I'm thinking tonight of my old pal Scotty. I don't really know why. Perhaps I'm trying to psych myself into seriously beginning to chronicle my story as anecdotes (or synecdoches if you'll pardon the pleonasm);{> and the tale of a Native American Shaman/ex-Korean War Marine/CIA operative sent to Berkeley in the early '70s to infiltrate/recruit The Brotherhood Of Eternal Light Psychedelic Missionary Movement into the MK Ultra black-op, who ended up defecting to the "hippies" (and, in the process, revealing the "Gemstone" files to a nascent Lightworker fraternity) just seems kind of appropriate.
I'm also thinking of Howard, who gave me that first baseline dosage of Sandoz "Yellow Wedge" on a trip a few of us took to Death Valley, and the experience of being caught in a 75 mile wide sandstorm for 6 hours as we were tripping. Reading and seriously discussing Artaud and Hegel while waiting it out in a Volvo 144s.
Or maybe I'm remembering "Mad John" who, after a few trips too many on Telegraph Ave., communicated for years by laughing only , in thousands of different inflective iterations, always getting his point across somehow (more about psychedelic telepathy anon) only to end up being stomped to death in an Oakland parking lot for offending some people who had not been "experienced".
Or perhaps I'm thinking of all those brave souls and fellow etheogenic explorers I knew who have, over the years, fled the corporeal for other realms ethereal, and how to begin to tell their stories and explain the pain they felt at being relegated to the culturally defined ranks of the "addicted", when, in truth, they were the sanest and least 'hooked' (by the druglike lure of the inculcated consensus reality that blinds more than just the Moral Majority to the truth of our existance and Puritan Ethic's definitions of 'normalcy') of any of their milieu.
I guess I can only say that they, like myself, always tried to practice 'samshara" - that elusive cognative state of being "in the world, but not of the world". Why I have persisted, past their much nobler efforts, I truly wonder . . .
