax. Published by Dutton, 1978.

    8.   LSD: THE CONSCIOUSNESS-EXPANDING DRUG by D. Solomon. Published by Berkley-Medallion, 1966.

    9.   THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION by A. Huxley. Published by Perennial Library, 1970.

    10.   THE PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCE: A MANUAL BASED ON THE TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD by T. Leary, R. Metzner, and R. Alpert. Published by Citadel Press, 1970.

    11.   AMAZING DOPE TALES AND HAIGHT STREET FLASHBACKS by S. Gaskin. Published by The Book Publishing Company, 1980.

These squares are not cheap. The price we are forced to charge reflects the fact that the necessarily large-scale production, packaging, storage, and distribution of such an easily recognizable dosage form of a highly illegal drug creates many expensive legal hassles. Also, we spend a considerable amount of time and money on painstaking and thorough research. Part of this research has involved the examination of tens of thousands of different specimens of LSD. Almost one-hundred percent of the specimens we studied were at least somewhat decomposed due to improper manufacturing, handling, and/or storage. Most of the so-called "commercial" doses we have seen contained approximately fifteen micrograms of active LSD. Every individual dose of LSD we looked at contained either colors, animal byproducts, or multiple unidentified chemical contaminants. We have found that there is a rather wide variance in dosage within many of the numerous batches of illicitly-made LSD available on the underground market.

WARNINGS:

Do not use these squares (or any other drug) if you are breastfeeding a baby, if you are pregnant, or if you are of child-bearing age and expect to become pregnant. Do not use these squares if you have epilepsy, or if you suspect a latent disposition to epilepsy. Do not use these squares if you have a history of mental illness. Do not use these squares if you are driving a motor vehicle, or expect to drive a motor vehicle. Do not use these squares if you are addicted to any drug, especially the benzodiazepines, which include Xanax and Valium. Do not use these squares unless you are in the presence of another person who is a willing and experienced guide. Do not inject, smoke, or nasally inhale these squares. The effects that can result from combining drugs (or from combining food and drugs) can be uncomfortably unpredictable. We strongly recommend that you take these squares on an empty stomach. We strongly recommend that you do not use or be under the influence of any other drugs while using these squares. (Tobacco, alcohol, coffee, tea, cocoa, and chocolate are all drugs. All herbs are drugs.) We recommend that you do not eat any food during the twelve-hour period that follows placing one of these squares under your tongue. We strongly recommend that you drink a sufficient quantity of high-quality water while using these squares. Do not drink tapwater, however, as it frequently contains harmful substances. Using, possessing, distributing, selling, manufacturing, or conspiring to use, possess, distribute, sell, or manufacture LSD is illegal. Arrest, torture, fines, and/or imprisonment may result from being caught using, possessing, distributing, selling, or conspiring to use, possess, distribute, or sell these squares.

STORAGE:

It is important to always allow the sealed packet to come to room-temperature before opening, otherwise moisture from the air may condense on the squares and cause the LSD to become less potent. Make sure this product is always kept sealed airtight in a cool, dry, absolutely dark, and very well-hidden place. Always keep this "Product Information Leaflet" attached to the outside of the packet containing the paper squares. This packaging is not child-proof. If you even suspect that you may possess this substance anywhere near a child, we insist that you transfer the squares, in their original packaging (which includes this "Product Information Leaflet"), to a larger unbreakable childproof medicine container. (Child-proof medicine containers may be obtained from any pharmacy.) Please keep these squares away from anyone who is uninformed, unintelligent, or irresponsible.

HOW SUPPLIED:

Each easily concealable packet contains twenty-five "CLEARLIGHT brand 'microdose' LSD" squares.)

(It is IMPORTANT to note that "Clearlight brand 'microdose' LSD" [each small PAPER square contained approximately 5 micrograms of LSD] was NOT the same as "Clearlight LSD" [each tiny GELATIN square was said to contain more than 100 micrograms of LSD].)



(I invented the word "microdose".

"If the story about 'Clearlight Brand "microdose" LSD' is true, then the origin of the term 'microdose' for very small doses of LSD precedes all other uses of the term, e.g. in pharmacology [since 1995], in agriculture [since 2005] and by Fadiman [2011]."

---German psychiatrist Torsten Passie, in his 2019 book THE SCIENCE OF MICRODOSING PSYCHEDELICS. The book reproduces a page of the above product information leaflet for "Clearlight brand 'MICRODOSE' LSD" that I wrote and distributed in early 1988.)


("The name Clear Light was a promise about the mind-state the material itself produced: as a famously 'clean' form of LSD, its effects were described as limpid, even at high doses. In later decades, the first branded packaging of LSD microdoses [5 μg] were also named Clear Light."

---Erik Davis, on page 20 of his 2023 book BLOTTER-The Untold Story of an Acid Medium, published by MIT Press. I am the person who produced the first branded packaging of 5 μg LSD microdoses.)


("There’s a future where LSD is not simply decriminalized but also legally accessible, says Ethan Nadelmann, founder and outgoing executive director of Drug Policy Alliance, who Rolling Stone has dubbed 'the real drug czar'.

'The information that's increasingly coming out about microdosing makes it more likely that it will happen sooner than later,' says Nadelmann. 'It's presenting a growing segment of the public with a new perspective on LSD, and it's something that really shatters the images of LSD that people may have in their minds.'"

---Stephie Grob Plante, TheVerge dot com, 4.24. 2017.)


(From the dictionary on Microsoft's Edge browser, 2023:

microdose

NOUN
microdose (noun) · microdoses (plural noun)
a very small amount of a drug used to test or benefit from its physiological action while minimizing undesirable side effects: "placed in the tumour, the device releases microdoses of different drugs, each affecting nearby cancer cells"

"he treats people with microdoses of marijuana"

VERB
microdose (verb) · microdoses (third person present) · microdosed (past tense) · microdosed (past participle) · microdosing (present participle) · micro-dose (verb) · micro-doses (third person present) · micro-dosed (past tense) · micro-dosed (past participle) · micro-dosing (present participle)

take a microdose of a drug:

"he has microdosed with LSD half dozen times in the past year.")


(A book about taking microdoses of LSD was published in 2017. [A REALLY GOOD DAY--How Microdosing Made A Mega Difference In My Mood, My Marriage, And My Life by Ayelet Waldman.])


("...how pretty it is!"

---Ayelet Waldman, who suffers from severe depression, quoting her first thought as she started to feel the first effects of her first dose of microdose LSD as she looked out her window at a Dogwood tree in full bloom. She was extremely impressed by how positive her thought was. [From her 2.16. 2017 appearance at a City Arts & Lectures event in San Francisco.])


("...the booming wellness industry is ready with promises of what psychedelics can do for you [spoiler alert: almost everything]. Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow's health and beauty brand features pieces with voices touting the health benefits of the drugs, claiming MDMA makes talk therapy more effective or ayahuasca increases a person's appreciation of nature.

'The Goopification is happening,' Ayelet Waldman said. She seems skeptical. Waldman took on the soft but authoritative voice of a yoga instructor as she jokingly described how psychedelics might be rebranded. 'You know, you take your jade egg, roll it in a little acid, and you shove it up your ---,' Waldman said, making a swift upward motion with her hand as everyone around the table laughed. 'Absorb it through your mucus membranes and it gives you a kind of extraordinary experience.'"

---Nellie Bowles, "The Highs and Lows of LSD Literature", The New York Times, 6.12. 2019.)



(["As a boy walking in the forest near his home, Hofmann had a vivid moment which he became enchanted by the natural world. 'As I strolled through the freshly greened woods filled with bird song and lit up by the morning sun, all at once everything appeared in an uncommonly clear light,' he wrote in his book, LSD: My Problem Child. 'It shone with the most beautiful radiance, speaking to the heart, as though it wanted to encompass me in its majesty.'"

---Trina Calderone, Rolling Stone magazine, 4.19. 2018, in an article about Albert Hofmann. The book mentioned was published in 1979.]


["During a schizophrenic break, one moves between the spectrum of sanity and insanity and is gradually pulled from the clear light of reason to that of madness."

---National Institutes of Health (.gov) June 26, 2009.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov articles PMC2800139]



The "Standard Metric Dose" of LSD is 100 micrograms. The first batch of microdoses I produced were made in Berkeley in 1980 from LSD I illegally purchased. I called them "CLEARLIGHT brand MIND VITAMIN TABLETS" and packaged them in labeled shrink-wrapped brown glass bottles, each containing 100 tablets. Each tablet contained 100 milligrams of ascorbic acid [vitamin C] and 5 micrograms of d-lysergic acid diethylamide. These tablets were given away, not sold. [The people that seemed to get the most benefit from the tablets were a major symphony orchestra chorus. MANY of the singers took the tablets over the course of perhaps 6 months, and said their experiences were “wonderful”.] I attended an interview with Albert Hofmann that was conducted at Shared Visions in Berkeley in 1983 by Will Noffke.

["This is the least toxic compound that exists."

---Albert Hofmann, describing LSD during the interview. The quote was published in the first issue of High Frontiers.]

I VERY briefly spoke with Hofmann afterward, and I mentioned 5 microgram "microdoses". The second labeled batch of microdoses containing 5 micrograms of LSD [each 25-dose package of which was distributed with a product information leaflet reading “CLEARLIGHT brand 'MICRODOSE' LSD"] I manufactured in early 1988. The LSD in this second labeled batch of microdoses was said to have been legally synthesized by a commercial lab for use as comparative samples by law enforcement and medical labs. I put it on perforated paper. More than 400,000 doses were manufactured. At least 200,000 doses of this second labeled batch were seized by the DEA in Oakland, California in January 1993. No one was arrested. The portion of the batch that was distributed was given away, not sold.

If I had been arrested and convicted for producing these microdoses, I could have been sentenced to life in prison.)



(NEVER trust dishonest people, especially those that PUSH psychedelic drugs. Pushers, like ALL capitalists, are a lot more interested in your money than your health. BEWARE! Far too much of what James Fadiman and his Microdosing Institute say are outright LIES. Don't be a fool.)

(Commercial marketers pushing drugs are claiming that their products are "microdoses" or are meant to be used for "microdosing". They tell such potentially harmful lies in an effort to make their product appear to be SAFE, because there are no credible reports of anyone being harmed by a single use of what I originally and very specifically defined as a "microdose": FIVE MICROGRAMS OF LSD.)

("I spent my first few years [with government approval] working with high doses to ensure transcendent and worldview changing sessions. Until recently, I had almost no interest in less reality-shattering sessions. As for marijuana, I was sufficiently puritanical to be gently disdainful of people who wanted nothing more then the slightly disorienting, pleasurable social, sexual and sensory enhancement that, at least in those early days, seemed its only uses. Therefore, when I first heard about microdosing from Robert Forte, and that Albert Hoffman had done it for decades, I was more amused than intrigued. That the same substance which could reveal your immortality and you being the divinity that created the stars might, in low enough doses, make you a little more emotionally stable seemed hardly worth noticing. But the wheel of fortune turns, and, as I’ve learned over the years, many things I’ve disdained turned out to be enormously valuable."

"For a while, I was convinced that I was the discoverer of a whole new way of working with psychedelics."

"...I began collecting reports in 2010..."

---James Fadiman, Sofia University, in his paper "Microdose Research: Without approvals, control groups, double-blinds, staff or funding", January 2016. "This article originally appeared in Psychedelic Press XV" and was published online on researchgate dot net after being uploaded there by Fadiman in September 2016. [Note that LSD discoverer Albert Hofmann's name is misspelled.])


(In 2010, James Fadiman sent an email message to people who said they were interested in microdosing.

Fadiman wrote "Albert Hoffman suggested that taking 10-20 micrograms of LSD could have a positive effect on mental health and physical functioning. Preliminary reports say this is often so."

[Note that Fadiman misspelled Hofmann's name.]

The email message was mentioned in a 11.24. 2015 article by Jason Koebler, "A Brief History of Microdosing", that was published in VICE.

Fadiman said to Koebler that he is ..."the least-known microdosing researcher in the world and the most famous microdosing researcher in the world."

Fadiman's instructions to interested people was to "Take a microdose every 4th day"...He wrote "Taking it more often may be beneficial, but there is have enough data." ["...there is have enough data"??])


(From "books.google.com/books/about/Microdosing.html?id=6RwCEQAAQBAJ", May 2024:

"Microdosing: For Health, Healing, and Enhanced Performance", by James Fadiman and Jordan Gruber. Publication date: February 4, 2025."

"James Fadiman is so O.G. in the microdosing field that he was introduced to psychedelics by Ram Dass six decades ago as a student at Harvard and compared notes with Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey."

"One of the original researchers into the medical benefits of psychedelics and his co-writer team up in a lively yet exhaustive book that answers every question about microdosing psilocybin, as well as LSD and other frequently miscrodosed substances."

["O.G." is an initialism meaning "Original Gangster".

"According to an essay by Steve Champion and Anthony Ross, former members of the Crips street gang in Los Angeles, the initialism O.G. was first used by the Crips in the early 1970's; see Champion and Ross, 'The Making of an O.G.: Transcending Gang Mentality,' written in 2006. The release of the album O.G. Original Gangster by the rapper Ice-T (Tracy Lauren Morrow) in 1991 likely contributed to the migration of the word from gang culture to more general use."

---Merriam-Webster dictionary.]

There is no such word as "miscrodosed".)


(HYPE from a Google search I made in May 2024:

"walmart.com/ip/Microdosing-Maximized-Fadiman-s-Guide-to-Small-Steps-for-Big-Healing-Wellness-Performance-Hardcover...")


("Toxic 'microdosing' candies cause horrifying health emergencies"

was the headline of an article by Mark Frauenfelder on boing boing, 6.24. 2024.)


From the Diamond Shruumz packaging: "LEADING FORM OF MICRODOSING".


("‘No telling what could have happened’: Woman overdoses after eating ‘Diamond Shruumz’ chocolate bar"

--- 6.14. 2024 headline from the "TOP STORY" on WPSDlocal6 dot com news in Paducah, Kentucky. A nurse named Tina Baker got sick after eating half of a "microdose chocolate" bar.

[From the news story by Bryce Patterson:

“'One minute I was there, and one minute I wasn’t,' Baker said."

Baker's friend who was in the car with her also ate half of a "microdose chocolate" bar.

"Baker was transported to the hospital by her daughter. Her passenger was transported via ambulance to Marshall County where she received a blood transfusion and was held for four days, according to Baker."])


("...Diamond Shruumz have caused seizures, unconsciousness and other health problems requiring hospitalization in the last week according to a press release from the Banner poison and Drug Information Center."

---Danny Shapiro, KTAR, Tucson, Arizona, June 2024, in an article about "...a recent outbreak of cases related to mushrooms products meant for microdosing.")


(From the Diamond Shruumz manufacturer's June 2024 RECALL NOTICE:

"Due to consumers becoming ill after consuming...some products containing higher levels of Muscimol than normal, it is crucial that all of our consumers refrain from ingesting this product..."

["Muscimol is a potent psychoactive compound found in certain mushrooms, most notably the Amanita muscaria and related species of mushroom."

---Wikipedia]

https://www.fda.gov/safety/recalls-market-withdrawals-safety-alerts/prophet-premium-blends-recalls-diamond-shruumz-products-because-possible-health-risk#:~:text=Prophet%20Premium%20Blends%20of%20Santa,of%20symptoms%20consistent%20with%20those)


("...as of June 25, 2024 test results...have identified the presence of...4-acetoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine [4-acetoxy-DMT, also known as O-acetylpsilocin or psilacetin]"...in a "Diamond Shruumz Birthday Cake Chocolate Bar" that was "collected from a retail store".

---From a 6.28. 2024 U.S. Food and Drug administration [FDA] report about Diamond Shruumz, noting that 39 illnesses resulting in 23 hospitalizations across 20 states had been reported: https://www.fda.gov/food/outbreaks-foodborne-illness/investigation-illnesses-diamond-shruumz-brand-chocolate-bars-cones-gummies-june-2024?utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery )


("FDA announces death in probe of recalled microdosing candies"

---CBS News headline, 7.2. 2024. 48 people are reported to have been sickened in 24 states. 46 of them sought medical treatment, and 27 were hospitalized.)


("...two people died and dozens were sickened after consuming gummies and chocolates made by Diamond Shruumz..."

---Jane C. Hu, in her interview of Amanita muscaria expert Kevin Feeney, 9.17. 2024, The Microdose.)




(My microdose product information leaflet strongly recommends consuming no food, herbs, tobacco, drugs, or alcohol in the twelve hours preceding the ingestion of a microdose of LSD.

["The data is so overwhelming the field has to accept it. We are finding tremendous overlap between drugs in the brain and food in the brain."

---Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, quoted by Michael Specter in an article about eating habits and health, The New Yorker, 11.2. 2015.])


(After I invented the word "microdose" I manufactured and gave away MANY microdoses. One of the most IMPORTANT things that I discovered was an extremely nasty surprise to me: There apparently is quite a bit of Charles Manson's type of self-righteous and darkly violent egomania in MANY Grateful Dead fans and MANY people who claim they are or were a "hippie". I received more than a few death threats! [Here is a note someone sent me: “By using high doses of LSD, I seriously risked both my freedom and my sanity in an attempt to make the world a better place. Now you are trying to tell me some horseshit about how people should do the opposite and strengthen their egos and ingrain their prejudices by using microdose LSD? FUCK YOU!!! You’re an asshole and a traitor!!!”])


("From Hollywood To Silicon Beach, Professionals Are Using LSD To Amp Up Their Careers" by Susan Campos, Los Angeles magazine, 4.4. 2019. "Taking small amounts of psychedelic drugs-a practice known as 'microdosing'-has gone mainstream."

"'People who are microdosing are not taking enough to see the trees turn into marshmallows' explains James Fadiman, a Stanford-educated psychologist and author of THE PSYCHEDELIC EXPLORER"S GUIDE. Fadiman's 2011 book introduced the idea of microdosing with a short chapter on the subject.")


("Microdosing: The Drug Habit Your Boss Is Going To Love" by Josh Dean, GQ magazine, 1.4. 2017. Originally published in the January 2016 issue, under the title "Your Boss Is Gonna Love Your New Drug Habit".)


("After 20 years in the finance industry I felt depressed and anxious--until I started microdosing. It helped me see how I was holding myself back"

---headline, online article by Kim Schewitz, BUSINESS INSIDER, 9.30. 2024.)


("In the February 2019 issue of the Marine Corps Gazette, a journal published by the Marine Corps Association, Major Emre Albayrak of the U.S. Marine Corps published a paper advocating that intelligence officers microdose LSD to help them with their jobs."

---Matthew Gault, vice.com, 12.4. 2020.)


(“Nowhere are Fadiman and Gruber’s words ‘being in the right mind at the right time’ more applicable than for the military fighter pilot. The world moving, quite literally, at Mach 1 creates an unforgiving cauldron where incoherent or incongruent thought yields catastrophic results. The difference between life and death depends on fighter pilots finding their mental best selves.”

---Buster Glosson, "three-star general, USAF [Ret.], author of War with Iraq", in a positive review on amazon dot com of YOUR SYMPHONY OF SELVES: DISCOVER AND UNDERSTAND MORE OF WHO WE ARE, a book written by James Fadiman and Jordan Gruber that was published in 2020.[Fadiman is a noted microdose advocate.])


("Silicon Valley men boast that microdosing allows them to work harder and longer..."

---Kit Warchol, on Girlboss.com 5.2. 2019.)


("...do...microdoses...actually benefit the mind?"

"'The benefits are real', says lead author Balázs Szigeti, a neuroscientist at Imperial College London. 'But they are not caused by the pharmacological effects of microdosing.'"

"Overall, Szigeti and his colleagues found that people who thought they had taken psychedelics felt greater well-being and lower anxiety than those who thought they had taken a placebo, regardless of what they actually took, they conclude this week in eLife.

The results echo the findings of a handful of very small placebo-controlled studies says Johns Hopkins University psychedelics researcher Albert Garcia-Romeu, who was not involved with the work."

---Cathleen O'Grady, 3.5. 2021, in her article on ScienceMag dot org accessed from a link on the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine webpage, HopkinsMedicine dot org.)


("Every weekday, Brad wakes up at 5 a.m. to meditate, pray, and read the Bible..."

"...his days used to be spent eating junk food and watching TV and pornography. He spent a few years in drug rehab and by his own account was 'basically stoned all day everyday' for 18 years. How did he change to become a beacon of healthy habits?"

"Brad credits his newfound lifestyle to microdosing..."

"...microdosers typically ingest LSD..."

---Michaela Barnett, Behavioral Scientist.org, 9.9. 2019. "In the online subreddit r/microdosing, an online community of over 60,000 subscribers and the place where I met Brad, microdosers pen lengthy tributes about how the practice has changed their lives...")

(As of November 1, 2022, the Reddit microdosing group had more than 222,000 members...)


("Hector is a killer microdosing PCP"

---Ken Goffman aka R.U. Sirius, in the lyrics to "The Enlightenment Entitlement", Mondo2000 dot com, 9.17. 2023. [Hector is the bodyguard of a woman who "is selling branded tantric pee" and who "has a private shaman"...])


(ALARMISM?

"LSD was found to have a potential risk for VHD due to its similarity in potency between the 5-HT2B and the main target receptor, 5-HT2A. While there is some safety margin, individual variations in how the body processes the drug and variations in dosing schedules may not provide adequate protection."

---Eric W. Dolan, Psypost.org, 10.1. 2023. "Scientists raise concerns about the potential link between chronic microdosing of psychedelics and valvular heart disease". What Dolan wrote does not seem to make sense. It reminds me of [and may be based on] a 4.13. 2022 article by psychopharmacologist Kelan Thomas "Safety First: Potential Heart Health Risks of Microdosing". Thomas wrote "VHD can cause shortness of breath, weakness, and sudden cardiac death."

I accessed the article by Thomas via a link provided in the 6.5. 2023 issue of The Microdose, the newsletter of the Center for the Science of Psychedelics at the University of California in Berkeley. [After repeated requests, I have not seen Thomas provide any evidence that, after the extraordinarily widespread use of LSD by many, MANY millions of people for more than 50 years, anyone anywhere has ever been found to have had their heart damaged in any way by taking microdoses (or macrodoses) of LSD.]

Because of the possible danger of developing Valvular Heart Disease, repeated microdosing is "extraordinarily risky until the appropriate studies have been done..." according to researcher Bryan Roth, quoted in the 9.18. 2023 issue of The Microdose. Roth notes that researchers have known of this risk for "twenty years". [After repeated requests, I have not seen Roth provide any evidence that, after the extraordinarily widespread use of LSD by many, MANY millions of people for more than 50 years, anyone anywhere has ever been found to have had their heart damaged in any way by taking microdoses (or macrodoses) of LSD.])


("...conclusions cannot be drawn due to the limited amount of data available."

---Antonin Rouaud, Abigail E. Calder, and Gregor Hasler [researchers at the University of Fribourg Center for Psychiatric Research in Switzerland], regarding "microdosing" "psychedelics", in "Microdosing psychedelics and the risk of cardiac fibrosis and valvulopathy: Comparison to known cardiotoxins", first published online in The Journal of Psychopharmacology, 1.12. 2024. A link to the study was posted in The Micodose by Jane C. Hu, 1.19. 2024.

"Presently, taking a single high dose of serotoninergic psychedelics is widely considered to be physically safe. This is also true for repeated high doses provided that sufficient time, for example, several months, elapses between doses [Nichols, 2004]."

"The two primary substances used for microdosing are lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and psilocybin, which is found in psychedelic mushrooms; some users also report microdosing with 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA). A microdose of LSD typically ranges from 10 to 20 μg, while a microdose of psilocybin-containing mushrooms ranges from 0.3 to 0.5 g of dried mushrooms."

The three authors of this 2024 paper were discussing frequent microdosing that might take place over an extended period of time.

From a different study:

"By design, the study examined doses near the threshold of detectability. This, combined with variability in response to the drug, makes the findings difficult to interpret."

---Harriet de Wit, Hanna M. Molla, Anya Bershad, Michael Bremmer, and Royce Lee, in "Repeated low doses of LSD in healthy adults: A placebo-controlled, dose–response study",

published in final edited form as:
Addict Biol. 2022 Mar; 27(2): e13143.
Published online 2022 Feb 1. doi: 10.1111/adb.13143


[I took LSD, usually high doses, more than 5,000 times over the course of more than 20 years, according to the records I kept. I have had more than one echocardiogram made of my heart. No doctor has ever told me that they saw any problems with my heart after they viewed my echocardiograms.]

I have heard more than a few people say they experienced an altered state of consciousness after taking a 10 microgram dose of LSD that I provided them. I have VERY rarely heard anyone say they felt any LSD-induced alteration of consciousness after taking a 5 microgram dose of LSD that I provided them. I define 5 micrograms as a microdose of LSD. I do NOT define 10 micrograms as a microdose of LSD.)


("...the...lawman delves deep into his ...subconscious to explore those unsettling hallucinations...which began after kidnappers drugged him with LSD last season."

---Kate Hahn, in her article "NCIS: New Orleans' Scott Bakula & EPs Preview a Journey into Pride's Mind", which was the cover story in the January 30, 2020 issue of TV Guide. "It all comes to a head in the trippy March 8 episode" which was written by Chad Gomez Creasy, who is an executive producer. "NCIS" is an initialism for Naval Criminal Investigative Service. The fictional series "NCIS: New Orleans" is broadcast by CBS. The leader of the NCIS team, Dwayne Pride [played by Scott Bakula], takes LSD-soaked paper under close medical supervision.


"We decided to do something very topical now, which is to treat trauma with a microdose of LSD."

---Jan Nash, a "NCIS: New Orleans" executive producer.)


("Conclusions:

These results suggest that microdose LSD produces temporal dilation of suprasecond intervals in the absence of subjective alterations of consciousness."

From:

"The effects of microdose LSD on time perception: a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial"

by Steliana Yanakieva, Naya Polychron, Neiloufar Family, Luke T J Williams, David P Luke, and Devin B Terhune

in Psychopharmacology [Berl].
2019 Apr;236[4]:1159-1170. doi: 10.1007/s00213-018-5119-x. Epub 2018 Nov 26. [Online here:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30478716/#affiliation]


This, of course, is but a single extremely preliminary study. Many, many more such studies need to be done. I find what these initial results seem to suggest to be fascinating...)


(Related: "Where does 'not being on LSD' end and 'being on LSD' begin?" is a legitimate and very important question...)


("...the clinicians’ sole gauge of their patients’ range of consciousness is the patients’ own introspective reports."

[from]

"There Is an ‘Unconscious,’ but It May Well Be Conscious"
by Bernardo Kastrup (2017)

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28904602/

My question:
How does one study the effects that a five microgram dose of LSD may have on the unconscious mind?)


("Open-Label Placebo Injection for Chronic Back Pain With Functional Neuroimaging: A Randomized Clinical Trial"

by Yoni K Ashar, Michael Sun, Karen Knight, Thomas F Flood, Zachary Anderson, Ted J Kaptchuk, and Tor D Wager


[9.11. 2024] [JAMA Network (Journal of the American Medical Association)]


"Chronic back pain [CBP] is a leading cause of disability. Placebo treatments often provide as much pain relief as bona fide treatments, such as steroid injections. Open-label [honestly prescribed] placebos [OLPs] may relieve CBP without deception, but OLP mechanisms remain poorly understood."

"In this randomized clinical trial of OLP vs usual care, a single nondeceptive placebo injection reduced CBP intensity for 1 month posttreatment and provided benefits lasting for at least 1 year posttreatment."


[How does a single OLP compare to a single 5 microgram microdose of LSD?])

I believe the study about placebos cited above is true, but I have not investigated the authors...OTOH:

"The three studies [38][39][40] that originally found high-dose mannitol effective in treating severe head injury were the subject of an investigation. Published in 2007 after the lead author Dr Julio Cruz's death, the investigation questioned whether the studies had actually taken place.[41] The co-authors of the paper were not able to confirm the existence of the study patients, and the Federal University of São Paulo, which Cruz gave as his affiliation, had never employed him. As a result of doubt surrounding Cruz's work, an updated version of the Cochrane review excludes all studies by Julio Cruz, leaving only four studies.[7] Due to differences in selection of control groups, a conclusion about the clinical use of mannitol has not been reached."

38 Cruz J, Minoja G, Okuchi K (October 2001). "Improving clinical outcomes from acute subdural hematomas with the emergency preoperative administration of high doses of mannitol: a randomized trial". Neurosurgery. 49 (4): 864–871. doi:10.1097/00006123-200110000-00016
. PMID 11564247
. S2CID 43880412
.
39 Cruz J, Minoja G, Okuchi K (September 2002). "Major clinical and physiological benefits of early high doses of mannitol for intraparenchymal temporal lobe hemorrhages with abnormal pupillary widening: a randomized trial". Neurosurgery. 51 (3): 628–37, discussion 637–8. doi:10.1097/00006123-200209000-00006
. PMID 12188940
. S2CID 20678448
.
40 Cruz J, Minoja G, Okuchi K, Facco E (March 2004). "Successful use of the new high-dose mannitol treatment in patients with Glasgow Coma Scale scores of 3 and bilateral abnormal pupillary widening: a randomized trial". Journal of Neurosurgery. 100 (3): 376–383. doi:10.3171/jns.2004.100.3.0376
. PMID 15035271

41 Roberts I, Smith R, Evans S (February 2007). "Doubts over head injury studies"
. BMJ. 334 (7590): 392–394. doi:10.1136/bmj.39118.480023.BE
. PMC 1804156
. PMID 17322250

7 Wakai A, McCabe A, Roberts I, Schierhout G (August 2013). "Mannitol for acute traumatic brain injury"
. The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. 2013 (8): CD001049. doi:10.1002/14651858.CD001049.pub5

---Wikipedia, 10.15. 2024

(In the very early 1970s in Berkeley, California, and over the course of MANY years after, I very often saw 22 gram packages of mannitol, made in Italy and labeled "Mannite Conoscenti", being sold as a laxative for babies but used instead to dilute ["cut"] powder containing cocaine. Dealers would, for instance, take 22 grams of powder containing a high percentage of cocaine and mix it with 22 grams of mannitol to produce 44 grams of powder, each of the 44 grams containing 50% less cocaine than the original 22 grams of powder that contained a high percentage of cocaine. Diluting the powder containing cocaine with mannitol increased the amount of money made by dealers, and almost always seemed to reduce harm by reducing the amount of cocaine users were consuming. Sometimes it seemed like the mannitol temporarily clogged people's noses, making it more difficult for them to overuse the cocaine with which it was mixed.

[Mannitol is named after manna, which, according to the Christian Bible, is an edible substance which God provided for the Israelites during their travels in the desert. The packages of "Mannite Conoscenti", printed in blue, had the image of a smiling woman harvesting a white substance (manna) dripping from a tree.


"Mannitol is...metabolically inert in humans and occurs naturally, as a sugar or sugar alcohol..."

---drugbank dot com, 2024.


"...mannitol is found in...almost all plants..."

---Wikipedia, 2024.]


A 1970s poster showed a sexy female model wearing a blue t-shirt and a bikini bottom printed with the words "A Cut Above The Rest" and an image of a package of "Mannite Conoscenti" directly over the crotch. The top of the poster had the words "The Blue Lady".

[At around 3 AM one morning, a wealthy cocaine addict I had known for more than 7 years woke me up by knocking very loudly on the front door of the house I was renting. She said she had heard that so-and-so, a mutual acquaintance, had visited me and left some cocaine with me, and that she desperately needed to buy it from me. I told her the truth, which was that the person had indeed visited and left me some powder, but that the powder DID NOT CONTAIN ANY COCAINE, that it was a rip-off, fake "cocaine" that only contained mannitol and caffeine. She said she did not care and vehemently insisted that I sell it to her anyway. I refused, and told her to go home. I went back to bed. Less than a minute later I heard a noise at the window as the addict removed the screen and then rapidly climbed through the window into the bedroom shrilly demanding that I sell her the powder that did not contain cocaine. I again refused and forcefully marched her through the house and back out the front door.])


("You want me
Come take a dose of this drug
Stop microdosing my love
Stop microdosing my love
You want me
Come take a dose of this drug"

---UNIIQU3, in her 2021 song "Microdosing".)


("How many tunes are there in San Francisco?
Y a combien de tounes sur San Francisco?

How many hippies took the plunge?
Combien de hippies s'sont jetés à l'eau?

How many bandits escaped?
Combien de bandits se sont échappés?

How many trash cans are piled up
Combien de poubelles sont entassées

In the deposit
Dans le dépôt

From San Francisco?
De San Francisco?

I know microdose enthusiasts
Je connais des adeptes de la microdose

They are geeks, intellectuals
Ce sont des geeks, des intellos

They only eat vegan, wholemeal, organic
Ils ne mangent que végane, intégral, bio

And the vapors ferment in their brains
Et les vapeurs fermentent dans leurs cerveaux

I challenge you
J'te mets au défi

To write a song that says almost nothing
D'écrire une toune qui raconte presque rien

Using major seven chords
Utilisant des accords majeurs sept

It's so beautiful
C'est tellement beau

It's so San Francisco
C'est tellement San Francisco

The atom and particle chemistry
L'atome et la chimie des particules

Which revolve around the nucleus
Qui gravitent autour du noyau

One day I will visit the lab
Un jour je visiterai le labo

Who makes and enchants
Qui fabrique et enchante

All the narcos
Tous les narcos

From San Francisco
De San Francisco

I challenge you
J'te mets au défi

To write a song that says almost nothing
D'écrire une toune qui raconte presque rien

Using major seven chords
Utilisant des accords majeurs sept

It's so beautiful
C'est tellement beau

It's so San Francisco
C'est tellement San Francisco"


---Canadian singer-songwriter Fred Fortin, in his 2019 song MICRODOSE)


"What’s the hippest fad in the drug world these days? It’s microdosing, the ingestion of tiny, sub-hallucinogenic amounts of psychedelics to improve mood, physical well-being, and creativity. The practice is increasingly popular with people from all walks of life.

Corporate executives, especially in Silicon Valley, are singing the praises of microdosing psychedelics."

---John Persino, 7. 28. 2022, Investing Daily dot com, in his article "Psychedelics: Big Bucks from Micro Doses".


("Precisely designed for microdosing."

---ad for Petra cannabis tablets that are each said to contain 2.5 mg of THC.)


(I ate what many experienced marijuana users have told me are "microdose-like" 5 milligram tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) tablets in Berkeley in 2018. The active ingredient in the tablets is said to have been extracted from organic Cannabis Sativa marijuana. The manufacturer of "Mint Micros Medical Cannabis", Stokes, calls them "low dose medibles". [Medible = "medical" + "edible".] There are "20 Micros" in each child-resistant container. [5 milligrams of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) weighs 1,000 times more than 5 micrograms of d-lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD)].)


(Homeopathy, quite unlike experimenting with taking very low doses of LSD, is clearly bogus. It reminds me of what Gertrude Stein wrote about her childhood home in Oakland that no longer existed: "There is no there there." I bought and studied MANY books about homeopathy. I paid a well-known Berkeley "expert" on homeopathic so-called "medicine" to teach me about preparing doses. I found their methods of "dilution" to be amusing but harmless.)



I have seen people get high on five micrograms of LSD...usually very receptive people who were in an optimum Set and Setting...

I have on multiple occasions personally observed LSD manufacturers making very large quantities of doses that contained approximately 18 micrograms of LSD per dose. Admittedly, many of the persons who bought the doses thought they were very, very weak... Sometimes I wonder if some of these manufacturers were clandestinely working for the government. I observed one of them as he made into tablets and blotters approximately twenty kilograms (!!!!) of crystalline LSD over the course of more than 2 decades. And he was never arrested...!!!!
(Perhaps he was a "dry-snitch" and that was why he was never arrested. A "dry-snitch" is someone who is not consciously aware that they are being allowed by law enforcement and/or intelligence officers to engage in illegal activities. These authorities do not arrest the "dry-snitch" because they have decided that in the long run the strategy of waiting and then carefully orchestrating the arrests of the associates of the associates of the "dry-snitch" is much more effective than arresting the "dry-snitch" himself.


["I'm Uncle Sam, that's who I am; Been hiding out in a rock and roll band."

---from the song "U.S. Blues", performed by the Grateful Dead.])


(Likewise, one can surmise that there might be such a thing as a "dry double operative", that is, someone who is consciously an informant but unconsciously is attempting to subvert the efforts of their law enforcement and/or intelligence handlers.


[Richard Aoki was a revered San Francisco Bay Area radical political activist (and an FBI informant) who gave the Black Panthers some of their first guns and firearms training in late 1966 and early 1967. In a 2007 interview he said "People change. It is complex. Layer upon layer."

---the quote is from a letter by author and investigative journalist Seth Rosenfeld that was published in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, 9.26. 2012. Rosenfeld discovered that Aoki was an informant after studying more than 300,000 pages of FBI records that were released to him as a result of five lawsuits he brought under the Freedom of Information Act.]


["There's a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware"

---Stephen Stills, in his song "For What It's Worth (Stop, Hey What's That Sound)", recorded by Buffalo Springfield in late 1966.]


["Tangle within tangle..."

"...a texture so intricate as to be incredible and yet true."

---Winston Churchill, quoted by Montgomery Hyde in his book ROOM 3603--The Story of the British Intelligence Center in New York During World War II.])


("There's something
Happening here...
What it is aint
Exacatickily
Clear..."

---what the bug-eyed "Love and Peace" hippie was thinking as many things were happening at the same time as he walked on a small fraction of a city street corner with a UFO hovering overhead and an alien propelled by small rocket shoes sailing up to a female and saying to her "BEHOLD!", showing her a small blue one-eyed triangle with legs and shoes...[Front cover of "Black and White Comics" by R. Crumb, 1973.]

["There's something happening here
But what it is ain't exactly clear"

---Stephen Stills, in his song "For What It's Worth (Stop, Hey What's That Sound)".])


(In some cases "...the unconscious has to resort to particularly drastic measures in order to make its contents perceived. It does this most vividly by projection, by extrapolating its contents into an object, which then mirrors what had previously lain hidden in the unconscious."

---Carl G. Jung, in his 1959 book FLYING SAUCERS--A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies [translated by R.F.C. Hull].)





("Awareness means the capacity to see a coffeepot and hear the birds sing in one's own way, and not the way one was taught."

"A little boy sees and hears birds with delight. Then the 'good father' comes along and feels he should 'share' the experience and help his son 'develop'. He says: 'That's a jay, and this is a sparrow.' The moment the little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing. He has to see and hear them the way his father wants him to."

"...awareness...spontaneity...and...intimacy...may be frightening and even perilous to the unprepared."

"...some games are urgently necessary for the maintenance of health in certain individuals. These people's psychic stability is so precarious, and their positions so tenuously maintained, that to deprive them of their games may plunge them into irreversible despair and even psychosis."

---Eric Berne, M.D., a psychiatrist, in his bestselling 1964 book GAMES PEOPLE PLAY: The Psychology of Human Relationships.)


("All successful games break the rules..."

---Chris Byrne, quoted by Cade Metz, 8.3. 2022, The New York Times, in an article announcing the death of Richard Tait, co-inventor of the popular board game "Cranium". Tait, who was 58, was said to have died from complications of Covid-19.)


("The thinking of a two-year old is already conditioned. Language constitutes the starting point for conditioning, which is evidently why one can no longer speak of complete independence from culture. From this point onward, the objects that meet the child's eye and everyone else's, and the accepted ideas surrounding him offer specious conventions for his views and thoughts."

---Jean Dubuffet, quoted by Lucienne Peiry in her book ART BRUT--The Origins of Outsider Art.)




("At a dinner party in 1965...the host spiked our drinks with LSD."

"...the walls moved, the plants talked, the other people looked like ghouls and time stood still. It was horrific: I hated the lack of control and not knowing what was going on or what would happen next."

"...John felt differently...he was...fascinated. He had enjoyed the lack of control and the weirdness. What for me had been the end was for him only the beginning."

"...John threw himself into it with abandon..."

"Within weeks of his first trip, John was taking LSD daily..."

"I couldn't live with a man who was constantly in another dimension."

"He did everything he could to persuade me to take LSD again.
Finally, I agreed."

"Terry said something to me and immediately transformed into a snake, then an alligator. His voice emanated from a monster that kept moving toward me, every scale on its body shining, glistening and changing color--even the carpet seemed to be breathing."

"...I didn't want drugs. To me they were terrifying and dangerous. I didn't want to tamper with my sanity."

---Cynthia Lennon)






("Leary...started using pseudoscience for propaganda purposes."

---Rick Doblin, quoted by Don Lattin, California, Fall 2010.)




("Brothers and sisters, at this time let us have no more talk of peace."

"Listen Americans. Your government is an instrument of totally lethal evil."

"...blow the mechanical mind with holy acid...dose them...dose them."

"...sabotage, jam the computer...hijack planes..."

"To shoot a genocidal robot policeman in the defense of life is a sacred act."

"Listen Nixon...We begged you to live and let live, to love and let love, but you have chosen to kill and be killed. May God have mercy on your soul."

"Right on Leila Khaled."

"Listen, the hour is late. Total war is upon us."

"Warning: I am armed and should be considered dangerous to anyone who threatens my life or freedom."

---quotes from Timothy Leary's "P.O.W. COMMUNIQUÉ", issued by him shortly after his September 1970 escape from a California prison. I VIVIDLY remember standing on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley in September 1970 not long after I became 19 years old. Most of the businesses had opened their doors and turned the volume of their radio receivers up as Leary's "P.O.W. COMMUNIQUÉ" was read. All of the many people strolling down The Ave stopped walking and stood still. Leary's insane message was coming from EVERYWHERE...)




(“Since he’d stood accused of frying his brain with LSD, he thought he might as well play that card.”

“The essence of his defense was that hundreds of ingestions of LSD had permanently altered his brain, which made it intolerable to be caged in a prison.”

 “There’s no arguing that he intentionally adopted the rhetoric of the government and the mainstream media in his defense.”

 “Tim was arguing that, in order to understand the nature of an experimental mind drug, he had risked his sanity by taking it hundreds of times over twelve years while keeping precise records…”

 “...he was playing to a jury of people who believed that anyway. Again, this was courtroom testimony of someone facing life in prison and having no other defense.”

 ---Michael Horowitz, Timothy Leary’s archivist, speaking about Leary’s 1973 trial. From an interview with Lisa Rein, Boing Boing, 8.30. 2017.)




(Timothy Leary began secretly giving information about some of his co-conspirators to the FBI in 1974.

"I want to get out of prison as quickly as possible..."

---from a BBC News item about the public release of Leary's FBI files. 6.29. 1999.)




("The book...clarifies my take on...Timothy's years in solitary confinement, and the factors surrounding our decision to become informants."

---Joanna Harcourt-Smith, 2011, on Kickstarter.com, asking for funds to publish her book TRIPPING THE BARDO WITH TIMOTHY LEARY.)







("Psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn's book, THE ARTISTRY OF THE MENTALLY ILL, [1922] stirred up Europe's avant-garde, not least because many paintings in his collection resembled the most advanced Cubist and Surrealist works."

"Where schizophrenia was involved...ornate designs...(and)...repetitive geometric shapes...filled every inch of the canvases."

"...apparent paranoia, and confusion of animate and inanimate objects...is common among schizophrenics as well as users of hallucinogens."

"When Hitler's Nazis came to power, they used the similarity between psychotic and modernist art to justify their persecution of avant-garde artists, depicting both...as 'degenerate products of diseased minds.'"

---From a review [in Wilson Quarterly, Summer 1986] of an article "The Artistry of Psychotics", American Scientist, January 1986.)


ANIMATE vs. INANIMATE:


(HT: "I've read that your first LSD trip in 1963 changed your whole worldview. You realized that even inanimate objects seem to possess individuality, consciousness. And that, in turn, is why, in your fiction, you've playfully made characters out of, for instance, a spoon, a dirty sock, and a can of pork and beans in Skinny Legs and All. Can you explain a little more about the revelatory trip you took that day?"

TR: "I don't want to give the impression that I hold daily conversations with my household appliances, although my toaster is as old as Drew Barrymore and almost as talented. However, guided by the acid genie, my consciousness did, back in '63, enter -- literally enter -- into a daisy, and that little adventure permanently altered my reality orientations, particularly when it comes to the usual lines of distinction between animate and inanimate. The crown of the daisy is a perfect logarithmic helix. My eyes followed that spiral, around and around, until -- pop! -- I actually went into the flower. What was it like in there? It was a subterranean cathedral made out of mathematics and honey, and occupied -- this is the amazing part -- by an almost palpable intelligence.

You can't talk about something like that without sounding like a lunatic, but let me confess that when I learned that every daisy in every field possesses an identity just as strong as my own, it radically changed my life. Now, a man-made bean can is hardly a living plant, but what I've come to appreciate about inanimate objects, aside from their utilitarian beauty, is the whisper of the Infinite in each and every one of them.

I'd better shut up now before the woo-woo alarms go off."

---From an interview with author Tom Robbins, High Times magazine, early 2000.)




("The second most boring thing in the world after people bending your ear about dreams is people bending your ear about their acid trips."

"Nevertheless! I saw immediately that everything...was alive. The chair I sat in was holding me up, with great consideration. The trees outside...waved and said hello. The bedspread on the single bed next to the wooden wall stretched and wrinkled and said hi."

"...once I looked at my dear friend and saw her face two ways at once: full face and profile, and thought, Picasso, big deal! He only painted what he 'saw'! "

---Carolyn See, in her 1995 memoir DREAMING--Hard Luck and Good Times in America.)




(Found on the street: "Cliffs Notes on Kesey's ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST", 1974.

[ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST (by Ken Kesey) was published in 1962.]

[a quote from the Notes:

"The fact that the narrator is insane frees the author from presenting an objective account of the action, for much of the plot takes place in the narrator's distorted subconscious. Kesey suggests that the choice of an Indian as narrator may have come from the association of Indians with peyote, a drug produced from a cactus by the Indians of the southwestern United States. It is at least obvious that the choice of narrator corresponds with Kesey's interest in states of altered consciousness, whether by madness or by drugs. It is his belief that the mind of a madman, like one who is high on drugs, is released from the preconceptions of society and is able to respond naturally and immediately to the moment. This state of altered perception in the book is frequently poetic in its method, seizing upon images as symbols of reality."]

[from the bibliography in the Notes:
Hoge, James O. "Psychedelic Stimulation and the Creative Imagination: The Case of Ken Kesey." Southern Humanities Review 6: 381-391].)


("The visual landscape of schizophrenics lies beyond the grasp of rational people. Their 'cracked minds' may let in light which does not enter the intact minds of many rational people."

---R.D. Laing, 1965.)


("There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in."

---Leonard Cohen)




Cambridge-educated Peter Russell has a degree in theoretical physics and is the author of ten books, including THE BRAIN BOOK and THE GLOBAL BRAIN.

Recently he wrote "...there is a trace of sentience...in molecules..."

(The above quote is from "What the Atom Felt", Anneli Rufus, the East Bay Express, Oakland, California, 11.25. 2009.)


Several prominent "underground" cooks, most notably the famous LSD maker Owsley, stated that the LSD molecule seems to be like a virus, because quite a few of the people who ingest it and have profound experiences on it become very interested in making LSD.


(“...the idea that consciousness exists, in some very basic form, in all matter, even at the level of the atom.”

 ---Larissa MacFarquhar, in an article about mind researchers, mentioning an idea that David Chalmers has discussed. The New Yorker, 2.12. 2017.)


(If an LSD molecule is "sentient", and if, like a virus, an LSD molecule has the ability to reproduce itself, a person might reasonably conclude that it may be possible that LSD is, in some way, "alive"???)


(Andy Roberts: "Some people have claimed that during a psychedelic experience they have had contact with/been contacted by what might be termed intelligence or entities."

Casey Hardison: "I tend to think that the molecules themselves are entities."

---from the 2016 book ACID DROPS--Adventures in Psychedelia by Andy Roberts.)


("Because the human brain is made up of the same basic matter as everything else in existence, 'the most natural view seems to be that [consciousness] is a general feature of matter.'"

---Matthew Rozsa, Salon, 7.23. 2021, via a Microsoft News link, quoting Luke Roelofs of NYU's Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness.)


("You see through it--It sees through you"

---what some people said about "Clearlight LSD".)


(One of R. Crumb's cartoon characters irreverently called Clearlight LSD "Kleer Lite"...)







"A woman who writes a computer column for the San Francisco Examiner had received in her mail box a copy of a Gentleman's Quarterly article, in which Timothy Leary is quoted as saying, 'The Japanese go to Burma for teak, and they go to California for novelty and creativity. Everybody knows that California has this resource thanks to psychedelics.' The columnist didn't believe what was asserted by Timothy Leary and others in the GQ article, that the computer revolution and the computer graphic innovations of California had been built upon a psychedelic foundation. She set out to prove this story false.

She went to Siggraph, the largest gathering of computer graphic professionals in the world, where annually somewhere in the United States 30,000 who are vitally involved in the computer revolution gather. She thought she would set this heresy to rest by conducting a sample survey, beginning her interviews at the airport the minute she stepped off the plane. By the time she got back to her desk in San Francisco she'd talked to 180 important professionals of the computer graphic field, all of whom answered yes to the question, 'Do you take psychedelics, and is this important in your work?'"

---Ralph Abraham. (I think it important to take the words above with a grain of salt...)




("I just finished working on a ride for a Japanese amusement park which combines 3-D computer graphics, smell-o-vision and moving seats, and had to deal with a lot of computer people. It struck me that they are all acidheads, and major figures in one of our only growth industries."

---Jim Shaw)






The following is my comment on an image I constructed, "SELF-PORTRAIT MADE USING LSD AS PAINT":

"LSD is colorless until it starts to decompose. In this picture, the LSD on the surface of the paper has turned brown because it has been exposed to ultraviolet light and air. (Brilliant underground chemists invented a way to synthesize LSD that yielded a purer product than the pharmaceutical LSD scientists and others made so very many studies of before it was made illegal. The LSD I used to paint this picture was EXTREMELY pure. In crystalline form, when it was vigorously shaken in a glass bottle in a dark room, the crystals struck one another and emitted an eerie blue glowing light. When the crystals were crushed with a glass rod in a dark room, bright blue sparks could be observed...)

At the time I made this painting, the 'carrier weight' law was in effect. Under that law, the DEA weighed the blotter paper into which the LSD was soaked, and then calculated the criminal charge as if the paper into which the LSD was soaked was pure LSD in crystalline form. If I had been caught with this painting, and convicted of possessing it, I would have faced a mandatory prison sentence of at least 20 years. It is quite possible that I would have been sentenced to 'life in prison with no possibility of parole'...

Some art critics have written that the significance and importance of a work of 'ART' today is often seen as being directly proportional to the amount of risk taken by the artist.

This self-portrait painted with liquid LSD on paper is not only an image. It was, and is, a political statement."


("Art ought to be a troublesome thing..."

---David Park)



("The knowledge that the paper is dosed cannot but affect how one looks at the picture. Even odder, however, is that the picture has a way of influencing one's notion of the acid. So mighty is the power of suggestion here that it seems to signify some secret knowledge or expectation of the trip, as if the ink could predict, direct, or code one's experience."

---Carlo McCormick)





("It's when you're outside your comfort zone that you're really creative."

---Sanjit Sethi, director of the Center for Art and Public Life, and an assistant professor at the California College of the Arts [in Oakland, California], quoted by Emily Wilson, the Berkeley Monthly, September 2011.)





("To create dangerously is to create fearlessly..."

---Edwidge Danticat, quoted by Melissa Phipps in Barnard Magazine, Winter 2012.)





(I have been very seriously opposed to "recreational" drug use my entire adult life. For the last 52 years I have been steadfast in my belief that people who get "high" just because they are bored or want to entertain themselves are quite often making an extremely serious mistake.

I also think locking people up in prison for so-called crimes involving mind-active substances of any kind is very, very frequently an utterly irresponsible and immoral thing to do!
AND
I think it is IMPORTANT to make a distinction between drugs and "dope". Drug use can sometimes be a good thing, especially if the drug is an accurately measured dose of medicine that a well-educated and competent doctor has recommended that a patient use in a particular way. [I am NOT saying that all the drugs sold by American pharmacies are what they are said to be. Many billions of dollars worth of counterfeit drugs are clandestinely manufactured and distributed each year.

["Prince died after taking fake vicodin laced with fentanyl..."

Mark Metz said "In all likelihood, Prince had no idea he was taking a counterfeit..."

----Daniella Silva, NBC news, 4.19. 2018.]

[Two important books: DANGEROUS DOSES: A True Story of Cops, Counterfeiters, and the Contamination of America's Drug Supply (2006) and BOTTLE OF LIES--The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom (2019), both by Katherine Eban.]

 Using "dope" [a substance that is alleged to be or alleged to contain some drug or mixture of drugs] is always risky, because the user NEVER knows for certain what they are getting or how much of it they are getting, unless they have had the "dope" analyzed by a federally-certified laboratory.)







(I think that if a person means no harm and is causing no harm, then any law prohibiting their harmless activity should not be enforced!

[To which police officers typically reply:

"Perhaps people should not be arrested for engaging in harmless activity. But it is not my job to make that decision. I am not a prosecutor or a judge. My job is to enforce the law. An important part of our legal system is the principle that justice should be blind."]

The American Bar Association instructs its members that the duty of an attorney engaged in public prosecution is not necessarily to obtain a conviction. The duty of an attorney engaged in public prosecution is to see that justice is done.)




("Mainstream society simply has no concept how 'normalized' drug selling has become on inner-city streets."

---Philippe Bourgois, in his book IN SEARCH OF RESPECT--Selling Crack in El Barrio.)




("For the first time, the General Social Survey--a large, national survey conducted every two years and widely considered to represent the gold standard for public opinion research--shows a majority of Americans favoring the legalization of marijuana."

---Christopher Ingraham, the Washington Post, 3.4. 2015.)






(I subscribe to a free official California state website run by the Department of Cannabis Control, which can be found here:

cannabis.ca.gov/resources/cannabis-recalls-and-safety-notices/


I think their testing of cannabis products is far, far too limited, in that there are many toxic and possibly toxic substances that they are not testing for. Still, there is value in receiving their email warnings, because I am not seeing these warnings about specific products being widely posted anywhere by the online media, and I do not see such warnings being publicly posted at cannabis stores. Below is a warning I received today.


"Notification of Mandatory Product Recall
June 25, 2024

The Department of Cannabis Control (DCC) is issuing this consumer advisory for a single CUREpen PREMIUM THC OIL Vape Cartridge product due to the presence of the pesticide chlorfenapyr.

Consumers who purchased this product are urged to check their packaging for the UID and batch number listed below."

The notification also mentions that the recalled product was "Packaged by: Alkhemist DM LLC".)




(The website of the large cannabis dispensary Harborside in Oakland, California has a "Seizure-Safe" setting that "clears flashes and reduces color".)

(In May 2011, "DistantEchoes" commented on reddit dot com that viewing my art "may cause seizures and brain damage.")

("...video games with rapidly changing images or highly regular patterns can produce seizures, and video games have increased in importance as triggers as they have become more common."

---from the Wikipedia page "Photosensitive Epilepsy".)




("...in November 2017, two months before legal sales were to begin...the California Department of Food and Agriculture released rules that shocked the farming community: The state would allow legal pot farms to grow as large as they want."

"Glass House Farms, one of the state’s biggest cultivators, grows cannabis in a 2 million-square-foot greenhouse facility that was financed by a $100 million loan."

---Lester Black, 11.17. 2024, SFGATE.



["Glass House reported its cost of production at $139 per pound. The company also stated that it sold the equivalent of over 90,000 pounds of dried biomass in the second quarter of 2023 at an average price of $340 per pound."

---cannabis benchmarks dot com, 8.22. 2023.]



["...we’re the largest cannabis flower brand in the largest market in the world."

---glass house brands dot com, 11.19. 2024. The site also says that Glass House has a six million square-foot "state of the art greenhouse footprint".]


[On their website, Glass House tells people how to buy stock in Glass House Brands, even providing links to brokers like Charles Schwab.])




"'Criminal records for marijuana use and possession have imposed needless barriers to employment, housing, and educational opportunities,' Biden said in December. 'Too many lives have been upended because of our failed approach to marijuana. It's time that we right these wrongs.'"

---from a 4.30. 2024 CBS News article "Justice Dept will move to reclassify marijuana in a historic shift, sources say". ("Robert Legare and Willie James Inman contributed to this report.") "The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration will move to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous drug, a historic shift to generations of American drug policy that could have wide ripple effects across the country."

(During the course of my career in non-profit quality control, I smoked marijuana every day for 29 of the past 42 years. I found that it often inspired me.




***Burning plants and then inhaling the smoke very, very obviously seems like an unhealthy thing to do since there are so many, many possibly toxic substances in the smoke!***




[“'On Jan. 1, 2014 in Denver, 1/8 ounce of Bubba Kush was the USA’s first legal sale of this for recreational purposes,' the host said."

"One of the $2,000 challenges on a recent episode was to identify the first part of the name of a 'well-known hallucinogen' that ends 'acid diethylamide.' The contestant said 'lysergic,' as in LSD."

---Kyle Jaeger, 5.12. 2019, marijuanamoment dot net, writing about the mainstream television game show "Jeopardy".]

As of early 2022, there are said to be 779 different strains of marijuana being sold.

My favorite imported kinds of marijuana were Punta Roja Colombian, "Thai sticks", and Mexican from Oaxaca. Some of the Cannabis Sativa grown in Hawaii that I smoked was not only potently psychedelic, but also WONDERFULLY TASTY.

I also enjoyed some of the hashish that came from Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Nepal. The hashoil I smoked that came from Morocco greatly lifted my spirits and provided unique insight. "Bubble Hash" made in Berkeley gave me colorful visions.

I even quaffed Hi-Brew Beer [early 1980s marijuana/alcohol beverage].


To celebrate my 70th birthday I smoked a potent "sativa hybrid" strain of marijuana called "Runtz". [29.1% THC, .05% CBD, 33.8% total cannabinoids. Total terpenes: 1.5%. Top 3 terpenes: caryophyllene, limonene, and myrcene. Packaged 9.6. 2021. Tested by Belcosta Labs. Distributed by a company in North Hollywood, California.]


[In the 1970s I trimmed MANY pounds of marijuana. One of my associates, a taxi driver who claimed that he had “rolled so many joints I don’t have any fingerprints left” was so impressed that he borrowed my scissors and had them plated with gold.]


['Miron had stolen a big pile of wedding invitations... and we would use them to make filters for joints."

---Etgar Keret, translated from the Hebrew by Miriam Shlesinger and Sondra Silverston, in his 2002 collection of short stories THE NIMROD FLIPOUT. When I was arrested in 1985 the police seized a small box of filters from me that I had made by cutting some of my business cards into strips. I called them "jay-spacers" and had labeled the box. In 1986 when I went in front of the parole board, they (not knowing what a "jay-spacer" is) made a big deal out of the filters. "You had almost a hundred jay-spacers!" they said very accusingly...]


["I was able to access memories I didn't even know I had in extreme detail!!"

---Idefe, describing "Peanut Butter Breath", a hybrid strain of marijuana. Leafly dot com, 2019. Idefe gave "Peanut Butter Breath" the highest possible rating. I AGREE!]


[And yet:

In late April 2021, Facebook warned me that when it comes to illegal drugs, on my Facebook page I am NOT allowed to admit "personal use" without acknowledgment of or reference to recovery, treatment, or other assistance to combat usage...]


Surfing on a toke--and when the bowl of the pipe looks like the Grand Canyon, I know I've almost had enough...


[Stoner humor: Photo of a marijuana cigarette. Over the first four-fifths of the marijuana cigarette is written "I love nature so much...what a beautiful day." Over the last fifth is written "The raccoons work for the CIA."]


[Willie Nelson won 10 Grammy awards, and has appeared in 37 movies and TV shows. More than 40 million copies of his more than 100 albums have been sold. He has smoked marijuana for MANY years. Nelson is an outspoken advocate for the drug and has been arrested several times for possession of marijuana. He was arrested in 2006 for possessing marijuana and hallucinogenic mushrooms. His latest song is titled "Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die".

---from an Associated Press news report, 4.21. 2012.]


["I smoke two joints in the morning
I smoke two joints at night
I smoke two joints in the afternoon
It makes me feel all right"

"I smoke two joints in time of peace
And two in time of war
I smoke two joints before I smoke two joints
And then I smoke two more"

---Chris Kay and Michael Kay, in their 1983 song "Smoke Two Joints", which was recorded by The Toyes.]


["Things Get Grounded When There's Chemistry"

"Cannabis Connects"

"Life In Color" (over a rainbow of colors)

---from a billboard advertisement for cannabis oil cartridges, edibles, and tinctures made by a company named Chemistry. I saw the billboard, which has a lavender background and depicts two women on a rug smiling at each other, on Telegraph Avenue at 63rd street in Oakland, California in June 2019.]


[The first cannabis label that I remember seeing (printed in black ink on blue paper) was "STONY RIDGE" brand marijuana. It was on a one-pound bag of American-grown product that I obtained from Richard Krech in 1972.]


["One toke over the line sweet Jesus
One toke over the line"

"Waitin' for the train that goes home sweet Mary
Hopin' that the train is on time
Sittin' downtown in a railway station
One toke over the line"

---Mike Brewer and Tom Shipley, in their 1970 song "One Toke Over The Line". Vice President Spiro Agnew did not like the song and called it "subversive". After being investigated on suspicion of conspiracy, bribery, extortion, and tax fraud, Agnew was convicted of felony tax evasion and forced to resign.]


["California's cannabis-growing nuns pray for profits"

---BBC News headline, late October 2022.]


["He said 'drugs make you too pleased with everything.'"

---Sarah Seiter, associate curator of Natural Sciences at the Oakland Museum of California, quoting David Hockney on the connection between drugs and creativity. Seiter was quoted by Paul Kilduff in an interview about a current show, "Altered State: Marijuana in California". The East Bay Monthly, July 2016 issue.

I think I somewhat understand what Hockney said, and I think there is truth in his statement. I also think that I often find great value and much joy in seeing beauty in both the wheat AND the chaff!]


[After many years of refusing to go to marijuana stores, I made my first purchase at one in 2020. (I now must purchase my cannabis at a store since, because of my extreme poverty, it is not [and has never been] possible for me to grow marijuana, and since it is no longer safe for me to continue, as I did for decades, to purchase black market marijuana. I enjoy interacting with the many helpful and kind people working at the local cannabis store. It makes me very happy to see them working there!)]


Here is a list of some of the cannabis products I have used [and a few that I have not used, or do not remember the effects of using] that were obtained from marijuana stores in the San Francisco bay area. [From labels I saved]:


"Jeeter" brand "Mai Tai" [sativa] pre-roll one gram joint of indoor-grown marijuana "infused" with THCA "diamonds" and kief. "MFG/PKG date: June 23RD, 2023" "Total THC: 42.5%, delta-9 THC: 1.69%, THCA: 46.5%"

["...a class action lawsuit against DreamFields Inc., and Med for America Inc., on behalf of California consumers who purchased cannabis products with inaccurate THC content labels.

The lawsuit alleges that defendants, who make, sell, and market 'Jeeter' brand cannabis products, overcharged consumers by illegally selling products whose THC content was substantially lower than the amounts listed on the label."

---from a October 2022 press release.]

Blueberry
Tsunami
Outdoor Rom
Trainwreck
Orange Hill Special
Red Widow
Smoothelove
Dutch Passionkush
Northern Green
Spice
Nor Kali Black Spice
Sensi Star
Organic Main Wreck
Sour Diesel ["22.73% THC" (2019)]
Sour Diesel [26.22% THC, .8% CBD, 27.72% total cannabinoids (2021)]
Ice Ice
Fruity Bliss
Organic Remedy
NYC Diesel
S1-5
Organic Super Silver Haze
Morning Star
Sun Grown Purple OG
Jedi
Sweet Nightmare
Kosher Strawberries
Dirty Little Pig
Durbin Poison
Oracle
Space Cowboy
Bubble Haze
White Widow
Mountain Kick
Snow White
Sun Grown Diesel
Yumbolt
Co-op
Organic Flo
Candyland
Silvercratic
Sun Grown Chocolope
Pineapple Kush
Goo-5
Nor Kali Kaui Kola
Dynomite
Nor Kali Buddha's Haze
Old Grand Huck
Grape Ape
Sour Diesel Lemon
Buddha's Sister
Super Jack
Organic Rom Thai
Third Eye
Pink Champagne
World Wide Widow
Afgootiva
Greased Lightning
Outdoor Organic Humboldt
Herijuana
Cherry Pie
Peak 19
Organic Mazar
Outdoor Train Crossing
Organic Shaman
Super Star
Rhino
Burmese
Double Dream
Jelly
Caramel
Kahuna
Shiva's Tears
Organic A-10
Purple Burmese
Lemon Skunk x Royal Orange
Mendo Blendo
The Sativa
Organic Hawaiian Snow
Purple Kush Domina
Organic Ultra Skunk
Sage 'n' Sour
Outdoor Organic Kam
Tree-W
Da Kind
Jack Frost
Pot O' Gold
Shiva Afghani
Gorilla's Mist
Strawberry Cough
Sativa 2
Organic Jane
Organic Purple Way
Outdoor Organic Bonkers
Organic Purps
Outdoor Organic Goo
Juicy Fruit
Mind Eraser
Pearly Baker
Lavender Goo
Titan OG
White Russian
Sonoma Coma
Organic Sticky Nurple
MK Ultra
Outdoor Organic Trainwreck x White Widow
Organic Sweetleaf
Organic Purple Ice
Jack Herer
Zlushie Kush
God's Gift
Outdoor Organic Purple Mendo
Organic Ogre
Organic Trance
William's Wonder x Northern Lights
Blue Ogre
Organic Lamb's Bread
Champagne
Black Bunanna
Super Chunk
Organic Rom Cross
Sun Grown Goji Jack
Rom Hottie
Organic Slider
Animal Cookies
Sunshine Grown Green Dragon
El Bueno
Jakki
Organic Time Warp
Durban Dream
Organic Mist
Cookie Pie
Mantanuska TF
Pineapple Trainwreck
Organic Mantanuska Mist
Organic Mothership
Traincrash
Swazi Haze
Grape Pop
Golden Goo
Organic Trance
Jack'l Berry
Outdoor Mysty
Purple Peak 19
AK-47
Sage
Motor City
Purple Erkel
Crazy Hazy
Bright Star
Green Crack
Power Plant
Organic Cindy 99
Skunk #2
Organic Bonana
Outdoor Organic Hash Plant
Baby Blues
Cat Piss
Mr. Nice (G 13 x Hash Plant)
Girl Scout Cookie
Outdoor Organic Blue Dot
Sour Daze
Thin Mint
Grand Daddy Purple
Spicy Jack
Outdoor Organic Pure Rezin
Old Mother Sativa
Master Yoda Kush
Mountain Girl
Green Ribbon
Ice Cream Cake #5
Super Wreck
Sapphire Star
Grenadine
Bombshell
Also Known As
Pea Soup
Razzlez
Pirate's Kush
Purple Tangie
Leda Una
Cloud Berry
Northern Lights x Big Bud
All Star Organic Oaktown Wreck
Animal Punch
805 Glue
Sunset Sherbet
Forbidden Fruit
Cookie Monster
Durban Oasis [31.54% THC]
Melon Mimosa [30.98% THC]
Blue Dream [Blueberry x Santa Cruz Haze] [26.64% THC, .1% CBD] ["AlphaPinene: 0.51%, BetaCaryophyllene: 0.25%, BetaMyrcene: 0.95%, BetaPinene: 0.23%, Bisabolol: 0.03%, CBC: 0.06%, CBD: 1.08mg/g, CBDa: 1.23mg/g, CBG: 0.07%, CBGA: 0.26%, CBN: 0.02%, Humulene: 0.1%, Limonene: 0.1%, Linalool: 0.06%, THC: 266.45mg/g, THC9: 19.57mg/g, THCA: 281.51mg/g" (Information posted by the Harborside cannabis store in San Leandro, California on 10.23. 2024 about "Dime Bag" brand Blue Dream marijuana flowers.)]
Berry Haze [26.8% THC, .1% CBD, 28.51% total cannabinoids] ["AlphaPinene: 0.03%, BetaCaryophyllene: 0.49%, BetaMyrcene: 0.05%, BetaPinene: 0.06, CBD: 1.02mg/g , CBDa: 1.17mg/g, CBG: 0.06%, CBGA: 1.31%, CBN: 0.02%, Humulene: 0.16%, Limonene: 0.35%, Linalool: 0.1%, THC: 267.97mg/g, THC9: 5.87mg/g, THCA: 298.85mg/g" (Information posted by the Harborside cannabis store in San Leandro, California on 10.23. 2024 about "Dime Bag" brand Berry Haze marijuana flowers.)]
Jelly Cake [27.4% THC, .14% CBD]
Cherry Popperz [28.85% THC]
Blue Face [Face Off OG x Animal Mints (Blue Pheno)] [32.90% THC, .05% CBD]
Orange Tree [27.08% THC, .06% CBD, 28.84% total cannabinoids]
Bubblegum Runtz [32.5% THC]
Starberry Cough [21.51% THC, 21.62% total cannabinoids]
Apple Fritter [37.1% THC]
Girl Scout Cookies [36.58% THC]
Organic Purple Haze
Purple Haze [34.5% THC, .043% CBD, 35.2% total cannabinoids]
Z x Georgia Pie [27.8% THC, 29.1% total cannabinoids]
Space Lollipops [31.42% THC, .12% CBD, 32.1% total cannabinoids]
Snow Runtz [37.34% THC]
Sour Tangie [25.05% THC, 25.29% total cannabinoids]
Rainbow Smacks [indoor shake] [23.37% THC, .01% CBD, 34.64% total cannabinoids (15.4% delta-9 THC)]
Platinum Gelato [18.17% THC, .07% CBD]
Blueberry Space Cake [31.98% THC, 33.6% total cannabinoids] [Said to be a 90% indica-10% sativa hybrid. Packaged on 8.31. 2023.]

[I am thinking of legally changing my name to Blueberry Space Cake...]

Gooberry [30.43% THC, .1% CBD, 31.75% total cannabinoids]
Lemonwreck [34% THC]
Balance [31% THC]
Chill [34% THC]
Platinum Scout [26.90% THC, .07% CBD, 27.60% total cannabinoids]
Cadillac Cookies [38.79% THC, 39.11% total cannabinoids] [infused with THCA "diamonds"] [With the image of an American flag:"Veteran owned and operated since 2017."]
Woah-Si-Woah [41.7% THC, 42.07% total cannabinoids] [infused with THCA "diamonds"]
Grapes N Cream [27.05% THC, .05% CBD]
Space Mamba [32.14% THC, .14% CBD, 32.71% total cannabinoids]
Blue Horchata Mintz [30.44% THC, .08% CBD, 35.78% total cannabinoids]
Triangle Cookies [19.49% THC, .07% CBD (21.22% total cannabinoids: 14.93% THCA, 6.40% delta-9 THC) (1.32% terpenes, including .69% b-caryophyllene and .21% humulene)]
GMO Fuel [Girl Scout Cookies x Chemdawg] [33.1 % THC, .06% CBD, 35.4% total cannabinoids] [A mostly indica strain that has a strong taste and smell reminding some people of things like "garlic, mushrooms, and onions" aka "GMO". (NOT genetically-modified, at least not in the conventional meaning of the term...)] I smoked GMO Fuel to celebrate becoming 72 years old in 2023.
Obama Runtz [30.61% THC, .09% CBD, 31.02% total cannabinoids]
Headband [OG Kush x Sour Diesel] [37% THC]
Jetfuel [31% THC]
GMO [28.7% THC]
Rainbow Belts [Moonbow x Zkittlez] [32% THC}
Wet Dream [Blue Dream x Ocean Beach Haze] [28.65% THC, 28.94% total cannabinoids]
Animal Mints [Thin Mint GSC x Fire OG] [25.03% THC, .03% CBD, 26.62% total cannabinoids]
Mixed Berry Runtz [30.6% THC, .07% CBD, 32.7% total cannabinoids]
Gello [21.4% THC, .04% CBD, 22.15% total cannabinoids] ["Indoor Sugar-Trim"]
Bernie Hana Butter [24.65% THC]
Prism [25.17% THC, 30.06% total cannabinoids]
Delirium [29% THC, 35% total cannabinoids]
Pave [29.9% THC, 30.9% total cannabinoids]
Astro Funk [21.2% THC] [Pre-ground indoor-grown flower shake] [Limited amounts of this surprisingly potent marijuana were being legally sold in California cannabis stores in May 2023 for fifty cents per gram as marijuana "extender"...]
Lemonchello Gelato [33.205% THC] ["Main Terpenes: limonene, caryophyllene, humulene"] A FAVORTE!
Gush Mints [27.32% THC]
Gush Mints [18.6% THC] ["indoor sugar-trim"]
OG Legend Littles [23.11% THC, .06% CBD]
Cherry Chem [21.16% THC, .04% CBD]
Dosilato [27.32% THC]
Cereal Milk [24.5% THC]
Fuji Ice [Apple Fritter x Ice Bx2] [31.44% THC]
White Cherry Gelato [25.07% THC]
Peanut Butter Gelato [Do-Si-Dos x Mendo Breath] [28% THC]
Toffee [26.6% THC]
Maui Cheesecake [24% THC]
Wedding Cake "Sugar Shake" [30.31% THC]
Kush Mints "Sugar Shake" [24.32% THC, 26.46% total cannabinoids]
Apple Sauce [33.84% THC, 37.91% total cannabinoids]
Early Bird [34.71% THC, 38.16% total cannabinoids]
Purple Cake Batter [25.82% THC, .06% CBD, 31.21% total cannabinoids]
True OG [26.4% THC, 27.2% total cannabinoids]
Magic City Mango [Platinum Cookies x GDP x Blue Power x Gelatti] [26.4% THC, .07% CBD, 31.3% total cannabinoids]
Cookie Dawg [26.89% THC, .07% CBD, 31.79% total cannabinoids]
Lemon Jack [25.86% THC, .06% CBD, 30.90% total cannabinoids]
Hawaiian Haze [25.56% THC, .07% CBD, 30.65% total cannabinoids]
Marshmallow OG [24.99% THC (22.49% THCA, 5.25% THCD9), 1.06% CBD, 29.16% total cannabinoids, 4.6% terpenes (1.72% Limonene, .82% B-Caryophyllene, .47% Myrcene, .35% B-Pinene, .30% Linalool, .25% a-Humulene, .24% a-Pinene, .23% Nerolidol) (indoor-grown)]
GMO Crasher [Wedding Crasher x GMO] [24.7% THC, .062% CBD, 26.46% total cannabinoids]
Black Diamond [28.26% THC, .08% CBD, 34.51% total cannabinoids]
Bubba Berry [36.57% THC, .11% CBD, 44.47% total cannabinoids]
Cookies and Cream [26.6% THC, .08% CBD, 32.7% "total active cannabinoids"]
Blue Cookies [38.25% THC, .15% CBD, 46.77% total cannabinoids]
Snowcap [38.96% THC, 41.35% total cannabinoids] [Packaged in May 2022 with an image of people dancing and the words "a Party in every Bag!"]
Hawaiian Dream [26.71% THC, .8% CBD, 31.97% total cannabinoids]
Cookies Kush [27.66% THC, .08% CBD, 32.72% total cannabinoids]
White Kush [26.06% THC, .07% CBD, 34.60% total cannabinoids]
Papaya Punch [28.10% THC, .07% CBD, 33.02% total cannabinoids]
Royal Kush [24.47% THC, .07% CBD, 29.31% total cannabinoids]
Platinum Cake [31.63% THC, .11% CBD, 38.23% total cannabinoids]
Gorilla Breath [22.33% THC, .16% CBD, 23.56% total cannabinoids]
French Cookies [Girl Scout Cookie x Chemdawg] [21.44% THC, .06% CBD, 26% total cannabinoids]
Bubba Hash [34.32% THC, .16% cbd, 35.68% total cannabinoids]
Dank You [26.57% THC, .06% CBD, 31.86% total cannabinoids]
Sugar Plum [27.87% THC, .23% CBD, 28.64% total cannabinoids]
Mazar Kush [36.86% THC, .16% CBD, 38.25% total cannabinoids]
Blackberry Hashplant [26.09% THC, .06% CBD, 31.19% total cannabinoids]
Kali Mist [26.24% THC, .08% CBD, 31.47% total cannabinoids]
Gumball No. 3 [29.73% THC, 35.73% total cannabinoids]
Gumball No. 4 [27.93% THC, 28.31% total cannabinoids]
Wedding Pie [28.13% THC, 32.72% total cannabinoids]
E85 [Jetfuel OG x Biscotti] [32.99% THC, 2.11% CBD, 2.56% terpenes, 35.1% total cannabinoids]
Super Lemon Cherry [31.4% THC, 36.6% total cannabinoids, 2.3% terpenes "white ash, no black ash, all organic, 14-day flush, slow cure"] Sour Jack [24.24% THC, .2% CBD, 25.23% total cannabinoids]
Sweet Diesel [34.3% THC, .06% CBD, 34.41% total cannabinoids]
Banana Dream [25.2% THC, .09% CBD, 30.5% total cannabinoids]
Banana Bread [Banana OG x Maui Bread] [34.98% THC, 42.2% total cannabinoids]
Kush Mountains [30.2% THC, .07% CBD, 35.19% total cannabinoids]
Hindu Kush [24.1% THC, .04% CBD, 28.79% active cannabinoids]
Hindu Kush [24.99% THC, .07% CBD, 29.92% total cannabinoids]
Biscotti Cookies [22% THC]
LA Pop Rocks [27% THC, 31% total cannabinoids]
OCC [17.87% THC, 20.38% total cannabinoids]
Sundae Driver [24% THC]
Flow White [22.14% THC, 0.056% CBD]
Slurricane [22.57% THC, 0.065% CBD]
Super Silver Haze [24% THC, 0.07% CBD, 1.30% total terpenes]
Super Silver Haze [27.87% THC, .16% CBD, 29.98% total cannabinoids]
Space Cakes [31.96% THC]
Gorilla Goo [23.24% THC]
King Louis [20.82% THC, 25.77% total cannabinoids]
Turquoise Jeep [23.6% THC]
OG Kush [22.0% THC]
Kush Mint Cookies [31.36% THC]
Willie's Kush [23.97% THC]
Chem Reserve [38.56% THC]
Petrol Kush [20.73% THC]
Mimosa [24.8% THC,  .1% CBD]
Mimosa [27.05% THC,  .14% CBD, 27.99% total cannabinoids]
Mimosa [28.49% THC,  0% CBD]
Clout Cake [26.14% THC,  .06% CBD] ["Friends Don't Let Friends Smoke Mids"]
Cali Cherry Pie [20.60% THC,  .08% CBD]
PR OG [16.51% THC]
Meat Breath [21.26% THC, 26.56% total cannabinoids]
Orange Cookies [19.90% THC]
White Fire [29.1% THC, .07% CBD, 34.5% total cannabinoids]
Motorbreath [15.42% THC]
805 Sour [20.72% THC]
Cherry Dosido [Cherry Cheesecake x Dosido] [29.98% THC]
Cherry Do-Si-Do [24% THC]
Super Chem [Sour 2.0 x Chem] [21.28% THC, 26.17% total cannabinoids]
Orange [20.08% THC]
Malawi Dream [20.4% THC,  .19% CBD]
Purple Cake [18.34% THC]
Strawberry Banana [20.59% THC,  .19% CBD]]
Peanut Butter Breath [18.18% THC]
Peanut Butter Breath [27.7% THC, .05% CBD, 32.8% total cannabinoids]
Alien OG [20.18% THC]
Garanimal Cookies [20.64% THC,  .03% CBD]
Dark Karma [Dutch Treat x Strange Love] [25.71% THC,  .04% CBD]
China White [26.42% THC]
Gushers [20.65% THC]
Gushers [36.08% THC]
Los Angeles Kush [23.05% THC]
Triple Scoop Gelato [27.7% THC]
Purple Punch [26.44% THC]
Trifi Cookies [21.99% THC]
Rollins [24.36% THC]
Wedding Chemz [24.2% THC] [from a cannabis company founded by Grateful Dead percussionist Mickey Hart]
Han Solo Burger [GMO Cookies x Larry F8] [More than 30% THC]
Cereal Milk [29% THC, 31.12% total cannabinoids] [A hybrid strain that is distributed in glass jars with VIVIDLY colorful reflective metallic labels containing 28 pre-rolled filter-tipped marijuana cigarettes. Each marijuana cigarette contains .5 gram "greenhouse hydroponic" cannabis.

One of the warnings on the label:

"Smoking cannabis increases your cancer risk and during pregnancy exposes your child to delta-9-THC and other chemicals that can affect your child's birth weight, behavior, and learning ability."]

Ice Cream Cake [22.2% THC]  ["Honest Flower" brand "Indica" from Eden Enterprises. "Flower You Can Trust" 3.5 grams in a small child-resistant plastic container from Calyx Containers. "Made in USA"]
Humboldt OG ["17.76% THC" hybrid pre-roll. Cultivator: "Grouse Mountain Green" in Humboldt  County, California. Distributor: "Emerald Family Farms" 2019]
Ghost OG ["22.49% THC .05% CBD" hybrid "Manufactured and distributed by Flora California" from "Sessions Supply Co." pre-roll]
Wedding Cuvee ["21.60% THC .05% CBD" hybrid "Manufactured and distributed by Flora California" from "Sessions Supply Co." "Time For Blast Off" (On package containing 3.5 grams)  2019]
Jungle Glue ["Krush Kingz" pre-roll by "Berkeley Pharmz" 2019]
Orange Mango ["19.8% THC" "Distributed by Black Oak Gallery" 2019]
Ziablo [Grown by IC Collective.] [2019] [The jars containing 3.5 grams feature one of my favorite labels, a very colorful skeleton-skull!]
Now and Laters ["20.51% THC" "Sativa" Grown in Shasta County, California, and distributed by Ember Valley, 2019.]
Ghost Mints ["23.31% THC, 0.9% CBD". "...may be habit forming." "This product may be unlawful outside of Washington State." from "Green Fire Production, Inc."]
Extreme Jack [16.49% THC "even hybrid" "greenhouse-grown" "Warning: This product can expose you to chemicals including arsenic, which is known to the state of California to cause cancer. For more information, go to www.p65warnings.ca.gov" from Foxworthy Farms, 2019.]
Blackout ["Inspire featuring limonene 7.84% THC, 8.05% CBD. From Abatin Farms, 2018]
Cherry Vortex [Sativa-dominant."17.46% THC". From Headwaters. Source: UPI Supply Systems, Inc. Origin: Carpenteria, CA. Packaged 12. 14. 2018. Expiration date: 12. 13. 2019. "WARNING: Cancer and Reproductive harm."]
Wedding Cake ["14.36% THC" pre-roll from "Humboldt Growers". 2019] [Also: from Marley Natural, "grown in Trinity County, California." "16.3% THC" 2019] [Also: "from Sublime, in Oakland, California." "Fuzzies" brand pre-roll, "infused with cannabis concentrate, kief, and terpenes" "25% THC and 1% CBD" 2019] [Also: from Pacific Stone in Santa Barbara, California 2019]
Blueberry Muffin ["15.94% THC" pre-roll from "Humboldt County Indoor". Harvested 12.1. 2018]
Unicorn Tears [indoor Sativa"blend"] "22.8% THC", 1 gram pre-roll from Sunset Connect in San Francisco, 2024.
Raspberry Diesel ["18.2% THC", grown by "Fleur d'elite"]
Banjo [hybrid pre-roll from "Just Chief"]
Banjo [2 gram bottle from "Coastal Sun Farm". Package date: 8.28. 2019. "26% THC. 30.9% total cannabinoids". "Consciously Grown." "Healthy Plants Heal Humans".]
Banjo ["16.49% THC "sativa" from Pacific Stone in Santa Barbara, California.
Wifi43 [pre-roll from State Flower Cannabis Company, San Francisco 2019 "19.63% THC"]
Dolato [hybrid pre-roll from "Just Chief"]
Miss U.S.A. [1 gram all flower Indica pre-roll from Lowell Smokes. 18% THC. In a glass tube. "Test: Cannasafe 01. 19. 19"]
Royal Blend ["Krush Kings" brand pre-roll from "Industry Standard Group, Inc." 18.74% THC "hybrid-indica" "Your Royal Highness"]
San Fernando Valley OG ["The Weed Brand pre-roll. 1 gram."]
Shark Shock ["The Weed Brand pre-roll. 1 gram." "grown by Caliber." "Harvested 4.20. 2019." "19.5% total cannabinoids"]
Gelato 45 [The Weed Brand preroll. Harvest date: 7.23. 2018. Packed: 9.24. 2018. "Best Buy": 7.23. 2019. 16.9% THC. 0.26% CBD.]
Banana Bubble [1 gram pre-roll. 160 mg THC. Manufactured by Marigold. Packaged in Santa Rosa, California. 9.28. 2018. "Cultivation with a conscience"]
Fire OG [1 gram pre-roll. 29.23% THC. "infused with oil and kief". From Jeeter.] Pure Kush [Indica. pre-roll. 133 mg THC. "Harvested 7.6. 2018. Best by 10.3. 2019."]
Grizzly Bones [Hybrid. 1 gram pre-roll. Indoor-grown. 155 mg THC. "Grown by Grizzly Peak Farms."]
"Lifted" brand .7 gm "House Cone Fortified with Hash Oil"]
"Cookies" brand "Triple Scoop Infused Blunt" [1 gram flower, .25 gram BADDER, and .25 gram THCA] [hemp wrap and glass tip.]
Super Silver Haze [infused pre-roll] [29.26% THC]
Chocolate Hashberry [Grown in downtown Los Angeles. "Manufactured by Purple Heart Compassionate, Inc."]
Orange Citron ["19.19% THC, 0.02% CBD" "Packaged 4.24. 2019" from "Molecular Farms" in California.]
El Fuego [from "Molecular Farms"]
Key Lime Pie ["Humboldt Farms" "Premium Flower-Hybrid" "15.2% THC, 0.00% CBD" "Harvested on July 2018, Packaged on July 2018" "One-Eighth Ounce" in a clear glass jar with a stopper made of wood. The label has a 1" x 2" colorful detailed image of tall trees and small flowers and a small white Volkswagen van. Printed with metallic ink. After smoking some Key Lime Pie I decided that, in my opinion, this extremely appealing image is the best illustration I have seen on a cannabis label.]
Taffie [This medical cannabis strain is sold in cork-lined light-proof well-labeled tins, each containing 5 joints. The tins come sealed in a bag that contains a Boveda 2-way humidity control packet. This product is distributed by Humboldt Legends, and is labeled Steelhead Sativa. Organically grown in sunlight and harvested by hand. The label has the name (and a copy of the handwritten signature) of the person who grew the marijuana (Scott Davies). Also the batch number and the percentages of THC (19.5%) and CBD (0.0%). The label on the back of the tin states that the group of cultivators who call themselves "Humboldt Legends" have been growing marijuana for "forty years". A warning note states that marijuana is a “Schedule 1 controlled substance”. And that “Smoking this product will expose you and those in your immediate vicinity to marijuana smoke...known to the State of California to cause cancer.” “Keep out of reach of children and animals.”  "This product may impair the ability to drive or operate machinery." Obtained in the San Francisco bay area, 2017. (After I smoked some of this marijuana in a dark room, I closed my eyes and saw beautiful hallucinations that were extremely complex, with uniquely vivid colors. When I opened my eyes I had a VERY strong urge to write poetry.)]
Juicee Fruit ["bud-only pre-roll. 1 gram. Cultivated 7.28.18. Packaged 7.16.18. Batch ID 6-15-18-JF.] THC 21.14%. 211.4 mg/serving. 0mg CBD/serving V.H.H.C. Juicy Fruit $9.99+Tax" Seven Leaves brand, packaged in black plastic child-proof tube]
"Top Shelf Rainbow Diesel Minis [Sativa]" [small joints]
"Top Shelf Hell OG Minis [Indica]" [small joints]
"Maui Wowie" [infused flowers] 25.20% Delta-9 THC, 41.75% total cannabinoids [from Baby Jeeter]
"Blue Poison" indoor-grown ground Sativa flower infused with solventless cannabis oil [45.1% THC, 47.8% total cannabinoids]
"Pineapple Express" hybrid indoor cannabis-infused 51.17% THC prerolls, live resin-infused, kief-coated, and terp-enhanced. Five prerolls in a glass jar from Stiiizy. Each pre-roll weighs .5 gram.
"Mericanna" hybrid [small joint] "16.79% THC" [2018]
"Pacific Remedy Shatter joint, hand-rolled in California" "Blue Russian flower, Kosher Kush, BHO Snake" "Indica-dominant" [2017]
"Heshies" brand pre-rolls "Selfies" [small joints] [2019]
"Sour Diesel X Sherbet" [Hybrid pre-roll. 19.97% THC.] [2019] [From Pacific Sunset.]
"Sublime King Fuzzies", pre-roll terpene-enhanced "top shelf bud, CO2 wax/kief", "Indica OG Kush" "THC 253 mg". [2017]
"Watermelon" ["Fuzzies" infused pre-roll, 54.72% THC]
"Trix Bubble" [concentrate]
"Fire Walker" [Raw Garden brand .5 gram pre-roll infused with "Crushed Diamonds" from fresh frozen whole flower. 42.4%
cannabinoids]
ZAZA flower pre-rolls [65% THC, .84% CBD "infused with dual refined distillate, rolled in golden kief"]
"Shiva Crystals" [hashish]
"Pineapple Fruz" [52.56% THC] "Diamond-infused select flowers" in a glass jar containing 2.5 grams of flowers, plus one gram "diamond". [Pineapple Fruz flowers are totally covered with THC "diamond" that looks like dense confectioner's powdered sugar.]
Bombed Buzz [36.46% THC, 36.30% total cannabinoids] ["ingredients: cannabis flwers, THCa, terpene blend"] The packaging features a colorful and vivid cartoon of a bee wearing aviator goggles, smoking a joint while kicked-back on a red bomb falling through the clouds, with these words: "Our mission is to achieve federal legalization for veterans. Your purchase helps fund our lobbying efforts to pressure Congress and the White House to make it happen ASAP. Thank YOU for YOUR support. Let's Roll!" [From the "American Weed Company"]
"Biscotti" [Indica] [Half gram THC pods, for vaping.] [88.24% THC.] [2019] [From STIIIZY. Made by Ironworks Collective.]
"Juicy Melon" [Half gram pods, for vaping.] [41.05% THC, 1:1 CBD] [2020] [From STIIIZY] "This product can expose you to chemicals including Beta-myrcene, which is known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm."
"Sky Diver" ["Refined raw resin. 84.68% THC .29% CBD" ["Indica hybrid" cartridge made by "Raw Garden" "100% fresh frozen whole flower terpenes and cannabis oil" 2019]
Jack Herer brand 1 ml cannabis oil cartridge 83.98% THC, .16% CBD, 89.49% total cannabinoids
"Yogi Berries"["Refined raw resin. 81.99% THC."] ["Indica hybrid" cartridge made by "Raw Garden" 2019]
"Skydoggie" ["Refined raw resin. 83.33% THC 0.2% CBD"] ["Indica" cartridge made by "Raw Garden" 2019]
"Chemberry" ["Refined raw resin. 81.65% THC .35% CBD"] ["Indica" cartridge made by "Raw Garden" 2019]
"Chem Walker" ["Refined raw resin. 81.82% THC" ["Indica hybrid" cartridge made by "Raw Garden" 2019]
"Lemon Haze" [Distilled CO2 extract.] ["90.63% THC 1.64% CBD".] [Made by "Clear Day". 2019]
"Mendo Breath" [CO2- extracted cannabis oil. 78.2% THC.] [From by Marley Natural.] [2019]
"Mango Kush" [Cannabinoid extract plus terpene blend cartridge] [2019] [Made by "Pure Extracts".]
"Select" brand "Mimosa" "cannabis oil vape cartridge" [125 doses per cartridge] 3.5 mg THC per dose. [from the  "Select" brand label: "Curating the Science of Feeling" [2018]
Cali Gold H20 [extracted cannabis resin]
"Emerald Dream" ["Single Origin"] [Trinity County, CA] [58% THC] cannabis oil extracted with CO2 [cartridge for use with "Highlighter" vapor pen]
Garlic Cookies [Raw Zen solvent-less cannabis extract. 72.45% THC. One gram in a small glass jar.] [2019]
"Chemdawg" ["terpene rich distillate" by Bakked. 81% THC. 1.14% CBD.]
"XJ-13" [distillate. 88.08% THC. ]
"Granddaddy Purple" ["Flavored Cannabis Extract" cartridge, for vaping, by "Naked Extracts"] ["Indica] ["Ingredients: Cannabis Extract, Non-Cannabis Terpene Blend, Natural Flavors"] [2019]
"Granddaddy Purple" "cured resin" [79.6% THC, 82.1% total cannabinoids]
"Green Crack" [distillate. 88.13% THC.]
[Concentrates:
Banana Kush  95.25% THC
Banana OG  79% THC
Skywalker OG  91.62% THC
Alien OG  87.76% THC
Sour Cookies  89.53% THC
King Louis XIII  85.85% THC
King Louis XIII  90.76% THC
King Louis XIII  92.28% THC
Blue Valley  77.54% THC, .23% CBD
Acapulco Gold  87% THC, .18% CBD, 92% total active cannabinoids
Lemon Tree  90% THC
OG Kush  91.68% THC
Purple Punch  91.7% THC
Super Silver Haze  79.46% THC [live resin]
Electric Blue  78.69% THC [live resin]
Dutch Treat Haze  84% THC, .20% CBD
Blackberry Kush  82.4% THC
SFV OG (San Fernando Valley OG)  78% THC
Crunch Berries Crumble  88.96% THC, 89.09% total cannabinoids
Apple Jack  88% THC
Strawberry Shortcake  91% THC
Dream Queen  87% THC
Star Chaser  89.42% THC
Berry Blast  88.13% THC
Jack Herer  90.83% THC
Blackberry Diesel  91.1% THC
Beach Party 2  83.07% THC
God's Gift  90.8% THC
Mango Dream  86% THC
Strawnana  92.25% THC
Stawberry Shortcake  91% THC
Melonade  91% THC
Incredible Hulk  [Green Crack x Jack Herer] 88.93% THC
Strawberry Cough  85.47% THC
Mendo Clouds  83.77% THC
Golden Kiwi  82.84% THC
Do-Si-Dos  91.35% THC
Cookies  84% THC
Blue Beary  83.91% THC
Birthday Cake  83.15% THC
Birthday Cake  87.72% THC
Watermelon Z  71.45% THC
Watermelon OG  91% THC
Cannis Major x Milky Way  65.6% THC, 67.9% total cannabinoids
Double Platinum Cookies  73.27% THC
Gorilla Cookies  77.65% THC
Orange Cookies #12  83.89% THC
Yoda OG  90.43% THC
Blueberry Cookies  85.0% THC
Grapefruit Romulan  92.2% THC
Limeade 83.20% THC
Premium Jack 90.5% THC
Dosi Lemonade 81.62% THC
White Fire  93% THC
Fruity Pebble OG  92.0% THC
Slurmberry  82.71% THC
Pineapple Express  92.82% THC
Georgia Peach  90.63% THC, .23% CBD
"Raw Garden" brand "Forbidden Fruit" "liquified diamonds and botanical terpenes" [87.98% THC, 92.81 total cannabinoids] ***Ocean Beach .5 gram "dry flower" vape cartridge from Cookies (November 2021): 35.3% delta-9 THC, 59.3% total THC, THCA 27.3%. Total terpenes: 7.53%, 1.8% Limonene, 1.08% Linalool, 1.54% Betacaryophyllene***
"hybrid cannabis" from Space Monkey Meds.
Chemdawg + Gelato "Sativa cannabis flowers" distributed in 2019 by "Papa's Herb", 3.5 grams in a lightproof ziplock bag.


"Green Crack" cannabis flowers bought at High Fidelity, a marijuana store next to Amoeba Music on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, several blocks from the University of California campus. "Grown by: Blue Nose. Harvested: 10.18. 2018. THC: 16.42%." High Fidelity motto: "Your supreme source for herbal inspiration and higher education."
(After smoking this marijuana, I ate a bag of HIPPEAS brand Bohemian Barbecue Flavor organic chickpea puffs. "Store in a dry and, like, totally cool place.")

("UC Berkeley synthetic biologists have engineered brewer's yeast to produce marijuana's main ingredients--mind-altering THC and non-psychoactive CBD--as well as novel cannabinoids not found in the plant itself. Feeding only on sugar, the yeast are an easy and cheap way to produce pure cannabinoids that today are costly to extract from the buds of the marijuana plant..."

---Robert Sanders, "Yeast Produce Low-Cost High-Quality Cannabinoids", news.berkeley.edu, 2.27. 2019).


"THC-Indica" transdermal patch 18.4 mg THC per patch. By Mary's Medicinals. [Made: 2.4. 2019. Expires: 2.4. 2021.] I have also tried the CBD version.

"Releaf Patch" Transdermal patch by Papa & Barkley. "18.56 mg THC plus 18.61 mg CBD" Mfg. date: 7.15. 2019 Best by date: 8.5. 2020

Oh, Yes! [cannabis extract + aloe vera] [for vaginal use] [from Quim]


[A few times I have gone for months without smoking marijuana, and then smoked a potent joint. On more than one such occasion I have experienced intense fearful disorientation, acute paranoia, and horrible physical distress including nausea and a sudden loss of consciousness. CAUTION IS ESSENTIAL!]




I have eaten a variety of cannabis preparations sold at marijuana stores in Berkeley, including:

"Emerald Bay Extracts" ["a women owned company"] brand 25 mg THC tablets. [Each of these tablets is said to contain 25 mg of THC from RSO "full spectrum" marijuana oil extracted from a very potent strain of Cannabis Indica called "Afgoo". (The strain is so-named because it is very resinous and is genetically related to marijuana from Afghanistan.) RSO "full spectrum" marijuana oil is named for a Canadian, Rick Simpson, who claimed in 2003 that "full spectrum" marijuana oil can cure a variety of ailments. RSO is VERY easily made by soaking dried and cured marijuana flowers in ethyl alcohol, then filtering out the flowers by pouring the alcohol/marijuana oil mixture through a coffee filter, then removing the alcohol from the alcohol/marijuana oil mixture by heating, leaving the "full spectrum" marijuana oil in the bottom of the container.

"Full spectrum" marijuana oil can be made from any strain of marijuana. I first made "full spectrum" marijuana oil more than 51 years ago. Over the decades I made and smoked quite a bit of it. I remain convinced that "full spectrum" marijuana oil made using pure food-grade ethyl alcohol as a solvent yields a product that gets me higher when I smoke it than any other marijuana oil I have tried that was made by any other method.

I never ate any of the "full spectrum" marijuana oil I made because I thought it was too difficult to accurately measure the dosage.

I find these easily dividable tablets to be EXTREMELY potent.

["Emerald Bay Extracts" also produces 25 mg THC tablets containing RSO "full spectrum" marijuana oil extracted from a very potent and, to me, very mind-active strain of Cannabis Sativa, "Blue Dream". Also 25 mg THC tablets containing RSO "full spectrum" marijuana oil extracted from a powerful and, to me, dreamy strain of Cannabis Indica, "Grand Daddy Purple". Also 25 mg THC tablets containing RSO "full spectrum" marijuana oil extracted from what to me is a wonderfully sensual strain of Cannabis Sativa, "Super Sour Diesel". Also 25 mg tablets containing RSO "full spectrum" marijuana oil extracted from a mysterious and exotic strain of Cannabis Sativa known as "Blackberry Sour". Also 25 mg tablets containing RSO "full spectrum" marijuana oil extracted from a strain of Cannabis Indica, "Ice Cream Cake". Also 25 mg THC tablets containing RSO "full spectrum" marijuana oil extracted from a (what I often find to be trippy) strain of indica-dominant hybrid cannabis, "Trifi Cookies". Also 25 mg tablets containing RSO "full spectrum" marijuana oil extracted from a strain of hybrid cannabis, "Banana Kush". Also 25 mg tablets containing RSO "full spectrum" marijuana oil extracted from a strain of Cannabis Sativa, "Lemon Zest". Also 25 mg tablets containing RSO "full spectrum" marijuana oil extracted from a thrillingly tasty strain of indica-dominant hybrid cannabis called "Dosilato" that seems to make art come alive. Also 25 mg tablets containing tasty RSO "full spectrum" marijuana oil extracted from a hybrid strain of Cannabis Sativa, "Lemon Cherry Gelato" ("Sunset Sherbet" x "Girl Scout Cookies"). Also 25 mg tablets containing RSO "full spectrum" marijuana oil extracted from a hybrid strain, "Runtz". The indescribable mental effects I experience after taking "Banana Kush" tablets are INTENSE.]

["Emerald Bay Extracts" gave me a free tin of small tablets. The rainbow-colored tin contained 20 tablets made in a variety of colors. Each 5 mg THC tablet contained RSO "full spectrum" marijuana oil extracted from a strain of marijuana called "XXX". "Pride Pack", April 2021.]

["Emerald Bay Extracts" also produces stronger 50 mg THC tablets containing RSO "full spectrum" marijuana oil extracted from a fascinatingly dreamy strain of Cannabis Indica, "Biscotti". I was given a free 20-tablet tin of these stronger doses at a cannabis store on 4.20. 2023..."WARNING! SUPER POTENT!"]

"Plus" brand vegan "10:1 Calm Mango" gummies, each containing 1 mg THC, 10 mg CBD, and a blend of terpenes. [20 gummies per container]
"Froot" brand orange tangie-flavored cannabis-infused "chews", each containing 10mg of THC. "sativa" [10 "chews" per package]
"Froot" brand blue razz dream-flavored cannabis-infused "chews", each containing 10mg of THC. "hybrid" [10 "chews" per package]
"Pax" brand wild strawberry-flavored cannabis-infused live rosin gummies containing 10mg THC. [10 gummies per package]
"Park Jams" brand coconut-flavored cannabis-infused gummies containing 10 mg THC. [10 gummies per package]
"Kiva" brand peppermint pattie-flavored dark chocolate-coated cannabis-infused "bites" containing 5 mg THC from "solventless cold water hash". [20 "bites" per container]
"Yummi Karma" brand "Wicked Apple Drops". Each bottle contains 30 milliliters of fractionated coconut oil, "whole plant cannabis extract" said to contain 1000 mg THC, flavors and sweetener. Each one milliliter dose is said to contain 32.89 mg THC, .08 mg CBD, .89 mg CBG, and .42 mg CBC. [San Francisco bay area in California, 2022]
"Uncle Arnie's" brand "Blueberry Night Cap" cannabis-infused beverage. Each 59 ml bottle contains cannabis oil containing 100 mg THC and 25 mg CBN.
"High Power" brand "Watermelon "cannabis-infused THC tincture", 250 mg THC per bottle.
"Korova" brand "Cannabis-Infused Tincture", said to contain 1000 milligrams of [what I experience as VERY POTENT] "THC distillate" per bottle. With "Midnight Guava" flavoring, water, etc. ["DRINK ME. MIX ME. MICRODOSE. MACRODOSE."]
"Butter Brothers" brand Brownies, Phat Mints, Blackberry Streusel, Ginger Snaps, Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies, and Peanut Butter Cookies.
"Absolute Extracts" brand Sleepy Time blueberry lavender cannabis-infused gummies containing "Ice Water Cannabis Extract, CBN, terpenes", etc. [5 mg THC plus 2.5 mg CBN per gummy] [2023]
"Dr. Norm's" brand SleepWell gummies containing "nanotized THC, nanotized CBN & long acting THC" [10 mg nano THC blend, 5 mg nano CBN, and 1 mg CBD per gummy] [2023]
"Chill" brand chocolate bar with finely crushed espresso coffee beans and 100 mg THC.
"Pura Vida" brand Ocean Spray, Happy Trails, Chocolate Jubilee, and Chocolate Chip Protein Bar.
"Ganja Candy" brand Caramel, Blackberry, and Dr. Pepper.
"Tainted" brand Thin Mints
"Dank" candy
"420 Grand" candy
HealTHCare "Private Reserve OG" [cannabis tincture in vegetable glycerin base]
"Double-Strength Medi Pills" [cannabis oil capsules]
"Shiva Candy" [hashish candy]
"Auntie Dolore's Medical Cannabis Glazed Pecans"
"Hashey's 200 mg Indica Bar" [made with dark chocolate In Santa Cruz]
"Rhino Pellet" [tiny cookie]
"Potlava" [vegan cannabis baklava]
"Enjoyable Edibles" brand cannabis-infused Snickerdoodle cookies. ["10.8 mg THC" per cookie. Each package contains 10 cookies. Made with "full-spectrum cannabis extract" by Ironworks Collective. 2019]
"Habit" brand "Sparkling Pineapple Cooler". 10 doses of THC in each 12.6 fl. oz. bottle. Made in Los Angeles by Canna Healthcare, Inc.
"Orange Zest Awakening Mints" [sublingual 10 mg THC tablets]
"Drivn" brand watermelon-flavored cannabis-infused gummies, 10 mg THC per gummy.
"Breez" brand mints [sublingual 5 mg THC tablets]
"Kiva" brand Blackberry Dark Chocolate [cannabis oil candy]
"Black Cherry Gummi" [cannabis oil candy]
"Wyld" brand Elderberry gummies [10 mg THC and 5 mg CBN per piece] For sleeping. "It's a little like watching sheep count you."
"Absolute Extracts" brand Blueberry Lavender gummies [5 mg THC and 2 mg CBN per piece] For sleeping.
"Original PLUS Super Potent Hybrid Cannabis-Infused Gummies" ["20 mg THC"]
"PureCure Sativa Strips" [preparation for oral use] [from the label: "EXTREMELY STRONG!"]
"Dr. Norm's Extra Strength medical cannabis cookie" "Chocolate Chip Therapy" 25 mg THC per cookie. hybrid.
"Full Extract Cannabis Oil" [Indica-dominant strain, for oral use. Full-plant extracted with ethyl alcohol. Dated 12.1. 2015 and provided in a 3 milliliter oral syringe marked for 0.1 milliliter doses. "THC 37.05%"]
"Stokes" brand "Mint Micros" [Sativa-strain] [small tablets, each containing 5 mg of cannabis extract] [I have used 2 different flavors: Mint and Watermelon]
OMedibles brand "Tree Hugger Medical Cannabis Cinnamon Maple" [high CBD extract mixed with nuts and spices]
 Utopia Farms brand "Medical Cannabis Raspberry Macaroons"
"Cafe Attitude THCoffee" 40 mg THC per 8 oz. bottle ["70% Sativa, 30% Indica"]

"Evil Aunt Emily's Seriously Psychotic Suckers" [cannabis oil candy] ["79 mg cannabis oil" per sucker])

("'Remember when Abigail got her prescription for medical marijuana and we all went to the top of Doheny and sucked on those marijuana lollipops and watched the sun set?'

'That was a perfect day', Cheryl says definitely."

---A.M. Homes, portraying some young people in Los Angeles in a short story in her book DAYS OF AWE.)

"Sprig" brand citrus soda containing 45 mg THC per can. Made in California. [2017]
Petra "Moroccan mint"-flavored medical cannabis tablets, each containing 2.5 mg THC plus matcha tea. Produced in 2017 by Kiva, a not-for-profit collective. Lab tested by CW Analytical. "A micro-dosed blend." Packaged in tins containing 42 tablets.

Kiva "Lost Farm" cannabis-infused fruit chews, 10mg THC from "live resin" per piece. These fruit chews are strain-specific. My favorite so far is BLUEBERRY.

["CW uses its best efforts to deliver high-quality results and to verify that the data contained therein are based on sound scientific judgement. However, CW makes no warranties or claims to that effect and further shall not be liable for any damage or misrepresentation that may result from the use or misuse of this data in any way."

---from a disclaimer issued by CW Analytical. (found outside of a warehouse in Berkeley in 2019.)]


"KushyPunch" brand plum flavor Cannabis Indica gummies. Each gummy contains 10 mg THC + 0.1 mg CBD + 0.8 gm sugar. "Feel the power of the punch"
"Korova" brand Peanut Butter Dip cookie, containing 100 mg THC.
"OmEdibles" brand Sour Apple flavor cannabis gummies. Each gummy contains 10 mg THC. Distributed in plastic boxes containing 6 gummies each.
"OmEdibles" brand Lychee Blossom flavor cannabis gummies, packaged the same as the above.
"CuriouslyCannabis" brand "Rayne Drops" berry, orange, and lemon flavor cannabis pastilles. Each pastille contains 5 mg THC. Distributed in tins containing 20 pastilles each.
"Emerald Sky" brand Alpine Strawberry cannabis-infused licorice. 10 mg THC per piece [Cannabis Sativa]. 10 pieces per container.
"Emerald Sky" brand Creme Filled Chocolate cannabis infused cookies. 10 mg THC per cookie [hybrid cannabis]. 10 cookies per box.
Kanha "Enhanced Nanomolecular Gummies" made from hybrid cannabis 10 mg THC in each "Blueberry Blast"-flavored dose. 2019.
"Cannabis-Infused" organic microwave popcorn, 44.5 gram pop-up bag containing 10 mg THC and less than 2 mg CBD. Made in Berkeley in 2019 by "Type 7 Manufacturing, Inc". "Movie Night's New Best Friend".
"Somatik" brand "Sparks" cannabis-infused chocolate coffee beans. 3 mg THC per bean. 25 beans per container. '"Lovingly made by A Tribe of Us Collective". "Turn Your Magic On".
"Smokiez Edibles" brand Cannabis Infused Watermelon Fruit Chews. 10 mg THC per piece.
"Smokiez Edibles" brand Cannabis Infused Peach Fruit Chews. 10 mg THC per piece.
"Smokiez Edibles" brand Cannabis Infused Green Apple Fruit Chews. 10 mg THC per piece.
Kaneh Co. brand Mango Chile fruit jellies. 5 mg THC per serving. Manufactured by Xtracta.
Distribution, Inc. Made and packaged 3.6. 2019. Best by 7.6. 2019. Tested 3.15. 2019 by Infinite Chemical Analysis.
Kaneh Co. brand Raspbery Lime fruit jellies. 5 mg THC per serving.
"Edible Cannabis Oil" batch 030119-MUT-5-01 [4.30. 2019] by CalVape Collective.
"Chew & Chill" Blueberry Dream + Sky Og Indica "LIVE RESIN" gummies, 10 mg THC per gummy
"MC Farma" brand "Full Spectrum Oil" capsules "THC 90 + THCV" ["THC 80.11 mg + CBD 20.35 mg + THCV 29.09 mg + CBG 2.98 mg" per capsule. Cannabinoids, lipids, fats, and terpenes remain in full spectrum extraction, which "enhances efficacy and is known as the 'entourage' effect." Each package contains 10 capsules. Manufactured in 2020 in Marin County, California.
Also: "MC Farma" brand "Full Spectrum Oil" capsules "THC 60" [" THC 62.86 mg  + CBD .38 mg  +  THCV 2.92 mg  +CBN 1.66 mg  + CBG 3.63 mg" per capsule.]
Glowing Buddha brand grape flavor cannabis candy, 10 mg THC per piece. Made in Santa Rosa, California. 2020

[It is not uncommon for people to have EXTREMELY negative experiences after they have eaten too much of a product containing cannabis. CAUTION IS ESSENTIAL!])




(The cannabinoid cannabidiol [CBD], along with the cannabinoid tetrahydrocannabinol [THC], is produced by many marijuana [cannabis] plants. Bottled water containing CBD is currently [2021] being sold over-the-counter ["AN EXTREMELY EXTREME VALUE"] at my local grocery store, where it apparently is frequently purchased by schoolkids. [From the "CBD Living Water" label: "Consult your physician before use if you are pregnant, lactating, have a medical condition or are taking any medication. CANNABIDIOL USE MAY BE HARMFUL. KEEP OUT OF THE REACH OF CHILDREN. These staements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease."] Last night I saw an ad for "Harrelson's Own CBD" on national TV: "When Life Gets Crazy...It Just Makes Everything About My Day Better")



("...the dudebros continue to pile into pot. Perhaps their worst public showing was when a bunch of them traversed the convention floor during MJ Bizcon wearing t-shirts that read 'Buy Weed From Rich White Men'. This was supposedly a response to the Buy Weed From Women movement, which has popular t-shirts of its own."

---Dan Mitchell, in his article "Low Times-2022: the year of stunts and desperation", East Bay Express, 12.28. 2022.)




("...marijuana is not legal."

---Ed Rosenthal, interviewed by Paul Kilduff, The Monthly, December 2014.)




("Indeed, positive hits for pathogenic mold are already changing grower operations. 'You smoke ten random samples of cannabis and you've most likely smoked aspergillus [mold],' said Dave, one of the lab's two founders. 'It's in there, often at unacceptable levels. Now it's up to the industry to respond. We also are not in a position where we want to make enemies and piss people off. We want to see it happen in the best way for the movement and the industry to kind of just naturally evolve.'
While the distributed nature of California's cannabis supply network obviously benefits mom-and-pop growers, it doesn't encourage quality assurance. Consequently, Dave and his peers believe that some pot consumers are in danger.
'It's expensive to test every single thing that comes through the door — that's the price you pay with a decentralized supply system,' Dave said. 'But that's what you've got. You've got five pounds coming from here and two from there and one individual. I mean, a dog walks in the grow room, and wags its tail — anything can be coming off that dog's tail. It's gross. Fertilizers with E. coli. Compost teas that they don't make right, anaerobic tea that has elevated levels of E. coli and salmonella...There's no way that this is sustainable. All it takes is one story of immune-compromised people dying from aspergillus infection. The myth that cannabis hasn't killed a single person in 3,000 years is allowed to go on. Well, it's not cannabis that kills people, it's all the shit that's in it.'

[From "The Manhattan Project of Marijuana", David Downs, the East Bay Express, 3.4. 2009.])




(Steep Hill Lab says eighty-five percent of the medical marijuana samples it tests "show traces of mold".

---Peter Hecht, "Pot Lab Fills Need for Oversight", the Sacramento Bee, 4.6. 2010. The owners of Steep Hill Lab in Oakland California [which is NOT a federally-certified laboratory] are extremely in favor of medical marijuana...)




("We find e.coli in hash. We're seeing pseudomonas aeruginosa, a bacteria that's found in filth."

---Robert Martin, of the Association of California Cannabis Labs. Martin was quoted by David Downs in the East Bay Express, 4.11. 2012.)




("It's a nasty little secret in the medical marijuana world that many growers spray their plants liberally with pesticides..."

---Robert Gammon, the East Bay Express, 7.28. 2010.)




(In places like Berkeley in 2018, where cannabis production is encouraged, much cannabis waste is generated. Some of the waste is toxic if consumed. Moldy marijuana, marijuana contaminated with chemicals, contaminated hashish, and contaminated cannabis concentrates do not seem to be rare. Some homeless people, alcohol addicts, and methamphetamine addicts find these sometimes poisonous contaminated cannabis products in garbage containers and sell them on the streets...)




("A 2015 study published in The Journal of Toxicological Sciences found that more than 80 percent of the concentrate samples were contaminated by residual solvents."

"In the same 2015 study, pesticides were detected in one-third of the concentrate samples."

---Kathleen Richards, The East Bay Express, 3.21. 2018, in an article about vaping cannabis.)




("...the true danger in untested cannabis comes from the potential pathogens--pseudomonas, aspergillis, and E. coli are routinely found by our laboratory [CW Analytical]."

---David Egerton, in a letter to the editor of the East Bay Express, 7.18. 2012.)




("...Anresco Laboratories conducted tests on all of the cannabis featured at the HempCon Festival held in San Francisco in August 2017. The San Francisco-based laboratory discovered that 80 percent of the cannabis at the festival was contaminated with unhealthy levels of solvents, pesticides, molds, fungus, or various bacteria."

---John Geluardi, East Bay Express, 9.20. 2017.)




(Over the decades, I have seen MANY careless and ignorant people with hands contaminated by perfume, cologne, cosmetics, grease, oils [and a number of other toxic substances] use their fingers to prepare marijuana for smoking. I am dismayed by the amount of marijuana I have had to throw away because of toxic substances that stupid and/or careless people have allowed marijuana to come into contact with!)




("Illegal Vapes are Killing People. Blame the 'Legal Market'"

---title of an article by Dan Mitchell, 9.11. 2019, East Bay Express. This San Francisco bay area newspaper is extremely pro-marijuana.

"Legal cannabis has created a market for manufactured products like vapes and gummies. If not for that legal market, there would likely be far fewer pirates out there making what look like legal vapes--complete with legit-looking packaging--but were actually made half-assedly by random cretins. When it comes to vapes, half-assed production can mean illness and death."

There is a full color ad for the Magnolia dispensary in Oakland on the same page as the article. "Dab Bar and Vape Lounge Open 7 Days 9AM--9PM".)




("People like to make poison. If you don't understand this, you will never understand anything."

---Margaret Atwood, in a short story, quoted by Jia Tolentino in her review of Atwood's 2019 novel THE TESTAMENTS, a sequel to THE HANDMAID'S TALE. The review was in the 9.16. 2019 issue of The New Yorker.)




("Mycobutanil...was found in a product recently recalled by Mettrum Ltd., a Toronto-based medical marijuana company."

Mycobutanil, used to control mildew, is said to emit hydrogen cyanide gas when heated.

"The Mettrum discovery was made recently, when a random screening of the company's products by Health Canada turned up the unauthorized use of pyrethrin, a pesticide...that is also not approved for medical cannabis..."

---Grant Robertson, The Globe and Mail, 3.10. 2017.)




("While I am grateful for access to the pot clubs...I am at a bit of a loss to understand why, given the virtual absence of risk in producing and distributing pot, it is still so expensive."

"What we have...are facilities charging the high end of street prices to people who are already ostensibly facing hardship."

["An ounce for $300 to $400..."]

"...besides basic capitalist greed, why does it still cost so much? Most of the truly disabled and terminally ill are on a fixed income, rendering the cost of pot not at all that compassionate."

--- Quotes from a letter written by Steve Stevens to the editor of the San Francisco Weekly, 1.20. 2010.)




("...in the Wild West of recreational marijuana consumption roamed by pandemic-stressed adults."

---Valeriya Safronova, The New York Times, 5.23. 2021. Article title: "Big Candy Is Angry". Some cannabis companies make drug-infused candy that is packaged to look similar to popular brand-name mainstream candy.)




("Each one-gram of flower is packaged in a wine bottle-shaped tin, topped with a version of Coppola's signature label and an embossed pot leaf. Each tin will retail for $99 and comes with a branded pipe and rolling papers."

---Katie Shapiro, Forbes.com, 11.2. 2018, describing marijuana grown in California's Humboldt County that will be sold by Francis Ford Coppola, who directed the 1972 film The Godfather.)




("According to Rand Corporation estimates...legalized...high-grade pot would cost just $20 per pound to produce. And low-grade weed would cost only $5 per pound."

---David Downs, East Bay Express, 10.9. 2013.)




(Since May 2011, four marijuana stores in Richmond, California [near Berkeley and Oakland] "...have paid $486,390 in police fees."

"To some, the situation evokes...the protection racket."

---David Downs, East Bay Express, 8.28. 2013)




(Daniel Rush, the former chair of Berkeley's Medical Cannabis Commission, was charged with 15 criminal counts, including extortion, fraud, and money-laundering. He later pleaded guilty to three felony counts.

["...federal authorities charged him for offering special treatment to one of the applicants for Berkeley's fourth dispensary spot."

---Frances Dinkelspiel, Berkeleyside, 6.23. 2017.])




("I've never met so many greedy slugs in my whole life."

---Michelle LaMay, chairwoman of the Teapot Party in Colorado, describing having to deal with the more than 3,000 people who have contacted her because they want to start their own cannabis business. [Willie Nelson was arrested in Texas for possessing marijuana on November 26, 2010. Following his arrest, Nelson founded the Teapot Party.] The quote is from an article by Eric Spitznagel, Bloomberg Businessweek, that was published in the San Francisco Chronicle, 11.20. 2011)




("We did $20 million in sales last year."

---Steve DeAngelo, executive director of Harborside Health Collective, a marijuana store in Oakland. DeAngelo was quoted by Kathleen Pender in an article, "Push to Protect Banks on Legal Pot Business". The San Francisco Chronicle, 5.25. 2010.)




("California's medical marijuana dispensaries now generate as much as $1.3 billion in sales and $105 million in state sales taxes each year, according to new---and dramatically increased---state sales estimates by California's Board of Equalization."

"The Board of Equalization earlier this year estimated medical marijuana sales at only $98 million annually..."

--- the Sacramento Bee, 5.8. 2010.)




(The Berkeley Patients Group is "a dispensary with about 10,000 patients in the Bay Area". In 2007 the DEA "pounced on a Southern California offshoot of the Berkeley nonprofit for distributing a federally controlled substance. Agents seized nearly everything on-site as well as $100,000 in funds in a bank account."

"The Berkeley dispensary actually got the money back after the City of Berkeley stood up for it. The city stated in a 2008 resolution 'seizures of assets of medical marijuana dispensaries and collectives have blocked payments of taxes to the state of California and the City of Berkeley.' The city asked federal authorities to back off and they did."

"Berkeley Patients Group, along with two other Berkeley clubs, net about $18.5 million per year."

---David Downs, the East Bay Express, 9.15. 2010.)




("The city of Berkeley filed a legal claim Wednesday in a federal asset forfeiture case against the landlord of a medical marijuana dispensary here, saying it would lose tax money from pot sales if the dispensary is forced to close."

---Doug Oakley, West County Times, 7.4. 2013.)




("Oakland's lawsuit said the closure would damage the city, which expects to collect more than $1.4 million this year in business taxes from Harborside and three other city-licensed dispensaries."

---Bob Egelko, San Francisco Chronicle, 10.14. 2012. Seeking to prevent the forced closure of Harborside Health Center, a "medical marijuana" dispensary, the City of Oakland filed a lawsuit against the federal government.)




Years ago there was a legitimate drug testing laboratory in California where a user could anonymously have a sample of their "dope" tested. Unfortunately, at one point such drug-testing laboratories were declared illegal by federal law enforcement officials and were forced to cease operation. As far as I can tell, the public does not have legal access to any federally-certified illegal-drug testing laboratory.




("This product was produced without regulatory oversight for health, safety or efficacy."

---quote from a blister-pack containing sixteen 10 milligram THC "Orange Zest"-flavored sublingual tablets that were made August 10, 2016 in Salinas, California for a company in Denver, Colorado. [The main isomer of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) is the principal psychoactive constituent of marijuana.])



("This product has not been tested as required by the Medicinal and Adult-Use Cannabis Regulation and Safety Act."

---quote from a childproof bottle containing one gram of "King Louis OG" cannabis flowers that was sold for $15 in February 2018 by KindPeoples Collective in Soquel, California.)




Many of the anti-drug police say they believe that "harm reduction" strategies increase drug use and are thus unacceptable. Some anti-drug police believe that the world would be a better place if users of illegal drugs died...




("Casual drug users should be taken out and shot. Smoke a joint, lose your life."


---Darryl Gates, 
Head of Los Angeles Police Department, speaking to a 
United States Senate Judiciary Committee on September 5, 1990.
[Gates said the above because he felt casual drug users were guilty of "treason", according to author Martin Torgoff, writing in his book CAN'T FIND MY WAY HOME--America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945-2000.] )




("In 1996, Newt Gingrich introduced a bill mandating the death penalty for bringing two ounces of marijuana into the country!"


[quote from a document published by Unitarian Universalists for Drug Policy Reform].)




(The Assassins were a Nizari Isma'ili sect of Shia Islam. They were an order of trained killers from 1090 to 1275 in Northern Iran. The definition of the modern term "assassination" is based on the tactics used by the assassins. The western world was introduced to the assassins by the works of Marco Polo [born in 1254], who understood the word as deriving from the word "hashish".

Used figuratively, the term "hashishi" connoted meanings such as "outcasts" or "rabble". The Christian crusaders spread the term after military encounters with followers of Islam.

Marco Polo recounts a story he heard of a man who would drug his young followers with hashish, lead them to a lavish "paradise", complete with heavenly music, exceptionally sexy young women, and perfectly delicious foods and beverages, and then when they passed out he carried them back to where he found them and the next day when they woke up, he would claim that only he had the means to allow for their return to "paradise". It is said that the followers believed that if they died in the service of the man who led them to this "paradise", that was where they would go, so they were willing to do absolutely anything he told them to do...

---paraphrased from Wikipedia)




("William Bennett, federal drug policy coordinator, said Thursday night he had no moral qualms about beheading convicted drug dealers.

'Morally, I don't have any problem with that at all,' Bennett said when asked on the CNN program 'Larry King Live' call-in television show..."

---Los Angeles Times, 6.16. 1989.)




("At a campaign rally Monday, Trump struggled to enunciate his view that drug dealers should get the death penalty. He initially failed to pronounce 'smallest,' and then added, 'We are an institute in a powerful death penalty. We will put this on.'"

---Aaron Blake, The Washington Post, Tuesday 1.23. 2024.

"It's like Trump is doing beat poetry now"

---James Surowiecki, on Twitter, 1.23. 2024.)




("Quinlivan told the judges that nobody has the right to use marijuana..."

"Judge Harry Pregerson asked Quinlivan whether it was OK for Raich to die or succumb to 'unbearable suffering.'
'So go ahead and die. That would be all right?' he asked.
'Congress has made that value judgement,' Quinlivan replied."

---David Kravets, the Oakland Tribune, 3.28. 2006, in an article about a hearing before a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Angel McClary Raich is a very seriously ill patient that multiple doctors say must use marijuana as a medicine or she will likely die. Mark T. Quinlivan is an Assistant U. S. Attorney.)




("One child said 'I love you, Mom'-- for the first time in his life."

---Debra Kamin, Newsweek, 2.23. 2018, describing what happened when a severely autistic child was given marijuana oil. The quote is printed large, with the words "I love you, Mom" in bright red. The front cover of this issue features an image of neon marijuana leaves and the words "The Blunt Truth About Weed and Autism". The back cover is a full-page full-color advertisement for Kavalan whisky. [The article is about a study of 60 severely autistic children who were given an oil containing a 20-to-1 ratio of CBD to THC. The study was conducted by Dr. Adi Aran, a pediatric neurologist and director of the pediatric unit of Jerusalem's Shaare Zedeck Hospital. "Most parents said their children improved. Nearly half saw a notable reduction in the core symptoms of autism."])




("You're real! You're really real!"

---Floyd, age ten, who had never spoken before, after being given a series of large doses of LSD at Fairview Developmental Center in California in the early 1960s. The quote was reported by Connell Cowan, at the time a psych tech, who was one of the people who were giving large doses of LSD to children. Cowan was working with Gary Fisher, a psychologist who had first taken LSD in 1959. [From "The Elementary Kool-Aid Acid Test", a podcast by Amy Standen and Judy Campbell, The Leap, KQED, 4.11. 2017.])




("...good people don't smoke marijuana."

---Jeff Sessions, in a Senate hearing in April 2016. Sessions went on to become Attorney General of the United States. It is obvious that Sessions is very mentally ill, as is Donald Trump, who chose Sessions to be Attorney General.)




("...defies language and logic..."

---federal judge Charles Breyer, October 2015, describing an extremely wrongful United States Department of Justice interpretation of the 2014 Rohrabacher-Farr amendment. [The federal Rohrabacher-Farr amendment prohibited the Justice Department from spending funds to interfere with the implementation of state medical cannabis laws. The Justice Department insisted that the amendment meant only state officials were protected from federal interference, and that users, providers, and producers of medical cannabis were not. Breyer's ruling against the Justice Department was considered by some to be a historic victory for cannabis reform advocates.])




("I'm a firm believer that drugs are the root of all evil."

---Contra Costa County [California] deputy sheriff Andy VanZelf,
quoted 10.4. 2009 in the Conta Costa Times by columnist Tom Barnidge. "VanZelf [a police officer for 23 years] ...was born to the job--his mother, father, and brother were cops--but that's not why he stuck with it. 'Putting bad guys in jail is very satisfying,' he said.")


("Sgt. Davin Cole, a 27-year veteran of the San Francisco Police Department, has been charged with shoplifting at a Rite Aid pharmacy and resisting arrest. Cole reportedly tried to steal painkillers..."

---Johanna Li, Inside Edition, 11.5. 2021.)




(“You can grow enough marihuana in a window-box to drive the whole population of the United States stark, staring, raving mad.”

---Winifred Black, an early Hearst anti-cannabis propagandist, in her 1929 book DOPE--THE STORY OF THE LIVING DEAD.)




("According to the FBI's annual Uniform Crime Report, in 2007 there were 872,721 arrests in the U.S. for marijuana violations."


---Adam Tschorn, the Los Angeles Times, 9.3. 2009.)




("It was downtown San Jose and another police officer had made a stop on three kids who were touring San Jose on a Saturday night. You know, driving around in circles like American Graffiti. And the officer pulled three kids out of the car and he didn't know but one kid panicked and tried to swallow a small bag of marijuana---and I pulled up just to watch and assist if needed and didn't realize what was going on either. And this kid died in front of us choking on a bag of marijuana. He didn't die because of marijuana, he died because he panicked over these stupid laws we have."

---former San Jose, California undercover narcotics detective Russ Jones, quoted by David Downs, the East Bay Express, 5.12. 2010. Russ Jones is a spokesman for the "Law Enforcement Against Prohibition" organization.)




("The general commanding Mexico's drug enforcement unit--hailed by U.S. drugs czar McCaffrey as 'an honest man and no-nonsense field commander'--was detained in 1997 for corruptly collaborating with Amado Carillo Fuentes."

---Kevin Williamson, in DRUGS AND THE PARTY LINE.)







(I have NEVER grown marijuana. Because of my extreme poverty, I have no place I can safely grow marijuana.

I have NEVER grown psilocybin mushrooms.

I also have NEVER synthesized [manufactured] ANY drug, especially the chemicals d-lysergic acid diethylamide [LSD], methamphetamine, or dimethyltryptamine [DMT]. I am not intelligent enough to do so. I am not educated enough. It was a struggle for me to graduate from a high school in a rural part of North Carolina.)





"Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" ("Who will protect us from the protectors?")

A very, very few of the MANY authorities who have been unmasked:


Norman Wielsch, the head of the Central Contra Costa Narcotics Enforcement Team (in Contra Costa County in the San Francisco Bay Area) and a 12-year veteran of the state Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement, was arrested in February 2011 and charged with selling methamphetamine and marijuana.


Richard Wayne Parker, BNE, 649 lb. cocaine theft, Riverside, CA., (assisted by 2 CHP officers). 1997


Joshua Wendell Blackburn, CHP, 140 lb. cocaine theft, Santa Ana, CA. 2007


Cary Kent, BPD, evidence theft (286 envelopes opened) and possession of heroin and methamphetamine, Berkeley. 2006


Deborah Madden, San Francisco Police Department crime lab technician, convicted of stealing cocaine. Hundreds of cases were dismissed because of Madden's actions. She told police investigators she used the cocaine to try to control an alcoholism problem. 2013


("...chemist Annie Dookhan pleaded guilty in 2013 to tampering with evidence during her nine years working at a state crime lab." [in Massachusetts]

---Scott Malone, Reuters, 4.18. 2017

"Investigators said she admitted to intentionally contaminating some samples to turn them from negative samples into positive samples."

---Eric Levenson, CNN, "Nearly 20,000 drug convictions dismissed over chemist's misconduct", 4.18. 2017

Sonja Farak, another chemist at a Massachusetts crime lab, was arrested for tampering with evidence and stealing cocaine.)


(FBI agent Matthew Lowry became addicted to heroin. He was arrested on the street in Washington, D.C.

"The counternarcotics agent, according to court documents, was found to be 'incoherent'."

"His car, which had run out of gas, had traces of heroin seized in the drug arrests in which he had participated--along with some emptied evidence bags."

"His theft of drug evidence...forced authorities to free about 30 drug dealers because the evidence used in their arrests had been tampered with."

"Lowry pleaded guilty in late March to 64 counts, including obstruction of justice, falsification of records and possession of heroin."

---Chantal Valery, Yahoo News, 7.9. 2015.)


Guillermo "Memo" Robles, former BPD narcotics officer who retired in 2001, drunk driving and vehicular manslaughter, Berkeley. The person Robles killed was a 82-year-old retired librarian named Betty Jean Kietzman. 2007

(When Robles was a police officer, I wrote several letters to Berkeley city officials, including one to the mayor, one to the city attorney, and one to the police chief. I also sent a letter to the Alameda County district attorney. All of the letters mentioned that Robles clearly had a problem with his alcohol use. Years before Robles killed Betty Jean Kietzman, I was walking in the parking lot of a shopping center in El Cerrito and Robles, who was VERY drunk, almost ran me over with his car. [It was not the first time it had happened.] I was able to jump out of the path of his speeding vehicle, but if I hadn't, he may well have killed me. I called the Berkeley police chief and very politely requested that he force Robles into treatment for his rather well-known problem with alcohol. It was the second time I had called the Berkeley police and very politely requested that they take action to stop Robles from driving drunk.  The chief declined to take action, as did the police chief of El Cerrito. I called the Alameda County District Attorney, who refused to investigate Robles. I called the Contra Costa County District Attorney, who refused to investigate Robles. I called the then U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California, Robert Mueller, and very politely told him that I thought Robles was going to kill someone with his drunk driving and very politely requested that he take action to force Robles into treatment. Mueller refused, stating that I was "anti-police" and a "troublemaker". After Kevin Ryan became the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California, I called him and very politely requested that he take action to prevent Robles from continuing to drive while drunk. Ryan loudly cursed at me and hung up the telephone.

["Former U.S. Attorney Kevin Ryan of San Francisco was seen by prosecutors on his staff as 'retaliatory, explosive, noncommunicative and paranoid,' and his firing in December 2006 was fully justified, the Justice Department's inspector general said Monday."

---Bob Egelko, San Francisco Chronicle, 9.30. 2008.]

I have NEVER liked alcohol, I don't use alcohol, and I have never been inside the bar where Robles very, very often got drunk. I am faintly acquainted with the alcohol server who served  Robles alcohol at the bar just before Robles killed Betty Jean Kietzman, because I used to talk to this alcohol server when the alcohol server sometimes drank coffee at a nearby all-night donut shop after the alcohol server left work at the bar. The alcohol server seemed to feel remorse about having served Robles alcohol just before Robles killed Betty Jean Keitzman.)


("Bodycam footage shows federal drug prosecutor offering cops business card in DUI hit-and-run arrest"

---CBS News/AP headline, 9.8. 2023.

"When Florida police arrived at his house to investigate a hit-and-run, Joseph Ruddy, one of the nation's most prolific federal narcotics prosecutors, looked so drunk he could barely stand up straight, leaning on the tailgate of his pickup to keep his balance.

But he apparently was under control enough to be waiting with his U.S. Justice Department business card in hand.

'What are you trying to hand me?' an officer asked. 'You realize when they pull my body-worn camera footage and they see this, this is going to go really bad.'

That footage obtained by The Associated Press showed Ruddy apparently attempting to leverage his position to blunt the fallout from a Fourth of July crash in which he is accused of drunkenly striking another vehicle and leaving the scene.

But despite being charged, the 59-year-old Ruddy remained on the job for two months, representing the United States in court as recently as last week to notch another win for the sprawling task force he helped create two decades ago targeting cocaine smuggling at sea.

On Wednesday, a day after the AP asked the Justice Department about Ruddy's status, the veteran prosecutor was pulled off three pending criminal cases. A Justice Department spokesman would not say whether he had been suspended but said that Ruddy, while still employed, had been removed from his supervisory role at the U.S. Attorney's Office in Tampa. The case also has been referred to the Office of Inspector General.

Such an inspector general's probe would likely focus on whether Ruddy was trying to use his public office for private gain, said Kathleen Clark, a legal ethics professor at Washington University in St. Louis who reviewed the footage.

'It's hard to see what this could be other than an attempt to improperly influence the police officer to go easy on him,' Clark said. 'What could possibly be his purpose in handing over his U.S. Attorney's Office business card?'

Ruddy, whose blood-alcohol level tested at 0.17%, twice the legal limit, was charged with driving under the influence with property damage - a first-degree misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in prison. Despite his own admissions and witness testimony, he was not charged with leaving the scene of an accident.

Neither Ruddy nor his attorney returned messages seeking comment.

Ruddy is known in law enforcement circles as one of the architects of Operation Panama Express, or PANEX - a task force launched in 2000 to target cocaine smuggling at sea, combining resources from the U.S. Coast Guard, FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Historically, PANEX-generated intelligence contributes to more than 90% of U.S. Coast Guard drug interdictions at sea. Between 2018 and 2022, the Coast Guard removed or destroyed 888 metric tons of cocaine worth an estimated $26 billion and detained 2,776 suspected smugglers, a senior Coast Guard official said in congressional testimony in March. The bulk of those cases were handled by Ruddy and his colleagues in Tampa, where PANEX is headquartered.

A former Ironman triathlete, Ruddy enjoys a reputation among attorneys for hard work and toughness in the courtroom. Among his biggest cases were some of the early extraditions from Colombia of top smugglers for the feared Cali cartel.

But the majority of cases handled out of his office involve mostly poor fishermen from Central and South America who make up the drug trade's lowest rungs. Often, the drugs aren't even bound for American shores and the constitutional guarantees of due process that normally apply in criminal cases inside the U.S. are only loosely observed.

'Ruddy is at the heart of a costly and aggressive prosecutor-led dragnet that every year pulls hundreds of low-level cocaine traffickers off the oceans and incarcerates them in the U.S.,' said Kendra McSweeney, an Ohio State University geographer who is part of a team studying maritime interdiction policies.

Research by Ohio State's Interdiction Lab found that between 2014 and 2020, the median sentence for smugglers picked up at sea and prosecuted in Tampa was 10 years - longer than any other court in the country and compared to seven years, six months in Miami, which handles the second-largest amount of such cases.

Last Friday, nearly two months after his arrest, Ruddy was in court to ratify a plea deal in the case of a Brazilian man, Flavio Fontes Pereira, who in February was found by the U.S. Coast Guard with more than 3.3 tons of cocaine aboard a sailboat off Guinea, in West Africa.

After two weeks aboard the U.S. Coast Guard vessel, Pereira made his initial court appearance in Tampa in March, charged under the Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act, which gives the U.S. unique arrest powers anywhere on the high seas whenever it determines a vessel is 'without nationality.'

Ruddy is next due to appear in court in his own case Sept. 27. He's accused of sideswiping an SUV whose driver had been waiting to turn at a red light, clipping a side mirror and tearing off another piece of the vehicle that lodged in the fender of Ruddy's pickup.

'He never even hit brakes,' a witness told police. 'He just kept going and he was swerving all the way up the road. I'm like, "No, he's going to hurt somebody." So I just followed him until I got the tag number and just called and reported it.'

When officers arrived at Ruddy's home in the suburb of Temple Terrace, they found him hunched over his pickup, holding his keys and using the vehicle for support, the report said. Officers noted that he had urinated on himself, was unable to walk without help and failed a field sobriety test.

'I understand we might be having a better night,' Tampa police patrolman Taylor Grant said before looking at the business card.

'Why didn't you stop?' the officer asked.

'I didn't realize it was that serious,' Ruddy said in a slurred response.

'You hit a vehicle and you ran,' the officer said. 'You ran because you're drunk. You probably didn't realize you hit the vehicle.'")


("Former Bay Area police officer turned serial killer in the '80s dies while on death row"

---CBS News headline, San Francisco, 9.11. 2023. Anthony Sully was a former police officer who is said to have murdered at least five people. He was said to have been addicted to smoking "freebase cocaine".)


Enrique Zambrano, a Berkeley waterfront commissioner, brutally beat and severely injured a university professor and his wife and then murdered and dismembered a fellow commissioner who would have testified against him. 1988


("In the summer of 2008, the Oakland Police Department's Internal Affairs Division discovered that more than half of all drug-related search warrants involving confidential informants had been falsified."

"In the end, the scandal cost the city millions of dollars."

"Of the 40 search warrants filed by Oakland police officer Karla Rush between March of 2007 and August 2008, 39 were fraudulent."

Rush lost her job with the Oakland Police Department and is now a University of California police officer in Berkeley.

---Joaquin Palomino, East Bay Express, 8.28. 2013.)


("A suicide note left by Oakland police Officer Brendan O'Brien in September 2015 implicated cops in having sex with a victim of sex trafficking who went by the name Celeste Guap. Eventually, OPD disciplined 12 officers, firing four of them. Prosecutors filed criminal charges against three officers and a retired sergeant."
---The Monthly, August 2017.)


("In cases spanning 2015 and 2016, Walnut Creek [California] police officer Curtis Borman made misleading or false statements in 31 police reports, lost a bag of Vicodin pills during an arrest but told a supervisor he threw the pills away..."

---Thomas Peele, in his article "Walnut Creek Cop Kept Job After Falsifying 31 Reports", East Bay Times, 4.7. 2019.)


Gary Dale Baker, who was a member of the Sacramento California police force for more than 20 years, was sentenced to 62 years in prison for repeatedly raping a stroke-disabled woman in her 70s. 2015


Louis Lombardi, a San Ramon, CA. police officer, arrested in 2011 for selling drugs to confidential informants, and for stealing cash, drugs, and guns.


The Sheriff of San Francisco, Ross Mirkarimi, was arrested in 2012 for domestic violence battery, child endangerment, and dissuading a witness.


Before he became President, George W. Bush was arrested for driving while drunk on alcohol. He was convicted of the charge and paid a fine. Bush has publicly admitted drinking "too much", but stated that he stopped after his 40th birthday celebration. (His wife, Laura Bush, once failed to stop at a Stop sign and hit another car, killing a teenage boy.)

("Perhaps that cocaine caused me to exclaim
As I fell to the floor give me more give me more"

---Ray Benson, Chris O'Connell, and Peter Sheridan in the song they wrote "Am I High?", performed by the band Asleep at the Wheel. [Asleep at the Wheel performed at the 2001 George Bush Inaugural Ball. They were scheduled to play at the White House on September 11, 2001.])


Before he became Vice President, Dick Cheney was arrested twice for driving while drunk on alcohol. In a 2011 book that Cheney co-authored, he wrote that he did not like waking up in jail.


Michael William Meyrick, DEA, (supervising officer of the San Jose, CA. DEA office) 2 counts of prowling ("peeping tom") and one count of resisting arrest, San Jose. 1996


("A former official of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in San Francisco was convicted this week of stealing $178,000 from a drug-buying fund the agency used in its undercover investigations."

"According to investigators...Clifford Shibata made 137 cash withdrawals from an agency fund used to pay for undercover drug purchases and informants."

"Shibata...apparently returned some of the cash to the agency with an anonymous letter that was intended to cast suspicion on a co-worker."

---Bill Wallace, 5.30. 1998, the San Francisco Chronicle, "Ex-DEA Agent Convicted Of Stealing $178,000".)

("A U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent has been sentenced to three years and a month in prison for stealing more than $120,000 in drug funds."

"Clifford T. Shibata, a 24-year DEA employee who ran the agency's Clandestine Laboratory Group in San Francisco before his supension in 1996, was convicted in May. Prosecutors said Shibata, facing financial trouble and bitter about being passed over for a promotion, took money between 1994 and 1996 from a DEA account that was used for undercover purchase of drugs as evidence and for payments to confidential informants. He routinely forged the signatures of DEA agents on forms declaring the agents had used money from the account for authorized purposes, the prosecutors said.")

(The investigation of Clifford Shibata was conducted by the DEA's Office of Professional Responsibility in Los Angeles, California, and was led by Senior Inspector Lowrey Leong.

[King's Ransom is a brand of expensive cigars made after 2016. The company logo, depicted in the "likes" on one of Leong's Facebook pages, depicts King Robert the Bruce wearing a crown decorated with a Christian cross made of oak leaves.]

Lowrey Leong was NOT an honest man. He lied to me AND he covered-up a theft made by one of Shibata's fellow agents.)


Michael Sullivan, Coast Guard Pacific area chief of response who supervised the operation of 20 Coast Guard cutters and was the Coast Guard's liaison to the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, possession of cocaine and obstruction of justice, California. 2008


Kyle Foggo, CIA (former Executive Director of the CIA and the No. 3 position at the agency) fraud (27 additional charges including money laundering and conspiracy were dismissed in exchange for his guilty plea). 2008


("Early last month, the former South Korean president Park Geun-hye was sentenced to 24 years in prison and fined $17 million for bribery, extortion and abuse of power. That same day, the former South African president Jacob Zuma, forced to resign in February by his own party, appeared in court to face charges over a $2.5 billion arms deal. The next day came an even bigger blow: Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Brazil's former president and current front-runner in polls for October's presidential election, began serving a 12-year jail term on corruption charges..."

---Brook Larmer, The New York Times Magazine, 5.6. 2018.)


(Moshe Katsav was President of Israel from 2000 to 2007. He was convicted of 2 counts of rape, obstruction of justice and other charges. He served 5 years in prison.

Benjamin Netanyahu, a "great friend" of Donald Trump, became Prime Minister of Israel in 2009. He was indicted on serious bribe and fraud charges in 2019.)


David H. Petraeus was director of the CIA, a former four-star general in the U.S. Army, the former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan (2010-2011), and the former commander of the Multi-National Forces in Iraq (2007-2008). Petraeus, who is married and has two children, resigned from his CIA job after the FBI discovered that he had lied to his wife and was having sex with another woman.

("David H. Petraeus...has reached a plea deal with the Justice Department and admitted providing his highly classified journals to a mistress when he was the director of the C.I.A."

Federal prosecutors noted that Petraeus lied when he told the Federal Bureau of Investigation that he did not share classified information with his mistress.

"Mr. Petraeus has agreed to plead guilty to one count of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material...
He is eligible for up to one year in prison, but prosecutors will recommend a sentence of probation for two years and a $40,000 fine."

---Michael S. Schmidt and Matt Apuzzo, The New York Times, 3.3. 2015.)


Bernard Kerik, former New York City Police Commissioner (the top law enforcement post in New York) 8 felonies, including tax fraud and lying to the White House when he was a candidate for Director of Homeland Security, New York. 2007


Marion Barry, the mayor of Washington, D.C., was videotaped smoking crack cocaine in 1990. He was arrested by the FBI on drug charges, was convicted of possessing cocaine, and went to prison. In 1994, Barry was again elected mayor of the capital of the United States.


Rob Ford, the mayor of Toronto, was forced to admit he used an illegal drug after a video was made that showed him smoking crack cocaine in 2013.


(“There comes the point where you just say, ‘I can’t deal with this anymore.'"

---Harriet Richardson, the extremely frustrated BART [Bay Area Rapid Transit] inspector general tasked with investigating fraud and waste, announcing her resignation. San Jose Mercury News, 3.10. 2023.)


Narcotics Detective Jason Fredriksson, arrested in San Leandro, CA. in 2011 for giving more than a pound of marijuana to a confidential informant. (The informant was a woman who was engaged in an extramarital affair with Fredriksson.)


John Fredriksson, a former Alameda County District Attorney's office Inspector who worked in the prosecutor's office for more than 20 years, arrested in Walnut Creek, CA. in 2011 and charged with 8 counts of sexually molesting a child under the age of 14. (John Fredriksson is the father of Jason Fredriksson.)


John Cunningham, former Richmond, CA. police officer, was sentenced to 16 years in prison for sexually abusing and beating his son, Richmond, CA. 2003


Michael Gressett, former Contra Costa County, CA. Deputy District Attorney (who was a sex crimes prosecutor), arrested for rape, Martinez, CA. 2008


(On September 7, 2022, Alameda County Sheriff's deputy Devin Williams, Jr., 24, murdered a woman from Vietnam who worked as a nurse at John George Psychiatric Hospital in San Leandro, California. He also murdered her husband.

[A psychiatrist named Dr. Cuyler Burns Goodwin at one point worked at John George Psychiatric Hospital. Goodwin's medical license is said to have been revoked in 2022. One of the reasons for the revocation was that he was accused of raping a patient after giving the patient ketamine.]

After the murders, it was revealed that Williams had previously failed a sheriff's department psychological examination. The sheriff then told 47 other deputies who had also failed their psychological examinations that they would no longer be allowed to carry guns or arrest people.)


Mark Peterson, the District Attorney of Contra Costa County, was charged with 13 felonies in 2017.


Former Santa Cruz County District Attorney Peter Chang was charged with felony witness tampering in 1999.


Rene De La Cova, DEA, convicted of stealing $700,000, Miami, Florida. 1994 (De La Cova was the DEA supervisor who arrested Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega in 1990)


("Two former federal agents have been charged with wire fraud, money laundering and related offenses for stealing digital currency during their investigation of Silk Road, an underground black market that allowed users to conduct illegal transactions over the internet."

[Silk Road was the world's largest online illegal drug marketplace.]

"Carl M. Force, 46, of Baltimore, was a Special Agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration [DEA], and Shaun W. Bridges, 32, of Laurel, Maryland, was a Special Agent with the U.S. Secret Service..."

"Force served as an undercover agent and was tasked with establishing communications with a target of the investigation, Ross Ulbricht..."

"Force...sold information about the government's investigation to the target of the investigation..."

"Force...engaged in a broad range of illegal activities calculated to bring him personal financial gain."

"Bridges...diverted to his personal account over $800,000 in digital currency that he gained control of during the Silk Road investigation."

---from a U.S. Department of Justice press release, 3.30. 2015.)


(Garrison Courtney was a Department of Homeland Security spokesman for 3 years before serving as the chief DEA spokesman for 4 years, beginning in August 2005. "Courtney...told companies he was working as a CIA operative under non-official cover, prosecutors say. If they would do their patriotic duty and hire him they would be compensated handsomely with no-bid secret intelligence contracts."

"From 2012 to 2016, the scheme netted him $4.4 million, according to court records."

After pleading guilty to wire fraud, Courtney was sentenced to 7 years in federal prison.

---Ken Dilanian, 10.25. 2020, NBC News via Microsoft News.)


(Corrupt FBI agent John Connolly, and his snitch, organized crime boss James "Whitey" Bulger. Bulger was found to have been involved in 11 murders.)


(“In February 2017, then-Santa Cruz Police Chief Kevin Vogel accused ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] of using gang raids as a cover to enlist Santa Cruz police officers in immigration enforcement and said his agency would no longer collaborate with ICE. ‘We can’t cooperate with a law enforcement agency we cannot trust,’ Vogel said at the time."

 ---Darwin BondGraham and Ali Winston, the East Bay Express, 10.11. 2017.)


Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, highly decorated New York City Police detectives who became mafia hit-men, arrested in 2005 for committing 8 murders.


Aldrich Ames, a highly-trusted longtime CIA officer, arrested and convicted in 1994 after many years of spying for the Soviets.


Robert Philip Hansson, a highly-trusted longtime FBI agent, arrested and convicted in 2001 of spying for the Soviets over a period of 22 years.


Daniel James White, ex-police officer, ex-San Francisco Supervisor, and Vietnam war veteran, who murdered San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in 1978. White served 5 years in prison for the murders and committed suicide after he was released from prison.


Gerrit Van Raam was a Field Supervisor of the Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement, Northern California. Van Raam later murdered 2 people and committed suicide. (A photo of Van Raam was on the cover of ROLLING STONE magazine, February 17, 1972. [It accompanied Joe Eszterhas' NARK, A TALE OF TERROR.])


Former "National Sheriff of the Year" Patrick Sullivan was arrested in Colorado for possessing methamphetamine and offering to sell methamphetamine if his customers had sex with him. 2011


("Van Buren, Missouri--Tommy Adams, county sheriff for a little more than two years, was arrested earlier this month after giving meth to an informant at his cabin on a remote and hilly gravel road, according to a court document. He also allegedly snorted the drug himself with a straw."

"Missouri has reported more than 13,000 meth lab incidents in the past seven years."

"Lloyd Parsons, 37, a member of the Van Buren Fire Department, never figured Adams for one of the bad guys. He described Adams, the married father of an infant son, as professional and knowledgeable.
'I've worked several accidents with the guy and he knew his stuff, even the medical part,' Parsons said."

---Jim Salter, Associated Press, 4.19. 2011.)


Webster Hubbell, Associate Attorney General of the United States, pleaded guilty to mail fraud and tax evasion and was sentenced to 21 months in prison. 1995


Arnold Schwarzenegger, the wealthy actor who served as governor of California, has four children by his wife. She left him when she discovered that he had cheated on her and fathered a child with a household employee. 2012


Republican Dennis Hastert, the former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, was the third most powerful public official in the U.S. in 2007. Hastert, a former high school wrestling coach, and said to be a homosexual pedophile, was arrested in 2015 and charged with lying to the FBI about the $1.7 million in hush money payments he made to one of his victims.


Robert Bernard Anderson, United States Secretary of the Treasury, pleaded guilty to tax evasion. 1987


Caspar Weinberger, United States Secretary of Defense, indicted in the Iran/Contra scandal. 1986


Henry Cisneros, United States Secretary of Housing, pleaded guilty to a charge of lying to the FBI. 1999


John Fife Symington, governor of Arizona, convicted of fraud, 1997


James Guy Tucker, governor of Arkansas, convicted of fraud conspiracy, 1996


Edwin Edwards, governor of Louisiana, convicted of extortion, 2000


John G. Rowland, governor of Connecticut, convicted of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and tax fraud. 2004


Don Siegelman, governor of Alabama, convicted of bribery, mail fraud and obstruction of justice. 2006


Harold Guy Hunt, governor of Alabama and a Baptist minister, was convicted of a felony for violating a state ethics law and removed from office. 1993


Alabama governor Robert Bentley, a doctor and a staunch family-values conservative republican who was a former Baptist deacon, pleaded guilty to 2 campaign violations and resigned amid a sex scandal. 2017


Rod Blagojevich,  governor of Illinois, arrested for conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud and influence-peddling. 2008


Eliot Spitzer, governor of New York, resigned after he admitted paying to have sex with a prostitute ("I have acted in a way that violates my obligations to my family and violates my, or any, sense of right and wrong," Spitzer said at a news conference.) 2008


Jim Traficant, U.S. Congressman from Ohio, convicted on 10 counts of financial corruption and sentenced to 8 years in prison. 2002


Walter R. Tucker III, U.S. Congressman from California, convicted on charges of extortion and income tax fraud and sentenced to 27 months in prison, 1996


Dan Rostenkowski, U.S. Congressman from Illinois, convicted of embezzlement and sentenced to 18 months in prison, 1995


Joe Kolter, U.S. Congressman from Pennsylvania, convicted of conspiracy to commit embezzlement and sentenced to 6 months in prison, 1995


Tom DeLay, former U.S. House Majority Leader, was convicted of money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering and sentenced to three years in prison. 2011


Bill Clinton: After lying about his sexual affair with Monica Lewinsky, President Bill Clinton was held in civil contempt of court by Judge Susan D. Webber Wright. His license to practice law was suspended in Arkansas for five years and later by the United States Supreme Court. He was also fined $90,000 for giving false testimony.
(Official investigators said Lewinsky was with Clinton when his unlit tobacco cigar was inserted into her vagina, after which Clinton is alleged to have placed the cigar in his mouth, saying "Tastes good.") 1998

("Recently, the portrait artist Nelson Shanks [past subjects: Princess Diana, Pope John Paul II] divulged that his portrait of Bill Clinton, currently hanging in the National Portrait Gallery, contains a hidden image: a shadow across the Oval Office mantel was painted in the shape of Monica Lewinsky's blue dress."

---Michael Schulman, The New Yorker, 4.6. 2015. Lewinsky's famous dress was stained with Bill Clinton's semen.)


("Friends in High Places:

On his last day in office, Bill Clinton pardoned his brother Roger for a drug charge, as well as Susan Macdougal, who was jailed for refusing to testify in the Clinton's Whitewater scandal."

---Rolling Stone magazine, February 2019.)


(Democrat Anthony Weiner, a former U.S. congressman from New York [who resigned in 2011 after it was shown that he sent obscene photos of himself to a woman] pleaded guilty in 2017 to a charge of sending an obscene image to a minor, and was sentenced to 21 months in prison. Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin [a long-time aide to Hillary Clinton, who served as vice chair of Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign] filed for divorce after Weiner pleaded guilty.)


(Veteran combat helicopter pilot John Nettleton, the former commander of the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba was sentenced to 2 years in prison for "trying to cover up a drunken fight with a commissary worker who was later found dead in the bay." Nettleton was found to have lied when he denied he had sex with the commissary worker's wife. John Bogdan, who had served as the warden of the prison at Guantanamo, told the court he knew Nettleton was a man of integrity because, after both Nettleton and Bogdan's 16-year-old sons were arrested by the police, Nettleton recused himself from the case.

---from a 10.9. 2020 article by Carol Rosenberg in the Miami Herald.)


Colonel David Russell Williams, a 23 year military veteran and the commander of Canada's largest Air Force base, was convicted of murdering 2 women and and raping 2 others. Williams also broke into at least 48 houses, frequently stealing the underwear of young girls, which he then photographed himself wearing. Williams is a decorated military pilot who flew VIP airplanes carrying the Queen of England and the Prime Minister of Canada. 2010


Joseph DeAngelo, a former cop who served in the U.S. Navy, was arrested in 2018 and charged with being the "Golden State Killer" who raped at least 45 people and killed at least 12 people. He also burglarized at least 120 homes.


U.S. brigadier general Jeffrey A. Sinclair, who served five combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, was charged with a number of crimes, including adultery, forcible sodomy, possession of pornography and alcohol while deployed, and filing fraudulent claims. 2012


("Army Maj. General David Haight, Army Ranger, decorated combat veteran and family man, held a key post in Europe this spring...He also led a double life: an 11 years affair and a 'swinger lifestyle' of swapping sexual partners that put him at risk of blackmail and espionage..."

"Haight was investigated by the Army inspector general, who issued a report in April, and fired him in May from his job running operations and plans at U.S. European Command..."

---Tom Vanden Brook, USA TODAY, 8.25. 2016.)


("The former chairman of Montgomery County's Republican Party was charged Tuesday drugging a female employee of his Lansdale, Pennsylvania law firm and raping her while she was unconscious.

Robert J. Kerns, 66, surrendered to county detectives Tuesday morning and was expected to be released after posting a portion of the $1 million bail. He faces 19 counts, including rape, sexual assault, tampering with evidence, and lying to authorities.

The charges followed weeks of investigation and represented a spectacular downfall for a power broker who led the county GOP for five years.

Less than a month ago, Kerns shared the spotlight at a party with Gov. Corbett. On Tuesday, he was escorted in handcuffs from court after a county grand jury portrayed him as a 'manipulative and predatory' rapist." 2013)


Lt. Col. Jeffrey Krusinski, the officer in charge of sexual assault prevention programs for the U.S. Air Force was arrested and charged with sexual battery. The police said Krusinski was in a parking lot when he approached and attacked a woman that he had never before met. 2013


("Like a lot of people of his generation, he experimented in his younger days. Those days have long passed and the experiment has long been over."

---Tom Dresslar, spokesman for California State Treasurer Bill Lockyer, in response to a question asking if Lockyer had ever used illegal drugs. Lockyer is a former Attorney General of California.

[From a newspaper article by Julia Prodis Sulek and Josh Richman, West County Times (Contra Costa County, California) 4.13. 2012. The article was about an email message that the press received from the account of Bill Lockyer's wife, Nadia, that stated that "Bill bought and gave me drugs..." Nadia Lockyer was an Alameda County Supervisor at the time the message was sent, and had just been in rehab for substance abuse.

Nadia, who is the the mother of a young child, has admitted that she was cheating on her husband with a boyfriend who is a methamphetamine addict.])


(LIAR Judge James Ware was the Chief Federal Judge in the Northern District of California, which includes San Francisco, from December 2010 to August 2012.

"On June 27, 1997, President Bill Clinton nominated Ware to a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, to replace J. Clifford Wallace, who had taken senior status. Ware had a hearing before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in October 1997.
However, Ware's nomination unraveled amid an embarrassing scandal that ultimately resulted in a judicial reprimand, and Clinton withdrew his nomination of Ware on November 27, 1997. In 1998, Judge Ware was reprimanded by the Judicial Council of the Northern District Court of California for fabricating the story of being the brother of Virgil Ware, a 13 year old black boy shot by teenage racists in Alabama in 1963 on the same day as the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. According to a story Judge Ware had told MANY audiences, he was riding his bike with his brother Virgil on the handlebars when Virgil was shot and killed by white racists. The incident was a real one, however it happened to a different James Ware, as was discovered when Judge Ware's claim was published in the Alabama papers after he was nominated to the Ninth Circuit by President Bill Clinton. The father of the long-ago slain boy contacted the Alabama courts to report that the California judge was impersonating his own son James Ware who was an employee in a Birmingham power plant. The Alabama courts contacted the California courts, who convened the ethics hearing. Judge Ware was reprimanded but allowed to retain his lifetime appointment as district judge.")

(Janet Reno was appointed U.S. Attorney General by Bill Clinton in 1993. She served from March 1993 to January 2001. In 1995 she was found to be suffering from Parkinson's Disease. Delusions and hallucinations occur in approximately 50% of people who are afflicted with Parkinson's Disease.)

(Federal judge Alex Kozinski was appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1985. Kozinski was Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit from December 2007 to December 2014. In 2008, according to the Los Angeles Times, Kozinski was the subject of a judicial inquiry because he posted "a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows" on his public website. He was reprimanded but allowed to remain a judge after he apologized and shut down his website. In December 2017 Kozinski resigned after at least 15 women reported they had been sexually harassed by him.)


("Back in May, three Indiana judges got into a fight. It was the crescendo of an incident brimming with colorful details: a gaggle of judges drinking the night before a judicial conference, a failed attempt to visit a strip club called the Red Garter, a brawl in the parking lot of an Indianapolis White Castle. The altercation apparently started sometime after 3 a.m., when one of the judges, Sabrina Bell, raised a middle finger at two men yelling from a passing SUV, and ended after one of those men shot two of the judges."

---Laurel Wamsley, National Pblic Radio, 11.14. 2019. Andrew Adams and Bradley Jacobs were the judges wounded by gunfire.)


("...offficers in some Brooklyn narcotics units regularly planted illegal substances on innocent people."

---Emily Mae Czachor, CBS News, 11.17. 2022, in her article "188 convictions tied to former NYPD officers convicted of criminal conduct to be vacated, district attorney says")


(“By his account, he had been awarded a Purple Heart in Vietnam. He’d participated in covert operations for the Central Intelligence Agency. He boasted of an impressive educational background as well--an undergraduate degree in physics and a master’s degree in psychology. None of it was true.”

 ---Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, National Geographic, June 2017, describing Los Angeles County Superior Court judge Patrick Couwenberg, who was removed from the bench in 2001.)


("A Maryland judge killed himself...just as the feds showed up at his home to arrest him in a child sex abuse case."

---Zoe Richards, Yahoo News, 9.10. 2021. Earlier, "While being interviewed by investigators, Jonathan Newell, 50, allegedly chewed and swallowed a camera memory card...")


(The University of Southern California is the largest private employer in the city of Los Angeles and generates $8 billion in economic impact on Los Angeles and California each year. As of May 2018, the University of Southern California had conferred degrees upon 29 alumnis who became billionaires. As of January 2021, 10 Nobel laureates have been affiliated with the university.

While dean of the University of Southern California medical school, Dr. Carmen Puliafito, said to be suffering from bipolar disorder, became addicted to smoking methamphetamine. He was infatuated with a young prostitute and used heroin and other drugs with her. The prostitute survived an overdose in Puliafito's hotel room in 2016. Puliafito eventually lost both his job and his license to practice medicine. The photos of him using drugs are scary!

Puliafito's replacement as dean of the medical school, Rohit Varma, stepped down as the Los Angeles Times was getting ready to publish an item about a sexual harassment allegation against him and a $135,000 payment to the person who made the allegation.

"...hundreds of women accused former University of Southern California gynecologist George Tyndall of sexual abuse."

---James Yuccas, CBS News, "USC agrees to pay $1 billion to women alleging sex abuse", 3.25. 2021.)


(“I don’t know anybody who didn’t lie on his resume.”

 ---Willie Brown, mayor of San Francisco, quoted by Larry Hatfield, San Francisco Examiner, 1.19. 1996. [Brown’s campaign manager, Jack Davis, had accused police chief Fred Lau of lying about having a bachelor’s degree from San Francisco State University.])


("'Fluent in Finnish?' Isla Fisher's character is asked in 'Confessions of a Shopaholic,' by a friend who is scanning her job qualifications. Ms. Fisher's character responds: 'Everyone has fudged their resume a little.'"

---Emma Goldberg, The New York Times, 2.18. 2022, in the lead article in the "Business" section: "What if the person you hired isn't the one you interviewed?")


(Jim Jones founded the Peoples Temple Christian Church Full Gospel. Headquartered in San Francisco, Jones' group was very strongly supported by California assemblyman Willie Brown, who later became mayor of San Francisco. Others who supported Jones included George Moscone, Walter Mondale, and Rosalynn Carter. Jones and some of his followers moved to Guyana. In late 1978 Jones, before killing himself, made 909 of his followers commit suicide.)


("A longtime federal judge was arrested in Atlanta, Georgia and charged with using cocaine and marijuana with a stripper while he met to pay her for sex. An FBI agent said U.S. District Senior Judge Jack T. Camp, 67, possessed and used cocaine, marijuana and Roxycodone with the exotic dancer, aided and abetted her possession of the drugs knowing she is a drug felon, and possessed guns while using controlled substances. 
Camp was appointed to the Federal bench by President Reagan in 1988."

---News report, 10.5. 2010.)


("...if a judge rendered a decision about granting parole just before a meal, the inmate's odds for a favorable outcome dipped to near zero; just after the judge ate, the chances rose to around sixty-five percent."

---Sarah Stillman, in her article "Good Behavior". The New Yorker, 1.23. 2017.)


(Alameda County, California Judge Daniel Paul Seeman was arrested in June 2012 and charged with elder abuse and perjury. Seeman is a former Drug Court judge.

"...police and prosecutors, through court records, told a story of a man who cunningly and systematically waged a 12-year campaign to take all of Anne Nutting's money."

---Paul T. Rosynsky, the Oakland Tribune, 6.15. 2012.)


(A news item in the San Francisco Chronicle, June 1975, noted the theft, from the police evidence office, of the $70 million worth of drugs that had been seized in the famous "French Connection" case...)



("...we humans live in an utterly frightening, insane world where our leaders, even if they are sane, must pretend to be insane in order to be electable, presumably to reflect the sentiments of the voters."

---from a letter someone sent to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, 7.13. 2004.)



("...the whole world is upside-down."

Greg Suhr, Deputy Police Chief, San Francisco, quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle after he was indicted for Conspiracy to Obstruct Justice in 2003.)



("I believed in order and conformity and the need for everyone to abide by social norms."

---former New York City police commissioner and former Los Angeles police chief William Bratton, describing why he was so offended in the late 1960's by artists, poets, marijuana smokers, and LSD users. The quote is from his 1998 book TURNAROUND: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic.)



(Information about how banks launder money for the drug cartels:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico-drug-gangs )



("Anti-narcotics agents working for the US government have laundered or smuggled millions of dollars in drug proceeds to see how the system works and use the information against Mexican drug cartels..."

"As it launders drug money, the Drug Enforcement Administration often allows cartels to continue their operations over months or even years before making seizures or arrests..."

---Yahoo news, 12.4. 2011, about a report that was published in The New York Times 12.3. 2011.)



("...if you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel."


---Milton Friedman, in a 1991 interview on "America's Drug Forum," a national public affairs talk show that appears on public television stations. From 1977 on, Friedman was a Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford , and was considered the leader of the Chicago School of monetary economics. Professor Friedman won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 1976, and was also the recipient of the National Medal of Science and the Presidential Medal of Freedom by the U.S. government in 1988.)



("Looters stole from pharmacies and methadone clinics during the 2015 Freddie Gray riots in Baltimore, Maryland."

"...police officers confronted the looters and seized the stolen drugs."

"Instead of removing the drugs from the streets...the officers themselves engaged in a pervasive pattern of re-selling...the drugs to Baltimore residents."

"The testimony revealed that during the course of the officers enterprise, they made a profit of more than one million dollars from these sales."

"Our officers are the very drug dealers they are entrusted to take off the streets. And in their dealing those drugs to Baltimore residents, the infusion led, according to the Baltimore Police Department, to a spike in crime after the riots."

---Kathryn Freybalter, a law professor who was a federal Public Defender for the District of Maryland from 1998 to 2012. "Federal Trial Unravels Years of Police Corruption in Baltimore". WNYC, 2.6. 2018.)



(Salvatore "Sammy the Bull" Gravano served only 5 years in prison for his involvement in 19 murders [because he became a government witness]. He testified in 1992 against his former mafia boss John J. Gotti. After leaving the witness protection program, Gravano started dealing the drug ecstasy, and was arrested for running what the authorities called the largest ecstasy ring to ever operate in Arizona. He pleaded guilty to the charges in 2001.)



("Sicilian Mafia boss Giovanni Brusca...has been released from prison. Brusca...confessed to his role in over 100 killings..." and "...became an informant, helping prosecutors hunt down fellow mobsters."

---BBC News, 6.1. 2021.)



The DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration), a Federal agency, conducts "buy/bust" operations, where its agents buy illicit drugs from a dealer and then immediately arrest the dealer. Sometimes the agents do a "sell/bust" operation where they sell drugs to a person and then immediately arrest the person. Occasionally the agents will conduct a "buy/let go" operation and at a later date arrest the dealer. What is not commonly known to the public, however, is that the DEA (and other law enforcement groups) also do "sell/let go" operations where, to establish the "credibility" of their undercover agents to a group of drug dealers, they sell a dealer drugs and do not attempt to arrest the dealer until some future date, frequently after the dealer has re-sold to the community the drugs the police provided him...



("As the U.S. Supreme Court said in Russell, supra:

'The illicit manufacture of drugs is not a sporadic, isolated criminal incident, but a continuing, though illegal, business enterprise. In order to obtain convictions for illegally manufacturing drugs, the gathering of evidence of past unlawful conduct frequently proves to be an all but impossible task. Thus in drug-related offenses law enforcement personnel have turned to one of the only practicable means of detection: the infiltration of drug rings and a limited participation in their unlawful present practices. Such infiltration is a recognized and permissible means of investigation; if that be so, then the supply of some item of value that the drug ring requires must, as a general rule, also be permissible. For an agent will not be taken into the confidence of the illegal entrepreneurs unless he has something of value to offer them. Law enforcement tactics such as this can hardly be said to violate "fundamental fairness" or be " shocking to the universal sense of justice" . . . .'"

[From Docket Number 79-1362
United States of America, Plaintiff-
Apellee, v. Peter Wylie, Defendent-
Apellant. United States of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Sheldon Perluss, Defendent-Appellant.
United States of America, Plaintiff-
Appellee, v. David Bachrach,
Defendent-Appellant., 625 F.2d
1371 (9th Cir. 1980)])



("Kenneth E. Melson, the acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, 'told congressional investigators that some Mexican drug cartel figures targeted by his agency in a gun-trafficking investigation were paid informants for the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration.'"

"The ATF 'allowed guns to be purchased in the United States in hopes they would be traced to cartel leaders. Under the gun-trafficking operation known as Fast and Furious, the ATF lost track of the guns, and many were found at the scenes of crimes in Mexico, as well as two that were recovered near Nogales, Arizona, where a U.S. Border Patrol agent was killed.'"

"Representative Darrell Issa and Senator Charles Grassley told Attorney General Eric Holder that Melson told them he became 'sick to his stomach when he...learned the full story.'"

"Issa and Grassley said 'The evidence we have gathered raises the disturbing possibility that the Justice Department not only allowed criminals to smuggle weapons but that taxpayer dollars from other agencies may have financed those engaged in such activities.'"

---Richard A. Serrano, the San Francisco Chronicle, 7.7. 2011.

In a September 20, 2012 interview on Univision, Barack Obama falsely stated that operation Fast and Furious began during the presidency of George W. Bush, when in fact operation Fast and Furious began months after Obama became president.)




("Just because something is in the public domain doesn't mean it's been officially released or declassified by the U.S. government."

---Jennifer Youngblood, a spokeswoman for the CIA, explaining why the CIA was demanding information that is already well-known to the public not be published in a recent book written by former FBI counterterrorism expert Ali Soufan. Youngblood was quoted in an 8.26. 2011 article in The New York Times, "C.I.A. Demands Cuts in Book About 9/11 and Terror Fight". The article, written by Scott Shane, mentions that the book details how the CIA withheld information from the FBI about two future 9/11 hijackers.)



("People think they're free in this country. Don't kid yourself. This is a police state. The government can pretty much do whatever it wants."

---Dr. Steven Hatfill, quoted by David Freed, The Atlantic, May 2010. Hatfill was harassed by the FBI because they very, very strongly suspected that he mailed anthrax to people. It turned out that the FBI was mistaken.)



("...a portrait of depravity that is hard to comprehend."

---The Editorial Board of The New York Times, describing "The Senate Report on the C.I.A.'s Torture and Lies." 12.9. 2014.

"...'at no time' did the C.I.A.'s torture program produce intelligence that averted a terrorism threat, the report said.")



("On March 8, 1971, burglars broke into an F.B.I. office in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole hundreds of the agency's files."

"The instigator of the break-in...was...a college physics professor."

Among the others participating was a professor of religion and his wife, a grad student studying child development...

"...they were part of the Quaker-and Catholic-influenced peace movement...which sustained the activities of the Berrigan brothers, among others. The burglars believed that the anti-war movement was being infiltrated by F.B.I. informants..."

The break-in led to the discovery and public disclosure of COINTELPRO:
"Since 1956...a highly secret program...spied on civil-rights leaders, suspected Communists, public critics of the F.B.I., student activists, and many others."

"The program sought to intimidate, smear, and blackmail them, to break up marriages, get people fired, demoralize them."

One of the first documents the burglars read instructed agents to "enhance the paranoia"...

---Margaret Talbot, in her review of the book THE BURGLARY by Betty Medsger. The New Yorker, 1.20. 2014.)

("The Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of free speech and association..."

---from the final report of the U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, issued in 1976. The sometimes lethally violent operations were approved by four presidential administrations.)


A new and inexperienced prison inmate is called a "fish". When I was being transported to federal prison in Arizona in early 1986, I gained a bit of criminal status by being the only person in the group who was forced to wear "black-box" handcuffs (you can't move your hands), ankle shackles, and chains. Because I had been convicted of Failure to Appear and had been a federal fugitive for more than 13 years, the guards called me a "rabbit".... En route, the system introduced me to a seasoned prisoner to "show me the ropes". His name was Harold Dean Klemp. He had been convicted for his part in a car theft ring and he told me he had been friends with members of the band Canned Heat. (Formed in Topanga, California in 1965, the band took it's name from Tommy Johnson's 1928 song "Canned Heat Blues", about an alcoholic who in desperation turned to drinking Sterno Canned Heat.) Band member Bob Hite rode an elephant painted dayglo purple to the stage of a late 1968 show in Los Angeles. Hite died following a heroin overdose in 1981. My friend from when I was a high school student in North Carolina, Jay Spell, was their keyboard player 1978-1980. In 2022 I used the internet to search the name Harold Dean Klemp and was surprised to see him mentioned as a "known associate" of James Earl Ray (Ray was convicted of killing Martin Luther King, Jr.) in a 5.24. 1978 letter that the counsel for the United States House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations sent to the United States Attorney General asking if Klemp or any of the others on a long list of names had ever been an FBI informant, operative, or source. The committee said they were trying to find out if the FBI and their COINTELPRO operations were involved in the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Harold Dean Klemp, an inmate at Folsom State Penitentiary, Folson, California, had met Ray through Ray's crime partner, James Owens. He and Owens had been cell mates from October 1961 to December 1964, at the Missouri State Penitentiary and it was at this time that he met Ray."

---from a FBI document, released under the Freedom of Information Act, that I found elsewhere online. When I knew Harold Dean Klemp he was a intravenous user of methamphetamine. A number of the people the FBI interviewed noted that Ray sold a lot of methamphetamine in prison and that he was a intravenous user of the drug.



("...you can surveil someone through...microwaves that turn into cameras..."

"...that is just a fact of modern life."

---Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway, in a March 2017 interview published in a New Jersey newspaper, The Bergen Record. The Los Angeles Times, 3.23. 2017, reported that there is no evidence that any microwave or any microwave oven has ever been turned into a camera. [Conway, when caught telling lies, famously denied that the lies were lies. She said the lies were "alternative facts"...])





(Dr. Joe Walker, chairman of psychiatry for Alameda Health System in Oakland, California "...told KTVU there's been an explosive growth of patients at psychiatric hospitals around the Bay Area and across the country."

---from a 12.9. 2016 article by Simone Aponte.)



("PLEAS TO SUICIDE HOTLINE DOUBLE"

---front page headline, USA TODAY, 7.20. 2018.

"The National Suicide Prevention Hotline saw calls double from 2014 to 2017, an increase that coincides with rising suicide rates in the USA."

---Marina Pitofsky)






President Ronald Reagan drank a beverage that contained alcohol on February 9, 1983 at the Eire pub in Boston. (In September 1992, Bill Clinton also drank a beverage that contained alcohol at the Eire pub...)

("If I were just a private citizen---Joe Six-Pack---I would have mixed feelings about not getting a chance to disprove these allegations in court."


---President Bill Clinton, quoted in TIME.)

("...shouting in Joe Six-Pack's ear to wake up and face the unsimplistic facts of life.''


--The Boston Globe, 8.28. 1970.)

(A six-pack is a half-dozen bottles or cans of beer, packaged to be purchased as a unit. The word "six-pack" was coined in 1952.)

(An illustration drawn by Mick Libra that appeared in my 1975 poetry chapbook COLLECTED DRUG POEMS 1969-1975 [published in Berkeley, California in 1975 by Exploding Mandala Press] shows an impatient long-haired lowbrow young man wearing bell-bottom pants with a hand full of cash, tapping his foot and thinking "Goddammit! I think I'm gonna hafta settle for a six-pack and a tube of glue" [because he can't find any marijuana to buy because president Nixon's Operation Intercept caused a near shutdown of border crossings between the U.S. and Mexico in 1969.])

("There is nothing whatever in common between a man of Huxley’s experience and intellectual discipline sampling mescaline, and a fifteen-year-old tripper whiffing airplane glue until his brain turns to oatmeal."

---Theodore Roszak, in his 1969 book THE MAKING OF A COUNTER CULTURE: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition.)


(San Francisco District Attorney Terence Hallinan's chief investigator and longtime friend, former DEA official Dan Addario "...is expected to undergo alcohol rehab..."

--- Phillip Matier, SFGate.com, 11.3. 2003.)


("Eliot Ness was an American Prohibition agent, famous for his efforts to enforce Prohibition in Chicago, Illinois, and the leader of a legendary team of law enforcement agents nicknamed 'The Untouchables'."

---Wikipedia.

When Ness died in 1957, he was an alcoholic and broke.)


(“I’m not crazy. I’m not fucking crazy. I’m not crazy.”

 ---Ruby Falcon, a drunk Chicago police officer, just before she committed suicide by shooting herself in the head. From an article in the Chicago Sun-Times by Matthew Hendrickson, John Seidel, and Sam Charles, 8.7. 2017.)


("I’m a reformed smoker; I think that surprises people. I quit, but then during the campaign, when you’re in a car driving through cornfields, occasionally I bum a cigarette or two. But I did all my drinking in high school and college. I was a wild man. I did drugs and drank and partied. But I got all my ya-yas out."

[from the book BARACK OBAMA IN HIS OWN WORDS by Barack Obama, edited by Lisa Rogak])

("U.S. President-elect Barack Obama failed to give a straight answer when asked on a U.S. talkshow on Sunday whether he had managed to quit smoking.
In a country where cigarettes are responsible for one in five deaths and smoking costs tens of billions of dollars in health care, Obama has been under pressure to set an example by giving up his reported two-decade-old habit.

Appearing on NBC's 'Meet the Press' program, interviewer Tom Brokaw told Obama he had ducked answering the question during an interview last month with ABC's Barbara Walters.
Noting that the White House was a no-smoking zone, Brokaw asked Obama, 'Have you stopped smoking?'
'I have,' Obama replied, smiling broadly. 'What I said was that there are times where I have fallen off the wagon.'
'Wait a minute,' Brokaw interjected, 'that means you haven't stopped.'
'Fair enough,' Obama said. 'What I would say is that I have done a terrific job under the circumstances of making myself much healthier. You will not see any violations of these rules in the White House.'
Obama was often observed on the presidential campaign trail chewing Nicorette gum, which helps ease the craving for nicotine. He has tried several times to quit."

---12.7. 2008)

("...Obama downed the full pint in four slurps..."

"'He's the first president I've actually seen drink the black stuff like he's not ashamed of something' said Christy O'Sullivan, an Irish government clerical worker..."

"Michelle Obama...then got behind the bar herself to serve Moneygall's parish priest, the Rev. Joe Kennedy."

---Nancy Benac, AP, 5.23. 2011, in an article about Obama drinking ale at Ollie Hayes pub in Moneygall, Ireland.)

("Just to make sure I'm actually answering your question, am I willing to pursue a decriminalization strategy as an approach? No."

---Barack Obama, in answer to a question ["...when is the war on drugs in society going to be abandoned and be replaced by a more sophisticated and cost effective program of rehabilitation...?"] in a public meeting at the University of Maryland, 7.22. 2011.)





("Obama and his team frequently talk about the president's fondness for beer, and Obama has been photographed many times downing a beer..."

"White House Honey Brown Ale, believed to be the first beer brewed on the White House grounds..."

"White House press secretary Jay Carney announced the beer recipe on Twitter, linking to a blog post entitled 'Ale to the Chief' that included a video on the brewing process."

---quotes from an Associated Press item, San Francisco Chronicle, 9.2. 2012.)

("'Through his resurrection, Christ has conquered death and forgiven our sins so we can live forever...' said Mike Brown, spokesman for the Most Rev. Salvatore Cordileone, Bishop of Oakland."

---From a headline frontpage article by Theresa Harrington in the Contra Costa Times, 4.24. 2011. The article was accompanied by a color reproduction of a photograph of a man drinking from a sacramental wine goblet. According to Roman Catholic theology, the wine in such a goblet literally becomes blood after being blessed by a priest...)



(Bishop Cordileone was arrested for drunk driving in August 2012.)



(Jesuit priest Father Kevin O'Brien, the president of Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California resigned "...after an investigation into 'inappropriate behaviors' connected to alcohol use..."

---Katie Lauer, SanJoseInside dot com, 5.12. 2021.)



("Kirsten Sandberg, the chairwoman of the United Nations panel, said at a news conference in Geneva that tens of thousands of children around the world had suffered abuse by priests. 'We think it is a horrible thing that is being kept silent both by the Holy See itself and in the different local parishes.'"

---Laurie Goodstein, Nick Cummings-Bruce, and Jim Yardley, in an article about a recent United Nations report about the Roman Catholic Church's sexual-abuse scandal. The New York Times, 2.5. 2014.)



("Bishops and other leaders of the Roman Catholic Church in Pennsylvania covered up child sexual abuse by more than 300 priests over a period of 70 years, persuading victims not to report the abuse and law enforcement not to investigate it, according to a searing report issued by a grand jury...

 The report, which covered six of the state's eight Catholic dioceses...found more than 1,000 identifiable victims...The report said there are likely thousands more victims..."

---Laurie Goodstein and Sharon Otterman, The New York Times, 8.14. 2018.)



("A new report released Tuesday reveals that, over the past eight years, the Catholic Church has spent $10.6 million in the northeastern United States to fight legislation that would help victims of clergy sexual abuse seek justice."

---Christina Capatides, CBS News, 6.6. 2019.)



("The remains of 215 children, some as young as 3 years old, have been found buried on what was once the site of Canada's largest Indigenous residential school--one of the institutions that held children taken from families across the nation."

"From the 19th century until the 1970s, more than 150,000 First Nations children were required to attend state-funded Christian schools as part of a program to assimilate them into Canadian society. They were forced to convert to Christianity and not allowed to speak their native languages. Many were beaten and verbally abused, and up to 6,000 were said to have died."

"The Canadian government apologized in Parliament in 2008 and admitted that physical and sexual abuse in the schools was rampant."

"The Kamloops school operated between 1890 and 1969, when the federal government took over operations from the Catholic Church and operated it as a day school until it closed in 1978."

---CBS News, 5.29. 2021.)



(Married evangelical pastor Ted Haggard founded the New Life Church, with a congregation of more than 14,000 in Colorado. He was the leader of the National Association of Evangelicals. Although he crusaded against homosexuals, ABC news reported that for 3 years Haggard had paid a male prostitute for sex, and that Haggard also bought methamphetamine.)



(Well-known  Alabama Christian televangelist Acton Bowen pleaded guilty in 2019 to 28 child sex crimes, including raping and sexually assaulting 6 young boys. One of his victims was 12 years old. He was sentenced to more than 1,000 years in prison.)



("In an early 15th-century book from the Netherlands, Jesus is being crushed in a wine press, his cross used as a lever, with blood spurting from his body as the juice is from grapes in the making of communal wine."

"Through the ritual of the Mass conducted by a priest, consecrated bread and wine are believed to undergo a literal transformation--transubstantiation--into the living body of Jesus, which can then be absorbed through ingestion by worshippers."

---Holland Cotter, in a review of an art exhibit at the Morgan Library and Museum. The title of the exhibit: "Illuminating Faith: The Eucharist in Medieval Life and Art". The New York Times, 7.5. 2013.)



("Forty-five percent of Catholics did not know that their church teaches that the consecrated bread and wine are not merely symbols but actually become the body and blood of Christ."

---Laurie Goodstein, The New York Times, 9.28. 2010, reporting about a recent survey.)

("...God said to Abraham, 'Kill me a son'

Abe says, 'Man, you must be puttin' me on'"

---Bob Dylan, in his song "Highway 61 Revisited".)

("Ain't no homos gonna make it to heaven..."

---boy, 4 years old, singing in front of a church congregation in Indiana, 2012. The people in the church responded to the song by applauding and wildly cheering. [A radio host on KGO commented on a recording of the audience reaction to the boy singing: "It sounds like a crowd at a sports event."]


Around the same time, Rev. Charles Worley, a minister at Providence Road Baptist Church near Maiden, North Carolina, was reported to have called for homosexuals to be killed, citing a passage about homosexuals in the King James Version of the Bible:"...they shall surely be put to death..." [Leviticus 20:13]. The congregation at Worley's church was said to have given him a standing ovation...)


(Grayson Fritts, a detective with the Knox County Sheriff's Office is also a pastor at the All Scripture Baptist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee. Fritts gave multiple sermons in June 2019 in which he angrily demanded that the government kill LGBTQ [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and/or Questioning] people.

---from an article by Brittany Crocker, the Knoxville News Sentinel, 6.19. 2019.)




("...the word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish."

---Albert Einstein, in a 1954 letter to philosopher Erik Gutkind.)


("The disciples were sincere in their belief that they had seen Jesus alive. However, because seeing Jesus crucified and killed, the experience was so traumatic and they were so sad that they had abandoned Jesus that they simply hallucinated that he was alive."

---from Christian propaganda found outside of a church in Albany, California. Written by someone who has the delusional belief that someone called Jesus died and then came back to life. The writer of this propaganda is attempting to explain why some people refuse to believe that Jesus was "resurrected". [There is, of course, absolutely no credible evidence (and thus absolutely no"proof") that someone called Jesus died and then came back to life.])


("There is no heaven or afterlife...; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark."

---Theoretical physicist and best-selling author Stephen Hawking.)


("Science isn't truth. God is.'

---Franklin Graham, son of the famous evangelical preacher Billy Graham, June 2020, on Facebook. [Franklin Graham, like his father, suffers from mental illness.])


("He deeply disliked religion, saying once that Christianity was all right between consenting adults, but should not be taught to children."

---Nicholas Wade, describing Francis Crick, in a book review. The New York Times, 7.11. 2006.)


("Christ, the royal master,
Leads against the foe,
Forward into battle,
See his banners go!"

---Sabine Baring-Gould, in her 1865 hymn "Onward, Christian Soldiers", which was specifically written for children.)


("Jesus loves me, this I know
For the Bible tells me so.
Little ones to him belong
They are weak but He is strong."

---Anna Bartlett Warner, 1859.)


("'First, they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out--because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out--because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--because I was not a Jew.'

---Martin Niemöller, a German Protestant pastor."

"Niemöller cheered the rise of the National Socialist Party, voting for Hitler, and openly echoing his nationalistic, pro-Christian, exclusionary rhetoric. 'Niemöller remained an outspoken anti-Semite throughout the 1930s, justifying his prejudices by referring to Christian teachings that the Jews were guily of deicide, the killing of Jesus,' the Holocaust Museum says."

"Later, Niemöller's sermons attacked the Third Reich's attempts to control the church. The nazis obviously didn't like this very much. They sent him to Dachau, a German concentration camp..."

"In examining interviews, speech transcripts, and other documents, University of California at Santa Barbara history professor Harold Marcuse concluded that Niemöller didn't quite say things as he's been quoted. The persecuted groups he cited sometimes changed for his audience. So did the order in which he listed them. Sometimes he spoke as 'we'. Other times, it was 'I' and 'me'--as in 'When they came for me, there wasn't anyone left who protested.'

Even today, there is no one correct version, no exact replica of his words."

"In 1958, at the end of a paperback issue of THE PLAY OF THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK, schoolchildren found it put like this:

First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out--because I was not a Jew

Then they came for the Communists and I did not speak out--because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Trade Unionists and I did not speak out--because I was not a Trade Unionist

Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me."

---Michael S. Rosenwald, The Washington Post, 8.19. 2017.)


(Early in the morning on January 7, after a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol hours earlier on January 6, "...the Senate chaplain, in a closing prayer, said the 'quagmire of dysfunction...reminded us that words matter.'

'Amen', the devoutly Christian Mike Pence softly said."

---Maureen Groppe, USA TODAY, 1.8. 2021.)


("...Hitler was raised an Austrian Catholic...he often declared his belief in God and...called himself a Christian."

---Daniel Peterson and William Hamblin, Deseret News [Mormon-owned], 7.20. 2018.)


("Berkeley police said in court papers that Vincent Bryant pulled out a 13-foot-long metal chain when officers confronted him, then 'whipped it on the ground', telling police 'My weapon of choice is a fucking gun, but God wants me to use this on your ass.' He then raised the chain in the air to signify his intent to use the chain as a weapon', police wrote."

---Emilie Raguso, Berkeleyside, 1.7. 2021.)


("Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious."

---Sam Harris, in his book LETTER TO A CHRISTIAN NATION. Harris makes it very clear that belief in religion is extremely wrong and causes great harm. Here is a list of some books that Harris recommends:

1. THE GOD DELUSION by Richard Dawkins
2. BREAKING THE SPELL by Daniel C. Dennett
3. MISQUOTING JESUS by Bart D. Ehrman
4. KINGDOM COMING by Michelle Goldberg
5. THE END OF DAYS by Gershom Gorenberg
6. FREETHINKERS by Susan Jacoby
7. EXTRAORDINARY POPULAR DELUSIONS AND THE MADNESS OF CROWDS by Charles Mackay
8. WHY I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN by Bertrand Russell
9. GOD, THE DEVIL, AND DARWIN by Niall Shanks
10. ATHEISM: THE CASE AGAINST GOD by George H. Smith.)


("A neural network for religious fundamentalism derived from patients with brain lesions"

Michael A. Ferguson, Erik W. Asp, Isaiah Kletenik, Daniel Tranel, Aaron D. Boes, Jenae M. Nelson, Frederic L.W.V.J. Schaper, Shan Siddiqi, J. Seth Anderson, Jared Nielsen, James R. Bateman, Jordan Grafman, Michael D. Fox

[https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.12.22.572527v1]

Abstract:

"Religious fundamentalism, characterized by rigid adherence to a set of beliefs putatively revealing inerrant truths, is ubiquitous across cultures and has a global impact on society. Understanding the psychological and neurobiological processes producing religious fundamentalism may inform a variety of scientific, sociological, and cultural questions. Research indicates that brain damage can alter religious fundamentalism. However, the precise brain regions involved with these changes remain unknown. Here, we analyzed brain lesions associated with varying levels of religious fundamentalism in two large datasets from independent laboratories. Lesions associated with greater fundamentalism were connected to a specific brain network with nodes in the right orbitofrontal, dorsolateral prefrontal, and inferior parietal lobes. This fundamentalism network was strongly right hemisphere lateralized and highly reproducible across the independent datasets (r = 0.82) with cross-validations between datasets. To explore the relationship of this network to lesions previously studied by our group, we tested for similarities to twenty-one lesion-induced conditions. Lesions associated with confabulation and criminal behavior showed a similar connectivity pattern as lesions associated with greater fundamentalism. Moreover, lesions associated with poststroke pain showed a similar connectivity pattern as lesions associated with lower fundamentalism. These findings are consistent with hemispheric specializations in reasoning and lend insight into previously observed epidemiological associations with fundamentalism, such as cognitive rigidity and outgroup hostility.")


"Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly."

---Isaac Asimov, writing about Christians, in THE ROVING MIND.


("According to the poll, almost 80% believe in God or a 'higher power,' and around 70% believe in angels, heaven, or the power of prayer."

---Cara Tabachnik, CBS News, 10.5. 2023, in her article "Many Americans don't believe in organized religion. But they believe in a 'higher power,' poll finds".

David Hannum said "There is a sucker born every minute." [The quote is often misattributed to showman P.T. Barnum.] It is sad that "almost 80%" of the Americans questioned are undeniably delusional. It is part of the reason approximately 116 million Americans are said to still strongly support Donald Trump.)


("He who dares not offend cannot be honest."

---Thomas Paine. Only 6 people attended Paine's 1809 funeral. Paine's revolutionary writings in support of America declaring its independence from England made him extremely well known, but he was ostracized for his vehement ridicule of Christianity. Americans were also not pleased that he called George Washington a "hypocrite".)


("The great religions are sources of ceaseless and unnecessary suffering."

"Faith is the one thing that makes otherwise good people do bad things."

---Edward O. Wilson, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and former Harvard professor, in his book THE MEANING OF HUMAN EXISTENCE.)


("Facts and truth are matters of life and death. Misinformation, disinformation, delusions and deceit can kill."

---Marty Baron, editor of The Washington Post, speaking to the graduating class of Harvard University in May 2020.)


("'They're killing people': Biden blames Facebook, other social media for allowing Covid misinformation" [headline]

"The White House has warned in recent days that false claims shared on those platforms are contributing to a decline in U.S. vaccination rates."

""They're killing people', Biden said..."

---Lauren Egan, NBC News, 7.16. 2021.)


("Absolutely nothing useful is realized when one person who holds that there is a 0 [zero] percent probability of something argues against another person who holds that the probability is 100 percent."

---Nate Silver, in his 2012 book THE SIGNAL AND THE NOISE: Why so many predictions fail--but some don't.)


("Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about. quite frankly. And I want to say that officially. You do not know what you are talking about."

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the White House chief medical advisor, speaking to Senator Rand Paul at a televised 7.20. 2021 Senate Health, Education, labor, and Pensions Committee hearing on the Covid-19 pandemic. Paul had made an "unsupported accusation" that Fauci was partly responsible for the deaths of "4 million" people from Covid-19 worldwide. Reported on CNN by Rachel Janfaza.)


(Is the moon made of green cheese?)


("A man without faith is like a fish without a bicycle."

---Charles S. Harris, 1955.

Someone later said "A man needs God like a fish needs a bicycle."

[In 1970, some feminists adopted a paraphrase of the second quote.])


("A belief in a god is one of the most damaging things that infests humanity at this particular moment in history."

---James Randi, 2016.)


("Christians Against Christian Nationalism describes Christian nationalism as an ideology that 'demands Christianity be privileged by the state and implies that to be a good American, one must be Christian.'"

Russell Moore, president of the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, "...said that he has begun speaking with pastors about quelling QAnon's potential influence within congregations and plans to do more to provide resources to that end.

'One of the barriers to speaking to these conspiracy theories is many pastors and leaders rightly recognize this stuff as crazy, so they assume it doesn't need to be spoken to', he said. "But we live in a crazy time.'"

---Elana Schor, [AP], 1.28. 2021, in an article about the "Christianity on display" at the Capitol riot in Washington, D.C. on 1.6. 2021.)


("This is John Cage. By chance, you are listening to KALX, K-A-L-X Berkeley, B-e-r-k-e-l-e-y...[soft chuckle]"

---University of California radio station identification announcement)


("Chance governs all things."

---Luis Buñuel)


(The belief that "nothing happens by accident" is one of the defining traits of mentally ill conspiracy theorists, according to Michael Barkun. It is also one of the defining traits of the delusional Christian belief in an all-powerful "God".

"...chance alone is at the source of every innovation, of all creation in the biosphere."

---noted molecular biologist Jaques Monod, in his 1970 book CHANCE AND NECESSITY.)


("In 2008, Steve D. Pankey's former wife heard him say at his son's funeral 'I hope God didn't allow this to happen because of Jonelle Matthews,' prosecutors wrote."

---Patty Nieberg, AP, Yahoo News, 10.13. 2020, in her article "Former Idaho Governor Candidate Indicted in 1984 Killing". A 12-year-old girl, Jonelle Matthews, was murdered. Pankey, her accused killer, is a fervent Christian and a Republican who was a member of the U.S. Army. He worshipped at the same church as Matthews.)


("I have been...a deacon and Bible teacher for many years."

"...my decision to sever my ties with the Southern Baptist Convention, after six decades, was painful and difficult. It was...an unavoidable decision when the convention leaders, quoting a few carefully selected Bible verses and claiming Eve was created second to Adam and was responsible for original sin, ordained that women must be 'subservient' to their husbands..."

"At its most repugnant, the belief that women must be subjugated to the wishes of men excuses slavery, violence,  forced prostitution, genital mutilation and national laws that omit rape as a crime."

---Jimmy Carter, who was president of the United States from 1977 to 1981. 7.15. 2009, The Age, in an article he wrote "Losing my Religion for Equality".)


("All... churches...appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit."

---Thomas Paine)


("Sarah Sanders was widely mocked in January when she told the Christian Broadcasting Network that God 'wanted Donald Trump to become president, and that's why he's there.'"

---Fintan O'Toole, The New York Review of Books, 3.21. 2019.)


("Superstition ain't the way"

---Stevie Wonder, in the 1972 song "Superstition".)


("You've...said...that God is with you."

---radio host Michael Krasny.

"Yes."

---25-year-old Republican Morgan Murtaugh, a Latina whose father is a deputy sheriff. Murtaugh was  a congressional candidate at the time she spoke with Krasny, 8.16. 2018, on KQED.

"How do you know?"

---Michael Krasny.

"I just do. I mean, I've been following my path...I mean this isn't an easy task to...this isn't an easy...easy path to be on but it has been very easy actually for me...I feel like everything's been falling into place and I think it's because he's with me."

---Morgan Murtaugh.)


(Walking down a street in Berkeley, I found a small translucent purple bouncy ball with the image of a witch [flying astride a broom] printed on it. A short time later I found a small coin with the image of a female angel with large wings, standing on clouds.

["...got to get your puppy buried so he can go to heaven."

---Singer/songwriter/actor Johnny Cash, in a 1976 episode of the TV show "Little House on the Prairie". Cash, once addicted to amphetamines and barbiturates, was arrested in 1965 for possession of amphetamines. In this episode of the show, he plays a crook who is impersonating a Christian preacher. He tells a little girl whose pet has died that when she goes to heaven, it will be waiting for her there...(I have not seen or heard of any evidence that life after death exists. I HAVE seen overwhelming and extremely convincing evidence that when a person dies, so does their consciousness.)

("In a classic 1997 episode of 'The Simpsons' [El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Homer], Homer has a hallucinatory experience after eating 'Guatemalan Insanity Peppers'" grown by the inmates of an insane asylum in Guatemala. While tripping, Homer is visited by a "Coyote Spirit Guide", voiced by Johnny Cash...

---from a 11.14. 2005 article by Karl Heitmuller, published on MTV News.)])


("He Turned the Water into Wine" is  a 1969 song by Johnny Cash, based on a quote from the Bible, John 2:1-11.)


In 1972 in Berkeley, I was ordained as a Universal Life Church minister by Isaac Bonewits...


('...in a bowler hat, wrapped in newspaper, were some sticks of celery."

---Graham Greene, in his novel THE END OF THE AFFAIR. Greene was describing a man in a church, with a bowler hat beside him, praying in front of "the worst" of the religious art there.)


"...a fascination with what exactly believers see in their minds while praying, and what happens to those images once belief is abandoned."

---Lidija Haas, book reviewer, describing the narrator in a novel. Harper's Magazine, April 2018.


("When the Second World War
Came to an end
We forgave the Germans
And then we were friends
Though they murdered six million
In the ovens they fried
The Germans now too
Have God on their side."

---Bob Dylan, in his song "With God On Our Side", first performed in 1963. "...you never ask questions when God's on your side.")


The Trijicon ACOG (Advanced Combat Optical Gunsight) used by the U.S. military caused a controversy in 2010 when ABC News discovered the company was putting references to Bible verses on its products.


(When I was 8 years old, my father traded a Russian rifle for a World War II Wehrmacht model Luger pistol, which came with a belt that had a buckle decorated with a swastika surrounded by the words "Gott Mit Uns" ["God With Us"]. I fired the gun many, many times as I grew up.)


("At one meeting not less than a thousand persons fell to the ground apparently without sense or motion."

"When attacked by the jerks, the victims of enthusiasm sometimes leaped like frogs and exhibited every grotesque and hideous contortion of the face and limbs. The barks consisted in getting down on all fours, growling, snapping the teeth, and barking like dogs...these last [who barked like dogs] were particularly gifted in prophecies, trances, dreamas, rhapsodies, visions of angels, of heaven, and of the holy city."

---Monsignor Ronald Knox, a Catholic theologian, in his 1950 book ENTHUSIASM: A Chapter in Religious History, describing Christian revival meetings like the many extraordinarily successful ones conducted by John Wesley.)



("...what people who take LSD experience. To them, everything becomes brightly colored, and they cannot see clearly. They paint some bizarre paintings which no one can figure out, because they just recklessly splash on the colors. After they finish painting, some people say, 'Wow! What a masterpiece!' People actually praise them...This experience is caused by the demon king. When you take LSD, the demons are also at work, making you experience changes."

---from the [Chinese "Buddhist"] Gold Mountain Monastery Newsletter, San Francisco, 1999.)


("There are these 'beatles', their creed is revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that has no meaning."

"Then there are these 'hippies', a special sect of the 'beatles' who believe that the road to a new garden, where there is eternal sunshine and ever-blooming flower season, is blocked by the limitations of the normal mind. To break through and transcend these limitations they take to, what are called, mind-expanding drugs, marijuana, L.S.D., hashish, alcohol and bhang. None has, so far returned...though many have preished in body and before our very eyes."

---Sirdar Kapur Singh, an eminent Sikh philosopher, in a 1968 lecture that was poorly translated and published in his book ME JUDICE [India, 2003].)





("...took a sip of his wine and said, nodding at a canvas, 'That reminds me of the time I took seventeen hits of acid.'"

---negative comment about an abstract painting, made by someone who hates art, in Patrick Somerville's 2012 novel THIS BRIGHT RIVER.)







(John Boehner, former Speaker of the U.S. House, smokes cigarettes, "saying 'it's a bad habit'. He says a lot of people tell him to quit, but 'I am who I am.'"

---Yahoo News, 1.7. 2011. Boehner is a Republican who has been called a "hard-core conservative". In 2016 he joined the board of the tobacco company Reynolds American. In 2018 he joined the board of Acreage Holdings, a cannabis corporation, and in 2019 he was named chair of the National Cannabis Roundtable, a lobbying organization.)




("Facts are stupid things--"

---Ronald Reagan, at the Republican National Convention, 1988, in a slip of the tongue that he immediately corrected by saying "...stubborn things...", which was what he had consciously meant to say.)




("And then the gorilla run knee socks paint porno on the Cadillac. But school laughed and didn't we sing hats?" were Pulitzer Prize winner Leonard Pitts, Jr.'s opening words in a piece published in September 2009. He was paraphrasing members of the Republican party at their convention. He says they have gone beyond mere "intellectual dishonesty" and are apparently genuinely insane. As he wrote, Republicans "behave as if words no longer have objective meaning".)




("...one of the hard facts of history: a nation may lose its power and integrity slowly, in minute particles."

---William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick, in the factual epilogue to their best-selling 1958 novel THE UGLY AMERICAN.)




("We oppose the teaching of...critical thinking skills and similar programs...which...have the purpose of challenging the student's fixed beliefs..."

---from the official platform of the Republican Party of Texas, 2012. Reported July 24, 2012 in the Miami Herald by Leonard Pitts, Jr., who contacted the Republican Party which confirmed that they had released a statement containing the above sentence. The Republicans were concerned about critical thinking skills "undermining parental authority".)



("Texas Attorney General Greg Abbot...used Ted Nugent for Republican campaign appearances a month after the singer referred to President Obama as a 'subhuman mongrel'."

---Mark Binelli, Rolling Stone, 7.3. 2014.)




(Federal courts "sit to ensure that individuals are not imprisoned in violation of the Constitution--not to correct errors of fact."

---William Rehnquist. At the time he wrote the above words, Rehnquist was the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Rehnquist then quoted a 1977 U.S. Supreme Court decision: "'Due process does not require that every conceivable step be taken, at whatever cost, to eliminate the possibility on convicting an innocent person.' To conclude otherwise would all but paralyze our system for enforcement of the criminal law.")




("...21st century America is a place where elections are bought by huge money, where presidents of both parties ignore the basic tenets of the Constitution, where the life-time appointed judiciary spends much of its time helping Big Business tilt the law against the population, and where the major parties resemble each other on most policies."

"...many Americans so accurately perceive the fraud being perpetrated on them that they have decided to tune out."

"That...doesn't prove a person is a bad citizen or dumb. That latter label should be left to those who doggedly pretend that America is still a functioning democracy."

---David Sirota, the San Francisco Chronicle, 7.6. 2012.)


"You can't clean the dishes with a dirty rag..."


("Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil. "

---Jerry Garcia, Rolling Stone magazine interview, 11.30. 1989, explaining why he did not vote.)




("Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable..."

---George Orwell)




("...if you are a woman, chances are you're feeling so much rage that there simply aren't enough hours in the day to contain it all..."

"In 2018, no one needs to ask a woman 'Why are you so angry?' She's an anomaly if she's not."

---Stephanie Zacharek, in her review of 3 recent books, RAGE BECOMES HER: The Power of Women's Anger by Soraya Chemaly, GOOD AND MAD: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger by Rebecca Traister, and FED UP: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward, by Gemma Hartley. TIME, 10.15. 2018.)




(The horrifying truth is that both major political parties in America have become what the musician Beck called "forces of evil in a bozo nightmare". Almost all mainstream political activity seems to be just "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic"...)




("Going to the candidates debate
Laugh about it, shout about it
When you've got to choose
Every way you look at it you lose"

---Paul Simon, in his song "Mrs. Robinson", which was recorded by Simon & Garfunkel and became a number one hit in 1968.)




("I have a strategy for watching Trump when he delivers his big address tonight: I'll clear my mind and set aside my doubts. I'll use what the actor Margot Kidder, my former mother-in-law, calls 'LSD eyes.' Because if there exists the slightest chance that tonight is the night the madness becomes unstoppable, I want it to tug at me too, at least a little, so I'll have a deep recollection of the turn. That, or I want to be struck aghast, which is impossible if I start already aghast."

---Walter Kirn, Harper's, October 2016.)







(6.2. 2011. BBC news item:

"THE WAR ON DRUGS HAS FAILED"

Former Presidents of Colombia [Cesar Gaviria], Brazil [Fernando Henrique Cardoso], and Mexico [Ernesto Zedillo], current Prime Minister of Greece George Papandreou, former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, and former EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, members of the 19-member Global Commission on Drug Policy, issue a call for an end to jailing users.

"'...repressive strategies will not solve the drug problem...the war on drugs has not, and cannot, be won,' the report said."

"The UN estimates that opiate use increased 35% worldwide from 1998 to 2008, cocaine by 27%, and cannabis by 8.5%."

"Instead of punishing users who the report says 'do no harm to others,' the commission argues that governments should end criminalisation of drug use...")



I have never met anyone who does not use some kind of drug. It is obvious that the "War on Drugs" is actually a "War on People". I strongly urge everyone to use any and all nonviolent means necessary to stop the vicious and insane nonsense called the "War on Drugs".



("Ronald K. Siegel, a leading authority on psychoactive substances...believed the war on drugs was futile because the pursuit of intoxication--drugs, alcohol, psychotropic plants--is permanently and deeply embedded in the psyche of every human being..."

"'In a sense,the war on drugs is a war against ourselves, a denial of our very nature,' Siegel wrote."

---from Siegel's obituary in The Los Angeles Times, 4.3. 2019)



(According to a report issued by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2010, there were more than than 1.6 million drug arrests in 2009. 82 percent of those arrests were for possession alone.)



("The World Bank estimates that tobacco will kill five hundred million of the present global population."

---Michael Specter, in an article he wrote, "Getting A Fix", about drug decriminalization in Portugal. The New Yorker, 10.17. 2011.)



("Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, an advocacy group, reports that after 40 million arrests and a trillion dollars spent to fight drug use, the number of those who have used drugs is up 2,800 percent since 1970."

---Leonard Pitts, Jr., in an article about why the NAACP has passed a resolution calling for an end to the War on Drugs. The Miami Herald, 8.1. 2011.)



("People like getting high.

Whether to shake off the busy day with a joint or a cocktail, or to break free of normal sensory reality and explore the wild beyond, drugs have always been a part of the human experience, shaping our societies for good, ill, or a complex and fascinating mixture of both."

---Steven T. Jones, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, 8.19. 2009.)



("That drug use is potentially harmful to the user is beyond dispute..."

"...not every incident of drug use harms others; in fact, the vast majority do not. Indeed...it is likely that many if not most drug users never do wrongful harm to others as a result of their using careers--bearing in mind that the majority of these careers are limited in duration and intensity."

---Robert MacCoun and Peter Reuter)







("During a speech on state TV, Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi made the claim that protesters in Libya were given 'hallucination pills' by infiltrating groups."

---CBS news, 2.22. 2011.)

Even though Qaddafi was said by American news media sources to be suffering from mental illness, I do definitely think that ALL secret police agencies have stockpiles of hallucinogenic drugs. Including the secret police agencies that are pro-democracy. (When the CIA said that they had discontinued their research on the feasibility of using LSD, etc. for interrogation and for use in warfare they were very obviously lying, of course.)

(According to Reuters, "On June 9, 1998 a former South African government scientist told South Africa's Truth Commission that in the final days of apartheid the government ordered its chemists to make one ton of ecstasy, for 'riot control'.
The scientist, Dr Johan Koekemoer, former head of chemical and biological weapons research at the secret Delta G facility, told the commission that he did not approve of the project and did not trust the motives of those who asked him to make the ecstasy, saying 'I did not believe ecstasy was a good incapacitant and I told my superiors that...ecstasy enhances interpersonal relationships. I told Dr Mijburgh [overall chief of Delta G] I did not want to kiss my enemy'. He personally delivered the ecstasy, in powder form, to Mijburgh between February 1992 and January 1993."

More details on the case from a correspondent in South Africa:
"At the moment, there is an ongoing commission of inquiry being held into the activities of the secret service during the apartheid years. The last few days of the inquiry have lifted the lid on the activities of a clandestine government laboratory called the Roodeplaat Research Laboratory. Evidence presented by former lab employees at the commission of inquiry this week, reveal that the laboratory produced all sorts of exotic poisons for use against anti-apartheid activists. These included cyanide, thallium, botulism and paraquat - and, wait for it, ecstasy.
According to evidence presented this week, between February 1992 and January 1993, no less than 912kg of Ecstasy `in pure crystalline form' was manufactured by the laboratory. Working on a tab dosage of say 125mgs, that's enough E for more than 7 million hits! The evidence being presented to the commission is that the E was going to be used to `incapacitate the enemy'.
The shadowy figure behind the E production was the former head of the army special operations called Wouter Basson who is now facing criminal charges for being in possession of E a year or two back. The evidence presented in court was that he was having the E manufactured for `incapacitating the enemy', but the word is that he was was producing it for international distibution in order to make himself a whole lot of money.")


("A court found a nephew of the United Nations Secretary General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, guilty today of smuggling the hallucinogenic drug LSD into Egypt and sentenced him to 10 years in prison.
The nephew, Karim Raouf Ghali, 17, was also ordered to pay a fine of $61,000 and customs duties of nearly $847,000 for the smuggled tablets. The street value of the drugs was not known.
His family is expected to appeal the sentence. Judge Abdel-Nasser Ramdan of the juvenile court in Alexandria called it lenient."

---The New York Times, 9.25. 1995.)





("Pickard faced 20 years in prison if convicted in 1988 [for manufacturing LSD] but according to a court affidavit, charges were dropped because he was an informant."

---quote from an article about William Leonard Pickard, "Past director of UCLA drug policy program convicted of running LSD lab" by Brad Greenberg. The article was published in the Daily Bruin, University of California, Los Angeles, 4.3. 2003, and was about Pickard's later arrest and conviction on LSD charges including those related to another LSD lab that was supposedly being assembled in a converted missile silo in Kansas. In the trial that occurred after Pickard's final arrest in October 2000, the authorities alleged that at one point he had been producing approximately 2.2 pounds of pure LSD [enough to make between 10 to 20 million doses] every 5 weeks.)


("Pickard himself told the Kansas court he had been a DEA informant since 1973 and had periodic contact with senior DEA officials on 'international cases' since 1992. If released on bail, Pickard promised, 'I would immediately proceed to report to the federal building [and] cooperate even aggressively with the DEA in any matters that they wish.'"

---Seth Rosenfeld, the San Francisco Chronicle, 12.19. 2000. On SFgate.com.)




(In his 1986 book THE AGENCY: The Rise and Decline of the CIA, John Ranelagh said that former CIA director Stansfield Turner noted that because CIA agents cannot tell anyone what they are doing, because they often have to lie about their life, they can develop a deformed personality, which is not a good thing.)




("...intelligence is more important than elimination."

---Nazi counterespionage officer H. J. Giskes, in his 1949 book LONDON CALLING NORTH POLE, explaining why the Nazis sometimes secretly helped British flyers escape from Nazi-occupied countries. These British flyers were completely unaware that that their journeys to freedom were orchestrated by the Nazis. Giskes was quoted by former U.S. Director of Central Intelligence [de facto head of the CIA] Allen Dulles in a book Dulles edited, GREAT TRUE SPY STORIES, 1968.)




(A longtime "friend" of mine came to me and said he had been selected by a group of my friends to do an "intervention" with me. He said that people were tired of me living in an "ivory tower". He claimed people felt that I was unfairly devoting myself to meditating, making art, writing poems, and doing good deeds. He said that in the real world, EVERYONE must do some good things and some bad things, and that because I refused to do my "share" of bad things, I was forcing others to do more than their "fair share" of bad things...



["Just as the conscious part of the psyche is focused in a center that we call "I" and that Jung discriminates as the ego, so the unconscious part of the personal psyche is focused and personified as a sort of alter ego, the shadow."

"If an individual is unaware of his shadow...the elements in his own nature which cannot be accommodated in this shining personality will be projected to someone in his immediate environment."

"...the one on whom the shadow has fallen is unavoidably influenced in an unconscious way by the projection...and...the recipient of the projection may be constrained to live the negative role projected upon him."

"We see this sometimes in a group where there is someone who...never, never raises his voice, never says an unkind thing about anybody. But then his shadow falls on others in the group, and they are compelled to express his negative and all-too-human reactions. They find themselves making critical remarks that are really more incisive and destructive than would be warranted by their own feelings. For there is something peculiarly exasperating about someone who has no shadow. We find ourselves obliged to disagree with him whether we want to or not."

---M. Esther Harding, a Jungian analyst, in THE "I" AND THE "NOT-I"---A Study in the Development of Consciousness.]

[I understand that what Harding has written contains much truth. I understand that I have a shadow. AND I think it is IMPORTANT to be as kind and generous as possible.]



["Virtue is difficult to endure. People resent the bright spotlight of pure goodness. It makes them feel deficient."

---Frances Fyfield, in her novel UNDERCURRENTS.]



["...powered by the overwhelming significance of jealousy in everyday life."

---Chuck Klosterman, explaining "reality" television programming, in his book CHUCK KLOSTERMAN IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas.]



["You are going to feel awful beyond words. You are going to have a number of days in a row where you hate everything and don't believe in anything."

"It can wreak just the tiniest bit of havoc with your self-esteem to find that you are hoping for small bad things to happen to this friend--for, say, her head to blow up. Or for him to wake up one morning with a pain in his prostate..."

---Anne Lamott, describing what happens to a writer when another writer, who is a friend, is very successful.]



["...perhaps someone...wanted to end a sense of their own ugliness by taking the life of the beautiful thing that gave weight to those feelings."

---Jacqueline Winspear, in her murder mystery LEAVING EVERYTHING MOST LOVED.]



[Jenks and Spoon are robbing Sherman in a rough part of St. Louis, Missouri. Sherman gives them his money and mentions that he is a grad student studying poetry.

"'You gonna be a poet?' Jenks couldn't believe it. Of all the fucked up things."

"As Sherman talked, Jenks felt himself deflate." (Because Jenks realizes that Sherman is "On his way to something better.")

"Spoon moved forward, stuck the knife into Sherman's chest, slammed it down to the hilt."

"Who the fuck he think he is. He think he better than us."

---Victor Gischler, in his 2005 novel THE PISTOL POETS.]



["The need to bring down to our own wretched level, to deface, to deride and debunk any splendour that is towering above us, is probably the saddest urge of human nature."

---Pierre Ryckmans, who writes under the name of Simon Leys, in his book THE HALL OF USELESSNESS: COLLECTED ESSAYS.]



["...the song of a poet who died in the gutter"

---Bob Dylan, in his 1962 song "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall".]



["No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth."

---said to have been said by Plato.]


["The world..."
"...may hate him who dares to..."
"...raze the gilding..."

---Charlotte Brontë, discussing Christian religious hypocrisy, in the 1847 preface to the second edition of JANE EYRE.]


["...as for getting along with one another, I put in a big plug for hypocrisy. We don't have to be honest with each other all the time."

---Patricia Limerick, a well-known historian who is described as a hippie-type, explaining how she is able to speak to the audiences of ignorant and hate-filled racist conservative Christian voters. The quote was in an article by Ian Frazier, The New Yorker, 5.8. 2017.]






["Humans are very irrational."

---Dennis Elam, a professor of accounting at Texas A&M-San Antonio, quoted by Matt Krantz, USA TODAY, 11.17. 2009.]


["Nothing drives people crazier than seeing someone have a good life."

---Chuck Palahniuk]





["...much of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control."

"...neuroscience has shown that the conscious mind is not the one driving the boat."

---David Eagleman, a neuroscientist, in his book INCOGNITO--The Secret Lives of the Brain.

("...I lie a lot..."

---Toni Cade Bambara, in "A Sort of Preface" in her 1972 collection of short stories, GORILLA, MY LOVE. She is the author of my very favorite short story, "Sweet Town".)

(Someone I knew quite well was driving a pickup truck that crashed. He and a passenger were seriously injured. Years after the wreck, the driver told me that what happened was that he was driving along at a high rate of speed feeling fine and suddenly he saw himself violently turn the steering wheel as far as he could to the left. He said "It was like I was possessed by a demon." This suicidal/homicidal driver, who had read a lot of what C.G. Jung had written, told me he had spoken with a number of people who were in serious wrecks and more than a few of them confided to him that something similar had happened to them.

Kind of scary when you think of all of the roads and all of the vehicles and all of the drivers!)]





["Just a broken guy...got a few screws loose, I guess...never really knew it 'til now..."

---Richard Russell, a 29-year-old airline worker who stole a 76-foot commercial airplane from the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, speaking to air traffic controllers. Russell, an active church member who was earning less than minimum wage, flew for approximately one hour before dying in a suicidal crash that did not injure anyone else. 8.10. 2018.]



["Losing belief in free will undercuts the rationale for ever hating anyone."

---Sam Harris, in his book FREE WILL.]


["...trouble him not, his wits are gone."

---King Lear's servant, Kent, jn Shakespeare's tragedy "King Lear", speaking to a nobleman about the king, who has become insane.]



[Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859), author of CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM EATER, brought the word "subconscious" into the English language.]


cryptomnesia



["...stumbling through the parking lot of an invisible 7-11..."

---Frank Beard, Billy Gibbons, and Dusty Hill, in their song "My Head's in Mississippi", recorded by ZZ Top, and released in 1990.]



["If you'd told me back in law school that within eight years I'd be married with four kids, assorted pets, a van, and a hideous suburban mortgage, I'd have written you off as a major wingnut. It just wasn't part of the master plan."

---Kelly Valen, in her 2010 book THE TWISTED SISTERHOOD: Unraveling the Dark Legacy of Female Friendships.]




["Nietzsche said the best way to enrage people is to force them to change their mind about you."

---Joanna Kavenna, The New Yorker, 7.11. 2011.]



["Would you rather earn $50,000 a year while other people make $25,000, or would you rather earn $100,000 a year while other people get $250,000? Assume for the moment that prices of goods and services remain the same.

Surprisingly--stunningly, in fact--research shows that the majority of people select the first option; they would rather make twice as much as others even if that meant earning half as much as they could otherwise have. How irrational is that?

This result is one among thousands of experiments in behavioral economics, neuroeconomics and evolutionary economics conclusively demonstrating that we are every bit as irrational when it comes to money as we are in most other aspects of our lives. In this case, relative social ranking trumps absolute financial status. Here's a related thought experiment. Would you rather be A or B?

A is waiting in line at a movie theater. When he gets to the ticket window, he is told that as he is the 100,000th customer of the theater, he has just won $100.

B is waiting in line at a different theater. The man in front of him wins $1,000 for being the 1-millionth customer of the theater. Mr. B wins $150.

Amazingly, most people said that they would prefer to be A. In other words, they would rather forgo $50 in order to alleviate the feeling of regret that comes with not winning the thousand bucks. Essentially, they were willing to pay $50 for regret therapy.

This research goes a long way toward debunking one of the biggest myths in all of psychology and economics, known as 'Homo Economicus.' This is the theory that "economic man" is rational, self-maximizing and efficient in making choices. But why should this be so? Given what we know about how irrational and emotional people are in all other aspects of life, why would we suddenly become rational and logical when shopping or investing?

Consider one more experimental example to prove the point: the ultimatum game. You are given $100 to split between yourself and your game partner. Whatever division of the money you propose, if your partner accepts it, you each get to keep your share. If, however, your partner rejects it, neither of you gets any money.

How much would you offer? Why not suggest a $90-$10 split? If your game partner is a rational, self-interested money-maximizer--the very embodiment of 'Homo Economicus'--he isn't going to turn down a free 10 bucks, is he? He is. Research shows that proposals that offer much less than a $70-$30 split are usually rejected.

Why? Because they aren't fair. Says who? Says the moral emotion of "reciprocal altruism," which evolved over the Paleolithic eons to demand fairness on the part of our potential exchange partners. 'I'll scratch your back if you'll scratch mine' only works if I know you will respond with something approaching parity. The moral sense of fairness is hard-wired into our brains and is an emotion shared by most people and primates tested for it, including people from non-Western cultures and those living close to how our Paleolithic ancestors lived.

When it comes to money, as in most other aspects of life, reason and rationality are trumped by emotions and feelings."

---Michael Shermer, 1.13. 2008.]


[It is "self-evident" "truth" that
"All men are created equal"

---from the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776. It is quite obviously delusional to believe that all men are created equal. This declaration reflects the extremely deep roots of America's unhealthy obsession with parity and disparity.])


I agree with Barbara Ehrenreich: I am offended by the "depraved smugness" of people who say or imply that "poverty is a voluntary condition".)


(It seems that more than a few people who work 9-to-5 jobs tend to have an intense dislike of artists and poets. Even artists and poets like me who have made absolutely no money from their art or their poetry. Old "friends" see that I am homeless and poverty-stricken and they genuinely feel I deserve to suffer--because they believe that I had fun and/or found meaning in my life while they had to go to work everyday doing doing jobs that they frequently did not like and now they are no longer young and they feel all their painful labor ultimately resulted in their obtaining nothing of real value.


["Trade in your hours for a handful of dimes."

---Jim Morrison, in the song "Five to One", recorded by The Doors in 1968.]


["If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living for. I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage. I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living."

---Henry David Thoreau, LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE, 1863.]


["Arbeit macht frei" (A German phrase meaning "work makes [you] free".)

---sign placed over the entrances of a number of Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz I, during the Second World War.]


It seems to me that many of my old "friends" have a false belief that I made a lot of money from my association with LSD and selfishly did not share any of it with them. Their attitude toward me when they see me poor and homeless defines schadenfreude!


["When I was down
You just stood there grinning"

---Bob Dylan, in his song "Positively 4th Street", first recorded in 1965.]


["The emphasis was on gossip, tailored for a mythical 'Missy Smith in Kansas City,' who 'wanted to know that celebrities suffered too.'"

---Kelly Vance, in a review of a movie about the National Enquirer tabloid. The East Bay Express, 11.20. 2019.]


They absolutely do not believe me when I tell them I did NOT make a lot of money--that, in fact, after I subtracted the cost of the materials required to properly handle and package the LSD, and the cost of properly transporting, and storing the LSD from the fees I was paid I LOST money! I was not even able to cover my operating expenses and had to borrow money to be able to eat and pay rent!


["There is far too great a disproportion between what one is and what others think one is, or at least what they say they think one is. But one has to take it all with good humor."

---Albert Einstein]


["...Deborah had noticed over the years that whenever she mentioned her art...a subtle change would come over Carla. Her face would harden almost imperceptibly; her manner would edge toward coolness."
"...one day...she realized that at any mention of her art, her friend drew back."
"...the strange aloofness stood out clearly."

(Deborah's doctor said to Deborah:
" 'You always took your art for granted...' "
" '...you managed to do your drawing in spite of every sort of inconvenience and restriction.' "
" 'You were rich in your gift...and now you see how it can be with others who are not so lucky to have a creative calling into which they can grow and grow.' "
" 'There may be many who envy you...' "
" 'You have been taking for granted this rich and prolific gift of yours that so many others would give so much to have themselves.' ")

---quotes from a 1964 novel by "Hannah Green" (Joanne Greenberg), I NEVER PROMISED YOU A ROSE GARDEN.]





["In the infamous Monty Hall Problem, named after the television game show, human subjects seem to pale next to pigeons in mathematical reasoning. A guest on the show has to choose among three doors, behind one of which is a prize. The guest states his choice, and the host opens one of the two remaining closed doors, always being careful that it is one behind which there is no prize. Should the guest switch to the remaining closed door? Most people choose to stay with their original choice, which is wrong—switching would increase their chance of winning from 1/3 to 2/3. (There is a 1/3 chance that the guest’s original pick was correct, and that does not change.) Even after playing the game many times, which would afford ample opportunity to observe that switching doubles the chances of winning, most people in a recent study switched only 2/3 of the time. Pigeons did better. After a few tries, the birds learn to switch every time."

---John Allen Paulos, Scientific American, January 2011.]

[I was explaining the Monty Hall Problem to a friend as we were drinking tea in a restaurant. Another customer (a gambler) overheard our conversation and became quite agitated. He was extremely insistent that the guest should stick with his first choice, because the customer said the odds were 50/50 that the first choice was correct. When I very, very politely informed him that the odds were actually more like 33/66, he stormed out of the restaurant, and got in his car. Then he came back in the restaurant in a state of fury and yelled "You are saying I am stupid!!! Why don't you step outside and tell me I am wrong, that the odds are not 50/50??? I'll punch you out, you insulting #@*#%!"]


[""I think avoiding humiliation is the core of tragedy and comedy and probably of our lives."

---playwright John Guare, quoted by John Lahr, The New Yorker, 5.9. 2011.]


[The pigeons are better than people at solving the Monty Hall Problem because, unlike human beings, they have no ego. LSD has been frequently cited as an inspiration by people working in the computer industry because LSD can lessen the ego and thus make it easier to solve problems. People who have not experienced LSD-induced states of lessened ego commonly believe that their ego is who they truly are. People who have not tripped sometimes think that if they lose their ego they will also lose consciousness. They tend to be quite frightened by the idea of ego-loss because they think that the less ego one has, the less control one has...]


["Jung's use of the word 'self' is different from that of common usage, in which the self is synonymous with ego. 'Self' as Jung uses it has a special meaning; it is that center of being which the ego circumambulates; at the same time it is the superordinate factor in a system in which the ego is subordinate."

---June Singer, in her book BOUNDARIES OF THE SOUL--The Practice of Jung's Psychology.]


["...the prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination."

---Alan Watts, 1966, in THE BOOK On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are.]


["The texture of...socially shared hallucinations is what we call reality, and our collusive madness is what we call sanity."

---R.D. Laing, 1967, in THE POLITICS OF EXPERIENCE.]


["A human being is part of the whole, called by us 'universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security."

---Albert Einstein]


[Civilization exalts the "sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin".

"There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarity."

---Walter Benjamin]


[THOSE WHO HAVE NOT EXPERIENCED A NON-EGO STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS CANNOT COMPREHEND THAT SUCH A STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS CAN EXIST.

THERE ARE NO WORDS TO ACCURATELY DESCRIBE A NON-EGO STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

IT CAN ONLY BE EXPERIENCED.]


["If something is a little foreign, it is strange...If something is completely foreign, it is invisible."

---Susan Schaller, in A MAN WITHOUT WORDS.]


["Aunt Edna...loathes being baffled."

---playwright Terence Rattigan, describing middle-class audiences with conventional tastes. Rattigan was quoted by John Lahr in The New Yorker, 10.17. 2011.]


["What is accepted as 'normal reality' is always a smaller reality than the one safely possible."

---Robert E.L. Masters and Jean Houston, in PSYCHEDELIC ART.]


["At least part of the meaning of LSD today is this: that chemical technology has made available to the millions the experience of transcendence of the individual ego, which a century ago was available only to the disciplined mystic."

---Frank Barron, in CREATIVITY AND PERSONAL FREEDOM.]


["...those common disorders that psychedelics show promise in alleviating: depression, addiction, anxiety and obsession. All these disorders involve uncontrollable and endlessly repeating loops of rumination that gradually shade out reality and fray our connections to other people and the natural world. The ego becomes hyperactive, even tyrannical, enforcing rigid habits of thought and behavior--habits that the psychedelic experience, by loosening the ego's grip, could help us break."

"That power to disrupt mental habits and 'lubricate cognition' is what Robin Carhart-Harris, a neuroscientist at Imperial College who scanned the brains of volunteers on psychedelics, sees as the key therapeutic value of the drugs."

---Michael Pollan, in an essay adapted from his 2018 book HOW TO CHANGE YOUR MIND: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression and Transcendence. The Wall Street Journal, 5.3. 2018.]


["Crab mentality...is a way of thinking best described by the phrase 'if I can't have it, neither can you'. The metaphor is derived from a pattern of behavior noted in crabs when they are trapped in a bucket. While any one crab could easily escape, its efforts will be undermined by others, ensuring the group's collective demise."

---Wikipedia, May 2021.]


[The psychedelic point-of-view:


"...I me mine, I me mine, I me mine."
"...They're frightened of leaving it..."
"...I-I-me-me mine, I-I-me-me mine, I-I-me-me mine."

---from the 1969 song "I Me Mine" by Beatle George Harrison.


The competitive mainstream point-of-view:


"Whether I'm right or whether I'm wrong

Whether I find a place in this world or never belong

I gotta be me, I've gotta be me..."

---words and music by Walter Marks, 1967, in the Broadway musical GOLDEN RAINBOW. Sammy Davis, Jr. recorded the song in 1968, and it was a surprise hit, 11 weeks in the "Top 40" for him in 1969. The song also ended up being recorded by Ella Fitzgerald, Stevie Wonder, Sammy Davis, Jr., Tony Bennett, and The Temptations.


(Paul Anka ate dinner in Florida in late 1968 with Frank Sinatra and "a couple of Mob guys", shortly after which Anka wrote the lyrics for "My Way", which was released in 1969 and became Sinatra's signature song. It was a top 40 hit in the UK from April 1969 until September 1971. [The quote is from an article that Neil McCormick wrote after speaking with Anka. The article was published by The Telegraph, 11.8. 2007.]


"As of 2007, the song reportedly had been taken off playlists of karaoke machines in many bars in Manila after complaints about out-of-tune renditions of the song resulting in violent fights and murders."

"...numerous people were killed for singing this song."

---Wikipedia)


("He was always extremely competitive by nature..."

"I saw it in him at seven months old."

"He has fought ever since to do exactly what he wanted to do--no matter what."

---Donda West, quoted on the back cover of the book RAISING KANYE--Life Lessons from the Mother of a Hip-Hop Superstar. West, who wrote the book with Karen Hunter, greatly admires her son.


A book describing a form of serious mental illness that is apparently similar to what Kanye West suffers from is SOULACOASTER--The Diary of Me by R. Kelly, with David Ritz.)]



["It's like I am being held captive by some insatiable monster..."

---Nic Sheff, in his 2007 book TWEAK (Growing Up on Methamphetamine).]


["...an estimated 72,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2017..."

---Sam Lansky, a recovering substance abuser, in his review of the movie Beautiful Boy. TIME, 10.15. 2018. The movie is an adaptation of two memoirs, BEAUTIFUL BOY by David Sheff and TWEAK, by David Sheff's addict son Nic.]



["Many people go about most or all of their lives...under the impression that they are the only 'I', they alone think, sense, experience, and particularly feel; all the others remain to them robots--a situation that results in a great deal of unconscious cruelty. To such people, I am the only 'I'; virtually I am God, a state of unawareness that accounts for the extreme egomania so often met with in adolescents--and in many adults as well."

---M. Esther Harding, in THE "I" AND THE "NOT-I"---A Study in the Development of Consciousness.]


["He didn't register as a person, he was just, you know, there."

"It was impossible not to surrender to the insanity of it all."

---U.S. soldier Jeremy Morlock, in the 2014 documentary film "The Kill Team", speaking about a young Afghan farmer that U.S. soldiers "killed for sport".]


[“To me, they’re not even people.”

 ---Eric Trump (Donald Trump’s son) speaking to Sean Hannity, 6.6. 2017, about people who strongly disagree with the president.]


["These aren't people, these are animals..."

---Donald Trump, describing some undocumented immigrants that he said were violent, during a White House meeting with California leaders. The New York Times, 5.16. 2018.]


["I want the State Department to get its swagger back."

---former CIA director Mike Pompeo, as he became Secretary of State in 2018. Pompeo's statement was widely quoted. The word "swagger" means "arrogant or aggressive gait or manner." Bullies swagger.]





["Someone said to Socrates that a certain man had grown no better by his travels. 'I should think not', he said; 'he took himself along with him'."

---Michel de Montaigne]



["Studies at the University of Michigan and Yale found that partisans, when confronted with facts that disproved their preheld beliefs, actually held on to their misbeliefs more strongly. One theory is that this is the brain's way of resolving cognitive dissonance."

---James Poniewozik, TIME, 8.23. 2010.]



["One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you."

---Frank Zappa]



["People do not process information in a neutral way. Their preconceptions affect their reactions."

"...exposing people to balanced information produced a more intense belief in what they had thought before..."

"It can be exceedingly hard to dislodge what people think, even by presenting them with the facts."

---Cass R. Sunstein, in ON RUMORS: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done.]



["...there is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described."

---Garry Winogrand, photographer.]



["We screen out much of our surroundings because we do not believe certain events occur. Once a friend unwittingly emphasized this to me by reversing an ordinary saying: 'I'll see it when I believe it!'"

"It is quite difficult for us to alter our assumptions even in the face of compelling new evidence."

---Robert E. Ornstein, in his book THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS.]


[Bigot: "Stop trying to confuse me with the facts!"]


[A recent article by a Harvard professor noted that when people are speaking, they are are only ever wrong in the past tense ("I was wrong"), never in the present tense. And that people are "oddly oblivious to how strange that is."]


["We are normally blind about our own blindness."

---Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist and Nobel Prize winner, in reply to a question about the biggest mistake in the way people think. Kahneman was quoted by Belinda Luscombe, TIME, 11.28. 2011.]


["...anyone who thinks that he or she is wise probably isn't."

"...in general, people who think they're competent are usually less competent than those who think they aren't--the so-called Dunning-Kruger effect."

---Ronald Siegel, Harvard Medical School, in Psychotherapy Networker, March/April 2013.]


["It's not like all you have to do is talk to one another and it'll all make sense. No, there are very serious divides in the country..."

---Dan Hoyle, a journalist who travelled to America's heartland and interviewed some of the people there. Hoyle was quoted in an interview with Paul Kilduff, The East Bay Monthly, March 2013.]


[An "...examination of online activity during the 2014 race-related protests in Ferguson, Missouri, found that liberals and conservatives in the U.S. cited or put forth completely different facts and arguments and seemed hardly to acknowledge each other's existence."

---Emerson T. Brooking and P.W. Singer, in The Atlantic, November 2016.]


[There is "a huge incentive to become truly offended at the speech of others in order to have a lever to suppress their ideas."

---Richard Allen Epstein, professor of law at the New York University School of Law, and professor of law emeritus and senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. MIT Technology Review, May/June 2013.]



["About a year ago I was on a panel talking about multiculturalism. Afterward someone in the audience, one of the authors of the papers, came up to me and said, 'that was fine, except I can't believe you used the word "truth"'...She said the word 'truth' as if she were referring to some obscenity I had used. I asked her what she meant, and she said, 'Well there is no such thing as truth.'...

---Barbara Ehrenreich]


[If "there is no such thing as truth", then the statement "there is no such thing as truth" is not true.]


[“What I believe to be true is truly unbelievable.”

 ---John C. Lilly, M.D.]


["...truth cannot be tolerant..."

---Sigmund Freud.]


"Eight months ago, at a talk I gave about the desirability of participatory economics, I noticed a few people ostentatiously 'turning off'. When asked why, one listener courteously indicated that the presentation was obviously unworthy of her attention. By emphasizing evidence, logic, and especially truth, I had turned her off. When I replied that I thought I was trying to be objective and find the truth was sensible, many in the audience thought me obtuse. 'There was no truth.' When I suggested that for a wide range of conditions Newton's Laws were true, I was told they couldn't be true everywhere.

Later, Noam Chomsky recounted arguing with an esteemed panelist before a rapt audience about whether there was an Eastern alternative to Western rationality. Trying to understand, Chomsky asked if beyond cultural differences an Easterner actually 'thinks differently' than a Westerner. Yes, was the answer. Disbelieving, Chomsky asked if the Easterner rejected that a claim is either true or false but not both. Yes. Incredulous, Chomsky asked if this meant a Chinese peasant might tend her rice fields believing it was simultaneously raining and not raining. 'Yes'. Chomsky politely changed the subject."

---Michael Albert



The above quotes by Ehrenreich and Albert were published in "Z Papers", October 1992, Boston.]






["As we know, the real cannot be apprehended directly: we have only (mis)representations of it."

---Hal Foster, who edited the 1983 anthology THE ANTI-AESTHETIC.]






["...the matches and mismatches between...two...signals, one generated inside the brain and the other from the outside world, ultimately define what we perceive as reality. That implies that there is no absolute truth, because the brain is not a mere slave to what, for example, our retinas report to have seen."

"...it is the collision of these two...signals...that generates the...pattern of electrical activity that morphs into one's perception of the world."

---Miguel Nicolelis, M.D., Ph.D., in his 2011 book BEYOND BOUNDARIES: The New Neuroscience of Connecting Brains with Machines--and How It Will Change Our Lives. Nicolelis was named one of the 20 most influential scientists in the world by Scientific American.]






["The postmodern self is a deeply subjective self. And Wilber makes very clear what the implications are of this subjective, or personal, turn on boomers' approach to the world. Rejecting both the traditionalists' God and the absolutist principles of scientific reasoning, the pluralistic mind leaves us only with our own inner, subjective experience as authority, as the ground for truth and action. Pretty frightening when you think of all of the mental and emotional debris that passes through us constantly! As Wilber explains, a number of 'principles' of boomeritis pluralism flow from this subjective stance:

Truth, then, being grounded in subjective experience, can only be relative.

There are no grounds for judging another—because what they are doing might be 'right for them.'

Hierarchy, or placing anyone's experience or authority above another's (especially one's own) experience, is a violation of what is true (that truth is only relative).

The only way to determine what is good and true is by how it makes one feel; therefore, if something hurts one's feelings, then one has been wronged.

Ironically, the result has been a creepy cultural etiquette of niceness. When the only truth is what we feel, then hurting someone's feelings becomes a violation of truth, an affront to what is held holy—ourselves."

---Elizabeth Debold, in a review of BOOMERITIS, a book by Ken Wilber. Debold's review appeared in Issue 22 of "What Is Enlightenment?", Fall 2002.]




["The very nature of any structure that makes one person different and superior to others not only breeds authoritarianism, but is authoritarian in its essence."

---Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad, in their book THE GURU PAPERS--Masks of Authoritarian Power.]




["The term 'bullying" was not used; students were asked how frequently 'mean things' happened to them in the past year. 'Mean things' was defined as 'anything someone does that upsets or offends someone else'..."

---Sharon Jayson, author of an article in USA TODAY, 8.17. 2010. The article was about the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association held in Dan Diego, California. The above quote was about an online study of the "bullying" of adolescents. The study was conducted by researchers at the University of California-Los Angeles, who included Guadalupe Espinoza and UCLA professor of developmental psychology Jaana Juvonen.])




("'Stendhal Syndrome' is a psychosomatic illness that causes rapid heartbeat, dizziness, fainting, confusion and even hallucinations when an individual is exposed to art, usually when the art is particularly beautiful or a large amount of art is in a single place. The syndrome was first diagnosed in 1982.

The illness is named after the famous 19th century French author Stendhal [pseudonym of Henri-Marie Beyle], who described his experience with the phenomenon during his 1817 visit to Florence, Italy in his book NAPLES AND FLORENCE: A JOURNEY FROM MILAN TO REGGIO."


"'Culture shock' is the anxiety and feelings [of surprise, disorientation, uncertainty, confusion, etc.] felt when people have to operate within a different and unknown culture... It grows out of the difficulties in assimilating the new culture, causing difficulty in knowing what is appropriate and what is not. This is often combined with a dislike for or even disgust [moral or aesthetical] with certain aspects of the new or different culture."

---Wikipedia)



("'Pareidolia' is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus [often an image] being perceived as significant. A common example is seeing images of faces in clouds.
Carl Sagan hypothesized that as a survival technique, human beings are 'hard-wired' from birth to identify the human face. This allows people to use only minimal details to recognize faces from a distance and in poor visibility but can also lead them to interpret random images or patterns of light and shade as being faces."


"'Apophenia' is the experience of seeing meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, who defined it as the 'unmotivated seeing of connections' accompanied by a 'specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness.'
 Conrad originally described this phenomenon in relation to the distortion of reality present in psychosis, but it has become more widely used to describe this tendency in healthy individuals without necessarily implying the presence of neurological differences or mental illness."

---Wikipedia)



("...the new 'normal' keeps changing..."

---KCBS news, June 2020, San Francisco.)




("Tolstoy once said that the most profound question he could think of was 'What is Art?'"

---Norman Cousins, in THE HEALING HEART.)




("...perhaps Golding's greatest gift as a novelist was his ability to go into 'Martian mode', showing familiar things from an alien viewpoint.'"

---Dwight Garner, in a review of a book by John Carey, WILLIAM GOLDING--THE MAN WHO WROTE LORD OF THE FLIES. The New York Times, 7.8. 2010.


Psychedelic states of consciousness seem to sometimes provide access to these profoundly valuable "alien" viewpoints...)




"The effort to see and really to represent is no idle business in the face of the constant force of muddlement."

---Henry James, in his novel WHAT MAISIE KNEW.




("...my soul has been psychedelicized..."

---Willie Mack Chambers and Joseph Lamar Chambers, in their 1967 song "Time Has Come Today", performed by The Chambers Brothers.

I was energized after watching a TV show featuring The Chambers Brothers performing this song in Berkeley. I was forced to leave home not long after, hitchhiked to Berkeley, and took LSD...)




(“Once, when I casually used the phrase ‘thinking outside the box,’ Lovins interrupted me. ‘There is no box,’ he said.”

 ---Elizabeth Kolbert, describing speaking with environmentalist Amory Lovins. The New Yorker, 1.22. 2017.)




("Most of what my neighbors call good, I am profoundly convinced is evil, and if I repent anything, it is my good conduct that I repent."

----Henry David Thoreau, quoted by Henry Miller.)



("...don't tell me that I should be ashamed for standing up and speaking out. Our democracy was not built on the belief that manners are more important than truth."

---California State Assembly member Tom Ammiano, in a letter to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, 10.12. 2009)


("...precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society."

---James Baldwin, 1963)



("There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies on the gears, upon the levers, upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus. And you've got to make it stop."


---"Free Speech Movement" leader Mario Savio, University of California, Berkeley, 1964)



("You must find a way to get in the way."

---John Lewis, 2012, speaking at a graduation ceremony.)


("You only talk about moving forward with the same bad ideas that got us into this mess, even when the only sensible thing to do is pull the emergency brake."

---Greta Thunberg, a 15-year-old from Sweden, speaking to a United Nations climate change conference, 12. 18. 2018.)



("By lack of understanding they remained sane."


---George Orwell, in his novel NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR, describing members of the Party.)



("All good art is political. And the ones that try hard not to be political are political by saying 'We love the status quo.'"

---Toni Morrison, quoted by Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, 1.1. 2018.)


("Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see."

---John Lennon, 1966, in the Beatles song he wrote, "Strawberry Fields Forever".)


("It's easy to like somebody when you don't know what they're saying."

---David Sedaris, living in Paris, speaking to Ira Glass. Sedaris indicated that he is not overly fluent in the French language. On the "This American Life" radio show, 7.19. 2019.)


("The unexamined life is not worth living."

---Socrates)



("Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity."

--- T.S. Eliot)



("Intensity is the price of excellence."

---Warren Buffett)


("uncontrolled nuances spell secrets"

---Danny Glix)


("Here's to the crazy ones, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes...the ones who see things differently."


---Jack Kerouac)




("A newspaper should have no friends."


---Joseph Pulitzer) 




("Ain't singin' for Pepsi, 
Ain't singin' for Coke...
Ain't singin' for Miller, 
Don't sing for Bud..."


---Neil Young)




("I wish to be paid, but I will not be bought."

---Vladimir Horowitz)



("...his mind is not for rent to any god or government..."

---from the song "Tom Sawyer" by the band RUSH)



("The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all."


----John Updike) 




("A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds..."


---Ralph Waldo Emerson)




("I don't pretend to understand the universe--it's much bigger than I am."


---Albert Einstein)


("...he could jump a mile to the second before coming down."

---Amos Tutuola, in his 1952 novel THE PALM-WINE DRINKARD and his dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Dead's Town.)


("Reality is nothing but a collective hunch."

---Lily Tomlin)


("Never assume the obvious is true."

---William Safire)


("Truth doesn't always win in the marketplace of ideas."

---Chip Heath)



("To see a world in a grain of sand, a heaven in a wildflower, to hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour."

---William Blake)


("...It rainbow spirals round and round, it trembles and explodes..."

---Bob Weir/Bill Kreutzmann, "The Other One")


("Create connections, if possible, between everything in the world."

---Kurt Schwitters)


("...interconnectedness defines the here and now...

---Douglas Coupland)


("One thing illuminates another."

---Frederick Wiseman)


("The objects are placeholders for thoughts, and when they are situated in proximity to one another, meanings can reverberate and ricochet off of each other."

---Barbara Bloom)


("Drawing is continuity. Everything else is interruption."

---Hedda Sterne)


("My works were designed to amuse, annoy, bewilder, mystify, and inspire reflection."

---Man Ray)


("The significance is hiding in the insignificant."

---Eckhart Tolle)


("...the possibility of seeing into, rather than just looking at."

---June Singer, in BOUNDARIES OF THE SOUL--The Practice of Jung's Psychology.)


("I am a part of all that I have met."

---Alfred, Lord Tennyson)


("There are more questions than answers
And the more I find out, the less I know."

---Johnny Nash)


("Chaos should be regarded as extremely good news."

---The 14th Dalai Lama)


(“...I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

 ---Judy Garland, playing the role of Dorothy in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz.)


("Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."

---Albert Einstein)










(“Kreamy ‘Lectric Santa Saves”

 ---on a bumper sticker in Berkeley.


 “...teddy bears with toy cell phones…”

 ---flea market ad.


 “Fist of the Zombie”

 ---inscribed on a sidewalk.)


 (Kreamy 'Lectric Santa is name of a band in North Carolina.)



Yoko took psilocybin in a silo with a xylophone.



(A BLIND RUCKUS
BECAUSE IT WAS STAPLED TO THE CHICKEN, OR:

Don't Worry!
A Thick Pigeon
Is Always
Just Around The Corner...

---inspiration: I was listening to KALX, the University of California, Berkeley radio station in September 2019 and they played a recording of a song by Thick Pigeon. "Blind Ruckus" is the name of a racehorse.)






("I was stoned to the max in evidence class!..."

---University of California, Berkeley law student Joe B., speaking in 1972 about what happened after he took Orange Sunshine LSD.)






(I was smoking marijuana on a Berkeley sidewalk in the middle if the night with a young mathematician from Croatia. I told him about a window I recently saw that had 2 rows of 9 panes of glass. I explained that I realized that 9+9 equals 18, and that 1+8 equals 9. And that 9+9+9 equals 27, and that 2+7 equals 9. Etc. "What does it mean?" I asked the mathematician. He explained that "in Denmark, a kangaroo is eating an orange.")






(I was once a member of the Travelers Protective Association of America, a fraternal benefit and service club in the United States. The organization was originally created in 1882 by and for traveling salesmen. I was NOT a traveling salesman, but as a favor to my father, I was admitted in 1991 after a special review by the board of directors of a post in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.)






A NOTE ABOUT "OUTSIDER ART:

"This is art that can neither be expressively tempered, nor politically corrected, nor marketably slotted by that great vetting, veneering machine called the art industry. So it stays volatile, radioactive, problematically hot. Is this why our mainstream institutions are so reluctant to exhibit it? Because they’re afraid of it, afraid of its unpredictability, afraid of how its intense singularity will react with, clash with, even infect other art? I don’t have an answer, but it is questions like this that keep my passion - crazy, I know - for contemporary art alight."


---from "The Desire to Draw, Sometimes a Compulsion", Holland Cotter, The New York Times, 9.16. 2005 (A review of "Obsessive Drawing", a show at The American Folk Art Museum.)






"There is no nirvana of inspiration that any one drug has unlocked. But they have played a very important role in the lives of artists, writers and scientists throughout history."

---Emily Sergeant, curator of an exhibit at the Wellcome Institute in London, England. The exhibit examined the relationship of drugs and art. Sergeant was quoted in an article "Artists Haven't Abandoned Search for Psychedelic Nirvana of Inspiration", Sylvia Smith, Deutsche Welle, 12.15. 2010.







("...what is at stake is a pattern of seeing, who makes what visible and for whom."


---Penny Florence)




(If I am sitting in a cafe looking at an art book or a volume of poetry, I am not forcing anyone else to see the art or the poetry. If I am sitting in a cafe and music that I do not like is being played over the sound system, while I am there I am being forced against my will to hear something I do not wish to hear [unless the employees turn off the sound system or change what is being played over it when I request that they do so].)


("What is heard knows neither eyelids, nor partitions, neither curtains, nor walls...Sound rushes in. It violates."

---Pascal Quignard, in his 1996 book THE HATRED OF MUSIC.)


("Almost a decade ago, I was browsing in a Barnes & Noble when I came across a book called ROUTE 666: ON THE ROAD TO NIRVANA. It was a music book about a band I liked, so I started paging through it immediately. What I remember are two sentences on the fourth page which discussed how awesome it was that 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' was on the radio, and how this was almost akin to America electing a new president: 'It's not that everything will change at once,' wrote the author, 'it's that at least the people have voted for better principles. Nirvana's being on the radio means my own values are winning: I'm no longer in the opposition.' I have never forgotten those two sentences, and there are two reasons why this memory has stuck with me. The first reason is that this was just about the craziest, scariest idea I'd ever stumbled across. The second reason, however, is way worse; What I have slowly come to realize is that most people think this way all the time. They don't merely want to hold their values; they want their values to win."

---Chuck Klosterman, in his book IV--A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas.)


("Keats may not have intended it literally, but the idea of nightingale song working as a drug is not that far-fetched."

"Male nightingales need to influence the behavior of female nightingales, and of other males."

"The song is not informing the female but manipulating her. It is not so much changing what the female knows as directly changing the internal physiological state of her brain. It is acting as a drug."

"The sounds...flood through the female's ears into her brain where they have an effect that is indistinguishable from one that an experimenter can procure with a hypodermic syringe."

---Richard Dawkins, in his book UNWEAVING THE RAINBOW--Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder.)


("Narkopop 1", a song by Gas [Wolfgang Voight], 2017.)


("Marcel Duchamp called art 'a habit-forming drug.'"

---Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, 5.8. 2017.)


"...that whole rock and roll musician thing does not interest me in the least. I just wonder, why are they popular?"


---John Baldessari, quoted by Glen Helfand, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, 7.22. 2009.


("Last year, the editors of ArtReview magazine named the Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei the most powerful artist in the world."

"Ai's resistance to all forms of control--capitalist and communist--manifests itself in one poignant way. He refuses to listen to music. He...prefers the silent spaces of independent thought."

---Art critic and Pulitzer prize winner Mark Stevens, Smithsonian, September 2012.)


(There is "...evidence suggesting that music can cloud reason, stir rage, cause pain, even kill."

---Alex Ross, in his article "The Sound of Hate". The New Yorker, 7.4. 2017.)


("music is the great imperialist of the 'arts'...u can't close your eyes or turn your head to avoid it...many times it slips into your ambience without permission..."

---Tatiana Okalidou, on Facebook.com, 9.27. 2013)


("Without the loudspeaker, we would never have conquered Germany."

---Adolf Hitler, 1938.) 



(The Latin word "obaudire", meaning "to obey", contains "audire", meaning "to hear".)


("Where one wants to have slaves, one must have as much music as possible."

---Leo Tolstoy)


"Singing the blues never solved any problems nor, for that matter, has listening to the blues. But Brownie McGhee says, 'I been livin' with the blues all my life--we all have. Singin' and playin' 'em just makes life worth livin', that's all.'"

---concluding words of a review of the 'Berkeley Blues Festival' by Philip Elwood, the San Francisco Examiner, 4.6. 1970. (It was one of the most amazing musical events I have ever had the privilege of attending. "Big Mama" Thornton singing her song "Ball and Chain"!)




"We are but a moment's sunlight, fading in the grass..."

---Chet Powers, in "Get Together", a song he wrote in the early 1960s.




Memories “ ...will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”

 ---actor Rutger Hauer, about what happens when one dies. Hauer wrote these words and the character he plays in the movie Blade Runner spoke them.
.



"We all leave an unfinished life..."

---Mary Oliver, in her 2009 book of poems, EVIDENCE.






If you can remember what one of my drawings looks like or if you can remember a line of my poetry, then I have physically altered the structure of your brain!




("I have only what I remember."

---W.S. Merwin, in his poem "A Likeness", about his mother.)





("We are our memories."



---Eric R. Kandel, Science, 12.4. 2009.)





("Columbia University neuroscientist Eric R. Kandel won a Nobel prize in 2000 for proving that memory---which had been regarded previously as fleeting, insubstantial, and not really a subject that could be investigated with a microscope---has a physical basis, and that each new thought and new memory actually alters your neurons at a molecular level."

---Kristan Lawson, the East Bay Express, 3.28. 2007.)




("The dream of artists...is to plant themselves in other people's heads."



---Tad Friend, The New Yorker, 8.16. 2010.)




("It's going to be alive in this space for a limited time then disappear. Just like us. But for people who interact with it, it will be embedded in their minds, so it's not really gone."

---Sun K. Kwak, describing her art which was shown at the "Phantoms of Asia" exhibit at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. Kwak was quoted by Jesse Hamlin in the San Francisco Chronicle, 5.13. 2012.)




("The words remained in her mind."

---Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, the last words in their science fiction novel DUNE: HOUSE CORRINO.)




(Advice columnist Ann Landers once wrote that sometimes it might not be a good idea to let "...someone...live rent-free in your head."

"...the phrase echoes the schoolyard and the blunt way children express difference: 'You think about me, but I don't think about you.' It recalls the famous line in "Mad Men"...in which Don Draper ends an argument with a surly subordinate by stating, flatly, 'I don't think about you at all.' The ability to make others think about you, and to let others know about it, is a form of power."

---Joseph Bernstein, BuzzFeed News, 10.1. 2018. ["Mad Men" was an acclaimed 2007-2015 television series about a fictional advertising executive in New York City. The series was set in the time period of 1960-1970.])




("The road is all, the end is nothing."

---Willa Cather)




(It is orange, not orange.

And, in fact,
It Is Much More Complicated Than That.)


(In January 2023, while it was raining hard here in northern California, I put a Def Leppard bath towel on a roof.)


My favorite knife is my black lock-blade folding pocket knife, marked "M16-01KS Carson Design" and made by "Columbia River Knife and Tool" in Oregon.


(its beginning to look a lot like xmas)




This Too Shall Pass




("There will be an end to all of this. Reality will die. This is a fact."

---Blindboy Boatclub, in his short story The Cat Piss Astronaut, published in his book TOPOGRAPHIA HIBERNICA. The story is about an autistic boy who is six. He meets a little girl and her mother on a school playground. He tells the mother something about the planet Jupiter.

"The girl looks at you but doesn't talk to you, instead she looks up at her mother. Her mother looks back at her, like she is talking to her daughter using only her face. You've seen your parents do this to each other before, but you don't know what it is and don't know how to ask what it is or why they do it."

The boy tells the mother and her daughter that the sun is a star and it will eventually expand and consume all of the planets around it. The little girl's mother becomes very angry, says the little boy is lying, and then violently attacks him. When the little boy later tells his mother what happened, she asks him what he said "...to make the woman that angry.")




(ARE YOU HIP TO CHINESE HAMSTER OVARY CELLS?
WELL--ARE YOU?

[Tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) is a protein involved in the breakdown of blood clots.

"The generation of CHO (Chinese Hamster Ovary) cells capable of producing single-chain human tPA has allowed the development of large-scale tissue culture fermentation and purification procedures, yielding rtPA for commercial purposes (Activase, patented in 1987 by Genentech, Inc., a San Francisco bay area company.)"]

Nearly every day for more than 10 years I walked to a public library and went online. I specifically went there because they have a defibrillator for heart attacks, and because it is located approximately 30 seconds away from an ambulance. In early December 2019 I was using my computer and VERY SUDDENLY I could not click "send" while using gmail. I could not speak, move, or see. The right side of my body badly drooped. All was TOTAL darkness. The people at the library saw that I was having a stroke and called 911. At the emergency room I was told that they had a substance, tPA, that they could inject into me that might break down the blood clot that was preventing blood from reaching my brain and causing some of my brain cells to die. They also said the tPA might kill me by causing my brain to bleed. "Do you want me to inject you with tPA?" The voice asked. I summoned all that seemed to remain of my strength and tried to say "Yes", but all I could do was make a TINY sound, "ee". The voice said "He said 'Yes'". The tPA apparently broke down the blood clot. [I am fascinated by the MRI scans of my brain that were made after I was treated.] After being in the intensive care unit for a while, and then a rehabilitation facility, I have apparently made a full recovery. No droop--and my brain seems to work [and not work] the same as usual. My wonderful daughter and her extraordinarily kind husband have been amazingly loving and extremely helpful! If I had been in the panel van where I was living and had the stroke, I almost certainly would have died. If I had been driving, many people could have died.)




(A selection of my hallucinographic designs may be viewed here:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/jdyf333/

[Free high-resolution downloads of the images can easily be made.])

(Or you can google jdyf333 and follow the link to my Flickr gallery. Once in my Flickr gallery, please click on one of the first items in my photostream, "An Important Warning". The caption there has links to edited selections of my hallucinographic designs, etc.)

And a selection of some of my poetry may be viewed here:

https://flickr.com/photos/jdyf333/albums/72157601783058195/page1/

("There is more to a library than meets the eye":
If you email me at jdyf333@gmail.com I will be more than pleased to email you a free copy of my 1,448-item annotated bibliography of drug literature.)





(I'll be playing small clubs and "I'll talk about what I used to be, and that will be the end of it."

---Sammy Davis, Jr., describing what he thought it would be like when he was 70, after being shown singing "Mr. Bojangles" in the 2018 documentary film "Sammy Davis, Jr.: I Gotta Be Me". Sammy Davis, Jr. was such an intense entertainer! He smoked tobacco and used alcohol and stimulants including cocaine, dying at age 64 in 1990.)






My telephone number is 510-260-9695



("Noon, like Midnight, is always a mystery."

---text message I sent to my daughter while she was in Mexico in 2023.)