2002_10_16: Genius is pain. Yeah, but what in life ISN’T, you schmuck!

There have been periods in my life where there was only one profound thought in my head that kept repeating itself over and over:

“I have been hurt almost beyond belief!”

I have gone through periods of almost unbearable agony and suffering. I suspect most people do. Nobody I know has gotten a free pass in this damn life.

But geez! I have gone through intense periods of such inner pain, it was like my soul was being permanently branded by the searing heat of it. I could literally feel my soul, my psyche, being warped out of shape by the pressure of it.

“Life is pain,” said the Buddha, and he was not fukking around. Or maybe he was. You don’t really like to think about it; about pain. Just as you don’t really feel like listening to somebody else bitching and whining about their problems, unless its done in a stylish, cathartic way, like “singing the blues”; or the pie-in-the-face suffering of comedy; or a case of somebody failing in a way that makes you feel successful by comparison (gee, I thought I had it bad, but that poor slob); or if you’re a soap opera junkie/tragedy queen who gets off on weeping and wailing for the suffering of the world….. But most other forms of suffering are dreary to think about. And usually we go out of our way to dodge it; to avoid dealing with it. Gimme a handful of codeines and a fifth of Jack Daniels. I’ll out-flank that damn suffering by hook or by crook.

But suffering has a way of exploding all over your soul in a way that demands: “DEAL WITH THIS, MUTHERFUKKER!!”

My Father was a Methodist minister and one of the perennial questions he had to deal with was the suffering of man; i.e. “Why me?” In fact, many of his parishioners came to him specifically in the hopes that he could heal their suffering or, at the least, give them a prescription from the Heavenly Doctor in the Sky.

One night when I was a kid, I remember my Dad getting a late-night phone call from one of his faithful parishioners. By the grave tone of his conversation, I could tell it was “serious.” My Dad kept repeating over and over: “Tsk! It just doesn’t make any sense! Geez!” It turned out the guy’s 18-year-old daughter had just died on the operating table while they were trying to deliver her baby. The guy kept asking my Dad that one unavoidable question:

“WHY WOULD GOD DO SOMETHING LIKE THIS?”

What can you say? “Gee, the Lord works in mysterious ways. Take two aspirins and call me in the morning….”

I know some people who get very bitter at God for interjecting the suffering bit into what otherwise was a very wonderful blueprint. “I mean, what’s the deal here, God?! I could be sitting here enjoying nectar and manna and lolling around on fields of golden grain for all of Eternity with nubile virgins with large breasts and endless supplies of Old English Malt Liquor. But no! You had to add this damn ’suffering’ thing to the mix. Mind you, its not that I’m questioning the wisdom of Your over-all plan, Oh Great Lord, and praises be to You and all the rest of it, etc., etc. But geez Louise! What’s the deal with that suffering thing? I mean, plagues, and locusts, and cancer, and painful rectal itch, and bad TV sit-coms. Talk about over-kill. What were You thinking, Big Guy? And another thing: that death thing. I could have lived without that, too”

I know some people who get so warped by the pain of life, they take the attitude: “There is no God! No God in His right mind would create a world as sick as this!” Others get so pizzed, they refuse to believe in God out of spite: “I don’t care if You are the Heavenly Boss! I ain’t getting down on my knees to You! You can’t break me. You’ll never take me alive! Um….”

The Greeks and the Romans sort of had the attitude that the gods play with mortal man for sport. The Hindus take it one step further by maintaining that God Himself is playing all the roles, that you are God, and He really isn’t doing anything to anybody but Himself.

But one thing’s for sure: It’s mostly pain and suffering that drives us to the spiritual path in the first place. “No atheists in fox-holes,” that bit. I know when I’m sailing along in a fat and happy state, the last thing I want to be bothered with is wrestling with the existential issues of Life. It’s only when I’m driven to my knees in absolute despair that I truly start asking the fundamental spiritual questions. It’s not so much that I’m looking for Heaven. It’s more a matter of: “GET ME OUT OF THIS HELL!”

And maybe that’s part of the answer too: “Why suffer?” If life is basically a game. And the game is basically Get Back to God. Suffering is the prime game rule that keeps us from veering too far off course. Suffering snaps us back to attention right quick.

Also, too, to continue with the Cosmic Sport analogy: Take basketball. Sure, you want to win the game. But you also secretly want to lose, too. I mean; imagine if you won every time. That would get boring. Sure, you could design the hoop so its 100-feet around; every time you threw the ball up you’d get it in. Yes! I’m shooting 100%! But how much fun would that be? Secretly, we want to lose half the time. It’s what makes the game work. Secretly, we WANT a game that’s difficult and full of suffering and frustration. We want to be puzzled by it all; otherwise there’s no fun with figuring out the puzzle.

Maybe this all sounds stupid, but that’s the only “meaning of suffering” that I’ve been able to come up with. And now I’m done with this column. You know what they say: “I’ve suffered for my art; now it’s YOUR turn.”

2002_10_16 This is art, goddammit! And if it isn’t, I sincerely apologize

I don’t know why I do this: send out my thoughts to thousands of strangers at the other end of my reality. I’ve been doing it off and on for 20 years; I’m compelled to do it in a way, but there’s always been something a little weird about the whole deal.

At one point, I couldn’t come up with any good reason to do it, so I stopped doing it. I sat under a tree in the woods and mostly kept my damn thoughts to myself. But doing nothing really didn’t work either, so I went back to doing it again.

I suppose I do it for a lot of reasons; both good and bad; both noble and ignoble. Fame, glory, and money. And self-expression and self-knowledge. To impress chicks. And to understand my soul a little better. It was an odd hodge-podge of motivations for sure.

Joan Rivers once said: “You have to be a little screwed up in the first place to have this need to stand up in front of thousands of strangers and win their approval.” I suppose you can look at anything from a neurotic side. “Sure, you’ve created this artistic masterpiece, but you’re just doing it to over-compensate for your lack of self-esteem and your tiny dink.” On the positive side you could say you’re trying to offer other people something worthwhile to feed on: food for thought or whatever. I know a lot of people on the street scene who don’t contribute anything to the world. They don’t produce; they just consume. I doubt that’s healthy.

At the peak of my so-called cartooning career in the early 90s, I was reaching about a million people every month. Minor-league stuff compared to real media celebrity. But it was too much of an over-load for my fragile psyche. It was one reason I ended up sitting under a tree in a daze for a year or six. Its no wonder all the truly famous people are mostly nuts. Communicating to even a minor-mass audience was like talking into a powerful microphone hooked up to an echo machine. Words you said 5 or 10 years earlier would come flying back at you when you least expected it. It was a lot like carrying on a conversation with thousands of people simultaneously. And if your work has a “personal” edge, or a weird cutting edge to it, the audience feedback can be doubly jarring. You can get lost in the feedback loop of it all. I mean, jeez, just regular life alone can be enough of a mind-fukk. Having intense personal relations with the mindless beast known as Your Audience added another layer to it.

I’d have people come up to me and say: “There was something you wrote 5 years ago that totally changed my thinking! It totally changed my life!”
“Aw gee shucks!” I’d say, all bashful and humble.
“Yeah, it totally screwed up my head! I’ve never been the same!”
Oh. Uh. Oops.

There was another guy who came up to me a couple years ago and said: “I’ve seen you around for years, and I’m still pizzed at you for what you said in that one comic strip back in 1992!”

He was legitimately angry at me, in fact he was seething with hatred towards me. Eight years after the fact. I asked him what the strip was, and it turned out it was some lame strip that I hacked out one night in 30 minutes one night when I really couldn’t think of anything to say, and then I never thought about again until that moment. Recently I came across that strip on a random search of the web. So it’s still out there, active, its wonders to perform.

Not that I’m complaining. Is there anything more insipid than famous people who spend their lives striving to get “known” by millions of strangers, and then, the minute their dream comes true, the first thing they start crying about is: they want their damn “privacy.” Stupid fukks.

Overall, its a great game. It’s all just Show Biz, right? Whether it’s high art at the one end, or schlock journalism at the other. And I can honestly say I’d be sitting here typing the same thing whether 2 people or 2 million people were reading it. Because really, I’m really just doing it for myself. It’s nice if people like what I do sometimes, but in truth, the best I hope for is that what I do isn’t harmful. And there are times when I’m not even sure of that.

On behalf of cartoonists everywhere

Great message by Max Cannon on behalf of cartoonists everywhere

http://www.redmeat.com/redmeat/1996-12-23/index.html

 

Max Cannon practices his art like “rusty corkscrew acupuncture.”

Portrait of the Artist as an Old Bum

I’ve been homeless now for about 2 and a half years. I’ve been homeless off and on for a good portion of my life. I once tried to add up how much time I’ve spent sleeping outdoors over the years and it came out to about 8 or 9 years, starting at age 19. I wrote about it in my previous book, SURVIVING ON THE STREETS. Which is a goddam classic. Just like my latest book, ACID HEROES. I actually wrote, edited and self-published ACID HEROES (along with the great Pat Hartman) while living out of a sleeping bag in the rainy season. It just about killed me. Try publishing a book out of sleeping bag sometime. But the thing has sold nearly 20 copies already. So I guess it was worth it. I’m still baffled as to why my stuff doesn’t sell better. One theory is that I’m a self-deluded egomaniac with an inflated opinion of my talents (in other words, a typical artist). But that can’t possibly be it. Another theory is that I’m 20 years ahead of my times. Or 20 years behind the times. Or maybe I’m a genius in some alternate dimension of reality. Alas, you can’t cash the checks in this reality.

My life is so weird. Every morning I wake up and 4 feral cats are sitting there staring at me, waiting to be fed. A mother and her 3 kittens. The mother, Blondie, I’ve been feeding for almost 2 years. She’s strictly feral and always keeps a safe distance from me. But the kittens have known me since they was born. So they sit right on my sleeping bag and eat out of my hands. I actually saw them being procreated. About 7 months ago Blondie, the shameless hussy, went wild in an orgy of cat passion. Those cats fucked for days. Non-stop. Some mornings Blondie would be dragging herself down the hill towards that cat food dish with a tom on her back pumping away the whole time. Finally she’d get down to the food dish and brush the tom off her with disdain. Another time, the tom wouldn’t let her be so she climbed way up this tree to get away from him. He climbed up right after her. Followed her all the way out to the end of this tree branch about 30 feet off the ground. Very precariously poised. No way out except down. Then a second female, also in heat, followed the two of them out to the end of the branch. So the 3 of them are sitting up there like a log-jam of backed up traffic. It makes you realize how strong the sex drive is. Even stronger than the survival drive. Willing to risk their lives for a piece of tail. Literally. Somehow, Blondie managed to manuever herself around the tom and escaped down the tree. With the other two cats in hot pursuit. Nowadays, when I see the kittens frolicking around by that tree, I wonder: Do they have any idea that that’s where they came from?

It’s pretty savage how they fuck, too. The tom sinks his teeth right into the back of the females neck. To give him extra pumping leverage, I guess. And when the female gets enough of it, she’s not adverse to slashing the male in the face with her claws. I was embarrassed to watch them. I mean, can’t they go do their business in private instead of right in front of me and my sleeping bag. But I guess I’m kind of a feral human myself. Thats part of my identification with those feral cats, I guess. I live like a wild animal myself, sleeping in the bushes under the stars and the moon and the rain. And we both do the same thing whenever we hear a strange sound in the woods. We both freeze and stare off in the distance in the direction of the sound. And we don’t move until we’ve been able to categorize the sound as either: a.) threatening, or b.) non-threatening. You’re in total survival mode in the deep dark woods. But once the cats realize it’s no threat, they immediately go back to goofing off. They turn it on and off in a second, all day long. Basically, them feral cats act like they’re stoned most of the time. frolicking and romping and investigating and generally just playing. It’s like some weird lesson of life to me, watching them feral cats. And I’ll look at them sometimes as they’re staring at me inscrutably (like cats do). And I’ll think. “They have eyes, and noses, and mouths, and ears, and they eat food and shit it out their kitty asses and fuck … ..” and its like, whatever Force is manifesting them is pretty similar to whatever Force is manifesting me. Sometimes I imagine that its God Himself who’s playing at being them cats. This divine life-force thats eternally dancing through the woods. They’re cosmic cats all right.

When the kittens were real little and still being nursed by Blondie in her secret nest, she would sometimes take the hot dogs that I tossed in her food dish and carry it in her teeth up to her kittens. Then, a couple weeks later, she brought the kittens down to the food dish for the first time. It was so cute to see her marching down the hill with the 3 kittens trooping behind her in a line. Here comes the troops. Now the kittens are about 4 months old and getting bigger every day. The little buggers eat like horses. It’s unbelievable how they pack it away. They’re eating me out of house and home. Or should I say houseless and homeless? Well, thats enough goddam cat talk for one day. I’m already enough of an art fag as it is. Those cats really got me.

Another Odd Thing

Which reminds me of another odd interaction I had with a cute young chick the other night. It made me realize I was completely losing my mind. I was packing up my vending table at the end of the night, and I’m on my hands-and-knees on the sidewalk packing all my vending crap into boxes, in my usual late-night state of drunken, stoned befuddlement. And this cute young chick walks over to me and says:

“Do you need any help?”

“No thats okay,” I said. “But its very sweet of you to offer, my dear.”

“Don’t you remember me?” she said.

“Uh, no,” I said.

“I was out here a couple weeks ago helping you out,” she said. “”Don’t you remember?”

“No,” I said. I took a good long look at the cute young chick and said: “Man, I should remember YOU.”

I thought to myself: Man, I’ve finally completely lost my mind. If I don’t even remember the cute young chicks anymore, god knows what else I’m forgetting.

Acid Heroes: Seven Years of My Life Shot to Hell

Had a total nervous breakdown yesterday. This chick gave me a really strong pot cookie and I over-loaded my circuits. Sometimes pot backfires on me like that. Maybe it’s because of the hundreds of acid trips I went on, but strong pot some times trips me out like I’m hallucinating. And this one was like the bad trip from hell. I’m laying there in my soggy sleeping bag up at my crashspot just trying to figure out how my life ended up like this. 53 years old. Failing health. A homeless bum. No career. And I go on this heavy guilt trip. My mind starts playing these tapes from my memory, re-playing every bad thing I’ve ever done. It’s like my own mind turns into a judge and jury and I’m condemning myself for some irreversible cosmic crime that I’ve committed. I’m this terrible person and now God is going to punish me. It’s like being damned to hell. It is being damned to hell. For those endless moments when you’re in hell.

Later, after I’ve come down, I wonder if it was just all in my mind. What is real after all? Is it just a matter of opinion. It’s like your mind comes up with some concept, and then the outer world manifests it.

What’s weird was, earlier in the day I was styling. I smoked a joint of good Mendocino herb, and I’m pounding the first beer of the day. And I’m sitting at an outdoor table on the Berkeley campus under an awning over-looking lower Sproul Plaza. I’m waiting out the rain storm. At first I was bitching to myself. Another miserable wet homeless day. And I got my shoes off and I’m trying to dry my socks off. And I look down across the plaza and there’s this adorable little 5 year old girl standing under the Zellerbach awning with her parents and a bunch of other people taking refuge from the rain. And the little girl is just dancing with delight as she watches the storm pound down on the pavement. She’s probably never seen a storm like that in her life and she’s just tripping on the glory of the Universe as it unfolds, fresh and new, in the eyes of a little child. You know how kids are. In this state of grace, not worrying about mortgages or credit card debts or failing health. And it made me realize yet again that it’s ALL IN HOW YOU LOOK AT IT. You can’t control the pictures that life jams into your brain. But you can control your reaction to it. And then the world mirrors back your own reaction.

So I was feeling strangely up-lifted in spite of the so-called miserable circumstances of my pathetic life. Then this beautiful 20 year old chick sits at the table next to mine. She’s huddling to get out of the rain, too, waiting out the storm. And she rolls a joint and passes it to me and we strike up a friendly conversation. Which is nice, and even flattering, that this cute young chick is giving some attention to an old burn-out like me. She starts telling me how hard it is for young people today to get their lives together.

“Oh man, I agree,” I said. “When I came to Berkeley 30 years ago, all I needed was $100 to rent out an apartment. Now you need like thousands of bucks for first and last and a deposit if you can even find a place. 30 years ago the California population was like 20 million. Now it’s already doubled to 40 million. And it’ll probably double again in my lifetime. I had big dreams when I was younger. Now I’m just hoping I can find a hole to crawl into for the next 10 years.”

“My parents just bailed on California,” she said. “They gave up trying to make it here and moved to Canada. They’re very happy.”

“Yeah, I feel the same way. I feel like a rat fleeing a sinking ship.”

She told me about how she’s going to a community college in Oakland. She’s already $15,000 in debt to student loans.

“I’m a 53 year old sophomore,” I said. “I should graduate by the year 2024.”

“I’m majoring in pharmacy,” she said.

“Oh thats a good idea,” I said. “Drugs are a recession-proof industry. The worse the economy gets, the more people are gonna want to get fucked up on pharmaceuticals.”

“The only way for kids my age to make any money is selling pot,” she said. “Just about every one I know that can afford to rent out a place is growing pot.”

“You ever hear about HIGH TIMES magazine?” I said.

“Oh sure!” she said. “I love that magazine.”

“I worked for them for 5 or 6 years in the late ’80s early ’90s. I did a comic strip.” It’s pathetic. Its sort of like trying to impress somebody by showing them your old press clippings.

Anyways, we had a nice chat as we sat there smoking a joint and me drinking my beer and smoking my cigarettes in my bare feet. When you’re homeless, the whole world is like your living room. And one thing about a rainstorm: you know the cops aren’t gonna get out of their cars to give you a ticket. Plus, there’s not many people milling around. So you have this little private space in the middle of the rain. So anyways, she kindly gave me a very strong pot cookie for the road (that chick knows her pharmaceuticals). And then I slipped into a psychotic nightmare. So you don’t always live happily ever after. You never know what life is going to throw at you the next moment. I’m sure it’s a coherent plot-line to the Great Script Writer in the Sky. But to the rest of us mortals stumbling around in the rain, it all seems like luck of the draw, don’t it?

2002_10_12 Barbara Ann: Part 1

The last successful romantic/sexual relationship I had with a woman was back in 1982/83. So you could say it’s been a pretty rough couple of decades for me. Somehow, I was always doomed when it came to the women. It was a set-up. No matter how hard I tried, no matter how hard I yearned, it always blew up in my face. Often spectacularly so.

I first met Barbara Ann back in October of 1982. She was hanging out outside this hip, trendy, so-called “new wave” club, the Berkeley Square, talking to this friend of mine. I was there to deliver copies of Twisted Image #2, a punk/art tabloid I was publishing at the time. So I talked my way past the doorman, and scammed Barbara Ann into the club with me. I hadn’t realized that my friend had been trying to pick up on her too, and that I had horned in on his act (which would lead to another weird story later, but you don’t need to know about that).

We sat in a table in the back of the club, me and Barbara Ann, this beautiful young chick. I was feeling very cool as a drank my bottle of beer and listened to the new wave rock band on stage (skinny ties, weird sunglasses, remember 1982?). Barbara Ann was cute, but kind of crazy — I could tell that right off the bat. She suffered from some weird form of dyslexia. The words spewed out of her mouth in this non-stop, gobbledee-gook jumble. Completely un-rational; she talked like an avant-garde poet, in symbols and weird metaphors, but you sensed deep emotional feeling underneath the blather. Later I would describe her as: “She had the soul of an artist. But not the talent.” Some crazy people are like that. They experience the same vivid, soaring emotions and inspirations of the great poets; they just lack the ability to capture it in a medium and communicate it to others. Barbara Ann showed me her notebook with her doodles and scribbles and song lyrics and weird poetry. She was an art girl. And I was taken with her. After awhile I stopped listening to the words and just dug her vibe. She was very cute. Girlish. She had light brown/reddish hair, with bangs that went all the way down to her eyes (sometimes she would let the hair grow down and cover her eyes like she wanted to hide behind a bush or something). And she had pink-tinted glasses. I can still see her face in the neon electric sheen of the dark club. It was one of the few times — maybe even the only time — that I had actually picked up a chick in a bar. So I felt very cool. For all she knew, I was a smooth operator who did this all the time. She took out these four little, porcelain Beatles dolls that she carried everywhere in her big purse and showed them to me. The early-years Beatles, clean-cut Fab Four. Barbara Ann’s role models were sort of Jane Asher and Marianne Faithful and the rock star girlfriend/muses of the 60s. And there was something of the fragile, porcelain doll to Barbara herself.

Somehow we ended up back in my apartment. I forget if it was that night, or if I ran into her later that week. I had just moved into apartment 26 on University Avenue, 26 years old. A new phase of my life was just beginning and here was this woman, Barbara Ann, who had somehow stumbled into it. She didn’t have a place to stay, was in and out of the Women’s Shelter, one step from the streets. And there she was. Somehow, we ended up standing their together in the little cubbyway/hallway that separated the main room of my studio apartment from the bathroom. We were sort of groping around. I had the top part of her frilly little-girl peasant dress pulled down, and her big, round, beautiful breasts were suddenly hanging there. I still remember that. Barbara Ann sort of pulled away from me for a second, stood there facing me, with her breasts hanging there, and said: “I’m afraid of sex.”

I could certainly relate to that. Even as I was pretending to be Mr. Cool. The odd thing is, I don’t remember much of what happened next. Its weird how the memory selectively pulls out certain images that you remember forever. But I’ll always remember me and Barbara standing there facing each other at that moment in that cubbyway.

Well, Barbara Ann moved in with me for the next two months. Love and sex. Every night. It was one of the few times in my life when I actually lived as sort of Man-and-wife. I’d go to work at my bicycle messenger job in San Francisco, and Barbara Ann would stay in the apartment, cooking deep-dish bacon quiche in the kitchen, and organizing my apartment, adding a women’s touch to my skuzzy bachelor pad; flowers in vases and candles and doilies and her little porcelain Beatles dolls. It was the closest I’ve come to that kind of Ralph-Kramden- going-off-to-work-while-the- wife-cooks-dinner thing. And she loved to fuck. What a doll she was. Oddly, the thing I remember most is lying there in the dark with her on my big, brass bed in my decrepit old apartment. There was a haunted pop song that used to play on the radio; “I hear the secrets that you keep/ ‘cuz you’re talking in your sleep.” And I’d look at this creature — this angel, this animal, this woman, this strange, strange creature — and wonder who she was. There was just something so haunted about my life…

Then one night we had a big fight. I forget what it was about. She wanted to have sex and I didn’t want to. I kept hiding in the bathroom to get away from her. And she’d come screeching into the bathroom, in her sexy negligee, harassing me. She really was crazy, and she could drive you nuts with her non-stop female prattle when you weren’t in the mood to find it cute and endearing. When she got hysterical she put out this suffocating vibe, like a high-pitched dog-alarm that was like a silent scream even though human ears couldn’t hear it. You felt it. And we both had the emotional-maturity of children. The whole scene felt like children play-acting, playing house. My nickname for her was Brat Girl. And I played at being the stern Father who dominated her. There was a definite S&M aspect to the role-playing between us. But sometimes the roles got confusion when our nerves were shot and it got too real. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore, she wouldn’t shut up, wouldn’t stop harassing me. We were both loners really, living in our own little worlds, but somehow we were trying to live together in this cramped little, decaying studio apartment. Finally, I just grabbed her by the arm and started pulling her towards the door. I guess I was going to throw her out into the hallway. But as I got the door open and was pushing her threw the doorway, she smashed the glass window-pane at the top half of the door with her fist, shattering the glass. CRASH. So now, we’re standing in the middle of the halfway, screaming at each other, amidst the broken glass, her in her sexy negligee, the manager and his wife are peaking their heads out the doorway; the neighbors down the hall are out in the hallway staring at us. The one nosey, old busy- body who always stuck her nose in everyone’s business was there too, of course. Just one more weird scene in the hallway of a decrepit old apartment building where people are quietly living out the madness of their lives.

So Barbara Ann packed up all her stuff in her big bags, including her little porcelain Beatles dolls. And suddenly she was gone. I sat there on my decrepit old couch later that night, and I immediately missed her. Fervently wished I could turn back the clock and start the whole evening over. But, alas, you can’t. It was over. Later Barbara Ann would tell me she spent the night riding back and forth on the BART train.

Later still, in 1984, Barbara Ann would come back, and we’d have an even more tragic Epilogue in that very same haunted doorway. But that’s another story.

2002_10_11 The Ace Backwords Report 4

I’m a philosophical sort. It’s not that I’ve read much of the great philosophers and intellectual egg-heads of our day. It’s more that I have this constant compulsion in my head: this basic thought that keeps repeating itself every day, all throughout the day: “WHAT THE FUKK IS THIS ALL ABOUT?” What IS this life, anyway? Who ARE we? What are people FOR? And what exactly IS this strange world in front of us; this enchanting and ever-shifting mixture of light and sound and feeling? This solid dream. This infinite Universe that little ol’ you and me are plopped smack dab right in the middle of. When you think about it: it is eminently weird that anything is even happening in the first place. It is all very mysterious, isn’t it?

Now this one so-called pragmatic friend of mine scoffs at all this philosophical thrashing. “Ace! You’re never going to figure it out, so what’s the point of thinking about it; what’s the point of smashing your head against that brick wall?”

Which is fine, except that one of my abiding philosophical hunches is that the whole POINT of this existence, the whole reason we’re here in the first place, is specifically to try and figure out the whole puzzle of it all.

Many people scoff at the notion of “philosophizing.” And there are certainly many bad philosophers. But the fact is: everyone has a philosophy of life, whether they’ve given it much thought or not. All you have to do is spring one little question on them — “What do you think happens when you die?” — and all their most basic philosophical premises will come tumbling out.

Some friends of mine take sort of a pride in being “hard-boiled realists.” They consider themselves from the Sgt. Friday-nothing-but-the-facts school of philosophy. They maintain:

“Nothing happens when you die. They dig a hole and put you in the ground. You’re dead. that’s it. It’s all over. There’s no more to it than that.”

I mean, who knows for sure? None of us will truly find out until we die, right? And yet, as logical as they think this position is, it’s always struck me as the most illogical and absurd philosophical premise of all (as well as the most unimaginative). I mean, we’re in the midst of this awesome, mind-boggling, infinitely complex Infinite Universe. To think that one’s life — which is certainly part of this universe — would add up to nothing more than a meaningless speck of dirt in the face of Eternity hardly seems to jibe with the overall blueprint of the Universe.

What exactly IS this world in front of us? That’s the question that always keeps pushing its way into the front of my lobes. Philosophically speaking, the only thing I know for sure is that this whole Universe is One thing. Everything else I consider to be strictly in the realm of personal opinion. This entire universe is One Unified Thing. What this One Thing is, is almost completely beyond the realm of my understanding. But I’d certainly like to get more acquainted with The Guy, whoever or whatever He/It is.

He’s a very mysterious fellow for sure. Heh heh. I guess I’ll have to think about it some more……..

2002_11_09 Backwords on Consensus Reality

Lets talk about “consensus reality.”

Have you ever stood at a street corner with a crowd of pedestrians waiting for the light to turn green? If one guy jumps ahead, usually the rest of the crowd will follow, even if the lights still red and they end up in the middle of the intersection dodging cars whizzing by. Why? Because most people aren’t looking at the traffic lights themselves; they’re looking at the crowd, and following the herd. It’s basic human nature. It’s consensus reality.

For 12 years I’ve been telling people something startling that flies in the face of consensus reality: “HIV has nothing to do with AIDS.”

And for 12 years the crowd has been telling me I’m wrong, that I’m an idiot, and a fool, and a dangerous lunatic (and worse). All the while I’m enjoying that secret delicious kick that comes with the knowledge that one day I’ll be able to say: “I told you so.”

The “HIV equals AIDS” theory (and thats all it is: a theory that hasn’t yet been proved, a theory that never WILL be proved) is a classic example of how consensus reality works. (Or doesn’t work.) In this case, a guy named Dr. Robert Gallo is the genius who jumped ahead of the traffic light, and the crowd followed him. Gallo’s first claim to fame was as the guy who discovered HIV. Later it turned out he stole this from a scientist in France who discovered HIV 6 months earlier. And its typical of the way virtually everything that’s come out of Gallo’s mouth has been subsequently discredited, even as his “HIV equals AIDS” theory lived on, and became embedded in the minds of the crowd. Virtually every prediction this guy made has turned out wrong. AIDS didn’t spread into the heterosexual population as predicted. AIDS hasn’t acted like any other sexually-transmitted disease has acted (because it isn’t). Millions of people weren’t wiped out by this “plague.” AZT wasn’t a “cure,” it was in fact a toxic form of poison. And the same people who were dying from AIDS in the beginning — hardcore drug abusers and people indulging in shockingly unhealthy sexual practises — are the same people who are still dying from AIDS (and its no mystery to anyone with half a brain WHY they’re still dying).

Meanwhile, Gallo has become a millionaire many times over from the $billions in funding being pumped into AIDS research, as well as the patent he got for his HIV-detection kit. This guy Gallo made a fortune off of this scam, as did plenty of other so-called scientists, AIDS social workers, and pharmaceutical companies. Which is the main reason why the “HIV equals AIDS” scam managed to keep perpetuating itself, in spite of massive evidence to the contrary, because none of these frauds wanted to derail the gravy train.

Professor Peter Duesberg of Berkeley, on the other hand, is the hero of this sordid tale. He was the first guy to point out that the Emperor was in fact naked. And for his trouble — for daring to be the heretic who defied consensus reality — he was practically bankrupted; losing all his funding, being denied access to get his scientific papers published, and generally being treated as a pariah by his peers at UC Berkeley where he’s only nominally still employed these days.

But in the long run it doesn’t matter. For the truth always comes out in the long run. Bullzhit can be artificially sustained for astonishingly long periods of times; but the truth is like an airplane circling in the sky above the airport waiting to land. Eventually the truth has to come down.

Someone like Dr. Gallo seriously misunderstands (not just basic scientific ethics but) the basic laws of karma. You simply can’t bullzhit your way through life. You might be riding high at the moment, but you can’t outflank karma. All I can say is: Gallo better enjoy his kudos while he’s getting them, because he certainly will go down as one of the most despised scientists of our times. Just as Duesberg will go down as the great hero. Thats just how it works. Consensus reality is really nothing more than the fashions and styles of the moment, and with just as much shelf-life as these passing fads.

There’s another guy in Berkeley who refuses to go along with consensus reality. His name is Stephen Lightfoot and he’s convinced that Mark Chapman isn’t the guy who assassinated John Lennon. He’s convinced that horror-novelist Stephen King did it, in cahoots with Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. He’s got a whole conspiracy theory worked out in his head. And he has “proof.” He has “evidence.” Which is basically all these obscure references that he’s pulled out of TIME magazine and a book written by Richard Nixon. Which he claims is a “code” that when put together reveals the true murderer: Stephen King.

Even though everyone tells him he’s wrong, everyone tells him he’s an idiot or a lunatic (or worse)– even though his own family has disowned him for his nitwit theory — he persists. In the face of “massive evidence to the contrary” as they say. He’s spent tens of thousands of dollars printing up Xeroxed copies of his “evidence” which he hands out to perplexed passersby on street corners. And he’s spent years lobbying the media for “15 minutes of airtime to alert America to the truth!!” For years he’s been parking his van (which he also lives in) in front of TV and radio stations, with different messages emblazoned on the side in big letters: “THE REAL TRUTH ABOUT THE LENNON MURDER COVER-UP!! KING, REAGAN, NIXON THE REAL CULPRITS!!”

Often, in between handing out his literature, Lightfoot will serenade passersby with his guitar, playing flat, plaintive versions of different Beatles songs. He is the ultimate “nutter fan” that Lennon lived in terror of, who were drawn to him like flies to zhit, and who eventually killed him.

“BERKELEY, YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF YOURSELF!” Lightfoot would harangue the passersby. “I NEED YOUR HELP TO SEE THAT LENNON’S REAL KILLER IS BROUGHT TO JUSTICE! BUT YOU TURN YOUR BACK ON THE TRUTH! FOR SHAME, YOU MORAL COWARDS AND DEGENERATES!” Lightfoot has all the zeal of a fire-and-brimstone crusader. He is the Old Testament prophet returned, ignored and rebuked, and now Babylon must pay. He is Don Quixote and Stephen King is his windmill.

Every now and then I’ll feel the urge to ask him: “um…Has it ever occurred to you, Steve ol’ bean, that you might be…..wrong?”

But what would be the point of that. So many people simply don’t have the “might-be-wrong” gene in their genetic make-up. Personally, the “gee-I-might-be-wrong” impulse is the only thing that’s saved me over the years. For I can be as lunk-headed in my Know-it-all presumptions as anyone else. We all have our blind spots, and it’s quite probable you see mine more clearly than I see them myself.

2002_11_07 Backwords on Success, Failure, Attitude

I’ve had this sense of failure that has dogged me all of my days. There was a line from an obscure Pete Townsend/Ronnie Layne song from 1978 that has always haunted me:

“His whole life was just another try.”

For that’s what it’s seemed to me. No matter what I’ve done, no matter what I’ve accomplished, theres always been this half-assed feeling like it hasn’t really added up to anything.

One of Johnny Carson’s ex-wives had a line about him, about the barren spiritual/emotional world he lived in, in spite of his great so-called success: “Its absurd to have accomplished so much and yet to have ended up with so little.” Johnny Carson himself used to have a recurring nightmare: “I’d be driving my car down this endless freeway in the desert, all alone, just me and the white line rushing under my car, but I never reach any destination. I just drive and drive to nowhere…”

And sometimes life certainly seems like that.

The other saying that haunts me is: “It’s all in how you look at it.” Which is certainly true. And yet, who amongst us really knows where that little switch is in our brain that controls the pictures we see, or the way our minds react to them? Certainly, if theres anything one can do to have a good, successful life, it involves learning how to control one’s mind: the runaway mind; the monkey mind; that jumps from here to there, seemingly out of control, jerking us every which way.

For example, I recently had a book published: “SURVIVING ON THE STREETS: How To Go Down Without Going Out.” (available from www.loompanics.com, or amazon.com). So I could look at that as a great success. Ace Backwords: Published Author. Radio stations and newspapers call me up to interview me so that I can spread my ever-so-important words to countless thousands.

And yet, on the other head, the book ironically chronicles the failure that my life has turned into. Ace Backwords: Homeless Bum; sleeping in the dirt and eating out of garbage cans.

So it’s all in how you look at it. And I’ve looked at it from both points of view — success and failure — and every other point of view in between. Is either point of view equally true? For the disquieting flip side to “It’s-all-in-how-you-look-at-it” is that it implies that there is no ultimate reality, at least from the level of the human mind. While theres certainly SOME indisputable truths — I’m 6 foot tall, 46 years old, not 3-foot-6, 12-years-old — when it comes to our ATTITUDE about life (which certainly shapes our very reality in a profoundly fundamental way) it seems that “reality” is totally a creation of the whims of our minds, and our emotions, and our delusions, and our opinions, and our chemical make-up, and (perhaps) our destined karma.

For example, sometimes I think I’m quite popular, that I have a lot of good friends and that I have a decent life. Other times I think I’m really all alone and I’m close to nobody and that I’m a total failure at relating to people. Which outlook is true? Both? Or neither?

Sometimes I think: “Well, if it’s just a matter of how you look at it, then I’m going to look at myself as a total Genius. If it’s all just a matter of opinion, and theres no concrete, definable “reality”, than I might as well err on the side of thinking TOO highly of myself, since I can’t really tell what I am one way or another anyways!”

I had this one friend, he took the pen-name “Hank Deadwood” — which should have told me something about how he saw himself. For we all reveal ourselves in a thousand different ways. Hank Deadwood was about my age, from an affluent suburban New Jersey background. He was good-looking, athletic, talented, an excellent musician, he could play guitar and saxophone, and he self-published a sort of Kerouac-esque novel about his adventures as a jazz-blowing, drug-taking street cat in San Francisco. We put his photo on the cover of our TELEGRAPH STREET CALENDAR 2000.

Anyway, he too, flew back and forth between the poles of seeing himself as The Great Genius of All-Time, or thinking he was a Worthless Piece of Zhit. In truth, his genius act was an attempt to over-compensate for this deep-seeded self-loathing that he could never shake. He never seemed to like himself. He carried himself around town like a man with a great burden on his shoulders. Who could explain that? For he certainly had more on the ball than most people. He certainly COULD have looked at himself with pride and approval. Instead he spent his days pizzing and moaning and whining in this state of perpetual disgruntlement. “You make your own breaks” is another one, and yet theres guys like Hank Deadwood who seemed to turn everything they touched into zhit.

Last year, Hank’s grandmother died and left him an inheritance of a half-a-million dollars. You know what they say (yes this is my column of old saws): “Money doesn’t really change you; it just makes you MORE of what you were before the money.” Anyways, Hank took a chunk of the money and bought himself a whole bunch of dope; rented out a room at the infamous Will Rogers Hotel in Oakland, a notorious crackhouse. I’m sure in Hank’s fantasy it would have been the even more fabled Chelsea Hotel in New York, for he was sort of trying to live out the whole bohemian Dylan/Kerouac/Burroughs fantasy that he idolized. Anyways, ole Hank got a little too high. You could imagine that last hit, as the bells started going off in his brain and the blood started rushing to his head and the airplanes started roaring off to the heavens. The custodian didn’t find him until 2 days later; he’d been lying on the floor in a coma for two days.

A friend of mine visited Hank Deadwood in the hospital later that week. He came back exclaiming; “Hank as we know him no longer exists!” They shipped what was left of him, and his half-million dollars, back to his parents in suburban New Jersey. And that was the end of The Hank Deadwood Story, at least what we would experience of it on the streets of Berkeley.

I even said in my STREET book: “A bad attitude has ruined more street people than all the other perils of the streets combined.” (And maybe that’ll be an old saw someday.) But the strangest truth of all is: Our own minds create our reality. And whatever you think will eventually manifest (so maybe we should be more careful what we think, huh?)

But the sad truth is: you see a LOT of these kind of stories on the streets. People flaming out in every way a human being can flame out. And after a while you begin to sense who the flamers are before they even flame. Because it all starts with how they look at it.